Irises

  She was tightening her sandals when Mary came into the room, carrying the wooden box that held all her tubes of paint. She placed the box against the wall by the bed. Kate could tell Mary was upset.

  “You don’t have to go if you don’t want to,” Kate said to her.

  “It’s not that. I couldn’t concentrate. I just stood there staring at the canvas.”

  “Why don’t you stay? I don’t know why Aunt Julia wants you to go.”

  “We probably shouldn’t rile her up. She’s been so easy to live with lately, and she’s been very helpful staying with us as long as she has.”

  “You never have trouble concentrating when you’re painting. Are you worried about something?”

  “I don’t know what it is,” Mary said thoughtfully. “It’s strange. It’s been hard for me to paint since . . . I was trying this technique where you paint over wet paint. It has to be done very carefully, otherwise you end up with a mess, and guess what. I ended up with a mess. Oh, well. I’ll try again some other day.”

  Kate could tell that Mary was not telling the truth. What was it Mary had said that night when they talked about Simon? Something about her painting not being the same since Mother’s accident. She wished for a second that she had paid more attention, but there was no time right now to pursue the subject. “Bonnie’s coming any minute. You better get ready if you want to go.”

  “Can’t I go like this?”

  “In overalls that have paint all over them?”

  Mary laughed and went to the closet.

  Kate said, “You know, now that Father’s not here, you could wear shorts when you paint outside.”

  Mary didn’t seem to hear her. “Gosh,” she said, reaching for the flowered skirt she always seemed to wear, “I don’t think I’ve ever been to a mall. Can you believe it? This will be the first time ever.”

  Kate observed Mary getting dressed. It made her sad to think that Mary’s sole shopping experiences had been at Walmarts and other discount stores, and when she went, it was Father who had the final say as to what she bought. That would have been true for Kate as well if she hadn’t had Simon and Bonnie to take her places. She couldn’t buy clothes at the mall because her father would ask where they came from, but at least she had visited malls.

  “What’s the matter?” Kate asked when she saw a gloomy shadow appear on Mary’s face.

  “I feel funny,” Mary responded.

  “Why?”

  “It’s like I’m going against Papa’s wishes, like I’m doing something wrong.”

  “You think it’s a sin to go to the mall?”

  “No, not a sin, exactly. It’s just that — it’s just that Papa believed we shouldn’t be concerned so much with how we look or what we have. It’s hard to all of a sudden stop seeing life the way he did, the way he brought us up.”

  “There’s nothing wrong with going to the mall,” Kate said with certainty. She stood up and zipped the back of Mary’s skirt. She took her sister by the shoulders and walked her to the mirror. “What do you see?” Mary blushed. “Look,” Kate insisted. She had noticed a long time ago that Mary looked in the mirror only to the extent that it was absolutely necessary. She put her hand under Mary’s chin and gently lifted her face. “Look at that face, those eyes, those eyelashes. You’re gorgeous. You recognize beauty everywhere except in yourself. What’s wrong with getting some shiny jewelry or colorful clothes to brighten up that beauty? Let your light shine before all men, especially all the good-looking men, and all that.”

  Mary slapped Kate’s hand jokingly. “Kate, now you’re making fun of scripture. If Papa could only hear you!”

  “Yeah, if he could only hear me,” Kate said dryly. “I’m going to check the mailbox. I’ll meet you out front.”

  Kate slid into Bonnie’s front seat even before Bonnie had the chance to honk. Mary and Aunt Julia came out. “Be careful,” Aunt Julia said as Mary was getting into the backseat.

  “Hi, Mary.” Bonnie located Mary’s face in the rearview mirror.

  “I hope it’s okay that I come. Aunt Julia insisted.”

  “Sure it’s okay.” Bonnie pulled out onto the main road, leaving a cloud of dust behind. “Which mall do you want to go to?”

  “We need to stop at the credit union first,” Kate said.

  Mary asked, “Kate, do we have enough money to go shopping?”

  “We have enough,” Kate said.

  “Kate,” Bonnie said, “what is that smile on your face? What happened? You can’t hide anything from me and you know it.”

