Kissing Arizona (6 page)

On Monday morning, Marisol got up early, washed her bloated face in cold water and started the coffee, got dressed and woke the girls.

‘Get up,' she said. ‘You have to go to school. I have to get to work.' It was as close to a plan as they would ever hear from her. Fatally humiliated, Marisol became essentially unreachable. Her answer to almost every question became ‘
Quien sabe?
' Who knows? Her other favorite answer was ‘no'. Soon even that was unnecessary, as her daughters quickly understood that with their father gone, their situation was desperate.

The girls coped in their different ways. Vicky got in every food line she could find and in time learned to do a little careful shoplifting. Luz hung around the neighbors' houses looking pitiful until they fed her and worked the school system for everything she could get. As she grew, she became as American as possible, worked hard to keep her clothes clean and neat, and copied the hairstyles in
People
magazine. As her mother sublet most of their rented duplex to noisy new arrivals in order to keep a roof over their heads, Luz drew an invisible bubble around herself and was soon as unreachable as Marisol. Her English became textbook perfect, her grades went to the top and stayed there, she learned to suck up to teachers for attention and prizes.

Emotionally abandoned, Victoria became an insolent stray named Vicky. She ran with the wild kids, grew a bad attitude. By shoplifting the toiletries aisles in the grocery store, she was able to style herself Gothic, with green fingernails and spiked hair. She slouched around the house scowling and swearing; when she bothered to come home at all, her mother complained.

Marisol began to transfer her anger, and with it her talent for nagging, from the husband she had lost to the daughter she could no longer control.
You want to eat my food you gonna help with the cooking
, she raged
. No you can't go to the movies, I been cleaning Anglo shit all day, you got to do the dishes.

Vicky had always resisted her mother's discipline, and after Pablo abandoned them, her rebellion slid gradually toward open warfare. She turned twelve, and then thirteen, flunked sixth grade and began to menstruate. ‘One more expense,' Marisol groaned as she showed her how to use the pad. It was all the sex education Vicky would ever get at home, but of course there was plenty to be had at school, much of it from the boys who had begun to taunt and tease her.

During the depressing boredom of the summer remedial classes she had to take after failing sixth grade, Vicky discovered the refuge her imagination could provide. Her reading was still too poor to escape into literature, but her spoken English was fluent. Her best friend in the world became the TV set. By the hour, she watched the competitive posing of reality shows, Masterpiece Theater channel with its elegant accents and period costumes, cop shows featuring tough, smart American women who could run and shoot without smearing their make-up.

Luz got a scholarship to a math-and-science camp for poor kids that summer, and Marisol worked her two jobs and slept. Vicky, ignoring Marisol's demands that she clean the house, curled in Pablo's chair, happy in her dream world. In bed at night she played the stories over in her mind, identifying with the smoothest-talking, smartest women, the ones with the power. Her inner view of herself became more and more at odds with her squalid surroundings and low test scores.

On the first sizzling-hot day in August, Immigration and Border Protection agents staged a sweep on the house-cleaning staffs at several motels just as Marisol was starting the morning shift. Her green card proven fraudulent, she waited, weeping, in a detention center till her children could be brought to join her.

Vicky, malingering through remedial math class in Wakefield Middle School, looked up from passing a note to the boy in the seat ahead of her and saw a man in a blue uniform in the doorway. She went with him willingly, glad of a break from the tedium of class. When her mother told her what was happening, she was first unbelieving, then indignant. Her reactions were all met with demeaning indifference by the authorities at the center, which reduced her to sputtering rage.

‘Shut up,' Luz hissed at her, ‘you're making it worse.' Luz had memorized the number on her Arizona birth certificate. She made them look her up in the computer and acknowledge her American citizenship.

‘But you can't stay here by yourself,' the social worker said, ‘You're only ten years old.'

‘I can stay with Tía Luisa,' Luz said. ‘Can't I?' she petitioned her mother. ‘Ask her!' Marisol didn't want to leave her younger daughter behind but Luz insisted, standing by the phone with her jaw pushed out till Marisol called Tía Luisa's house and begged for the favor.

