Read Night at the Fiestas: Stories for Free Online Page B

her jeans and her long underwear. She unhooked the heavy white nursing bra and slid the thick straps off her shoulders, pulled off her wool socks. She stood naked before the narrow mirror that hung on the closet door. The skin at her belly was still loose and puckered from Beatrice, her legs purplish and hairy. Her swollen breasts hung heavy, and despite the temperature, her nipples barely tightened.
    “Well?” said Cordelia. “What are you waiting for?”
    “Yes, yes.” Monica slipped the dress over her head. The silk was so cold against her skin that she gasped, laughing, and her goosebumps rippled through the light fabric. “Last time I wore this it was ninety degrees in L.A.!” Monica’s smile faded as she caught her reflection—the ridges of belly and hip under the fabric, her face, broad and splotchy hovering above—and she couldn’t help feeling as though she’d done some violence to the dress by letting herself get like this.
    “What did I wear that day?”
    “It was just me and your dad.”
    Cordelia rolled away. “You look ugly.”
    Hurt flashed through Monica, then fury. This child, seven years old, wanted to wound her and knew exactly how. In a minute Cordelia was paging sulkily through a book.
    Monica was beautiful—men were always telling her so—and at one time it had seemed only right that she should wear clothes like this. After all, Monica had at seventeen been proposed to in the waiting room of her dentist’s office by a wealthy Frenchman who was visiting Santa Fe. “You are the most beautiful woman I have ever saw,” he told her, and Monica had believed him. He’d waited for her to have her teeth cleaned, and she’d allowed him to take her to dinner at a restaurant on Canyon Road, a restaurant so expensive there were no prices on the menu. Her whole life in Santa Fe, and she’d never even known this restaurant existed. “This is French,” he explained, and ordered escargot and old wine, pâté de lapin and roast duck avec sauce Roquefort, gratinée de Coquille St. Jacques. He insisted she try it all, kept passing his full fork across the table to her. “Beautiful women should eat beautiful food,” he said, and she’d agreed. At the end of the night he drove her back to her mother’s house and seemed resigned when she told him she couldn’t marry him because she had to finish high school. She’d thought then that’s what her future was: opportunity after opportunity unspooling around her.
    Monica had therefore been ready two years later when she began dating the man who would be her first husband, ready to exchange college and literature for proximity to wealth, ready to stand smiling with a glass of wine in his parents’ galleries and to be kissed by old men who were influential in the art world. How embarrassed she’d been by her mother, with her faulty grammar and fake Anglicized name, her eagerness around his family, her transparent admiration of their money.
    But Peter had liked her mother’s accent, had liked explaining things to Monica. “My little conquistador,” he called her. “My little Mexican.” Peter felt he’d discovered Monica, plucked her out of a provincial existence, just as he’d begun to discover and show outsider artists: an autistic man who built intricate scale models of his neighborhood out of toothpicks and plaster, an elderly woman who made elaborate cut-paper crowd scenes with an X-ACTO knife, a soybean farmer who painted large canvases of sloppy, expressive horses. Always seeking in people overlooked value that he could commodify.
    Monica hadn’t, however, anticipated the pleasure he got in humiliating her—laughing at her in public for working her way through the classics or for not knowing framed Monet prints were tacky or for pretending to taste the difference in wine. Once, passing her as she read War and Peace, Peter yanked the book from her hands and snapped it shut. “You think reading Tolstoy means you’re smart. But it just