All about Skin (33 page)

He decided to turn around and head east.

Traffic moved slowly as they passed the mini-mart from where they'd started, continuing east, under the interstate overpass. The area changed abruptly on the other side of the interstate. He drove through Suitcase City, a low-rent area of town where worn hookers, homeless people pushing shopping carts, and scab-skinned meth-heads roamed the streets.

Efraín drove on diligently on the lookout for an address he was now starting to believe didn't exist. The dimming winter sun cast a yellow shadow, and he felt his ankle begin to throb. He asked the woman about her family, making conversation to keep the pain in his foot at bay.

“Tengo cinco hijos,” the woman said, telling Efraín of the five children she'd left in Mexico with her mother, and how she sent money every month to keep them fed. She'd followed the crops alone for almost two years, and now her brother was here. It would be easier, verdad, with someone?

“It must be so hard,” Efraín said mindlessly, and the obviousness of his statement actually shamed him.

“I do whatever destiny asks,” she said. She smoothed her gray sweatpants, and delicately placed her crossed palms on top of one knee. “¿Y usted, Señor? What is your work?”

“Techos.”

He'd come from Nebraska to the house of Rafaelito's parents, where for a short time he was allowed to stay. Construction work was readily available, and even though he had no skills, he could hit a nail with a hammer. A friend of Rafaelito's family found him work—framing roofs. Efraín swung himself across the trusses under a hot Florida sky, vengefully pounding nails. He peeled off his shirt and let the sun blister his skin. Sweat poured out his body. He finished each day with aching muscles, and a profound exhaustion that gratefully brought him sleep.

Two weeks after meeting Emelina behind the palmettos, he saw her again at a birthday party for one of Rafaelito's cousins. From a distance, he watched Emelina dance in the living room, then watched as she headed for the back door and followed her to the corner of the yard where rose bushes surrounded a thigh-high, plaster San Lazaro.

“Caught me again,” she said.

“What?” he asked, “no cigarettes?”

Emelina giggled. “No cigarettes, but too much cidra. Do you dance?”

Efraín shook his head.

Before he realized what was happening, Emelina leaned his way and kissed him, softly and fully. At eighteen, he had never been kissed before.

“Seems there are two things I'm going to have to teach you,” Emelina said.

Efraín stood there breathing hard, his face burning, and said nothing.

“I had a boyfriend,” she motioned with her head, “back there. An official boyfriend. Comprometida. My father said we could get married when I turned twenty.”

“What,” Efraín started and cleared his throat, finding his voice, “happened?”

“He didn't want to come with us when we had the chance to leave,” she said. “There was room in the boat, but I guess he loved the Revolution more than me. He sent a picture a few months ago. He's standing by a truck, holding a large transistor radio. He wrote he'd won it cutting sugar cane—he was the first to meet the required quota. I sent him back a picture of me with a radio. I told him I'd won mine by eating ham.” Emelina turned around quickly and went back into the house, leaving Efraín alone in the yard.

In her sing-song voice the woman recounted the names and ages of her children, adding some detail about each, telling him Roberto, her eldest, ate whole tomatoes the way americano children ate apples, and Luisita, her youngest, was afraid of thunder. Then she told him her husband was gone. Se nos fue, she said, and Efraín chose not to ask if she meant he'd died or had abandoned them. And when he said nothing, because he didn't know what to say, she asked if he was married.

“Sí,” Efraín nodded, “sí, Señora, sí.”

In the same way Efraín found roofing work, knowing someone, or someone who knew someone, he found a small room to rent. Two years later as they both turned twenty, to his happy surprise, he married lovely Emelina.

One night in bed, while on their brief honeymoon, Emelina held her arm toward him, her wrist pulse side up. “Bite me,” she said.

Efraín let out a snicker, shook his head puzzled, and pushed her arm away.

“Do it,” she said. “Bite me!”

When he said no, Emelina grabbed his arm and sunk her teeth into his flesh. Efraín yelped and yanked his arm away.

