Free The Ladies of Managua by Eleni N. Gage Page B

Bela, I’m almost positive that she didn’t hear my exchange with Madre. It seems like she doesn’t even really hear the words of condolence well-wishers are offering her, as if they were canap é s she could nibble on to slake her hunger. She nods, but then she looks back at her handkerchief and they know they’re dismissed. And then, it’s strange, but as she holds the handkerchief to her forehead, dabs it at her face, she almost seems to smile a little. Relief, I suppose, at having been left alone until the next sympathetic mourner leans in to offer inadequate comfort.

 
    11
    Isabela
    Silvia never spoke to me again. I don’t blame her. Who knows what hopes she had pinned on the pleated navy dress, what it had cost her father? And she was back at school not one hour after Mauricio picked her up; I heard her heels clicking on the marble of the hallway, and even her shoes sounded angry.
    The next night, Mauricio and I were out until the chaperone insisted it was time to leave or I’d miss curfew and she’d lose her position. We’d had coffee at Charlie’s Steak House on Dryades, just behind the school; Mauricio told me later he felt it wouldn’t be wise to go farther than a few blocks from campus, at least until we’d earned the chaperone’s trust. I didn’t speak much; it was the first time I’d been out with a man who wasn’t a relative. But by the time he dropped us off, Mauricio had learned several important things: first, that if he pressed her, the chaperone could be induced to order a milk punch or a little sherry—“My mother, she does love a glass of sherry in the afternoon, sometimes two. It’s quite the fashion in Cuba,” he told her.
    And second, that once she’d had her drink, she didn’t mind if we lapsed into Spanish, which she said she knew, “of course, it’s just not my mother tongue.” Not ten minutes into the date she’d forbidden us from speaking Spanish, saying it was school rules that I should practice my English, but I think the truth was that she couldn’t understand what we were saying, not with the way I swallowed the ends of my words, or how quickly Mauricio nattered on. But by the end of the afternoon, her cheeks were rosy and she was starting to nod off, and Mauricio was bold enough to say, in Spanish, “My mother only drinks at Christmas and Easter,” which made me laugh, waking the chaperone. That’s when she insisted it was time to go. But on the way back to school we passed a shoe-shine boy and Mauricio whispered to him and handed him something and when we reached the arched gate that spelled out S ACRED H EART as if the letters were floating across the sky just like in my Mariana’s painting, the little boy ran up with two bunches of flowers, violets for me and sweet peas for the chaperone. “To thank you ladies for the loveliest afternoon I’ve had in this country,” Mauricio said, and the chaperone—we called her Miss Birdie—she actually blushed. She was the one who said she looked forward to seeing him in two weeks, not me.
    And so Miss Birdie and I started seeing Mauricio every fortnight, on Friday afternoon, Saturday afternoon, and Sunday after Mass—and by the time I was a junior and given more free time off campus, sometimes Saturday night, too. It wasn’t technically allowed, such frequency, not without a girl’s parents having given written permission. But Dolly was there and a year older than I, so she counted as an approving relative (although not as a chaperone; that would be taking things entirely too far). Dolly had been significantly harder to win over than Miss Birdie, but Mauricio arranged for Cristian to take Dolly for a spin in his convertible at least once a weekend when they were in town, and she liked having a date, and a reason to walk past Silvia and her emerald cross in her dotted-Swiss afternoon dress. So