| |
IF I’D HAD any delusions that my sex education was now complete, they would have been disabused a few weeks later when I bumped into Cesar at Trader Joe’s. Actually, it was in that store’s infamous parking lot. The grocery chain was known for how poorly their lots were designed. This one wasn’t any different, and when I say I bumped into Cesar, it was nearly literally, with my back bumper and his front one doing a kind of do-se-do before stopping on the brink of a bonk.
We both managed to park more or less parallel to each other, with the front right of the Prius jutting ever so slightly toward the left front tire of his sputtering old Honda, which probably was once a bright red, but now sported a shade of dusty rust. I saw that he took care not to bang his door against mine when he came out of his car. I also saw that he had a passenger, who exited his car with the alacrity of a child. And, indeed, she was pretty pint-sized for a young woman, maybe about four feet, ten inches.
She joined Cesar at his side until a man in a top-down silver Jaguar honked aggressively and made all three of us jump and make haste toward the market.
We came to a stop at the shopping cart stand. Cesar nodded toward his companion, saying, almost grudgingly, “This is Gladys Morales.” Then he added, as if I’d asked how they’d met (which I hadn’t), “She helped me find my mother. She was finishing up her social work internship for the University of San Carlos when we met.” The girl’s smile was friendly and curious. Though her skin was as pale as mine and her hair nearly as blond, she had the signature Guatemalan flat face with almost slanted Asian eyes. She raised an eyebrow at him.
Inelegantly, he took her cue. “This is Fleur. Is it Manus?”
“Actually, I go by Robins.”
“Of course you do. Fleur Robins.” He looked away from me to shrug at Gladys. “She’s my adopted sister. Well, I’m the adopted one. You know, the daughter of the woman who died.”
I flinched. The statement was bald, impersonal.
“You know, then,” I commented, a slight edge in my voice betraying my irritation.
“Yeah. Fidel told me.”
Cesar bringing up Fidel made me marvel even more at the incongruity of it all. The last time I’d seen the two of them together, Fidel was swirling on stiletto heels to Gloria Gaynor’s “I Will Survive,” and Cesar had worn a thong that left virtually nothing to the imagination. Now he was fully clothed in relaxed jeans and a conventional button-down shirt. The biceps under his short-sleeved shirt were visibly cut. He looked very handsome. And masculine. And he held the young woman close to him like a prized possession.
“Did you just get back in town?”
“No, I ... we came about six months ago.”
Neither one of us commented that he hadn’t come back for the funeral.
We parted awkwardly, with a nearly dismissive hand wave from Cesar, and Gladys and I exchanging a set of polite nice to meet yous.
As I wheeled my cart into the store, I had to stop and catch my breath at a table stacked with watermelons. I sensed more than saw that the store was quite busy, with people’s carts pushing determinedly past me, bells ringing from the service counter, and Jackson Browne singing—what else?—“Linda Paloma” on the loudspeaker. I recovered myself by recalling that I really did need to get home and relieve Sister F. from babysitting duty.
It was in the frozen food section, where I was reaching for Callay’s favorite veggie “meatballs,” when I sensed Gladys at my side. I turned and held out the package as if offering it to her and then laughed, flinging it into my cart.
“You should come and have dinner with us,” she said. Only now did I notice Cesar standing further down the aisle with their cart, not even bothering to disguise his frown.
“Oh, I wouldn’t want to bother ...”
“No,” she insisted, “we don’t have many friends. And I have no family here except for Cesar. Please.” She put a hand on my arm. It was beautiful, with long pianist’s fingers and a light dusting of freckles that suggested she was no stranger to the sun. I noted that she had a faint female mustache over her attractively upturned lip. Somewhere along the line, I’d picked up the information that many Guatemalans were Mestizo, a blend of native and European ancestry. It made for an intriguing mix in Gladys. She said warmly, “Let me text you with some times.”
Oh dear. This wasn’t one of those “let’s get together sometime” pleasantries. She was getting specific. I gave her my number, and she deftly inputted it into her phone. She smiled widely, and I realized that she had a slight gap between her two front teeth. I nearly said, “Oh, you’re ‘tooth mingi,’” but caught myself in time.
Have you ever noticed how synchronicities tend to appear in groups? I ended up feeling like it was Old Home Week, what with my encounters over the course of a few days with Cesar, “Linda Paloma,” Gladys Morales, and just a few days later, Assefa, along with the “tooth mingi” queen herself, Lemlem, and their baby Ife, whom I’d not yet seen.
