The harpsichordist needs help to move her instrument over a bit. Two cellists have gotten up to assist her, along with some other boy who came out of nowhere and looks like a Goliath. We always think that people who seem strong are—until, in the end, they prove themselves to be people. I thought my mother was strong until she showed me her weaknesses, that she needed to eat in order to live, like everyone else—and, what’s more, that she needed someone to give her support. Someone who wasn’t a little girl who was really a burden, who made her have to work more just to get by.
I learned to recognize strength in people’s eyes. When I met Karl, I saw strength in his. That wasn’t my thought when I saw Anna’s eyes, despite her showing up for the first time all sassy and ready to take on the world. She came with a maid, who took her around everywhere. Normally, at least for the first class, the parents would come to introduce me to the child and tell me what their expectations were or simply to meet me. That never happened with Anna; she came with the maid on the first day, and every other day as well, and Anna was already old enough to get around on her own. The maid would wait for her outside, and I sometimes would stick my head out the window and watch as they walked toward the Diagonal to catch the bus—because, as the girl had explained to me, they lived on the other side of the city, near the park with the lake.
I had spent a lot of time at the park myself. I brought children there to play after cleaning their kitchen, after ironing and scrubbing their floors and bathrooms. I say bathrooms because those folks had two and, sometimes, three—for me, that was quite the luxury. I had never seen a house with more than one bathroom. And what bathrooms they were: They looked to me like the ones in the films I watched on television. I was fifteen then, and that was when mother told me, wiping the beads of sweat from her forehead: We’ve both got to roll up our sleeves now, girl. My childhood was over.