Fingerprints

The apartment was a sizzle and clang of pipes, even with the window open, the air a confusion of cooking smells. A salon dryer, mousses, gels, sprays, boxes of straightener, permanent and nonpermanent hair color, cotton puffs and pearl-white plastic weave-imprinted bowls holding small clips, long clips, bobby pins, and wave clips furnished that corner of Tomasa’s living room.

On the phone, the señora had said, “You come, but I am working.” Thirty-three, ten years younger than Julia, Tomasa had told Julia how to address her. So much for the directive from Julia’s supervisor, “Address them as doña.” Julia’s job at the Women’s Empowerment Center at UMass was the best job she’d had, and she meant to stay, though cuts were coming. The good news was that Tomasa had agreed to be recorded and would sign the release today.

Tomasa handed Julia a tall glass, its gleam caught by the afternoon sun, and filled it with Coke before Julia realized she was holding it. Then Tomasa went back to her work, lining up pink plastic rollers on the head of her neighbor, Lidia. She fastened a roller, popped it in its pink plastic cage, and moved on to the next. Julia stayed put in the cushioned chair Tomasa had offered her, facing Tomasa. It tilted each time Julia did.

Tomasa laughed toward her visitor as she concentrated on Lidia, who sat under one of those big salon dryers in the crowded living room, the kitchen off by the entrance, a sturdy clothes rack of frilly dresses along the living room’s far wall, a red velvet curtain to the left. The kitchen was lit up, and three children sat around the table with books, notebooks, and pencils, working quietly.

“So please, Miss Julia, tell me, why you are here?”

Julia knew that Tomasa had moved from a little town in Honduras to Swansea—this Massachusetts town where Tomasa’s uncle, next his wife and three children, then her sister and mother, and finally two cousins and a five-year-old nephew lived. Julia knew they must have come by bus into Mexico, probably paying coyotes to get them across the border. Going through immigration would have been impossible—they couldn’t have gone to the embassy and requested a visa. They weren’t rich. They had to be undocumented, most of them, anyway. Julia explained that WED, the Women’s Empowerment Development project, had gotten a grant to build on other research about immigrant success. And Julia had gotten the project.

Julia had taught kids from Central America, but she rarely saw their mothers at the school. They were different from the others—respectful, looked you in the eye, smiled without wile, as though your speaking to them was a present. A social worker said that since they were new immigrants and didn’t come from a hand-out system in Central America, they knew to work for what they got. Who were the mothers of these kids? Julia was more than curious; she was attracted to people who have walked up mountains—and come back down. Mothers, especially.

“Doña Tomasa . . .”

“Tomasa is okay.”

“You know the university talked to Deysi Garcia at the Latina Health Center. She told us you are a strong woman—the kind of successful woman we should talk to. She said you helped build a community, con éxito, in Honduras.”

When Julia had visited a friend in Mexico, the testosterone-voiced DJ on “Radio Monterrrrrrey” was always presenting the next pop song, “Su primer éxito, ‘Mi Amor.’ ”

“Success?” Tomasa brushed her hair back and straightened her flowered short-sleeve blouse over her jeans that had sparkles embedded in the rear pockets. “She tell you I have success? No, I am not sure I know this Deysi Garcia.” She plopped down, then jumped back up.

Don’t lose her, Julia told herself. “Well, our program wants to help other women become strong by hearing the example of successful women like you.”

“Why are you doing this kind of work?”

“That’s what I want to explain.”

Tomasa hovered over the woman in rollers, checking her work. “Is this really a kind of work? Okay, I hear of research—investigación, right?—but what it is for? I mean—really for.” A long pause. “Success. Hmh.” That was all. “You have a tape. I buy a tape for me yesterday. There,” Tomasa pointed. “You make me a copy, right? It is the only way. My friend tell me.” She nodded toward the counter where a tape sat, still in its cellophane.

Julia smiled a yes, and at Tomasa’s nod, pushed Record.

Tomasa shifted her body toward Julia. She reached up to pull the chain and lowered the lights on the standing lamp near Lidia. “Well, I do not know about success. I know about goals. Education. In Honduras I say myself, ‘My kids are small. I cannot fit what we need into the money I have. When they are older, they will not have a high school education. Hey, in Honduras I’m not going to give them what they need the most!’ And my relative was sick.”

