The next week, just moments after we’d sat down with our hot chocolates, coffee, and donuts, Lulú told me she wanted to go to college at one of the city colleges. In that instant I understood what had bothered her when I’d encouraged her to go to Berlin: it meant I assumed she was content to go on being a nanny.
In Mexico, Lulú explained, she’d taken the exams to be admitted into one of the public universities, but then she’d left home before even getting the results back. She said, Right after the exams, when I talked to my friends at school who’d also taken them, they all were complaining, Oh, I did so terrible. I’ll never go to university. But I didn’t feel like that.
You mean you thought you did good on the exam?
She nodded yes. It wasn’t hard to answer the questions, she said.
Were you a good student? I asked. Did you like doing homework? I sure never did.
I was okay, she said. I could have studied more, but I never hated studying like some of my friends did. She said the reason she’d decided not to go to university was because she wanted to work, that’s all.
And what finally made you decide to come to this country?
I don’t know, she said in a tone of voice that sounded as if the question had almost put her to sleep.
It must have seemed like I was silently waiting for her to say something more, because she gave her head a willful little shake. I faked a short laugh that turned into a real one, of embarrassed relief, when she laughed a little too. Okay, she just wasn’t going to tell me.
Instead she told me about her Mexican friend Brenda, so pretty and talented, who cleans houses in Manhattan. Brenda wants to be a designer, maybe work in fashion, and she met a Mexican boy here, but a fresa, a guero, here legally, who’d gone to college in New York, a math genius, and now he works in business in the city. He was in love with Brenda and was paying for her to go to Pratt. Though out of her own need for independence—Lulú mimed the Mexican gesture of clutching a stack of bills in her palm—she’d refused to give up all her housecleaning jobs, just enough to leave her time to attend classes. Lulú said that she would find a way to keep working through college too. She supposed she’d have to. Brenda is twenty-seven, two years older than her novio, so I think that is not too old for college here, she said. You’re the same age as Brenda? I asked. Mmmm, yes, almost the same age, she said in a way that made us both grin. She comically rolled her eyes and said, One year older.
Meanwhile, Marisela sat upside down in her chair, face and torso hidden by the tabletop, legs and feet straight up in the air, the toes of her sneakers lightly bouncing off the wall behind her. Look, I’m a fallen angel, she shouted from under the table. I fell out of paradise and landed upside down! Lulú and I laughed, and I took a picture with my phone. I felt something like a foreshadowing, a sense that I was going to be doing this for years, sitting at tables with Lulú and Marisela, laughing at the girl’s antics, taking their pictures.
We talked about mole de olla, and how good it would be to have a bowl of mole de olla on a cold winter day in New York. Do you miss Mexico? I asked her.
Claro que sí, she said. After a moment, she said, I don’t want to go back until I have a profession. But if I study for a profession here, maybe this is where I’ll have to stay, to work at that profession. I am good with that.
Have you thought of what profession you’d want to study?
I was good at math. I thought I wanted to be a civil engineer.
You mean build bridges and things?
Yes, she said. Or maybe be an architect.
All that following week, I thought about what Lulú had said about her desire to go to college and about her friend’s story too. Now, on the train, I look at the digital picture on my phone of Marisela sitting upside down with her legs and feet in the air and wonder, What will this photo mean to me a month from now?
The next Wednesday night in our workshop, I couldn’t help but listen and watch for clues and signs. Would Marisela say something that revealed that Lulú talked about me at home? Instead, as I sat in the ring of little girls at our table, Jazmery blurted at me: You’re old. Why are you so old? We’re the youngest children here, so how come we have to have the oldest teacher? I noticed Marisela looking at Jazmery as if this were new information she needed to pass on to Lulú. What about you, Jazmery, I thought. Why don’t you try to get your damned peregrine into the air? Don’t take your frustration out on me, chamaca. I felt hurt, as if a weakness of mine had been exposed and my stature with the girls had been toppled. You’re overreacting, I told myself.
But we went back to the Dunkin’ Donuts that evening and the next week too. We didn’t linger quite as long as we had in previous weeks, as if Lulú were wary of upsetting her cousin. These conversations were a bit like we were auditioning for each other, a little careful
