I lived on the Upper West Side when I first came to New York, I told her. Infamous seventies New York. Hard to believe sometimes that this is still the same city. It’s probably best not to go on too much about that time, call her attention to how long ago that was, I thought, though she’d like the part about seeing some of the famous punk bands at CBGB. When I’d asked what her favorite music is, she answered punk. Also cumbia, oh, Escorpion and Queen.
I wondered how old Lulú is and thought she could be anywhere between twenty and thirty. I wondered about that not just passingly but as if by concentrating hard enough, I could make her twenty-nine or thirty.
The sophisticated clothing Lulú sometimes wears are hand-me-downs from Verena. Her teeth are uneven, lusterless. Poverty teeth, bad childhood nutrition, rural Mexico in the post-village-agriculture economy. It doesn’t make any difference to me; it’s just that I noticed. My lower incisors are crooked but could easily have been fixed with braces. Considering my father’s profession, I remember Gisela teasing me, his not having had my teeth fixed in childhood was comparable to a blacksmith having at home only a little wooden knife to carve his roasted turkey with. En casa de herrero, cuchillo de palo is how she said that.
The third week, a freezing evening at the end of January, as we headed up the sidewalk to the L train stop again and just as I was about to say goodbye and descend the stairs into the station, Lulú said that she was stopping into the Dunkin’ Donuts on the next block for the hot chocolate she’d promised Marisela and asked if I wanted to come.
We sat for a long time, talking, switching back and forth between English and Spanish. Lulú is a determined English speaker. She makes mistakes but can get across most of what she seems to want to say. She ordered a hot chocolate for herself, too, and I had a coffee and ordered us each a donut. I’m mesmerized by the extraordinary hues and texture of Lulú’s hair, a dark rich buffalo-pelt brown with faint coppery shadings, a whirly wild complexity like a Jackson Pollock painting but one in only those colors. She has a habit, I noticed for the first time that evening, when she’s wearing her hair loose, of impulsively taking two long locks, one from each side, into her fingers to twirl the ends before pulling them around to the back of her head and then, holding her elbows out in the air, she twists a black elastic band around those two wound locks, knotting them together. Though it’s something that can take a while to get right, her fingertips twiddling at the band, she keeps on calmly conversing and listening through the whole operation.
That evening I found out quite a bit more about her. She told me that she’d grown up in a village in Veracruz and that she and her mother had moved to Mexico State, Ecatepec, where she’d gone to high school. When was that? Oh, a long time ago, she said. Then with a friend from school in Mexico City she went to work in Puerto Vallarta for a few years; algunos añitos is how she said that. Not even three years ago, she came north, making the journey across the border with another old school friend. Is the friend living here in Brooklyn now, too? I asked. And she gave an abrupt shake of her head and said no.
I know not to ask what her border crossing was like, or if it was with a coyote or a pollero. When she wants to talk about it, if she ever does, she will. Hopefully, there’s not much to tell. So many who’ve crossed never share what happened with anybody.
When Lulú told me that the family she works for is planning to relocate to Berlin for nearly a year so that el baritono can perform in an opera house season there and that they want to bring her along, I said, encouragingly: Well, that would be a wonderful experience, Lulú, you should do it. I’d only been to Berlin once, for a literary festival, I told her, but I left wanting to spend more time there. Everyone goes around on bicycles, I said. As I was talking about Berlin, her hands went to the back of her head to undo the tie holding her tresses together, which fell forward like two unraveling cords of tangled shadows. Aren’t you excited to go? I asked her. She wrinkled her nose a little and shook her head no, and her eyes seemed to spark with disappointment or even resentment. I was a little taken aback. Marisela, who’d been listening to us the whole time and had finished her second hot chocolate, said, Don’t go, Tía. Then Lulú’s cousin phoned her from the restaurant she works at. After she hung up, Lulú told me that her cousin was surprised that she hadn’t taken Marisela home yet. She had to make dinner and put Marisela to bed. Lulú’s expression remained serene, even as she obediently told Marisela to put on her coat and rose to go, lifting her cup to her lips to finish the last bit of her hot chocolate.
All that week I wondered why what I’d said about Berlin had bothered Lulú. It must have to do with her immigration status, I decided, with Lulú of course not being able to fly to Europe and then fly back into the United States without at least a tourist visa. But wouldn’t her