That particular morning was worth celebrating. SoCal had been sodden in the kind of horribly humid heat wave that only climate change could wreak on our once Mediterranean-like habitat. Today was still pretty warm, yes, but breezy enough to preclude the full-body itchies that tended to come over me when I perspired too much. The bees and butterflies and mockingbirds seemed to savor the shift, too, and were buzzing and swirling as I pushed Callay along in her “UPPAbaby” stroller toward the Huntington Gardens. It was only when I passed the ticket kiosk, flashing my Member badge, that I saw Assefa and Lemlem pushing their own stroller towards me, but it was Assefa’s baby who grabbed my attention.
When they told me her name, I of course had to ask what it meant. It was Lemlem who said it proudly, “It is love. Ife means love.” I found I couldn’t look at Assefa right then. But I could look at his wife. Needless to say, Lemlem looked gorgeous, back to her ridiculously perfect slender body in what must be less than six months post-delivery, while I was still battling the baby bulge after nearly twelve more.
The two of them exclaimed over how big Callay was. My daughter, bless her, actually held out a pudgy hand to shake each of theirs when I told her their names. She solemnly pronounced, “How ee do, Atheffa? How ee do, Lellem?” before looking up at me for approval.
“My goodness, Assefa, isn’t she precocious?”
He smiled affirmingly, his eye tic going like crazy.
I patted Monkey on the head while responding, “She’s the light of my life. But I wish I could just freeze her in time. Actually, I feel like that at every stage. But a baby— oh, do I ever miss having a little baby to hold.”
As if on cue, Lemlem lifted Ife out of the stroller and held her out to me. She beamed, but it was Assefa’s eyes I was aware of, as if he didn’t know what to make of me holding his child against my shoulder. I tried not to visibly sniff her, but I didn’t have to. I’d know that cinnamon and Roquefort cheese scent anywhere. But did it emanate from the child’s own pores or just be the residue of her father having recently held her? Either way, I found it incredibly hard to let her go.
After we parted, my own darling singing “It-thee Bit-thee Thpider” beneath me, I wondered how long it would for me to feel less haunted by my memories of Assefa. On a quantum level, once objects have interacted with each other or come into being in a similar way, they become linked or entangled forever. Was there something about the emotional entanglement of humans that echoed that? Might feelings operate like fractals of physical memories?
On the other hand, if we were butterflies, Adam and I wouldn’t even have been able to mate without Assefa’s spermatophores having been cleared from my system. But it seemed more than apparent than ever that humans aren’t butterflies, and I was still more than vulnerable to feeling uncomfortably stirred-up by having my ex-lover around.
And speaking of feeling haunted, I had the uncanny sensation of smelling Mother’s signature Chanel No.5 perfume as I knocked on Cesar and Gladys’s paint-chipped front door a few weeks later. It didn’t help my mood much that I was on my own, Adam having been felled by a lousy cold. The doorbell button was missing, and the stucco walls were covered in cobwebs. The earthy-toned Mexican tiles at my feet were breaking apart, the cracks making rather interesting zig-zag patterns, and a bare light bulb above my head looked dangerously askew from its socket. I knew that the rents in SoCal had gone through the roof, right along with our shamefully overpriced house prices, but I couldn’t help but wonder how it felt to Cesar to live in this rather rundown place after all those years in Mother’s posh digs.
As a grinning Gladys ushered me over the threshold, I felt shame over where I lived. These two were crammed into a living room not much bigger than a postage stamp, their “dining table” actually a narrow glass coffee table with one wrought iron leg wrapped in duct tape. Opposite a slumping gold sofa that shouted Goodwill stood a brown Naugahyde chair currently occupied by one of the fattest and furriest cats I’d ever seen. Dark Gray all over except for a nearly white ruff around his neck, it summoned a couple of plump forelegs from under its body, stretched them out in front, and blinked contentedly.
“May I?” I asked, squeezing around the coffee table to offer it a well-received stroke under the chin. “Cat crazy, I am,” I said unnecessarily. “What’s its name?”
To Cesar’s obvious dismay, Gladys offered, “His name is Fidelissimo, but we call him Fidel most of the time. We’re so lucky. He’s a Maine Coon. We named him after Cesar’s friend Fidel, who rescued him from under his house and gave him to us because he’s allergic to animals.”
Well, I thought, the blood-soaked Chin-Hwa coming to mind, that was one way of putting it.
I tried to shoot Cesar a look intended to reassure him, but he’d disappeared into the kitchen.
