Playing with Boys

by Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez

Genres: Hispanic & Latino; Women's Fiction

Synopsis

Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez's first novel caused a sensation when it was published last year. Listeners flocked to the story of six friends in Boston because Valdes-Rodriguez created utterly fresh voices and characters.

In Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez's delicious new novel, three friends, each a Latina in her late 20s, take Los Angeles by storm. Marcella, Olivia, and Alexis have bonded not only over trouble with men but about how tough it is to make life work in L.A. no matter what you do.

Marcella is a hot young television actress, hardly able to enjoy the life she's bought for herself, and she's certainly not enjoying her body, which is never quite perfect enough. Olivia's tethered to her toddler son and her suburban mommy track so tightly the other girls sometimes cringe. Alexis has a smart mouth, an ample body, and a great job, but about enough self-esteem to fill a Prada card case. The emotional richness and girly fun of the heroines' friendship will delight listeners.

A Macmillan Audio production.

Release date: September 1, 2004

Publisher: St. Martin's Publishing Group

Print pages: 368

Sample

Playing with Boys

Autumn
Charm is a product of the unexpected.
--José Martí
ALEXIS
There were times that made me s'dang proud to be a Mexican I wept 'til my mascara melted--say, when Vincente Fernandez sang "Cielito Lindo" for the Republican National Convention in 2000. But darlin', this wasn't one of those times.
I stood alone in a black-tie crowd, at a private outdoor cocktail party, on a terrace of L.A.'s Getty Museum, faking interest in a cube of raw tuna on a silver tray. It was like a wobbly, wet, red dice--or was it die? Correction: Was it dead? I jabbed it with my designer toothpick, just to be sure.
"It's only Jell-O, sugar," I whispered as I closed my eyes and shoved it into my mouth. But it was nothing like Jell-O, unless they'd come out with a "slippery acrid" flavor I hadn't seen yet. What I needed was a steak, well-done. Fat chance.
Suddenly, the chatting dimmed and all eyes turned toward a doorway as I held my breath and prayed for patience.
One by one, the members of Los Chimpances del Norte--the norteño band I had stumbled, dear God please tell me how, into managing--strutted single-file onto the terrace in perfectly matching toucan-vomit-meets-cowboy outfits.
I'd asked them to wear Armani. Black Armani. As usual, they'd ignored me. I instinctively fingered the little pink pearls around my neck, and smoothed my hands along the sides of the size 14 Ann Taylor cocktail dress I liked to think of as my "little black," but which was, by L.A. standards, more like a massive, flapping black.
A woman behind me gasped. "What are they wearing?" A man comforted herby saying, "I believe they're going for post-modern kitsch." No, I wanted to say. They think they look good, and there is a large percentage of an entire nation--my ancestral nation of origin--that agrees. I was not among that percentage, but then, I was raised in Texas, not Mexico.
Lime-green fringed blazers aren't for everyone. Neither are banana-yellow Wrangler pants worn tight as skin on a sausage. White ten-gallon Stetsons look good enough on Toby Keith. But twelve of 'em, all in a row, stuffed over waxy Mexican mullets in the middle of a modern museum? Lordy. And who knew twenty-four maroon snakeskin boots could look quite that bad, all lined up together like the keys of Satan's own little player piano?
We were here this evening, enjoying the gardens of this curvy modernist masterpiece of a museum perched in the gently smoggy hills of Los Angeles, for an exclusive private party. A celebration. What were we celebrating? This: the fact that Los Chimpances del Norte (the Chimpanzees of the North) had just donated $5 million to UCLA's Center for Chicano Studies, for the study of previously neglected U.S.-Mexico border music of the oom-pah type they themselves had inflicted upon the public for the past twenty years.
