The first lesson I learned in church was that a finger thins itself to hold a wedding ring, making a bed for the metal that slips back and forth all day, smooth and familiar and half-forgotten. Most Sundays from the age of five, I removed or desired to remove my mother’s heavy ring and examine the square diamonds set in silver metal she called white gold. Underneath the ring was the underring, the bare line below the lightly freckled knuckle of my mother’s third finger. Primarily I was interested in jewelry. I wanted the diamonds to flash rainbow sparks all over the chapel, for the ring to be yellow gold, and, in pursuit of such daily pleasures, to get married right away. But the ring was a solemn object, as sacred as the sacrament tray. I was permitted to wear it for 30 seconds, then it went back to its pale, waistlike hollow on my mother’s finger.

When I went away to graduate school and lived among feminists, I learned that the ring signifies a girl is chattel, bound first to her father, then the groom. Wed lock. “Why do you think they use that term, give her away?” my linguistics professor asked, unaware that in my Mormon family women were not given away but sealed to their husbands for time and all eternity in temple ceremonies I couldn’t attend until I’d knelt and been sealed myself.

Many women in my family have been sealed. We were a family of long marriages even before we became Mormons and that phrase, “time and all eternity,” was uttered above our heads. My mother’s genealogy chart shows Joshua Adams living with his Elizabeth from their wedding day in 1803 until the Civil War, Weeden Vander Hakes sticking with Eliza from 1822 to 1884, and so on. In my lifetime, both sets of sealed grandparents lived to the 50th wedding anniversary, though my mother’s father passed that fluorescent afternoon in a hospital bed, his left side paralyzed.

The ring he gave Geneva Crosby in middle age was yellow gold with three diamonds like salt flakes in the band. Though my grand father raised cattle most of his life, for a few years he ran a gas station in Red Hill, New Mexico, where the story goes that a man traded the ring for a tank of gas. The ring is gone now, like all the participants, but as a child I imagined the broke man’s wife sitting in a dusty car, a white line on her finger where the ring used to be. Now I envision her else where, tanning the line by another man’s pool.

I’m two and a half years into my beloved, unsealed, Scottish Presbyterian marriage. I have my mother’s hands, and my ring finger thins under garnets, which meant constancy to the Victorians. It was a late marriage, so it’s doubtful we’ll mark the 50th passing of that grassy, rainscented day by the River Doon. And yet I feel I’m in search of our future when I talk to couples who’ve made it past the paper, linen, and tin anniversaries to gold, which lies under the numeral 50 like a rainbow’s pot. Better it should be iron, which marks number six. Iron is a better symbol of love that 50 years ago promised, “With this ring,” and 50 years later is still saying, “I thee wed.”

Mary and Arlister Tillory

Mary and Arlister Tillory, Logan Heights

Mary Emma Jackson was born in Washingtonon the Brazos, Texas, to a family of eight children. Her father raised cattle on his own land, and everyone in the family picked cotton for cash — 25 cents per hundred pounds. When Mary Jack son was 16, she could pick five or six hundred pounds of cotton in a day and still leave the sun in the sky.

She met Arlister Tillory at a school function in Bren ham in the fall of 1937, on the day he came back from a cotton pick. In a graduation photograph, Pickard High School is a clean, white, clapboard frame for graduates in black gowns. Tillory, the class vice president, grandson of a Methodist minister, stands solemnly in the front row, identified by his last name and his office. Mary Jackson isn’t there. She says the photographer took so long that she and her girlfriend went off to do something else.

Tillory liked Mary right away. “She was always such a beautiful person,” he says, “had such beautiful skin.”

Though no high school picture is available to prove this, no proof besides Mary is necessary. At 76 she holds herself erect to a height of 5 ́10 ̋, and her skin is age less. If you saw her, you’d think her too young to have passed the gold and emerald anniversaries — she looks as if she could pick five or six hundred pounds of anything and still leave the sun in the sky.

At Pickard High School, this energy was directed at Tillory. “I used to run him around and fight him, beat him up,” Mary says. “I done all kinds of things. But I liked him a lot, and I fell in love with him.”

