Delia's Crossing

  She nearly smiled and caught herself. “Tell her I didn’t understand a word she said,” she told Señor Baker. He started.

  I smiled and looked away, daring to mumble, “Sí. Yes, you did.”

  She heard me, and it reddened her cheeks and put the fire back into her eyes.

  “Mrs. Rosario!” my aunt screamed.

  Señora Rosario appeared so quickly that it was obvious she was waiting just outside to be called.

  My aunt pointed to my suitcase.

  “How could you permit that dirty thing to be brought into the main house?”

  “I…she had…”

  “Never mind. Take her and that thing to her room, and show her what her duties are. Don’t treat her any better than anyone else, and let me know the moment she fails to do what you say.”

  “Yes, Mrs. Dallas.”

  “Mr. Baker will be teaching her English whenever her work is completed. Do whatever is necessary to make him comfortable in the library.”

  “Yes, Mrs. Dallas.”

  “Get her moving. I won’t tolerate another lazy Mexican in my house or on my grounds,” my aunt said, and started to turn away.

  I looked at Señor Baker and quickly spoke up in my newest English words.

  “Thank you, Mrs. Dallas. I’m pleased to be here and grateful for all you are doing for me,” I said.

  She spun around, her eyes wide. I held my gaze. I would not be treated as if I were no better than a cucaracha, something to be crushed and swept away. She glanced at Mr. Baker, who dared a short laugh and shrugged.

  “She’s got spirit,” he said. “She’s more like you than you think, perhaps.”

  She paused and stared at me a moment. I held my gaze on her, my self-pride still firm.

  “We’ll see,” she said, and then marched out of the living room, her high heels tapping the travertine floor in a rhythm of rage, rage I neither appreciated nor understood. It was as if my very presence infuriated her. If this was so, why did she send for me? Why did she want me in her home? If she still hated her family so much, why did she want a living reminder of it right under her nose?

  Something told me, warned me, however, that I had just seen only the tip of the flame. There was quite a fire burning in her chest, a fire started years ago back in our village. Would I ever understand it?

  More important, would it consume me, or would I snuff it out before it could?

  “You can get more with honey than with vinegar,” my grandmother used to tell me. “Anger is easy. Kindness is harder but more rewarding.”

  I had seen the anger.

  Now I wondered, where was the kindness here?

  4

  Cleaning for Sophia

  Señora Rosario told me to pick up my suitcase and follow her. I was surprised when she took me out a side door and led me to one of the buildings away from the house. I was anticipating going up the beautiful stairway to my room.

  “Adónde vamos, Señora Rosario?” I asked.

  “In this building is a room for you,” she said as we walked toward it. “You will be responsible for cleaning up after yourself and keeping your things in order. You will share a bathroom with Señor Garman, Señora Dallas’s driver. I can tell you now that he is not happy about it. He’s never had to share his bathroom before, so don’t dilly-dally whenever you’re in there, and be sure you pick up after yourself, and never, ever touch any of his things.”

  So, that’s why he was so upset, I thought. There were so many bedrooms and so many bathrooms on this property, probably, and he had to share his with me. I wondered if Señora Rosario slept in this building, too, but before I could ask, she told me that she and the other servants lived in their own homes. Señor Garman and I would be the only servants sleeping on the property.

  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.

  She knocked and then waited to demonstrate or drive the point home, because she had already told me she was sure my cousin was still at school. Why knock? Did they all think I was that stupid just because I had just arrived from a small Mexican village and they had to demonstrate such a simple thing? How sad that a Mexican would think that of another.

  She opened the door.

  I was not prepared for such an overwhelmingly grandiose bedroom. At the center was an enormous four-poster bed with a canopy and a headboard that had two great butterflies facing each other. Their eyes were filled with emeralds or stones closely resembling them. The bedspread looked softer than a cloud, and the pillows were enormous. The pink rug was so thick I felt as if I were truly walking on air when we stepped into the room.

  Above the bed was a ceiling I didn’t understand. There were hundreds of tiny lights. Señora Rosario saw how I was staring, my head back.

  “Mr. Dallas designed this room for Señorita Sophia before he died. He created a night sky in the ceiling.”

  “Night sky?”

  “Those little lights look like stars, and to the right up there, they form the Milky Way. There are other constellations as well. Do you know what that means?”

  “Sí,” I said. “Stars shaped as things. Aquarius, Cancer.”

  She looked surprised that I knew so much.

  “Mi padre loved to tell me about the stars,” I said, and for a moment, I saw some pity and sadness for me in her eyes, but just as quickly, as if she were afraid she would be caught showing kindness, she blinked it away.

  To the right, I saw the closet door was open, but the closet looked as big as my room, if not bigger. I could see the shelves were stacked with shoes, and there was a very long rack of dresses with blouses and jackets on the other side. At the end of the closet were a dressing table and a full-size mirror. There was even a small television set in the wall. Why would someone want to watch television in a closet? I wondered.

  “Everything is supposed to be organized in that closet,” Señora Rosario said, smirking, “but never is, no matter how well it’s kept. Nevertheless, you are to put everything back where it belongs as best you can. You see where the dresses belong, the blouses and shoes. Just around the door, there are five bathrobes on hangers.”

