“The one you have is perfectly fine,” Mauro said, and Talia argued briefly as Elena watched through the phone, a spectator to an intimacy she no longer shared with either of them.
Perhaps it had nothing to do with her body but with what the man at the restaurant did to her. The only man she’d ever been with besides Mauro. Their separation was involuntary. But time and borders did more to distance them than any divorce or widowing could.
She’d remained faithful. If not with her body, with her mind and heart, still with Mauro even through his years lost to drinking and hiding in city streets, despite the sporadic contact and stilted conversations, the silence that on her end, at least, held fear that it would be that way forever. She had many nightmares, but when her dreams were good, they were only of him, of being old with Mauro, their children safe and grown with families of their own. In her dreams they were always back in Colombia, never in the north, waiting peacefully for death to find them in their own land.
* * *
She stayed to work at the restaurant a few months longer. These were zombie days of obstinate nausea when Elena understood that what she said or wanted meant nothing. She kept what happened to herself, even when she’d hear about another woman from the neighborhood who went through something similar. They never commiserated. They kept each other strong so they could keep mothering and survive.
Maybe it goes back to the first time she got paid in the United States, apart from Mauro’s income, and was able to send money back to her mother. A pride, a satisfaction like no other she’d known. To be able to give to the one who gave her everything. To be able to make Perla’s days easier. A feeling that brought meaning and light to every dark day that came before or after.
One spring day with a morning moon, instead of walking from the bus stop to her regular shift at the restaurant, Elena turned and headed past the main avenue to streets lined with houses, expensive cars parked in driveways, and began knocking on doors. In her best English, she pronounced: I can clean your house. First time you pay what you want.
She soon had a few regular clients. She tried to be discerning. Yamira had taught her to be careful for whom she cleaned. Just like at any other job, one could be assaulted by an employer or work for weeks without getting paid.
Some houses were bigger than others. In one case, the current housekeeper had just been fired. In another, the lady of the house told Elena her husband demanded she do the cleaning herself but she would hire her if she promised not to tell anyone and be gone before the husband returned from work. In another home, the patrona made Elena wear slipcovers over her shoes. In another, no shoes were permitted at all. One man insisted Elena clean everything with bleach, which made her so dizzy she’d often have to lie on the bathroom floor, cheek to tile, until she could see clearly again. Some nights, she coughed through her sleep. Hands calloused, fingertips inflamed. Back sore and feet blistered from treks to each house to the bus station and back home. But the money. It was everything.
From her cleaning pay, she was able to set some aside to pay a lawyer she found through Toya to help her apply for a green card. He asked for only five hundred up front and collected the rest in monthly installments, which she could save by washing and folding clothes for other residents of the Sandy Hill house at the coin laundry. But after nearly a year of payments and nothing to show for them, Elena went to the lawyer’s office to inquire about her case’s progress and found his office had been vacated.
She cleaned the house of a woman who learned Spanish during a school exchange in Sevilla. She loved to practice and sometimes invited Elena to sit with her as she ate lunch. She told her about the boyfriend she had in Spain who she still thought about, found on the internet, and dreamed of contacting. Elena felt she could trust this woman the way she trusted her. She told her what happened with the lawyer, hoping she might have advice since she was married to a lawyer, though her husband worked at a bank. She explained the family’s situation, how Mauro had been sent back. It was the first time she’d ever gotten so personal with a boss, but this woman struck Elena as compassionate, how she straightened her house before Elena arrived to clean and always apologized for her son’s messes. She was surprised to learn Elena had three children, since she’d never mentioned them, including a boy exactly her own son’s age.
“Can I ask you a question?” the woman said.
Elena thought it would be something about Mauro’s case. Maybe his deportation story sounded too far-fetched.
“Why do your people have so many children when you can’t afford to take care of them?”