Something frying in the kitchen, plantains, Julia guessed, that crackling of water against oil.

Tomasa sighed, as though Julia was one more institutional barrier she had to overcome in this new country. Maybe she saw Julia as a government representative threatening her family’s well-being. Now Julia wondered why she did want to do this work—taking women’s stories from them, writing them up for another institution, with footnotes, maybe even publishing them? Would the women get to read them? Correct them? Respond to readers? What Julia really wanted was entry into Tomasa’s life.

Julia fought to keep from looking beyond the curtained-off area to the left of the room. She also avoided taking the liberty of getting up to examine the dozen or so ruffled dresses—probably quinceañera dresses—hanging behind Tomasa and Lidia. Outside a rooster crowed in the dark. Julia looked up at Tomasa, still rolling and pinning Lidia.

“Los gallos, they go crazy,” Tomasa said, laughing.

Tomasa’s hair was a pale blonde, a sharp contrast to her naturally tan face. She struck Julia as pretty. Her high cheekbones reminded Julia of her mother’s Slavic face in old photos. Even her apron was like her mother’s.

Tomasa looked up at Julia every now and then, and now, with a complicit smile to Lidia, already asleep, whispered, “Lidia,” patting the dryer. “Take a sueñecito, corazón.”

Julia had her old GE tape recorder, the first voice-activated one she’d used in her ESL classes. It still had her children’s fingerprints on it from their faked interviews those allotted weekends together—just after the custody was defined, a time that always seemed to stand still. Years later, after she had lost them through a constricted joint custody decision, she would listen to that tape. There she was, the obstreperous Bulgarian countess answering her ten-year-old, Natasha, an NPR straight-woman type, with Georgy, a noisy seven-year-old, in the background. You could hear Natasha trying not to crack a smile. Later Julia would take the tape out of the smirched cassette case, slip it into her boombox, and listen for their alliance in the silences there—just Nastasha and Julia’s—in their charade.

One Saturday night, when Natasha was wonderfully depleted from Dress-Up Drama on the mattress in Julia’s room, and Julia was about to rub each of their backs, Natasha said, “Mom, you don’t have to rub me. I’m okay.” And the next visit, “Mom, I can read to myself, you know. It’s okay.” Julia accepted, and soon they let themselves separate—too soon.

Tomasa seemed more relaxed, and Julia leaned back in the soft chair. “Okay, Miss Julia,” Tomasa announced, “it’s okay for me. Many times I am careful about talking to people, but . . . go. Ask me your questions. I will try to help you.”

And together the two women settled the black tape recorder and microphone on the arm of the new wine brocade sofa Tomasa had bought on layaway and on which she sat. Julia plugged the recorder into the unreliable-looking outlet.

“Are you sure the machine is on, Miss Julia?”

Julia sensed some buy-in. Might Tomasa actually want to tell her story this soon? Julia decided Tomasa had let her know.

“Let me check.” Tomasa tapped the mic. She checked the lights and dials like a kid. They were in this together, this first time, anyway. Tomasa would trust her.

Suddenly Tomasa looked directly at Julia. “Hey, Miss Julia, can I ask you a question? What are you going to do with this tape? Really?”

“You can talk as much as you want. English or Spanish.”

“I will speak English.”

“Better than my Spanish,” Julia laughed. “This”—she patted the recorder—“just makes it easier for me to listen to you, so I don’t have to take notes.”

“Well, maybe I will be careful what I say.”

Julia stayed with Tomasa’s eyes. “You can be careful.”

“I can. I know how.”

Tomasa adjusted herself and considered her response, even though Julia hadn’t asked a direct question. Tomasa seemed respectful and friendly in the presence of the machine, as if she were speaking to a paying audience.

Julia explained the voice activation, and in a moment, pressed Record.

“No, no, I’m not going to do it. I have to practice my voice.” They both laughed. “Yes, we must practice our voices. Andale!”

So Julia turned off the recorder.

“Okay, okay,” Tomasa said. “We have to be ready now. Turn it on, Miss Julia.”

