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9/1/08
Cleaning

7/12/08
Big Trash Friday

Lourdes smelled of vanilla and Fabreeze, which meant she’d had some sort of wardrobe crisis this morning. Even on Big Trash Friday—-which, for us, meant moving day—-Lourdes looked perfectly put-together and pristine. She’d been like that for as long as I’d known her. Raised by a strict, old-fashioned grandmother, she operated on the idea that it was proper to look nice for every occasion, not just special ones. And, through some magic I could never quite master, she always managed to make everyone else look underdressed.

Because I could smell her—-her vanilla-cookies smell only became really noticeable when her skin began to heat up—I knew Lourdes was beginning to tire. She was always embarrassed at being the smaller and weaker of the two, so I sat down first on the couch we were lugging around. Lourdes collapsed onto the seat next to me, face flushed prettily. Had she known I was catering to her obvious needs, she would have been furious. That was the second thing Lourdes got from her grandmother: pride.



“Enjoying yourself?” I asked lightly. She huffed and puffed and shook her head. She had a Hawaiian look about her, with a round, golden face and silky black hair. Somehow, she never sweated, and the carefully-placed (and never too dramatic) dark makeup around her eyes never smudged. Even I had never seen her looking anything less than perfect, and I lived with her.

“Well, you look as lovely as the dew on a spring flower,” I teased, to hide the fact that she really did look lovely. If Lourdes envied me strength, I was utterly jealous of her beauty. She was willowy and perfect and, on a nearly daily basis, had people stopping dead on the street to admire her. She was smart, and the only reason we were fishing furniture out of people’s trash was that she hadn’t yet found a newspaper quite worthy of (that is to say, willing to pay her for) her ace journalistic abilities.

I was Lourdes’ big rebellion, the only thing about her that could make her grandmother squeak. Sometimes I worried that was the only reason she loved me. Mostly I knew that she really cared because I was me, but every now and again I worried, if only a little.

She patted my hand. “You lie to me, Nora,” she panted. She pulled her hair off her neck and quickly looped it into a perfect bun. It took me at least ten minutes to do my hair with any style—as it was, today I’d just thrown it into a ponytail and decided to hell with it.

Flopping down into my lap, Lourdes enveloped me with her vanilla-and-Fabreeze scent. Whenever I starting thinking I was jealous of her, so jealous that I was beginning to hate her, she did this and I remembered to love her all over again.

“I wish we could just sit here forever, Nor,” she told me, tracing a circle on her knee, a contemplative half smile on her face. Lourdes often looked contemplative--it was all part of her charm. “Just you and me, on this couch, with no jobs to keep, and no groceries to buy, and no laundry to clean. We could ignore everyone else and everything else and it would be just perfect.”

Lourdes sure knew how to spin a pretty story. I maintained that she could convince you to give her your last nickel, and not only make you think you really, really wanted to do it, but also have you believe that it made you a better person to do so. I knew her well enough that I knew I couldn’t always believe her stories.

Like this picturesque fantasy, for example. Promised an eternity spent laying on a couch, Lourdes would last half a minute before she got bored. There would be things that could be learned, places that could be visited, feats that could be accomplished. She would hate an eternity lying here.

Reaching down, Lourdes started shredding a handful of grass. “I love you,” I reminded her, just as she reminded me sometimes, if she figured I was close to forgetting. Sometimes I forgot, times like when I started thinking about how she’d be much better off with a boy that she could take home to her family. When I started thinking how perfect she’d look in a wedding dress, with lace and pearls and a ring. When I started thinking about how she deserved a family, with little children running around begging for treats and rides and the stories she told so well.

Lourdes was always quick to assure me that those things bored her. I was practically superhuman, she claimed, because I'd managed to capture her attention for so long. When she pointed that out, I felt impressed with myself.

She started sticking bits of clover leaves onto my bare legs. Lourdes wore no shorts—she stuck strictly to skirts and slacks, with the occasional forage into a pair of dark jeans that hugged her perfect curves. She was a knockout when she paired them with a red top.

With a contented sigh, she sat up to rub her snub nose against mine, which had a bump in the middle and was too big by half. “I know,” she said, getting up to start lifting again. Pride dictated that she had to initiate the activity, simply because she could barely manage. “I know even when you don’t.”