I glanced at Mason, who was absorbed in his coloring book, though probably listening. “Is that a problem?”
“Oh, yeah. Viola’s big on all the traditional stuff. She’s real tight with Doña Althea. She wants us to raise the boys puro, speaking Spanish and knowing all the stories. Seems like it might be easier with girls, but these guys…” She shrugged her shoulders. “My parents were always so modern, you remember how Mom is, electric can openers all the way. I always felt like she wanted me to grow up blonde, you know? My dad told me she actually wanted to name me Gidget!”
I laughed. “No. He was pulling your leg.”
“No, he wasn’t. And poor Tucker was named after a car.”
Tucker was a younger brother who’d died in infancy, before I ever knew the family. To tell the truth, I’d forgotten him, in spite of his name passed on to Emelina’s first son.
The baby was sitting with his mouth opened unbelievably wide, waiting for my attention to return to his dinner. I poked in the next bite. A scattering of loud laughter like a rainstorm came from the other room, and all of us in the kitchen were quiet. This gang of old women staked out such a presence, we felt almost crowded out of the house. Mason actually gathered up his papers and started to go outside.
Emelina called him back. “Wait a minute, Mason, before you run off, come show Codi your hand. Codi, could you take a look at his hand? There’s some kind of bump on it. Do you mind?”
“Why would I mind? Let’s have a look.” I felt uncomfortable, not because she’d asked, but with myself, playing doctor. I was a doctor, technically, which is to say I had the training, but it unnerved me to think people saw me in that role. Both Emelina and Mason were quiet while I examined his hand. I bent the wrist back and forth and felt the lump on the tendon. “It’s a ganglion.”
“Is that bad?” Emelina asked.
“No, it’s not serious at all. Just a little bump. Usually they go away on their own. Does it hurt, Mason?”
He shook his head. “Only when he has chores to do,” Emelina offered.
I put a kiss on my fingertips and rubbed it into his wrist. “There you go, Dr. Codi’s special cure.” As he ran off it occurred to me, with a certain self-punitive malice, that this was the extent of special curing I was licensed to dispense.
“So what’s it like up there at the high school?” Emelina asked. “Don’t you keep feeling like Miss Lester’s going to catch you smoking in the bathroom?”
“I never smoked in the bathroom,” I said, scraping the bottom of the cereal bowl and wiping the baby’s mouth with his bib. I’d never seen such efficient eating in my life.
“Oh that’s right, Miss Goody Two-Shoes, I forgot. You didn’t do things like that.” Emelina smiled. She’d been at least as virtuous as I was in high school; the difference was she was popular. Virtue in a cheerleader is admirable, while in a wallflower it’s gratuitous.
“Miss Goody Orthopedic-Shoes,” I said.
She hooted. “Why on God’s green earth did you and Hallie wear those shoes? I never did ask. I figured the polite thing was to just ignore them. Like when somebody has something hanging out of their nose.”
“Thank you. We wore them because Doc Homer was obsessed with the bones of the foot.”
“Kinky old Doc,” she said, stabbing a wooden spoon into a pot of boiled potatoes.
“You have no idea. He used to sit us down and give us lectures on how women destroy their bodies through impractical footwear.” I delivered his lecture, which Hallie and I used to ape behind his back: “Of the two hundred bones in the human body, more than a quarter are in the foot. It is a more complicated instrument than an automobile transmission, and it is treated with far less consideration.”
Emelina was laughing. “Really, you have to give him credit. All my mom ever told me was ‘Sit up straight! Don’t get pregnant! And wear a slip!’”
“Doc Homer wasn’t that great on pregnancy and underwear, but Lord knows the Noline girls were not going to have fallen arches.”
“Where’d you get those god-awful things from? Not the Hollywood Shop, I know that.”
“Mail order.”
“No.”
“Swear to God. Hallie and I used to burn the catalogues in the fireplace when they came but he’d still get those damn shoes. For the sizing he’d draw around our feet on a piece of paper and then take all these different measurements. I expect I spent more time with Doc Homer getting my foot measured than any other thing.”
Emelina found this hilarious. I know she thought I was exaggerating, but I wasn’t. In a way we were grateful for the attention, but the shoes were so appalling. They affected our lives, the two of us differently. Hallie just gave up trying for image, while I went the route of caring too much. It was harder for me, being the first to break into junior high, then high school, in these shoes. I suffered first and therefore more.
“I’m positive that was the whole reason I hardly ever had any dates in high school,” I told Emelina.
“That’s ridiculous,” she said. “The only reason boys didn’t ask you out was because they thought you were too good for them. You were so smart, why would you want to run with a Grace boy? That’s what they thought.”
The meeting in the living room was beginning to break up. We lowered our voices automatically.
“No,” I said solemnly. “It was the shoes. It’s a known fact. The day I left Grace I bought a pair of gladiator sandals and my sex life picked right up.”
Emelina eventually remembered a letter for me she’d been carrying around a while. She’d stuck it in the diaper bag when she picked up the mail, and then forgotten it, so it suffered more in its last hundred yards of delivery than it had in its previous fifteen hundred miles. Of course, it was from Hallie.
I went home to read it, like a rat scurrying back to its hole with some edible prize. I settled into the living-room chair, polished my glasses, and scowled at the postmark: Chiapas, near Mexico’s southern border, only days after she left. That was a disappointment, anything could have happened since then. I slit it open.
Codi dear,
I’ve been driving the way you’re supposed to here, like a bat out of hell, the wrong way out of hell whenever that’s possible. I’m getting the hang of outlawry. You’d be proud. I burned up the road till around La Cruz and then slowed down enough to enjoy the banana trees going by in a blur. The tropics are such a gaudy joke: people have to live with every other kind of poverty, but a fortune in flowers, growing out of every nook and cranny of anything. If you could just build an economy on flowers. I stayed in a house that had vanilla orchids growing out of the glutters and a banana tree coming up under the kitchen sink. I swear. There were some kind of little animals too, like mongooses. You would know what they are. I’m happy to be in a jungle again. You know me, I’m always cheered by the sight of houseplants growing wild and fifty feet tall. I keep thinking about 626-BUGS and all those sad ladies trying to grow zebrinas in an arid climate.
I wanted to take the coast highway as far as Nayarit, where it gets rugged, but I paid the price for that little adventure. (Doc Homer would say: I paid a dollar for my shiny dime.) I broke, not bent but flat out busted an axle in Tuxpan and spent two days waiting around while a man with a Fanta delivery truck and time on his hands brought in a new one from Guadalajara. The only hotel was a two-story pension with live band (euphemism) on weekends. I spent the time mostly sitting on my balcony watching pelicans dive-bomb the sea, and remembering our trip to San Blas. Remember those pelicans? If you’d been there, in Tuxpan, it would have been fun. I couldn’t bring myself to do anything productive-there were people I could have talked to about crops and the refugee scene, but instead I spent one whole morning watching a man walk up the beach selling shrimp door to door, He had a pole over his shoulders, with the bucket of shrimp hung on one side and on the other side a plastic jug of water. Every time he sold a kilo of shrimp he’d pour out that much water and drink it, to balance the load. I watched him all the way down the bay and thought, I want to be like that. Not like the man selling shrimp. Like his machine. To give myself over to utility, with no waste.