Chapter Five
The only person I confided in about you was Marisol. Another undergrad, she lived in the dorm room across the hall under the football stadium. You wouldn’t ever want to know her.
Sporting fishnet stockings and boots, my Guatemalan dormitory neighbor, whom you never met, lingered outside her door as I came up the stairs and headed for my room. My key tumbled my lock with a loud clunk when she came to my side, suddenly seized my elbow, and hauled me toward her room. “Listen, I have to talk to you,” she said, dragging me through her open door. I went along–she wasn’t going to let me do otherwise--and immediately when I came through her door my elbow brushed against a pale and spindly tomato plant that had clambered out of the drain of her sink. “It grew from a tomato in an experimental salsa. I flushed the salsa down the drain, but a seed must have caught in the top of the pipe. I didn’t have the heart to kill it,” she said with a careless wave of her hand.
“But your sink,” I said in horror.
“I can use my neighbor's.”
In the middle of the room, where she let go of my elbow, she stood close and commiserate, ready to share secrets. “Forgive me for being so pushy, but I think you’re in love with an idiot. The same thing happened to me. He is a professor, isn’t he?”
I shook my head. Evidently, she’d been eavesdropping or else she’d seen you pick me up or I’d been crying too loudly over you the prior night. “No, he’s an antique dealer. He’s got a shop full of old doors and stuff.” Talking about you left me weary. I let my eyes travel up to her ceiling where three dazzling sombreros hung on shortened chinstraps. I drifted away from these hats, to her window where I studied the craggy pink and gray mountains with their recent sprinkling of powdered sugar. When seen from the outside, our rooms form the headdress, our windows become the eyes, of a stylized and rather stolid Kachina god, who hunkers down, game-weary, against Hopi Stadium’s façade and watches the play of light and shadow in the far-off canyons and sharply chiseled hoodoos of the Catalina Mountains north of the desert valley. “Really he’s been very, very nice,” I said abruptly. “Considering my problems.”
For an instant, gravely, she studied me. “I have something for your dealer of old doors,” she said, crossing the room to an open closet. There she began riffling some hangers.
I was about to leave—she hadn’t explained what she was doing, and my need to cry was beginning to overwhelm my curiosity—when suddenly she found what she’d been looking for and shoved the other hangers away.
Out it swooped. The most amazing shirt. At first I could do nothing but stare at the multitude of tiny daisies, blooming on the shoulders, the shiny bouncing bunnies, the intertwined, enraptured red roses and mysterious blue velvet doughnuts that some mad seamstress had embroidered and appliqued indiscriminately everywhere on what seemed to be soft, striped flour sacking. “It’s a little wild,” I said, approaching the strange shirt, all the while secretly enthralled. “It’s very wild,” she corrected me. “Huipals. That’s what they’re called. There from Guatemala, like me. Imagine showing up in this with a little slacks and a chunky gold bracelet.” She snapped the shirt up to her, making it blossom out around her torso. “Try it on,” she commanded. Not waiting for me to refuse, but quickly unpinning the shirt from the crackling paper cover on the wire hanger, she hoisted the heavy shirt over my head and fit it on me. When she’d smoothed it at the back, I gazed down at the thickly festooned fabric and felt as though I had metamorphosed into a mysterious jungle princess, or some ethereal, shimmering parrot.
“It’s Guatemalan and very, very old,” she said. “These shirts come from different villages. They are very beautiful, too, as you can see. And of course, my grandmother put a spell on this one.” Noticing my alarmed expression, she added, “Nothing murderous. It’s a love spell. But it works a little strangely. Sometimes people fall in love with you, sometimes you fall in love with people. Another time you might fall in love with a sunset. It’s unpredictable. Do you want to borrow it?”
“Desperately,” I said.
“Then it’s yours. Keep it for a weekend.”
Still wearing the wondrous shirt over my jeans, still gazing down at it, I mumbled a confused goodbye to my benefactor and crossed the hall to my room; in a daze I began making plans to see you, if only once more.