Daughter's Keeper

by Ayelet Waldman

  She never made it to Chiapas. A pair of German backpackers who had relieved her unexpected loneliness on the bus convinced her to join them in San Miguel de Allende. The tall, gangly women with barking laughs and bright blond hair tangled on their legs fascinated Olivia. They were potters on their way to study ceramics at the Instituto Allende, a college of arts and language, and Olivia thought they might be lesbians. Her initial feelings of anxiety and forlornness upon leaving the United States had surprised her with their intensity, and the idea of following two cheerful artists rather than her own poorly planned agenda was too attractive to resist.

  The tiny colonial city, with its cobblestone streets, thickly stuccoed houses, and Indians in tipica costumes of brightly embroidered fabrics, was exactly the Mexico Olivia had been looking for. While her German friends threw their pots and mixed their glazes, Olivia wandered the streets in a state of ­perpetual enchantment. Her feet slid confidently over the ­cobblestones as if they’d never felt asphalt and concrete. Her half-Jewish, entirely nonreligious soul shivered with delight whenever she ducked into one of the many churches and dropped coins in the offering baskets for La Guadalupana, the gentle virgin whose graceful image adorned places of worship, municipal buildings, key chains, and shopping bags throughout the city. One Sunday morning she joined a line of penitent Catholics, following their lead, kneeling when they knelt, mumbling the words of the prayers in her perfect Spanish and finally, thrillingly, accepting the flavorless body of Christ onto her tongue. In the market, Olivia chattered to the vendors and gleefully gobbled taquitos, fresh mangoes, and strange Mexican candies that tasted like fiery bits of paper. She bought filigreed silver earrings and crudely painted wooden turtles with bouncing heads that fit in the palm of her hand. She drank coffee in the Jardín, the main square, in the shade of the gazebo and watched the peddlers hawk their churros, balloons, and toys made from cut soda cans.

  Olivia enrolled in a Spanish language and literature class at the Instituto, so she could make use of the school’s family placement program. She moved out of her cheap hotel and into the spare room of a little house on the outskirts of the city. The young couple who the school administrator insisted on calling her “host parents” were no more than a few years older than she was. He drove a truck, and she took in sewing and cared for their three children. The family of five slept in a single room, on a long bed made of three or four cots pushed together. Olivia slept in a small, dark bedroom off the kitchen. She woke early in the morning to the sounds of the roosters living in a cage under her window, and ate a simple breakfast of eggs and tortillas served by her sleepy “mother” who refused, despite Olivia’s entreaties, to join her in her meal. Olivia returned in the evenings after her classes, ate with the family, and then watched Univision, a child perched on either knee. She was absolutely content—in love with the city, with the country, and with her own sense of belonging.

  One afternoon six weeks after she’d arrived in San Miguel, Olivia noticed banners hanging from the street lamps and across the busy boulevards. The signs announced the commencement of the annual Celebración de Resistencia: Indígena y Popular. She followed them to a soccer field in the center of town and found it teeming with students in jeans and T-shirts emblazoned with American brand names, and Indian men in straw cowboy hats, their wives and daughters wrapped in scarves and skirts made of gaily colored woven fabric. They were all gathered in front of a stage that had been assembled in front of one of the goal posts, and Olivia joined the throngs, pushing her way up to the front of the crowd. For the next three hours, she listened to speeches about the rights of indigenous peoples throughout Latin America. She applauded loudly when the others did, even when she wasn’t quite sure what it was the speakers had said.

  Finally, as the light began to fade, a young man took the podium. He was a handsome man, although not unusually so. His face had the sharp angles and broad planes common to the Indians, but his nose was large and hooked, not flat. He wore his black hair a little long, to his collar, and he stood taller than most of the other men on the stage. His jeans were new and pressed, and his shirt was embroidered with tiny birds. Olivia wondered who had done that for him—his mother? Sister? Wife? He didn’t lecture like those who had stood before him. Instead, he raised his voice in a shout and his hand in a fist.