  Kate’s smile got even bigger. She opened her canvas handbag, took out a thick white envelope, and waved it in the air.

  The car swerved off the paved road for a second. “Oh my God!” Bonnie screamed. “Is that what I think it is?”

  “Don’t crash! Don’t crash!” Kate yelled.

  “Where?”

  “Stanford!”

  “Ohhhh! That’s so awesome! That’s where you’ve always wanted to go. Your first choice! Wait, wait, I have to give you a hug.” Bonnie maneuvered the car to the side of the road. The driver in the car behind them honked angrily. The two girls got out and they hugged and held hands and jumped in unison.

  Mary opened the door and stepped out, a bewildered, lost look on her face. “What about Stanford?” she asked.

  Kate stopped her celebration with Bonnie to face Mary. She wished for a moment that Mary weren’t there. “I was accepted to Stanford. I’m getting a full scholarship.”

  Before Mary could say anything, Bonnie was screaming again, “Get outta here! A full scholarship? Oh my God! Oh my God! Get in the car, girl, we are going to celebrate!”

  Bonnie ran around the back of the car to return to the driver’s seat. Kate and Mary stood alone by the side of the road.

  “Be happy for me, okay?” Kate said.

  “I’m happy for you,” Mary said. Then, tentatively, “Is that the Stanford near San Jose, where Aunt Julia lives?”

  “Yes.” Kate took a deep breath. “Mary, I need to tell you something. Remember the time when Mama and I went to visit Aunt Julia by ourselves?”

  “Yes.”

  “Mama took me to visit Stanford. She made me promise that I would do all I could to go there. It was her dream when she was my age, and then she dreamed I would go there in her place. It became both our dream.” She took Mary’s hand. “I’ve been working for this, dreaming of it, for years, Mary. We’ll work everything out, all right?”

  “All right,” Mary said. Then she gave Kate a long hug. When they separated, Kate saw that Mary had quietly begun to cry.

  Mary sat in the backseat of Bonnie’s car and tried to look happy. Kate and Bonnie kept talking about Stanford. She had always expected Kate to go to college, but it never occurred to her that she would leave El Paso. The only reason she could think of why Kate didn’t tell her about Stanford was that she needed to keep it from Papa, and that meant, in Kate’s mind, keeping it a secret from Mary too. But Kate was wrong. She would have kept her secret well.

  Every once in a while, Kate turned around to see how Mary was reacting to it all. Whenever she did this, Mary immediately smiled.

  “Please be happy for me,” Kate said to Mary again, one of those times.

  “I’m happy if it makes you happy,” Mary said.

  “Here’s the credit union,” Bonnie said before Kate could say anything else.

  While Kate went into the credit union, Bonnie and Mary stayed in the car with the air conditioner running. “That’s so awesome about Kate. Dang!” Bonnie said. She banged her hands on the steering wheel for emphasis. “I can’t wait to tell everyone in school. A full scholarship too! You know what that means? That means she doesn’t have to pay a cent, not for tuition or room and board or anything. Plane fare, maybe books, that’s about it.”

  “Plane fare,” Mary repeated to herself. She was looking out the window. Cars were driving up to the automated tellers on the side of the building. People stuck their a
rms out and completed their business in a matter of minutes.

  “I wonder what Simon is going to say when she tells him?” Bonnie fiddled with the radio. She began to bob her head to the music when she found the right station.

  “Simon doesn’t know?”

  “What?” Bonnie turned the volume down.

  “Simon doesn’t know about Stanford?”

  Bonnie shook her head. “I’m the only one she told,” she said, sounding guilty. “I think she was afraid that people would get worried about her leaving and all, you know.”

  Mary nodded. She wondered how she was going to live first without Papa and now without Kate.

  Kate came out of the credit union, waving an envelope and beaming. “Let’s go shopping!” she said as she opened the door to the car. Mary hadn’t seen her so buoyant and carefree in a long time.

  “How much did you get?” Bonnie asked. “Not that it’s any of my business. I just want to know what we’re working with, you know what I’m saying?”