After high school, Mary left home to get a house keeping job in Navasota, and Tillory worked in his father’s shoe shop in Bren ham, a 25cent bus fare away. When he came to town, they would talk all the time about getting married and things they were going to do, how far they wanted to go in life. He said he was going to buy her a car, and she looked up at the moon and thought, “This guy is crazy!”

Mary’s mother didn’t think so much of him. She thought the wedding was a bad idea even though Mary was living on her own, rooming in the big house of a Methodist woman in Navasota. “You couldn’t do that,” Mary says, “and be a respectable person. My mother was always telling me I should come back home, because something was going to happen to me.”

They decided to marry in the fall of 1939. Shoe business was always bad in the summer, because people went barefoot, so Tillory picked cotton to get extra money. He ordered a set of wedding and engagement rings from Walter Fields for $9. His family put up fresh wallpaper for the newly weds, who were expected not only to say their vows in Tillory’s parents’ house but to live there afterwards. The day before the wedding, Tillory received a letter saying Walter Fields didn’t have the rings in stock.

On Sunday morning, October 15, Mary put on a new purple dress and reconsidered. “When my husband came from Brenham to pick me up,” she says, “I almost didn’t go. I said, ‘Well, I’ve changed my mind.’

"But Tillory was prepared. People in Brenham had told him he wasn’t going to get married, and he just said, “Oh, yeah, I’m going to get married all right. ’Cause I’m going over there and get her.”

“So I got married,” Mary says, “and we got along pretty well. All the years that we’ve been married, I haven’t regretted it at all.”

That first year, Mary had no intention of living in Brenham with her in laws, wallpaper not withstanding. She and Tillory went to live in Mary’s furnished room in Navasota. Her employer owned a line of dry goods stores, and he gave Tillory a job in the Navasota store, a job that led to other jobs in town, Mary says, because people met him and liked him. The two of them cleaned the white Baptist church on weekends for $40 a month, and they had money in the bank when Tillory was drafted and sent to cooks and bakers school in Point Loma.

“I was a cook,” Tillory says. “That was another one of my hobbies. They look in your records to see what skills you possess, and they saw in there that I had gone to cooking school.”

“With the girls,” Mary points out, “ ’cause he was a womanizer.”

“I went to school for 16 weeks,” Tillory says, “and in the meantime, I wrote back and told my wife that I wanted her to come out here and bring everything that she wanted, because I’d found paradise.”

By then, Mary was working for a Mr. and Mrs. Greenwood, who owned the boarding house where every one in town ate on Sundays. After she received Tillory’s letter, she went to the bank and asked Mr. Yeager, the bank president, if she could withdraw her savings.

But Mr. Yeager told Mary, no, he wasn’t going to let her have the money because what was Mrs. Greenwood going to do for help? “He said, ‘All you niggers are leaving and going out to California, and I’m not going to let you.’”

“I was from the country,” Mary says. “I didn’t know how to do things.” But there was an older woman who worked for Mrs. Greenwood, an older woman named Pearl, and she told Mary to wait a minute. She would tell Mary how to strike while the iron was hot.

They waited until Mrs. Greenwood’s daughter married a high-ranking Navy officer and left Navasota to be with her husband. “Now, you come next week,” Pearl said, “and you ask Mrs. Greenwood, you tell her you want to go and spend some time with your husband. You’re a young woman.” Mr. Yeager came to dinner, and Mrs. Greenwood did as Mary asked.

“I got everything I had out of the bank,” Mary says. “He asked me, ‘Do you need that much money?’ and I said, ‘Yes, sir, I don’t know where I’m going to live or anything. Maybe I need all of it.’” Mary laughs and says, “I got it all!” Then she took the train to San Diego.

In 1944, Tillory says, you could drive across the prairie where Logan Heights now stands. Pointing to a view of stucco houses, wooden fences, and yards, he says, “This was all rattlesnakes and jackrabbits.” The Tillorys set up house at 3034 K Street and used their blue-and-red ration chips to buy meat and vegetables at the Navy commissary on E Street.

