For instance. A big surprise was the relief she found in no longer having to conform to outside expectations. Until then she had not realized how she’d made a prison of each moment of her day. Where had this compunction come from for sparkling countertops, scoured sinks, bleached sheets, socks and shirts folded neatly in their drawers? Whom was she out to please? Who was grading her? What an unexpected liberation to let dust accumulate, let the grass grow long and verdant, to allow birds to build nests in the eaves, to forget the grocery store and eat stew for three days in a row, or corn on the cob, or strawberries dirt-smudged from the fields. Minna’s laxness revealed that it mattered to no one, and now least of all to Claire.
* * *
There had come a time, after the trip to Mexico with the girls, when Claire could no longer stand miming her way through the empty days. After Forster left, she sat in her bedroom, still in her nightgown at five in the afternoon, hair unbrushed, when Lucy, home from school, came into her room, sat on the bed, and held her hand.
“Mom,” she said, “would it be okay if we just pretended we were happy?”
The shock of what she was doing to her girls called her to action. And that’s what she did all those years — conformed to the world’s expectations. Cleaned the house, ran the farm, took care of the girls, and smiled and pretended, pretended and smiled. Finally, pretenses were falling away.
Before she left, Gwen had stocked the freezer with meals she’d cooked, but over the next weeks, these ran out. For a while, Minna got motivated and cooked her own dishes: chicken and rice, plantains and beans. But these inspirations were erratic. Some days she would simply pick vegetables and fruit from the garden, and that would be what they ate. A few days they simply scooped avocado directly out of the shell, or smashed it on toast, drizzling it with lemon and salt. Ate oranges off the trees.
Minna no longer shut the windows or the doors, so it was as if they had no indoors, or rather that the rooms had become derelict and abandoned. A great interpenetration of the in with the out. Breezes fluttered papers on the couch, ruffled pages of an open book, ballooned the curtains. Sparrows tumbled through the windows and perched on the rafters, flying into furniture and walls until they found their escape. Feathers drifted onto the floor. Lizards sunned on the doorstop. It felt like living inside a ruin.
Yes, dirt collected on the tables, cobwebs in the doorways. A baby garden snake was found coiled in the bathroom. The floor was gritty, and the soles of Claire’s feet turned brown after walking barefoot across the room, but she was happy as she had never been happy in her spotless house. Dishes crowded the sink and counter, mold bloomed in the shower, but a great peacefulness was in the hours. It was as if from sheer will they had somehow stopped the track of time. Literally, Minna had disengaged the grandfather clock, saying the counting of the hours depressed her.
* * *
One afternoon as they watched the news, street riots were shown in some small island country Claire didn’t catch the name of. Minna watched, eyes widening till the whites showed, like the rolling eyes of a frightened horse. She got up unsteadily and turned the TV off. After that, they never watched television again, never listened to the radio. Claire got used to silence and for the first time in her life realized her own thoughts required a stillness she had never allowed.
Sometimes when they sat outside, they heard the workers’ voices far away, but the noise was indistinct and melodious and of no consequence, like birdsong or the buzzing of bees at work. Only for a special treat would Minna put on a CD, and then listening to Mozart or to jazz or reggae took on a richness unimaginable. Was that what heaven would feel like if one believed in it?
* * *
As summer drew on, the house grew hot in the daytime, and they slept in later and later. Claire woke to the smell of earth from the fields, citrus baking in the scorching sun. When it was unbearable inside, Minna swam naked in the pool while Claire dangled her legs in the deep end.
One morning by the pool, she noticed that Minna was putting on weight when a noise startled her. The pool man stood there, unexpected, holding his net and scrubber, lewdly grinning. For a moment, Claire felt panicked, the shadow of a memory of male intrusion. She was unused to the eyes of strangers. The women both wrapped themselves in towels and hurried inside. Claire was surprised that Minna, despite her brazenness, hid in her room. After he left, Minna insisted on firing him.
“Who will clean it?” Claire asked, knowing already the deed was done.
“I will.”
“But…”
“But what?”
And so with time, the pool, too, returned to its primordial nature, turned from blue to green. Leaves floated on its surface, and dirt collected on the bottom till it resembled a pond.
Claire added the pool man’s wages onto Paz’s wages onto her assistant’s salary, with no protestations from Minna. None of this bothered her for the simple fact of Minna’s increasing goodwill. She was simply buoyant, and her happiness transferred itself to Claire. They were like children going to camp during the summer, the ordinary, workaday world temporarily suspended except for the injections each morning that reminded Claire of her illness.
The heat grew so intense, they moved entirely outdoors, using the inside of the house only for storage. When the temperature passed one hundred, they lived on lawn chairs under the deep canopy of a large avocado tree next to the pool, mirroring Octavio’s makeshift headquarters out in the orchard.
Minna went barefoot, wore cotton overalls cut off short on the thigh. Thin, white strips of cloth were threaded through her braided hair. Bare of makeup, shiny with sweat, she looked like a wholesome teenager. Despite the heat, Claire tried to keep covered. Minna looked at her perspiring face, then reached over and yanked off her baseball cap.
“Don’t,” Claire said.
“Enjoy the air.”
After a minute, Claire had to admit it felt better, the air dry against her scalp. She tried to forget what she must look like. “I’m tired of being ugly and old.”
“It feels the same when people stare at you because you’re beautiful. Or because you’re black. Staring is staring.”
The next time Minna caught Claire despondent over her appearance in a mirror, she took all the mirrors down in the house and put posters in their place: the living room became Greece, and the den turned into Italy, and the dining room, which they never went into, languished as Finland. In the bathroom, Minna painted over the seventies-style mirrored walls with great swathes of blue-gray color so that one could only see one’s ghostly shape moving as if through fog.
As the house fell into a swoon of neglect, Claire tried to take an interest in the farm, but it was no use. For years she had overseen and shared the decisions on the daily work with Octavio, but over the last months, as she spent less and less time out in the fields, everything ran just as smoothly as it had before. Trees were sprayed and pruned, the irrigation ran, the pickers came and went, all without her lifting a finger. Now when Claire forced herself, the long walks out in the field were difficult, and she arrived exhausted, unsteady, more nuisance than help.
She suspected that her previous efforts had been in vain, that Octavio had never needed her input, had consulted her as a courtesy. With Octavio’s new coolness, Claire had to admit what she had never before considered. How could he not feel that three Mejia generations had worked their lives away on the ranch for nothing more than a decent living? Of course he wanted better for Paz. Forster’s family had bought when buying was cheap, and that piece of paper allowed them the lion’s share of the money, allowed them a home and belonging that was denied Octavio’s family. In her new state, human arrangement and history seemed a strange and arbitrary thing. When did a person really own something?