Drama drama drama

I decided I should elaborate on this family drama more, since some people seem curious and it’s really pretty entertaining. Sometimes I feel like my mere presence here has thrown off the precarious balance of relationships between my family members; on the other hand, these are all really complex class and gender issues that go way back. Anyway, it all started last week when I started hanging out a lot during the day in the pet store under our house with Mijael. Usually he helps me with Quechua and I teach him some phrases in English, and then while he’s attending to customers I do my reading for class the next day. Admittedly this is not always the most efficient way of getting my work done, but it’s more fun than just doing it holed up in my room. Sometimes I bring my guitar down there to practice, and he also plays a little (he said he played pretty well, until one day when he left his guitar in a taxi and never got a new one). And then there was one day when I showed him ALL the pictures I have on my laptop (over 1000) because, well, he wanted to see them all.

Anyway, from the beginning I was a little nervous about how my host mom was going to react to this new habit of mine (of hanging out in the pet store), and I sensed that she would rather I spend more time in the house, but all she said was to let her know when I was going down there so she would know where I was. Then one day last week when I was down there, my friends Jenny and Raquel wandered in, and we were all taking turns with the guitar, talking, and having a good time. Then Mijael’s friend Carlos wandered in. Carlos is a Cuzqueñan who was just recently married to a gringa from Maine, but to make a long sad story short, she dumped him for some other guy literally a week after he had finally gotten his visa and moved in with her in Maine. The day we met him was his first day back in Peru, and unfortunately he has to go back to the US really soon to resolve some legal issues surrounding his green card. He’s a really funny guy though, pretty much always in good spirits. Anyway. The next day my host mom explained to me that it’s fine for me to hang out in the store with Mijael, but my friends aren’t allowed to be there because supposedly they are too much of a distraction. She made it sound like this was a mandate coming from his sister, who owns the store, but I think she was making that up because his sister is too nice to have ratted on Mijael and besides, she was never there at the same time as my friends were there.

So. Then there’s this other thing my host mom has doing lately that’s been bothering me, which is asking me to stay in the house for certain periods of time so that Rosita can go out. She’s afraid she might be robbed if the house is ever left alone, which is completely ridiculous, a) because we have at least 4 locks on the doors, b) Santa Monica is a very safe neighborhood, and c) Mijael is always in the store during the day (according to her, you can’t see from the store anything thats going on outside the store, which is also untrue). But I can’t say no to her when she asks me to stay in the house, because otherwise she won’t let Rosita leave. Well, one day when I was in the store my host mom came down there to ask me to go up to the house in a few minutes because she was leaving. I staid down there for another hour or so, in which time Raquel wandered in, and I told her she could stay for a few minutes because Socorro wasn’t around. Eventually I went into the house so that Socorro wouldn’t find me in the store when she got back. I told Raquel that she could stay at her own risk, but that if my host mom got back her best option was to hide, then run away. Well, sure enough, Socorro came back and found her there, along with Carlos and a couple of Mijael’s other friends. She got really mad at Raquel and gave her a tirade about how the store is not a public socializing space. Ironically though, when she walked in Mijael was attending to a customer (obviously not distracted), and she didn’t say a word to Carlos or any of the other guys who were hanging out there (I think because they were also friends of my host mom’s son, Javier). Instead she waited until Carlos and the other guys had left, then scolded Mijael about them having been there.

Then the next week my friends and I were planning on going out dancing with Carlos, and I invited Mijael to come along—he has nights free now because he quit his job at the hotel. He said he would come, but not to tell Socorro that I was going out with him (I also was instructued by Carlos not to tell her I was going out with him). We went dancing at some place where Jenny and I were pretty much the only two gringas in the whole place, and had a lot of fun (attempting) dancing to latin music with the guys, who of course all know how to dance. When we arrived back in front of my house in Santa Monica, it was around 1:30 and Socorro was most definitely asleep, but Mijael was scared shitless that she would see him with us if he got out of the taxi. “She’s watching! She’s watching!” he kept saying. He was so terrified that he even called Carlos right after he left in the taxi just to make sure that none of us would even do so much as mention his name anywhere in the vicinity of the house. The next morning I told Rosita that we had been out with Mijael, and then she spent the whole breakfast telling me about how Mijael lies all the time and you can’t trust him with anything. Even though he and Rosita are friends to some extent, both she and my host mom are constantly giving him shit and I’m not sure how much of it to take at face value. It makes a lot of sense to me that Mijael may have developed a habit of lying as a defense mechanism, after years and years of my family treating him like a poor misguided little indigenous boy who needs to be disciplined. Well, apparently that day (the day after we had gone out at night) Mijael overslept and came to the store late. Rosita asked him if he had been out the night before, he said no, and she called him a liar. Mijael was a little upset with me because apparently I wasn’t supposed to have told Rosita either, even though I know she would never rat on me to my host mom. What Rosita did report to her was that Mijael had arrived late. So I got to witness my host mom asking Mijael why he had been late. Had he gone out the night before? Mijael made up some long-winded story that I couldn’t quite follow, and to that my host mom responded, “Look, his nose is already a foot long!” “No, it’s still here,” Mijael responded, jokingly patting his nose. Luckily the subject was dropped after that. Man, so much drama, so much drama. And I always seem to be right in the center of it.