Tillory had 18 months of shore duty, which meant he cooked for seven days on the base in Oceanside and then came home for seven days. Mary took the street car from 30th and Imperial Avenue down to Fifth and Market, where she would get off the streetcar, walk on up to the nickel snatcher, and cross the bay to North Island. She was a storekeeper in an aeronautics supply house, checking the shelves for aircraft parts when servicemen came in with requisitions.

Tillory spent the end of the war in the Pacific. He wrote to Mary every day, and she wrote to him every day. He wrote about Oki nawa and the battle for Eniwetok, but when his letters entered the mail room, censors clipped out details, slowing down the mail so that Mary received 30 or 40 letters at once, all cut up like paper snowflakes.

Those letters are gone now. Gone also is the photograph in which Mary wears a yellow suit and Tillory, ship’s cook, third class, wears his midi, the two of them posing in a studio whose address they still remember as Fifth and Market Street. One of their children slipped this photo from the album and kept it in the way I would have kept the ring that was exchanged for gas, in the way I slipped my parents’ youthful faces into my college suitcase and studed them from far away.

The Tillory house is full of photographs, color pictures in frames that layer dressers and line walls. Six children were raised in this house, which the Tillorys bought in 1950: three sons and a daughter in graduation caps, two granddaugh ters in debutante dresses, who are now in college and whose names are engraved on secondary school plaques and awards of achievement. The Tillory house is an expression of Mary’s passion for red, and it makes me feel that I have entered a genie’s bottle. The carpet is red, the Queen Anne sofa is red, the drapes are red, her dress is red, and the table is set with Christmas Spode china. A red napkin has been rolled inside a napkin ring and placed in the center of every plate. Through the living room sheers, it is possible to see Mary’s red Cadillac, evidence that Tillory, walking Mary home in the moonlight and telling her he’d buy her a car someday, is a man who keeps his promises.

“In 1978,” Mary says, “my husband took me out and bought me my own Cadillac car. The guy did it! I couldn’t see what in the world he could be talking about, back there when he was telling me what he was gonna do for me and what he was gonna buy me. It was just absolutely like a fairy tale.”

Sitting on the Queen Anne sofa, the Tillorys have two pieces of advice for married people like me. “You have to talk,” Mary says. “You can’t be quiet and keep a marriage together 56 years.”

“I think reminiscing is the most important thing,” Tillory says. “You go back and think of all those important dates and how you man aged to get along.”

In the china cupboard are the nesting stacks of china he bought her while he was in Germany during the Korean War. Mary brings over a gravy boat and says, “He knows I like dishes.”

Through the doorway, I can see the yellow kitchen.

“I never forget,” Tillory says, “the time my wife fixed dinner for my family. I thought that was the most wonderful thing, and every once in a while I go back to it and tell her what a beautiful meal it was that she fixed up there, even though we didn’t have much money.”

“On the first Valentine’s when we were married,” Mary says, “he brought me this big sucker and asked me to accept this sucker until he could buy me a box of candy. I remember that. I thought that was marvelous.”

And with the afternoon light coming through the sheers, Mary heads for the bedroom and returns with the diamond and emerald rings that replaced, on various milestone anniversaries, the $9 set that was out of stock at Walter Fields on October 15, 1939.

Rosanne and Warren Dawson

Rosanne and Warren Dawson, Bonsall

Although Rosanne was born in Salt Lake City, she grew up on the island of Oahu. Her father was a bookkeeper on the sugar plantation at Laie, and in 1941, when Warren Dawson sat behind her in Sunday school, Rosanne Musser was 20 years old.

Warren had come to Hawaii from another Mormon town, Boise, Idaho, where his father ran the Dawson Candy Company. Warren was a 23yearold carpenter for the Pacific Naval Air Bases, and week days in Pearl Harbor he built decontamination and telephone communication buildings that could take a direct hit from a 10,000 pound bomb.

They met just before the blitz. They went for drives up Tantalus in his sky-blue Plymouth convertible, and every Sunday morning, War ren came to church hold ing a lei for Rosanne to wear.

On December 7, 1941, Rosanne did not have the radio on. “I was lying in bed thinking what I’d wear to church,” she says. “I could hear the bombing, but I thought it was maneuvers.” Her father was not at home that day. His Naval Reserve unit had been called to active duty, and on that Sunday morning he was in a tug boat in the middle of Pearl Harbor, transporting sup plies from Ford Island.