‘You should have kept your mouth shut and hung onto your husband,' Luisa said, blaming the wife as usual.

‘Wouldn't make no difference now, they sending me back,' Marisol said. ‘But Luz is American citizen like your girls. Won't you sign for her till we see—'

‘See what? I got my hands full to feed my own. She's too young to work on the house-cleaning crew and I can't keep her for nothing, you hear?'

Luz, who was hanging by her mother's ear to hear as much as she could, said, ‘Tell her I can learn, I will do any work!'

Marisol repeated Luz's promises and added, ‘This one is determined to succeed, you will not lose on her.' Luz got a ride home to pack and came back with Tía Luisa and her husband, who scowled and groaned but signed the paperwork. Marisol surrendered herself and Vicky to the agents at IBP.

That year the Border Patrol tried returning as many illegals as possible to Mexico by plane, trying to get them resettled in their home communities, away from the border so they would not keep coming back. Marisol and Vicky got airlifted to Guadalajara.

Marisol tried to get Vicky to agree that at least the plane ride was a treat. But Vicky was so outraged that her rotten little sister got to stay and be a US citizen while she got thrown out, that for once she was almost speechless. Anger filled her chest and throat so she could hardly breathe. She had built up a very good opinion of herself; she knew she was cute and clever, whatever the teachers said. Boys already teased and chased after her. She had one almost-boyfriend named Chaco who would do anything for her, or said he would if only she . . . but she was still holding off on sex, hoping to find somebody strong and brave, a leader. Older men winked and made jokes, and she knew they were not just being kindly as they pretended. If even grown men wanted her, who were these people now who said she wasn't good enough to stay in the United States?

At the back of her anger was the shrinking fear she was too proud to admit – that her Spanish was not good enough, she would be awkward and make stupid mistakes. Kids her age would laugh and mock her, she thought – and besides, she had heard that the food in Mexico would make you sick if you weren't used to it. At the same time, oblivious to the irony, she feared they would be too poor to eat at all, and would starve.

At the Guadalajara airport they caught a bus to Ajijic. Marisol taught her how to say it, Ah-hee-heek. It was Marisol's home town, a small suburb full of artisans' factories and shops, near Lake Chapala. For generations, the men of her family had been glass-blowers here and in Tonalá, the even smaller village nearby. The women painted designs on the pottery, or were weavers, or worked in one of the shops that sold the goods. ‘In the old days,' she told Vicky, ‘before all the young men left, this was a good place to live. If I can find some of the people I worked for . . . or my sister Yolanda . . .'

But Marisol had been gone almost twelve years. Both her parents had died. None of her family wrote or read well – she had exchanged a few Christmas cards with her sisters and brother, had heard about a wedding and a couple of babies. She had very little money, and no idea of the right price for things now. Marisol was plenty jittery herself, but was counting on the goodwill of relatives to get her started at something. She had tried to find family members by phone while they waited for their flight, but was not too worried that none were listed – nobody in her family had ever had a phone.

They got off the bus near the town square, checked their bags into a locker and walked around aimlessly at first. The streets were quiet; it was summer, there were only a few tourists. All the small merchants were out, though – the ones for whom their own body was the store. They piled hats high on their heads or draped lace tablecloths over their shoulders and arms. One man was almost invisible behind the dolls he had hung all over himself.

Marisol walked into shop after shop, asking questions. Her Spanish was fine, she had used it every day in South Tucson. Vicky understood some words but not many whole sentences; people talked so fast! She stared at her toes, growing more and more surly. Marisol got sick of her attitude quickly and yelled, ‘Nobody gonna help me with you there looking like death! Go sit on that bench and wait for me.'

‘How long . . . ?'

‘Till I come get you! Just wait!'