Tomasa held herself erect and cupped one hand in the other on her lap. “You need opportunities, the support of a good family, and to know what is right.” Tomasa flung out her arm toward the rack of dresses, as though welcoming a performer onstage. “My boss fired me for no reason, so! I make dresses for quinceañeras.” Now Tomasa reached for a framed diploma on the wall, whisked it clean with the sleeve of her sweater, and showed it off under the floor lamp beside the sleeping Lidia. “I have a diploma in hairdressing, from Honduras—cosmetología,” as though announcing to the public she was documented, legal.

A child coughed behind the red curtain. Tomasa stopped, listening. “My Pablito. He is not feeling good.”

Julia tended to change the subject at moments like this—as if she could save them or herself from the embarrassment of a silence, a cough. In spite of her training to stay with the moment, that silence said something. Tomasa stood and quickly moved in the opposite direction from the curtain, toward the kitchen. Barely visible to Julia now, the kitchen had been in open view when she’d entered the apartment a half hour ago—the kids working there quietly at their homework. She would have loved to go with her now to see the soft, creased child arms bent alongside their work. But this was their first meeting—you had to win that familiarity and invitation.

“You kids! Anybody has trouble with homework!” These were not questions, and the silent response was what Julia imagined army privates maintained, heads to task. “You tell me. Right! No excuses! Good kids! Comen el papaya, Armando and the others will be here soon, and then we’ll eat.”

Water ran through a vibrating faucet, shaking the innards of the building as it was turned on, then off. In a moment Tomasa sat opposite Julia again, wiping her hands on her apron, put her hand under the dryer to test the heat. Lidia was snoring now, softly. All seemed well.

“So!” Tomasa said to the microphone, significantly, asking Julia with her eyes if she was doing it right. Julia nodded yes. “You want to know about my life. I am not sure what you want to know.” She looked at Julia and then at the recorder, as if feeling out who was the better to deliver her story to, who the reliable listener. “Like I tell my kids, I had to live in a garage. The girls made fun of me in school, until I left.” Tomasa laughed into her hand and then poked Julia on the arm, laughing now into her eyes, and Julia surprised herself by laughing aloud with her. She warmed to the intimacy Tomasa seemed to offer and that Julia hadn’t had to earn. At the same time, Julia could see that Tomasa’s laugh expressed embarrassment and maybe even the thrill of recording her voice.

“The garage had windows. I grabbed a cloth and cleaned them inside, but the outside was always dirty—we could not see out. Bad boys walked by—not our boys, our family, but neighborhood boys. We slept there, cooked there. Umm! good food. The best tortillas, not like here from a package. For breakfast. You mix the masa and the water and slap them like this.” Tomasa submitted perfect staccato claps to the recorder, like the sounds of a flamenco dancer. “And baleadas, for something special, right there in the garage, cheese and pintos and crema, even maybe huevos, jalapeños, aguacates—and for a wedding, beef! The best!” She licked her lips.

“So! My mother locked us up, she went to work and she left us in the garage, all four kids!” Tomasa’s eyes were big and expectant. “She thinks she’s going keep us safe! Can you believe?” And she exploded in laughter, her eyes inviting Julia to join in the rapture of the irony. Sitting there, they leaned into each other laughing, as Tomasa touched Julia on the knee. Julia realized she hadn’t heard what Tomasa had said. Instead, she had been watching her face, feeling her touch, returning the warmth of her laughter.

“Yes,” Tomasa said, pulling her teeth along her lower lip, “my mother—I should not say this—she was powerful, too much. Sometimes I was angry. I hated her and loved her, I loved her more when I grew strong. I grew strong because of her.”

“Of course you did, Tomasa. One day when I was seventeen, my mother walked into my bedroom when I was brushing my hair in front of the mirror, excited to see my boyfriend. She looked at me in the long mirror. ‘He’s not good enough for you.’ I felt that coming, you know, her attitude, because I slapped the brush on my naked thigh.” Julia struck her thigh. “I can feel it now. Nobody was good enough for me. She was always working, helping my father and learning everything—German, chess, flute, bowling, sewing. She liked to win; she always found the seven-letter words, except once. So I hated her too. I loved her too.”

“Sewing! Americans know to sew?”

“Well, I don’t! But my mother was born in another country.”

They laughed and Tomasa played the tape back. “That’s not me!” she said, laughing. “But that is you!” she exclaimed, pointing at Julia, and Julia laughed too.

