19
The mattress sloped to one side as if the bed might be sinking into the cement floor. The room remained dim, the sun not yet passing through the fabric she had tacked to the window frame. If it were any day other than Sunday, she would already be struggling to get up and prepare breakfast, then rush to get ready for her workday. Socorro could hear the rickety whir of the fan and what sounded like muffled voices coming from the street. When she turned onto her right side, toward the wall, the sheet slid off her leg as if it were caught on something.
“It looks like she wants to wake up.”
“I remember when she was a little girl, I would have to carry her to the bathroom so she could get ready for school.”
“Mamí?” Socorro squinted until she could make out the figures in the room. “Is something wrong?”
“We just want to talk to you,” her aunt said.
“Now, at this hour?”
“I lost my sleep again,” her mother answered, “and then your tía woke up.”
“Can we talk in the morning?”
“We want to talk now, mi’ja, when your mind isn’t so mixed up with other ideas.”
Socorro reached for the lamp behind her.
“No, leave it off,” her mother said.
“But why?”
“Leave it,” she repeated. “We want you to listen to our words.”
Socorro sat up so she could at least talk to them more comfortably. She strained to see the outline of her mother’s wheelchair angled toward the bed. With her short dark hair slicked back, it looked as though she had just come in from swimming. What little light there was shimmered off the bulbous shape of her forehead. Her aunt sat on the edge of the bed with her legs dangling off the side. She was wearing a thin nightgown, sheer enough to reveal the thick black brassiere that she removed only to bathe. At night she undid her long dark braid and let the ends reach the small of her back.
“A mother only wants her daughter to be happy.” She rolled the wheelchair closer in order to pat Socorro’s leg.
“Good, because I found somebody who makes me happy.”
“And later?”
“What about later?”
“These relationships look nice at first, but then later is when it comes out, that he only wanted a younger woman so he could take advantage of her. And I know because that’s the way it happened to the daughter of a woman who used to help at the church, the girl was staying after she did the cleaning, with hopes that there would be more, someday more, someday more than washing his underwear, and cleaning his toilet, and the rest of whatever she did for him, the things he wanted her to do in the bed. And you know what else she got? Nothing, because he was like this one you found for yourself, already with one foot in the ground.”
“Celestino is healthier than most men half his age.”
“Like the men your own age,” her aunt said.
“And that, what difference does it make?”
“What difference?” her mother said, almost whispering as she pulled up even closer to the bed. “Those are the men you are supposed to marry, not their grandfathers.”
“Who said anything about marriage?”
“And then?”
“We’re just friends.”
“Such good friends, but you cannot bring him here for us to meet him? You prefer that your little friend stop the car across the street instead of bringing him inside to meet your family, like you are embarrassed for him to meet us.”
“Or maybe for us to meet him?” the aunt offered.
“Bring him here so you can criticize?”
“Friends who are the same age get married.”
“Yes, that’s why I ended up alone,” Socorro snapped, maybe louder than she would have if the lights were on.
“Now you’re talking about more than fifteen years ago,” her mother said. “How are you going to find a man more young and healthy if you keep thinking about something that happened so long ago? You think that they are all the same, but you would know different if you gave them a chance.”
“The men my age have not changed — they only got older.”
“No man is perfect,” her aunt said.
“And how would you know?” Socorro couldn’t believe this was coming from a woman who’d never so much as had a male friend.
“I was just saying, from what I hear.”
“Why do you have to keep defending him? You talk about Rogelio like I was the one who made everything go bad.”
Her mother leaned forward. “I only want you to see what you’re doing, if you go with this other one, the little old man.”
“He has a name,” she said.
“And that’s all you are going to have when he dies,” her mother said. “Do you really want people to say, ‘There goes the widow of Don Celestino’?”
“They said it once about me, at least this time they would be saying it for more sincere reasons.”
“So you do want to marry him?”
“You two were the ones who brought it up.”
“Then he hasn’t?”
“No, already he was married for more than fifty years, and he has his own family.”
“And you, what do you say?” her mother asked.
“I spent six years married, that was enough.”
“Hmm,” her aunt let out. “She wants us to believe she hasn’t thought about it.”
“Believe what you want.” Socorro pulled more of the blanket up to her chest.
Her mother rolled backward in a half circle. “Later you will see that we were telling you the truth.”
“You worry because you think I would go away.”
“Bah, now she thinks we cannot live without her.” Her aunt laughed.
“You act that way.”
The wheelchair squeaked as her mother adjusted herself. “You think your poor tía hasn’t sacrificed to be here with us?”
“And where else was she going to go?” Socorro said. “If before this she was living with her mother?”
“Taking care of her.” Her aunt stepped off the bed and went to stand behind the wheelchair. “Until God needed her.”
“Very nice,” her mother said. “Talking that way to your poor tía.”
“Sorry.”
“We just want to help you, right?”
Her aunt only nodded from behind the chair.
“It would be better if you stopped seeing him,” her mother said, “found yourself another house to clean, just so you can get away from him.”
“You say it like I was a young girl and I need for my mother to tell me who I can spend time with.”
“A mother knows.”
“You tell me the same answer for everything, that you know better than I do.”
“When you get to fifty, he will already be at eighty-five,” her aunt said. “When you are sixty, he will be ninety-five.”
Her mother laughed. “As if the man is really going to reach that age.”
Socorro clutched her pillow a little tighter and curled up on her side until they left the room, then she shut the door and crawled back into bed. Since when had the differences in people’s ages become so important? Her tío Felix had married a girl who was half his age when he was in his sixties, and nobody said anything. No, they congratulated him like he’d won a color television in a raffle at the church.
She lifted the pillow and turned from the wall. Why was she wasting her time arguing with them? Rogelio hadn’t wanted her. He’d shown her with his body what he couldn’t say to her face. He could’ve had babies with half the women in Matamoros, and her mother still would have thought they needed to stay married. Maybe in some way, all of it — the ugly woman he found, the baby he left her with, even the drowning — had been a blessing. By now she would have suffered so many years with him. But then maybe she had also given up too soon, before God might have fixed her body. What if her body hadn’t changed simply because she had lost faith that it ever would? Maybe this was her biggest mistake.
The first light of day was peeking through the window. A chattering newscaster had replaced the voices in the other room. She could hear her aunt moving around the kitchen, the sound of the kettle on the stove. After a while the scent of cinnamon wafted throughout the house. She knew she hadn’t heard the last from her mother and aunt. If this was the only sincere man she had found after all these years of believing she would be alone, who were they to protest? And then it occurred to her that she still hadn’t reached the age when her body was supposed to have started changing. How, after giving up on Rogelio and then her own body, could she give up on this new man? Maybe Celestino was the type she should have met years earlier, maybe from the very start. A man who already had his children and didn’t care to have any more. A man who simply wanted her for her.