I was a Dallas girl, born and raised, armed with an arsenal of acronyms--BA and MBA from SMU, darlin'--but I was trying to become a California girl, with mixed results. I came to Hell-eh because I thought it was shameful that in a city where the top three FM radio stations now played Mexican music, the big PR companies were oblivious to the talent and riches in Spanish-speaking America. I was the first to offer artists like the Chimps American-style publicity, complete with professional press releases, follow-up calls, lunches--as opposed to Mexican-style publicity, which usually meant buying reporters off with things like cocaine, or island vacations.
My clients at Tower Entertainment, the Whittier-based firm I worked for, had been on The Tonight Show, 60 Minutes, and in the New York Times, which impressed me but rarely impressed my clients. As I often had to tell reporters, America was changing, fast. Tortillas now outsold bagels. Famously, Americans now ate more salsa than ketchup. Wal-Mart carried plantains, yuca, and Goya products. Kraft in the U.S. had come out with something they called "mayonesa," a Mexican mayonnaise with lime. Why? Not because they were nice. Because they had to. The top FM stations in New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago now broadcast in Spanish, and the U.S. had become the world's fourth-largest Spanish-speaking country. I was one of those lucky people who had long existed in a United States that spoke Spanish and English with matching facility. I swung with ease betweenthe cheesy comedy of Sábado Gigante and the cheesy comedy of WB sitcoms. Some academic types, like my professors at Southern Methodist University, called people like me bicultural. But with Latinos poised to make up one in four Americans in the blink of a big brown eye, I preferred to call it American.
Of course, most people at this party didn't care about any of that. They cared that there was a "Latin" band that lived in Los Angeles with this kind of money--a band they'd never heard of until the L.A. Times ran a story on the donation. Everyone knew the statistics about the growing Hispanic population, and for money reasons wanted to connect with us. So they came. But they had no idea what they were getting into with my boys. Mine? Well. I called the Chimps mine, but really I was theirs: their manager, their agent, their publicist, their whipping girl.
Five million bucks was the sort of gift American schools traditionally got from benefactors whose non-Spanish last names were read in soothing monotones at the end of programming on NPR and PBS. And a private Getty shindig was the sort of shiny event people attended in cocktail dresses and bow ties.
In other words, there was something horrifying to my sorority-girl brain (Sigma Lambda Gamma, y'all) about the Chimps showing up in neon cowboy gear like rowdy goat-humping bumpkins from Chihuahua. I knew, of course, that the Chimps had made their millions (yes, millions) playing "workingman's" music in rodeo arenas from Zacatecas to Whittier, and that they, bless their hearts, did not forget this, though they had amassed enough of a fortune to forget whatever they pleased. Maybe the goofy getups were a statement to the effect. Either that, or they just had no clue.
So, while I was proud of my guys for being able to give away enough money to attract the movers and shakers of this achy-quakey town--and, I should add, support me and my potentially unhealthy handbag habit--I was also a well-bred woman of twenty-nine, whose lovely, Avon-selling momma had worked herself near to death to give me the kind of life she'd never had. The kind of life where I made good money, where I was never assumed to be stupid for lack of credentials, where I knew what side of the table-setting the bread plate went on; like Momma woulda been if her parents, my dear but insanely backward Granny and Grampy Lopez, hadn't been the kind of old-world first-generation Mexicanos who said things like "Only easy women go to college," and "Don't talk so much or act too smart cuz no man's never gonna go fer no woman like that." Sigh.
It had been my idea to give "chimp change," as I called the hefty donation,to UCLA. I suggested the academic gift as a way to raise the group's visibility among mainstream Americans, and in the process raise the profile of all successful Mexicans and Meximericans here, which, in the end, might improve my life, too. And, who knew, maybe if L.A. powerbrokers started to see that we Messicans had money--real money--and not just, I dunno, pruning shears and toilet brushes, they might start to produce movies where The Mexican was a person and not a gun, and Hidalgo was a human instead of a stinkin' (but determined) horse. It was a long shot, but so was everything worth doing, in my humble opinion, and in Hollywood, there was plenty that needed doin', Amen.
