Eudora. Mexico. Color and light and Cuernavaca and Eudora.
At the compound, Easter Saturday, she was just coming out of a week’s drinking binge which started with the firing of Robert Oppenheimer, the atomic scientist, in the states. I was full of the Good Friday festivities in Mexico City, which I had attended with Frieda and Tammy the day before. They had gone to Tepotzlán. I was sunning myself on my front lawn.
“Hello, down there! Aren’t you overdoing it?” I looked up at the woman whom I had noticed observing me from an upper window in the two-story dwelling at the edge of the compound. She was the only woman I’d seen wearing pants in Mexico except at the pool.
I was pleased that she had spoken. The two women who lived separately in the double house at that end of the compound never appeared at tables in the Plaza. They never spoke as they passed my house on their way to the cars or the pool. I knew one of them had a shop in town called La Señora, which had the most interesting clothes on the Square.
“Haven’t you heard, only mad dogs and englishmen go out in the noonday sun?” I shaded my eyes so I could see her better. I was more curious than I had realized.
“I don’t burn that easily,” I called back. She was framed in the large casement window, a crooked smile on her half-shaded face. Her voice was strong and pleasant, but with a crack in it that sounded like a cold, or too many cigarettes.
“I’m just going to have some coffee. Would you like some?”
I stood, picked up the blanket upon which I’d been lying, and accepted her invitation.
She was waiting in her doorway. I recognized her as the tall grey-haired woman called La Periodista.
“My name’s Eudora,” she said, extending her hand and holding mine firmly for a moment. “And they call you La Chica, you’re here from New York, and you go to the new university.”
“Where did you find all that out?” I asked, taken aback. We stepped inside.
“It’s my business to find out what goes on,” she laughed easily. “That’s what reporters do. Legitimate gossip.”
Eudora’s bright spacious room was comfortable and disheveled. A large easy chair faced the bed upon which she now perched crosslegged, in shorts and polo shirt, smoking, and surrounded by books and newspapers.
Maybe it was her direct manner. Maybe it was the openness with which she appraised me as she motioned me towards the chair. Maybe it was the pants, or the informed freedom and authority with which she moved. But from the moment I walked into her house, I knew Eudora was gay, and that was an unexpected and welcome surprise. It made me feel much more at home and relaxed, even though I was still feeling sore and guilty from my fiasco with Bea, but it was refreshing to know I wasn’t alone.
“I’ve been drinking for a week,” she said, “and I’m still a little hung-over, so you’ll have to excuse the mess.”
I didn’t know what to say.
Eudora wanted to know what I was doing in Mexico, young, Black, and with an eye for the ladies, as she put it. That was the second surprise. We shared a good laugh over the elusive cues for mutual recognition among lesbians. Eudora was the first woman I’d met who spoke about herself as a lesbian rather than as “gay,” which was a word she hated. Eudora said it was a north american east-coast term that didn’t mean anything to her, and what’s more most of the lesbians she had known were anything but gay.
When I went to the market that afternoon, I brought back milk and eggs and fruit for her. I invited her to dinner, but she wasn’t feeling much like eating, she said, so I fixed my dinner and brought it over and ate with her. Eudora was an insomniac, and we sat talking late late into the night.
She was the most fascinating woman I had ever met.
Born in Texas forty-eight years before, Eudora was the youngest child in an oil-worker’s family. She had seven older brothers. Polio as a child had kept her in bed for three years, “so I had a lot of catchin’ up to do, and I never knew when to stop.”
In 1925, she became the first woman to attend the University of Texas, integrating it by camping out on the university grounds for four years in a tent with her rifle and a dog. Her brothers had studied there, and she was determined to also. “They said they didn’t have living accommodations for women,” Eudora said, “and I couldn’t afford a place in town.”
She’d worked in news all her life, both print and radio, and had followed her lover, Franz, to Chicago, where they both worked for the same paper. “She and I were quite a team, all right. Had a lot of high times together, did a lot of foolishness, believed a lot of things.
“Then Franz married a foreign correspondent in Istanbul,” Eudora continued, drily, “and I lost my job over a byline on the Scottsboro case.” She worked for a while in Texas for a Mexican paper, then moved into Mexico City for them.
When she and Karen, who owned La Señora, were lovers, they had started a bookstore together in Cuernavaca in the more liberal forties. For a while it was a rallying place for disaffected americans. This was how she knew Frieda.
