She was lost then, and she was lost now. People were temporary entities flitting around in her imagination as solid substance but it had been an illusion. Why she had come to Tijuana was even more difficult to isolate. It had less shape and size than even the divorce of intimate parties. It was a shirt of a distorted form. Here, she could more easily stretch the money that she had fully withdrawn from the "grocery and household account" which Michael had put in her name at Daiko Ginko (Daiko Bank). It was around 3000 dollars. Within Albany she had her real money and property but she had not seriously thought about those resources for nearly a year. The passbook and ATM were lost to her now and she could never access those resources from here.
It was a most mortifying fact that upon telling her he had filed for divorce and his reason for doing such that she just stood there so numbly like a driver witnessing a falling bridge. She had not laughed or accepted it with a smile, which would have been her typical reaction—a reaction she had toward all absurd caprices of a human race that she still believed was beneath her. But within the daily work at managing the store and fighting along with him to secure a profit, she had unwittingly married him in her heart; and all those outings with Kato sealed the three in work and pleasure. It was her first time of really feeling as if she belonged to a group and the explosion of it wounded her in shrapnel.
Upon entering the states she was too fragile and too mortified by all that she had abandoned to go back to her son in New York State. She spent a few days in Los Angeles and a few more in San Diego. Then she pushed the rotating gate in San Ysidro and found herself in Tijuana. She had always wanted the chance to recall her college Spanish and to somehow use it. American cities seemed so large and so full of violent accosting figures; but she did not reason that this large south-of-the- border city that she had chosen to reside in, which had its toddler days as American military barrooms, had the crime level of LA and Chicago combined. She didn't really have a reason for her inability to acclimate. She told herself that Ithaca was too cold but Sapporo had been colder yet. The bench at the zoo before the spider monkeys had been her favorite spot in San Diego but the monkeys reminded her of the man with the unmemorable name.
For a few moments she hypnotically watched her towels and clothes through the window of the double-load machine. Washing clothes was a dollar and sixty-five cents per load. Most of the customers paid in dollars, but not all of them; so the machines needed special tokens to fall into the slots. To her knowledge doing laundry here was the only thing that was more expensive than in the states. A teenager was seated in a laundry cart. Her hand leaned on the lever of the dryer and she pulled and pushed herself in a gentle swinging movement as if it were a hammock. Two children on roller skates created a roller derby for themselves but they walked and stumbled more than they rolled and the force in which they ran into people was nominal.
Just as she was glad that her ex-lover, Candyman, had not been allowed into her body during one of her more fertile dates and had been kept as syrup on her tongue, she was glad that throughout the time of living together with Michael as lovers and then as husband and wife, that no daughter or son was concieved (for once concieved the embryo never would have been aborted since her principle of being humane would have been the overriding consideration at the expense of all else). She was also glad that she and her husband had not amassed any common property within their nine months of marriage. She liked a disconnection—a dismembering—that was made neatly in one quick motion of the knife. She felt that it was good even when the knife was not sterile.
She thought of the salient, life-changing conversation that she should have laughed off with the frivolity worthy of all human considerations. At the door of their room in the lodge Michael said to her, "Yesterday while we were snow skiing and Kato broke his foot, I lifted it and touched him in front of you without wanting to hide anything. Do you remember? You stood above us. You were wearing a cap and your bangs were in your eyes; still I could see that you understood fully. I knew that you had known all along. Can you really say that you haven't known anything all these months?" He asked her this as if she were the one who was culpable. He asked her this as if she were the one who made him feel guilty by this contrived performance of consternation and shattered innocence.
The stoic that she was, she had not created a dramatic or melodramatic spectacle unless an ingenuous sense of confusion was a spectacle. There, in the hallway outside their rooms at the lodge, he condemned her, the victim. That which preceded it had been Michael rummaging through his pockets, handing her their key, and then announcing that he would stay with Kato. Naturally, she had been disconcerted; her feelings had been dominant and ineffable; and the scenario of them talking like this with their friend on his crutches gazing at them both in a horrified expression had been so surreal. Her true self would have laughed and relinquished him. She would have even bought the gay couple a housewarming gift of his and her bathrobes (maybe just his and his) with minimal bitterness that would have animated her in light-hearted mischief-making. Instead a bomb detonated.
Time moved by like a shell-shocked soldier and it dragged her along as a war prisoner tripping recklessly over landmines. She was battered in shrapnel but she knew that her wounds were figments of the imagination since they were merely psychological ones. With the right idea she knew that she could wedge herself from the microcosm of being a casualty of an imaginary war, escape from its hatch, and be herself once again. If she were just to open the hatch she would be out of jealous instincts and the pettiness of a personal life.
Whenever she got bored with reading Mexican newspapers and memorizing new Spanish vocabulary she would go into San Diego and take bus #9 from Broadway Avenue until she was in Old Town. Her favorite building was Casa De Miguel Pedona y Maria Antonia Estudillo. Maybe it had been restored long ago, but now it retained its tattered walls once again and no refurbished items cluttered the dense emptiness. It was time: empty and tattering. She felt less alone seeing it exhibit that, which in an abstract way, was in her own heart. To her the dilapidated structure was good.
She could easily enough replace a husband. When she was in Asia she had often sent e-mail to some of those whom she met in chat rooms. There were lonely males out there just as there were lonely females. She might find an exceptionally attractive man with responsibility, status, and initiative who would infatuate her and, if she were lucky, seem like a comfortable friend. Perhaps they would have a rapport even if their hobbies were different and the degree of seriousness that she gave her art disconcerted the domineering male who could not understand the independent fullness of self in ideas. She could find a man just as she could get rid of her old clothes and replace them with new ones.