Lucky Boy

by Shanthi Sekaran

  They made love wordlessly, heavily. Rishi succumbed to soft snores.

  Fertility treatments. When she’d spoken the words, when Rishi took them in hand and said yes, her hope awakened. Now, it shimmered up her spine and across her scalp. She would not sleep. She settled for lying still, so as not to wake Rishi, letting her thoughts course past. She listened to other couples slipping keys into doors, to the chink of a room-service tray, to splashing, around midnight, from the courtyard pool. And before she was aware of having slept, she woke to the morning light that winked between the curtains.

  9.

  Every morning, Señora Cassidy left the house in running shoes and black leggings, and came home with fresh bread from the bakery around the corner, and a scone that she ate with her tea. “Fresh from the Gourmet Ghetto,” she beamed, and held the baguette high.

  It wasn’t clear if the señora had a job. She took Saoirse to preschool and returned in the afternoons, then spent the remaining day wandering from room to room, or sitting on the front porch with her arms wrapped around her knees. She seemed, much of the time, to be thinking very hard, to be lost in a cloud of a plan, sipping from her blue goblet.

  But this was a good family to work for. Yes, they hoarded like rats and there were times Soli wanted to tour the house with a garbage bag and throw out everything she saw. And Mrs. Cassidy tried most days to speak her incomprehensible patois, ending every attempt with a laugh and an explanation that she’d never taken Spanish at school. The upside was that Soli was learning English and even a little Italian. And most important, she had a job.

  She also had Silvia’s rules. “Never throw a piece of paper away,” Silvia had told her. “Even if it looks like trash, even if it stands up and begs you to end things. Just straighten it up and make it look neater. You never know what it is these people want to hold on to. Believe me.” She wasn’t wrong.

  There were other rules to remember: “Lift everything off the countertop and clean under it,” Silvia instructed. “They’ll check and they’ll know if you got lazy and cleaned around things. Always bring your own food and your own water. Never—NEVER—open the fridge to help yourself, no matter what they say. Think of it!” Silvia said. “If they saw you with your trasero sticking out of their fridge? They won’t like it if they see it, no matter what they say.” So every day, Soli brought some bread and meat and fruit.

  Soon the bread and meat and fruit were not enough. As her child grew inside her, he demanded more. She wasn’t sick with pregnancy—she was the opposite. She ate like a beast in a cave. She found herself addicted, thinking only of her next meal, where it would come from, what it would taste like, how much of it she could cram down the hole before anyone saw her. If she could have smothered herself with bread and meat and fruit and yogurt, she might have stopped praying altogether, certain she’d found paradise.

  And so it was hard to stick to, this rule of Silvia’s. Sometimes the señora would leave her morning scone uneaten, resting on a plate by the sink like it was ready for the garbage. It wasn’t easy, but every day Soli covered that scone in plastic wrap like it was a holy relic and left it where it was.

  “My trasero,” she announced to Silvia, “is staying out of trouble.”

  The baby raged inside her. He raged inside her and sent her to the fridge with a wet yearning. Wiping down the shelves, she gazed at what she could not have. Every morning she played this game with herself. Then one day—it was bound to happen—she found herself reaching for a tinfoil parcel on the low refrigerator shelf. She watched, as if in a dream, as her hand yanked fingerfuls of meat from the foil bundle. She chewed, her lips slipping with grease. Chicken. Lemon. Garlic. Before she could stop herself, she grabbed again at the meat, and again.

  “That happened to me, too,” Silvia said later that evening. “It must be a thing with our family, you know? We don’t get sick, we turn into warthogs.”

  “I know this baby’s appetite,” Soli confided. “It comes from the father. From Checo.” Checo’s hunger had been incessant, born of days and days on a train. The wind, the air, the ceaseless sun, made them all hungry as animals. But Checo had eaten more monstrously than any of them.

  La Bestia, the great freight train, had moved through Mexico like an angry python. It had sucked the open air into its belly; it would have sucked the dozy traveler beneath its wheels. But the beast in Soli was a different sort of monster. Its only menace was its hunger, and its hunger was insatiable.

