The rent and utilities we split fifty-fifty. Lou Ann had savings left from Angel’s disability insurance settlement-for some reason he hadn’t touched this money-and also he sent checks, but only once in a blue moon. I worried about what she would do when the well ran dry, but I’d decided I might just as well let her run her own life.
For the party I was making sweet-and-sour chicken, more or less on a dare, out of one of Lou Ann’s magazines. The folks at Burger Derby should see me now, I thought. I had originally planned to make navy-bean soup, in celebration of Turtle’s first word, but by the end of the week she had said so many new words I couldn’t have fit them all in Hungarian goulash. She seemed to have a one-track vocabulary, like Lou Ann’s hypochondriac mother-in-law, though fortunately Turtle’s ran to vegetables instead of diseases. I could just imagine a conversation between these two: “Sciatica, hives, roseola, meningomalacia,” Mrs. Ruiz would say in her accented English. “Corns, ’tato, bean,” Turtle would reply.
“What’s so funny?” Lou Ann wanted to know. “I hope I can even fit into this dress. I should have tried it on first, I haven’t worn it since before Dwayne Ray.” I had noticed that Lou Ann measured many things in life, besides her figure, in terms of Before and After Dwayne Ray.
‘You’ll fit into it,” I said. “Have you weighed yourself lately?”
“No, I don’t want to know what I weigh. If the scale even goes up that high.”
“I refuse to believe you’re overweight, that’s all I’m saying. If you say one more word about being fat, I’m going to stick my fingers in my ears and sing ‘Blue Bayou’ until you’re done.”
She was quiet for a minute. The hiss of the steam iron and the smell of warm, damp cotton reminded me of Sunday afternoons with Mama.
“What’s Mattie going to be on TV about? Do you know?” she asked.
“I’m not sure. It has something to do with the people that live with her.”
“Oh, I’d be petrified to be on TV, I know I would,” Lou Ann said. “I’m afraid I would just blurt out, ‘Underpants!’ or something. When I was a little girl I would get afraid in church, during the invocation or some other time when it got real quiet, and I’d all of a sudden be terrified that I was going to stand up and holler, ‘God’s pee-pee!’”
I laughed.
“Oh, I know it sounds ridiculous. I mean, I didn’t even know if God had one. In the pictures He’s always got on all those robes and things. But the fact that I even wondered about it seemed like just the ultimate sin. If I was bad enough to think it, how did I know I wasn’t going to stand up and say it?”
“I know what you mean,” I said. “There’s this Catholic priest that comes to Mattie’s all the time, Father William. He’s real handsome, I think he’s your type, maybe not. But sometimes I get to thinking, What if I were to strut over and say something like, ‘Hey good looking, whatcha got cooking?’ ”
“Exactly! It’s like, did you ever have this feeling when you’re standing next to a cliff, say, or by an upstairs window, and you can just picture yourself jumping out? The worst time it happened to me was in high school. On our senior trip we went to the state capitol, which is at Frankfort. Of course, you know that, what am I saying? So, what happened was, you can go way up in the dome and there’s only this railing and you look down and the people are like little miniature ants. And I saw myself just hoisting my leg and going over. I just froze up. I thought: if I can think it, I might do it. My boyfriend, which at that time was Eddie Tubbs, it was way before I met Angel, thought it was fear of heights and told everybody on the bus on the way home that I had ackero-phobia, but it was way more complicated than that. I mean, ackero-phobia doesn’t have anything to do with being afraid you’ll holler out something god-awful in church, does it?”
“No,” I said. “I think what you mean is a totally different phobia. Fear that the things you imagine will turn real.”
Lou Ann was staring at me, transfixed. “You know, I think you’re the first person I’ve ever told this to that understood what I was talking about.”
I shrugged. “I saw a Star Trek episode one time that was along those lines. All the women on this whole planet end up naked. I can’t remember exactly, but I think Captain Kirk gets turned into a pipe wrench.”
The six o’clock news was half over by the time we got the TV plugged in. There had been a mix-up with the women next door, who were waiting for us to come over and get the television. They didn’t realize they had been invited for dinner.
Meanwhile, Estevan and Esperanza arrived. Estevan played the gentleman flirt, saying how nice I looked, and didn’t he perhaps know my tomboy sister who worked with a used-tire firm? “Exquisite” was what he actually said, and “torn boy” as if it were two words. I batted my eyelashes and said yes indeed, that she was the sister who got all the brains of the family.
I suppose I did look comparatively elegant. Lou Ann had parted my hair on the side (“What you need is one of those big blowzy white flowers behind one ear,” she said, and “God, would I kill for black hair like yours.” “Kill what?” I asked. “A skunk?”) and forced me into a dress she had purchased “before Dwayne Ray” in an uptown thrift shop. It was one of those tight black satin Chinese numbers you have to try on with a girlfriend-you hold your breath while she zips you in. I only agreed to wear it because I thought sharing our clothes might shut her up about being a Sherman tank. And because it fit.
But Esperanza was the one who truly looked exquisite. She wore a long, straight dress made of some amazing woven material that brought to mind the double rainbow Turtle and I saw on our first day in Tucson: twice as many colors as you ever knew existed.
“Is this from Guatemala?” I asked.
She nodded. She looked almost happy.
“Sometimes I get homesick for Pittman and it’s as ugly as a mud stick fence,” I said. “A person would have to just ache for a place where they make things as beautiful as this.”
Poor Lou Ann was on the phone with Mrs. Parsons for the fourth time in ten minutes, and apparently still hadn’t gotten it straight because Mrs. Parsons and Edna walked in the front door with the TV just as Lou Ann ran out the back to get it.
One of the women led the way and the other, who appeared to be the older of the two, carried the set by its handle, staggering a little with the weight like a woman with an overloaded purse. I rushed to take it from her and she seemed a little startled when the weight came up out of her hands. “Oh my, I thought it had sprouted wings,” she said. She told me she was Edna Poppy.
I liked her looks. She had bobbed, snowy hair and sturdy, wiry arms and was dressed entirely in red, all the way down to her perky patent-leather shoes.
“Pleased to meet you,” I said. “I love your outfit. Red’s my color.”
“Mine too,” she said.
Mrs. Parsons had on a churchy-looking dress and a small, flat white hat with a dusty velveteen bow. She didn’t seem too friendly, but of course we were all dashing around trying to get set up. I didn’t even know what channel we were looking for until Mattie’s face loomed up strangely in black and white.
Signatory to the United Nations something-something on human rights, Mattie was saying, and that means we have a legal obligation to take in people whose lives are in danger.
A man with a microphone clipped to his tie asked her, What about legal means? And something about asylum. They were standing against a brick building with short palm trees in front. Mattie said that out of some-odd thousand Guatemalans and Salvadorans who had applied for this, only one-half of one percent of them had been granted it, and those were mainly relatives of dictators, not the people running for their lives.