The Falling Woman by Pat Murphy Page B

head, his legs outstretched.
    I believed him when he said he never used the same line twice. He was a fisherman, choosing his bait carefully with a certain fish in mind.
    A moment of silence. The lizard suddenly lifted its head and ran away across the wall. The little girl's singing had stopped. As I watched, she peeked over the wall at us.
    "What's the little girl's name?" I asked Carlos. "She won't talk to me."
    "That's Teresa. Qué tal, Teresa?"
    She smiled at him and muttered something in Spanish. He said something else to her, but the only words I caught were "la señorita." Teresa shook her head and said something quickly that I could not begin to understand. She turned and ran away to the kitchen hut.
    Carlos looked at me. "I asked her why she wouldn't talk to you. She said that her mother told her not to."
    "I wonder why."
    Carlos shrugged. "Maybe she's worried that getting to know loose American women will corrupt her little girl."
    "What makes her think we're loose?" 1 said.
    He raised his eyebrows and grinned. "All American women are loose," he said. "Ask any Mexican man."
    "Somehow, I wouldn't trust you as an expert on American women." I leaned back in my chair and noticed my mother watching us from the door of her hut. I waved to her and she strolled out into the plaza.
    "I'll be leaving for town in fifteen minutes or so," she said.
    I finished my beer and stood up. "I'll be ready."
    She glanced at Carlos, and turned away without saying anything. "You know," he said when she was out of earshot, "I don't think your mother likes me."
    The ride to town was hot. The truck hit the potholes in the road hard and the seats were poorly padded.
    The roar of the engine made polite conversation impossible. Now and then, my mother would shout over the engine to point out a landmark—the road to a small village, the henequen-processing plant, a local high school.
    The market in Mérida was housed in a corrugated-steel building: a place of noise, low ceilings, strong smells, and confusion. A beggar woman wrapped in a fringed shawl huddled beside the doorway. My mother dropped a coin in her hand and started into the crowd. I followed a few steps behind.
    A woman in a white dress, embroidered with flowers at the neck and hem, carried a plastic basin filled with strange yellow fruits. She balanced it on her head, steadying it with one hand and making her way purposefully through the crowd.
    A man shouted behind me and I stepped aside. He carried three crates in a stack on his back, secured with a rope wrapped around his forehead. I let him pass, then hurried after my mother.
    An old peasant woman held out a plastic bowl filled with peppers, calling out the price. A younger woman, her daughter I think, squatted beside her, carefully arranging glossy peppers in a neat pile on a square of white cloth.
    My mother stopped by a stall in which a wizened old man stood, surrounded by burlap sacks filled with beans. Each sack was open to display its contents—red beans, black beans, rice, dried corn. My mother fingered the black beans and exchanged a few words with the man. He shoveled several scoops of black beans into the metal dish of a scale and poured them into a smaller sack.
    My mother glanced to make sure I was with her, beckoned me to follow, and continued through the crowd. "Maria does most of the shopping," she commented. "She's better at bargaining. I'm just picking up a few things."
    Another stop—this one for chickens. My mother bargained and the chickens watched her nervously from between the wooden slats of their crates. Chicks peeped from the back of the stall, and three large turkeys, exhausted in the heat, lay in the dust of the aisle. The three black hens that my mother bought pecked at the hands of the boy who carried them, still crated, to the truck.
    My mother made her way through the crowd with confidence, not stopping to glance at the butcher's stall, where vacant eyes stared from the face of a butchered pig. She