Aunt Isabela shook her head at Sophia and walked away, which was what she usually did. She would rather retreat than spend the time and effort to cause Sophia to change or improve.
“I’m trying to be more of a cousin to you, Delia,” Sophia continued, with a sickeningly sweet smile as a way of urging me to do her math homework. “You can at least meet me halfway.”
“Okay, I will. I will help you with your math homework whenever you ask.”
“Help me? I’m not asking you to be my teacher!” she flared back at me. Then she quickly calmed down and again slipped that phony smile over her face, a smile I had grown so accustomed to that it no longer had any effect.
Why she never saw the futility of these antics, not only with me but with others, especially her teachers and her supposedly close friends, I didn’t know. She was so obviously being phony. I was tempted to tell her time and time again that she wasn’t fooling anyone with her false faces. Just be yourself, believe in yourself. And then again, I was beginning to wonder if she even had a self. Maybe she was just a mixture of this deception and that lie, a bundle of phoniness that when unraveled left nothing.
“Look, if you do my math, I’ll help you make more friends. Everyone needs more friends, Delia.”
Now I was tempted to laugh aloud at her. On my desk in my room was an invitation to Danielle Johnson’s birthday party, an invitation she had yet to receive. I had learned never to mention any invitation before she received it, because if she wasn’t invited to the same party, she went into a sulk and then a tantrum. It only made life more miserable for everyone in the hacienda, especially the servants she badgered and abused, such as Inez Morales, the assistant maid to my aunt’s head housekeeper, Señora Rosario. Poor Inez desperately needed the money, since her husband had deserted her and her twin boys, so she had to endure whatever abuse Sophia unloaded on her. Sophia was like that, quick to pounce and take advantage of someone who was practically defenseless. I remembered how defenseless I was my first days here and how she had abused me.
Never again, I vowed.
“I am pleased with how many friends I already have, Sophia. When your mother and your brother told me I would attend the private school, I was worried that so many of the other students would be snobby, but I’m happy to say it’s not so,” I told her with a deliberately exaggerated happy smile.
Of course, there were snobby girls and many who were not friendly to me, but give her back the dishonesty she doles out to me and to others, I thought. Or, as my Señora Paz would always tell my grandmother whenever someone would say something insulting, “Páguela en su propia moneda.” Pay her in her own currency.
I could see the frustration boiling inside Sophia, the crimson color coming to her cheeks, the tiny flames dancing in her eyes. I knew my grandmother Anabela would not like to see me so vengeful, but sometimes I couldn’t help it. Was I becoming too much like my cousin?
More than once I had heard my father in conversation with other men say, “Cuando usted se convierte como su enemigo, su enemigo ha ganado.” When you become like your enemy, your enemy has won.
Was that happening to me? Was my living in this
house with my aunt and my cousin turning me into a woman with a character just like theirs? Was I doing it to survive or because I had come to enjoy it?
“Don’t be fooled, Delia. You speak English okay, but you’re not sophisticated enough yet to be an American. They’re lying to your face and talking about you behind your back. You don’t hear what I hear in the girls’ room. They still think you’re some wetback Mexican who just happened to fall into a good thing.”
“If that is so after all this time, then there is not much you can do to change them, Sophia, but thank you for thinking and worrying about me,” I told her, smiled, and went to my room.
Even before I crossed the hallway, I could hear her heaving things about in anger. It brought a smile to my face, until I looked into the mirror above my vanity table and thought I saw mi abuela Anabela shaking her head.
“I’m sorry, Grandmother,” I whispered. “But I’ve turned the other cheek so many times, I feel like I’m spinning.”
I dropped myself onto my bed and stared up at the ceiling. Yes, I was back in this beautiful room with this plush, expensive furniture, and I had a closet almost as big as the room Abuela Anabela and I had shared as a bedroom back in Mexico, but it still felt more like a prison at times.
I’m the Lady of Shalott in the Tennyson poem we were studying, I thought when I rose and went to my window to look out on the estate. Just like her, I’m trapped in a tower, hoping somehow to be with my true love but cursed if I dared look at him. If I acknowledged Ignacio, I would have the same fate.
All of the clothes, the cars, the riches of this hacienda, and the privileges I now enjoyed did little to relieve me of my aching heart. Sometimes I thought I was torturing myself by continuing to hope. On many an occasion, I heard Señora Paz bitterly say, “Quien vive de esperanzas muere de hambre.” Who lives on hope dies of hunger. In her old age, she could only look back at missed opportunities and be cynical, but I was determined not to be that way.
I glanced at my desk. Under my books was the letter I had started, the secret letter I would have to get to Ignacio’s family so it could somehow travel through the clandestine maze and find itself in his hands. During these past two years, we had the opportunity to speak to each other on a telephone only a half-dozen times. He was afraid to call his home and certainly could never call here, even though, thanks to Edward, I had a phone in my room with my own number. Ignacio and, especially, his father were afraid that somehow someone would overhear or trace a conversation. It was better to be extra careful. Everyone except someone like my cousin Sophia knew that an ounce of prevention was worth a pound of cure.
But when it was possible, I went to a pay phone in a strip mall and answered the phone for a secret, prearranged telephone rendezvous. Once, one of the girls at school, Caitlin Koontz, saw me do it and asked about it. I told her I had just heard it ringing and picked it up. I said I quickly learned it was an elderly lady who had made a dialing mistake.
“Why did you speak so long?” Caitlin asked.
“I was just trying to calm her down and help her call the right number.”
“Was she desperate for some kind of help?”
“No, just confused.”
She smirked and shook her head. “Boring,” she sang, and sauntered off.
I was afraid she would tell some other girls, but she either forgot or didn’t think it was important enough. Nevertheless, just that little confrontation filled me with such fear and anxiety that my body trembled all day. I knew Ignacio’s father didn’t want him to have any contact with me other than the letters, and he wasn’t happy about that, either. Reluctantly, because of promises he had made to Ignacio, he would get a message to me that a letter from Ignacio had arrived. I would have to wait until I could find a way to get out to the Davilas’ house to read it. Right after I had, his father would burn it, and his mother would turn away and cry.
Ignacio’s father was a very proud, strong man, and he wouldn’t permit tears to be shed in front of him. I thought he forbid it because it would only make him more aware of his own pain and sorrow. Despite his attempt to be stoic and firm, I saw the glitter of deep sadness in his own eyes, too, whenever Ignacio’s name was spoken.