America's Dream (12 page)
Once Ester is gone, América knocks on Rosalinda’s door. “Time to get ready for school,” she calls, in as gay a manner as
she can muster. A few minutes later Rosalinda comes out of her room, but she’s not dressed in her uniform. “Why aren’t you ready?” América asks, and Rosalinda screws up her face.
“Didn’t Papi tell you? He’s coming to get me later.”
América’s heart drops. “No,” she says, “he didn’t say anything to me.”
“We’re taking the afternoon ferry,” Rosalinda says with fear in her voice.
“When were you going to tell me?” América asks, her hands on her hips.
“We talked about this, Mami!”
“Did we? All I remember is I tried to talk to you and you slammed the door in my face. I’m surprised it’s still on its hinges.” “And I remember telling you I need to go away for a while,
and you gave me a lecture.”
They stand face-to-face, Rosalinda almost as tall as her mother, so that she doesn’t have to look up to her.
For an instant, América doesn’t know what to do. Whatever
I do now, she realizes, will be remembered the rest of our lives. She’s relieved when Rosalinda is the first to speak.
“Please, Mami, let me go. I promise I won’t do anything to make you ashamed. Please let me go, Mami.”
América wraps her daughter in her arms and holds on to her tightly, as if by doing so she will ensure that Rosalinda will never even think of leaving her. Dry-eyed, she feels her daughter’s sobs rip into the deepest part of herself, the part that bore this child, that carried her for nine months, that binds them woman to wo- man. She hugs her fiercely, embracing all that she was, is, and will be. This child, this woman, her child, a woman. She lets her go, wipes the tears from Rosalinda’s cheeks, kisses her streaked face the way she did when Rosalinda hurt herself and needed to be reassured that the hurt would heal. And the same soothing rhyme she used to sing to Rosalinda enters her brain, and she sings it softly as she caresses her daughter’s hair away from her face. “Sana, sana, colita de rana, si no sana hoy se sana mañana.” Rosalinda listens to her mother, not with the delighted trust of the child who knows only Mami can make it better, but with the certain knowledge that Mami often makes it worse.
América waits on the porch for Correa to arrive. The ferry leaves at three, so for them to make it, Correa has to pick up Rosalinda no later than two-thirty. She made no promises to Rosalinda, didn’t agree to let her go, has no intention of letting Correa take her away. I’ve never stood up to him, she tells herself, but this I will not allow. He will not take my daughter from me. Even if he kills me, he won’t take her. She rocks back and forth, steeling herself for the moment Correa enters the path strewn with rose petals.
He forgot, she thinks, that today I don’t work. He planned to take her when I wasn’t here, so that I wouldn’t know she was gone until I came home. Rosalinda was hoping to sneak out of here the same way she snuck out with Taino.
She stews in her fury, creating scenarios for Correa and
Rosalinda that would make her laugh at her foolishness if she stopped to think how unlikely they are. She’s had the same work schedule for years. Correa is not likely to forget her whereabouts at any given moment. Rosalinda keeps América’s and Ester’s schedules, with phone numbers for La Casa and Don Irving’s private line, pinned to her wall, and another copy in her school assignments book. It’s impossible that both of them would forget that América doesn’t work on Tuesday and Wednesday. If América stopped to think, she would wonder why Correa chose the one day both he and Rosalinda knew for sure she’d be home. When his Jeep rounds the corner, she loses some of her determ- ination. I-ie parks it in front of the house, nods in her direction when he sees her sitting on the porch. The frown that crinkles his forehead further erodes her confidence. She should have waited
for him inside.
In the time it takes him to walk around the vehicle and open the gate, América’s emotions run from fear to anger to resentment to fear again. He pays no attention to the thorny branches grazing him as he comes up the walk. His graceful, loose-hipped gait does not alter its rhythm for any obstacle. Even the three porch steps seem designed to help rather than impede his progress to- ward her.
“What’s so interesting out here?” he asks looking around the empty sidewalk, at his Jeep shimmering in the midday sun, the heat-wilted vegetation in the garden and across the street.
She goes into the house without a word. He follows. Rosalinda’s door creaks open, and she peeks out, a question on her face.
“Stay there,” América orders. The door closes instantly. “What’s the matter with you?” Correa demands, his eyes lively,
going from América to Rosalinda’s door to América again.
