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Sometimes Carmen looks at Amanda LaRusso and wonders what it is like to be ruthless.
Or maybe it's more that she wonders what it's like to be allowed to be ruthless. To be a hotshot businesswoman, a queen who can and will ruin a person with a clench of her fist, a flick of a finger, with seemingly no consequences.
It's not that she envies her, no. Carmen has survived as long as she has, has kept Miggy out of trouble as long as she has, exactly because of who she is. She is soft spoken and determined and a healer and she tries to show Miguel that being kind is for the best. Ruthlessness has no place in her world, no matter what Mamá might think.
But Carmen is only human. Carmen wants to scream sometimes, shout at the world that it isn't fair that she had to be poor and have bad taste in men and be a single mother and work long hours for almost nothing. It isn't fair that she tries so hard and gets so little, while people like Amanda calculate and scheme and bulldoze through life, and get everything.
She doesn't want to be Amanda but she hates her a little. Wants to rip up her life and see how far her disregard for anything that isn't her goal gets her.
Those are her weak moments.
In her weaker moments, she wonders what it would be like to heal a destitute Amanda, show her a different way.
And in her weakest moments, Carmen thinks of Amanda's cool, piercing stare and dismissive eyebrows and her laugh that invites you to laugh with her. She thinks that maybe what she really wants is to be able to look her in the eye, soften her eyebrows with a touch of her hand, and take that invitation to laugh again and again, so that Amanda never stops thinking of her mouth.