Judith Tarr: Household Gods

Josefina’s face set. Nicole damned herself for political incorrectness, for thinking that this woman whom she was so careful to think of as an equal and not as an ethnic curiosity, looked just now like every stereotype of the inscrutable and intractable aborigine. Her eyes were flat and black. Her features, the broad cheekbones, the Aztec profile, the bronze sheen of the skin, were completely and undeniably foreign. Years of daycare, daily meetings, little presents for the children on their birthdays and plates of delicious and exotic cookies at Christmas, reciprocated with boxes of chocolates — Russell Stover, not Godiva; Godiva was an acquired taste if you weren’t a yuppie — all added up to this: closed mind and closed face, and nothing to get a grip on, no handhold for sympathy, let alone understanding. This, Nicole knew with a kind of angry despair, was an alien. She’d never been a friend, and she’d never been a compatriot, either. Her whole world just barely touched on anything that Nicole knew. And now even that narrow tangent had disappeared.

“I’m sorry,” Josefina said in her foreign accent, with her soft Spanish vowels. “I know you are upset with me. Lots of parents upset with me, but I can’t do nothing about it. My mother got nobody else but me.”

Nicole made her mind work, made herself think and talk some kind of sense. “Do you know anyone who might take Kimberley and Justin on such short notice?”

God, even if Josefina said yes, the kids would pitch a fit. She was… like a mother to them. That had always worried Nicole a little — not, she’d been careful to assure herself, that her impeccably Anglo children should be so attached to a Mexican woman; no, of course not, how wonderfully free of prejudice that would make them, and they’d picked up Spanish, too. No, she worried she herself wasn’t mother enough, so they’d had to focus on Josefina for all the things Nicole couldn’t, but should, be offering them. And now, when they were fixated like that, to go from her house to some stranger’s -

Even as Nicole fussed over what was, after all, a minor worry, Josefina was shaking her head. “Don’t know nobody,” she said. She didn’t mean it the way it sounded. Of course she didn’t. She couldn’t mean, It’s no skin off my nose, lady. Josefina loved the kids. Didn’t she?

What did Nicole know of what Josefina felt or didn’t feel? Josefina was foreign.

Nicole stood on the front porch, breathing hard. If that was the way Josefina wanted to play it, then that was how Nicole would play it. There had to be some way out. She would have bet money that Josefina was an undocumented immigrant. She could threaten to call the INS, get her checked out, have her deported…

Anger felt good. Anger felt cleansing. But it didn’t change a thing. There wasn’t anything she could do. Deport Josefina? She almost laughed. Josefina was leaving the USA on her own tonight. She’d probably welcome the help.

“I’m sorry, Mrs. Gunther-Perrin,” Josefina repeated. As if she meant it. As if she even cared.

Nicole didn’t even remember going from the house to the car. One moment she was staring at Josefina, hunting for words that wouldn’t come. The next, she was in the Honda, slamming the driver’s-side door hard enough to rattle the glass in the window frame. She jammed the key in the ignition, shoved the pedal to the metal, and roared out into the street.

Part of her wanted to feel cold and sick and a little guilty. The rest of her was too ferociously angry to care how she drove.

She might not care, but with the luck she was running, she’d pick up a ticket on top of being drastically late. She made an effort of will and slowed down to something near a reasonable speed. Her brain flicked back into commuter mode, cruising on autopilot. The main part of her mind fretted away at this latest blow.

I can’t worry about it now, she told herself over and over. I’ll worry about it after I get to the office. I’ll worry about it tonight.

First she had to get to the office. When she came out onto Victory, she shook her head violently. She knew too well how long tooling back across the western half of the Valley would take. Instead, she swung south onto the San Diego Freeway: only a mile or two there to the interchange with the 101. Yes, the eastbound 101 would be a zoo, but so what? Westbound, going against rush-hour traffic, she’d make good time. She didn’t usually try it, but she wasn’t usually so far behind, either.

Thinking about that, plotting out the rest of her battle plan, helped her focus; got her away from the gnawing of worry about Josefina’s desertion. It was good for that much, at least.

As she crawled down toward the interchange, she checked the KFWB traffic report and then, two minutes later, the one on KNX. They were both going on about a jackknifed big rig on the Long Beach Freeway, miles from where she was. Nobody said anything about the 101. She swung through the curve from the San Diego to the 101 and pushed the car up to sixty-five.

For a couple of miles, she zoomed along — she even dared to congratulate herself. She’d rolled the dice and won: she would save ten, fifteen minutes, easy. She’d still be late, but not enough for it to be a problem. She didn’t have any appointments scheduled till eleven-thirty. The rest she could cover for.

She should have known it wouldn’t be that easy. Not today. Not with her luck.

Just past Hayvenhurst, everything stopped. “You lying son of a bitch!” Nicole snarled at the car radio. It was too much. Everything was going wrong. It was almost as bad as the day she woke up to a note on her pillow, and no Frank. Dear Nicole, the note had said, on departmental stationery yet, Dawn and I have gone to Reno. We’ll talk about the divorce when I get back. Love, Frank. And scribbled across the bottom: PS. The milk in the fridge is sour. Remember to check the Sell-By date next time you buy a gallon.

Remembering how bad that day was didn’t make this one feel any better. “Love, Frank, “ she muttered. “Love, the whole goddamn world. “

Her eye caught the flash of her watch as she drummed her fingers on the steering wheel. Almost time for the KNX traffic report. She stabbed the button, wishing she could stab the reporter. His cheery voice blared out of the speakers: “ — and Cell-Phone Force member Big Charlie reports a three-car injury accident on the westbound 101 between White Oak and Reseda. One of those cars nipped over; it’s blocking the number-two and number-three lanes. Big Charlie says only the slow lane is open. That’s gonna put a hitch in your getalong, folks. Now Louise is over that jackknifed truck on the Long Beach in Helicop — ”

Nicole switched stations again. Suddenly, she was very, very tired. Too tired to keep her mad on, too tired almost to hold her head up. Her fingers drummed on the wheel, drummed and drummed. The natives, she thought dizzily, were long past getting restless. Her stomach tied itself in a knot. What to do, what to do? Get off the freeway at White Oak and go back to surface streets? Or crawl past the wreck and hope she’d make up a little time when she could floor it again?

All alone in the passenger compartment, she let out a long sigh. “What difference does it make?” she said wearily. “I’m screwed either way.”

She pulled into the parking lot half an hour late — twenty-eight minutes to be exact, if you felt like being exact, which she didn’t. Grabbing her attache case, she ran for the entrance to the eight-story steel-and-glass rectangle in which Rosenthal, Gallagher, Kaplan, Jeter, Gonzalez Feng occupied the sixth and most of the seventh floors.

When she’d first seen it, she’d harbored faint dreams of L.A. Law and spectacular cases, fame and fortune and all the rest of it. Now she just wanted to get through the day without falling on her face. The real hotshots were in Beverly Hills or Century City or someplace else on the Westside. This was just… a job, and not the world’s best.