Vicky sat pouting on the shady end of a hard wooden bench. What was wrong with her mother to give in so easily? There had to be some way back to Tucson and they could find it. She watched a man lead a burro across the cobblestone square, pulling a cartload of clay pots, and promised herself, ‘Damn if I'll stay in this one-burro town.' The expression pleased her and dampened her anger a little, as she thought about saying it to Chaco, making him laugh.

Then Marisol burst out of a shop door, transformed by happiness, yelling, ‘
Ayé a Yolanda!
' Chattering in excited Spanish, dropping in some English words when Vicky demanded it, she told about the clerk in the store who knew her sister and let her make a phone call. ‘She told me which bus to take, too.
Vámanos!
'

When Marisol's sister Yolanda opened her door to them, and her other sister Sophia brought her daughters with food to welcome them, Marisol began to wonder why she had ever left this place. They were poor, she told Vicky, but they had enough to eat and they looked after each other. She could manage here, it was a kinder place than Tucson.

There was no money for school, though. Vicky had hated school in Tucson, but was indignant when she learned she had no chance for it here. She was an adult-in-training now, expected to carry her share. Marisol used all the family connections to get Vicky an apprenticeship in a pottery in Tonalá, where skilled artisans threw the pots on a wheel, fired them and painted the patterns. Vicky was put to work with the other beginners kneading clay and mixing glazes. Her pay was so little it felt like an insult, and her mother made her give most of it to her aunt for board and room.

‘Room!' Vicky sneered, ‘I wish!' She had one end of a tiny cot, with her smallest cousin at the other end and her clothing underneath in the small suitcase she had brought along.

‘
Ya basta!
' Marisol hissed, afraid her sister would be offended. ‘Enough now. Be nice with your cousins, they will take you with them to the
paseo
in the evening so you can find friends your own age.'

‘Who needs cousins? I know where the plaza is.'

‘You can't go alone, girls don't do that here. Vicky, here the family is very important, girls especially must be well-behaved. We are lucky to have Yolanda, so
firme la boca
,' – she drew an imaginary zipper across her mouth – ‘and follow the rules.'

Making pots was hard work and Vicky saw in the first week that she would never be one of the ones who learned to coax beauty from the clay. Soon she understood fully how boring real poverty could be, how dismal it made her to work hard for bare survival and see everybody around her doing the same. At least in Tucson you could see other people living well, so you could dream of some day having what they had.

Marisol got a job in one of the shops in Ajijic and quickly became a valued employee. She was proud that her employers valued her few words of English, which enhanced her ability to deal with tourists. Vicky sneered when Marisol told her they admired her ‘
estilo Americano
'. In Tucson her mother had made beds in a motel, the most menial job, and still sometimes said ‘
zanahorias
' when she wanted carrots. She had depended on Vicky to find things in the mall. Now she thought she was doing a big favor when she offered to escort Vicky to an evening at the stupid plaza. Walking around in a brain-dead circle, what fun was that? Still, it was better than staying home in Aunt Yolanda's tiny crowded house, so she went.

She walked beside her mother with her nose in the air, pretending to ignore the curious stares of the local boys. All these quaint local customs that the tourists loved; they made her realize that from now on she had to think for herself. What use was advice from a mother who thought Ajijic was a sweet place to live? Under her lashes, she watched the boys and men who came on to her, more of them every week now. She was looking for the discontented ones, the ones most likely to jump the wall.

THREE

T
he first thing the detective division taught Sarah Burke was that word processors, contrary to predictions, had not eliminated paperwork. If anything, they allowed detectives to burn through trees faster than ever, because electronic keyboards made report-writing faster. And better forensic science meant there was more to report every year.

More reporting meant that the secret to staying afloat in Homicide was keeping your emotions under tight control so you could transition quickly from one task to another. Been out on the street for two hours, talking to some nutcase through a door? Feeling maybe a little roughed up because he kept promising to shoot you? Tough cheese. Because as soon as you walk back in the station, you had better get your tushy on a chair and start typing, or you will find yourself woefully behind in your reporting chores, where you do not want to be if you value your slot in Homicide.