“I think you know.” América winces when she hears how weak her voice sounds, how much less confident than it did when she played out possible scenarios in her mind. She’s glad her back is to him and he can’t see her frightened eyes.
She hears him take a deep breath, as if he were trying to fig-
ure out what to say next. “América.” He pronounces her name softly, a sigh, as if he were tired. “You know this is the right thing to do for now. She needs a break from all this.”
She whirls to face him. “When did you become an expert on what Rosalinda needs?”
“América,” he says, tight-lipped, “deja eso.”
“Leave it?” Anger replaces fear. Fifteen years of reading Cor- rea’s moods, his body language, the tone of his voice, of anticip- ating how he will behave next, fly out the window on the wings of her fury at having to give in to him one more time. Fifteen years of negotiating with herself just how far she will go to pre- vent a beating disappear the instant she hears him asking her to leave it alone as if “it” were a trivial thing, as if “it” didn’t include every other moment in those fifteen years in which she has “left it alone.” “No,” she screams, “I won’t leave it alone. I won’t.” And she lunges at him, beats her fists into his chest, scratches his smooth-shaved cheeks with her nails, screams at the top of her lungs, “No! No! No! No!”
Correa’s surprise lasts less than a blink of his green eyes. His muscular arms tense, his hands reach hers after only two or three scratches have reddened stripes on his skin. He pulls her off him with one hard push and, with the other hand, catches her before she falls against the shelves with the dancing lady and the shep- herd playing the flute. Once she’s upright, scratching at him still, he looks at her for an instant, then slaps her twice before her own hands cover her face. A punch to her stomach takes her breath away. She doubles over on the floor, where he kicks her, first with the right foot, then with the left.
“You stupid, stupid bitch!” he snarls so softly he might be calling her baby, baby.
She lies on the floor, blind with tears, her hands not knowing where to go, where to cover her soft flesh from his hard hoot. But he doesn’t kick her anymore. He stands over her, watching her squirm, while Rosalinda tugs at his sleeve.
“Stop it, Papi, stop!” she screeches. He pushes her away as he would a buzzing fly, and she crashes through the open door of her room, sprawls on the floor and cowers.
“Get up,” he orders América. She pushes up painfully. He offers his hand to help her, but she slaps it away, and he kicks her again. “Get up!” he yells. Blindly, she throws herself at him, knocks him off his feet. He falls on top of her, cursing. She kicks up at him, but he’s too heavy for her to have much effect other than to make him madder. His breath is quick and hot. He pins her down on the floor and hits her, picks up her head by the hair, slams it against the tiles. Rosalinda is on top of them now, screaming, pulling at her father, her carefully applied makeup a grotesque mask of streaks and splotches. Rosalinda’s screams pierce through América. Correa’s growls are savage, animallike. She keeps punching him, kicking him, not knowing if her strikes connect, but getting satisfaction from the effort. Rosalinda and Correa yell and tear at each other. She feels them struggling, hears their screams echo dully, as if rather than being pinned to the floor by a great weight, she were swimming under a vast pool, every sound a mere vibration. But then she doesn’t hear anything. She’s floating on an icy floe toward a dark island with a flashing red sky and the dull steady drone of distant thunder.
She’s on Rosalinda’s bed, lying on her back, a wet cloth on her face. Her head is turned all the way to the right, because if she moves it, a sharp pain by her left ear feels as if her head would explode. Everything hurts. She tries to move her legs, and her hips hurt. She raises her hand to remove the cloth, and her arms and chest hurt. The rising and falling of her breath, now faster than when she woke up, hurts her belly and around her ribs. She
opens her eyes. They feel swollen, and even the lids hurt.
Every move she makes is accompanied by an “¡Ay!” followed by another “¡Ay!” followed by more. She manages to get up, to shuffle step by tiny step to the door. In the living room, the tele- vision is tuned to Cristina Saralegüi’s talk show. The topic, América learns as she staggers to the bathroom, is men who are in love with transsexuals awaiting their operation. Are these men, Cristina asks the audience, homosexual if they make love with a man, even if that man wants to be a woman? América doesn’t care.
Just as she reaches the bathroom door, Ester flies out of it, eager, it seems, to find out what Cristina’s guests have to say for them- selves about their situation.