“It was where people came to find out what was really going on in the states. Everybody passed through.” She paused. “But it got to be a little too radical for Karen’s tastes,” Eudora said carefully. “The dress shop suits her better. But that’s a whole other mess, and she still owes me money.”
“What happened to the bookstore?” I asked, not wanting to pry, but fascinated by her story.
“Oh, lots of things, in very short order. I’ve always been a hard drinker, and she never liked that. Then when I had to speak my mind in the column about the whole Sobell business, and the newspaper started getting itchy, Karen thought I was going to lose that job. I didn’t, but my immigration status was changed, which meant I could still work in Mexico, but after all these years I could no longer own property. That’s the one way of getting uppity americans to keep their mouths shut. Don’t rock big brother’s boat, and we’ll let you stay. That was right up Karen’s alley. She bought me out and opened the dress shop.”
“Is that why you broke up?”
Eudora laughed. “That sounds like New York talk.” She was silent for a minute, busying herself with the overflowing ashtray.
“Actually, no,” she said finally. “I had an operation, and it was pretty rough for both of us. Radical surgery, for cancer. I lost a breast.” Eudora’s head was bent over the ashtray, hair falling forward, and I could not see her face. I reached out and touched her hand.
“I’m so sorry,” I said.
“Yeah, so am I,” she said, matter-of-factly, placing the polished ashtray carefully back on the table beside her bed. She looked up, smiled, and pushed the hair back from her face with the heels of her hands. “There’s never enough time to begin with, and still so damn much I want to do.”
“How are you feeling now, Eudora?” I remembered my nights on the female surgery floor at Beth David. “Did you have radiation?”
“Yes I did. It’s almost two years since the last one, and I’m fine now. The scars are hard to take, though. Not dashing or romantic. I don’t much like to look at them myself.” She got up, took down her guitar from the wall, and started to tune it. “What folksongs are they teaching you in that fine new university up the mountain?”
Eudora had translated a number of texts on the history and ethnology of Mexico, one of which was a textbook assigned for my history class. She was witty and funny and sharp and insightful, and knew a lot about an enormous number of things. She had written poetry when she was younger, and Walt Whitman was her favorite poet. She showed me some clippings of articles she had written for a memorial-documentary of Whitman. One sentence in particular caught my eye.
I met a man who’d spent his life in thinking, and could understand me no matter what I said. And I followed him to Harleigh in the snow.
The next week was Easter holidays, and I spent part of each afternoon or evening at Eudora’s house, reading poetry, learning to play the guitar, talking. I told her about Ginger, and about Bea, and she talked about her and Franz’s life together. We even had a game of dirty-word Scrabble, and although I warned her I was a declared champion, Eudora won, thereby increasing my vocabulary no end. She showed me the column she was finishing about the Olmec stone heads, and we talked about the research she was planning to do on African and Asian influences in Mexican art. Her eyes twinkled and her long graceful hands flashed as she talked, and by midweek, when we were not together, I could feel the curves of her cheekbone under my lips as I gave her a quick goodbye kiss. I thought about making love to her, and ruined a whole pot of curry in my confusion. This was not what I had come to Mexico to do.
There was an air about Eudora when she moved that was both delicate and sturdy, fragile and tough, like the snapdragon she resembled when she stood up, flung back her head, and brushed her hair back with the palms of her hands. I was besotted.
Eudora often made fun of what she called my prudishness, and there was nothing she wouldn’t talk about. But there was a reserve about her own person, a force-field around her that I did not know how to pass, a sadness surrounding her that I could not breach. And besides, a woman of her years and experience—how presumptuous of me!
We sat talking in her house later and later, over endless cups of coffee, half my mind on our conversation and half of it hunting for some opening, some graceful, safe way of getting closer to this woman whose smell made my earlobes burn. Who, despite her openness about everything else, turned away from me when she changed her shirt.
On Thursday night we rehung some of her bark paintings from Tehuantepec. The overhead fan hummed faintly; there was a little pool of sweat sitting in one wing of her collarbone. I almost reached over to kiss it.
“Goddammit!” Eudora had narrowly missed her finger with the hammer.
“You’re very beautiful,” I said suddenly, embarrassed at my own daring. There was a moment of silence as Eudora put down her hammer.
