American Chica_ Two Worlds, One Childhood - Marie Arana [73]
Perhaps that is why the subject of another mixed marriage began to interest our household. The romance between Ralph Cunningham and Carmen, the laundress’s daughter, became the topic of intense conversation between my mother and father. It, too, was a flash fire between two opposite fields of energy. My parents found they could talk about Ralph and Carmen and in the process say a great deal about their own feelings. They could do it without being accusatory or hurtful. It was something akin to the manner in which timorous Chinese women once talked to their doctors: by pointing to taboo body parts on ivory dolls and saying where the poor things hurt. My parents would talk about the Cunninghams in endless and heated exchanges. We knew because we listened at the doors.
Ralph Cunningham, it seems, was an Englishman from Dover, a soltero whose solid frame, thick eyeglasses, and stubborn ways belied a hunger in his heart. He had come to the hacienda as a large mule comes to water, in the simple trajectory of a man coming to work. He did not realize he was looking for love.
But love found him. In the form of Carmen, a tiny, brash woman standing in the solteros’ doorway with black hair down her back and one hip dangling midair like an itchy question mark.
Her mother was Mrs. Gilfillen’s laundress, a hardworking indígena from one of the villages that dotted the nearby wilderness. Even when engineer Gilfillen had been alive, his wife had taken an interest in her employee, as loyal and pleasant a human being as the Scotswoman had ever known. But when Mr. Gilfillen died, his widow took that interest a good notch higher, investing a missionary’s zeal in the welfare of the laundress and bringing her daughter into her home to teach her the manners of an Edinburgh miss.
Carmen learned to speak, read, and write good English. She learned how to set a proper table, serve a square city meal, hold forth in polite conversation, and cite a line or two of Robert Louis Stevenson as ably as any silk-gloved debutante. In the mornings, the young girl would leave her mother in the back with her washboard and come in the house to sit at Mrs. Gilfillen’s table. She started at twelve and was schooled till sixteen. But her hips filled out, and her walk took on a market-day waggle. When she learned to squeeze her breasts up between her elbows—a lesson Mrs. Gilfillen did not teach her—and when she colored in her mouth, she began turning heads. That was when the señoras started to squawk, and that was when Carmen found herself spinning through our airtight hacienda toward the door of the solteros.
At first it was a jolly Dutchman who took the luscious bait, flashing his blues in her direction with an irresistible wink. One after another, they all began to play, batting her around the casa de solteros like cats with a soft new toy. Mrs. Gilfillen never knew about Carmen’s visits to the solteros, or, perhaps, being a perfectly proper Edinburgh lady, she chose not to know. But when walnut-skinned Carmen landed—full-mouthed and ripe—on a chair beside Ralph one night, he blinked and gawked and asked her to marry him.
The news shook the hacienda when Mrs. Gilfillen announced it. “I am so ple-e-eased,” she sang to the ladies at the club, “that Carmen has accepted Ralph Cunningham’s proposal. What a lovely couple they will make.” Lovely couple? The wives looked around at one another. A poker-stiff Brit from a cottage in Dover and the