clothes, what with Marisela’s having adopted the rural, denim-centered tastes of the Zacatecas people who dominated this neighborhood, while Araceli stuck stubbornly to the pop-inspired trends of Mexico City.
“And it hardly cost me anything at all.”
Several hours later, after watching a bit of television in the living room, and then getting themselves dressed and primped in Marisela’s bedroom and bathroom, they were out on the street and walking down Maple Street, headed to a quinceañera party. Marisela wore her new hat and a pair of jeans with arabesque-patterned rhinestones swaying on the back pockets. Araceli had let her hair down so that it reached halfway to her waist, brushing it out for a good long while. The effect of this liberated mane on her appearance was striking to anyone who knew Araceli the maid: all the tension of her workday face disappeared, and with her temples freed of the pulling strain of the buns in which she imprisoned her hair, her face took on the relaxed expression of a young woman without children to take care of or meals to prepare. She was wearing her “Saturday night chilanga uniform”: short black leggings with flamingo-colored trim that reached halfway down her calves, a black miniskirt with a few sequins, and a T-shirt with the word love across the front, a peace symbol filling the o. Three strands of necklaces made of raspberry-colored plastic rocks, and a few matching bracelets, were her chief accessories. It was a bold statement of where she came from. Similar versions of her uniforme de chilanga had previously earned Araceli a derisive comment or two from Marisela. “You know that people here think you look ridiculous. This isn’t the Condesa district.”
“That, my dear, is precisely the point.”
But today Marisela also kept to their pact and said nothing as they walked to the party, her teeth gleaming in their ruby lipstick frame, the most expressive part of her face, given the large, wraparound sunglasses she was wearing, another example of norteño chic, with encrusted “diamonds” on each side, eyewear that possessed an aeronautical quality, as if Marisela were preparing to be the first Zacatecas astronaut blasted into space.
“I don’t really know the people at this party that well,” Marisela was saying. “The girl who is having the quinceañera, her name is Nicolasa. She’s very tall, very pretty. I know her aunt, Lourdes is her name, because I used to work with her at that clothes factory.”
“I remember you telling me about Lourdes.”
“Actually, I do know some chisme about these people.” It was more tragedy than gossip, a story with dark, nausea-inducing contours, complete with psychopathic border smugglers and a father who disappeared once the family was safely ensconced in California. Abandoned with two children, Nicolasa’s mother had soldiered on until illness struck. “She got too sick to work, and too sick to even take care of the kids. So some people from the government came by and took the kids. They put them in something called Foster Care.”
“Foster” was one of those words than never quite found a home in Araceli’s mental arrangement of the English language. She’d heard it before and sometimes confused it with “faster”—much in the same way some English speakers themselves confused words like “gorilla” and “guerrilla,” or “pretext” and “pretense”—and she’d wondered if the American fix to broken families known as Foster Care somehow involved finding the quickest solution possible: instant guardians for the parentless, quick meals for the unfed.
“In Foster Care they separate siblings,” Marisela continued. “So this girl and her brother lived in different places for, like, three or four years.”
“What about the mother?”
“She died.”
“Dios mío.”
“I wish I could remember what she had.” “AIDS?”
“No, it was something more like cancer. But anyways, my friend Lourdes tried for a long time to get them out of Foster Care. They tried looking for the father too. Finally Lourdes’s sister and brother-i n-l aw tried to adopt them, but of course it took forever, because they were stuck in Foster Care and once they’re in that I guess it’s really hard to get them out.”
The story stayed with Araceli as she walked with Marisela past old bungalows whose windows and doors were open to catch a breeze in the final hours of a dying summer afternoon. Araceli saw kitchen walls shimmering in stark incandescent light, and heard a radio tuned to a Spanish-language broadcast of a baseball game, and a murmur of voices followed by a chorus of laughter, and she wondered about the