Tomasa rose and turned to raise the hairdryer up and over Lidia’s head, whose ears were now plum-colored and swollen. Lidia moaned as she awoke. “Me quema!” which Julia thought meant the chemical in the permanent had affected her ears but later realized the heat had burned her.

“Yes,” Tomasa said over her shoulder to Julia, tenderly removing each pink plastic roller and its accompanying long curved aluminum clip. “Pobrecita,” fussing with the woman’s scalp and ears and neck, embracing her cheeks in her palms, placating her in Spanish, and Julia realized Lidia had been burned because Julia was there.

Lidia’s ears were pink. Tomasa touched, prodded, and poked the big curls of “mahogany” hair from their rolled shapes, helped Lidia feed her arms into the sleeves of her red sweater, and moved with her to the door without a nod to Julia, and for a moment they looked like the old allies they were. Tomasa leaned down to kiss Lidia on the cheek. No money passed between them, just the pushes, leanings, easings, whisperings, and then the door closed.

When Julia left Tomasa that first night and returned alone to her car, she had felt even more alone with her own words. How could that be? Julia drove home down Comm Ave, the recorder beside her. At a red light she turned it on. It seemed easier to be with this strange woman than with herself.

She heard herself and Tomasa laughing, and the silence when Tomasa poked her thigh.

So Tomasa’s child had been sick that long. Not just a cold.

When Julia came the next Monday, the hair dryer was unoccupied. As she set up the tape recorder, Tomasa helping her check it, she turned toward the kitchen fragrance.

“Baleadas. Snack. For you and me. And here, your glass.”

Julia smiled at the usual sparkling glass. But, eager to get started, she didn’t want to talk about food. “I was talking to a mother at the Women’s Center at UMass, you know, where I work and she hated going to her kids’ school. Do you feel that way too?”

Tomasa composed herself on the sofa, Julia on the edge of the wobbly chair. “I go to my kids’ school. If I am invited or not. If the teachers speak to me only in English or not. I am used to visiting the schools. Here they call parents to go when the kids get in trouble. My kids don’t get in trouble.”

Tomasa looked at Julia, the recorder waiting as she studied its response. “Miss Julia, you have to understand. I told my kids the story about the garage because they have almost everything they want. Well, almost; you know they have a lot of desire.”

“Desire?”

“You know, they have and they want more.”

Tomasa got up and moved into the quiet kitchen. Soon she was back holding two steaming plates of tortillas, frijoles scooped neatly beside them. She pulled the red curtain to the side and spoke softly, quickly, in Spanish. A child’s voice moaned.

Tomasa sat opposite Julia again and placed a warm plate on her lap, ready to talk. “I have a great many dreams and plans. I know that when one wants something, one can get it.”

Sometimes Julia felt caught in her thoughts. The child sounds took her away, to her memories of the lost years with her children and then made her anxious and embarrassed that she hadn’t heard Tomasa’s last words. The recorder was good only to a point. It couldn’t speak back to Tomasa. Now the movements from behind the red curtain—as when she, restless, couldn’t get comfortable in bed.

“So I got out. I escaped from the garage and made my own way. Yes, life here is difficult but also easy. Some families don’t teach kids when they are little to be united—to help each other instead of stay separate, each living for himself.” Tomasa’s smile absorbed into her and melted into thought. Her chest rose in a deep breath. “Probably you can’t understand, Miss Julia, you are from this country, you know how it works. We are different.”

Eventually I will learn her story, Julia thought, but she won’t learn mine. And she wouldn’t understand it, if she did. Julia too had a lot of desire—for lost years with her children, their mess, their demands, their tiredness, their flesh, the little one’s eyes flickering closed in front of the TV, the patina of Georgy’s violet eyelids. Still she had a lot of desire somewhere. But how could Tomasa, with her children around her, extended family and neighbors coming in and out, know desire? Need it?

“And that’s why I said to myself, I’m going to the US because I wanted my kids to superar.” Another silence. You know, get ahead?”

Julia had missed something again. She had thought éxito was the direct translation for success, but none of the women she had interviewed used the word éxito. Hmmm, success tempered, as overcoming. So Tomasa was more concerned that her kids overcome problems than that they be a success.

“Do you understand?” still rang in the air and Julia could just say, I think so, but she knew Tomasa would see through to Julia’s distraction. Julia thought back to years ago, wishing she had a tape recorder to help her know who was wrong and who was wronged.

