I suppose I did look comparatively elegant. Lou Ann had parted my hair on the side (“What you need is one of those big blowzy white flowers behind one ear,” she said, and “God, would I kill for black hair like yours.” “Kill what?” I asked. “A skunk?”) and forced me into a dress she had purchased “before Dwayne Ray” in an uptown thrift shop. It was one of those tight black satin Chinese numbers you have to try on with a girlfriend-you hold your breath while she zips you in. I only agreed to wear it because I thought sharing our clothes might shut her up about being a Sherman tank. And because it fit.
But Esperanza was the one who truly looked exquisite. She wore a long, straight dress made of some amazing woven material that brought to mind the double rainbow Turtle and I saw on our first day in Tucson: twice as many colors as you ever knew existed.
“Is this from Guatemala?” I asked.
She nodded. She looked almost happy.
“Sometimes I get homesick for Pittman and it’s as ugly as a mud stick fence,” I said. “A person would have to just ache for a place where they make things as beautiful as this.”
Poor Lou Ann was on the phone with Mrs. Parsons for the fourth time in ten minutes, and apparently still hadn’t gotten it straight because Mrs. Parsons and Edna walked in the front door with the TV just as Lou Ann ran out the back to get it.
One of the women led the way and the other, who appeared to be the older of the two, carried the set by its handle, staggering a little with the weight like a woman with an overloaded purse. I rushed to take it from her and she seemed a little startled when the weight came up out of her hands. “Oh my, I thought it had sprouted wings,” she said. She told me she was Edna Poppy.
I liked her looks. She had bobbed, snowy hair and sturdy, wiry arms and was dressed entirely in red, all the way down to her perky patent-leather shoes.
“Pleased to meet you,” I said. “I love your outfit. Red’s my color.”
“Mine too,” she said.
Mrs. Parsons had on a churchy-looking dress and a small, flat white hat with a dusty velveteen bow. She didn’t seem too friendly, but of course we were all dashing around trying to get set up. I didn’t even know what channel we were looking for until Mattie’s face loomed up strangely in black and white.
Signatory to the United Nations something-something on human rights, Mattie was saying, and that means we have a legal obligation to take in people whose lives are in danger.
A man with a microphone clipped to his tie asked her, What about legal means? And something about asylum. They were standing against a brick building with short palm trees in front. Mattie said that out of some-odd thousand Guatemalans and Salvadorans who had applied for this, only one-half of one percent of them had been granted it, and those were mainly relatives of dictators, not the people running for their lives.
Then the TV showed both Mattie and the interview man talking without sound, and another man’s voice told us that the Immigration and Naturalization Service had returned two illegal aliens, a woman and her son, to their native El Salvador last week, and that Mattie “claimed” they had been taken into custody when they stepped off the plane in San Salvador and later were found dead in a ditch. I didn’t like this man’s tone. I had no idea how Mattie would know such things, but if she said it was so, it was.
But it was all garbled anyhow. Mrs. Parsons had been talking the whole time about not being able to sit in a certain type of chair or her back would go out, and then Lou Ann flew in the back door and called out, “Damn it, they’re not home. Oh.”
Mrs. Parsons made a little sniffing sound. “We’re here, if you want to know.”
“What program did you want to see?” Edna asked. “I hope we haven’t spoiled it by coming late?”
“That was it, we just saw it,” I said, though it seemed ridiculous. Thirty seconds and it was all over. “She’s a friend of ours,” I explained.
“All I could make out was some kind of trouble with illegal aliens and dope peddlers,” said Mrs. Parsons. “Dear, I need a pillow for the small of my back or I won’t be able to get out of bed tomorrow. Your cat has just made dirt in the other room.”
I went for a cushion and Lou Ann rushed to put the cat out. Estevan and Esperanza, I realized, had been sitting together on the ottoman the whole time, more or less on the fringe of all the commotion. I said, “I’d like you to meet my friends…”
“Steven,” Estevan said, “and this is my wife, Hope.” This was a new one on me.
“Pleased to make your acquaintance,” Edna said.
Mrs. Parsons said, “And is this naked creature one of theirs? She looks like a little wild Indian.” She was talking about Turtle, who was not naked, although she didn’t exactly have