"Orale, Alexis!" shouted Filoberto, the bandleader, spying me. His lips pulled back to reveal a checkerboard of yellow and gold teeth, one or two outlined with what looked like brown eyeliner. He slowly lifted one hand, then flicked it toward the floor, in one fast snap, as if a roach had landed there and he wanted it off. This was Filoberto's "mero mero" mime-speak for "I'm here and I'm manly, ahua, Amen."
I hurried to greet my band.
"Filoberto," I said, kissing him on the cheek as was our custom. He smelled unwashed. "Hi, honey."
I leaned close to his ear and whispered, "Didn't you want to wear the Armani suits?"
"Pues, no," Filoberto replied. Both his hands dove to his crotch area, and I cringed. I didn't want to look, but I did. He gripped and shook his enormous belt buckle up and down, and a few of the Chimps followed suit, in a strange approximation of a circle jerk. I was relieved. I'd feared Filoberto was going to whip "it" out, as he'd done backstage last month when I suggested he be nicer to a reporter. "Who's the man here?" he'd asked as "it" peered out like a deflated one-eyed slug.
In general, belt buckles are a good idea. They keep your pants up, hold the belt on. They're useful. But when they are the size of a salad plate and encrusted with red, green, and white gemstones sparkling in the shape of a Mexican flag, there's something unforgivably, I dunno, Liberace about them. Particularly when they cut deep into the flesh of a beer belly. I looked down the lineup of Chimps. They all had them.
"Why?" I whispered to Filoberto.
Filoberto stared hard into my eyes. "Look," he said, in the perfect English he often pretended he didn't speak. The Chimps were from Sacramento, California, but pretended to be from Sinaloa. "Mexicans gave us the money that we gave tothe school. We owe our careers to Mexicans. We are Mexicans. And we're not going to dress like gringos just to make your little ooh-ooh friends here comfortable."
Ooh-ooh? Nice to see Filoberto not only speaking English, but enhancing it as well.
"I didn't ask you to dress like a 'gringo,'" I said, cringing at the racial slur. My stepdaddy was a "gringo" and the nicest man in the world. "I asked you to wear Armani."
"And I should ask you to suck it," he whispered in my ear. "Because this is my band and we do what I want. Got it?"
"Okay," I said, forcing a smile once more. "I understand. It's your choice and I respect that. I hope I didn't offend you. Good luck tonight." I started to walk away. Whenever anger bubbled up, that was the best policy. Back away, calm down, then talk.
"It's not us that need to change," called Filoberto, pointing to the crowd. "It's them."
Blah, blah, blah. Filoberto still thought we were fighting the Alamo.
"You're right," I lied. "I'm proud of you. Knock 'em dead, sweetie."
Many of the elites assembled here did not seem to know quite how to regard the Chimps, and seemed to be searching for the right facial expression. Condescending benevolence did not work. But neither did obsequious curiosity. Mostly, those unfamiliar with the border gangsta-polka world--folks who had, I think, come expecting a salsa band--stared at the Chimps in disbelief. Heck, I stared at them in disbelief. But why not have the Chimps at the Getty? After all, the Chimps lived in the U.S., paid taxes in the U.S., and made as much money off their music as many major U.S. pop stars, even if Rolling Stone, Spin, and every pop music writer in the land ignored them with almost vicious regularity.
With relief I saw three representatives from UCLA emerge from inside the museum and walk toward us in three-piece suits. At least they got it. The cute one, Samuel Reyes, managed to be cute even though he was balding. He smiled at me and my pulse quickened.
As the university people got closer, I stepped forward, past Filoberto, to be the first one to greet them. I heard Filoberto sigh behind me, dismayed yet again that I believed I could, you know, wear pants.
"Samuel," I said with a huge smile. I gripped his hand and shook it with authority. He held it longer than he needed to and searched my eyes.
"They look great," he said. "They're courageous."
"Yes, they are. This is a wonderful event. You've done such a good job."
Samuel nodded. He agreed he was great. A proper Texan man would have returned the compliment. But, Toto, we weren't in Texas anymore.
