Suburban Swing Voter
Let me tell you how it will be. You already know what will happen to your garden on a day without a Mexican, to the sour-smelling mountain of laundry piled up next to the washer if the Guatemalan or maybe Nicaraguan lady doesn’t show up, to your porch that is flaking paint and that you have asked your husband to fix, and in a nice voice, what’s more, and yet here you are, you’re still waiting. You already worry about what will happen to your children while you’re at work, after school on a cold day in January, if that kind woman from the Congo does not show up to let them into the house as you have planned. You, who, after all, are entitled to a life of your own, a home and a family, and a job and career that you can be proud of, and the possibility of freshly starched sheets besides, you think about what could happen if this kind woman — and is she from the Sudan, or was it Somalia? You’re always so afraid to ask; you don’t want to embarrass her, you keep the delicate questions about family to yourself, let’s just say she’s African — you worry about what could happen if this woman, whose own children you sincerely hope are vaguely thriving under the care of her mother-in-law back home, somehow disappears. As a mother yourself, you’re concerned about your children, who love her and call this woman “Auntie,” believing that her smile, her loving hands, can make it so; you fear what could happen to them if she, for instance, vanished early one morning instead of appearing punctually at 3:30 p.m. to unlock your door and let your children inside. You depend on this woman, who you hardly know; you trust her and her husband, who replaced your tire that time you had a flat, and who comes every week to rake your garden and clean your gutters; you count on his brother-in-law who sometimes comes to help him and the other Franciscos and Josés and Robertos who seem always to be ready to help; you begin to fear what could happen if one day the world turned on its axis in a way that nobody predicted, that you honestly didn’t see coming, and the millions of people who fell into this country from somewhere else in the world dropped clear out of sight.
You can’t say, they went home, because for many of them, like you, home is here …
