Delia’s Crossing (8 page)

“Then I’m not proposing anything you’ll think terribly unfair or cruel.”

She stared at me, making me feel uncomfortable.

“If you feel her grandmother wouldn’t approve…” he continued.

“I don’t care what anyone back in Mexico thinks!” she cried.

He nodded. “Delia,” he began in Spanish, “how would you like to stay with me for a while and just spend all day and night learning how to speak English? No more housework for now.”

I looked at my aunt and then at him and then at my aunt and shook my head. I didn’t fully understand yet, but staying with him? Did that mean moving into his house?

“She doesn’t like the idea,” my aunt said, smiling coolly. “No?” she asked me, her smile still unnerving.

“No,
por favor,
” I said.

“No, please,” Señor Baker corrected. “Please. Say please.”

“Please.”

“See?” he told my aunt. “Imagine my being able to do that day and night for two weeks.”

“Yes,” she said. “I see what you mean. You’re right. Besides, I’m not interested in what she wants and doesn’t want. She’s already opened her big mouth and told Edward she’s his cousin.” She glared at me. “After I specifically said not to mention that to anyone!”

“It had to come out sooner or later, Isabela,” Señor Baker said.

“Later would have been better. Mrs. Rosario!” she screamed. She went to the doorway.

I looked at Señor Baker. He was staring at me strangely. It made me feel naked.

“
Todo será bien,
” he said, trying to calm me down, assuring me that all was going to be just fine.

I looked at my aunt again. She shouted once more for Señora Rosario, who came hurrying down the hallway.

What did he mean, everything would be fine? What was happening?

My aunt spoke quickly to Señora Rosario and then turned back to Señor Baker.

“However, now that I think of it, it might attract too much unnecessary attention if you return to your condo, John.”

“What do you suggest?”

“I have that house for rent in Indio. It’s furnished. Take her up there for two weeks. No one in that neighborhood will notice or care. Half the people living up there were probably brought here last night by a coyote. I will expect that she’ll be quite different when you return,” she added in a threatening tone.

“Oh, she’ll be like brand new,” he said, looking at me and smiling. “She’ll be a Mexican American and not just a Mexican.”

“Good,” my aunt said. “Do you want Mrs. Rosario to go along to help you set up?”

“Oh, no,” he said. “We don’t want her to have anyone near her who can speak Spanish. That’s the point. She will need to remember what I teach her to survive.”

“You’ll have to keep her under lock and key up there, then, John.”

“No problem,” he said, and smiled at me again. “It’ll be like
My Fair Lady.
I’ll be Professor Higgins.”

“Yes, only don’t expect her to turn into Audrey Hepburn, John.”

“She’ll come damn close to it,” he vowed.

My aunt laughed.

What was going on? They were speaking too quickly, and the words I caught and understood just confused me.

Mi tía
Isabela turned to Señora Rosario and began explaining everything. She told her to explain it all to me in Spanish. For a moment, Señora Rosario looked as if she was going to disobey her. My aunt widened her eyes, and Señora Rosario turned to me.

“Señora Dallas and Señor Baker think it’s going to take you too long to learn English here while you spend so much time helping with housework. Señora Dallas wants you to learn faster and get to school.”

I nodded. That didn’t sound so bad. No more housework.

“Señora Dallas and Señor Baker think it will be better for you if you are somewhere where no one speaks Spanish so you will have to learn English quickly.”

“Where?” I asked. “
Dónde
?” Were they talking about me living in his house again?

“Señora Dallas owns many properties. She has a house in Indio that you and Señor Baker will use. It’s not that far away from here.”

“Only me and Señor Baker?” I turned to him. He was smiling at me gleefully. I felt my heart begin to thump. I shook my head.

“Don’t you dare shake your head!”
mi tía
Isabela screamed at me. “Tell her if she doesn’t do what I tell her to do, I will contact her grandmother and let her grandmother know how disrespectful and disobedient she is.” She smiled, folded her arms under her breasts, and stood straighter. “Tell her I will stop sending her grandmother money to help her survive.”

Señora Rosario told me, and I looked up with surprise. Aunt Isabela was sending money to my grandmother?

“That’s right, Delia. I am sending her money now,” she told me in English. “She’s an old, old lady. She can’t work hard enough to keep her house and herself alive. Without my help, she’ll be out in the street. Tell her what I said, and ask her if she would like that.”

Mrs. Rosario translated.

“Well?” my aunt demanded, bringing her hands to her hips and stepping closer to me. “Are you going to do what I want you to do or not? Yes or no? I have no more time to waste. Tell her!”

Señora Rosario told me.

