Most of the time, Zelma wears comfortable loose old clothes when she is doing her heavy duty house cleaning, messy cooking for five people, and several loads of laundry, all at the same time. She is the multitask queen. At least, she makes sure the color of her clothes match, so she does not look like she is crazy, or have a low self-esteem problem. Her strong body likes the house cleaning exercise: big bones, big muscles, she is tall and heavy. If there were Housekeeping Olympics, she could compete in the heavy weight's category. Like a reversed tornado, she is able to turn any upside down house back to a neat, aligned, dust free, display of a perfect cozy home in few hours.If there is a “Type A” CEO, she was a “Type A” Housewife: untiring, driven, an expert in her field. At 36 she, is at the peek of her capabilities, and she could make it to the 500 Fortune Housewives list, only if there was one. She memorizes every recipe she cooks the first time she makes it. After that, she does not need to look in the recipe book; she does it only to confirm and to read her own notes with ideas on how she thinks she can improve it next time.
Zelma and her friends usually meet at church after the Sunday service to chat and to plan the rides for the activities for their children. After the angry preaching, somber religious songs, request for donations, and thanks for every little thing, this is the most pleasurable church time, when they have time to relax and chat while the children are runnning around playing “It”. After hearing gory stories at the Sunday School about lions eating apostles, people being thrown alive into ovens, and stories of crucifixions they need to run, run, run, to burn out the anxiety. Zelma did not approve of some of the gruesome Bible stories; however, she thought her children needed to learn some morals, she learned hers in church, and that is the end of story. Amen.
Her husband José is a quiet sort of “invisible”, very low key man. Although he is always there, he hardly occupies space in Zelma’s kingdom, since Zelma's runs the household while he helps with the kids when he can. His job as an accountant has allowed him to teach her some basic money management skills and with that, they have provided a stable home situation for their kids. Now, at 45, he is entering another “age group” with other expected activities. Yet, he cannot find himself anymore. Like most men, he never learned to get in touch with his true desires; he only know to play his “role”--or roles, the good ones and the bad ones-- sometimes right, sometimes wrong.
He did not know any better. As a matter of fact, Zelma either. They went through 12 years of their marriage following what they thought were their roles, always measuring how they were doing comparing themselves with their neighbors. Well, what they saw and thought was happening with their neighbors. Zelma feels her main purpose in life is to push her children forward to do better than herself --that is, to go to college-- and that keeps her busy until the kids leave the house for good. When Zelma relaxes, she gets anxious; when José relaxes, he gets depressed.
José escapes his routine by imagining he is the bicycle man in the movie “Il Postino”. “I wish I could have lived in a sunny island in the