  • • •

  THERE WERE THINGS she got used to in the Cassidy house. Like the dog. Toto. She was greeted each morning in the most profane way, with Toto digging his nose between her thighs. But soon she grew accustomed even to this. “It’s just me, Toto,” she’d say. “Same old Soli.” She learned to live with him and, eventually, to like him. The little girl grew fond of Soli as well, began to hug her around the waist when she came home from school. She followed her from room to room as she cleaned, introduced her to her toys, of which she had many; but the toys she had most of were Barbie dolls. She carried them through the kitchen like an armful of kindling. As Soli picked muck from the corners of the windowsills, the little girl lined them up against the wall to balance on their gruesomely angled feet.

  “See this one, Soli? See? See? See? See?”

  These people probably believed that in Popocalco they had one Barbie doll, Soli thought, and that they all shared it, and that one summer when the corn wasn’t growing they fried the one Barbie and shared it among the hungry village. In fact, the citizens of Popocalco had a wealth of Barbie dolls. They were brought by a missionary who visited the school, and by some miracle had enough Barbie dolls for all the girls, and enough baseballs for the boys. Where he got them and why he bothered coming to Popocalco, nobody seemed to know. They were Catholic enough without his help. But for the Barbies, they were grateful.

  “This one is Malibu Barbie.”

  “Malibu?” Soli asked. Some of the names she understood, others were only sound.

  “This is Doctor Barbie,” she continued. “And Fireman Barbie, and Pet Vet Barbie and Teacher Barbie and Bride Barbie and Pizza Barbie and News-Lady Barbie. She has a microphone.”

  “And Mexican Housecleaner Barbie?”

  The little girl bent over with little-girl laughter. “There’s no Mexican Housecleaner Barbie!”

  “M’ija,” she said, “I could have told you that.”

  “You’re a silly lady,” the girl pronounced, and trailed from the room, chattering.

  The señora was Mug-of-Tea Barbie. She was a Barbie doll brought to Earth and wrapped in wool, holding a rough-hewn blue mug, the sort of thing Soli’s grandmother had drunk from. Her eyes were round and stricken and as blue as the mouth of her cup. They took up most of the space on her thin face; they were the most voluptuous things on her body. She had red-brown hair and always wore a sheen of gloss on her lips. She was taller than the fridge. Soli could tell that she’d once possessed the sort of beauty that inspired a twinge of pain, and that she had gotten used to this beauty, taking it for granted even as it began to wither. Her eyes had sunk into deep sockets and her lips spewed creases like cascading vines. Soli wondered why she didn’t get them taken away by a doctor. In Mexico, the women with real money didn’t have to grow old.

  “Nobody here has any goddamn money,” Silvia told her. “Even the people who have money don’t have money.”

  Soli asked why.

  “It’s their houses, their houses are vacuum cleaners that suck up all their money. Those pretty trees? Money. Those nice flowers? Good paint, no water stains? Money and more money.”

  “But they have homes. That’s something.”

  “Mortgages,” Silvia said. “They don’t have homes. They have mortgages.”

  Soli grimaced at the word. The syllables themselves stuck in her throat.

  “Mort. Gage,” Sylvia repeated. “And don’t look
so worried. You’ll never have one.”

  Mort. Gage. It was a word that got in its own way. It was a word that held within itself a sense of its own limits, an echo of death.

  • • •

  AFTER TWO MONTHS, Mr. Cassidy returned from Hong Kong. Soli had grown so used to their little household of three people and one animal that she’d forgotten about him completely. With no man in the house, there were no men’s undershorts to pick up, no shaven hair peppering the bathroom sink, no clouds of aftershave hanging over steamy morning bathrooms. But then, one Monday morning, there he was. She sensed, even before she opened the house door, that something inside it had changed. An odor of the faraway greeted her, mingling with the smell of baking bread that followed her in from the street.