Emelina looked directly into his eyes. “Remember this,” she said. “You couldn't, but I could.” She took his arm again and gently licked the red crescents her teeth had left, then she trailed her tongue up his arm, across his chest, and down his body.

“¿Y usted y su esposa?” the woman asked. “Do you have children?”

Efraín shook his head. They were stopped. The truck idled as they waited for traffic to move, but Efraín did not look her way.

“¡Qué lástima!” the woman said, and having expressed her pity, fell silent.

Emelina had lost six. The first one they conceived and lost before their first anniversary. Ten years later, the last one, the one she carried the longest, bled out of her before she'd reached the third trimester, even though she'd diligently stayed in bed for weeks.

“You can leave too,” Emelina had said to him. “I don't need you to stay.”

They continued along, leaving behind Suitcase City and entering the part of Fletcher Avenue that housed medical offices and backed the research area of the university.

“It is not here, is it?” the woman asked.

It was time to turn around. Efraín looked at her. “Do you know anyone else?”

“No.”

They drove in silence, through the early dusk, back the way they came. Efraín felt a weight deep within him, as he considered options. He could drive her to a shelter, rent her a motel room, take her home; what would Emelina say?

They were now reentering Suitcase City again, when she said loudly, “There. Stop there.”

“Where?” He looked where she pointed.

In a strip mall, housed between an Amscot and an Asian nail parlor, was a small storefront; the sign above it was a replica of the Mexican flag labeled Productos Mexicanos. The storefront window read: Tomatillos, Masa Harina, Envíos Directos.

“That's not the address,” Efraín said.

“It does not matter.”

Efraín parked in front. He grimaced as he stepped down from the truck, and walked to the passenger side. He intended to help her with her bags, but she was already out of the truck, possessions in hand, holding tightly to what was hers.

“Señora, are you sure?” Efraín asked uncomfortably.

She nodded, reached in her pocket, and pulled out a crumpled five-dollar bill. Before she could offer it to him, Efraín held up his hands, palms flat, firmly saying no, hoping it wouldn't be an insult if he offered her some money.

She draped her knapsack over her shoulder, touched his arm, and said in her melodic Spanish, “God will pay you in his glory.”

Efraín sat in the truck and watched her enter the market. The heat from the vents suddenly felt stifling and he turned it off, noticing that the floury corn scent lingered even though she'd gone. Finally, with an oppressive sense of loss, he drove away.

When Efraín entered his house it was filled with the pungent smell of sofrito. He closed the door quickly against the cold.

“Efraín!” Emelina said loudly. She walked toward him, wiping her hands on a dish towel. “You left your cell here.”

Efraín opened his mouth to speak, but Emelina didn't give him a chance. “Where have you been?” she asked and he saw genuine worry in her eyes. “You're gone forever, it's dark, and you're out there with that damn foot of yours, all descojona'o. You hear all the time about people having strokes, forgetting where they live.”

Emelina reached out and took his hands in hers. “What happened, viejo? Did you get lost?”

Glendaliz Camacho

A
mparo met him on a Friday night when the brothel was resurrected by the women's laughter—too high pitched to be sincere—tobacco smoke, and dimmed lights winking off chipped glasses of rum. She strode into the bedroom, where he was sitting with the posture of a war hero's statue in the plaza.

Amparo introduced herself by offering her back so he could unzip her dress. His hands were smooth and weighty like rocks worn flat by constant water, unlike the calloused sugar cane cutters who sometimes held her by the throat, as if she were a goddamn reed herself. Amparo removed his fedora, somber gray suit, tie, shirt, shoes, socks, and underwear, hanging up and folding as necessary. She was as thorough the rest of the night, so that the scar on her right index finger, the faded burns on her left forearm, or her pendulous breasts that hung like a wet nurse's did not matter. He finished not with a grunt but with an anguished pant in her ear as if he had bitten into food that was too hot. Amparo poured him a glass of water from a jug on the nightstand.

“When can I see you again?”

She lit a cigarette, inhaled, and passed it to him, while he gulped down the water.

“Ask yourself.” She pointed her chin toward his wallet, which she had placed conveniently within his reach on the nightstand. She would not remember his name until his fifth visit, when she wiped the sweat from his forehead with someone else's forgotten handkerchief and Fede told her he loved her.

