by Mira T. Lee
“Do you think she should go to school?” she says. She slides a finger down her daughter’s nose. The skin, smooth and supple. Those eyelashes. Every part of her small being a miracle.
“School? Why?”
“Just for something to do. It might be good for her.”
Manny shrugs. “My hija, she is beautiful.” He strokes Essy’s hair.
“Angelic.”
“Amazing.”
“Perfect,” she whispers. She pats Essy’s head.
“But especially when she’s sleeping,” adds Manny.
She laughs. On this, at least, they will always agree.
One morning she wakes and the air feels different. Thicker, heavier, with an earthy fecundity, it adheres to her tonsils and must be forcibly gulped. Her eyes water. Her legs itch. Essy is crying. She says her head hurts, and she has been bitten, too—scratched at the raised red bumps on her ankles, drawn blood, which now dots the floral sheets. The wet season has come. Each day’s heat grows more dense. By noontime, animals flop in the shade; only their tails twitch to swat the flies. In the afternoons the clouds let out rain like a rage. The river swells, fat and turbid. Water bubbles in through the seams of the casita, turns dirt to mud; they place flattened cardboard boxes over the sludgy floor. At dusk, the rains cease. Swarms of gnats emerge to hang in the air. The mosquitoes return. She lights a citronella candle in their bedroom. Her thighs glue together when she sleeps. When she wakes, her forehead is damp, her hair matted. She whiffs a blend of excrement and burning rubber.
She hangs a mosquito net over the bed, a cascade of nylon mesh. “Seriously?” says Manny. He hates that they can no longer lie around and watch TV, just as he has rigged up a small satellite dish. Essy is happy. She’s a princess! With her stuffed animal bunny as her knight, the bed their impenetrable castle, veiled in tulle, secured by moat. Dragons, keep out! We have swords! We’re having a birthday party! The television is moved into the kitchen.
“Do you hear her in there? Talking to herself?”
“She always does that,” he says.
“Maybe she should go to school. It’d be nice for her to have some friends her own age.”
He dips his head, neither in assent or dissent, only to signal that he’s heard. She doesn’t bring it up again until one day they return from helping Papi dig out the rear axle of his truck from a ditch, and find the mosquito net in shreds. Essy has torn it down, ripped it apart, attempted to craft it into a pair of wings.
• • •
It is a village-run day care, with twenty-five kids, ranging from babies up to age six. An airy, cabana-like space with wooden posts, a thatched roof, unvarnished plank floors, attended to by four crinkly-eyed women dressed in traditional ponchos, all shaped like pears. They sing songs, play games, cook simple meals eaten on low rectangular tables. The older ones teach the younger how to wash hands, clean up, weave straw baskets or tend to the vegetable patch where they grow pumpkins and potatoes and squash. The children are dark and speak mostly Quichua, the indigenous language, which Essy does not understand. At first she protests. Cries. Clings stubbornly to her mother’s legs. For two weeks, she cries every day, despite the coaxing and begging, reassurances and threats, the candy Manny sneaks to her each morning as a bribe. Then one day, without warning, as they approach the front steps, she lets go of her mother’s hand. Two girls, sisters, each with spindly brown arms, are dressing their dolls in the corner. Essy squats beside them. They examine her, curious. Lucia holds her breath.
After this day, her daughter rarely looks back, not even to wave when she calls out Besitos! Good-bye! and when she arrives in the afternoon by foot or burro or motorbike to retrieve her, Essy is always setting up a picnic or a birthday party with the other niños, and is never ready to leave.
• • •
Without Essy, the usual chores are completed in a fraction of the usual time. She feeds the chickens and pigs, makes yogurt and cheese with the goats’ milk, adds dandelion, milk thistle, gingerroot to her garden. She can’t remember when she last felt this efficient, like a fully autonomous being! Sometimes she takes out her narrow-ruled notebook, powers on her laptop computer, starts to type. Sometimes she walks to the main house to visit with Mami and Tía Camila, but they are usually talking about this woman or that woman who is now with this man or that man and she finds she doesn’t really care. She weeds, forehead dripping, knees permanently brown with dirt. The steep hillside behind the casita is terraced and planted, rises up like a verdant green quilt. With that project complete, she decides she will bring up the outhouse again, the one Papi promised to build—but she can’t ask Papi, she doesn’t want to seem rude.
