by Mira T. Lee
• • •
After one month of heavy commutes, she is tired. Despite her dozes on the chicken buses her head is fogged, her body fatigued. The pills drain her energy; always she has had to compensate. Now she lacks the stamina. Her eyelids droop. When Manny remarks on it, she snaps at him. It’s the pills. She hates the pills.
One of Jonesy’s friends offers her a studio apartment situated above an Italian café—a late-night hot spot for expats and backpackers alike, located on one of the busy calles in El Centro. No, she couldn’t. But she’ll take a look. The room comes furnished with a twin mattress on a metal frame, a metal dresser, an old hutch sink with a pink marble top, a heavy antique brass lamp; just that much is tight. But the dramatic French doors; the Juliet balcony overlooking the café tables on the street; the city an airy extension of her personal space—oh, she loves it! And the walk to work: three minutes.
Like they say, happy mama = happy children, right?
And when she approaches him this time—This way I’ll be less tired when I’m home, and he doesn’t even put up a fight, she finds herself both relieved and slightly disappointed.
• • •
On the eve of her first night away, she paces back and forth in the kitchen. She cooks vegetable soup, enough to last for several days. Sets it on the stove in the bright yellow enamel pot. Then she boils a pot of rice, picks three ripe mangoes and a perfect papaya from the garden. She cuts the fruit into bite-size chunks, carefully apportions the chunks into three bowls.
“I’ll be back on Wednesday. That’s three days. Just three. Is three a lot, sweetheart?”
Essy shakes her head.
“No. No, three is not a lot. Today is Sunday. Tomorrow Abuela will bring you to school. Papi will pick you up. It’ll be Wednesday before you know it.” She kisses her daughter’s forehead, hugs her tight, finds herself teary as she packs a small duffel bag. She has never been away from them, not even for one night. Not since her time in the p-ward.
When she returns three days later, late afternoon, her hands are full of boxes and bags. A pair of shoes for Manny. A new lunch box for Essy with kittens stitched to the front.
Essy is playing with Fredy in the fields by the main house. “Mama!” She comes running.
Bao-bao. Hija. “Essy!” At first glance, so much tinier than she remembered. This girl, her child! It has taken three days away to regain this perspective, this awe, this appreciation for the newness of her daughter’s life, so luminous and close to its beginning. But it will take only one day for Esperanza to resume shape as a singular individual: small, young, untrained and inexperienced, a fraction of an adult in size and years—yet certainly no less of a whole being. Lucia understands this now, as a mother. She folds Essy into her arms, burrows her face in her hair.
“Look, hija, I brought this for you.”
Essy tears open her present. “Gracias! It’s beautiful! Thank you, Mama!”
How did she not know, or had she merely forgotten, that she had such a wonderfully polite child?
“Mama, we’re playing hide-and-seek. It’s my turn to look. Play with us, Mama.”
She needs to wash up, change her clothes. “You play. I’ll come back in a few minutes,” she says.
She heads past the old barn, the fields, the meadow, the brook, down the steep hill of wildflowers, up the winding dirt path. As she approaches the casita, she notices, first, the watermelon rinds. Then the seeds and pits, dumps of coffee grinds, chicken bones littering the ground. She can sense the odor before it hits her nostrils. Fetid. The casita is a sty. Dishes and mugs piled in the kitchen sink, the crusty pot of rice on the floor, next to a heap of Manny’s clothes. The bright yellow enamel pot of soup still sits on the stove. She lifts its lid. It’s full.
She cleans. She neatens. She washes. She sweeps. She heats the soup, forces herself to swallow down two large bowls. Dumps the rest out for the pigs.
The house zipped up, tidy again, she retrieves Essy. Together they lie in bed, surrounded by swaths of mosquito netting. They read a book. She sings softly in Chinese.
“No, Mama. Something else. The bones.”
Back bone connected to the shoulder bone
Shoulder bone connected to the neck bone
Neck bone connected to the head bone
Now hear the word of the Lord
At the sound of heavy footsteps, her daughter calls out, “Look, Papi! Mama is home! She’s here!”
