Playing House by Lauren Slater Page A

But perhaps she is best described by what she did outside of her working hours. Ceci took kickboxing, English as a second language, cooking classes. She was a gifted photographer and painter. She had her degree in marketing from the University of Mexico, but her interests leaned more towards the arts. She knit elaborate blankets, used a loom, could crochet a piece of intricate filmy lace. She found a beat-up bike in the trash and single-handedly restored it to working order. She loved jigsaw puzzles, huge four footers with thousands of scrambled pieces, and she had the patience to put it all together, day after day, until a coherent scene emerged. Once she was finished, she would spray her creation with clear glue, hang it whole on the wall. It always delighted my daughter, the image at once cracked and solid, a seeming impossibility, but there it was.
    I could go on. She was from a close family in a small town and had come to the States to learn the English necessary for her career. The oldest of five children, the only girl, she had been both a daughter and another mother to her siblings from her own youngest years. She was full of mystical folk cures but also common sense to the extreme. Once, my daughter had a high, high fever. She thrashed and muttered and tore at the air with her hands. I, new to all this, did not know what to do. My hands shook and I could not measure out the medicine. Ceci took the bottle from me, drew the liquid up, grasped my thrashing daughter’s chin, and squirted her mouth full of cherry, all in one seemingly seamless move.
    Months passed. The presence of Ceci in our family was like a light but firm hand arranging our shape in ways we could only see in retrospect. She was shocked to find out my husband and I celebrated neither Christmas nor Chanukah. My husband had been raised rigorously atheistic and anticapitalistic. I am Jewish by birth, but once I left my mother to live in a foster home, I soon lost touch with my family, and its traditions, for good. “No tree?” Ceci said that first year she was with us. “No presents?
El niño
. What about
el niño
?”
    “Clara doesn’t care,” I remember saying. “She’s only one.”
    “Clara cares,” Ceci said. And that afternoon she came home with a tree, tinsel, a plastic star, all those silk globes. My husband looked uncomfortable, but then after a second, he smiled. By the week’s end we were all zooming around town, buying up toys and trinkets, festive bows, shiny wrapping paper. “I’m Jewish,” I kept saying to my husband; “I’m a communist,” he kept saying to me. Then we shrugged. We were on a roll, and loving it. On Christmas Eve, Ceci took us all to Mass in a tiny basement church in the inner city. The priest was bedecked in some kind of crown and glossy robes, waving his incense stick so the whole church filled with the smell of frankincense and myrrh. Clara could not take her eyes off the princely looking priest or the children in the choir, all of whom were dressed in bright red ruffles and whose ears were pierced with tiny hoops of gold. Music started playing, something salsa-ish, and then a clip-clop hip-hop version of “Deck the Halls,” and before we knew it the whole church was dancing, skipping after the skipping priest, who waved his wand of smoke high and low. We skipped too. The air was so thick and cloying I could barely breathe. I felt I would choke. On the other hand, it was a lot of fun.
    It was for reasons like these that I felt enormously grateful to Ceci and continuously lucky to have her; she brought humor into our tight little lives. However, I also know that her confidence and kindness, the charm she had for children, her easy engagement with them, and her steadfast love of the things I did not love—the dressing, the hair combing, Chuck E. Cheese’s, and swimming pools—only deepened my belief in my own inadequacies. I allowed it to. I felt I simply could not compare.
    Here is a scene: It is early