Gladys took my purse from me, along with the small vase of flowers I’d purchased for them at my favorite florist’s, Jacob Maarse. “Que bellas flores!” she exclaimed, setting them down on a rather rickety looking end table that I had visions of the feline Fidel overturning as soon as he had the chance. I was glad I’d thought to bring the white and apricot roses already arranged in a vase, as I doubted the young couple possessed one.
Before I knew it, Cesar was sailing into the room bearing a steaming platter of what Gladys proudly told me was called Chicken Pepián.
“Oh my God,” I exclaimed. “It smells heavenly!” Once he set it down on a colorful Mexican tile trivet on the coffee table, I leaned down and put my nose up close to it. “What’s in it?”
Gladys ticked off the ingredients on her fingers. “Pear, squash, carrot, potato, tomato, corn.” She laughed. “Well, and chicken, of course.”
My eyes veered toward Cesar, but he’d fled the room again.
Gladys confided, “He cooks better than a woman. His friend Fidel taught him a lot. Gave him a love for it. We’re going to open a restaurant one day. We’re saving the money from his mother.” She hesitated, then went on shyly, “Well, I mean ... I’m afraid his biological mother has disappeared again. I meant your mother. I hope you don’t mind that she—”
“Are you kidding? She had enough dough from my dad to feed a couple of armies.” I mentally berated myself. Not the greatest image to use to a Guatemalan, whose people were still struggling to recover from a 36-year civil war prompted in part by our own CIA’s support of the military overthrow of their democratically elected government; everything I’d read suggested that the country was still traumatized by the military’s massacres and civil rights abuses and forced evictions from their homes.
I tried to save myself. “A restaurant! You should talk to our family friend Dhani. Cesar knows her. She used to cook for us. Then she started a cooking school. She could give you all kinds of tips. Maybe provide you with some staff.”
Cesar had slipped back into the room again. He set dishes and silverware down on the coffee table and pulled some gaily decorated floor pillows from a corner. He gestured with his head for us to sit down. I wriggled my bum around until it found its place in the middle of my pillow.
Spooning food onto the plates, he commented curtly, “Yeah, well, I don’t want to rely on that old gang.”
He said it with such contempt that the words came out in spite of me, “You evidently don’t mind taking some of that old gang’s money.” Immediately, I clapped a hand to my mouth. Gladys looked more confused than anything else by my astonishing rudeness.
Mortified, I quickly added, “I’m so sorry. Foot in mouth disease.” Which, needless to say, confused her even more. “No, really.” I reached a hand across the table toward Cesar. When he didn’t bridge his own toward me, I hurriedly took a bite of my Chicken Pepián. Gladys had been right. Cesar was on his way to becoming a master chef. I detected a hint of cinnamon, a bit of coriander, cloves, pumpkin seeds, sesame seeds, chilies, of course, and garlic and onion. I would have thought it might have tasted too sweet, but the bitterness of the roasted vegetables conveyed just the right amount of edge.
“Wow. This is food for the gods.” I paused with another forkful midway to my mouth. “Listen, Cesar, that was downright offensive of me. Especially when you’ve gone to such trouble to cook me such a heavenly meal.” I waited to see if he would accept my apology.
But Gladys jumped in for him. “No. Cesar should not have said that.”
Surprised, I saw that he actually looked ashamed. He must really love this young woman if he was letting her tame his habitual resentment.
I hastened to take my opening. “No. I get it.” I stared into Cesar’s deep, nearly black eyes. “You want to do this your own way. Put your stamp on it. A restaurant is a creative enterprise for anyone who can cook like this.” And I meant it.
He studied me for a moment, then seemed to relax a bit. “Yeah. That’s a good way to put it. I’m totally psyched.” He added warmly, “And not just for me. This is going to be a real partnership. Gladys will be right with me every step of the way, from designing menus to working out prices to hiring and managing staff. She’s a real people person.” I nodded. He was right on that score. His hand reached down to give Gladys’ bum a possessive squeeze, “It’ll be our baby until we have a real one.”
Gladys blushed. I think I did, too. I’d heard a lot lately about gender fluidity, but something must have gotten positively sodden in Cesar that he’d transformed from Miss Hot Little Mama to this convincing young paterfamilias. He’d shed his previous incarnation as dramatically as a doughty monarch butterfly, some of whom have been spotted flying past the Empire State Building at a height of a thousand feet. I had a hunch that, with Gladys by his side, Cesar was about to soar.
As for me, it was more than clear that I knew next to nothing outside of my own little physics bubble and was an absolute dunderhead about human nature. I kept wanting to vanquish the uncertainties of my void by typecasting people, and they simply wouldn’t cooperate.