The tears broke free from the corners of my eyes. I couldn’t imagine
mi abuela
Anabela left to live on the street. Her friends wouldn’t permit it, but I also knew she was too proud to accept charity. I lowered my head and nodded.

“Good. Get her miserable things together,” my aunt told Señora Rosario. “Mr. Baker has wasted enough time. Bring her back in two weeks speaking English well enough to get by, or I’ll see to it that you’re deported along with her,” my aunt threatened him.

Señor Baker laughed, but whatever she had told him brought a little fear to his face, especially into his eyes.

“Don’t worry. I know I’ll be successful,” he said. “We’ll be successful,” he told me in Spanish.

“Go on. Get her started!” my aunt ordered.

Señora Rosario returned to my room with me to make sure I hurriedly gathered my things. I put everything back into my little suitcase while she stood there looking very sorry. My tears flowed even more freely.

“I don’t want to go with Señor Baker,” I told her. “I don’t like him.”

She bit down on her lower lip as if she was stopping herself from saying something she would regret and then shook her head.

“I’m sorry,” she told me. “Do the best you can. It’s what we all do. Come along.”

I followed her to the front of the house, where Señor Baker waited in his car. He was all smiles, eager to help me with my suitcase. Then he opened the car door for me.

“
Adentro.
Get in,” he said.

I got into his car, and he closed the door and got in behind the wheel.

“I’ll start your lessons by identifying every part of the inside of the car,” he told me, and then, as he touched something, he pronounced the English word for it. He asked me to repeat what he said and then touched the part again without speaking and asked me to identify it in English.

Despite my nervousness and fear, I was able to do it easily.

“See how easy it can be when we work like this?” he said loudly enough for Señora Rosario to hear. He nodded and smiled at her, but she just stared at us. “That was so simple. You liked that, didn’t you?” he asked me.

“
Sí.
”

“Yes.”

“Yes.”

“Okay,” he said, starting the engine. “We’ll have a little tour of the desert. We’ll stop and get groceries, and I’ll teach you words all along the way. It will be good. You’ll see. I’ve gotten you out of slave labor here, too,” he said loudly, and nodded at the house and Señora Rosario, who continued to stand there on the steps watching us. She grimaced and shook her head slightly.

“The housework you will have with me will be nothing in comparison with what they made you do here,” he said, leaning over to whisper, “and you won’t have to put up with that spoiled brat, Sophia. I’m the only spoiled brat in your life now.” He laughed.

“Now, here’s another good idea,” he said. “I’ll teach you a song that will teach you numbers in English. Ready? It starts like this:
One hundred bottles of beer on the wall, one hundred bottles of beer. If one of the bottles should happen to fall, ninety-nine bottles of beer on the wall.
See? Sing along. Come on,” he said as he drove away from the house.

I looked back at Señora Rosario and saw her shake her head again and turn to go back inside. Despite what Señor Baker said and how I had been treated, I was not happy about leaving with him. We continued down the long driveway, past the beautiful flowers and hedges, the statues and fountains.

“Sing what I sing,” he ordered.

I did.

“Louder. Be happy, energetic. You’re off to begin a new life.
Ninety-seven bottles of beer on the wall…
”

The gate opened for us, and I looked back one more time as Señor Baker continued to sing and forced me to sing along with him.

Now I don’t even have a phantom family, I thought.

Why should I care what awaited me when we reached zero bottles of beer on the wall?

A
s he had promised, along the way, we stopped at a supermarket at the center of a big shopping mall. Señor Baker explained that we had to get basic necessities and enough food to keep us for at least a week or so. He said my aunt told him that all of the kitchen utensils were there, dishes and glassware, too. A vacuum cleaner, pails and mops, brooms and rags for cleaning were in the pantry. As she had said, it was a house she usually rented out. From the way Señor Baker spoke, it sounded as if
mi tía
Isabela owned many properties. Señor Baker told me
mi tía
Isabela’s husband had been very smart about his real estate investments.

“You should be very grateful,” he said. “Your aunt is making a big investment in you. She’s paying me a lot of money to teach you English quickly.”

He looked at me to see if I appreciated what
mi tía
was doing for me, but it didn’t feel as if she was helping me. It felt more as if she was looking for a way to get rid of me.

“Your aunt is paying for everything we need and buy, so choose whatever you like to eat,” he said. When we entered the supermarket, he said, “Go on. Get anything you want, just like a kid turned loose in a candy store.”

He gave me a cart to push and fill up. I had never seen a supermarket as big as this one. There were so many choices of every food imaginable. I
was
like a child turned loose in a candy store. How did anyone know what to choose? Pictures on boxes told me what many things were, but many were difficult to understand.

Señor Baker followed along and explained things, translating them for me and telling me something about everything. I had to admit it was very educational. He actually paused to tell someone I was his student.