Those nights in a pre-drunken bedroom. She’d already heard the craziness in her dead-end conversations with a husband whose questions she answered in earnest, defending herself—for not having cleaned the white wall thoroughly or for undermining his work. In the chill of that bedroom, she had longed for another’s ear—to record, to validate that something was unjust.

Now Tomasa was saying, “. . . so one can stand much deprivation. You want some more Coke?”

Quiet. “I think my English is not clear. Julia, you have a problem understanding?”

Now caught. “I have trouble understanding? Oh no, Tomasa, I am just thinking about what you said.”

So that’s how Tomasa was—serious one moment, comic the next, perfunctory, stoic, challenging, even, but not hardened or unfeeling, though maybe growing suspicious.

Suddenly Julia’s silence had solidified like cold fat in a frying pan. The machine was waiting beside the two sparkling glasses. Tomasa looked up at her, reached for the giant bottle of Coke, filled her own glass, and offered Julia some. “You don’t like Coke. You want Pepsi? What do you like? You have to know. You know that, don’t you?” Tomasa poured anyway. Julia hated soda but she smiled Tomasa off, protecting something in herself, and Julia gulped down a third of the glass to prove she liked it but didn’t need more.

“I’m sorry, Miss Julia, but I learned we have to say what we really want. And don’t want. You want to hear my story, but you don’t listen, Miss Julia.” Tomasa’s face was a blank, something had hardened in her. “Sometimes I am not sure why you are here. You ask me to talk, and I see you think to yourself. Maybe you are not really interested in my story. Maybe you just want to come into my house. I am sorry for you because you do not know how to talk to me. Please. Take your machine. I decide I have no time for this.”

Julia was exasperated with herself for having been caught drifting off. She would leave the project, tell the Women’s Center, call it “a problem with rapport.” She didn’t stop right then and say, Tomasa, your story, I hear some, I imagine the rest, forgive me, I want to come into your house, I feel good here, I listen to things you tell me—strong things. They make me think my own thoughts and ask myself questions I never wrote down for myself—the right questions.

Their visits were ruined. They had each ruled out the other. Julia sometimes felt stuck on a single movie frame of herself running—legs no longer in touch with the ground but body poised with energy for the next contact. She didn’t know what to say. It was true, she often didn’t know what she wanted—not since her children left childhood behind. Of course her mind traveled, but where did that get her?

In the car she stopped along a side street in Swansea, rewound the sluggish tape to “You have to say what you really want.” Under the street lamps she thought, Yes, I had taken my kids with me out of my garage, had said what I wanted, but the courts don’t care what you want.

Julia would have to get Tomasa back. She would think during her night walks, but when with Tomasa she would keep her mouth shut and listen. Simple enough. She started the car, angry at herself, and almost hit the convertible in back of her. The recorder slammed to the floor, its door now open. She bent down in the darkness of the car. The machine smelled like a pot handle too close to the fire. She checked it. It was stuck on Rewind.

She called Tomasa the next morning in a gentler mood and apologized for not hearing what Tomasa was saying: she was distracted by some personal problems. Tomasa said, “No worry. I was myself in a bad mood.”

“Because . . .”

“My son. I will no let go of him.”

Let go? Why would Tomasa have to let him go? Only Julia had had to do that.

“When we will meet?” Tomasa said.

“Next Monday.”

Julia drove to Radio Shack for a new recorder.

Tomasa lit a cigarette, and in the darkening day Julia noticed for the first time Tomasa’s young forehead crease, betraying her tinted foundation. She looked older, more spent. “I do not do this when they are here. Is okay for you?” She tossed the dead match into a clean ashtray.

Tomasa fell silent, her arm still raised on its way back from the ashtray. She asked something in Spanish toward the curtain. “Pablito?” No answer. She leaned forward, elbows on knees. She dragged on the cigarette.

Again, the rustling. Tomasa left, not excusing herself, and spoke softly to the child. When she returned she leaned over and turned off the recorder and looked at Julia head-on. “You do not must record everything.”

She went on as though Julia no longer needed to be there. She filled her glass, and Julia offered hers for more Pepsi. Tomasa pulled a fringed pillow from behind her and Julia placed it on her lap; it was warm. Julia listened, leaning back in the tipsy chair.