As the university people mingled with the Chimps and prepared to present the award, I strolled off to schmooze. After harvesting a few business cards for later use--yes, I hoped to one day escape the Chimp world--I stood back to observe the Chimps. I soon wished I hadn't.
First, a well-known Pacific Palisades socialite and her husband timidly approached Filoberto to introduce themselves. Filoberto made eye contact only with the man, though the woman was the one speaking to him.
"So nice to meet you," she said. "Congratulations."
Filoberto addressed her large, buoyant breasts, a perfect pair of surgically constructed half-grapefruits like so many in Southern California. "So nice to meet you," he leered. Then, to her husband, he added, "Congratulations," with a suggestive chortle.
The couple quickly hurried off to inspect a sculpture.
As I headed back toward Filoberto to give him a quickie etiquette lesson, a tall, gorgeous waitress sashayed past the line of Chimps with her tray of shrimp. Filoberto slapped her ass. He needed a lot more than etiquette. And I needed a new job.
The tuna cubes floated past once more, and though I was hungry, I couldn't do it. I couldn't. Once was enough. See, at the center of my fat-saturated heart, I was a steak-and-potatoes girl who didn't like exercise unless it involved a man in my bed. I was Christian, and unapologetically Republican, as my momma and daddy raised me. You can imagine how far this got me in Hell-eh, where it seemed to me everyone wanted to spend their free time doing yoga, volunteering for liberal causes, or lecturing the rest of us to join them. Oh, and I had a flat chest--a crime in Southern California.
Anyhoo. Schmoozing. I walked with confidence to a small cluster of beautiful people and planted myself among them.
"Hello," I said, sticking out my hand to the friendliest-looking person. "I'm Alexis Lopez, manager for the group we're honoring tonight. Thanks for coming!"
The assembled screenwriters, actors, and lone MTV animator shook hands with me. I stood with my toes turned out ninety degrees, in ballet's third position, because to point them directly toward the subject of your current conversation meant you had committed to them, and nothing was more fatal in room-working than committing to a single person or group.
I had friends. Granted, they were mostly in Dallas, but still. I didn't come to cocktail receptions to make friends. I came to make contacts. I took everyone's card, even the animator.
After listening to them complain and gossip for three minutes, I pretended to see someone I knew. Time to move on.
"Guys, really great to meet you." I opened my business card holder and dealt like I worked a Vegas craps table. "Thanks again."
I strolled away with the uneasy sense I was being followed.
"Those idiots yours?"
The female voice was dusky, and close to my ear, and I felt the red tones of her wine breath, laced with dark, musky perfume, on the back of my neck. I knew that voice. I had perfect voice recognition.
I turned toward the voice and saw the tall, slender cocktail waitress Filoberto had smacked. Dressed in a well-fitting white blouse (okay, truth be told, it strained at the bosom as if she carried water balloons in her bra) and black slacks, she had lustrous long hair, brown with gold and honey highlights, wavy and down to the middle of her back. Beautiful gold earrings I recognized as $550 Paloma Picasso designs (I also had perfect price recognition) flashed on her lobes, and I felt ashamed for wondering how a cocktail waitress might afford something like that. She was almost six feet tall, but must have weighed about 130 pounds. I had perfect weight recognition, too. Her electric blue eyes danced with amusement and what appeared to be controlled rage. The golden brown skin reddened on the cheeks as she prepared to speak. I recognized her from somewhere. She was the kind of woman you couldn't take your eyes off of, even if you wanted to because she reminded you of how you'd never be that thin or gorgeous without surgical and divine intervention.
"You mean the boys in the band?" I asked her.
She nodded.
I glanced at Filoberto. He had hoisted his barrel-body onto the small stage and planted his feet apart, like an easel. It was the stance he took when he was about to sing. It wasn't time to sing, but Filoberto did not care. Without a microphone, he began to belt out a few bars of his favorite ditty, "El Rey," by José Alfredo Jimenez.
