Hilda told her that she had majored in health and physical fitness at the community college. She graduated but any plans to teach went awry in a pregnancy, a miscarriage, and then some years of housekeeping. But when her husband lost interest in her for her infertility and inability to carry a child when they had undergone such expense and effort to conceive one through a fertility clinic, she stopped taking care of the house and got a servant. This allowed her to teach aerobics.
Gabriele listened intensely while her eyes glanced at the cart of wet clothes, which seemed to her like the great hills of Tijuana dirt but in a medley of colors and fabrics.
"Why are you really living here in Tijuana? Why not Puerta Vallerta or Mexico
City?" Hilda suddenly asked.
Gabriele began spacing her words into fragments and some of the fragments contained space as if her mind were moving up and down those hills across all of the distant colonias, the ocean, and into the past. She said that for a few weeks, now, she had been staying in a room of a house owned by a "nice woman." She just wanted to learn her Spanish here and she wanted to learn of simplicity. "I thought moving here would improve me somehow— Suppose it hasn't," she prevaricated. Hilda, who now doubted the sincerity of the conversation, was beginning to withdraw her attention; so sensing this Gabriele confessed. "The truth is that when I got married I lost myself to a wifely role — domesticated Betty Crocker crap and being an unpaid cashier/assistant manager for my husband's business. When I wasn't at my shift I was learning how to cook regular western food since he hated Japanese food—sushi, mizu soup, soba, and all that stuff. Of course, washing his clothes and ironing his shirts. In the meantime he was seeing someone—a friend…an employee who was dear to us." She chuckled. "Not someone but the same gender — a man. He was seeing a man. After the divorce I came back to the states. I didn't know where to go so I followed my own shadow and came here."
Hilda looked at her empathetically. She spoke softly. "So many people come to this ugly place for one reason or another. Some work in the American and Japanese factories. They often live in groups so they can afford rent. They earn 150 pesos each week, but what can they do? They tell themselves that a job like this is better than none. For others Tijuana is a place to sell souvenirs to the American gringos. They sell this and that on cardboard tables and they survive. It is a place for a young woman to hope that one of the American naval officers that she sells herself to will actually want more than a…como se dice… Anyhow, not being used for sex — a real relationship. It is where those lacking emotional resources can recover."
Gabriele caught the air before it came out of her mouth as rude chortling. "Lacking emotional resources" …th she hadn't heard a more apt and erroneous phrase to describe herself; but she liked how artfully Hilda used such laconic sentences to show understanding, to make the two women's experiences cognate, and to pull the conversation out of the dead-end of the personal domain.
Gabriele smiled thoughtfully with her closed lips. She was pleased that the serendipitous heat so early in the morning had carried her here the way birds, without having to flap their wings, soared on waves of solar energy that were refracted from the ground. She now felt that she was soaring away from the flares of tortured memories—memories that if personified, seemed to think that she could somehow rescue them when the only rescue to be had was their own burial. She was at last leaving the pine trees and the snowy slopes where she had once skied with Kato and her husband. She was razing that raised foot to its burial pit and raising herself out of the inundations of yearning in the pools of Michael's retinas. She was no longer drowning in the deprivations that had fathered his unfulfilled pent-up yearnings or trapped in her own eyes and ideas for witnessing what she didn't care to see and, at that point, couldn't conclusively know. She was demolishing the ski lodge where her former self stood in front of that door of what was their room with mouth agape, key tightly clutched, and thoughts wandering lost here and there but aggravating her with recurrent questions of where she would "fit into the picture" should her husband's homosexual liaisons be more than a temporary and belated experimentation. For the first time in so long she no longer felt the inclination to pull a ski cap down over her face.
For Hilda sentiment had risen the previous year for warmth and stability and she clung to her husband's side, the old ogre that he was. She begged him to not leave each night and see this other woman or to see her but to not treat their marriage with such total indifference and contempt. If she had not loved him before she loved him desperately then; for to be rejected by an ogre made her feel uglier than the one rejecting her. She pontificated that love was a shared experience that could not be dropped one rainy Sunday when it was apparent from the first ten minutes of the televised soccer game who would be the winners, clearing the way for daily habitual liaisons thereafter.
She told Gabriele that, while they were living together that last year, she never knew who her husband saw. "It was probably a woman. I don't know. A Mexican man, when he is horny and bored, would get off in a hollow log but never his wife if she has disappointed him."
One night on the Guadalajara beltway, while she was returning to her empty home with her bags of groceries, there among distant lights in clusters like grounded stars, Hilda's headlights beamed on the sign "Tijuana." She felt that second where the new could not be avoided and that out there might be a little compassion toward her. She headed north to Baja California and then got a job as an aerobics teacher for the Municipal Sports and Cultural Center of Tijuana.