“No, we’re not having a wedding here. It’s like we already had the wedding,” he explained. “That’s it. We’ll be like a bride and groom. Everything will be easier to explain that way.”
Again, I shook my head. How could we be like a bride and groom? And why would that make it easier?
“Don’t worry,” he said when I asked, and then he went into a brief explanation of the word worry. “Your aunt is worried you won’t learn English well enough to attend school and you will be a big problem for her. We’ll show her she has nothing to worry about, right?”
He stepped up to me, put his hands on my upper arms, and held me while he smiled.
“Right, Señora Baker?” he asked.
I pulled my head back. Señora Baker? Why was he calling me Señora Baker?
“We’re newlyweds, remember? That means you are Señora Baker, and I’m your husband.”
He kissed me on the forehead, then turned to leave and paused in the doorway.
“Put your suitcase in the bigger bedroom,” he said in Spanish, and then he said it again in English and had me repeat the words suitcase, bigger, and bedroom. “No need to use two bedrooms. Our work will take all day and all night. We’ll be inseparable for these few weeks.” He explained it in Spanish, and then he stopped smiling and added that in a few days, he would stop listening to my questions if I didn’t try to use the English words first.
“It will be as if I don’t hear you,” he said. “If the house caught on fire and you didn’t say fire, I would not hear you, and we’d burn up with it,” he told me.
Again, I thought that was silly and just meant to scare me, but he had no humor in his face when he said it or right afterward. In fact, his eyes burned with seriousness.
“I’m not going to fail here,” he told me in Spanish. “Which means you’ll do whatever I tell you to do and learn quickly, or else. Entiende? Well? Entiende?”
“Sí,” I said. His mood changed so quickly I was afraid to say anything else. There was much here I did not understand.
“Not sí, damn it. Yes, yes. Say yes.”
“Yes,” I repeated.
“Get your things into the drawers in the bedroom,” he ordered. “Comprende? You know what that means?”
“Yes.”
“Good. Let’s get organized. C’mon.” He beckoned.
I followed him, took my suitcase, and watched him back out.
“Get started!” he shouted at me. “Clean the kitchen, and start on our first dinner as newlyweds.” He laughed as he turned the car around and headed away to buy whatever else we needed.
I clung to my suitcase.
The world around me looked desolate. I thought I had reached the bottom of the pit of loneliness at my aunt’s house, but my descent into hell apparently went deeper yet. I had the urge to start down the road in the direction opposite where he had gone, but where would that take me?
Back in Mexico, my grandmother was full of hope for my new future. It comforted her to know I was in the United States and exposed to so much more opportunity. Surely, if she saw me now, standing in the carport of this small, very simple house, confused and lost, her fragile heart would collapse inside her chest, and I’d be going to another funeral, only I would be standing there at her grave and wondering if I could have prevented her death by simply swallowing my fear and muddling my way through this hard time. I had to find the same grit and strength in myself that she had. As she often told me, “No hay dolor de que el alma no puede levantarse en tres días. There is no sorrow the soul can’t rise from in three days.”
Maybe, once I did learn English well enough, my aunt wouldn’t be as ashamed of me, and she would give me a place in the family, and I would give my grandmother the happiness she needed to take with her to her final rest. She would die with a smile on her face instead of a grim expression of defeat.
I owed her that much.
Pulling myself up with new determination, I went into the house an
d put my things away. Then I started cleaning the kitchen, finding the pots and pans, and beginning the dinner, silently reviewing every English word Señor Baker had just taught me about the kitchen. Losing myself in the preparation of food reminded me of mi abuela Anabela losing herself in food preparation to prepare for the crowd of mourners.
Work was truly the raft upon which we floated in this sea of sadness. It kept us from drowning. It was all we had to cling to, and it kept us from thinking about our dire situations. No wonder my people were out there in the fields, churning away at their chores, looking almost grateful there was at least that.
I smiled to myself, recalling another one of mi abuela Anabela’s dichos when we had to work hard: “La pereza viaja tan lentamente que la pobreza no tarda en alcanzarla. Laziness travels so slowly that poverty soon catches up.”
Back in my small village, we were always one step ahead of poverty.