“So are you, Chica,” she said, quietly, “more beautiful than you know.” Her eyes held mine for a minute so I could not turn away.
No one had ever said that to me before.
It was after 2:00 A.M. when I left Eudora’s house, walking across the grass to my place in the clear moonlight. Once inside I could not sleep. I tried to read. Visions of Eudora’s dear one-sided grin kept coming between me and the page. I wanted to be with her, to be close to her, laughing.
I sat on the edge of my bed, wanting to put my arms around Eudora, to let the tenderness and love I felt burn away the sad casing around her and speak to her need through the touch of my hands and my mouth and my body that defined my own.
“It’s getting late,” she had said. “You look tired. Do you want to stretch out?” She gestured to the bed beside her. I came out of my chair like a shot.
“Oh, no, that’s all right,” I stammered. All I could think of was that I had not had a bath since morning. “I—I need to take a shower, anyway.”
Eudora had already picked up a book. “Goodnight, Chica,” she said without looking up.
I jumped up from the edge of my bed and put a light under the water-heater. I was going back.
“What is it, Chica? I thought you were going to bed.” Eudora was reclining exactly as I had left her an hour before, propped up on a pillow against the wall, the half-filled ashtray next to her hand and books littering the rest of the three-quarter studio bed. A bright towel hung around her neck against the loose, short-sleeved beige nightshirt.
My hair was still damp from the shower, and my bare feet itched from the dew-wet grass between our houses. I was suddenly aware that it was 3:30 in the morning.
“Would you like some more coffee?” I offered.
She regarded me at length, unsmiling, almost wearily.
“Is that what you came back for, more coffee?”
All through waiting for the calendador to heat, all through showering and washing my hair and brushing my teeth, until that very moment, I had thought of nothing but wanting to hold Eudora in my arms, so much that I didn’t care that I was also terrified. Somehow, if I could manage to get myself back up those steps in the moonlight, and if Eudora was not already asleep, then I would have done my utmost. That would be my piece of the bargain, and then what I wanted would somehow magically fall into my lap.
Eudora’s grey head moved against the bright serape-covered wall behind her, still regarding me as I stood over her. Her eyes wrinkled and she slowly smiled her lopsided smile, and I could feel the warm night air between us collapse as if to draw us together.
I knew then that she had been hoping I would return. Out of wisdom or fear, Eudora waited for me to speak.
Night after night we had talked until dawn in this room about language and poetry and love and the good conduct of living. Yet we were strangers. As I stood there looking at Eudora, the impossible became easier, almost simple. Desire gave me courage, where it had once made me speechless. With almost no thought I heard myself saying,
“I want to sleep with you.”
Eudora straightened slowly, pushed the books from her bed with a sweep of her arm, and held out her hand to me.
“Come.”
I sat down on the edge of the bed, facing her, our thighs touching. Our eyes were on a level now, looking deeply into each other. I could feel my heart pounding in my ears, and the high steady sound of the crickets.
“Do you know what you’re saying?” Eudora asked softly, searching my face. I could smell her like the sharp breath of wildflowers.
“I know,” I said, not understanding her question. Did she think I was a child?
“I don’t know if I can,” she said, still softly, touching the sunken place on her nightshirt where her left breast should have been. “And you don’t mind this?”
I had wondered so often how it would feel under my hands, my lips, this different part of her. Mind? I felt my love spread like a shower of light surrounding me and this woman before me. I reached over and touched Eudora’s face with my hands.
“Are you sure?” Her eyes were still on my face.
“Yes, Eudora.” My breath caught in my throat as if I’d been running. “I’m very sure.” If I did not put my mouth upon hers and inhale the spicy smell of her breath my lungs would burst.
As I spoke the words, I felt them touch and give life to a new reality within me, some half-known self come of age, moving out to meet her.
I stood, and in two quick movements slid out of my dress and underclothes. I held my hand down to Eudora. Delight. Anticipation. A slow smile mirroring my own softened her face. Eudora reached over and passed the back of her hand along my thigh. Goose-flesh followed in the path of her fingers.
“How beautiful and brown you are.”
