-
Chapter 11. The Flowering of Isabel
- University of Wisconsin Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
113 Elizabeth Bonjour had just entered the crowded subway car and squeezed into a space facing the seated passengers when the one in front of her, a man in a blue pinstripe suit, got up and offered his seat. Her first impulse was to decline, but as he was already standing , and she was so tired after her evening marketing class that she simply thanked him and occupied the seat. Once seated, she sensed that the man, attractive with wavy black hair and who could have been Latin himself or as well Middle Eastern, was silently addressing her, not rudely or brazenly but in a subtler, flattering way. But she wasn’t about to pick up a man in a subway , and she had to study. She removed the textbook from her briefcase and read until she noticed that the book’s top edge cut across the man’s pinstriped crotch. She put the book flat on her lap. At the next stop, the man turned, and his crown of wavy black hair floated out among the exiting passengers. His looks reminded her of her classmate Luis, who had started to arrive early to class and sit next to her. That very night he had invited her to have dinner with him after class, and she turned him down. She couldn’t believe how much that exiting man resembled Luis. Even more important, she couldn’t believe she was tempted to accept Luis’s invitation. For the past six years, her life had been simplified by routine. Weekday mornings she boarded a subway in Brooklyn to Manhattan , where she cared for Mrs. Farber’s baby Jimmy. For the first half k The Flowering of Isabel of the day, she studied as he slept. In the afternoon, she took Jimmy out in his stroller along Madison Avenue. Three nights a week she attended night classes at Hunter College, conveniently just blocks away from Mrs. Farber’s. Then she rode the subway back to Brooklyn . On Fridays she went straight home to relax and devote the weekend to catching up on schoolwork. Graduating had been her unwavering, central ambition, and now, in her final spring semester, she had become curious about the worldly things she had kept at bay, dating being one of them. She had, of course, dated before, a couple of boyfriends in high school and when she worked as an office temp, but she never really felt they were a serious step toward a future in which she saw herself. Once, she was actually engaged, the breakup sowing her determination to study. Only now, on the verge of graduating, did she allow herself to seriously contemplate that future with herself reinvented, no longer the uncertain young daughter of a woman who cleaned of- fices at night but someone on her way to becoming a grown, confident woman like those she observed along Madison Avenue, dressed in the fine clothes that she fleetingly admired in store windows without pausing to torture herself with desires beyond her means. That very afternoon, in fact, as she pushed Jimmy in his stroller, she paused briefly to look at a beltless silk dress with a Chinese collar, a soft turquoise with little green swirling leaves, and helplessly imagined wearing it, her normally pony-tailed black hair loose and flowing . That fantasy lasted only a second before she saw her reflection in the storefront glass: a plain-looking young woman in a trench coat, clutching Jimmy’s stroller. As she walked away, she imagined the embarrassment of pricing the dress then looking ridiculous as she took off her coat while still in her white working uniform. She made the mistake of telling her mother about the dress, and her mother warned her yet again about the danger of forgetting her real life for fantasy after their meeting with that lawyer. He had informed Isabel that her father’s widow had established a trust fund with “substantial money” that would be enough to give her security but whose exact amount could not be revealed until she reached the age of thirty, when she would receive the money. 114 The Flowering of Isabel [3.239.149.56] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 16:43 GMT) 115 The Flowering of Isabel The lawyer and papers may have said whatever they said, but for her mother there was no guarantee that Isabel would inherit anything . Now that she’s an old lonely woman, Javier...