It was a neighbor who told the Mussers to turn on the radio. Then they heard what Warren was watching from a distance: the planes descending, their sides marked with rising suns.

By evening, an uncle with military clout man aged to determine that Mr. Musser was alive.

After that, Warren worked seven days a week instead of five. The Mussers, like everyone else in Honolulu, covered their windows with wrapping paper and old newspapers, then went outside to see if any light eaked through the sides. Headlights were painted black, except for a pupil the size of a silver dollar, which was painted blue. Only mil itary personnel could travel after 8:00 p.m., so Warren and Rosanne began to con duct what was called a black out romance.

First, Warren had to live within sneaking distance. He moved from the servant’s quarters of a doctor’s house to a friend’s apartment near the Musser house; and every night, while the headlights of the Army trucks cast slim neon beams, Warren dashed between hedges and houses and plumeria trees.

The Mussers’ lanai smelled like night-blooming jasmine, a cold, delicious smell after the stopped up air of houses. Warren and Rosanne would sit out there in the dark by the jasmine vines and the rainbow shower trees.

“I might add,” Warren says, “that Rosanne had a mother who watched her like a hawk, and I was watched very closely.” The men who were recruited to work as defense carpenters had a reputation for roughness. They were not esteemed like the officers and service men Rosanne had dated before Warren — officers and servicemen who were now, in 1942, out to sea.

By April 28, Rosanne’s 21st birthday, Warren had proposed twice. His first proposal, which Rosanne turned down, had been fol lowed by a period of mutual loneliness that convinced him to stay in Hawaii and ask her again. She accepted, and he arranged for a forward-thinking birthday present, a negligee procured by a friend’s wife who worked at a fancy boutique in Waikiki.

“It was beautiful,” Rosanne says; but when her mother saw it, she said a bachelor couldn’t give any sort of clothes to a girl with out making her look like a kept woman.

This wasn’t, Warren says, the sort of etiquette lesson you learned much about when you grew up in Idaho with three brothers. But he had to take the neg ligee back. He carried it to his apartment and hid it under the bed so his house mates wouldn’t know.

Mrs. Musser, or Sister Musser, as the other Mormons would have called her, still didn’t approve of the match. She wrote to her brother in Idaho and had him check out the Dawson family, a safeguard that made Rosanne furious. “At least wait three months,” Mrs. Musser said, thinking they were only in love because the blackout threw them together during a time when Warren didn’t have any com petition from officers.

Three months later, on August 1, 1942, Warren and Rosanne rode to the Laie Temple in the back seat of the Mussers’ sedan. “We held hands very tightly the whole way,” Warren says.

It is Warren who describes the drive to the north side of the island, Warren who remembers the precipice of Pali, where the wind blew very hard, and the valley floor, where the jacaranda, African tulip, and plumeria made a flowered tunnel for the road, which then broke out into a view of the Pacific. The Laie Temple, he says, is cream colored, and its length is reflected in pools like those that stretch before the Taj Mahal.

I try to remember pic tures of the Hawaii Temple. Surely it was among the Mormon temples that were held up for me to see at age 8 and 13 and 21, but I can’t remember it, and there is no wedding portrait by the reflecting pool.

Instead, there are two studio pictures of Rosanne, in manila folders and theatrically signed “de Gaston.” In the first portrait, Rosanne sits in one curve of a couch shaped like an S. In the second, she stands in her white organza dress beside a vase of orchids. She holds a bouquet of maidenhair fern and tiny white blooms she says are ginger buds, a transitory flower. They brown quickly, as did the organza dress her mother made, darkening, I imagine, to the shade in de Gaston’s photograph.

The rings of this marriage were bought at Eggholm Jewelry in Honolulu and lost three or four years later when their old est daughter, born nine months and seven days after the wedding, took the rings from her mother’s night stand to the beach and lost them in the sand.

