SIXTEEN

Before they left for Texas, people warned Elena everyone gets fat in the north. Chemicals replace natural ingredients, so bread is not bread by the time one eats it. Meat from hormone-reared animals, mutant produce, colorful and rotund yet flavorless. Where fresh was expensive, and cheap was a tasty poison packaged as a meal. But after each time she gave birth in the United States, her body restored itself to its original form. It was after Mauro left that her body became something else, even as she walked more, ate less, carrying the children and their belongings every time they moved. She was stronger but never felt more tired or shapeless. When cell phones enabled people to see the person on the other side of the call, Elena held the camera close to her face to conceal from Mauro her new bulges.

She remembered the first time Mauro’s eyes glinted in that small screen. For years she’d imagined them meeting again, and there he was in her hand, gaunt, his forehead wide and square. The long hair she so loved to bury her face in was gone. She could tell he was taking in the sight of her too. The new wrinkles mapping old smiles, grays sparking from her temples.

“You’re as beautiful as ever, Elena.”

“I’m not and I know it. You don’t have to lie.”

Silence anchored until Talia took the phone from her father to ask Elena to send money to buy a new schoolbag.

“The one you have is perfectly fine,” Mauro said, and Talia argued briefly as Elena watched through the phone, a spectator to an intimacy she no longer shared with either of them.

Perhaps it had nothing to do with her body but with what the man at the restaurant did to her. The only man she’d ever been with besides Mauro. Their separation was involuntary. But time and borders did more to distance them than any divorce or widowing could.

She’d remained faithful. If not with her body, with her mind and heart, still with Mauro even through his years lost to drinking and hiding in city streets, despite the sporadic contact and stilted conversations, the silence that on her end, at least, held fear that it would be that way forever. She had many nightmares, but when her dreams were good, they were only of him, of being old with Mauro, their children safe and grown with families of their own. In her dreams they were always back in Colombia, never in the north, waiting peacefully for death to find them in their own land.

She stayed to work at the restaurant a few months longer. These were zombie days of obstinate nausea when Elena understood that what she said or wanted meant nothing. She kept what happened to herself, even when she’d hear about another woman from the neighborhood who went through something similar. They never commiserated. They kept each other strong so they could keep mothering and survive.