The narrator asserts that she lives in a doorway between two rooms which provide distinctly different sounds.
On one side of the doorway lies a room filled with the soft sounds of quiet efficiency from professional women dressed in beige suits who drink their coffee black as they discuss topics like school budgets, teacher tenure and classroom curriculum who rarely stop to flash their beige smiles.
The room lying on the other side of the doorway is filled with the jubilant laughter of senoras in faded dresses who take their coffee with sweet milk as they eat steam tamales and scold each other with smiles that must be trapped inside their dark Mexican eyes.
