It was addictive, that sensation of resonance, and yet she followed Pamela’s advice to the letter and took her recommended breaks, which she used to practice awareness of her breath.
She felt so at home there in the laundry room when she finished her fifteen minutes that it came to her to stay a while, savoring her tingling lips. She had plenty of time, after all, with Pamela gone, Juanito off visiting his cousin, her aunt incommunicado on a mummy adventure, and Armando away and rarely calling. Besides, Juanito’s sales needed dusting. The angel with the broken wing. The cracked mirror in the tin frame. The chipped glass vase. She practiced awareness, too, when dusting them, and so she noticed new things. The way, for example, the pattern of flowers on the tin frame had been painted, one corner of the frame left unfinished, as if the paintbrush had wandered.
She had tried calling her mother every few days and expected that her mother would call her, too, as usual when Aunt Ida was away. But she hadn’t been able to reach her mother, and her mother hadn’t called once.
But finally a week into July Callie came home to see her answering machine blinking. She ran to the machine, her backpack still on, to listen to the message. “Your doll now has two eyes,” her mother had said, “though not the same blue as before.” She hadn’t been able to find a matching button for the one dangling from her doll’s face.
Callie slipped her backpack off. The poor doll. It had not been her fault. She shrugged. At least now the doll was all better. But her mother. How was she? Should she be worrying about her? She put the kettle on for tea. She didn’t think so. Apart from not being at home when she usually was, she sounded fine. Better than fine, now that she thought of it. Her mother had even giggled about joining the church choir. “Who would have thought?” she had said. Callie saw her mother covering her mouth, the way she did when a giggle slipped out. Her mother had joined a reading group at the library, too. She had giggled again before hanging up, “My how I’ve gone on, Dear,” she had said. “I’ve got to get these things to give away over to the church.”
That reminded her. She really should do something about the angel with the chipped wing and Juanito’s other sales. They seemed to her, after their daily dusting, to deserve a better life. Why not have them fixed? Armando’s driver, Jorge, had mentioned family members who fixed things. She had seen a flyer somewhere about an organization looking for things to sell at a bazaar. A fundraiser for animal welfare. Well, that would be perfect. She could get the things fixed and then give them away for a worthy cause. Juanito would be proud.
She got right on it and called Jorge, who came by to pick them up the next day. When they were ready, he would take them to the people organizing the bazaar. She didn’t need to do anything but give him a call with the information about where they were to be dropped off.
She thought she caught the jaguar raising a questioning eyebrow when Jorge left with the stone angel, but she just returned the stare with a sigh of relief and a checking motion of her hand. One more thing off her to-do list.
SHE continued her morning sessions of breathing and then playing along with the tape Pamela had made, trying to match her sound to Pamela’s. She replaced the time spent dusting Juanito’s prize sales with transplanting lavender seedlings Maestro Chávez had given Armando, who, not having a green thumb, or as he had put it la main verte, had passed them on to her. Each day she planted a few seedlings in pots of their own.
Within a few days she’d finished tucking the last of the seedlings into fresh loamy soil and placed their pots in line with the other ones, pleased with herself for having completed the task in the full of the rainy season and weeks before Armando’s expected return. Yet, when she stood back to take in the results of her labor, she felt a little sad at how small the plants looked in their pots. She shrugged her shoulders. Perhaps she had been feeling a little lonely rambling about her house without Armando coming by. And she hadn’t had Tavelé to keep her company, as she usually did when Armando was away.
Armando hadn’t called often either, which was a good sign, Callie thought. Things must be going well with Claude. She had finally reached her mother who talked about this and that, little details of life in a small town. Her garden, the 4th of July fireworks. How the crops were doing. She’d been more interested before in dahlias than in soy beans or field corn. But when Callie acted surprised, her mother just laughed. “Well,” she had said, “The farmers and their crops keep our little town going. I guess it’s time I start thinking about them.”