  “Five?”

  “Some were presents, and some were just…some presents,” she added, holding her smirk. “Don’t ever hang a bathrobe where a dress goes,” she warned.

  Glancing through the bathroom door, we saw a pink silk bathrobe on the floor. There was a slipper near it and another just outside the bathroom.

  “She’s not in the habit of picking up after herself,” Señora Rosario muttered, picking up the slipper outside the bathroom.

  When I entered the bathroom, my mouth dropped open. Not in the habit of picking up after herself? That was an understatement. Besides the wet towels and washcloths on the floor, there was a sanitary pad beside the garbage can, at which it had been tossed perhaps. The roll of toilet paper was unraveled on the floor. There were two sinks side by side, and both were streaked with makeup and toothpaste. The mirrors were smudged, and the shower doors were streaked with shampoo residue. Everywhere I looked, something was left open. Drawers were open as well.

  Señora Rosario checked her watch.

  “You have less than a half hour to do this and straighten out the closet and the bedroom, so work quickly, and don’t dilly-dally. When you’re finished, come down to the kitchen,” she said. “And don’t leave any cleaning supplies behind in the room. She hates that.”

  I wanted to ask how a girl this young had so much authority and could put so much fear into the servants, but I didn’t have to ask. Señora Rosario saw it in my face.

  “Señorita Sophia and Señor Edward are owners of the estate and of the family’s financial holdings. It is in the will their father left, and they have let everyone know it. Stay out of her way, and you’ll be all right,” she added.

  How do I stay out of my cousin’s way? I wondered. What did that mean, anyway?

  I began to clean up the bathroom. I had everything picked up and the tub and sinks washed down before I started on the shower stall. I had taken off my shoes and socks and had gone into the stall to wash down the tile. Time was never something I paid much attention to when I worked with mi abuela Anabela in our casa. I was determined to do a very good job and impress my aunt Isabela, so I lost myself in the work.

  Squatting to get at the lower tiles in the shower, I had my back to the stall door and did not hear anyone enter the bathroom. Suddenly, a downpour of ice-cold water crashed down on my head and shocked me so much that I lost my footing and fell back onto the shower floor. The water rained down over me, soaking my clothes, my apron. I heard laughter and turned to see my cousin Sophia standing in the doorway.

  As quickly as I could, I regained my balance and turned off the shower faucet. Dripping wet, I looked at her. Her smile evaporated, and her face filled with rage.

  “How dare you go into my shower with your filthy, diseased feet?” she screamed. I understood filthy and feet and figured out the rest.

  In Spanish, I said, “It was the best way to clean it.”

  “I don’t speak Spanish, you idiot. Mrs. Rosario!” she cried. “Mrs. Rosario!”

  Her screams echoed in the shower stall. I actually felt myself trembling. Mrs. Rosario came running to the bedroom.

  “Look at where she is!” Sophia told Mrs. Rosario, and pointed at me.

  “Why are you soaked?” Señora Rosario asked me in español.

  I explained what had happened, and she shook her head. She spoke softly to my cousin, trying to calm her down, but my cousin fume
d and folded her arms under her breasts.

  Sophia was un pollo regordete, a plump chicken, as mi abuela Anabela would say. Her cheeks were bloated and looked as if she had a mouth full of walnuts. They diminished her dark brown eyes, which were her best feature. Her nose was just a little too long, and the nostrils flared like the nostrils of a small bull. She had twice the size bosom I had, but her hips were wider, and her arms were puffy all the way to her shoulders. I noticed she had fat fingers, too.

  I thought, considering her round face, that her walnut-brown hair was cut too short. It emphasized the fullness in her cheeks and the slightness of her small mouth, which she seemed capable of stretching like a rubber band when she shouted. She turned back to me.

  “Can’t she speak any English?”

  “Un poco, a little,” Señora Rosario quickly corrected. “She just arrived from Mexico.”

  “Why did my mother want such a servant in our house? Don’t we have enough Mexicans?”

  “She’s a good worker,” Señora Rosario said. She didn’t know what else to say. “She went right to work as soon as she was brought here.”

  “More reason for her not to be in my shower. Did she bathe first? Did you bathe first?” she asked me.

  Señora Rosario explained what she had said and what she wanted to know, but I already understood what she was implying. My grandmother or my mother wouldn’t let me out of the house with as much as a pin stain on my clothing and never before I washed and had my hair brushed.

  “I’m clean,” I told Señora Rosario. “Cleaner than she is, I’m sure.”

  “What did she say? Did she say something mean? What did she say?” Sophia demanded.

  Señora Rosario made up something satisfying, because it seemed to calm Sophia down a bit. Then she pointed to me again and shouted, “Get her out!”

  I quickly put on my shoes and socks, gathered up my pail, washcloths, mop, and cleaning fluids, and started out of the room.

  “Why did you take so long?” Señora Rosario asked me in the hallway. “I told you how much time you had. I told you not to be in there when she returned from school.”