Sitting out here in the evening several times a week when the doctor didn’t come home, Mrs. Mahmood trying hard to make it seem they were friends, Mrs. Mahmood serving daiquiris in round crystal goblets, waiting on her personal maid. It was nice to be treated this way, and it would continue, Lourdes believed, until Mrs. Mahmood finally came out and said what was on her mind, what she wanted Lourdes to do for her.
The work was nothing, keep the woman’s clothes in order, water the houseplants, fix lunch for herself— and the maids, once they came in the kitchen sniffing her spicy seafood dishes. Lourdes had no trouble talking to them. They looked right at her face telling her things. Why they avoided Dr. Mahmood. Because he would ask very personal questions about their sexual lives. Why they thought Mrs. Mahmood was crazy. Because of the way she danced in just her underwear.
And in the evening the woman of the house would tell Lourdes of being bored with her life, not able to invite her friends in because Woz didn’t approve of them.
“What do I do? I hang out. I listen to music. I discuss soap operas with the gook maids. Melda stops me. ‘Oh, missus, come quick.’ They’re in the laundry room watching As the World Turns. She goes, ‘Dick follows Nikki to where she is to meet Ryder, and it look like he was going to hurt her. But Ryder came there in time to save Nikki from a violent Dick.’”
Mrs. Mahmood would tell a story like that and look at her without an expression on her face, waiting for Lourdes to smile or laugh. But what was funny about the story?
“What do I do?” was the question she asked most. “I exist, I have no life.”
“You go shopping.”
“That’s all.”
“You play golf.”
“You’ve gotta be kidding.”
“You go out with your husband.”
“To an Indian restaurant and I listen to him talk to the manager. How many times since you’ve been here has he come home in the evening? He has a girlfriend,” the good-looking redheaded woman said. “He’s with her all the time. Her or another one, and doesn’t care that I know. He’s rubbing it in my face. All guys fool around at least once in a while. Woz and his buddies live for it. It’s accepted over there, where they’re from. A guy gets tired of his wife in Pakistan? He burns her to death. Or has it done. I’m not kidding, he tells everyone her dupatta caught fire from the stove.”
Lourdes said, “Ah, that’s why you don’t cook.”
“Among other reasons. Woz’s from Rawalpindi, a town where forty women a month show up at the hospital with terrible burns. If the woman survives …Are you listening to me?”
Lourdes was sipping her daiquiri. “Yes, of course.”
“If she doesn’t die, she lives in shame because her husband, this prick who tried to burn her to death, kicked her out of the fucking house. And he gets away with it. Pakistan, India, thousands of women are burned every year ‘cause their husbands are tired of them, or they didn’t come up with a big enough dowry.”
“You say the first wife was burn to death.”
“Once he could afford white women — like, what would he need her for?”
“You afraid he’s going to burn you?”
“It’s what they do, their custom. And you know what’s ironic? Woz comes here to be a plastic surgeon, but over in Pakistan, where all these women are going around disfigured? There are no plastic surgeons to speak of.” She said, “Some of them get acid thrown in their face.” She said, “I made the biggest mistake of my life marrying a guy from a different culture, a towelhead.”
Lourdes said, “Why did you?”
She gestured. “This …” Meaning the house and all that went with it.
“So you have what you want.”
“I won’t if I leave him.”
“Maybe in the divorce he let you keep the house.”
“It’s in the prenup, I get zip. And at thirty-two I’m back stripping on Federal Highway, or working in one of those topless doughnut places. You have tits, at least you can get a job. Woz’s favorite, I’d come out in a nurse’s uniform, peel everything off but the perky little cap?” The woman’s mind moving to this without pausing. “Woz said the first time he saw the act he wanted to hire me. I’d be the first topless surgical nurse.”
Lourdes imagined this woman dancing naked, men watching her, and thought of Miss Olympia warning the cleaning women with her Biblical Integrity: no singing or dancing around while cleaning the offices, or they might catch the eye of men working late. She made it sound as if they were lying in wait. “Read the Book of Judges,” Miss Olympia said, “the twenty-first verse.” It was about men waiting for women, the daughters of Shiloh, to come out to dance so they could take them, force the women to be their wives. Lourdes knew of cleaning women who sang while they worked, but not ones who danced. She wondered what it would be like to dance naked in front of men.
“You don’t want to be with him,” Lourdes said, “but you want to live in this house.”
“There it is,” the woman who didn’t look at all like a Mrs. Mahmood said.
Lourdes sipped her daiquiri, put the glass down, and reached for the pack of Virginia Slims on the table.
“May I try one of these?”
“Help yourself.”
She lit the cigarette, sucking hard to get a good draw. She said, “I use to smoke. The way you do it made me want to smoke again. Even the way you hold the cigarette.”
Lourdes believed the woman was very close to telling what she was thinking about. Still, it was not something easy to talk about with another person, even for a woman who danced naked. Lourdes decided this evening to help her.
She said, “How would you feel if a load of wet concrete fell on your husband?”
Then wondered, sitting in the silence, not looking at the woman, if she had spoken too soon.
The redheaded woman said, “The way it happened to Mr. Zimmer? How did you feel?”
“I accepted it,” Lourdes said, “with a feeling of relief, knowing I wouldn’t be beaten no more.”
“Were you ever happy with him?”
“Not for one day.”
“You picked him, you must’ve had some idea.”
“He picked me. At the party in Cali? There were seven Colombian girls for each American. I didn’t think I would be chosen. We married …In two years I had my green card and was tired of him hitting me.”
The redheaded Mrs. Mahmood said, “You took a lot of shit, didn’t you?” and paused this time before saying, “How much does a load of concrete cost these days?”
Lourdes, without pausing, said, “Thirty thousand.”
Mrs. Mahmood said, “Jesus Christ,” but was composed, sitting back in her yellow cushions. She said, “You were ready. Viviana told you the situation and you decided to go for it.”
“I think it was you hired me,” Lourdes said, “because of Mr. Zimmer — you so interested in what happen to him. Also I could tell, from the first day we sat here, you don’t care for your husband.”
“You can understand why, can’t you? I’m scared to death of catching on fire. He lights a cigar, I watch him like a fucking hawk.”
Giving herself a reason, an excuse.
“We don’t need to talk about him,” Lourdes said. “You pay the money, all of it before, and we don’t speak of this again. You don’t pay, we still never speak of it.”
“The Colombian guys have to have it all up front?”
“The what guys?”
“The concrete guys.”
“You don’t know what kind of guys they are. What if it looks like an accident and you say oh, they didn’t do nothing, he fell off his boat.”
“Woz doesn’t have a boat.”
“Or his car was hit by a truck. You understand? You not going to know anything before.”
“I suppose they want cash.”
“Of course.”
“I can’t go to the bank and draw that much.”