IN mid-July, Callie was on the patio weeding the lavender when she heard the phone. She ran to answer, expecting to tell Armando about how well the lavender was doing. But it was Pamela. She was so excited Callie could hardly understand her. “She’s here. She’s here,” she kept saying.
“Ami Mai?” Callie sat on the side of her bed.
“No, the baby!”
“Baby?”
“The baby girl. I’m pregnant!”
Pregnant. Callie thought again of the baby she’d imagined in her own belly. A little Noah. Now, it seemed, Pamela imagined a little girl in hers. “That’s …” She wanted to say “wonderful,” but her throat closed. Her baby had been as wonderful as a baby could be, and yet she had let her go. She saw her baby’s last questioning look and began to shake.
“I wanted to tell you in person. But Ami Mai thought you’d like to know as soon as possible. So you can plan for her. I mean …” Pamela paused, as if she didn’t want to presume. “You know how Ami Mai is.”
She had sung her dream to her baby. Of Daddy Noah, who was going to be a doctor and would come to take them home. But that wasn’t the plan. She couldn’t sing the plan. She couldn’t think the plan. She couldn’t admit the plan. Not when she first felt her baby inside her or when she held her to her breast. She couldn’t imagine letting her go.
“Callie?” Pamela said. “Are you there?”
Pamela sounded worried. Callie shook herself. She had to think about Pamela. About her baby. “A baby. That’s wonderful.” She could plan for Pamela’s baby. She knew what to do. Line up Doña Petra. “Don’t worry,” she said, “I’ll start getting ready right away.”
And she did.
SHE must be missing Juanito, she realized some days later, when she was practicing in the laundry room. Instead of relishing how clean and organized it looked, she regretted giving up his treasures, as if, with them gone, she had lost something of Juanito himself. She called the woman organizing the fundraising auction and offered a large donation to get the pieces back. “Very generous,” the woman said, “but too late.” The auction had begun.
And so she took off down the callejón and arrived at the fundraiser out of breath, but in time to race around, adding her name to the bid sheets for each item she had donated. There were so many bids for the angel, the volunteers had had to add extra bid sheets. She sighed. It had to be the angel. She didn’t want to part with any of her donations and especially not with the stone angel, which Juanito had taken such pride in getting to her house. And so she stood close by, elbowing her way in each time someone wrote a name and amount on the latest bid sheet. Her stomach tied in knots at the effort, and so she tried to breathe. But she had barely a moment for breath, given how anxious other bidders were to get their hands on her angel.
She considered slipping the bid sheets into her pocket, not that she wanted to keep the price from going up. She just wanted to make sure her bid was the winning one. She kept a close eye on the clock. As the minute hand crept toward the deadline, her impulse to take the bid sheets increased. It was, after all, almost time to end the bidding, and, besides, she had to abandon her post a moment to make sure she had the last bid on Juanito’s other treasures. She reached for the slips of paper, but just then one of the helpful volunteers came by. She looked the volunteer in the eye, as if she had nothing to hide, increased her own last bid, and then hurried around the room adding bids where necessary. She made it back just in time to sign her name as the last bid be
fore the deadline. “Perdón!” she said to the woman whose toe she had stepped on.
Jorge, when he arrived to take her home, was surprised to be returning the items to her house. “Well, it was for a good cause,” he said.
“Yes,” she said and smiled all the way home, imagining Juanito’s delight at seeing the newly repaired treasures.
“Que le vaya bien,” she called after Jorge when he left after carrying the last of the treasures down the hill.
She closed the door and leaned against it, studying the angel Jorge had placed on the opposite side of the terrace. Juanito would be pleased. But she found herself strangely dissatisfied. She crossed the terrace to take a closer look. The line where the wing had been repaired was so well hidden she could barely see it. It seemed as if the angel were no longer the one she had dusted for days. She shook her head in frustration. Still, she overcame her impulse to take a hatchet to its wing. Not that she had one anyway. And, besides, what would the jaguar— who appeared relieved on seeing Juanito’s treasures returned— think then?
