Girl in the Mirror (29 page)

“N
o, no, not like that. You’re painting like the books tell you to paint, all in straight lines.”

Bobby was teaching Charlotte how to paint. He sat in the shade of a ginkgo tree, his long legs crossed at the ankles and his broad forehead shadowed by his ubiquitous floppy panama hat. He was calling out instructions as she stood, in a wide stance, at the easel a few feet away. At various times, like now, he’d leap dramatically to his feet, moaning with exaggeration.

“Forget the books. Blend! Use your fingers. Don’t be afraid. See? Go ahead, try it. A little more. That’s right! Wonderful!” He panted with the effort.

Charlotte felt a thrill of discovery as she painted, even though she kept a careful eye on Bobby. He seemed more winded of late, not quite as bright in the eye.

“You don’t have any role to play here, Miss Godfrey. Paint freely.”

“I’m trying!” Unlike when she acted, she wasn’t becoming someone else or losing herself in a role. This was more scary. She was probing herself, discovering and releasing hidden emotions and feelings that she released in bright, vivid colors.

“Bobby, can this be right? It looks so strange.”

“What have you drawn? Tell me about it.”

She cocked her head and frowned. “I haven’t a clue what it is.”

“You don’t know what all those menacing black lines and evocative swirls are? Darling, I’m sure Freud would have a heyday. But let’s not let him steal your thunder. Tell me what you think it is.”

She narrowed her eyes, tucking her chin in her palm. “I think that box is my life. Or maybe…me.” It was a large, blackened box, very foreboding and with defined borders, surrounded by black swirls like smoke. She looked up, her blue eyes very bright. “And that little white dot in the middle is me, too.” She stepped back, laughing nervously. “Can that be right?”

He lifted his shoulders and smiled serenely. His voice was very gentle. “It is if you think it is.”

A few weeks after she’d arrived, she came upon Marta in the small garden beside her house. The small, thin woman was bent double, pulling sprouting weeds around a four-foot-high full color statue of the Blessed Virgin Mary. Charlotte knew this model well. The blue cloaked BVM wearing a white wimple and carrying a rosary was a favorite of Catholic grammar schools across the nation. She felt a tug at her heartstrings, recalling how she’d loved to place the flowers she’d plucked from various yards on the way to school at the Virgin’s feet.

Charlotte walked beside Marta and bent to tug at a dandelion. She felt much more at ease with Marta since she’d spent many hours with her in the kitchen, learning how to flatten
masa harina
in her hands to make tortillas, how to rinse the pintos and pluck out the bad ones before boiling them, and how to make a smooth mole sauce. She’d even learned the names of the many peppers that Marta cooked with, delighting Michael almost as much as she was delighting Luis. Her interest in the Mexican culture was going a long way in winning over the proud patriarch.

“You’re looking better. Rounder. Not so spare,” Marta said, looking up from under her wide-brimmed straw hat. Her gloved hand rested on a tough chickweed clump. “You feeling good?”

“A little better,” she replied cheerfully.

“Sometimes,” Marta went on, huffing a little as she struggled with the roots, “the healing must go on inside the soul as much as the body, no? I think you are still very sad about your mother.”

Charlotte didn’t reply, but tugged harder at the weeds.

“I was thinking, maybe…” Her hand stilled on the trowel and she raised her dark eyes to meet Charlotte’s. “Do you like to come to church with me on Sunday?”

From the brush, a bird flew into the sky.

“Yes, I’d like that very much.”

When she talked to Michael about it that night, he frowned, wondering aloud why his mother felt everyone had to go to church to be saved.

“I don’t think she’s worried about my immortal soul, except perhaps for the sin of us living together. That she’s having a tough time with.”

“You realize, of course, that the only reason she’s putting up with the arrangement is because she wants grandchildren.”

“I rather think she’s concerned that I raise her grandchildren as Catholics.”

“It doesn’t matter to me,” Michael said gruffly. “I don’t want any of that breast-beating and finger-pointing in my household. I spent a lifetime lifting that guilt off my shoulders. I won’t have my children shoulder it.”

“I understand, but I do want our children raised in the faith. I can’t imagine not…The sacraments, the tradition. The fabulous hats…” She laughed when he smiled. “Religion binds a family together.” She paused. “Michael, you do want our children raised as Catholics, don’t you?”

He looked up at her, his dark eyes somber. “Do you realize we’re talking about our children?”

She looked off, imagining a chubby baby with Michael’s dark hair and golden skin. The notion of being a mother suddenly became very real. “I suppose we are,” she replied, amazed.

Charlotte attended mass at Our Lady of Lourdes with Marta and Luis on Sunday. Marta wore a long black mantilla in the old tradition and looped a long black rosary with a wooden cross around her thin fingers as she prayed. Luis paged through his missal with his well-worn, tanned hands, his mouth moving over the words.

The smell of incense, the brilliant, meshed colors of the stained glass windows, the familiar statues of the Virgin and St. Joseph on either side of the altar, and the large marble crucifix of Jesus hanging above it, stirred her as nothing had in a long while. She felt as though she’d returned home again after a long, arduous journey. She knew the proper responses to the priest’s invocations, knew when to kneel and when to stand, knew the words of all the mass’s litanies: the Apostles’ Creed, the Our Father, the Hosanna. When she prayed the communion response, “Lord, I am not worthy to receive you, but only say the word and I shall be healed,” her face was wet with tears.

Marta looked at her with naked sympathy and compassion in her eyes, then reached over and patted her hand.

That night, as the crickets sang outside her window, Michael stretched out on the creamy leather sofa they had purchased together from Gumps. Charlotte sat at the kitchen table. On the oak surface she laid out a sheet of her best Tiffany stationery, an enamel Waterman fountain pen and a cup of chamomile tea. She sat with her hands still on the table, listening to Mozart’s
Eine kleine Nachtmuzik,
trying to get in the mood, to find the right sentiment in her heart to be able to write this letter.