Noelia had spent every year since her twenty-third tightening the habit of spinsterhood around herself so that now at thirty-three, men were wholly obscured from her sight. Men were something to be sifted through like the pots of uncooked pigeon peas that as a child she would watch the cook inspect for pebbles. Noelia had no shortage of suitors, but sooner or later—thankfully always sooner rather than later—they revealed themselves as pebbles. Noelia saw no good reason to risk what was certain to be a cracked tooth.

Noelia's brother introduced her to Federico on a Sunday after Mass. He spoke to her for too long, too animatedly, about his work at the sugar refinery, the book of Pedro Mir poems he was reading, how the music young people listened to like that merengue sounded as if it barreled straight out of a bayou, his sonorous voice drawing curious glances. Noelia found him silly, especially for a man of forty-three, but there was something about his enthusiasm that made her smile as he spoke.

It was not until she was at the dining table, later that same Sunday, surrounded by her parents, brother, sister-in-law, sisters, brothers-in-law, nieces, and nephews that Noelia allowed herself a moment to indulge in wondering what it would feel like to have a man seated next to her that she could look upon with tenderness, as he brought a forkful of food to his lips. To her surprise, she pictured the somewhat endearing laugh lines around Federico's mouth.

Noelia declined Federico's first invitation for coffee after Mass—since visiting London, she preferred tea—and a subsequent one for lunch—she ate with her family. His dinner invitation was far too intimate, but she finally acquiesced to a walk in the plaza. He was shorter than she would've preferred and his spicy cologne was so overpowering, she was grateful their proper walking positions—he on the outside, closest to the curb, and she on the inside, closest to the houses and shops—did not place her downwind. Yet she found herself wondering if his kiss would taste of his last meal, the mints that clattered against their tin prison in his suit jacket pocket, or nothing at all.

Their courtship was much like that first stroll—pleasant, unhurried, respectful. Saturday afternoons they enjoyed films at the local cinema—
The Bridge on the River Kwai, An Affair to Remember, Tizoc
. They attended dances at the San Juan Social Club, established by the burgeoning community of Puerto Rican émigrés, thanks to the refinery. Noelia waited for him to lie, make a disparaging remark, or cross the line of propriety between a man and a woman, but the moment never arrived.

One evening, after the customary light dinner with Noelia's family—fish soup, white rice, toasted bread, and marble cake that night—Federico smoked his cigarette on the porch. Noelia sat beside him on the swinging bench that cupped them in the breeze. The full moon hung low and heavy like an expectant mother.

“How beautiful.” Federico's exhaled smoke drifted up to the moon like an offering.

“If you like old rocks,” Noelia teased.

“That old rock has been illuminating the darkness for millennia.”

“Don't we have the sun for that?”

“The sun is a tyrant. The Earth is forced to revolve around it or die, but the moon orbits around us.”

“That makes the moon nothing more than our slave.”

“Not at all. Because as much as we pull the moon toward us, she also pulls back and rules a part of us. The ocean.” Federico clasped Noelia's hand in his. She was no longer looking at the moon. Six months later, they were married.

Amparo had not seen Fede in a couple of months, but she only realized it when he reappeared seated at the foot of her rickety bed with a box in his hands. From the way Fede's eyes grew large behind his glasses and he cleared his throat, Amparo could tell he was not expecting to see her hand holding another's. I bet this will put out his fire, she thought. Her son peered at Fede from behind her thigh. She leaned down, whispered in his ear, and the boy slipped away.

“I noticed you have pierced ears, but never wear earrings.” Fede handed her a red box tied with white ribbon. Inside was a pair of diamond earrings mounted on white gold. Amparo resisted the urge to bite them, but considered their utility in an emergency with a visit to the pawn shop.

“You have new jewelry too.” She eyed his wedding band. Even in the caliginosity of her room, Amparo saw Fede's cheeks flush. She began to unzip her skirt, but he grasped her wrist and patted a threadbare patch of sheet next to him on the bed.