  He sat at the kitchen table, unshaven, with the deep tan of a foreign sun. He had the hair of a romantic hero, a thick sweep of it. “¡Hola!” he called. “¡Solimar! ¿Com’estas?” He spoke Spanish, this man, faster even than Soli did. Before him spread an array of teacups and a small black teapot on a stand. On a plate sat a mountain of scones. Her hunger thrashed inside her.

  “Where are you from?” he asked in English.

  “Mexico.”

  “Right, oh-kay, excellent.” He switched back to Spanish: “Where in Mexico?”

  She told him.

  “I went backpacking through southern Mexico one summer, after college. It was amazing! The mezcal is something else, isn’t it? It’s really another world out there.”

  “Sí, señor.”

  He fell silent, but she stayed put.

  He cleared his throat. “So what do you think of the Chiapas situation?”

  “Chiapas is very nice,” she said. “Very beautiful.”

  He considered this.

  “But the situation? The Zapatistas?” He lifted his hands to the air, as if the situation were beyond his understanding. “What do you think?”

  Mister, she could have said, I don’t think a thing.

  Instead she said nothing and stared dumbly at the plate of scones. She didn’t know how to speak politics. She’d seen people doing it, men at the cantina in Popocalco who pounded their fists and believed ferociously in what they were saying. But she didn’t speak that language. Tossing up an idea would mean having to catch it again, having to actually understand what it was she believed. And what made him think Soli knew a thing about the Zapatistas?

  Later, she told Silvia about it.

  Silvia clapped her hands and threw her head back with laughter. “No manches! Oh, no no NO! He did not say that to you!” She fell back on the sofa laughing, wiping at her eyes.

  “What was I supposed to say to him? Was I supposed to answer?”

  “Stop it. The Zapatistas? Stop it!”

  “What would you have said?”

  “Don’t ask me, bruja. No one’s asked me a thing like that. He must think you’re smart.”

  “Well, that’s his problem if he thinks I’m smart.”

  “So what did you do?”

  “I stared at him like a donkey.”

  “And what did he do?”

  “He gave me a scone.”

  Maybe because he felt bad for asking her questions she couldn’t answer, maybe because she couldn’t pull her eyes away from the mountainous plate, Mr. Cassidy had picked up a scone and held it out.

  “Have you eaten today?” he asked, the way you’d ask a homeless person or a runaway. Of course she’d eaten that day. The scone was gold-crusted, and red berries pushed through its doughy boulders. She took it. Inside her, the baby leapt for joy. She took it to the other room before she crammed it in her mouth, because she knew that no matter what anyone said or did, no one in that house would truly want to watch her eat.

  • • •

  SOLI LEARNED A NEW WORD that year. Housekeeper. She was the quiet mesh that contained the Cassidy home and kept it whole. Two months passed, and then three. They didn’t have time to make a mess when she was there every day. She felt like the house, in some very small way, belonged to her. She was its day nurse, and without her, it would have suffocated, forgotten, beneath the Cassidys’ colonies of material possessions.

  Now and then, Soli caught the señora watching her through the archway that led from the kitchen to the living room, her arms folded, her head cocked forward. She tried to ignore it, but the woman’s eyes sent a current through the house that chilled Soli’s arms and quickened her heart. She stuck to her work and didn’t look up. She hummed to seem at ease. Every evening, Mrs. Cassidy did a tour of the kitchen, peeking at the dusted shelves, nodding at the spray-cleaned stove. Every evening, Mrs. Cassidy stood before Soli, said Gracias, and blanketed her in her ponderous gaze. After Soli gathered her things and left, she could feel the woman’s eyes follow her steps down the drive, down the street, until she escaped around the corner.

  The Cassidys were waiting for something. Soli just didn’t know what. She went over her list of daily tasks with Silvia, to see if she’d been missing something vital.

  “You could polish their shoes, I guess,” Silvia said. “But it all looks good to me.”

  Even when Mrs. Cassidy wasn’t watching, Soli felt that she was. Watching and waiting. Expecting a miracle of service, of cleanliness? Expecting the saints themselves to rain down their praise? But no. Soli sensed that what the Cassidys wanted had nothing to do with her work. They approved of her in one sense; they seemed to approve deeply of where she’d come from, how she’d struggled. Mrs. Cassidy asked her questions about her life in Mexico, and sometimes received her answers with a slow nod, open lips, wells of empathy. Other times she met her with a quizzical smile, as if Soli’s answers had missed the question.