The Dawsons sailed to the mainland in 1957 and lived in Alhambra for 30 years. The hardest time in their marriage was the beginning of the Alhambra years, when Warren was working swing shift as a cabinet maker and taking design classes at Woodbury College, when their six children were growing up and Rosanne was working in the accounting department of Woodruff ’s Men’s Store. “For peanuts,” she says. Later she would finish school, get a credential, teach for 18 years in the Los Angeles Unified School District, but in the meantime she saw her husband at one time of day: midnight. This seems like a good moment to ask, “So how did you stay together?”

“We didn’t expect to divorce,” Rosanne says. “It didn’t seem an option. We had a lot of rough times, but...”

“In the days we got married, it was a serious thing to get married.”

“We’re not particularly pious now — churchwise — but in a Mormon marriage it’s to last forever; it’s not ‘Till death do you part.’ So if you’re looking ahead that far...”

“This was an attitude that was taught to us.”

The mantel is still dec orated with Christmas paper, and there’s a popping, almost heatless fire in the castiron stove. Behind me on the kitchen wall is a sign that says DAWSON CANDY COMPANY, a reminder of his father, the confectioner, who lived with them for eight years before he died. In the bedroom are dozens of framed photographs, some color, some black and white, all family members except for the monkey, which Rosanne threw in as a joke.

Perhaps for all these years, they were simply doing as they’d been taught — a feat in itself — but I’m glad just the same when Warren tells the story of a fight he and Rosanne had a long time ago in Hawaii.

“I was working all the time,” he says. “I had quit Pearl Harbor, and I was working in my own business, and I was trying to be very successful and have things work out, and, I don’t know,” he says, looking across the end table at Rosanne, “we’d had a little spat or something?”

“Probably,” Rosanne says, laughing.

“Anyway, I went home, and she wasn’t there. She’d gone over to her mother’s.”

It turns out that Rosanne didn’t intend to worry him like that, but all day Warren thought and thought about it, and finally the guy working for him asked if something was wrong. “I think Rosanne has left me,” he said and burst into tears.

There’s something about the look on Warren’s face when he says, “I was just devastated,” that tells me I can chalk this one up to love. Fifty-three years and counting.

Mary and Roy Klein

Photo by Sandy Huffaker, Jr.

Mary and Roy Klein, Fallbrook

She was born Mary Louise Nelson to the wife of a dentist in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Roy was born in Shattuck, Oklahoma, to a Baptist family, and he grew up among the wheat farms and cottonwood trees of Ellis County.

They met in an elevator in Chattanooga, Tennessee. She was training to be a WAC at Fort Oglethorpe, and he was a Navy recruit selected to take courses at the University of the South in Sewanee. The sailors and the WACs used to spend weekends in Chattanooga, rooming with their friends in hotels, and that’s how Mary and Roy came to be in the same elevator in 1942.

“He had his pea jacket on,” Mary says, “with the collar up, and his face tucked down in there, and his lit tle blue sailor cap, and I thought, ‘oh, how cute.’” There’s a picture in the hall that confirms her impression. The two of them lean together and smile — she in a dotted dress, he in a blue sailor uniform with white piping. He looks shy and is not wearing his cap. They are both dark-haired and hand some and young.

“So we got to talking,” Mary says, “and we met again the next day and talked and talked and talked.” After that, they had to write let ters. After his first year at Sewanee, Roy went to study meteorology at MIT. Mary didn’t like the job she was offered after training at Fort Oglethorpe (“radio transmitting and that kind of stuff,” she explains), and she needed a reason to get out. “I had a reason at that point,” she says.

Roy Klein, the man in the elevator, wanted Mary to move to Massachusetts and become his wife. Her parents thought it was the worst thing that could hap pen to her — a man they hadn’t even met! — but she went to live in a little apart ment across the Charles River. They intended to get married right away, but somebody in Roy’s suite got scarlet fever, and the whole floor was quarantined. Six weeks later, in a gray wool suit, Mary Nelson became Mary Klein before a justice of the peace in Quincy, Massachusetts. Mary’s landlady asked to see the marriage license before she would let Roy enter Mary’s room Their hands and faces were cold from crossing the bridge over the Charles River. It was March 25, 1944.