Tomasa’s mother had told her she was a renegade when at fourteen she sat in at the banana workers’ strike. Wanting to be a lawyer, she became a mother living with no electricity or water. “I’m the kind of person who when I see something bad I want to change it. And they knew I read and went to the strike meetings and was into things and became mandón, fuerte, how do you say?”

“Bossy,” Julia smiled.

“Yes! I am bossy. But it was hard. Soon my son, he didn’t want to eat. He was tired, his bones hurt, he could not breathe.”

Tomasa released a long breath and toed off her left shoe, then her right, and leaned into her hands, elbows propped on her knees.

Julia slipped her shoes off too, and the two pairs sat side by side—women’s shoes, stretched in rounded humps. Women who worked a lot and walked a lot.

“You begin learning, the real learning. You find extra hands, and someone told me, ‘Take him to Tegucigalpa, and there they said, ‘Boston has the best.’ ”

She listened for the breaths and the silences, Tomasa’s reactions to her, an unanswered question, their hesitations and unfinished thoughts not taken up. In this way she would have clues about Tomasa and probable misunderstandings. Sometimes Julia’s mind was a black machine that had broken and was now in her closet—yet still held her kids’ fingerprints.

There had been a clear day in Boxboro, Vermont, when their family was still together. Natasha had come home from school with a flyer—An Opportunity for You and Your Kids: Fingerprinting at Your Local Police Station. There, where they never locked home or car, this invitation was at once absurd and yet the thing to do in case—god forbid—you ever lost your kids. So they piled into the old station wagon, the kids astir about being little convicts at the police station they’d visited all the years of their growing up. Now the fingerprint cards lay in her safe deposit box, just “in case,” though the kids were now older.

Julia had never been able to win them back from the male judge who had taken counsel from Fred Someone, the guardian ad litem, who took counsel from their father’s blind Brazilian psychiatrist, Pascoal Someone, who decided that, since Georgy had said his father gave him pizza and hotdogs, the father was clearly the primary nurturing parent; and because he worked at home as a programmer was an important male model for the son, and since the parents agreed the children shouldn’t be separated, she would be the weekend “fun” parent. “Ma’am, let’s get this right,” the defense lawyer had said to her on the stand. “You have a history of working outside the home, is that right?” And her lawyer had said early on, “Of course, you’ll be staying in the house.” “No,” she said. “Let him have it.”

So no, no child beating or molestation, no affairs, stealing, drugs. Though she was not guilty of these things, she was the weekend fun parent who still lost custody of her kids. A paradox. Three weekends a month. Friday afternoon, Friday and Saturday dinner, Sunday, finding backpacks and homework for the drive back—the three of them silently preparing to separate again and not talking about it. No one understood, so how could Julia? How to explain it away? She read about feelings, found a therapist. Guilt, shame, loss—the words did nothing for her. She had moved out of the house with the children, and then suddenly she was a childless mother. She found a conference, Mothers without Children, but they were all lesbian psychologists. She pictured her mother, eyebrows raised, her finger warning her, a toddler, about the button on the vacuum cleaner, “Happen! Happen!” Yes, a big noise would happen. Yes, she was guilty of working outside the home. And later, she saw, yes, guilty of leaving the house until the lawyers sorted it out, and moving into a nice apartment with the kids, until they were no longer hers.

Again Julia sat in her car, the overhead light revealing her to passersby as she wrote in her notebook, switching the recorder on and off, thinking, writing. Who did Julia look like to Tomasa’s neighbors?

Week after week she recorded these disconnected memories in her field notes. A logjam of feelings. She mechanically turned the tape and pushed the button to hear more. At times she let the tape run but no longer listened, thrown back to old feelings, unnamed, as with her dreams, so detailed in the moment on awakening and in the next, irretrievable. At those times, her perceptions brimmed, full, complicated, bottled up.

On the tape she heard “. . . a certificate in hairdressing,” and Tomasa shuffling for the framed diploma on her wall, then pictured her own diplomas stuck in a drawer. She needed a different kind of diploma to feel right, or maybe it was called a custody agreement.