She rose slowly. I unbuttoned her shirt and she shrugged it off her shoulders till it lay heaped at our feet. In the circle of lamplight I looked from her round firm breast with its rosy nipple erect to her scarred chest. The pale keloids of radiation burn lay in the hollow under her shoulder and arm down across her ribs. I raised my eyes and found hers again, speaking a tenderness my mouth had no words yet for. She took my hand and placed it there, squarely, lightly, upon her chest. Our hands fell. I bent and kissed her softly upon the scar where our hands had rested. I felt her heart strong and fast against my lips. We fell back together upon her bed. My lungs expanded and my breath deepened with the touch of her warm dry skin. My mouth finally against hers, quick-breathed, fragrant, searching, her hand entwined in my hair. My body took charge from her flesh. Shifting slightly, Eudora reached past my head toward the lamp above us. I caught her wrist. Her bones felt like velvet and quicksilver between my tingling fingers.
“No,” I whispered against the hollow of her ear. “In the light.”
Sun poured through the jacarandas outside Eudora’s window. I heard the faint and rhythmical whirr-whoosh of Tomas’s scythe as he cut back the wild banana bushes from the walk down by the pool.
I came fully awake with a start, seeing the impossible. The junebug I had squashed with a newspaper at twilight, so long before, seemed to be moving slowly up the white-painted wall. It would move a few feet up from the floor, fall back, and then start up again. I grabbed for my glasses from the floor where I had dropped them the night before. With my glasses on, I could see that there was a feather-thin line of ants descending from the adobe ceiling down the wall to the floor where the junebug was lying. The ants, in concert, were trying to hoist the carcass straight up the vertical wall on their backs, up to their hole on the ceiling. I watched in fascination as the tiny ants lifted their huge load, moved, lost it, then lifted again.
I half-turned and reached over to touch Eudora lying against my back, one arm curved over our shared pillow. The pleasure of our night flushed over me like sun on the walls of the light-washed colorful room. Her light brown eyes opened, studying me as she came slowly out of sleep, her sculptured lips smiling, a little bit open, revealing the gap beside her front teeth. I traced her mouth with my finger. For a moment I felt exposed, unsure, suddenly wanting reassurance that I had not been found wanting. The morning air was still dew-damp, and the smell of our loving lay upon us.
As if reading my thoughts, Eudora’s arm came down around my shoulders, drawing me around and to her, tightly, and we lay holding each other in the Mexican morning sunlight that flooded through her uncovered casement windows. Tomas, the caretaker, sang in soft Spanish, keeping time with his scythe, and the sounds drifted in to us from the compound below.
“What an ungodly hour,” Eudora laughed, kissing the top of my head and jumping over me with a long stride. “Aren’t you hungry?” With her towel around her neck, Eudora made huevos, scrambled eggs Mexican-style, and real café con leche for our breakfast. We ate at the gaily painted orange table between the tiny kitchen and her bedroom, smiling and talking and feeding each other from our common plate.
There was room for only one of us at the square shallow sink in the kitchen. As I washed dishes to insure an ant-free afternoon, Eudora leaned on the doorpost, smoking lazily. Her hipbones flared like wings over her long legs. I could feel her quick breath on the side of my neck as she watched me. She dried the dishes, and hung the towel over a tin mask on the kitchen cabinet.
“Now let’s go back to bed,” she muttered, reaching for me through the Mexican shirt I had borrowed to throw over myself. “There’s more.”
By this time the sun was passing overhead. The room was full of reflected light and the heat from the flat adobe over us, but the wide windows and the lazy ceiling fan above kept the sweet air moving. We sat in bed sipping iced coffee from a pewter mug.
When I told Eudora I didn’t like to be made love to, she raised her eyebrows. “How do you know?” she said, and smiled as she reached out and put down our coffee cup. “That’s probably because no one has ever really made love to you before,” she said softly, her eyes wrinkling at the corners, intense, desiring.
Eudora knew many things about loving women that I had not yet learned. Day into dusk. A brief shower. Freshness. The comfort and delight of her body against mine. The ways my body came to life in the curve of her arms, her tender mouth, her sure body—gentle, persistent, complete.
We run up the steep outside steps to her roof, and the almost full moon flickers in the dark center wells of her eyes. Kneeling, I pass my hands over her body, along the now-familiar place below her left shoulder, down along her ribs. A part of her. The mark of the Amazon. For a woman who seems spare, almost lean, in her clothing, her body is ripe and smooth to the touch. Beloved. Warm to my coolness, cool to my heat. I bend, moving my lips over her flat gentle stomach to the firm rising mound beneath.
