“Sí, bueno.”
“Good. I can’t wait to see it on you. What time is Ignacio coming for you?”
“He comes at three.”
“Three! There’s not much time. Come on to my room. I’ll work on your hair at my vanity table, and we’ll experiment with some makeup, eye shadow, and lipstick. You can take a shower in my room first, if you want. Well?” she said when I didn’t move.
I started to get up.
“Don’t forget the dress,” she said, “and the shoes and the earrings.”
I gathered it all and followed her to her room, not without trepidation. This would be the first fiesta I had gone to outside my little village in Mexico. I wondered if the people there would be so much different from my people back home that I would feel as if I was with strangers, like a foreigner. Wearing Sophia’s beautiful and expensive dress, putting on makeup, and wearing expensive jewels would perhaps make me look alien, too different. And yet I had nothing good enough from my own wardrobe.
I did not like the way Sophia wanted my makeup, but if I made the smallest complaint or questioned anything, she went into a rage, telling me I was ungrateful and that she was just trying to help me look beautiful.
“You have to look American beautiful,” she said, “not Mexican. You’re my cousin.”
I had no idea what that meant, but I put on the eye shadow, lashes, rouge, and thick red lipstick. We brushed out my hair and had it lie differently from any style I had worn before. Afterward, she was dissatisfied with the way the dress fit me and made me wear one of her older bras, something she said raised my breasts and made my cleavage deeper. It was nearly three by the time we were finished. She said that because I looked so beautiful, she wanted to lend me a shawl for the night hours, when it would be cooler.
Then she and I went downstairs to wait for Ignacio. He called from the box at the gate, and Señora Flores pressed the button to open it for him. She came out to tell us Ignacio had arrived to pick me up. He was right on time. Sophia went with me to the front entrance, and we watched him drive up in his father’s pickup truck. There were still some pieces of lawn machinery in the back. Sophia laughed at the sight of it, but when Ignacio stepped out, dressed in his traditional fiesta outfit, she stopped laughing. He did look very handsome.
He wore a gold-embroidered black jacket with gold running down the sides of his pants, a white shirt with a red sash, shiny black boots, and an embroidered sombrero. His shoulders looked fuller and wider.
“He’s good-looking,” Sophia said. “Go have a good time.” She pushed me out, closing the door quickly as if she didn’t want him to see her.
I hurried out to greet him. I could see that the makeup, my changed hairstyle, and the expensive dress took him by surprise. He quickly smiled.
“Muy bonita,” he said, nodding at me.
“Gracias. Y usted, muy hermoso, Ignacio.”
He gazed at the front door. “Su tía? I should say hello, no?”
“She’s not home. No está aquí,” I said.
He nodded, looking a little relieved, and then moved quickly to the truck and opened the door for me. I glanced back at the house and thought I saw Jesse looking out of Edward’s bedroom window. The curtain closed quickly.
“I cleaned the seat,” Ignacio said, thinking that was why I was hesitating.
“Gracias,” I said, smiled, and got in quickly.
“To live in such a big house,” he said, looking at my aunt’s hacienda and shaking his head. “I’d get lost, I’m sure,” he said in Spanish.
I nodded.
I am lost in there, I thought, but I said nothing more about it. I was thinking about the fiesta now. I had not been here long, but all that had happened left me so insecure that I wasn’t confident about anything I was doing. I so longed for the warmth of family, for the love that Ignacio enjoyed. I wanted to be a part of this, because I knew it would be like going home. I only hoped that I would be accepted.
We went off the main highway onto a side road and then to his parents’ home. It was not hard to see that a fiesta was about to take place. The outside was decorated with streamers of red, green, and white, the colors of the Mexican flag, and balloons were tied to every place possible on the front of the small but well-kept house. Because his father owned a gardening and landscape company, there were especially pretty, well-trimmed hedges, bougainvillea along the walls and fences, a rich green lawn, and a yard filled with grapefruit, orange, and lemon trees.
Both sides of the street were already lined with the cars of their guests. Families were parking and walking to the front entrance when we pulled into the driveway. Everyone was dressed in traditional Mexican style, except me, of course. I was afraid to get out of the truck now that I saw the women and the young girls approaching the house. There were women in white cotton and lace campesinas, or peasant farmer dresses, dresses with embroidered flowers, and simple white shifts with loose tops we called huipiles. Everything looking hand-made. Both women and men wore sombreros. Most of the men wore pleated shirts with red or green scarfs and dark pants or red and green sashes.
I rea
lized that the simple clothes Abuela Anabela had packed in my old suitcase would have been more appropriate. Dressed as I was, I was sure I looked like a Mexican girl trying to put on airs. What was I thinking? Why did I let Sophia send me off like this? Was it more important to please her or to please Ignacio’s family and friends, people with whom I shared so much more? I wished this was my aunt’s home instead of the palace in which she lived and where we were all in different ways trapped.
“C’mon,” Ignacio urged.
“I feel foolish,” I said. “I am not dressed correctly.”