sister’s nobility of soul and Sam’s basic decency, the only short-lived immortalities they are likely to have, Antonia has to live the only mortal life she is sure to have.
If I try to be like you, who will be like me? Her therapist’s grandmother’s Yiddish sayings now live on in the mind of a stranger she could never have imagined as a child in the camps.
And so in mid-May Estela moves in. The empty house fills with the messy busyness of two more lives, one with no sense of the divine division between day and night. With encouragement and the small incentives of extra cash for helping with this and that, Mario starts coming around. Antonia buys the Spanish-language package from the cable TV provider, 80+ canales en espa?ol, 120+ en inglés, not only to entertain Estela as she breastfeeds the baby on the couch but also to entice Mario to stay after his little jobs are done, his cash pocketed, to watch his programas and telenovelas on la do?ita’s big screen, a lot better than the small box with rabbit ears left behind in the trailer by former workers. From her study Antonia can hear the two teenagers cheering on their favorite teams or gasping at the antics of the narcotraficantes or falling silent when El Noticiero brings more distressing news from the border they once crossed.
Estela names the baby Marianela—a smart move, giving the little girl the name of the disgruntled boyfriend Estela hopes to woo back. Antonia’s friends comment that Marianela is the spitting image of her namesake, whom they assume is the baby’s father. But these are friends who aren’t acquainted with many Mexicans, so it might well be a case of all people of a certain race or ethnicity looking alike to someone who doesn’t share the same traits. In this case, though, they have a point. There’s a strong resemblance—same pointy chin, same dimples and slight Asian slant to the eyes, not such a stretch in their small village that the biological father might well be a distant relation of Mario. Perhaps this resemblance or the fact that the baby endearingly takes to him, quieting when she is handed over—begins to soften Mario’s tough stance.
Antonia seems more lighthearted herself, her friends comment, relieved. Everybody likes a resurrection.
Dinner party invitations increase. She’s a better guest, Antonia guesses. Except when she gets started on the situation of undocumented workers in their very same county, carrying Vermont’s dairy industry on their backs, or in Cassandra mode, on the looming death of the planet, Antonia can get as tiresome as poor dear Sam—her turn to ruin the lite mood at her friends’ gatherings.
She has become friends with the much younger Beth Trotter by virtue of their common bond, looking out for Estela and her baby—a bond nonparent Antonia has never before experienced but often observed among moms in the playground, talking endlessly and unapologetically with each other about feeding strategies and toilet-training approaches and schooling options without feeling they’re circumscribing everybody else’s world in their sandbox.
Have you considered making this a more permanent arrangement? Beth asks one Saturday as they head to a workshop at the Zen Center.
Too many times! Antonia laughs, and leaves it at that. Given their destination today, Beth also lets it go.
Antonia has signed up for a series of six workshops Beth invited her to attend at the center, where she is a member. Couldn’t hurt, Antonia encouraged herself. The workshops, Beth assured her, would not be hard-sell Zen, not playing dress-up with an Eastern religion, but fun, relaxing activities: rock gardening, Tai Chi, ink drawing, and today’s flower arranging. Bring your own vases and blooms, if you have them. Antonia harvests handfuls of flowers in the garden, hoping the teacher will enlighten her as to their names. But the teacher, an American woman with a placid face and closely cropped hair—perhaps a Buddhist monk or a cancer survivor?—rarely speaks. They are to circle their vases, breathing in, breathing out, observing the blooms, the grasses, their angles, this way and that, adjusting for balance. Antonia, accustomed to her own very different teaching style, where words and the structures made from them are the focus, nevertheless finds herself enjoying this quiet respite from the rigors of wordsmithing the world. Let it be, let it be, the lyrics play in her head. There she goes again, caught in the word thicket!
Unfortunately, this Saturday, Beth’s question reboots the internal debate of what to do about Estela. What