  “El pueblo, unido, jamás será vencido,” he bellowed, and the crowd soon joined him. The young man swept Olivia up in the embrace of his cry, and she raised her voice along with the rest. The evening ended with them all shouting to the night that the people, united, would never be defeated. Olivia trembled with the sense that she had finally found a goal worthy of her resolve and a man worthy of her desire. She stayed on the soccer field long after the crowd had dispersed and the cool night’s breeze had begun to blow. She sat, perched on the edge of the bleachers, and watched the speakers embrace one another and head off down the darkened streets. Finally, shivering, she rose to leave. She picked her way through the detritus of soda cans, paper wrappings, and banana leaves and peels that had been left by the crowd. Suddenly, she caught her foot in a rut in the field and stumbled. A hand steadied her, and she looked up into the thickly lashed eyes of the young man whose voice had inspired the crowd and had set her heart aflutter.

  “Be careful,” he said, softly, in Spanish.

  “Thank you,” Olivia replied in the same language and righted herself. She took a tentative step and winced as though she felt a twinge in her ankle.

  “Are you hurt?” he asked.

  Olivia, surprised at the ease with which she had assumed the role of damsel in distress, quickly answered, “No, no. I’m fine.”

  “Are you North American?” Olivia heard the sound of laughing and only then noticed the other two young men standing behind the one whose hand still rested on hers. He leaned over and punched one of his friends in the arm. Then he whispered something in a rapid slang that Olivia couldn’t understand. The other two boys laughed again and walked away, whistling over their shoulders. The young man led Olivia back to the bleachers, and she limped alongside of him, careful to continue her pantomime of injury.

  “Are you a tourist?” he asked, once she’d sat down.

  “No. I mean, I’m from the United States, but I’m a student. At the Instituto.”

  “You speak Spanish well. Your accent is very good.” He sat down on the bench next to her.

  “Thank you.”

  “What’s your name?”

  “Olivia,” she said.

  “Olivia,” he repeated.

  “What is your name?”

  “Jorge. Jorge Luís Rodriguez Hernandez.”

  “I enjoyed your speech.”

  The young man shrugged and leaned back on one arm, forcing her to turn slightly to look at him. He had a narrow line of an upper lip, but the lower was wide and full and looked soft, like a baby’s. “It was just a chant,” he said. “Not a speech. I’ve given speeches at the University. Lots of them.”

  “Are you a student?”

  “Yes,” he said, and his pride was obvious. “I study politics at the University of Guanajuato. Have you been to Guanajuato?”

  Olivia shook her head. “No. Not yet.”

  “You should go. It’s a beautiful city. A real city, not like this tiny little town.” He waved his hand derisively at the now entirely empty field and the shuttered stores behind it.

  “Is that where you live? Are you from Guanajuato?”

  He shook his head. “No, I’m from San Miguel. My family is here. But I’ve been at the University now for almost two years.”

  Olivia was conscious of the heat of Jorge’s body. He sat close to her, almost touching, and she felt her leg ache to inch closer to his.

  “I came today for the conference,” he said. “Did you hear the speeches?”

  “Yes, they were wonderful.”

  Jorge shook his head in exaggerated woe
. “Old men. All of them. What do they know of the struggles of the youth movement or the Indians? But, still, their voices are better than ­nothing.”

  “Are you involved in the…in the movement?” Olivia asked, not sure what movement she was talking about.

  “I am a cell leader for the Guanajuato Student Revolutionary Union,” Jorge said, with just the faintest tinge of haughtiness in his voice.

  Olivia’s breath quickened in her chest, and she smiled. It was as though everything in her life—her love of Spanish, her commitment to social change, her itchy traveling feet—had been designed to lead her precisely to this dusty field, to this dark night, and to this young man wearing a shirt embroidered with birds.

  They talked for a long while. He told her about the guerilla theater his student group performed in the streets of Guanajuato and of the letters they wrote to the president of Mexico in support of the Indians in Chiapas. She shared with him her plans to travel to the violence-torn area and offer herself as a laborer for the revolution, and although his lips twitched in a smile, he told her he was impressed with her courage. Finally, as the night grew colder, he reached an arm around her. “You’re shivering,” he murmured.

