Hungry Woman in Paris (3 page)

I jumped in my car and locked the door immediately. If I’d been a little girl, my mother would have yanked me out of the car
and taken me back inside to apologize, but I was too big for her to do that anymore. Her last hope was guilt.

“How can I go back in there and face your tías and our relatives after what you have done?” she asked with one of those faces
painted on tortured saints you see in the million and one churches in Mexico.

“Tell Tía Lucia I’m sorry,” I blurted and drove off.

For a few weeks after that I stayed in bed. “Why didn’t I stop her?” and “Why didn’t I go with her?” were the two questions
that kept repeating in my head. I stayed in bed until my loneliness scared me and La Calaca Flaca sat next to me. She looked
like a skeleton lady in a Posada drawing. She would keep me company and remind me why life was shitty and unfair.

“If life is not an adventure, it’s not worth living,” she would whisper to me. I don’t know if I created her or if she created
me to keep her company, but I was used to her. She was like Luna, a loyal friend who promised never to leave me, until I finally
joined her and died one day. La Calaca Flaca had shown up in my life on many occasions when life had dealt me a blow too painful
to overcome. I always thanked her for her company and shared my stories of hardship with her. I purposely kept busy to avoid
seeing her around me, but when she did show up to remind me I wasn’t alone, I actually felt a tiny bit better.

“Why don’t you join Luna?” she asked, as if recommending a solution. I cried in her arms and she hugged me.

“Just go to the bathroom and grab the sleeping pills. I’ll start the bath for you,” she suggested, like the loving and comforting
mother I did not have.

I got up and went to the bathroom. I saw my face and couldn’t believe how bloated it was from sleeping so much. I stared at
myself in the mirror and wondered why anyone would think I was beautiful. At least the texture of my light skin was still
resilient. I reached into the medicine cabinet for face cream and my hand hit the bottle of sleeping pills. It fell and cracked,
sleeping pills rolling into the sink, and I picked them up to examine them. I turned around and heard the bath running. Did
I turn it on? I asked myself. I stared at the water and knew it was nice and hot, and how wonderful it would be to sleep in
bathwater. La Calaca Flaca moved her bony index finger in her direction.

The phone rang, startling me back to my reality. La Calaca Flaca disappeared and I rushed to get the phone, but I stopped
in front of it and let it ring until the answering machine picked up. I was certain it was my relentless mother with her desperate
attempts to guilt me into changing my mind.

When I finally worked up the courage to start my day and get some underwear, I saw my wedding dress in the closet. I’d designed
it to look like a passionate flamenco dress even though it was in ivory. It was so beautiful it made me want to get married.
I put it on to see how it would look. What a shame, all the money I’d spent and I wouldn’t get to wear it. I tried it on but
it would not zip up, not even halfway. Maybe they’d made it the wrong size, I thought, and checked the tag. Before my eyes,
I was back to being a size 12. In less than a month I’d gone from a size 6 to a size 12. Women’s bodies are amazing: you can
be skin and bones one day, another you’re eighty pounds heavier and someone is living inside you rent-free, and then six months
later you’re back to the same body with a tiny pouch that will never leave you. Maybe they should make men pouch-size so they
stay in there and remain faithful forever. Reminds me of that joke: “Men spend nine months inside a woman trying to get out
and the rest of their lives trying to get back in.” God, I was so heartbroken I couldn’t even laugh at a stupid joke. What
do you do with a never-worn wedding dress? Do you donate it to Goodwill? Do you put out an ad and try to sell it on eBay?
Do you keep it around for the next guy?

The phone rang again and, finally picking up, I told my mother, once and for all, “No. I’m not getting married. Please stop
calling me about that. If Armando is so wonderful, you marry him!” I hung up and went back to bed. I grabbed a bar of chocolate
next to my bed and ate it. I’m convinced God created chocolate to make up for not striking down the Catholic Church when they
were burning innocent women accused of being witches and destroying the “sacred feminine.” Chocolate makes being a woman bearable—at
least temporarily.

The phone rang again; I couldn’t believe my mother would not give up. I let the answering machine pick up again and heard
my
Modern Latina
editor leave a nasty message. Perhaps I deserved it. Until now I had never missed a deadline, and now that I had, she was
stuck writing the article herself at the last minute. I knew she would never hire me again and that if she could help it,
she would make sure none of the other Latina publications would either. I was too depressed to care even about my writing
career.

“I hate my president,” I muttered to myself, risking imprisonment and another mark on my FBI file. Everyone has an FBI file;
didn’t you know? Whenever I saw his lying-through-my-teeth face I squirmed as if I had a yeast infection. Never mind that
he lied, never mind the truth, he was still going to be reelected. He might not be my ideal candidate, but I was sure he was
an inspiration to a lot of mediocre people out there. Why shouldn’t they aspire to be president too? I guess he really embodied
the American dream. Anyone can be president. Anyone whose family has money, oil, and connections can be president. I saw a
sign at a war protest that said, “Somewhere in Texas, in a small village, an idiot is missing,” and here he was on TV. In
less than two weeks he was going to take the oath of president again and there was nothing I could do. I could go throw eggs
like a lot of my fellow activists did at the last inauguration, as he tried to walk to the U.S. Capitol. I have pretty good
aim. But I’d probably be beaten to a pulp by the time I got done throwing eggs for all the Latina mothers who’d lost their
sons in Iraq. I changed the channel and surfed. Yes, TV relaxes you; it does something to your brain that renders you a happy
idiot. Some days that’s the best you can hope for when another happy idiot is running the country. I got hooked on the Food
Network and was enthralled by two chefs competing to see who could make the most delicious meal with rhubarb. I’d thought
it was just for dessert. Who knew? A commercial break set me running for more distraction. I came across the Travel Channel
and saw a sweepstakes advertised. The winners would get a romantic getaway to Paris.

