of me. & Marty was gone.
Yolanda shrugged. We sat together silently until the room was full of silence & I was afraid to say anything for fear that I would break something. I was still as a flower.
Finally Yolanda spoke. “My mother was thirty when she had me,” she said. “She was old. She didn’t think she could have kids even.”
“Not old . . .” I said.
“Whatever, she didn’t think she could have kids. She prayed for a baby every day. When I was born it was a miracle. Then she never had any other kids after me.”
“An only child,” I said.
I asked her where her parents were from. “Argentina,” she said.
“Buenos Aires? Rosario? Córdoba?” I asked, with a wish to be connected to her past. When I was a child I was obsessive about geography and what I learned then has, with surprising consistency, remained intact.
“In the country,” she said. “In the mountains.”
She said a favorite uncle brought her mother and father over when they were young and in love and newly married. The uncle got her mother a job cleaning houses, which is still how she makes a living. But for Yolanda she had wanted something different.
“What did she want you to do?” I asked her.
“I don’t really know,” said Yolanda.
“Go to college?”
“I don’t really know,” she said again, sadly. She was wearing her too-large sweat outfit that I hope is not Junior’s and she put the hood of it up and played with the drawstrings of it, pulling them taut until only her nose was showing. She was jigging her legs up and down, which she always does when she’s sitting.
“I met Junior through a friend,” she said, muffledly. “I never brought him around because I knew they wouldn’t like him. Then when I got pregnant I had to bring him over and I was right. They didn’t.”
“Do you?”
“Not anymore,” she said. “Not even at all. I don’t know why I ever did,” she said. She was tying the drawstrings of her hood into a bow, blindly. Her whole face was obscured by the gray fabric. She looked like a helmeted knight.
“When I told them I was pregnant they said that’s it. They said, you’re an adult now and you have to work now. They took me out of school. I was about to be a senior in high school. I would have graduated this spring.”
“O no,” I said.
“I deserved it,” said Yolanda. She nodded through the hood. “I did.”
I began eating carrots to have something to do. I crunched them very brutally. I did not want to think that I was doing Yolanda a disservice by having her here. But things were coming into focus.
“My mom got me a job at Home-Maid and the first place they sent me was your house.”
I swallowed the carrots before they were fully chewed.
She undid her hood, slowly, and then took it down from her head. Her hair, which is normally pulled back tightly, was loose and slightly fuzzy. Like a chick. In general she reminds me of a chick. It is in how she moves & in her general greenness, her dearness. She is something to be cradled.
“Do you want to go back to school?” I asked her.
“Maybe someday,” said Yolanda. “I don’t care. Maybe.”
“Once the baby’s born?”
“Maybe,” she said again, & then I could tell she was done with the subject. She looked at me with her eyebrows raised then.
“Go,” she said. “Your turn. You have to go now.”
She was looking at me fiercely. I could tell she was waiting to be betrayed.
So I had to do as she said.
“I was born here,” I said.
“Here in this house?”
“Here in Brooklyn.”
“How old are you?”
“Fifty-eight years old.”
“Go.”
“I was not a happy child. I was not well liked.”
“Why not?”
“I did not know how to act like the people I went to school with.”
“Why not?”
“Because they all had parents that had grown up here too. And grandparents.”
“And your parents were born in England.”
“Yes.”
“So they had accents?”
“They did indeed.”
“Why did they move here?”
“For his work.”
“He was an architect.”
“Is. Yes.”
“Go ahead.”
“My father was not kind to my mother. He was very infrequently home, and when he was he was berating her in one way or another.”
“Berating?”
“Insulting.”
“For what?”
“For her weight, mostly. She was large.”
“As big as you?”
I paused. It stung. I let it sting. It was her honesty.
“No. Not as large as I am. Still large. She was always trying things. Mail-order brochures for calisthenics programs. The lentil soup diet. The grapefruit diet. She was