“Another student.”

“Another student and?” Her hair practically standing on end.

“Conducta insólita. Irregular conduct. Señora, no more can be said. You would have to put me out on the street if you knew the rest.”

She crossed her arms and smiled. “That’s what I’m going to call you: Insólito.”

The examination: passed, with highest honors. The prize: a possible ally in this impossible house.

5 January 1936

After weeks lying in bed existing on air and pink bananas, the Queen has risen. She came down the stairs, ribboned and ruffled like a Oaxacan saint’s day, to reclaim her rightful place in this house and terrorize the staff. She announced a hundred people are coming for the Feast of the Kings tomorrow. Later she said, “Really only sixteen are coming, but cook for one hundred in case.” Chalupas, flautas, tacos, gaznates, and macaroons. The dining room is the only place Candelaria and Olunda can sit to cut up vegetables without poking out one another’s eyes. And the rosca: the mistress started screaming when she remembered that, “Tell César to get the car and take you into the city to find a rosca, they’ll all be gone already from the bakeries here in San Angel.” But Candelaria told her we have one already: “This boy knows how to make it.”

Señora gawked as if a fish had arrived in her home, wearing an apron. “Insólito. It’s just as I said. You’re the oddest egg. A boy who makes rosca.”

“Odd egg, go upstairs and get me a bowl,” commanded Olunda, rolling her eyes. She had argued against making a rosca in the first place. (Too much trouble. Not enough space.) Then she insisted there was no Pilzintecutli to hide in the cake. When Candelaria retrieved the porcelain figure from a storage chest, Olunda stomped out. Now the Christ Child himself was contradicting her.

It’s a new year in a house turned upside down. The mistress hangs bright, fluttery paper banderas over the Bauhaus windows, making the house embarrassed, like a plain girl in too much makeup. On the heads of her husband’s Azteca idols she puts red carnations, turning them into altars, and she sets the table the way a priest prepares the tabernacle: white lace tablecloth from Aguascalientes reverently unfolded from the cupboard, blue or yellow plates set out, each one blessed by her fingertips, then the Kahlo grandmother’s silverware. Finally, the flowers and fruit piled in the center of the table like a sculpture: pomegranates, bananas, pitahaya, everything chosen for color and shape. She was finishing the arrangement this morning when the monkey scuttered in and snatched out the bananas. The mistress bellowed, tiny as she is, and chased him out into the courtyard with a mimosa branch she was using in the centerpiece: “Wicked child!”

The diagnosis of Olunda is that this hairy child is the best the señora can hope for. Only twice pregnant in six years of marriage and both times the baby bled out, one at a gringo hospital, the other one here. They say it’s because of a trolley accident years ago that ruined her woman parts and is “too horrible to discuss,” though Olunda and Candelaria still manage to do so. By their accounting, in the last two years she’s had two miscarriages, four surgeries, thirty doctor visits, and a giant fit over her husband’s affair: she broke a lot of the talavera crockery before she moved out. It took her all of last year to forgive him. “And that was only the affair with her sister Cristina, we’re not even counting women outside the family. Listen, how do you make the dough shiny like that?”

“You brush it with softened butter and then the white of one egg.”

“Mmph.” Olunda folded her arms across the mountain range of her bosom.

“Where did the señora live? Before she moved back in here?”

“An apartment on Insurgentes. Candelaria had to go clean it sometimes. Give me those dried figs, mi’ija. Tell him about the mess, Candi, it was even harder to clean up over there than here.”

“It was because of the paintings,” Candelaria explained.

“He painted, in her apartment?”

“No, she did.”

“The Mistress Rivera is also a painter?”

“If you can call it that.” Olunda was shredding chicken breasts for the chalupas, grunting as she worked, settling an old grudge with those hens.

Candelaria said once she went to the señora’s apartment and found a sheet of metal covered with blood. “I thought she had cut herself while setting it up on the easel, or else murdered someone. Probably her husband, considering. But then the mistress sat down with her red pigments, whistling, and happily applied more blood on the picture.”

“Enough gossip,” said Olunda, who was clearly jealous not to have seen this sight herself. “Candi, you have to peel every tomato in that bucket, and you, Odd Egg, I want to see you chopping onions until tears come out of your ass.”

2 February

Eight kinds of tamales for the feast of Candlemas. Even César was ordered to help. He threatened all day to quit, as he is “a chauffeur, not a peon for women’s work.” He’s been angry since October because of having to share his room with an Odd Egg, and now he even has to put on an apron, the world may end soon. The Painter says he’s sorry, but that’s how it is, Frida rules the house. “And besides, old comrade, you’re getting too old for driving, so you better get used to peonage.” It’s true, yesterday César got lost four times on the way to the pharmacist’s. The mistress calls him General Wrong Turn.

Even more than aprons he despises this notebook. He calls it “the espionage.” He is adamant, shutting off the lights on pen and paper. But most nights, by the time every dish in the house has been scraped, cleaned, and put away, he’s already snoring like a whale. The spy may do his work here unless the whale is roused from stupor. It is like being in a casa chica again with Mother, Put out the damn candle before you burn us all.

19 February

Candelaria doesn’t remember that day when she carried the parrot cage on her back through the Melchor market. She says she must have just come from the village then, the Painter and Mistress hired her when they were newlyweds, living at the Allende Street house with the señora’s parents. Candelaria doesn’t remember the parrots, or why they were purchased, or how long the couple lived in that place with the fantastic courtyard, before building this house. She couldn’t say if she liked it better there. She seems to forget almost everything. The secret to surviving the storms of Rivera service.