*
Carefully placing Maria and Clara in their boxes first, we folded up the stroller, waved Marissa Melissa farewell, and drove to the airport. On the way there we listened to the album that had become a kind of soundtrack to the trip, because someone had left it in the rental car. Noelia loved that album, which was sickeningly schmaltzy. Or perhaps she just wanted The Girls to preserve some link to their past, because driving along she suddenly declared that they were no longer going to be called Maria and Clara, but rather Kenny and G. I asked if she understood that Kenny was the name of a boy, and she laughed.
‘Seriously,’ I told her, and when we stopped for gas I showed her the CD.
Noelia, who never wore her glasses on vacation, had seen the long hair and guessed that Kenny G was a female saxophonist. She moved the album right up close to her nose to make absolutely sure she wasn’t right, and then, after thinking about it for a second said, ‘Makes no difference, the names are staying.’
Once on the plane we flipped a coin to decide who was going to take which name. Kenny is Clara, the one who can’t breathe. G is the one with the brida. I change her batteries every three weeks, but ever since Agatha Christie branded me a polluter, they’ve been rechargeable, and during the time it takes for the light on the charger to go from yellow to green, G doesn’t breathe. But I sit her right up next to Kenny, who’s used to living like that, and she teaches her. I don’t expect anyone to believe this, but they’ve been good sisters to each other.
*
Noelia decided to have chemotherapy. Not because she thought it would work, but because she refused to sit around twiddling her thumbs. Luckily, she also agreed to take huge doses of antidepressants, which helped her live out her last months more or less in peace. They put me on the same ones. I still take them. When I’m about to run out I write a prescription on one of the pads still left in the study with her ID and details on. And I fake her signature, which is something I’ve known how to do since we got married and I was a junior researcher with no rental income to rely on, so all our groceries went on her credit card.
Lately I’ve doubled my dose, telling myself I take it for the both of us.
*
Like all daughters who are only a daughter, Noelia had an incomprehensible relationship with her mother. She always felt the urge to call her at the slightest problem, but whenever she was around, the mere tone of her voice, the rhythm of her breathing, or the volume of her chewing was enough to drive Noelia insane. I didn’t sit through a single meal with them in which they weren’t both putting the other down. Only in her rare lucid moments — generally led by a mixture of alcohol and guilt for some rude reaction on her part — would Noelia admit that the things that most irritated her about her mother were also behaviors she repeated without noticing. Like, for example, only ever buying cheap shoes that gave her blisters.
The one time I thought I’d point out how similar they were, my wife answered, ‘You can be a real iguana sometimes, Alfonso, you know that?’
*
I didn’t like the hepatitis story. And I especially disliked Noelia telling it in public. It showed me up as unmanly and impressionable. I thought it was proof of how she did whatever she liked with me and I just rolled over and let her, limp and compliant. I didn’t and still don’t negate my hen-pecked condition, which I’ve always acknowledged publicly and with my head held high. But I felt that the details of these sacrifices should stay between us. The story of my hepatitis seemed especially intimate to me, and I always felt affronted when I had to listen to it at a dinner party, as if Noelia were telling everyone the story of how, when we first met, I couldn’t sleep spooning but now I can’t sleep any other way. I also converted to the religion of hugs, sweatpants on Sundays, even frozen fish (despite knowing it’s drying up lake Victoria). She even convinced me to watch romantic comedies with her every now and then. Nowadays, to get to sleep I have to prop two pillows behind me. But the pillows don’t hug me or warm me up when I come back from the bathroom. Before going to bed I sing to Kenny and G, and tuck them in like Noelia did every night since the day we brought them to Mexico.
One thing Noelia never spoke about at dinner parties was The Girls. And I was grateful to her for that, but now I regret it. Or rather, I don’t regret it, but I’ve changed since then. Before, if Noelia took The Girls out on the street, I was so uncomfortable I’d run around in circles making sure the neighbors didn’t see us passing by with the stroller. Now I couldn’t care less. I don’t care if I’m the crazy old man on the block. Some months ago now, I started to show them off around the mews and explain to anyone interested that they are indeed dolls, but special dolls. Turns out the real girls adore my girls. In the evenings I put them in the stroller and take them for a turn, whistling. I still don’t dare take them beyond the mews and onto the street, but I’m contemplating it.
‘You’d look hot walking them! Like a sexy granddad.’
‘What a generous liar you are, love, thanks.’
‘Take them out, it’ll do you good.’
‘I’ll give it a go.’
*
About her friends with children, which was all of them, Noelia would say, ‘Their lives shrink.’ But when it came to other women like her, the only-a-daughters, she would scoff, ‘Career women!’ from the very height of her own hypocrisy.
‘Well, that’s the pot calling the kettle black! If there’s anyone who’s devoted their life to their career it’s you,’ I’d point out.
‘I don’t consider cardiology a career.’
‘Oh no? What would you call it then?’
‘A vocation,’ she’d say, and then, a second later, roar with laughter.
Her friends assured her that it wasn’t true; quite the contrary: when kids fell into the mix, life proliferated, grew big, enormous even. You lived for two, three, six. It wasn’t true that you never got to go to the theater anymore, and in any case watching the person you gave birth to grow up was better than any damn play, how could she think of comparing the two things!
‘Oh, the arrogance!’ Noelia said to me. ‘How dare she compare her little brat with the arts?’ But she took it back in an instant, ‘I’m sorry, it’s a classic only-a-daughter symptom to confuse maternal love with arrogance.’
But the truth is Noelia didn’t fully understand those mothers. It wasn’t within her powers to, just like it wasn’t within mine to understand her relationship with The Girls. I became agitated every time she invited me into the pink room. Nothing in that space went right for me, and you could tell I was an intruder, like one of those people who visit Saudi Arabia and dress up in local garb to sneak into the mosques, but get found out because everything about their demeanor screams tourist. Oh, wait, that’s me too.
Our childless life was neither big nor small. I don’t know exactly what size you’d call it: regular. And having The Girls opened up a space that we hadn’t had before. The bedroom is full of saccharine knickknacks that my normal self would detest, but the truth is that lately I feel good in there among all the frills and lace. Sort of understood. Or maybe just seen. Only Noelia Vargas Vargas knew how to see me in this life. And now I have no way of knowing how much of me existed only by virtue of her gaze.
*
It took Noelia’s cancer for me to stop seeing the dolls as mere dolls and to start seeing them as The Girls. I supported Noelia in her whims for years, but inside I always kept my distance; a kind of protective irony. When Noelia wanted the room upstairs for them, I accepted. When she wanted to line the walls with imported pale-pink and bone-white striped wallpaper, I asked myself who was I to put up a fight if she was footing the bill? When she bought the booster seats and started to take The Girls with us in the back of the car, I told myself that what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. And, looking back, the emotional rollercoaster that The Girls brought with them acted like a shot of youthfulness in a marriage where we took most things for granted. Sometimes I was embarrassed by Noelia, and at other times proud of her. Some days her little game seemed funny, and others it broke my heart to see her there in the house carting around a baby who wasn’t a baby. And who wasn’t mine.