At first they couldn’t live together. Roy’s arrangement with the Navy, a category called V12, didn’t include a living allowance for wives, so he didn’t tell them he was married. Mary moved to Waltham and worked at the watch factory, which made detonating devices for bombs during the war. On weekends Roy hitchhiked to Waltham.

“His roommates,” Mary says, “all wanted to know who was this girl he’d go visit and spend the weekend.”

Roy graduated in 1946, and the Navy wanted to send him to the Aleutians. “I’m a warmweather boy,” Roy says. “I could see where I could be up there for quite some time.” He had enough points to get out of the Navy, so he took his dis charge, and the Kleins moved to Muncie, Indiana, a region known for glass, auto parts, hogs, and soft winter wheat.

After his first job with the Ball Brothers glass company, Roy went on to design refineries for the Fluor company. He helped design the first refinery in Kuwait. Their two children were very young in Houston, a little older in La Mirada, graduated in Chino and the Netherlands, in college when the Kleins lived in London. The Kleins moved to Antwerp and then South Africa, where there is no oil, but plenty of coal, and coal, Roy explains, can be oxidized into ash, vapor ized with steam, run over an iron catalyst, and turned into oil.

“At that time, you see,” Mary says, “South Africa was really being persecuted by the rest of the world...”

“Apartheid,” Roy says.

“They were trying to get them to change.” In South Africa, the Kleins lived in what Mary calls a small town built out of nothing, out where the coal was. “It was nice,” Mary says. “We enjoyed it. It was a real cultural shock when I came home. I mean, everything was done for you — you just had fun and socialized.”

A friend in South Africa had an avocado grove in Fallbrook, and he said they would love it here. They began to divide their time between Newport Beach and a condo on the Fall brook golf course. In 1983, two years before Roy retired, an accident occurred. Their daughter Beth, who was an equestrian once, a barrel rider in rodeos, the mother of an eight-year-old boy, was driving in the right hand lane of the San Diego Freeway.

“She had a tendency,” Mary says, “to drive in the slowest lane.”

“This truck comes past her on the other side,” Roy says, “just clean over, big semitrailer, and before you know it, the truck turns off to his exit, which was cross ing her lane. Either she didn’t notice it, or — we don’t know what happened — but her car went underneath the trailer. And the back wheels came over and stopped on top of her. She was in there a couple of hours before they could get her out.”

Beth died by nightfall.

The Klein house sits on a ridge overlooking the golf course. The windows of the living room are filled with the green of that grass the dark pond, the silent motion of white carts. On the walls are oil paintings of South Africa, where the roofs, Mary tells me, are built in the Dutch style.

In a moment, we’ll go into the hall and see black and white pictures of Beth when she was a child in Richardson, Texas. An aerial photo of the refinery in South Africa, two miles wide by three miles long, where coal is turned first into ashes and then to oil. Beth and her husband before a fireplace, giddy and blurred with happiness.

I remember my last question. “What about the wedding ring?”

“We went together and picked it out,” Roy says.

“I don’t even remember where,” Mary says. “It wore out; it wore through. It’s amazing how rings wear.” Mary tells me that the one she’s wearing is getting thin; and we study the full-color portraits of grandchildren, the black and white faces of Mary and Roy when they were children in tiny clothes, standing on lawns in the American Midwest.

José Arce Alvarado and Maria Luisa Madriga

Photo by Sandy Huffaker, Jr.

Maria Luisa Madrigal and José Arce Alvarado, Escondido

It’s a sunny afternoon between two holy days: the day when the Virgin of Guadalupe appeared to Juan Diego on the hill of Tepeyac, and the day when the Virgin Mary gave birth in Bethlehem. José and Maria have been in California for eight months now, traveling to see the children who left Mexico for Escondido, Los Angeles, and cities farther north. They will spend Christ mas here in Escondido with their daughter Rosa and her family, which includes their grandson Eddie, my interpreter.

My Spanish is rudimentary, a classroom Span ish that allows me to identify the past subjunctive tense of “to be” only on multiple-choice tests. I manage to shake hands and say, “Mucho gusto” to Maria and José. After these words, my American questions are polished into español by Eddie.