“Paris! Oh, my God! I have the tickets to Paris, our honeymoon package!” I yelled out. Armando and I had bought the tickets
four months ago because it was hard to pass up the deal. Paris in January is cheap! I ran upstairs to my file cabinet and
found the Los Angeles to Paris tickets and the itinerary. Four months ago, when we’d bought the tickets, we had purposely
timed it so that we’d depart a day before the inauguration, in case he won, but I had forgotten about it. One week at a fancy
hotel in the honeymoon suite… Sweet.

T
hey’re dreadful. They’re so rude. They’re just as bad as New Yorkers.”

“Is that before 9/11 or after?” I asked the lady next to me on the plane, who’d just revealed that she was a U.S. diplomat.
She thought about it a few seconds and said, “Before.”

The flight attendant approached us, speaking French. I didn’t understand her, so she spoke to me in English and asked what
kind of document I needed to clear customs.

“My French is dreadful,” the diplomat confessed once the flight attendant had left. “Whenever I have to deal with French farmers
I have to take a translator with me because I got tired of them correcting me and telling me to ‘Please make an effort’ in
their bad English.”

“You deal with farmers?” I asked.

“Yes, I handle many things, including the national ‘foie gras fight.’”

“Foie gras?” I mispronounced it and had to ask what it was.

“It’s made out of an enlarged goose liver.”

“Oh, I think I had some at a Hollywood party,” I said, trying to cover up for my ignorance.

“Well, you know how inhumane it is to overfeed the geese. They practically feed them to death, until the liver is so huge
they walk lopsided. The U.S. is considering not buying French foie gras to protest the inhumane treatment of animals. Of course,
the farmers argue that the geese love it.” We both nodded and I sympathized with her struggle.

“Yeah, my French is awful too,” I said, showing her my little phrase book. I had tried learning French so many times that
I was ashamed to admit it was practically a lost cause. Back when I was a chubby teenager, I saw a show in which my favorite
sitcom characters went to Paris for the summer. After that I became a Francophile and swore I would go backpacking through
France as soon as I turned eighteen. My first French teacher, God bless him, was more intent on teaching us Chicano studies,
back when Chicano studies hadn’t yet made its way to the junior high schools. He was a Frenchman married to a Mexican woman
and he wanted to empower all his poor, mostly undocumented students with self-love and pride in our culture. He taught us
a lot of beautiful and valuable things, but he didn’t teach us French. Then he got sick and we got lots of substitute teachers,
who just babysat.

My second French teacher was a fun-loving man from Martinique, gorgeous and dark. Any woman could learn French from him. Things
were going great and I was even writing comedy skits in French for extra credit, until his car accident. His mouth had to
be wired shut for the rest of the semester. A permanent substitute teacher came in and was so strict I wanted to not learn
French just to spite him. He was so mean he killed the joie de vivre of our classroom.

The third time, I attempted to learn French from a private French teacher when I was in grad school. I wanted to do an exchange
program at La Sorbonne and it was mandatory that I speak French. She was fabulous, an older, sophisticated woman who loved
teaching. She swore she could teach anyone to speak French beautifully by the end of her intensive course. I mentioned to
her how relieved I was to be taking her course because I’d almost given up trying to learn it. She laughed when I mentioned
all the tragedies my past French teachers had encountered and told me not to worry. The second week into our studies I received
a message on my answering machine telling me she couldn’t teach me that week because her mother was in the emergency room.
The third week she canceled because her mother had passed away and she was too depressed to go on. After that she mostly sent
substitutes. I took it as a sign and figured I wasn’t meant to learn the language.

“Unless your French is perfect, you can’t really say you speak French,” my seatmate advised me now. Sometimes it’s better
to ask in French if they speak English and if they do, speak only in English. If you attempt to speak it and it’s horrible,
they will stop you because they don’t want you to ‘ruin’ their language,” she advised.

“Thanks, I’ll try not to speak it if I don’t have to,” I vowed.

Rosemary met me outside of customs. She almost didn’t recognize me with the extra weight. She had managed to stay so thin
since college. How did she do it? Rosemary hugged me and gave me a kiss on both cheeks, French-style. Her breath stank like
an ashtray left to rot in the sun. She helped me with my bags and told the taxi driver where to take us. I was so impressed
by Rosemary’s ability to speak French and sound and act like a native. She’d even taken up smoking to fit right in. Don’t
get me started on smoking and smokers—I’ll save that one for another time when you like me much better.

Rosemary and I met in college, way back when I didn’t know any better and called myself “Hispanic.” Rosemary asked me, “Whose
panic are you?” I didn’t understand her question. So she proceeded to give me the whole lecture as to how the classification
of “Hispanic” had been conjured up by the census and how it didn’t pay tribute to our indigenous heritage. After several hours
I got it and marched on over to MEChA, the Chicano activist association founded in the sixties to empower Chicanos. I participated
in a lot of protests; it was really exciting. Standing for a cause is a real adrenaline rush. I was even willing to go on
a hunger strike with Rosemary to fight to get a Chicano studies center at the university. Of course, I had to back down at
the last minute when I got real with myself. I loved eating too much to give it up, even for a good cause. I really admired
César Chávez and Gandhi, but my form of activism would have to be the written word, not the empty stomach. My parents had
brought my family to the United States because of the fear of empty stomachs.

“Stay with me at the hotel,” I begged Rosemary. “It’s a honeymoon package and I don’t want to use it alone.”

We arrived at a fancy hotel off the Champs-Élysées and a doorman opened the taxi door. The woman at the reception desk looked
at Rosemary and me and had to ask, just in case she was making a mistake, “You’re in the honeymoon suite?”