“Here she is,” says Manny. He lifts one corner of mosquito netting. Brushes her cheek with his cheek. He does not comment on the house or the yard or the clothes, neatly folded. “Welcome home,” he says.
“Yep,” she says. “Here I am. Home.” She does not look at him.
• • •
The next week, she cooks vegetable curry in the yellow pot. The next, beef stew. The next, sopa de pollo with cilantro. Still, the same. And then one evening she returns from the city and it is humid and buggy as she trudges up the path to the casita. But this time she notices no trash, no seeds, no rinds. No offensive smells. She pokes her head in. The kitchen is tidy. Dishes stacked on the shelves. The bright yellow pot sits on the stove, empty.
“Hello?” she says.
In the bedroom, clothes are folded, stacked in three neat piles. Now she is suspicious. She walks outside. The fireflies just beginning to light. She sees Manny winding up the dirt path, Essy on his shoulders.
Her daughter slides down his back, runs to her. “Mama!” she says, throwing her arms around her neck. She pops inside, emerges with her stuffed bunny rabbit. Then, “Mama, where is Yasmin?”
“Who?”
Yasmin is Tía Camila’s youngest daughter, Manny’s cousin. She has been sent over by the women to help with daily chores.
She is not resentful by nature. She does not complain. She has never complained. Not about the cold or the heat or the leaks or the mud or the flattened cardboard they must lay on the floor of the casita when it rains too hard, or the fleas or ticks or midges that inhabit their bed, which no configuration of netting can keep at bay, which choose her sweet blood as their feast and inflict painful red welts on her belly and legs.
She does not complain about the trash—the endless stream of plastic bags or bottles or wrappers or scraps or bones or toilet paper or glass or string or corroded metal parts that litter the towns, the roads, the riverbanks, the hillsides, that collects in renegade dumps around the campo, drawing stray dogs to mark it with their spray.
She does not complain about the men who hiss like snakes as she walks down the street, or the ones who call out China, China, or Chiquita Chinita, or the ones who leer openly, stare at her breasts or try to touch her hair or rub themselves against her on a crowded bus, or the ones who urinate on the sides of city buildings, or the children who do the same.
She does not complain at work about the painfully slow Internet connection, the intermittent phone service, or when rolling blackouts cause the electricity to zap out for half the day.
She does not complain when Tía Camila or Tía Alba or Tía Paula poke and prod with the same questions about her personal life—when will you and Manny have another baby?—or when they wrinkle their noses at her sweet rice desserts, or when Tío Remy tells her once again about his lady friend in Quito who cooks Chinese food and is highly skilled with her hands.
And so she does not complain about this girl, Yasmin, who is nineteen and chatty with small, perky breasts, who wears tube tops as she cleans the house and feeds the pigs and launders their clothes in the river and who quickly manages to scorch the bottom of her yellow enamel pot. Why should she complain? The dishes are washed. The clothes neatly folded, placed on the wire shelves. Everything is in order.
She focuses on Essy. Her daughter is four years old now. She blooms, like the wildflowers of the campo. She has recently befriended a pair of shepherd girls, eight
and ten, who live on the other side of the hill. They roam everywhere with their dirty sheep and forlorn faces, and Essy follows them like a puppy dog. When the sun lowers itself behind the hills, Lucia walks outside with a whistle. Three whistles means it’s time to come home. Essy mostly cooperates. Though the child refuses to wear shoes and whines and begs for candy all the time (and Manny indulges her, and then she complains about headaches).
One day Mami asks: “Why do you go?” They are preparing tamales. Tía Camila and Tía Alba mix masa with their hands. “Why do you go, to be away from your family, your child?”
She is caught off guard by the question. Her mind blanks, though she detects no rebuke in Mami’s voice. She bites her lip, searches for words, tries to formulate an answer that is not a defense.
“It’s what I did back in America,” she says. “I was a news reporter. A writer. I studied journalism after college.”
“Una periodista?” says Mami. Her face, still puzzled.