“What?” says Manny.
“The outhouse. Will you be able to start on it now?”
Essy hates to squat outside. Each time, it’s Mamaaaaa! Terrible wails, and the child refuses to let go of her hand, totters back and forth, and the inevitable result: pissing her own calves or ankles, soiling her leggings or shoes, and then she screams again and must be sprayed down with the hose. Lately, the protest: NO, NO, I don’t have to go! and she finds herself scraping shit off another pair of underwear with a plastic spoon.
“She’ll get over it,” says Manny. It’s harvest season, the busiest time of the year. He and Papi have a lot to do.
“Then when?”
“Soon. I promise, soon.”
That day he shows her how to kill a chicken by slitting its throat. His hands are quick, assured, and as she watches the creature jerk and twitch and bleed out into a plastic bucket, she finds she feels no tinge of remorse. It disturbs her. She cannot tell whether it is her closeness to the earth that allows her to accept the brutality of this act so calmly now, as part of the natural order, or whether she has been blunted and dulled by her pills. She douses the carcass in boiling water, plucks off the feathers, begins to remove the bloody viscera.
Shin bone connected to the knee bone
Knee bone connected to the thigh bone
Thigh bone connected to the hip bone
Hip bone connected to the back bone
• • •
It is one of her earliest memories as a child: Jie, singing. Jie, standing on a plastic lawn chair, that white one with the cracked seat, one of two handed down from a neighbor, which Ma had wiped clean with wet paper towels. “H-e-a-d bone, see?” said Jie, patting her head. “N-e-c-k bone. S-h-o-u-l-d-e-r bone.” Pointing to each bone, she enunciated in her best English, made Lucia repeat and repeat until she was tired and cried. But that evening, when their mother came home, the two of them stood tall in their uncle’s basement on their plastic chairs, shoulders rolled back, with ruler-straight spines, and they sang loudly and proudly as if they performed often on the grandest of stages. The swell of admiration she’d felt for her sister then! The love, the adoration. And her three-year-old body, full of bones inside, ready to burst with pride. Ma had smiled and smiled!
She misses her sister, the one of her youth. Is Jie painting pictures of flowers, listening to the Beatles or Pavarotti or NPR? Watching Sex and the City? Buried in the Sunday crossword? She cooks lion’s head meatballs in her bright yellow pot, bakes almond cookies for dessert.
• • •
One day, Mami offers her an old sewing machine, a black and gold Singer with a manual foot pedal. She is touched. Clothing is expensive, especially with a child who outgrows things in a matter of months. She starts by sewing a pink apron for Essy. A matching one for herself. Then she finds a simple pattern to sew a dress from a pillowcase. On her first try, the elastic thread puckers, pulls at the neckline, and the sleeves are much too tight. She rips it out. Tries again, and again. Finally she sews on an orange ruffle, trims the hem with pink satin, attaches a sash. It looks like a real dress you’d buy in a store.
“See, hija,” she says, triumphant as she holds it up.
“No, Mama,
I don’t like it.” Essy sticks out her tongue, wrinkles her nose. New behaviors she has picked up at school. “I like my old clothes.”
“You can wear it to your cousin’s birthday party tomorrow night, okay?”
Essy shakes her head.
“Tomorrow. Not now,” she says.
The next morning she brings it out with a smile. “See, it’s a new dress.” The cotton in her hands, so soft, smoothed from repeated washes. She lays the dress out on the kitchen table, fingers the pink satin piping sewn to the hem. She can hardly believe she has made this. From an old pillowcase! It’s pretty. Really pretty. And recycled, no less! The mamas from Group would be impressed.
“Essy!” she calls.
