Chapter 33
November. At the hot springs, the pools were shrouded in steam.
Draping the matching towels I’d bought us over our chairs, we made our way to the water.
The grass silvered with frost, our breath streaming into the cold.
By noon, it would be seventy degrees, the days capering from winter to summer to winter again.
“I had the sweetest exchange with José Luis,” I said.
“Who’s this?” she said, suddenly alert.
“My friend who manages the butcher shop.” We had entered the tunnel, treading water as our eyes adjusted to the darkness. “The one who keeps the books on his desk and reads them to his wife over the phone.”
“She’s probably illiterate,” Louise said grimly, stroking forward.
“I hardly think so. He taught literature at a university in Guanajuato. He’s a very educated man.” I was annoyed. “Anyway, I think it’s sweet.”
“Sweet! In some ways, Mia, men are all alike. They enjoy marrying beneath them.”
“Is that why Allan married you?”
Slowly she turned to face me, bracing her hands on either side of the wall so that I was unable to swim ahead of her. “Don’t be a fool, Mia. Your friend, please! He sees a hundred spoiled Americans pass in and out of this town every month.”
“North Americans.”
“You’re correcting me now?”
“The correct term is estadounidenses—José Luis taught me that forever ago. It’s offensive otherwise.”
“Offensive! Listen to you! If you weren’t a grown woman, I’d pull you out of this pool and spank you.”
“I’d like to see you try,” I said, my voice quiet with rage. I was stroking in tiny circles so as not to brush against her. For seconds more, we squared off, before I turned and swam back toward the chairs.
The rest of the afternoon was passed in shallow politeness. I offered her a glass of wine. She refused. I drank one, pretended to doze. In the last hour, we played a form of Scrabble using only the tiles. I yawningly lost round after round until it was time to get the children.
“I suppose I ought to be grateful for the ride,” Louise sniffed, getting out of the car.
“No need,” I said without turning, thinking: Good, I was getting bored with her anyway.
But after a day of not speaking to her, two, I became troubled at the thought of her angry with me.
I imagined passing her on one of the city’s narrow, shaded streets, the two of us saying nothing to each other.
Or Louise becoming sick and not telling me; or Ida asking to spend an afternoon with her, and me not knowing what to say.
“Mommy, will you read to me?” Henry called one evening from the bottom of the stairs.
“Yes, angel, be there in a moment.”
I’d opened my laptop to check. Nothing from Louise.
It had been three days. I opened a blank email.
Sorry I was such a pill earlier, I typed.
My hands, I noticed, were shaking. I don’t know what came over me.
Please forgive me. I began to cry. I cursed myself.
I detested that kind of weakness, the groveling.
I deleted the hated sentence, retyped it, read it over several times.
For moments, my fingers hovered above send.
“Mommy, are you coming?”
Quickly I typed out a closing: Love you, M. I stared at the initial that wasn’t mine but the one she’d given me, my eyes brimming with rage and self-pity. I hit send.
In Henry’s room, pressed tightly against him in his twin bed, I read Little Bear.
It was a special book out of my childhood—a rare artifact of happiness.
Henry was too old for it, really, but he seemed not to mind.
He curled against me, his plump hand patting my thigh whenever I turned a page.
My voice quavered. The tears kept threatening to fall.
Once the lights were out, I lay waiting impatiently for him to fall asleep, listening to all the usual festive sounds drift up from the Jardín.
The out-of-tune mariachis and the calls of street vendors.
The drunken laughter and shouts. The night before, I’d had a nightmare—I only now remembered it—in which I was running through the building site in a long coat with nothing underneath, and it was full of monkeys screeching as I passed, threatening to dart under the coat and bite my genitals.
When I left Henry’s room at half past nine, there was still no reply from Louise. I checked six or seven more times, vacillating between hopefulness and fury, before finally falling asleep near midnight.
It wasn’t until the following Monday that an email arrived from Louise, written entirely in capital letters as always: SOMETHING I MUST SHOW YOU; COME AT ELEVEN.
I went, nervously, as summoned. In the car, driving to whatever it was she wanted to share with me, it was as if nothing had happened.
Louise spoke of a gallery opening she’d attended over the weekend.
“The absolute naivete,” she scoffed. “The egotism. Look at me! I slapped a little paint on a canvas, now I’m a painter!
” She snorted. “Do us all a favor: Go plant a tree instead.” There had been a dinner party, too, she said, at which she’d been forced to sit next to Hector’s fiancée, such a drag!
“Not one even halfway intelligent thought in her pretty head. Not like you, Mia; I wish you’d been there. ”
A few minutes later, several miles from the outskirts of Dolores Hidalgo, we arrived at our destination: a tiny, ancient-looking stone church at the side of the road. As I parked, she pushed back my hair, asking solicitously, “Did you enjoy your weekend with Tom?”
As usual, I sensed, in her tone, in the quality of the silence that followed her question, an implicit critique. Also as usual, I did nothing to correct her, giving a generic answer: It was fine.
In the church, women bent praying. I was envious of their faith and wanted to join them. But I was too self-conscious and lit a candle instead.
We lingered another quarter of an hour and then drove home in silence. It wasn’t until we were nearly to her house that she said, “If you’re serious about staying here, if you truly want to live here and not just be a tourist, you ought to live in one of the farther colonias.”
“Like Montes?”
“Yes, exactly.”
I stifled back a laugh. Of course she would say that; I was surprised she didn’t suggest I live in her spare bedroom.
“Then again, maybe farther out would be even better. San Luis Rey or—” She fell silent.
“What?”
“Only, I’m not sure Tom feels the way you do.”
I let that pass, smiling at her transparency, thinking how quickly moments with her turned this way, like pages of a book caught in the wind, flashing from romance to disillusionment.
I was suddenly sick of her, her old age, her bitchy knowingness.
I thought, viciously, What could she possibly know about marriage? Her husband is a corpse.
She still had not gotten out of the car. At last, she pushed the door open, slowly extracting herself in her shuffling way, shifting her weight above her bad leg as she stood, then paused, saying, “You like La Cieneguita, yes?”
I nodded. It was the town nearest the hot springs, beautiful and lush. In fact, I’d fantasized about living there.
“I have a friend who lives there. You ought to visit him; he’d enjoy meeting you.”
I didn’t respond. I was eager to get going, to be out of her company, and she said, a little brusquely:
“You have to decide what you really want.”
“Oh?” I said, affecting boredom. “Really, do I?”
A beat of silence. The familiar wry expression, the narrowing of her eyes. Reflexively I opened my mouth to apologize. But before I could find the right words, she went limping and clattering over the gravel to her door, where the dog was barking to raise holy hell.