Mario rang our room and we headed to the lobby to meet him and Estrellita. But she was still at her practice, so we headed there to pick her up. When we arrived, we walked through a wrought iron gate, and before we could reach the door, a beautiful woman with auburn-colored shoulder-length hair and bangs swept to the side opened the door and beckoned us to come in. With a smile almost as bright as the red elbow-length suit jacket she was wearing, and few wrinkles in sight on her radiant skin, she gave me a hug and then energetically stretched her right hand out to shake Keith’s.
Following a brief introduction to the office manager, she took us into the room where she gives her eye surgery consultations. Estrellita is a successful ophthalmologist, and Mario, we learned, is a successful orthopedic surgeon, former professor, and pediatric trauma specialist. He pointed to the stairs just to the right of the door leading to a second floor. “That’s my office.” He does his consulting for his practice on the second floor, and Estrellita does the consulting for her ophthalmology practice on the first. After being in their presence for just a small bit of time, it made absolute sense they would work in the same place. They’d built their careers together, from the bottom up, so here they could revel in their success together.
As we stood in the reception area, waiting for Estrellita and Mario to tie up a few loose ends with the office manager, I turned to Keith. “Yep, I’ve definitely found the fountain of youth.” Unless she’d married at the age of twelve, which I was pretty sure she hadn’t, Estrellita was much older than she looked and had high energy to match mine. I’m quite certain she and Pat would have no problem power walking a marathon together.
When we returned to Mario’s car (Estrellita followed us in her own), I asked Keith, “How old do you think she looks?” To which he replied, “Late forties, maybe?” Mario let out a sigh, “Noooo, she looks like she’s in her fifties.” Something tells me people must comment often on how young she looks.
Arriving at their flat, I could tell they were successful empty nesters. Small remodeling projects had been completed in the bathroom, kitchen, and washroom. They were looking to complete some other rooms to make it the home of their dreams. When I asked Estrellita if it’s hard to be in a flat with so much space after the children have left, she exclaimed, “Oh no! We like it. It’s beautiful.”
They’ve settled again into their lives as husband and wife quite nicely. Mario walked us around the living and dining room to look at the beautiful paintings on the walls. “Estrellita painted those,” he said, beaming.
Estrellita is a creative soul at heart. When they met, she was studying medicine but had previously tried her hand in theater and enjoyed it. Once she and Mario became serious, and were talking about marriage, the theater became an issue. Mario didn’t approve of it because of the environment, drugs, and late nights. He said he wouldn’t marry her if she decided to return to theater. It was nonnegotiable for him.
After some time, she thought about it and decided she loved Mario much more than she loved performing in a theater. And she was already in medical school, so it wasn’t a deal breaker. “I chose to give it up,” she told me, wanting to make it clear it was her choice and her choice alone. “I had one condition for giving it up. I told him he had to make breakfast for me for the rest of his life.”
“So, has he?”
“Sí!” Fresh-squeezed orange juice and homemade breakfast for the past forty years. She obviously got the better terms in that negotiation.
We sat around the dinner table to start our conversation about love and marriage. Estrellita had prepared an unusual and delicious quiche with ham and pears. Throughout our conversation, courses of cheese plates would rotate onto the table for everyone to nibble.
In most of my interviews, I had engaged the couple in very lighthearted chat, sprinkled with casual questions, and was able to obtain all the information I needed during our time together. When you give a happy couple the opportunity to talk about what makes marriage great, it’s like a water spigot you can’t quite turn off. In Estrellita’s case, without prompting, she began listing all the things she thought to be most important in building and maintaining a successful marriage.
Her list included the usual suspects: treating your spouse with respect, choosing happiness daily, trusting one another, and nurturing your marriage. But there were two she seemed to hover around a little longer.
“One of the things that is important when you share your life is what you think about what you like to do in your life,” she said awkwardly, trying to figure out how to better explain her point in English. “I don’t know how you say, um, valores?”
“Ah yes, goals,” I confirmed, only to later realize she was really trying to say “values.”
“Goals, yes, that’s very important. Also, it’s important always to think better for your husband or wife. To always want the better for him or the better for her.
“You have problems,” she continued, “because in your life you will have problems. That’s important to know,” not wanting to suggest marriage is without its conflicts and needs.
“Want to be with your couple. Be glad when you are with your couple,” she said, confusing the word spouse with couple. But this time, I clearly understood her point. “And if you discuss a problem, sometimes you say, ‘Tomorrow, I will say this.’ But don’t say it in the moment when you are very angry. That’s very important, too, because you have to respect your couple.”