“Why are you out of bed?” she asks América. “I’ll bring you whatever you need.”
“Shower,” América mumbles, moving past her, withholding her moans so that Ester doesn’t know just much pain she’s in. It hurts more when she can’t say “¡Ay!” with every step.
She usually avoids the mirror after Correa’s beatings, but this time she looks. She has a black eye. She takes off her clothes and finds bruises on her abdomen, her hips, her upper arms. Her bra has cut deep welts into the swollen skin around her back and on the shoulders. There is an enormous lump just behind her left ear. Lifting her leg to get into the shower brings more pain in a new place, in the tailbone, right between her buttocks. She runs the water as hot as she can and soaps herself slowly. She’s startled when she sees blood and then remembers she has her period. “¡Ay!” she moans, as if this were a new wound.
She comes out of the bathroom wrapped in three towels. One around her waist, another covering her breasts, and the third draped over her head like a veil because the throbbing lump makes it impossible to wrap it turban-style. Ester has served a fish soup thick with grated plantain.
“I have to get dressed first,” América mutters as she goes past, and Ester looks at her resentfully, as if letting the food sit more than a minute after it’s served were an insult.
América dresses in clothes that will hide the bruises. She chooses a loose housedress with sleeves to the elbows and a high- enough neckline that the black-and-blue marks on her chest won’t show. The black eye she can’t do anything about. And she can’t comb her hair because of the lump, so she lets it dangle over her shoulders, the moisture soaking into the collar of her dress.
Sitting is painful. There are bruises on her buttocks. But she lowers herself without complaints, avoiding Ester’s eyes across the table.
“I made you a poultice for that eye,” Ester says, her lips stretched in a straight line, so that the wrinkles around her mouth look like faintly drawn lines.
Her neck hurts when she looks down at the bowl of soup.
Her shoulders ache when she moves the spoon from front to back of the bowl, when she lifts out a bay leaf and sets it aside. It hurts to open her mouth. It hurts to swallow. It hurts when the warm food slides down her throat, into her stomach. It hurts to look at her mother.
“He took her anyway,” Ester says, and América nods her heavy head, which makes her spine ache from neck to tailbone.
“But she knows I didn’t let her go,” she says, her tongue thick, each syllable a deliberate effort that hurts.
The next day it’s Ester’s turn to work. América stays in bed as long as she can. The sharp pains of yesterday are dull aches today, relieved with aspirin and Ester’s compresses and ointments. She can’t stay in bed for too long because she’s not used to it. It makes her feel worse to lie there with nothing but her thoughts. She gets up and does some chores, avoiding sudden movements and too much bending, the radio tuned to the salsa station. If she fills her head with music, if she sings along, she’s able to forget everything else, even some of the pain.
She doesn’t remember how she ended up in Rosalinda’s room once she passed out. She enters it as if looking for clues. The walls are stripped of all the posters. Square brown blotches of adhesive stain the cement walls where Rosalinda’s fantasies were born. América remembers lying in this room when she was a teenager, staring at the posters she had ripped out of magazines or pur- chased at the carnival concession stands during the patron-saint feast days. When Ester was a teenager in this house, she too, had ripped out pages from magazines, had tacked up pictures of movie stars with intense dark eyes and thick bigotes.
Rosalinda left some things. A couple of stretched-out bras in the dresser. A broken comb, three pennies. Her school uniform hangs forsaken on a wire hanger in her closet. But nothing else to remind América of her daughter. It’s as if she wanted to erase herself from here, as if she wanted no one to know that this was her room, this her house. América sits on the edge of the bed as she did the day Rosalinda ran away with Taino. What was I feeling that day, she asks herself. Did I have any idea it would come
to this? Should I have acted differently? She remembers her anger at Rosalinda for being so stupid, for gambling with her future when she has two examples at home of all that can go wrong for a girl who doesn’t think further than the empty promises of a good-looking man. What else should I have done, she wonders. But try as she might, she can’t figure it out.
She pushes off the bed with effort, turns her back on Rosalinda’s room as if an answer were there but she doesn’t want to know it. She slams the door after herself, surprised at the satisfaction it gives her, at the feeling that the hollow noise is a punctuation to a story she didn’t know she was telling herself. It’s her life, she mutters, pulling herself up to her full height, and I can’t live it for her.