  Olivia didn’t reply. She leaned her head back and felt his smooth, hairless forearm on the back of her neck. She closed her eyes and wasn’t surprised to feel his mouth on hers. She parted her lips softly. His tongue darted into her mouth. He tasted faintly tangy and sharp, like nothing she had ever tasted before. He tasted like Mexico. They kissed, and then, finally, Olivia said, “I have to go.” But she didn’t move.

  “I’ll walk with you. Where are you staying?”

  She told him the address of her host family, and they walked there together, his arm wrapped tightly around her waist, and their footsteps echoing loudly on the empty cobblestone streets.

  Olivia looked up at the colonial houses lining the blocks. The street lamps cast pools of orange light along the walls, and the heavy night sky flickered with stars. In the distance, the bells of a hundred churches began to clang and jangle with the tolling of the hour.

  “It’s so beautiful here,” Olivia said.

  “Yes, beautiful,” Jorge said and pressed his lips to hers. She stumbled over a broken cobblestone, and he caught her in his arms.

  ***

  Jorge watched Olivia rub the rough towel across her body. She bent over to dry her legs, and he stared at her round ­bottom, its cleft revealing a hint of the reddish-gold pubic hair that still made him catch his breath with desire whenever he saw it. His penis, which had never quite softened, stirred, and he resisted the urge to stroke himself. Instead, he ducked his head under the water, shuddering against the cold. It had taken him no time at all to grow accustomed to hot showers. In his family’s home there was no hot water in the shower, nor anywhere else in the house. They would no sooner have wasted money heating their bath water than they would have burned dollar bills for fuel.

  Jorge’s family was not poor, exactly, but his father, Juan Carlos, had always had to work not one but two jobs in order to provide for the seven children his wife, Araceli, bore him. His industrious nature might have inched the family more surely up the ladder toward the middle class had he not taken just as seriously his obligation to support his mistress and their four children. It was this combination of dependability and profligacy that was Juan Carlos’s undoing. The money he earned would have allowed a single family some modicum of security and perhaps the barest hint of luxury. It barely kept two fed and clothed.

  Araceli ran a small market out of the front room of their house. From the time they were able to walk and talk, the Rodriguez children were expected to help her in the store, stacking cans of chipotle chilis and Nestle Table Cream, bags of Flor de Mayo and Maizena flour drink powder, jars of El Pollo Cuckoo and Barbacoa. They packed customers’ purchases into crinkly plastic bags, swept and mopped up spills, and wiped away the dust churned up by the cars passing over the dirt road in front of the open door of the market. When he was a student at university, Jorge’s father had gotten him hired onto the ­construction sites where he was the foreman. Jorge had lugged pieces of wood, stone, and brick, and fetched tools and water for the carpenters and masons. His days in Oakland were, in fact, the only ones in his life when he hadn’t had a steady job, and the shame of his sloth was like bitter lemon on his tongue.

  He watched Olivia wrap herself in the old flannel bathrobe she still wore, despite the beautiful, slippery satin one he’d bought her with the proceeds of one of his few days at work. He’d taken the BART all the way to Target in El Cerrito and had spent almost an hour sifting through bits of gossamer and lace until he found one in the precise shade of periwinkle blue of her eyes. He’d anticipated her squeal of delight in such minute detail that he knew her actual response was doomed to disappoint him, but it had been so muted, and her shiver when she’d slipped the glossy fabric over her shoulders so obvious, that he hadn’t been surprised to find the robe shoved into a corner of her lingerie drawer, underneath the panties and bras she wore only when it had been too long since they’d visited the Laundromat. No, he hadn’t been surprised, but he had been angry. He had taken the robe from its hiding place, ironed it precisely, just as he had seen his mother do to all his clothes, even his T-shirts and underwear, and hung it on a hanger on the back of the bathroom door. When she saw it there, Olivia had blushed and explained that it was too cold in the dank apartment for such a beautiful, light garment, but that she promised that as soon as the weather turned, she would wear it. She hadn’t done so yet, and Jorge was sure he could see the robe hanging more limply every day, the blue fading to the flat gray of a foggy Oakland summer sky, and dust gathering on its shoulders.

