And now Jorge Luis had been in an accident and must have surgery. It almost didn’t matter, her upcoming birthday, compared to that. The car, still at the repair shop, didn’t matter. She concentrated on the problem of injured Jorge Luis, on trying to imagine whether Beatriz would learn the truth about his disappearance or Jorge Luis’s evil mother would keep his medical condition a secret. The story was a pink cloud that blotted reality away.
Until Friday. On Friday the rains came and scrubbed clean the pastel colors that had intoxicated her. Friday, and the next issue of the magazine was finally there, finally between her hands. She saved her reading for the evenings, when she could sit in her old green chair and play Bobby Darin, Frank Sinatra, or Nat King Cole. She had bought a set of records to teach herself English and dissect the lyrics of songs but couldn’t be bothered with them. If she really wanted, she could have bought the Spanish language covers that were much more affordable and easy to find, although in many cases she realized these didn’t resemble the original lyrics by a long shot. She didn’t mind the mystery the songs posed. In the end, she liked the music even if she couldn’t understand the words. Sometimes, she penned lyrics to go with the tunes. The Illustrated Larousse was handy, helping her find new words she could rhyme with “love” and synonyms for “misery” to sprinkle inside spiral notebooks.
Maite was so nervous she made an exception that morning, and she read through Secret Romance before lunch, leafing through it while the other secretaries were busy typing or proofing documents.
On page twenty-five Jorge Luis fell into a coma. Maite was aghast. She rushed to the bathroom, locking herself in one of the stalls, and went over the last pages again. But there it was. Jorge Luis was in a coma! There was no mistake.
Maite wasn’t sure how long she stayed in the bathroom, but by the time she walked back into the office, the secretaries were putting their money in the collection box. She stared at Laura as she held up the box and shook it in her face.
“Laura, I forgot.”
“Maite, you always forget. This is not how it works,” the woman said, and the other secretaries shook their heads.
“Fine,” Maite muttered. She found a bill and tossed it in the box.
After work she dashed down the stairs instead of waiting for Diana like she normally did. She had eaten nothing that day and had a headache again. She wanted to go home and go to sleep, but her mother was expecting her.
Maite glanced at the phone booth ahead of her, but if she didn’t show up her mother was liable to pop by her apartment to check up on her. She still didn’t agree that a woman should live on her own. Women didn’t leave home until they were married, but two years before, Maite had grown tired of the limits of her mother’s home and decamped for her place at the Escandón. She knew she didn’t really earn enough to afford the apartment, which was located close to the edge of the elegant Condesa and therefore commanded a higher price than if she’d been living at the edge of Tacubaya. That, the furniture she’d acquired, the car, and her proclivity for buying LPs, books, and magazines torpedoed her budget.
Maite made it to her mother’s place in the Colonia Doctores. The area had been for many years lower middle class, but these days it was leaning toward lower despite the names of the illustrious physicians that had given the area its moniker. Even if she’d had her car, she wouldn’t have brought it to her mother’s place. They stole anything with four wheels there and also picked pockets. Cheap motels and rowdy bars further provided the area with an air of seediness. When Maite was growing up, she had lied and told her classmates that she lived in the posher Roma.
Maite wished she had been born in Monaco or New York. Most of the girls in the comic books she read looked like they’d never set a foot in places like the Doctores. If they had toiled in poverty, then they had been lifted to a higher plane by the fat wallet of their beloved. Cinderellas, dreaming. Maite dreamed too, but nothing came of it.
Thirty. She was thirty and her hair was beginning to sprout gray strands. Her body betrayed her.
When she walked into the combination kitchen–dining room, the first thing Maite’s mother did was chide her for being all wet from the rain.
“I mopped today,” her mother said.
“Sorry.”
“Sit down. Manuela should be here soon.”
Maite shuffled into the living room and turned on the radio. She had hoped the rain would keep her sister away. Manuela was two years younger than Maite and had been married for five years already. She had two annoying kids and an equally annoying husband who was going prematurely bald and was never home. Maite’s mother watched over the children in the afternoons. If they weren’t in the apartment already, it meant they were on their way, soon to interrupt the blessed sound of the music in the living room—“Can’t Take My Eyes Off You” was playing. In her purse, Secret Romance weighed heavily. She wanted to read it again. To make sure that she hadn’t read it wrong.
Manuela walked in then with her children. The kids proceeded to ignore Maite and immediately turned to their grandmother, demanding cake.
“Very well,” Maite’s mother said, and they went to the kitchen–dining room. She took out the cake she’d baked that day while Manuela found a package with candles.
“It’s chocolate,” Maite said, eyeing the cake.
“So?”
“I don’t like chocolate.”
“Everyone else likes chocolate. Besides, it has cherries too. You like cherries.”
“Manuela likes cherries, Mama. No, not that. I don’t want candles,” she protested.
“You can’t have a cake without candles,” her mother said as she began systematically placing each candle.
“You don’t have to put them all on the cake.”
“Nonsense, Maite. Thirty years and thirty candles.”
Maite crossed her arms and stared at the chocolate-and-cherry cake.
“I got the promotion, by the way,” Manuela said at the point when their mother had counted to twenty candles. “And the boss gave me a new fountain pen. Look, isn’t it lovely?”
“That’s beautiful. Look, how pretty!” their mother said, and she put the candles down, now cooing over the new fountain pen that Manuela was flashing before them.
Manuela hadn’t even wanted to go to secretarial school. She had merely copied Maite. When they were kids she hoped to become an airplane stewardess. Now she worked at a bigger and better firm than Maite, one where they apparently gave their employees fancy fountain pens.
Maite wondered if she could swipe the pen without her sister noticing, but she hadn’t stolen from her since they were teenagers. Now she limited herself to stealing small things from the tenants in her building and occasional items from the drugstore or department stores.