Harriet Doerr by The Tiger in the Grass

grass behind Fliss’s house. Singing, she rode home on the bus from the downtown market, carrying cheeses, melons, cooking oil, and kilos of sugar and rice in a basket she could barely lift. Scarcely breaking her song, she staggered down the steps of the bus, allowing the driver to pinch her as she passed.
    Sometimes at night Morgan imagined she heard her mozo’s voice rising out of the tangle of stems in her neighbor’s garden. From her window she would see a flicker of apron strings, and early the next morning she would hear song again.
    Morgan saw that Carlos also was happy, but in a different way. He was a man content with himself. One day Lalia told her that other men respected Carlos for his customary even temper and occasional quick right fist. Women looked out from the doorways where they swept or sewed or, in the case of foreigners, from the windows of their imported cars as Carlos passed.
    Morgan, too, noticed him. In the sala she abandoned the letter she was writing to watch as, wasting neither time nor motion, and in silence, he laid a fire. When he drove the car, she sat in front and saw him in clean Indian profile as he spoke.
    “There is talk of improving the zoological garden,” he would say. “The cages are too small. A number of animals have died.” He would point. “Over there, señora, you will see the monkey’s hut. It is a barbarity.” Morgan, declining to become involved, consistently refused to look.
    She spent hours of sunshine on a terrace chair, eyes closed, measuring her past, drawing blinds against the uncertain, looming future. Not far away, her neighbor, Fliss, also reclined flat on her back, facing south. So it was that day after day Morgan and the Englishwoman lay on separate sides of the wall in independent retrospection as the mornings of their lives slid by.
    Every day Morgan imagined to herself the unrevealed places where her children might be. She had reached them with the greatest difficulty, one in New Mexico and one in Quebec, to tell them of their father’s death. The telephone connections were bad. She had scarcely recognized their toneless voices.
    “Tell me how you are,” she had said, and they replied, “All right.” But what else was there to say to the woman who had rejected their father only months before he died?
    These children were Morgan’s hourly torment. She tried and failed to invent futures for them. Meanwhile the girl Stevie and the boy Greg, both not long out of adolescence, remained in peril. Morgan longed to push them back into infancy, contain them again in cribs and strollers.
    Day after day, she cultivated hatred against her dead husband, Ned, and daily failed to achieve it. At any moment of any hour she would have had him back if she could.
    And she continued to watch Carlos as he bent over a geranium or pot of mint with the grace of a man about to kiss a woman’s hand.
     
     
    Just as Lalia’s singing was the first thing Morgan heard in the morning, the watchman’s whistle was the last thing she heard at night. This watchman, a retired clerk, arrived among the foreigners’ houses on the last bus each evening and left at daybreak by way of a path that dropped straight down the hillside from the Frenchman’s pear trees to the zoo. The watchman’s whistle was his only defense against trespassers and thieves. It had a lilting, uncertain tone, and he blew it once every hour in front of each house. Neither he nor his eight employers contemplated the purchase of another weapon. Even though the cooks and mozos returned to the village at night, leaving the foreigners—women, children, and the aged, and the tipsy—behind, the stone houses circled by stone walls were considered impregnable.
    Of the houses on the hill above Santa Felicia, Morgan’s had the heaviest iron gate. Her wall was higher than the others and was topped with a fiercer dazzle of broken glass. Even so, Morgan understood it was not too great a barrier for a determined man to