  ***

  Like most of her friends, neighbors, and fellow Californians, Elaine had been born someplace else—Bergen County, New ­Jersey, in her case, not far from the Paterson Falls. She had grown up in a small suburb a short commute from the city, although neither of her parents ever actually spent hours on the buses or trains going into Manhattan. Her father was a printer in a shop in Paterson, her mother stayed home. Elaine grew up the only child of quiet, middle-class Jews in a quiet, middle-class Jewish town. The only thing that made her different from all the other Jewish girls growing up in the identical houses on the identical blocks was her father’s vague past as a not-particularly-active member of the Communist Party—although the truth was that there were probably other ex-Party apparatchiks in the neighborhood. Many of the middle-aged women manning the voting booths and the men managing the local silk mills and small businesses might have spent evenings, when they were young, in stuffy union halls listening to Earl Browder revile the pointlessness of the New Deal and sing the praises of Soviet Socialism. Then they had children, grew more conservative and afraid, and worried less about redistributing the wealth and more about paying the mortgage.

  The month after she graduated from Douglass College, Elaine had surprised her parents and herself by packing her belongings into a VW Fastback and heading out for California. She was young, only twenty years old, but it was already 1970, and Elaine was terrified that if she didn’t get to San Francisco soon, it would all be over without her.

  As it turned out, she had missed most of it.

  Elaine lived for a while in an all-woman vegan commune in Haight Ashbury. They grew pot in their backyard and smoked it every night, but there was a desperate edge to their hedonism, as if each was afraid that the others would figure out that she was not really having the fun she claimed. Elaine had unremarkable sex with many of the men who passed through the house for much the same reason: because she’d come to California expecting free love and debauchery, and their joyless coupling seemed as close as she was going to get to what she’d been imagining, ­sitting in her organic chemistry and European history classes back in New Brunswick.

  By the time Elaine met Olivia’s father, she was living on her own in
a small apartment in Cole Valley, near enough to the Haight to feel a part of the scene if it ever woke up again, but somewhere quiet and, most importantly, clean. He was just a guy, a lot like the other dozen or so guys she had been with over the past few years, although he stayed a little longer than most. Long enough, at least, to get her pregnant. They were married at City Hall, and he stuck around until Olivia was almost six months old. It wasn’t a particularly dramatic leave-taking. They didn’t scream or yell; he didn’t even walk out the door for a pack of cigarettes and never return. One day he simply told Elaine that he wasn’t cut out to be a husband and father and asked her if she’d be able to manage on her own. She said she would, and he left, taking with him their stash of marijuana and the Smith Corona typewriter her parents had given her as a graduation present.

  The truth, however, was that she really couldn’t manage. She felt totally lost in the face of the unremittingness of Olivia. No matter how many diapers Elaine changed, the baby dirtied more. No matter how many bananas she pureed or bowls of cereal she mixed, the next day the baby was still hungry. Elaine had never realized that it was possible to feel stretched so thin, worked so hard, and yet at the same time—there was no other possible word for it—so bored. She found Olivia tedious. And to her surprise, considering the fact that she was never alone, she was achingly lonely.

  One morning Elaine dragged herself out of bed to the sounds of Olivia’s wails, just as she had every morning for the past seven months. She staggered over to the crib and reached out her arms. Her hands stopped just before they touched her daughter’s squirming body, and she stared into the crib as though she’d never seen the baby before. Olivia’s face was red and sodden with tears and mucus. A few strands of thin, damp hair clung to her skull, and her hands waved desperately in the air. Elaine couldn’t bring herself to touch her. The baby’s cries grated in her ears like the voracious squawk of a carrion bird. She gagged at the stench of urine that just the day before had been so familiar as to be ­innocuous. She stared at her daughter, feeling nothing more or less than a mild revulsion.