Once she reheard Tomasa’s words, tides of feeling and memories flooded her notes there in the car, with sorrow and humor from her earliest days of being a girl. In many ways Tomasa and she were alike—neighborhood girls had taunted them; their mothers were too strong. Julia had lived in the same house her whole childhood, assimilating the opera 33s her parents played, discouraged from playing with kids who weren’t good enough. Tomasa confined to a garage for safety. Yet each had freed herself somehow to perform her life. Tomasa had her kids . . . though there was the sick child. Julia had hers only when she had them, like mittens on strings that could never be lost, which she could put her hands into when she needed them—as though their hands were her warm mittens. How do you let go of desire and dreams, like having your children, forever?

Julia thought of how Tomasa had handled Lidia her first visit, how she prided herself as a renegade, bossy. She had envied Lidia and would have liked Tomasa to assert her intimate, assuming hands on her own head, like those hairdressers who push and yank you here and there as if to say, “Let go. I’m in charge, you can do nothing, so don’t even bother.” Tomasa was younger, but she knew more.

“Miss Julia. You are thinking again.” They were both silent a moment. Then Tomasa spoke patiently, as if to a child. “I don’t understand. You want to talk to me about my education and my life, but I don’t know anything about your life. You have kids, right? Why you never tell me about them?”

“Of course, Tomasa, I can tell you about my kids. But it’s a long story. Yes I have . . . great kids, smart, sweet, creative.” How, she realized, she had learned to create an acceptable conversation about her missing children. “They’re in high school. I’ll tell you about them one of these days.”

“No. You can tell me about them now. Why do you talk so funny about your kids?” She leaned forward and said, “You are lucky you have them.”

“Well, of course, Tomasa. I should tell you about myself. We had some problems—you know, like husbands and wives do.” She looked up. “You see your diploma there on the wall? Well, on my wall are my kids’ birth certificates. Yes, I’m divorced, but . . .” Keep it light. “You know, that’s what happens in the US. So you move on. Like you say, I also had opportunities, the support of a strong family, and I knew what was right.”

“So explain.”

Julia didn’t say, Tomasa, my story is too long. It doesn’t make sense. You could never understand. But the woman waited.

“I can’t.”

“Something bad happened.”

“Happened . . . It doesn’t matter, we lost each other but we’re getting each other back.”

Tomasa interrupted. “What that means, ‘You are getting them back’? What that means, ‘It doesn’t matter’? ”

“Tomasa, I am sure you have been through much more than I have. Or you are stronger than I am. Please . . . your story is much more interesting than mine.”

“No, Miss Julia, I think you like my story because you think you can understand it because you want to throw away your story because it feels bad.”

Julia had to face her. “You want my story, don’t you?”

“Here, take a drink, make yourself at home, momentito” trailed behind Tomasa as she moved toward the kitchen and returned with tortillas filled with frijoles, chopped fresh chiles, lime, and cilantro and placed them on the table.

Did she have a choice? “Tomasa, suppose it was Friday and you hadn’t seen your kids for a week and you went, excited, to pick them up at school ten minutes early. Suppose the principal, who used to come to your home for dinner, stood in his office and said you couldn’t have your kids until the bell rang? And kept standing there with your custody agreement and a letter in his hand like pieces of dirty . . . underwear. Papers threatening a problem with lawyers if he let her get her kids before the bell rang.

“Tomasa, suppose you drove two hours from your job to get them on a Friday, the weather dark and cold, and Julia eager at 5:00 p.m., their father standing outside, the children watching through the window, and he handed you a tally of the minutes you had delivered them later on Sundays because. Because. Because it was hard letting them go. And it was Friday, when your lawyer had left his office to join his family and the cops told you there on the steps of your cold ex-house, ‘Sorry, lady, this is a domestic matter.’ And the little one’s fingers splayed until he moved out of view because he saw you looking at him and just the window was left, stained with the warm outline of his fingers.”

Should she continue? She was already there. “Suppose one minute you thought the whole town knew your kids didn’t really live with you. And the next minute you weren’t sure what they knew. When the court pulled my kids away, my friend Natalie was frustrated with me. ‘Why don’t you yell?’ she said and looked at me with blazing eyes. ‘I’d be angry if I were you. At least cry. Or scream.’ ”

Did she cry? She had a problem of remembering. She caught herself often staring out the window, hollowed out. Her lawyer had advised: a conservative judge would surely give a mother her children, when she’d asked if she should she do something. She should have stayed in the house and stopped working. Outside the home. An appeals attorney a few states away said, “Reversals are rare.” And so she relented, and as time went on her husband’s domineering grew and the children learned the rules and whispered, “Mom, you know you’re not supposed to step over the threshold.”