“You realize you’ve been sitting there for half an hour, not moving a muscle,” Michael said from across the room.

She startled, looking up and blinking heavily, as though waking from a deep sleep.

“Where are your thoughts?” His smile was beguiling.

“I’m just thinking,” she replied, looking at his face.

“Of what?”

“Of my mother.”

He set down his book then, giving her his full attention. That gesture implied she was his top priority and meant a great deal to her.

“I was thinking of what words I could say in a letter that would cross the miles between us and find some way to bridge that gap. Being in a Catholic church again brought to mind happier memories with my mother. We spent hours every Saturday cleaning the church together. We’d polish the heavy brass candlesticks on the altar, dust pews, air out the priest’s vestments, arrange flowers for the vestibule.”

“Did you enjoy doing it?”

“I enjoyed the attention from Mom. I remember her teaching me how to scrub far into the corners. She has these large-boned hands, curved and worn from years of hard work. I was fascinated by them, and by her long fingers, puckered from use. It was very important to her that I not leave a mote of dust in God’s house.” She sighed and twiddled with the fountain pen. “It seems to me we spent so much time cleaning dirt out from the church that we didn’t leave time enough to see to the mess in our own lives.”

“Why don’t you write that? Tell her now.”

She startled in alarm. “What?”

“You’ve just told me what you really want to tell her. If you want to start cleaning out the mess, roll up your sleeves and begin now.”

“She’d think I was blaming her.”

“Are you?”

She paused, examining her feelings. “No,” she replied honestly. “Not anymore. I just want to be close again. Our happiness has changed me. Talking of our future, our children.” She paused. “I miss my mother.”

“You might try telling her that, too.”

A week later, Michael and Luis rounded the corner of the cabin, hands gesturing in the air, engaged in a hot conversation. When they reached the front door they stopped short. Inside the house they saw Charlotte seated at the kitchen table, earphones on her head, books splayed out on the table before her. Her eyes were closed as she listened intently, then she responded to the tape, reciting Spanish aloud with a remarkably good accent.

Michael was both surprised and touched that she would make this effort for him, for his family. It had to be mostly for their benefit, since he demanded that the family speak English around her.

The two men stared at her with a look of puzzlement. Anyone looking at them would have thought they were studying a piece of art. Finally Luis reached up to an itch behind his ear, giving the spot a thorough scratching.

“I admit she is not what I thought you’d bring home. A movie star. Humph.” He rocked on his heels and rubbed the bristle on his cheek. “And she is so scrawny a bird, so rangy. Not much meat on the bones. But she has a big heart. And she makes a good mole sauce.” He stopped to place his large, meaty hand on Michael’s shoulder. “She maybe will make a good wife.”

Maria Elena and Charlotte were in Marta’s big, homey kitchen preparing for Maria Elena’s saint’s day dinner. The yellow, blue and green tile border gleamed in the morning sun that was pouring in from the glazed windows. Marta had laid out on the long, heavy wood table bowls of warm, wrapped dough for rolls, and on the stove, several saucepans were simmering with the sauces they’d made earlier that morning. The air was redolent with the scents of sweet dough, spicy sausages, and cornmeal.

Marta was patting out the tortilla dough while Charlotte and Maria Elena cooked the fresh tortillas on the grill.

“Take it off when you see the first bubble,” Marta reminded her.

“Sí
, yo sé!” Charlotte called back, smiling at Maria Elena.

Marta grunted softly in appreciation. “Luis, he say you do good work at the nursery with Miguel. He is happy to see you in the family business. It is good for a woman to know the family business. To keep the accounts, no? A man might rule at the dinner table, but the woman—” She flipped the dough and pounded it with efficient strokes. “The woman rules the home. This she must do for her children. A man might gamble away the money, or drink.”

“I doubt that Michael would gamble away his money. He works too hard at earning it.”

“Miguel? No, but some,
sí
, it happens.” Her small hands kneaded the dough while she glanced discreetly at Maria Elena. Charlotte had heard about Manuel’s increasing drinking, and she nodded, remaining silent.

“In my heart, Mexico is my home,” Marta continued.

“It is the country of my family. My parents, my sisters and my brother. My culture, eh? But my children’s home is here in America, so in my mind, it must be my home, too. Luis, he does not feel this way but—” she shrugged and caught Charlotte’s eye, her own eyes twinkling “—the parents must suffer and endure so that the children can do better. It is the way it must be. I wanted my children to go to the schools taught by the nuns. On this I was firm. I didn’t want my children to drop out of school or end up in jail like so many other children that I knew in the old neighborhood. Like—” She fumbled with a word at the tip of her tongue. “What is the English word for when they have numbers for an opinion?”

“Statistics?”

“Sí
,” she nodded, resuming her pounding. “Statistics. They were bad for Mexican children in Los Angeles. So many drop out of school. Gangs. Not good for the children. So we moved to the suburbs and Luis he worked like a
mule en el labor
for very little money while I hired out as a seamstress close to home. The nuns, they gave our children money for school…scholarships, eh? My children, they were smart.
Sí
. Very smart. My Miguel, he went to a college in Boston!”

“Yes, I know,” Charlotte replied, thinking to herself that Harvard was hardly just some college in Boston.

“I wonder now if maybe I made a mistake. That maybe Luis was right. Miguel, growing up he had his heart torn in two. For a long time he did not want anything Mexican. Not the language, the music, the food. Not even his family. He was very bitter about any prejudice against him, and maybe when he rejected his culture…” She shrugged. “He was prejudiced, too. He ran far from his family.”

“Did Tío Miguel run away from home?” Maria Elena asked.