THE package. There it was on the laundry shelf that had held Juanito’s most prized sales. The package she had never opened, nor paid attention to in her ministrations to Juanito’s treasures. But once they had been removed, the package became salient in her field of vision. Still, she had not touched it. Or even reached out. She stood there, her hands on her hips, and looked at it.
She had woken that morning at daybreak and had gone to the patio, looking forward to seeing the lavender sparkling from the evening rain. But when she stood looking at the little plants in their clay pots, all she could think of was how, weeks after being transplanted, they still looked lonely. Mr. Charles’s melodious voice had come to her, “Be good and you’ll be lonely.” She shook her head. She had tried to do the plants good by giving them space. But instead of radiating happiness in their pots large enough for them to flourish, they looked, well, lonely. “Be good and you’ll be lonely.” She had always smiled before when she thought of those words. But not that morning. Not when she stood back, studying the plants, wondering at their stubborn loneliness. And it wasn’t Armando, Pamela, Juanito, or even Tavelé, but the package that had come to mind. The one the size of a paperback, wrapped in butcher paper and tied with twine. She shook her head, but the image remained, and so she had climbed the stone stairs to the terrace and then the iron stairway to the rooftop terrace, where she had opened the door to the laundry room. There it sat alone on the top shelf. The package Jacob had given her.
She frowned. She had never felt lonely before knowing him. Darn him. And after recovering from their breakup she had thought she never would again, but here she was, years later, imagining her lavender seedlings were lonely, and all because of him. Darn him. Darn him. Darn him.
Not that Jacob had initiated their parting. It was she who had done that. A parting she did not regret. Not once or ever. But, even so, she had felt lonely. She had grown accustomed to their weekly twenty-four hours, eight a.m. sharp Saturday, when he would arrive, his arms loaded with fruits and vegetables from the farmer’s market, until eight a.m. sharp Sunday, when off he would go to catch a church service somewhere in his community.
They always passed their twenty-four hours at her place, because, though Jacob had many admirable characteristics, housekeeping was not one of them. At his place, you were likely to find newspapers, sports gear, laundered shirts on hangers and wrapped in plastic, and other miscellanea strewn about. There would be moldy take-out in the fridge—no, he didn’t cook or even barbecue—and countless blinks on the answering machine. His clutter didn’t bother him, he said, but he treasured the quiet simplicity of Callie’s studio—“Spartan,” he called it—and the meals she made from scratch. Their weekly twenty-four hours gave him, he said, respite from the social hurricane of his life.
Likely as not after she had put the groceries away, he would draw a canceled stamp from his pocket to place by the stamp she had placed on the counter. Stamps from other times and places they had given each other the week before. They would then tell each other about the envelope or parcel, the relationship between its sender and receiver, and the modes of transportation used to carry the stamp between them. The stories did not have to be accurate. How could they have known? But they did have to be plausible. And so they each, during the week, would have done some research on distant times and places. In spite of the wide variety of possibilities, their stories without exception turned out to be about how lovers overcame seemingly insurmountable odds to end up in each other’s arms, which is where each Saturday morning they, too, ended up, after lowering Callie’s Pullman bed, if their passion did not overtake them beforehand.
It was when Jacob’s stories started turning to lovers bent on marriage that she began to get nervous. She should have ended their relationship then.
She went over to the package, blew the dust off the sprig of lavender, placed the package inside a box of the philosopher’s books, and shut the lid.
Twenty-Seven
ON AUGUST 2ND, CALLIE WOKE JUST AS THE SUN began to light the sky. It was Sunday morning, but there was no time for lounging. Pamela was coming back. She would have given Pamela some time to settle in. But after realizing that it was not her lavender, but she who was lonely, she had decided to invite Pamela for dinner that very day. She bounded out of bed. She needed to get everything ready.