She should have seen it coming when he arrived at court the first time, carrying a beautiful leather briefcase she had never seen and she wore her third world fabric shoulder bag. No, she didn’t plead, cry, or scream.

One can stay in denial in so many ways.

The tape clicked and Tomasa deftly slid it out, turned it, and replaced it. “And what did you say to your friend?”

“Nothing. I went to yoga class, and when the lights were turned down I felt big feelings, hard feelings in the dark gym, and I returned there each day after work. I moved back to town. I was near my children but not with them. I became an assistant Cub Scout leader just to see Georgy legally during the week. We hated it and soon I came and he didn’t.”

Tomasa touched her arm. “Julia, your life here is difficult too. You had to protect yourself for your children.”

“When the kids left, I sat in my apartment. I felt pieces of their lives looking at me. Their books staring and quiet, their Dungeons & Dragons people saying nothing because no one was there to give them words. My house was a cave, cold and with no color. I would have to wait till I could speak to them on the phone and never knew how much time would be allowed, how much our conversation was watched. I started to feel unnatural with the children I had pushed out of my body and nursed.

“On Sundays we prepared for the change—from my two-bed apartment to the house. We would be jumpy and unpredictable, each one in a different way. I didn’t understand what I was feeling; how could they? Then my job was cut, and I didn’t have to get dressed in the morning.

“I spoke to Natasha and Georgy every week.” Somehow the mic was turned toward Julia, the tape still going. “So I found a job that would fill me up—where I asked the questions, solved the problems, asked the questions about someone else’s life, and wrote down the answers, because you know, if I just sat in my empty apartment with the fingerprints of my children, I would have nothing to write.”

There were sounds behind the red curtain—a shoving something against a wall, a whine, a swishing of bedclothes. Tomasa looked up toward the dark space and the women just sat. Tomasa fingered the lace for a quinceañera on her lap. “My child has cancer. We are not sure what kind, or how complicated.”

They inhaled at the same time before rising. Julia reached out her hand formally, wanting to embrace Tomasa but not to presume, and Tomasa took her hand. “Don’t worry. Ask me the questions. Next Monday.”

Alone now, Julia could get up and look closely at the quinceañera dresses—the creamy lineup of tulle, taffeta, and satin. The seed pearls that had been sewn with care along demure necklines, and the pastel ribbons threaded through the lattice of a textured sleeve, tied finally in bows there to embrace the plump, virgin skin of the upper arms of little girls from good families who had opportunities—girls who knew what was right, and who had a lot of desire.

Julia’s friends reminded her that hers was joint custody—to make her feel better. As a little girl Tomasa had listened to the strike organizers while Julia was taking piano lessons. She had had it easy.

“When one wants something, one can get it,” Tomasa had said. Julia fingered the handwork on dresses that held promises for other girls of fifteen. She had challenged Julia. “You set goals, Julia. You have to choose. If I saw an opportunity, I stopped myself and said, ‘Not now, because of the kids.’ ”

My story runs in reverse, Julia thought. I have my children, but I am missing pieces of their childhood. A weekend is not a weekend when it starts at the school bell on Friday, and carries them into Sunday, preparing for the five o’clock delivery back to their father, leaving her to eat dinner alone.

Tomasa set a plate of fried plantains near their recorder. From the kitchen came the familiar sound of splattering water, and Julia anticipated the familiar fragrance of onions and garlic and peppers.

Tomasa leaned into Julia and, checking the sleeping Lidia beneath the dryer, nodded toward the curtain. “Julia, that is my Pablito. His bones are feeling hurt. So now I am able to . . . no, I have to tell you . . . the doctor said that by Christmas Pablito maybe will get better. The radiation. The chemotherapy.”

There was that silent moment they’d had in the beginning of their interviews. Tomasa did not laugh as she had that first time as she adjusted Lidia’s rollers. The women’s eyes locked. “Tomasa, I’ll have pictures of my children next time.” Julia filled their glasses with Pepsi. Lamplight shone dully on the glasses.