On Monday, I went back to school. In the next month, Eudora and I spent many afternoons together, but her life held complications about which she would say little.
Eudora had been all over Mexico. She regaled me with tales of her adventures. She seemed always to have lived her life as if it were a story, a little grander than ordinary. Her love of Mexico, her adopted land, was deep and compelling, like an answer to my grade-school fantasies. She knew a great deal about the folkways and beliefs of the different peoples who had swept across the country in waves long ago, leaving their languages and a small group of descendants to carry on the old ways.
We went for long rides through the mountains in her Hudson convertible. We went to the Brincas, the traditional Moorish dances in Tepotzlán. She told me about the Olmec stone heads of African people that were being found in Tabasco, and the ancient contacts between Mexico and Africa and Asia that were just now coming to light. We talked about the legend of the China Poblana, the Asian-looking patron saint of Puebla. Eudora could savor what was Zapotec, Toltec, Mixtec, Aztec in the culture, and how much had been so terribly destroyed by Europeans.
“That genocide rivals the Holocaust of World War II,” she asserted.
She talked about the nomadic Lacondonian Indians, who were slowly disappearing from the land near Comitán in Chiapas, because the forests were going. She told me how the women in San Cristobál de las Casas give the names of catholic saints to their goddesses, so that they and their daughters can pray and make offerings in peace at the forest shrines without offending the catholic church.
She helped me plan a trip south, to Oaxaca and beyond, through San Cristobál to Guatemala, and gave me the names of people with whom I could stay right through to the border. I planned to leave when school was over, and secretly, more and more, hoped she could come with me.
Despite all the sightseeing I had done, and all the museums and ruins I had visited, and the books I had read, it was Eudora who opened those doors for me leading to the heart of this country and its people. It was Eudora who showed me the way to the Mexico I had come looking for, that nourishing land of light and color where I was somehow at home.
“I’d like to come back here and work for a while,” I said, as Eudora and I watched women dying wool in great vats around the market. “If I can get papers.”
“Chica, you can’t run away to this country or it will never let you go. It’s too beautiful. That’s what the café con leche crowd can never admit to themselves. I thought it’d be easier here, myself, to live like I wanted to, say what I wanted to say, but it isn’t. It’s just easier not to, that’s all. Sometimes I think I should have stayed and fought it out in Chicago. But the winters were too damned cold. And gin was too damned expensive.” She laughed and pushed back her hair.
As we got back into the car to drive home, Eudora was unusually quiet. Finally, as we came over the tip of Morelos, she said, as if we’d continued our earlier conversation, “But it would be good if you came back here to work. Just don’t plan on staying too long.”
Eudora and I only went to the Plaza once together. Although she knew the people who hung out there, she disliked most of them. She said it was because they had sided with Karen. “Frieda’s all right,” she said, “but the rest of them don’t deserve a pit to hiss in.”
We sat at a small table for two, and Jeroméo ambled over with his bird cages to show his wares to the newcomers. The ever-present chamaquitos came to beg centavos and errands. Even the strolling mariachi players passed by to see if we were a likely prospect for serenading. But only Tammy, irrepressible and pre-adolescent, bounded over to our table and leaned possessively against it, eager for conversation.
“Are you coming shopping with me tomorrow?” she inquired. We were going to buy a turtle to keep her duck company.
I told her yes, hugged her, and then patted her fanny. “See you tomorrow,” I said.
“Now the tongues can wag again,” Eudora said, bitterly. I looked at her questioningly.
“Nobody knows anything about us,” I said, lightly. “And besides, everybody minds their own business around here.”
Eudora looked at me for a moment as if she was wondering who I was.
The sun went down and Jeroméo covered his birds. The lights on the bandstand came on, and Maria went around, lighting candles on the tables. Eudora and I paid our bill and left, walking around the closed market and down Guerrero hill toward Humboldt No. 24. The air was heavy with the smell of flowers and woodfire, and the crackle of frying grasshoppers from the vendors’ carts lining Guerrero hill.
The next afternoon when Tammy and I came from the market, we joined Frieda and her friends at their table. Ellen was there, with her cat, and Agnes with her young husband Sam, who was always having to go to the border for something or other.
“Did we interrupt something?” I asked, since they had stopped talking.
“No, dear, just old gossip,” Frieda said, drily.