“I guess it’s something I’ve always done. And I like it. A lot.” How to explain? “It’s hard to just stop.”
“But this is not America,” says Tía Camila.
“Esperanza must miss you,” says Tía Alba.
She swallows. Nods. Tía Camila purses her lips.
• • •
She loves her daughter. She could leave her job in the city, return to the campo. Now their own crops are growing, there is much to be done. But with Ricky and Juan out of school, and Yasmin around, it seems to get done just fine without her. And on the days she’s home in the campo she finds herself on edge, irritable, exhausted by evening. She can’t say exactly why, but she finds her brain struggling to send words to her mouth, and when the words come, often she must swallow them down to avoid confrontation. Her favorite time becomes the rides in the chicken buses, those long hours back and forth.
One day she stops to observe a small day care on the main calle, two blocks from her office in the city. An idyllic array of children sit in a circle, white and brown and all in-between shades. The facility prepares three hot meals a day. The next day she requests to observe again. Rice and chicken and fresh vegetables.
“The food is super healthy. It’s really nice,” she says.
“You want to bring her to the city?” says Manny.
“I think she’d like it.”
“To put her in a day care?”
She nods.
His jaw, open, his forehead scrunched. “No, Lucia. This is her home. My daughter lives in her home, with her family. Not in some dump in the city.”
Some dump in the city.
The tone. It catches her by surprise. That mole on his left cheek, like an alien object. She could scrub it off his face.
“She’s happy here,” he says. “With Mami, with Fredy, with the escuela you found for her. She loves the campo. She’s free. Isn’t this everything you wanted for her?”
She swallows. Nods. Yes, she supposes, on this matter he is right.
Hi Lucia, Just wanted to give you a heads up, I’m sending a package for Essy to your city address. We were back in NYC last week. Stefan brought Rafael, so I played tour guide. Empire State Building, Statue of Liberty, Central Park, the museums, all of it! We even went to a hardcore punk show at an art space on Rivington Street, which ended up being mortifying for Rafi, dad and stepmom in tow (equally mortifying for us—well, he is into that kind of music and too young for CBGB’s!). But you know the one thing he actually did like? Chinatown. Kosher vegetarian mock-meat dim sum! Only in New York!
Anyway, we were in the East Village, even stopped into Yonah’s store. It looks different now, but Chaka and Noemie were there. They have three boys now! And I found this sundress for Essy at one of those cute new boutiques. Couldn’t resist. I do miss New York. “Querencia,” is that the word? Or “saudade?”
Are you all right? Please take care of yourself. Your health is very important! :-) Jie
Hardcore punk show? CBGB’s? Jie? She finds herself irritated by this message, something in it forced, desperate. The sight of Yonah’s name irks her, too, weighs her down, like a lump of meat sitting undigested in her belly. She cannot indulge in a trip down memory lane right now.
She bangs out a reply:
Dear Jie, I’ll watch for the package. Thanks. I’m fine. L.
Hi LuluBird, How’s your crazy commute? Sorry can’t really write, have papers to grade and kids have been waking up 2x every night. Natey screams his head off even if I bring him into my mind. Ha ha, did I just say mind?? I meant bed. Miss you crazy eights. When you coming for a visit? Nipa.
Hi Nipa, I’ve actually rented a room in the city now, on top of a café where all the expats hang out. It’s like part action, part cave.
She taps her fingers distractedly on the table.
Miss you. Hard to believe it’s been almost a year and a half. Can that be right? Feels like forever but also no time at all. L.
• • •
She is neither this nor that. Here nor there.
Here, she socializes with teenagers half her age. In the campo, it’s his. His land, his house, his family. If he is in a generous mood, he might say it’s theirs. But nothing is really hers. Even their casita is marked, with Mami’s flowery ruffle curtains, with the perfume of another girl. Only this small room in Cuenca, where she has deliberately selected solid blue sheets and a dark green bedspread, can she call her own, and on the wall above the bed she has started to decorate, taped up photos and pictures snipped from magazines, all the most beautiful things: a glass flower, a mountain vista, hazy fog over London, a pair of Venezuelan waterfalls. In the density of the city, she feels alone. In the open space of the campo, she feels constricted, the eyes of his family ever upon her.