"Yo se bien que estoy afuera," he began. I did a quick check of the faces in the room and realized that, to them, Filoberto was quaint, a glorified restaurant mariachi, while, to him, he was the King of Mexico.
"They're mine," I sighed, thinking, For better or worse and mostly worse.
"Okay, then." Her woodsy voice was as familiar as her face. She scowled and placed a firm hand on my shoulder. "Tell the fat one to keep his fucking hands to himself unless he wants to swallow his tiny balls. Whole."
Filoberto sang on: "Con dinero y sin dinero, hago siempre lo que yo quiero ..."
"I'm sorry," I said to the cocktail waitress. "He's a bit ..." I searched for the right word and smiled so strenuously, and with such artifice, that my face cramped. It was just like Momma used to say, you did things for work that you'd never do in real life. "He's a bit old-fashioned."
The waitress laughed at me as if I had told her a transparent lie, tossed her glorious mane, and it struck me that in this party full of beautiful people, she, with her large chest and flat belly (I, for the record, was the precise, schlumpy reverse of that) was probably the most beautiful.
"He's a bit of an asshole," she corrected me. "And if you don't take care of the problem, I'll take care of it myself." She held up a fist before smacking it into the palm of her other hand. "Black belt in karate, girl."
Something about the way she grinned was incredibly familiar.
"Have we met before?" I asked her.
Her large eyes narrowed as she inspected me, a manicured finger to her full, pouty lips, and finally she shook her head. "Did you go to Cate?" she asked.
"Where?"
"The Cate School, in Santa Barbara. But if you have to ask, the answer's no." She looked me up and down. "Nope," she said. "We've never met."
"Then I apologize," I said, aware of my thin lips and double chin. It looked like the waitress had porcelain caps on her teeth; at a thousand bucks a tooth, I wondered, again, how it was possible. I remembered the first time I went to get a manicure in Los Angeles, when the Vietnamese nail lady told me in shock that I was "pretty, but natural pretty, chubby pretty," as if this were rare. In L.A., even the help had invested in cosmetic surgery. "I just really thought I knew you from somewhere."
Her posture softened and she lowered her voice the way a friend might, if she were going to say something not exactly appropriate for the setting, something conspiratorial and delicious the way my girlfriends back in Dallas used to do. How I missed my girls! "Do you ever watch novelas?" she asked.
I nodded.
A novela was a Spanish-language soap opera, a dramatic miniseries that played every night of the week on Univision or Telemundo for a season, and if your family was from West Dallas, like mine was, there was little chance you'd escaped them growing up, especially if you had a grandmother like Granny Lopez, who lived for the melodrama and happy endings.
"That's it!" I exclaimed. "You played that illiterate peasant girl who fell in love with Fernando Colunga on Sus Raices!"
Sus Raices, or "Her Roots," had been the only novela I'd watched as an addiction--with my sorority sisters, religiously--and this comely cocktail waitress had been not only beautiful, but a very competent actress we'd envied and admired. I'd even bought a copy of that Spanish-language gossip rag, TV y Novelas, when she was on the cover, and remembered having been surprised to learn the actress with the perfect Spanish was actually half-Dominican and half-French, born and raised in Santa Barbara, California. From a rich family. That explained the teeth, earrings, and, quite possibly, the boobs. But why was she working here?
I grabbed her arm and heard my voice rise up in excitement. "Oh my gosh! You're Marcella Gauthier Bosch!" I remembered her name, even though it had been almost ten years since the show aired. That probably made her somewhere around thirty now. I remembered reading something, too, about how she had hoped to give up Spanish-language TV for mainstream Hollywood. She'd quit novelas around the same time as Salma Hayek, but apparently had not fared as well.
"Weren't you going to do some English work?" I felt awkwardly starstruck, and a little embarrassed and confused that this woman was serving cocktails. It wasn't right. She nodded, confirming the fact that she was the actress I had in mind.