Her daughter is outside, hopping from mud puddle to mud puddle, splattering their two new pigs, who she has named Princess and Pea. She will need to be sprayed down with the hose.
Manny emerges from the bedroom. Rubs his eyes. “What’s going on?” he says.
“Come, Essy! It’s a pretty dress. Look, orange and pink!” Her daughter’s favorite colors. That pink satin piping on the hem, such a fine detail. “Look how shiny. Come, try it on.”
“But I don’t want to wear it, Mama.”
“For the party.”
Essy shakes her head.
“But look, it’s beautiful.” A desperation in her voice she cannot explain.
“No, I don’t like it!”
“She doesn’t want to wear it,” says Manny, with a yawn.
Essy grabs the dress, darts back outside, throws it in the dirt.
“Essy!” She is seething. Calls out again. But Essy has disappeared into the campo.
“I’ll get her,” says Manny. He heads out and she waits, but they do not return. The girl will play all day with Fredy, pop in occasionally at the main house to take refuge with Mami, return in the evening with her hair full of burrs.
Hi Farmer Girl, Your big adventure sounds like paradise. Things are ok here. The job is good. Winston moved out. My lawyer got me a pretty good settlement so I can pay for a nanny. I feel horribly guilty, but I need the help. Natey hates having someone else in the house, he’s been acting out, tantrums and potty regression. Pooped in his pants three times this week—right when I got home. Joy! But in the grand scheme of things, I still think we’re moving in the right direction. Like they say, happy mama = happy children, right? Nipa.
She has traveled to the city on her own today. Stopped in at the bakery, the flower market, the farmacia, where she smiles at the eyebrow-less woman, who smiles back. Last time, they exchanged pleasantries. This time, their names. Ana Maria. This is how she chisels her way into a tight-knit community. Her face is easily recognized, and in time, everyone in town seems to know who she is. Lucia. The Chinita. But she is an Americana, no? From New York. A Chinita Americana? Verdad! It’s common there. She lives in the campo. With a daughter. The campo? If she lives in the campo, then why is she always here?
Now she sips tea from a paper cup, watches the blip of the cursor, taps her fingers on the mouse. A Sunday morning. The Internet café is empty, everyone at church, though the music blares like a discotheque past midnight.
Hi Nipa! Essy has poop issues too!!
She likes this sentence. She has to laugh.
Sorry about Natey’s tantrums. You sound awfully composed. Manny’s been promising to build an outhouse for months, but somehow he’s always “too busy.” Not too busy to play futbol, of course, but
She rests her chin in her hands, stares at the blink of the cursor.
Lucy Bok?
The voice, a man’s. An American. She looks up. He’s handsome, roguish. An acquaintance from her youth she can’t quite place.
“Quito,” he says. “Before your sophomore year.”
Yes, of course, that first summer she lived in Quito! When they lived in that gigantic shared house full of gringos and no hot water, ate communal dinners every night on the front stoop.
“Jonesy! Have you been here all these years?”
He loves the expatriate life. Could never go back. He introduces his girlfriend, a redhead from Indiana who can’t be more than twenty-one. Jonesy, always slick and smooth as a race car.
“Lucy and I taught English through the same program, a long time ago,” he says.
“That’s amazing!” gushes the redhead. “And are you teaching somewhere now?”
“It was amazing,” Lucia says, smiling. She explains that she is trying to become a farmer. It isn’t going so well. It’s a joke, except not really.
A farmer? A Chinese girl born and raised in America wants to labor on a farm?
“Did you do that back home?” asks the redhead.
It’s comforting the way she says it, as if home means the same thing to all of them, as if Indiana sits next door to New York. “Oh, no. Back home I was a news reporter. A writer.”
“Oh, wow! No way!”
“I have a buddy here who runs the gringo paper,” says Jonesy. “They’re always looking for writers. I could put you in touch with him. I mean, if you want a job.”
A job? you say.
No, it’s impossible, a job in Cuenca, it’s too far away. The bus ride this morning, relatively uneventful, still took over an hour. But Lucia takes down the friend’s name and number on a napkin.