Thus I learn that Maria Luisa Madrigal was born in the town of Las Tlazalca, Michoacán, on June 19, “Mil novecientos veinte seis,” Maria says, giving the year the grave length of Roman numerals on an MGM movie reel: one thousand nine hundred twenty-six. She had two older brothers named David and Luis, a younger sister named Guadalupe, and a younger brother named Miguel. Their father was

un comerciante, a merchant.

José Arce Alvarado was born ten years earlier, on August 14, 1916, to a family of nine. He first saw Maria in the street outside her house when he was 22. She was, he says, muy encerada, a girl shut away from the world. It wasn’t good for her to leave the house. But on this occasion, when he passed by in his work as un comerciante, he saw her, and she saw him. She was 12 years old, a year younger than Shakespeare’s Juliet. She knew that she wanted to marry him.

In the next four years, Maria says, she saw José just four times. He was her novio , her boyfriend, but she remained a girl muy encerrada . On each of those rare occasions, she was pro tected by her cousins, and he was attended by his friends. They did not go dancing. They did not, in fact, go anywhere. They spoke at a distance of six meters.

“No kiss, no nothing,” their soninlaw Roberto says, and everyone laughs. “ Unos tiempos muy delicados,” José explains, and Eddie translates, “Delicate times.”

When Maria was 16, José and his brother went to see her father, who refused to give his consent. “I left my parents and my house,” Maria says, “to marry him.”

They were married on the Day of the Holy Kings, January 6, the day the Wise Men finally saw Jesus. It was a cold day, Maria remembers, and I picture sunlight so clear it hurts the eyes. The words of a judge were followed by the blessing of a priest, his hand drawing a cross in the air before them en el nombre del Padre, del Hijo, y del Espiritu Santo. They wore no special clothes, posed for no photograph. They knelt, and then they stood up together. They held a fiestacita to cele brate, at which a woman sang and two men played guitars; but her family was angry and they didn’t attend. They forgave her three months later.

For 40 years, José car ried milk to the towns around Las Tlazalca, first by horse and then by truck. Maria gave birth to Etelv ina, Maria Refugio, Elisia, José, George, Fernando, one after the other until there were 12. Nine children were born at home and three in the hospital of a larger town. A young girl would come to tend each new baby, while Maria went back to cooking and clean ing for the older ones.

“It was like a restau rant,” she says, “like a wed ding.” Enormous pots of food cooking day and night. Clothes to wash, not in a lavadora , but in the stream near her house: scrubbed by hand, rinsed by hand, wrung by hand. After the clothes dried, she ironed.

But when I ask what was difficult in those years, José says that he always worked, so his children never lacked food or clothing. What could be difficult?

The answer to the question of how they stayed together comes from Maria, who says simply, “Comprender. Sufrir.” To understand and to suffer. “ Yo nunca pensaba separar con el, nunca, nunca.” I never thought of separation from him, never, never.

So they stayed together in the town where they were born. One by one their children moved to the United States. Once, when Eddie was nine, he returned with his parents to the town of Las Tlazalca, where in the plaza on Sun day afternoons a band plays, people eat peanuts, hear serenatas, watch fireworks. And once, on the 50th anniversary of the day when Maria Luisa Madrigal knelt down in the church with José Arce Alvarado, the Day of Kings, nearly all the family came home for Mass and a fiesta.

“My father never dances,” Rosa says, “but he danced on that day.”

In the corner of the living room is a small shrine to the Virgin of Guadalupe. The painted plaster hands press together in prayer. Her corona of holiness, represented by yellow spikes, radiates like the rays of a medieval astronomer’s sun. “Tiempos muy delicados,” José says, staring gravely into the camera with his wife, the Virgin of Guadalupe bowing her head behind them. They do not think of separation. Not in the past, present, or future.

Outside, the sun is still warm on the streets of Escondido, where a boy and girl younger than 16, older than 12, are walking home together. He wears the long white T-shirt and baggy jeans of his times, and suspended from her shoulders is a small, girl ish pendant of a backpack, the mark of her times. They could hold hands if they wanted. Her skirt, which is pink and short, flips a little as she walks. They may forget this day as soon as it’s gone, or remember it. The winter sun on the grass beside them is delicate, and brief.