“Nothing like hands-on, day-to-day life to help someone learn a language fast,” he explained to a woman who seemed to know him. “Right, Delia?” he asked me. He repeated what he had said in Spanish quickly, and I nodded. It did sound right.

Maybe what he was doing would be good, I thought hopefully. Maybe he wasn’t as terrible a man as I imagined he might be. He was a teacher, and when I thought of a teacher, I thought of Señora Cuevas. Like her, surely, he had to have some pride in his students and his accomplishments. If I learned English well and quickly, he would be successful, and I had no doubt that
mi tía
Isabela was paying him well and might even give him some sort of bonus.

I felt myself relax and became more and more interested in the choices of cereals, rices, beans, and breads. The sight of the meat and fish counters was overwhelming. There was so much. This was truly what I was told to expect in America.

“Are you a good cook?” he asked me.

I explained how I had learned many dishes from
mi abuela
Anabela. When I described some, he made sure we had everything we needed to prepare them. Every item I chose he identified in English and had me repeat. As we moved about the supermarket, he would nod at people and things, saying the English words. “That woman is wearing a blue hat,” he would say, or “That man is here with his son.” Whatever he said, he had me repeat and then explained and had me repeat again.

“You see,” he said, holding out his arms, “this way, the world is our classroom. Now, do you understand why I wanted to take you out of your aunt’s home and away from all of that distracting housework?”

I had to admit I did understand, although I still felt very nervous and uncomfortable about it.

Before we reached the cashier to get ourselves checked out, he made me go through the entire cart of food, calling each item by its English name, correcting my pronunciation.

When the food we bought was checked out, he reviewed the numbers on the bill, and when we rolled the cart out of the supermarket, he stopped, turned to me, and asked in English, “Where do you want to go now?”

“Where?” The question seemed so obvious I thought I was misunderstanding him. “
Dónde
?”

“No, no, only in English. Where?” he asked again.

I shrugged.

To the car, I thought. Where else?

I said so, and he smiled. “That’s it. Think in English. Say to the car,” he commanded, and I did.

In fact, everything we did, every move we made, he described in English and had me repeat.

“We are loading the groceries into the car’s trunk. This is a trunk. I am opening the car door for you. This is where the passenger sits. The passenger. Repeat it all,” he told me, and I did. I was beginning to feel like a big parrot. He corrected my pronunciation and made me repeat the words until he was satisfied.

Even after he started the car and drove out of the parking lot, he continued identifying and describing as much as possible along the way, each time having me repeat the words, and then, if we saw another similar thing, he would point to it and ask me to identify it in English. From the way he was reacting, I thought I was doing very well.

At one point, he began to review what he called idioms, expressions that were common.

“Every morning when you wake up, you say?”

“Good morning.”

“And?”

“How are you today?”

“What kind of a day is it?”

“It’s a sunny day.”

On and on we went, driving and talking. He would recite, and I would repeat. Then he surprised me by asking me to tell him what I was thinking, using as many English words as I could. I didn’t know what to say, but I managed, “The car is long.”

“You don’t mean the car. You mean the ride in the car,” he corrected. “It’s not that long,” he added. “Well, maybe because of all these lights and the traffic. Too many cars,” he said, pointing to the automobiles in front of us.

Finally, we turned down a side road and passed some smaller houses, and then we turned onto another road and stopped in front of a tan stucco house not much bigger than
mi casa
back in Mexico. This had a thin light blue gate around it, and there was a nice lawn, but there wasn’t much land. A rim of low mountains loomed behind it. It reminded me of places in Mexico. It was truly as if I had closed my eyes for a while, opened them, and found myself back home. The terrain was that similar. It gave me pangs of sadness and homesickness. How I missed Abuela Anabela.

Señor Baker had to get out to open the gate to the short, narrow driveway. There was no garage, just a carport. He identified it in English and again narrated every little thing we did and what we saw and touched. There was a side entrance to the house from the carport. He took out the keys and opened it, reciting the words for
key, door, open, unlock.
As with everything else, he made me repeat and corrected my pronunciation.

The door opened right into the small kitchen. There was a preparation table and a small sink beside it at the center. The appliances looked old and used, and the floor was covered in a dull, light brown, scuffed linoleum. We brought in the groceries and set them on the table. As he took things out of the bags, I had to identity them in English again. If I missed one, he put it back into the bag. He went on to another item and returned to the one I missed until I recalled it and pronounced it adequately. He said until I did, he wouldn’t take it out, and if I didn’t, he would never take it out. I thought he was being silly, but he looked very serious, so I concentrated hard until I got it right.