She said, "Uh-huh. But I refuse to play a maid with an accent, or a crack whore, so I guess you could say I'm taking my time finding the perfect role."
She glanced worriedly over her shoulder at a tall, stern man in black pants and a white shirt who stood behind the bar tapping his watch in her direction. He looked like Moby.
"Yeah, okay, you relentless, meaningless sphincter," she said under her breath. Then, to me she added, "Please ask that fat piece of corrido chimpanzee shit to leave me alone, okay? Or I'll get him. Wax on, wax off." Her hands spun in front of her face and she let out a low crazy karate wail that made me think of Angelina Jolie. She actually rather resembled Angelina. Her, and Carmen Electra.
"Wait!" I cried as she kickboxed away, far too graceful and angry for her job. I didn't say it, but I thought, What on earth are you doing serving cocktails?
I wondered, with no small amount of self-interest, if she had good representation. I noticed that more than one of the elites, the men in particular, stared at her. It was a huge accomplishment to turn heads in Los Angeles, a city withperhaps more good-looking people per capita than any other in the world. I knew L.A. was brutal, but the apparent fall of Marcella Gauthier Bosch made me want to cry.
At the stage end of the terrace, a microphone screeched feedback as the top brass from UCLA prepared to hand the Chimps some sort of plaque and answer questions from the press. The band was supposed to be up there, next to the university people in a photo-friendly chorus line, but they were scattered around the terrace, doing other things, like throwing pennies into a fountain that was actually a sculpture you weren't supposed to touch. I intercepted Filoberto as he began to move toward Marcella Gauthier Bosch again, licking his lips.
"Don't touch the help, and don't talk to them," I told him. "You need to get over to the podium and talk about how exciting all this is for you. How honored you are. The importance of education for your people, etcetera. Remember what we talked about?"
"Don't tell me what to do," he countered with beer breath. "You do your job, I do mine." His eyes did not move from Marcella's lovely body as she waltzed here and there with the tray, a mixture of hope and fury in her eyes. I truly hated women with flat bellies and big chichis. I did. I hoped Jesus would forgive me. Envy was such an ugly thing.
"Please," I said. "It's not a strip club. It's a museum. Act like a gentleman for Pete's sake. Everyone's here. The Times, The New Yorker. Everyone."
Filoberto, high on the fact that he was being celebrated as rich and powerful by a bunch of "gringos," seemed to feel invincible and shrugged out of my grip, moving forward on his mission to find and fondle Marcella.
"Trust me," I said, pulling on his lime-green fringe, "there will be plenty of other women in your life."
"Me vale madre," he said, steamrolling on. "Quiero esa buenota." Polite translation: I could give a rat's behind.
I thought, frantic.
"She's pregnant," I lied, in loudly whispered Spanish. His expression changed instantly, to fear. I put a kind hand on his forearm, like an older sister offering a kind-hearted suggestion. "I know her, and ..." I thought hard. "And I think she's sick, amorcito, that's why she's so skinny. You deserve better. I'm just looking out for you."
Filoberto made a disgusted face that I thought went nicely with the ensuing crotch-scratch and loud exclamation of "nimodo," and stopped following Marcella.
Yes, ma'am, there were times that I was proud to represent this band--but thiswas not one of them. I didn't know whether to be proud of myself for smoothing the situation, or ashamed to my bones for lying. But Los Angeles was nothing if not a lie factory, and the longer I lived here, the more lying--like asthma and Starbucks--became essential.
I dragged Filoberto by the hand to the podium, and released him to the care of sexy Samuel. The professor stood with a tiny, pretty woman, no more than five feet tall, with fierce black eyes and shiny dark shoulder-length hair streaked with a few strands of white and cut carelessly and stylelessly, as if she might have done it herself with sewing scissors while absently listening to NPR.
"Alexis," said Samuel, "I'd like you to meet my wife, Olivia."