There is always another party, another birthday, another quince, another engagement, another celebration of another saint. And the music louder, the men drunker, the women nosier: What’s this, I hear, about Lucia living in Cuenca? Cuenca? But isn’t Lucia standing over there by the Jell-O? She lives in Cuenca? No, no, she travels to Cuenca. By bus. For work. For work? She works for some gringo newspaper. In Cuenca? For this a woman travels alone? Cuenca, it could be Mars.
She is not resentful by nature. She dances bachata with the tíos, sits politely with the women, doles out cake and Jell-O to the neighbors. She is not resentful by nature. But about Manny, this is where she starts to fray.
• • •
At night, when she feels his eyes upon her as she brushes her teeth and rinses and spits and thinks back to their conversations about the business they once said they would start together, the house they said they would build, and in the mornings when she is gardening and glimpses the exterior of their casita which he and Essy have taken on as a project, painstakingly painting a white rabbit on one side, clouds, a blue sky, and in the afternoons when he is watching futbol with his cousins or talking futbol with his cousins or playing futbol with his cousins, and in the evenings when he is watching telenovelas in the kitchen, she finds herself wondering: How is it he finds time for such things but never has the time to build an outhouse, and meanwhile, she still must shit in the woods?
She has asked, repeatedly, and then she stopped asking, and then she started asking again, and always the same answer, over the course of the year. I’ll get to it. About this particular detail, the outhouse, is where she starts to fray.
One evening she storms outside, grabs a shovel from the garden, starts throwing dirt. She can dig. She need not wait for a man. If he will not do it, she will do it herself.
He comes after her.
“Are you all right?” he says.
“I’m fine,” she says. “I’m working. See?”
He narrows his eyes. “Lucia,” he says. Slow and steady as pavement. “You need to take care of yourself.”
Jie’s words. Always Jie. Like a shadow.
�
�Shut up,” she says sharply.
“We don’t have the same kinds of hospitals here. You get sick here, I don’t know how to help you. You get sick here, you stay loco for the rest of your life.”
Her blood, electric. She throws down her shovel. Bites her lip, walks away.
The next day she is back in the city again, and in the evening she does not go for pollo con fritas and colas with the interns though they beg her to join. She returns to her small bed in her small room, looks up through her dramatic French doors, to the night sky too cloudy for stars. She is hot. Itchy. Fresh mosquito bites have risen on her ankles, she digs in her nails with little relief. Heavy trucks roar by, axles shake her bones, smells of grease and salt mixed with cigar smoke roil her belly. It is so overwhelming she wants to shut the French doors. But then she’d be locked in a cave. So she lies next to her window, allowing the diesel fumes of the city buses to assault her nose, clog and contaminate her lungs. She coughs. Reaches between her legs, fingers deft, brings herself to orgasm. Still, she feels unsatisfied, strangely aroused, so again and again, and then lulled to sleep by the raspy sounds of German and tireless American twang: “Well, in America, we ___ .” When she wakes, she feels something inside her like a venom, a flare in her chest, a burning sensation just beneath her skin. The serpents. A thought flickers. She extinguishes it. When she slows her breath to listen, the air is quiet. It is only her.
But back in the campo, new frictions, even as Manny finally builds the outhouse (which he and Essy paint a bright purple). There’s the volume of the television. Muddy boots. A rake left in the garden that gets stolen overnight. And then money—how much they should contribute for all the meals they now take at Mami’s when Lucia is away. He accuses her of neglect, missing his second cousin’s quince. He says she doesn’t appreciate his family, his mother. She is shocked. She loves Mami. She has always tried to be polite.
“You don’t even cook anymore,” he says.
“What?”
It’s true. Because he never wants to eat her food. All those Sunday soups and stews she finds three days later, sitting untouched on the stovetop. It’s a woman’s humiliation.