Of course, I never considered that I was being brought here to be another servant. This was my family. Supposedly, I was going to have an aunt for a legal guardian, not an employer. I looked back at the beautiful hacienda longingly. I was not to have a grand room to myself after all. There was no way I could think of myself as part of this family now. In fact, I had just been warned that I couldn’t let anyone know I was related to Señora Dallas and her children. She had slapped me only once, but her words were far more stinging anyway. I was sure my ears were redder than my cheek.
At least I no longer had to feel guilty about my parents’ deaths bringing me wonderful new opportunities. I felt more like a starving girl standing outside a restaurant, watching other people gorge themselves on rich and delicious foods. My suffering hadn’t ended. It might only have just begun.
Now that I was closer, I could see that the building where I was to sleep was devoid of any style or character. It looked as if it had been thrown together in a rush, the dull brown stucco smeared quickly over the squared structure. It had a very ordinary front door and a dark, dank-looking, narrow hallway that took us to what would be my room.
I stood there staring in at it. Ironically, I had enjoyed a bigger room with my grandmother back in our humble casa in our Mexican village. This room was stark and had only a single window. The floor was charcoal-painted concrete, cracked and pitted, with a rusty drain at the center. It wasn’t meant to be a bedroom, I thought. To the right was a single bed which now had a naked, stained mattress and a pillow without a pillow case. The bed had no sides, no headboard. It had been pushed against the wall. I saw spiderwebs in every corner, and the window looked as if it hadn’t been washed since the day the building had been constructed. There was a strong, stale odor that reminded me of dead fish.
“I’ll show you where your bedding is,” Señora Rosario said. “You make your own bed, of course. There’s a blanket and a pillow case. You should strip it down and wash everything once a week. The room needs a little dusting as well,” she added, gazing about.
A little? I thought. As my grandmother might say, there was so much dirt in here I could plant flowers.
The room had no closet, just an old wood armoire with one door open. I would discover that it wouldn’t close. To the right of that was a small dresser of lighter wood. There was a lamp on the dresser and a naked light fixture at the center of the ceiling dangling on a wire. That was it. This was my new room. Could a Mexican prison be any worse? How surprised and disappointed mi abuela Anabela would be if she saw this, I thought. I would never tell her. It would break her heart to hear about it and to hear the things mi tía Isabela had said and done to me.
“Follow me,” Señora Rosario said.
She led me farther down the hall to show me the bathroom. It had a tub and a shower with a faded yellow plastic curtain, a sink with a small cabinet above it, and a toilet. The toilet seat was up and had urine stains all over it. The floor was a chipped and cracked pale white linoleum, and the walls looked as if they had never been repainted or, on closer inspection, ever painted.
All of the fixtures were old and rusted, and there was a long rust stain at the bottom of the tub. She opened the cabinet. The four narrow shelves were crowded with Señor Garman’s things. There was no place for anything of mine.
“Um,” Señora Rosario said. “There is no room. You’ll have to bring your things in and out every time you use the bathroom. Sorry.”
She continued down the hallway a few more feet to a closet and showed me my bedding.
“You have no time to start all this now,” she said, “but later, this is where you will come for your things.”
“No time now?”
“No. You need to go directly to Señorita Sophia’s room and start on the bathroom. Señora Dallas so instructed before you arrived.”
“But after all this traveling? I’m not to be given any chance to rest?”
She looked at me as if I had asked the dumbest possible questions, and then she took an apron off a bottom shelf and handed it to me.
“You are to wear this over your clothes always when you are here on the property. There’s another in here so you can wash one and have a spare. Don’
t ever let Señora Dallas see you wearing one that’s dirty. You saw how clean the house is kept. She has a thing about seeing any dust or smudges and can get very angry about it. Put it on now,” she ordered.
I did so. It was starch white with a hem that was somewhat frayed. It nearly reached my feet.
“Pull it higher and tighten it around your waist, or you’ll trip over it,” she instructed. “Okay, let’s go.”
I followed her out of the building. She led me through a rear entrance of the main house this time, to familiarize me with the pantry that had all of the cleaning utensils, soaps, rags, and pails. She told me what to take. It was so much I almost dropped some of it as we made our way from the rear of the house to the stairway. I glanced about to see if my aunt was nearby but neither heard nor saw anyone.
“Señorita Sophia and Señor Edward are still at school. They attend a private school,” she told me as we started up the carpeted stairway. She glanced at my feet. “Be sure you never track anything onto these carpets. If you work quickly, you will be finished before Señorita Sophia arrives. She doesn’t like any of the help in her room when she’s there. Her room, her bathroom, her clothes are all now your responsibility.
“However,” she added at the top of the stairway, “that’s not all you will have to do here. You will help serve the meals and clean the kitchen and the bathrooms downstairs. Señora Dallas calls them powder rooms, so if she says that, you should know what she means.”
“Powder?”
“Just remember it,” she snapped. Either she was impatient with me now or with mi tía Isabela’s assigning her to supervise me. Before I had even set foot on the property, my aunt’s main employees resented me, I thought.
The upstairs was just as beautiful as below. The floors had thick light blue carpets, and there were big teardrop chandeliers all the way down the hall. The windows were stained glass, and there was more statuary, busts on pedestals, and great pictures in gilded frames.
We paused at a double doorway.
“This is Señorita Sophia’s room. Even though she is not here, knock. We might be mistaken, and she might be here. Sometimes she comes home earlier from school or doesn’t go and we don’t know it. You are never to go in there without first knocking. Understand?”
I nodded.