  • • •

  SOLI WAS BRINGING HOME two hundred forty dollars a week. And after Silvia took half of it (For your food and for your passage here, she said. You have no idea how much you eat!) she was left with an acceptable chunk to send home every month. A few hundred dollars could do a lot in Popocalco, and she liked to think that she was giving her parents a home. Working while pregnant was getting harder every day, but she knew how it was for other people—slaving in factories, getting cheated and beaten. On the train, she’d heard stories of how workers were treated and Silvia told her more, about the women in factories who’d been raped, about workers locked indoors for twelve hours a day and paid for only six. “Consider yourself lucky,” she said, “to be working for me.”

  When the baby had been in her for five months, it started to get harder to bend. A weight pulled at her back, anchored her to the ground, and bore down on her knees and feet. She began to sit down—to wipe the table, to wipe the counter. Washing dishes, she leaned on her elbows. She began to sweat in a way she never had before, covered throughout the day in a moist film. It sprung fresh on her face and trickled down her neck, it bloomed in the dip of her back and streamed quietly into her panties. Even the backs of her knees perspired.

  One morning, Mrs. Cassidy found her sitting at the kitchen table, her head in her hand, her eyelids drooping.

  “Soli!”

  She shot to her feet. Too fast. Her head spun and she had to catch herself on the table’s edge. She sank back into the chair.

  Mrs. Cassidy set her mug of tea on the table. “You’re sweating, Soli. Are you ill?” She lay a hand on her forehead. “You’re clammy!”

  Soli’s heart beat faster when she realized the woman wasn’t going to ignore this. She wanted an answer.

  “Do you need to go home? I’ll make you some tea. Stay there.”

  “¿Señora?” She didn’t know how Americans turned this particular phrase, but the señora sat before her and she had to say something, so she stated what she knew.

  “I have a baby.”

  Mrs. Cassidy frowned. Soli pointed to her stomach. “Baby.”

  The señora covered her mouth and
chirped like she’d swallowed a bird.

  “You’re pregnant?” she said. “You’re pregnant.”

  She leaned closer, looked right into Soli’s face. Soli cowered, waiting for the slap. None came.

  “Soli, you’re pregnant.” A smile bloomed, and she was beautiful. “But where’s the father?” The smile fell.

  Soli laughed inside when people called Checo the father. To her, a father was Papi. A father was a man who scratched his belly and talked back to the radio. Checo was no more a father than the wind was. He’d blown through her, woken her up one day and kept her breathing. And then, as quick as the wind, he was gone.

  Señora Cassidy picked up a notepad and started flipping through the pages. “What are you going to do, Soli? What are you going to do? Is your sister helping?”

  “My cousin.”

  “Oh.” She stopped flipping. “Does that mean something in your culture? I mean, will she help you still?”

  Help me to what, she wondered.

  “Okay, let’s plan. We’ll have to plan.” At the far end of the house, the little girl was belting out a song. “You don’t have kids, Soli, do you? Do you have kids back in Mexico?”

  “No, Mrs. Cassidy.”

  “My goodness, Soli. Oh, honey. You have no idea, do you? You really have no idea what you’re in for.” She sat back and shook her head and looked like she might start crying. “Is the father in the picture?”

  She didn’t understand this at first.

  “Is the father here?” She rammed her finger into the table. “In Berkeley? Does he live with you?”

  “No, señora. He does not.”

  10.

  Soli had started to enjoy her walks home in the evenings, when the autumn air was welcoming and the soft chill drew a finger up her spine. Around her, the city bloomed. Rosebushes rose above aeoniums, beach grass tickled the trunks of Japanese maples, princess plants sheltered yuccas. In Berkeley, the plants grew over one another like the people did, around and under and in between one another. They held each other up and kept each other down, and all the while they seemed wholly encased in their own private ecosystems.