Later that day, she considers it. Running into Jonesy after all these years! A job opening at the English paper! She recalls the résumés, the phone calls, the failed interviews back in New York. And Beige, tap-tap-tapping his foot. But now, a fresh start. A reboot, right here in Cuenca. The coincidences, the signs, surely they cannot be ignored?
“Cuenca?”
“Yes, Cuenca.”
“Why would you want to do that?”
They’re sitting outside, playing backgammon. A single lightbulb dangles above them, exposed to the night, enticing bugs. She swats away a crane fly.
“It’s a job, Manny. A paid news job! They offered it to me.” The interview had been easy, relaxed. And just like that, on the spot! “They might even let me work part time.”
“But in Cuenca. It’s ridiculous.”
“What, it’s no worse than commuting from Manhattan to New Jersey or Connecticut. I used to do that all the time.”
He rolls the dice, doesn’t bother to look up. She hates it when he doesn’t take her seriously.
“I like working.”
He shakes his head. “There is plenty to do here. Plenty of work.”
“It’s not the same. This is a good job.” The tinge of vehemence, unexpected. I’ll bring it up, she’d told herself. Just to see what he says. But if she was unsure before, now it begins to feel like the best damn idea she’s ever had.
“You need money?” he says.
“Everyone needs money,” she says. “But it’s not just that.”
“What?”
She is on the verge of tears. Angry tears. Why should she have to defend herself? Why should she have to explain to him, when he will never understand?
“Writing is part of who I am,” she says. In her voice, thin and sharp, a portent of danger, like a hairline crack in a glass.
He looks up, finally. Frowns, perplexed. Then again, those dog brown eyes.
“It’s important,” she says. “I need to work. Writing is good for me. It’s good for my health.” She knows, with those dog eyes, he does not want a fight.
“Lucia,” he says. He inhales, sighs. “You do what you have to do.”
• • •
You could say: This is the way two people drift apart.
She rides the chicken buses three days a week. The buses, unreliable, show up, or they don’t. Sometimes they stop on the roadside to wait for a herd of sheep to cross, or the driver’s grandmother to deliver a bag of laundry, or his sixteen cousins to roll in. In the height of wet season,
small roads flood, or simply wash away. The rain hitting the roof sounds like an army of hammers. A bus can get stuck in the mud for days.
But she loves the job at the newspaper. She is relieved to be writing again, shaping ideas into words. Most of the articles deal with expat life—navigating the housing market, finding a doctor, the best hair salons and masseuses and gringo cafés. She discovers a tiny bodega owned by a Chinese man. Mr. Lo stocks chili oil, oyster sauce, glutinous rice, even chicken feet, chicken necks and heads (very popular with the locals!). Mr. Lo’s father shuffles up and down the aisles with his walker anchored in ratty tennis balls. And Mr. Lo’s wife, a former beauty queen from Shanghai, offers to cut her hair. How quickly the city shrinks to the size of a neighborhood—the paper is young; in time she’ll tackle more substantive subjects. For now, she’s content to flow at this slower pace, though her own life hardly resembles those of her audience, mostly retirees or recent college grads. On the rare occasions when she meets women her own age, they are single and childless and hypochondriacs, preoccupied with discovering their artistic sides.
Her boss is geeky, young, entrepreneurial. She soaks up the energy of the five teenage interns, who imbue the gray-walled office with joyful energy. Everything is the best! Or the worst! Oh, young lives yearning for drama, while nothing much is at stake! Their laughs make her laugh, she echoes their groans, appreciates their teasing and jokes. They listen to American rap, watch bygone American TV shows dubbed over by melodramatic Spanish actors. They ask all the time about America.
New York, is it very dangerous?
Did you meet celebrities in Hollywood?
She explains that New York and Hollywood are three thousand miles apart, but this concept never quite registers.
Do you drive a convertible?
Do you know Will Smith?
Do you have friends? Like Friends? In a coffee shop?
Sometimes they go out after work for pollo con fritas and colas. Surely she is closer in age to their mothers, but they don’t seem to mind.