Dangit. He was married? I'd been hoping he wasn't, and was a little surprised, given the shameless way the boy had flirted with me, that he was married. Or at least I thought he'd been flirting. But that was the problem with me. I misread men all the time. I thought they wanted me when all they wanted was a sandwich. And I had, more than once, ignored a wonderful guy who loved me because I did not believe in my ample gut that a guy like that could in fact love a woman with an ample gut. All the good men in this town were either married, or gay, which is why I was stuck dating a loser of a newspaper writer named Daniel, who was supposed to be here with me but who'd had a last-minute assignment covering a rap-world shooting. I shouldn't have been relieved Daniel was elsewhere, not to mention an elsewhere involving violence, but I was. He was almost forty, and wore his baggy jeans so low you could see his Fubu underwear; worse, he thought that was cool. I used to think he'd improve with time, but recently it was looking like that wasn't going to happen.
Olivia held her hand out to shake mine and I was impressed by her strength. For a petite, slouching wisp of a woman, she was powerful. Even the tendons in her forearms looked toned, as if she never ate fat and ran marathons for fun, like Gandhi. Samuel took Filoberto to one side and began prepping him for the press conference, and I was left with his wife.
She hunched and cowered as if she were afraid of something. Me? Was she actually afraid of me? How silly. She clutched her sweating wineglass with two hands, and sipped cautiously, her eyes closed to slits, observing everything around us with what I took to be judgmental amusement sprinkled with paranoia.
She wore a simple, linty black jersey dress with a too-long skirt; it would have been just right for a Mormon schoolteacher, and looked like it might have seen better years. Her jewelry was a stained-looking sterling silver in need of a polish.Her navy blue pumps were worn out and dusty, and did not match her dress; she stood awkwardly in them, as if she were more accustomed to boots, or running shoes. Or no shoes at all. She wore no hose, and the tops of her feet had a couple of ugly black hairs sprouting on them. What, she hadn't heard of hot wax? Nair? A razor? Something. Her purse was the kind my granny used, from a Wal-Mart or a Target, sort of a mesh material with nylon underneath it. Pinned to the strap were about a dozen buttons with left-leaning political slogans in Spanish and English, the usual sort of United Farm Workers/Frida Kahlo kind of nonsense I'd seen so much of since moving here, and a particularly disturbing pin that looked like a Bush/Cheney bumper sticker but in the place of "Cheney" was the word "Chupa," Spanish for "sucks." The nerve.
Still, Olivia radiated intelligence and the intangible quality of grace, almost as a defense mechanism, in inverse proportion, it seemed, to her shabby wardrobe. She had to have been aware of the many gorgeous gowns in the room, and the fact that she wasn't in one. In spite of her politics, and likely because of my generous reserves of pity, I liked something about her. My momma always accused me of "collecting strays," meaning that of all my Latina sorority sisters I was the most likely to befriend the homeless and drug-addicted people we met during service projects, the one most likely to hang out with needy folks, the one most likely to want to adopt a foster child in the event that I failed to produce a child of my own--which, considering the odds lately, was more than likely. This little Olivia person seemed a little needy, and I wanted to ease her suffering somehow.
"So, you're married to Samuel?" I asked. It was an idiotic question, but I didn't know what else to say to her. We certainly couldn't talk about fashion. I stopped myself from the thought because it was so not nice and I had been raised to be nice.
Leave judgments to God, I said, but it wasn't always easy.
"He's really nice," I said of Samuel. "He's been a great help to me." I also imagined he'd be good in bed, but didn't raise the subject.
"For ten years now," she said with a smile sadder than I thought should accompany such wonderful news. Her English was tinged with a slight Spanish accent. She sighed. "We've been together a long time."
"Are you in academia, too?" I asked, assuming, given the collection of horrible pins and the shoes, that the answer would be yes.
She shook her head and sucked at the wine with a loud slurp, shrinking even further into the thin shell of her shoulders