“I see you’re getting to know everybody in town,” Agnes said brightly, sitting forward with a preliminary smile. I looked up to see Frieda frowning at her.
“We were just saying how much better Eudora looks these days,” Frieda said, with finality, and changed the subject. “Do you kids want café or helada?”
It bothered me that Frieda sometimes treated me like her peer and confidante, and at other times like Tammy’s contemporary.
Later, I walked Frieda and Tammy home, and just before I turned off, Frieda said off-handedly, “Don’t let them razz you about Eudora, she’s a good woman. But she can be trouble.”
I pondered her words all the way up to the compound.
That spring, McCarthy was censured. The Supreme Court decision on the desegregation of schools was announced in the english newspaper, and for a while all of us seemed to go crazy with hope for another kind of america. Some of the café con leche crowd even talked about going home.
SUPREME COURT OF U. S. DECIDES AGAINST SEPARATE EDUCATION FOR NEGROES. I clutched the Saturday paper and read again. It wasn’t even a headline. Just a box on the lower front page.
I hurried down the hill towards the compound. It all felt monumental and confusing. The Rosenbergs were dead. But this case which I had only been dimly aware of through the NAACP’s Crisis, could alter the whole racial climate in the states. The supreme court had spoken. For me. It had spoken in the last century, and I had learned its “separate but equal” decision in school. Now something had actually changed, might actually change. Eating ice cream in Washington, D. C. was not the point; kids in the south being able to go to school was.
Could there possibly, after all, be some real and fruitful relationship between me and that malevolent force to the north of this place?
The court decision in the paper in my hand felt like a private promise, some message of vindication particular to me. Yet everybody in the Plaza this morning had also been talking about it, and the change this could make in american life.
For me, walking hurriedly back to my own little house in this land of color and dark people who said negro and meant something beautiful, who noticed me as I moved among them—this decision felt like a promise of some kind that I half-believed in, in spite of myself, a possible validation.
Hope. It was not that I expected it to alter radically the nature of my living, but rather that it put me actively into a context that felt like progress, and seemed part and parcel of the wakening that I called Mexico.
It was in Mexico that I stopped feeling invisible. In the streets, in the buses, in the markets, in the Plaza, in the particular attention within Eudora’s eyes. Sometimes, half-smiling, she would scan my face without speaking. It made me feel like she was the first person who had ever looked at me, ever seen who I was. And not only did she see me, she loved me, thought me beautiful. This was no accidental collision.
I never saw Eudora actually drinking, and it was easy for me to forget that she was an alcoholic. The word itself meant very little to me besides derelicts on the Bowery. I had never known anyone with a drinking problem before. We never discussed it, and for weeks she would be fine while we went exploring together.
Then something, I never knew what, would set her off. Sometimes she’d disappear for a few days, and the carport would be empty when I came from school.
I hung around the compound in those afternoons, waiting to see her car drive in the back gate. Once I asked her afterwards where she’d been.
“In every cantina in Tepotzlán,” she said matter-of-factly. “They know me.” Her eyes narrowed as she waited for me to speak.
I did not dare to question her further.
She would be sad and quiet for a few days. And then we would make love.
Wildly. Beautifully. But it only happened three times.
Classes at the university ended. I made my plans to go south—Guatemala. I soon realized that Eudora was not coming with me. She had developed bursitis, and was often in a lot of pain. Sometimes in the early morning I heard furious voices coming through Eudora’s open windows. Hers and La Señora’s.
I gave up my little house with its simple, cheerful long-windowed room, and stored my typewriter and extra suitcase at Frieda’s house. I was going to spend my last evening with Eudora, then take the second-class bus at dawn south to Oaxaca. It was a fifteen-hour trip.
Tomás’s burro at the gate. Loud voices beneath the birdsong in the compound. La Señora almost knocking me over as she swept past me down Eudora’s steps. Tomás standing in Eudora’s entryway. On the orange table an unopened bottle of pale liquor with no label.
“Eudora! What happened?” I cried. She ignored me, speaking to Tomás in Spanish, “And don’t give La Señora anything of mine again, understand? Here!” She handed him two pesos from the wallet on the table.
“Con su permiso,” he said with relief, and left quickly.
“Eudora, what’s wrong?” I moved toward her, and she caught me at arm’s length.
“Go home, Chica. Don’t get involved in this.”