  “One thousand,” Kate answered.

  “Kate!” Mary couldn’t help sounding like Papa.

  “It’s not just for shopping,” Kate said. “We need it to pay bills and buy groceries. I don’t want to come to the credit union every day and go through the hassle of proving to them that I’m on the account.” She said this in a way that Mary hadn’t heard before, like money matters were something for Kate alone to decide.

  They drove on to the mall. Bonnie chattered so fast that Mary caught only a word or two. Kate seemed to agree with whatever Bonnie was saying, but Mary got the impression that her mind was someplace else. Mary closed her eyes. When she got to talk to Kate alone, she would not worry her with concerns about how she and Mama would get along without her. It was obvious that one of Kate’s dreams had just been fulfilled. She only wished Kate had shared her dream with her as she had shared it with Bonnie.

  The mall was bustling with people. Some of them walked purposefully, as if they knew just what they wanted to get or were looking for a particular store. Others ambled aimlessly through the corridors, swept away by the frenzy of sights and sounds. Mary had been in large stores before, but the proximity and variety of the stores in the mall overwhelmed her. Colors darted at her from everywhere, and there was hardly any time to recognize them. There were clothes in racks in different patterns and shapes. She could not find a place to rest her eyes.

  Bonnie and Kate decided to go into a store that had mannequins dressed in black. Outside the front of the store stood a fountain surrounded by granite benches.

  “I’ll wait for you here,” Mary told Kate.

  “You need to get some things as well,” Kate said.

  “I will,” Mary responded. She didn’t think she needed any new clothes, but she didn’t want to disappoint Kate. “I’m going to wait until we get to the big stores.”

  Kate opened up her purse, took out two fifty-dollar bills, and offered them to Mary. “The big stores are at each end of the mall. Want to meet here in an hour?”

  “Kate, this is way too much money,” Mary said, staring at the bills in her hand.

  Kate grabbed Mary’s hand and closed her fingers around the money. “Don’t be silly. Look at you. You’ve had that dress for two years now and it’s so worn out, you can almost see through it. You can buy old-fashioned-looking things if you want, but at least they’ll be new. Trust me, one hundred dollars is not going to get you much.”

  “Okay. I’ll meet you here in an hour,” Mary said. Kate smiled and started to walk to the store. “Kate,” Mary called after her.

  She stopped and came back to Mary.

  “I’m happy for you about Stanford, I really am.”

  “Thank you,” Kate said. “Now don’t be so serious all the time, and go spend some money.”

  Mary walked around the noisy halls of the mall in a daze. It wasn’t just the noise and the visual images that flashed before her. Her head was filled with memories of her childhood, of Kate, and imagining life without her, all intermingled. She came upon the food court, found an empty table, and sat down.

  Across from where she was sitting, she saw a store that specialized in arts and crafts. She remembered the day Mama took her and Kate into a similar store. First they got a chemistry set for Kate, then they bought a palette of watercolor paints and a pad of thick paper, not the flimsy kind that Mary had been using up to then. The palette had twelve colors, two rows of six, and the tint of the colors was high quality. Mary remembered how Mama looked at all the brushes. She picked up one after another and ran her finger across the bristles. “This one feels so nice,” she said. “Why is it so much more expensive than the others?”

  “That one is made from ox hair, Mama.”

  She was shocked. “Ox hair? Ox, like a hueye?”

  Mary grabbed the brush from Mama’s hand and tried to tickle her arm with it, but Mama brushed it away, a look of disgust in her face. “I hope they gave the ox a bath before they cut the hair of the poor thing.”

  Mary put the brush back and picked up another one. “Look at this one, Mama.”

  “Oooo. That’s so soft.”

  “This one is even more expensive than the ox hair.”

  “Don’t tell me it’s made from some poor old lady’s hair, because I’ll be very upset.”

  “No, silly, this is a sable brush. They’re the best kind of brushes you can have.”

  “A sable? I thought those animals were extinct,” Mama said.

