The Tortilla Curtain

she realized with a jolt that the big man had neglected to give her the plastic gloves. She held her hands up to the light then and saw that the skin had begun to crack and peel and that all the color had gone out of the flesh. These weren't her hands--they were the hands of a corpse.
    She was alarmed. If she didn't have those gloves there would be nothing left of her fingers by the end of the day--only bones, as if in some horrible costume for the Day of the Dead--but she was too timid to go look for them. The _patrón__ might be watching even now, watching to see if she was scrubbing hard enough, ready to burst in and abuse her in his harsh superior language, to send her home, fire her, lay his big bloated paw in her lap. Her fingers were burning. Her throat was a cinder. She couldn't see the Buddhas for the water in her eyes. Finally, she stole a look over her shoulder.
    No one was watching her. Both doors that gave onto the room were shut and the house was silent. The near door, the one she'd come in through, led to the garage and the stairway to the second floor, and the other must have been to the bathroom, judging from the amount of time Mary had spent behind it yesterday. For her part, America had been afraid to get up from her seat--who knew when the _patrón__ would come to check on them?--and that was a trial, because she felt like she always had to pee lately and she'd had to hold it all day (it was the baby crowding her organs, she knew that, and she wished she could talk to her mother about it, even for a minute). But that was over. That was yesterday. The second she and Cándido got off the road and into the cover at the head of, the trail, she'd squatted in the bushes and the problem was solved. This was different. This was dangerous--and it wasn't her fault. The _patrón__ should have given her the gloves, he should have remembered.
    It was eleven-fifteen by the sunburst clock. The mountains pressed at the windows. Her fingertips burned. The statue before her loomed and receded and her head felt light. Finally she got up from the chair and hurried across the room--she had to rinse her hands at least, to take the sting away, no one would deny her that...
    There was a bathroom behind, the door, as she'd surmised, pink and white tile, a little shower stall, fluffy pink mats and wallpaper decorated with dewy-eyed little rabbits, and she couldn't help admiring it--this was just what she wanted, so pretty and efficient, so clean. She ran the cold water over her hands, and then, not wanting to risk dirtying the plush white towels, she dried them on her dress. That was when she caught a glimpse of herself in the mirror, her hair all ragged and wild--she looked like a madwoman, a gypsy, a beggar in the street--but she suppressed the image, eased back the lid of the toilet and sat down quickly, thinking to relieve herself now and get everything over with at once.
    Sequestered there in that pink bathroom with the bunnies on the walls and the pristine towels and the lilac soap in a little ceramic dish, she felt at peace for the first time since she'd stepped away from Cándido and slipped into the big man's car. She studied the architecture of the shower, marveling at all that pretty tile, and thought how nice it would be to have hot water whenever you wanted it, a dab of shampoo, soap, a bristle toothbrush instead of a stalk of dry grass. And then she thought about the fat man, all lathered up with soap, and his pink ridiculous flesh and fat white feet. Maybe he'd go away to China to buy more Buddhas for his store and she could stay here and sleep in the big room at night and use the bathroom ten times a day if she wanted...
    She was thinking about that, daydreaming--just for a second--when a sudden noise from above brought her back to herself. There was a dull thump, as if someone had just pushed a chair back from a table, followed by the sound of footsteps. América jumped up from the toilet, afraid to flush it for fear of giving herself away, and in her extremity forgot what she'd come for. The footsteps were directly overhead now, and for a moment she froze, unable to think, unable to move. _The gloves__, that was it. She tore open the cabinet under the sink, rifled the drawers beside it--one, two, three, four--but there were no gloves and the footsteps seemed to be coming closer, coming down the stairs. She hit the chair on the run and snatched up her brush in a panic.
    The footsteps ceased. There was no