Every relationship has challenges. Estrellita and Mario clearly wanted to make sure I wrote that. They wanted to be certain I didn’t make marriage sound like roses all the time.
“When you have a problem, you have to fight together,” Estrellita told us, as if pressing Keith and me to apply that principle to our own marriage. “That is the problem: most of the time couples don’t want to fight together. They fight against each other.”
“And that’s the problem,” Mario finally chimed in, “because the couple, the esperada . . . ,” Mario said, searching for the next word in English. Estrellita helped him out by translating. “They marry thinking if things are not good, I separate. No, don’t say! If it’s not good,” he said, his voice beginning to elevate, to emphasize the importance of this point, “go and fight for it!
“Cómo se dice, mamá?” Mario said endearingly to Estrellita while trying to get something out. “In the couple, there are problems,” he began, with her help. “We have problems along the time, but we speak to each other and we try to both work to solve the problem. And sometimes you must cerrar la boca!” he said with laughter. He brought his right thumb and index finger closer to each other in front of his mouth. “They must close their mouth and say nothing sometimes.”
“And wait until the right moment,” Estrellita added.
Estrellita was an amazing woman. When we talked about balancing career and family, in my mind, she became a superhero. Forget the fact that she took up violin classes at age sixty and has been playing two hours a night beginning at 10:00 p.m. to get better. “I’m studying,” she said nonchalantly, as though it’s normal for a person to take up such a challenging hobby with that kind of commitment at her age.
As a doctor with a young family, she’d schedule all her consultations and surgeries for the first half of the day so she could come home and be with the children. And three days a week, she didn’t take any clients at all. Whenever she had patients with late-night emergencies, Mario would go with her to the clinic. And she did the same for him.
When they began their life together, they didn’t have two pesos to rub together. Mario had worked two jobs just to help them make ends meet. “His mother said, ‘You are going to die with that salary!’ ” Estrellita says, amused by her mother-in-law’s certainty. But they’d refused to allow that to happen. Her parents were public school teachers, and Mario’s parents had equally common jobs. But Mario and Estrellita wanted more for their lives and their children’s, so they put their heads together and built the amazing life they now can call their own. But it didn’t come without a cost.
“I always remember something that happened with my son,” Mario began. “One day I was driving in my car with Marcello. And I told him, ‘Marcello, when you are a man, what is the profession that you want to be?’ He said he wanted to work at a bank. ‘For what? What is the reason?’ I asked him. I was hoping for higher goals.
“He said, ‘Daniella’s father works in a bank and he’s with Daniella all the days. And you are on duty a lot of days in the weeks. This was very hard for me.’ ”
But he and Estrellita worked together as a team to change that perception.
Because Mario’s schedule was less flexible than hers, and his hours were often long due to him working with pediatric trauma cases, she’d bring the children to the hospital to have lunch with him.
It was clear to Keith and me that Mario and Estrellita were a great team. They’d worked together through their own marriage needs and the family needs too. There was an indefatigable partnership between them. I could also sense that Keith was getting his first taste of what I’d been telling him about—talking with successful married couples and happy wives gifts you with more wisdom and instruction than you can handle in one sitting. It was like he was getting waylaid by a life’s worth of hard-earned lessons in the space of a few hours. Truth be told, I liked seeing him that way. It meant I wasn’t the only one feeling it.
Firecrackers started popping in the distance, probably post-Christmas celebration by neighborhood kids. It caused a little break in our conversation, and Estrellita and Mario went into the kitchen for a few moments. Keith had a grin on his face, and I was grinning at his grin.
When they came back, they were holding a glass cake stand with a beautifully decorated chocolate cake with gold stars and a sheet of chocolate covering the top. Singing what I think was a happy birthday song, they placed the cake with a single lit candle on it in front of Keith. That day was our anniversary, but we didn’t want to make a big deal out of it in front of them. They were our center of attention for the moment, but it was so kind they’d done this for us. It was the kind of gesture that reinforces that there is goodness in the world. They wanted us to both blow out the candle in honor of our anniversary. Keith seemed a little shocked—he’s not one to be the center of attention. I sat back and prompted him to exhale and make a wish for his birthday (which is just a few days before our anniversary) and hoped whatever wish he made would soon come true.
Mario and Estrellita gazed at us both admiringly and clapped ecstatically when the candle was extinguished. Then Estrellita cut generous pieces for all of us, and my stomach was protesting because of the lasagna. But I didn’t care. I figured there was nothing wrong with overfilling on a good thing.