  A little girl at the table next to Mary dropped her ice-cream cone on the floor and began to cry. Mary snapped back to the present. At that moment she felt her mother next to her, her warmth and intelligence vibrant as always. She smiled at Mama’s confusion about saber-toothed tigers. Mama was so proud of Kate and her. Mama loved Kate’s intelligence and she loved Mary’s talent for painting.

  Mary walked into Sears and bought a blouse and a pair of jeans, which she tried on to make sure they were loose and comfortable. Everything she bought was on sale, so she spent forty-five dollars all told. The bag that she carried out of Sears looked big and bulky. Kate would be happy with her. Then she went into the arts and crafts store and looked at the tubes of oil paint. She picked up the yellow and thought of the portrait of Kate she had painted once, the rich yellow background she had given it. She placed the tube of paint back on the shelf and walked back to sit by the fountain.

  Fifteen minutes later, Kate and Bonnie appeared, their arms full of packages. Mary’s bag looked very small in comparison. “Is that all you bought?” Kate asked.

  “There’s a lot in there. It’s just folded really well.” Mary smiled, knowing that Kate would see through her.

  “Oh, you’re impossible,” Kate said. “Come on, you’re coming with us.”

  “You guys go,” Bonnie said. “I’m going back in there to buy that cute pink blouse we saw.” She pointed at the store with the mannequins in black.

  “I’m all set, really,” Mary objected.

  “You should get her some makeup too,” Bonnie suggested.

  “She doesn’t need makeup,” Kate said reproachfully.

  “Something subtle,” Bonnie said as she turned to go into the store. “The kind a guy never even knows is there.”

  “I don’t want any makeup,” Mary said.

  “Don’t listen to her,” Kate told Mary. “Let’s start with shoes. You definitely need shoes.”

  “I can get those for myself,” Mary protested.

  “We have to get you new dress shoes,” Kate said. “The ones you have are old-maidish. You’re sixteen!”

  “I only wear those to church. No one there cares,” Mary protested.

  “How much of the money did you spend?” Kate asked.

  “About fifty dollars.”

  “We’ll buy dress shoes with what’s left over. It will be fun.”

  “Kate, we should save the money. We’re going to need it, don’t you think?” Mary tried not to sound worried.

  Kate sho
ok her head. She seemed tired of reminders that they should be responsible. Mary suddenly understood that Kate needed to be, at least for a short while, as carefree as that day when they walked out of the arts and crafts store holding Mama’s hands, she with her paints and brushes and Kate with her chemistry set, all three of them connected by a single happiness.

  Kate woke up to the sound of Mary getting ready for church. Kate had decided to go this Sunday morning for Mary’s sake. It was the first time they would be back in church since Father died, and it was not fair to let Mary bear the brunt of people’s questions and curiosity about their future. Besides, it would be nice to see Reverend Soto again.

  There was no pressure from Aunt Julia to attend church. One of her long-standing grievances against Father was that, according to her, Father had forced her sister to become a Protestant. As far as she was concerned, no church was a thousand times better than a Protestant church. But she’d begrudgingly agreed to watch Mother so Kate and Mary could go.

  Usually, Simon came over half an hour before services and the three of them walked the two blocks together. In the year and a half that he had been dating Kate, Simon had never missed a Sunday. It was one of the reasons Father trusted him so much. But today, Mary and Kate waited outside the house for ten minutes, and when Simon didn’t show up, Kate told Mary that they should go ahead by themselves. Kate thought it was Simon’s way of reminding her yet again that their relationship had changed since the night he had “proposed.”

  The sign in front of the church announced that Reverend Soto was now conducting the Sunday services. Kate felt surprised that she was not upset that Father’s name had been removed from the sign so quickly.

  She was wearing a light green sleeveless dress she’d bought at the mall the day before. It was nothing she would have worn if Father were alive, but when she put it on that morning, she felt as if she could finally breathe a full measure of air. She didn’t think the dress was much different from what other women at the church wore, but she could still feel their eyes following her as she and Mary walked to their usual pew, the third row on the right-hand side. Mary took out her pad of paper and a pencil as soon as they sat down. Kate folded her arms and hugged herself. She cast a sideways glance at Mary, who had already begun her doodling.