She made her bed, folding and tucking in the corners of the sheets, military style, like her father had taught her, and then opened the curtains to the patio. She looked up at the avocado tree laden with nearly ripe fruit and then hazarded a glance at the lavender plants, which stood lined up in their pots like brave little soldiers. She shook a finger at them. “There’s nothing to be brave about.” Then she took a quick tour about her room, noting that everything looked the way it should. She would shower. And then she would practice. She began humming “Tea for Two” from the Clora Bryant recording Pamela had loaned her.
She shivered when she slipped out of her PJs. The bathroom was cool, but she realized that wasn’t the real reason. Silly as it was, she was shivering with excitement. Silly, yes, but there it was. With everyone out of touch, she had not been able to share her new enthusiasm with anyone, and, besides, no one else would understand. Not the way Pamela would.
She turned on the shower and leaned in to place a bucket to catch the cold water for her plants. She stood up. Shouldn’t she jot down some notes, so she wouldn’t forget? She stepped back into her bedroom and picked up a pad from the bedside table. What was most important? Okay. Here goes. She started writing. “Lips tingling less, notes sounding more …” How would she put it? More … more … ah, focused, that’s it. “Focused.” And what else? Oh, yeah. “And easier to produce.” She added. “Gifts of the breath.”
She ran back into the bathroom, moved the bucket, and stepped into the warm shower. She leaned back to wet her hair. Not that she had played many notes, but no matter. She foamed shampoo into her curls, then rinsed. She had started with middle C and added a note every couple of days, like Pamela had suggested. Not pushing it. She got all the way up an octave. And she had sung and buzzed the notes, too. Singing, buzzing, and playing along with the tape Pamela had given her. It was like having her there, in a way. She had liked that.
WHEN she finished dressing, she calculated the time it would take Pamela to clear customs, get a taxi to the Teatro Principal, and walk up the hill to her house. Then she filled every moment getting ready.
“Good timing,” Pamela said when she called her. “I just walked in the door.”
She blurted out, “Would you like to come to dinner?” And then caught herself. She hadn’t even asked Pamela how she was feeling. “Oh, that is, if you’re not too tired.”
“I hoped you would invite me to dinner,” Pamela laughed. “I haven’t a bean in the house, and I’m starved.”
It was only five p.m. But why not? “Well, yes, come whenever you like. How do salad, lentil stew, quesadil
las, and fresh blueberries sound?”
“I’ll be right there. Well, I might just take a peek at the baby things first. They’re too cute to leave in suitcases.”
Suitcases? How many baby things had Pamela brought with her? Callie laughed. She started to say goodbye and then had a feeling she’d forgotten something. She closed her eyes a moment to think. “Oh, I almost forgot. Do you know how to get here?”
“Didn’t you say you’re around the corner and up the hill from me?”
“Right. The stone house with the mesquite door.”
She put down the phone and smiled, glad she had set the table. And then she noticed the jaguar eyeing the empty vase. She had meant to pick some bougainvillea. “Well,” she told him. “Everything else is ready, and that will be, too.” She swiped the vase off the table and skipped down the stairs to the garden.
PAMELA started talking as soon as she opened the door. “I couldn’t wait to see you. I wanted to ask you right away. I knew the first time I saw you with Juanito. You didn’t see me. But I saw you with him one day in the Plaza Baratillo. And then I saw you with other children gathered around asking you questions.”
Callie smiled. “They like to hear their names in English. You know, John for Juan, Mary for Maria, etc.”
“Well, like I said, I knew right away. But remember what I said about Ami Mai. She likes to think things through.”
Like with their wedding. And planning for the baby. No problem there. Doña Petra was delighted to help out.
“It’s not like there’s a list of contenders, I told her. Oh, I don’t mean anything by that. Even if there were, I would pick you. But still, I understood, she likes all the Is dotted and Ts crossed. And so, besides my flawless intuition, I used reason,” Pamela said and laughed. “You speak Spanish fluently, and you live just around the corner.”
The Trumpet Lesson Page 15