Once everything was put away, he went through the kitchen, identifying everything in English and having me repeat the words. He also made me put some words together, such as “I am putting the dishes in the sink.” Then he would ask me, “Where did you put the dishes?” and I would reply. My confidence grew. Maybe this was a very good idea, I continued to tell myself.

We walked through the living room. The gray rug looked tired and worn and in need of a good vacuuming. The furniture didn’t look much better. The arms of chairs and the sofa were scratched, and the pillows looked as if they needed a good airing. Gazing about at the coffee-colored walls, I saw there were no pictures anywhere, but there were nails where pictures had been hung.

As in the kitchen, he reviewed the English words for everything in the living room and again put them into sentences and questions. “Where will you sit?” “Sofa.” “What’s on the floor by the sofa?” “A rug.” He looked very pleased with how I was doing.

“Your aunt is going to be amazed,” he told me, and explained what he meant by
amazed.
“It’s good to know a few words that mean almost the same thing,” he explained. “We call those words synonyms. Words that mean the opposite are antonyms. Let’s try it. What’s a word for the opposite of warm?”

I told him, “Cold.”

“Great!” he said. It was more like a game now. I smiled. I’m going to be all right, I thought. This will be fine.

He tried the television set. It received only a few local stations. The pictures came in cloudy and powdery, which upset him.

“No damn cable hookup,” he muttered, and then turned to me and explained what that meant.

I told him we had a much smaller television set with even worse reception in Mexico, but there were places we went to watch television, and one place had a satellite receiver.

“At least we have an old video player here,” he said, pointing to something under the set, and again explained what that meant. Of course, I had heard of it and seen them.

“I’m going to pick up some movies for you to watch repeatedly, because you could learn a lot more English that way,” he said. He said he knew someone who learned Spanish that way.

“He watched one movie three hundred times if he watched it once,” he said.

That was how I had learned most of the English I knew. This would be more fun than just reading an English textbook.

We continued through the small house, pausing at the one bathroom. Although it was bigger than the one I shared back at
mi tía
Isabela’s estate, it didn’t look all that much nicer. There was no shower stall, just a tub and a shower with a plastic curtain. The bathroom did have a large window, however, which made it brighter but also clearly showed the stains in the floors, walls, sink, and toilet.

“You’ll have to do some cleaning here,” he said. He described the words
wash, rinse, scrub, polish,
and
mop.
I didn’t think it would take much work, because it was nowhere as large a bathroom as Sophia’s.

I told him that, and I told him what a mess her bathroom and her suite were.

“I know,” he said. “She’s as spoiled a brat as you could find anywhere in the world. I heard what she did to you in her shower, but don’t worry. I can tell already. You’re much smarter than she is,” he said.

His compliment made me blush.

“Such a sweet, innocent face,” he said, touching my cheek. “You’re a fresh breeze, believe me. I love innocence,” he added. “It’s pure.”

He looked at me more intensely now, and my heart seemed to trip over itself. Then he quickly smiled again and continued our tour of the house.

We inspected the two bedrooms, one with a king-size bed and one with two double beds. He checked the closets in the room and the one in the hallway.

“Damn. Your aunt forgot about some other basic things,” he said.

I shook my head, not understanding, and he explained that
mi tía
Isabela had sent us up here without telling him that we needed towels, washcloths, sheets, pillows, and pillow cases. At the supermarket, we had bought what I would need to start cleaning the small house.

“Now I’ll have to return to the shopping center,” he told me. “We’ll bring in our suitcases first. You unpack your things and start cleaning up the house. Start with the kitchen, because we’re going to have our first dinner here.”

He looked around and nodded.

“The place will work for us. We’ll be fine here,” he told me, his voice insistent. Then he suddenly smiled the smile of someone who had just had a lightbulb go on in his head.

“This is called setting up a home. Newlyweds do it,” he told me. “You and I are like newlyweds. That will help you learn faster, and it will be more fun pretending to be newlyweds.”

The word threw me. I knew
wedding,
but
new wedding
? How could there be a wedding here? I asked him.

“No, we’re not having a wedding here. It’s like we already had the wedding,” he explained. “That’s it. We’ll be like a bride and groom. Everything will be easier to explain that way.”

Again, I shook my head. How could we be like a bride and groom? And why would that make it easier?

“Don’t worry,” he said when I asked, and then he went into a brief explanation of the word
worry.
“Your aunt is worried you won’t learn English well enough to attend school and you will be a big problem for her. We’ll show her she has nothing to worry about, right?”

He stepped up to me, put his hands on my upper arms, and held me while he smiled.

“Right, Señora Baker?” he asked.

I pulled my head back. Señora Baker? Why was he calling me Señora Baker?