“Involved in what? What’s going on?” I shrugged off her hands.
“She thinks she can steal my bookstore, ruin my life, and still have me around whenever she wants me. But she’s not going to get away with it any more. I’m going to get my money!” Eudora hugged me tightly for a moment, then pushed me away. There was a strange acrid smell upon her.
“Goodbye, Chica. Go on back to Frieda’s house. This doesn’t concern you. And have a good trip. When you come back next time we’ll go to Jalisco, to Guadalajara, or maybe up to Yucatan. They’re starting a new dig there I’m going to cover…”
“Eudora, I can’t leave you like this. Please. Let me stay!” If only I could hold her. I reached out to touch her again, and Eudora whirled away, almost tripping over the table.
“No, I said.” Her voice was nasty, harsh, like gravel. “Get out! What makes you think you can come into someone’s life on a visa and expect…”
I flinched in horror at her tone. Then I recognized the smell as tequila, and I realized she had been drinking already. Maybe it was the look on my face that stopped her. Eudora’s voice changed. Slowly, carefully—almost gently—she said, “You can’t handle this, Chica. I’ll be all right. But I want you to leave, right now, because it’s going to get worse, and I do not want you around to see it. Please. Go.”
It was as clear and as direct as anything Eudora had ever said to me. There was anger and sadness beneath the surface of her words that I still did not understand. She picked up the bottle from the table and flopped into the armchair heavily, her back to me. I had been dismissed.
I wanted to burst into tears. Instead, I picked up my suitcase. I stood there, feeling like I’d been kicked in the stomach, feeling afraid, feeling useless.
Almost as if I’d spoken, Eudora’s voice came muffled through the back of the armchair.
“I said I’ll be all right. Now go.”
I moved forward and kissed the top of her tousled head, her spice-flower smells now mixed with the acrid smell of tequila.
“All right, Eudora, I’m going. Goodbye. But I’m coming back. In three weeks, I’ll be back.”
It was not only a cry of pain, but a new determination to finish something I had begun, to stick with—what? A commitment my body had made? or with the tenderness which flooded through me at the curve of her head over the back of the chair?
To stick with something that had passed between us, and not lose myself. And not lose myself.
Eudora had not ignored me. Eudora had not made me invisible. Eudora had acted directly towards me.
She had sent me away.
I was hurt, but not lost. And in that moment, as in the first night when I held her, I felt myself pass beyond childhood, a woman connecting with other women in an intricate, complex, and ever-widening network of exchanging strengths.
“Goodbye, Eudora.”
When I arrived back in Cuernavaca just before the rains—tired, dirty, and exhilarated—I headed for Frieda’s house and my clean clothes. She and Tammy had just come in from the farm in Tepotzlán.
“How’s Eudora?” I asked Frieda, as Tammy fetched us cool drinks from the kitchen.
“She’s left town, moved up to the District, finally. I hear she’s reporting for a new daily up there.”
Gone. “Where’s she living?” I asked dully.
“Nobody has her address,” Frieda said, quickly. “I understand there was one hell of a brawl up at the compound between her and La Señora. But evidently they must have gotten their business settled, because Eudora left soon afterwards. It all happened right after you left.” Frieda sipped her fresca slowly. Glancing at me, she took some change from her pocket and sent Tammy to the market for bread.
I carefully kept what I hoped was an impassive expression on my face as I toyed with my fruit drink, screaming inside. But Frieda put her drink down, leaned forward, and patted me on the arm reassuringly.
“Now don’t worry about her,” she said kindly. “That was the best thing in the world Eudora could have done for herself, getting out of this fishbowl. If I wasn’t afraid of losing Tammy to her father in the states, I think I’d leave tomorrow.” She settled back in her chair, and fixed me with her level, open gaze.
“Anyway, you’re going back home next week, aren’t you?”
“Yes,” I said, knowing what she was saying and that she was quite right.
“But I hope to come back some day.” I thought of the ruins at Chichen-Itzá, of the Olmec heads in Tabasco, and Eudora’s excited running commentaries.
“I’m sure you will, then,” Frieda said, encouragingly.
I returned to New York on the night of July 4th. The humid heat was oppressive after the dry hot climate of Mexico. As I got out of the taxi on Seventh Street, the sound of firecrackers was everywhere. They sounded thinner and higher than the fireworks in Mexico.