America's Dream (27 page)

voices, a radio somewhere, horns, sirens, footsteps on the sidewalk three stories below. The sofa bed is lumpy in places, and she tosses and turns trying to find a comfortable spot. Somewhere, a clock tick tocks, and she focuses on its sound until the steady, predictable clicks put her to sleep.

Sometime in the middle of the night, Elena tiptoes in, leaving in her wake the scent of roses.

Homesick

’m so glad you’re here!” Karen says the minute América walks in on Monday. “The baby-sister never came.” The kitchen is a mess, and Meghan is on her mother’s lap, crying. Karen looks frazzled and tired. “I had to leave work early to get the kids from school. I had no way to reach you.” There is the tiniest hint of

reproach in her voice. “Where Kyle?”

“Kyle is isolated in his room,” Karen says, tight-lipped. At mention of her brother, Meghan wails.

“I help. One minute.” América drags in two large bags. “Have you been shopping?”

“My aunt gave. Warm clothes.” Paulina, still apologizing for offending, insisted América take the best she had in her closet. Wool sweaters and pants, a pair of leather boots, several pair of jeans, a couple of jackets, all hardly worn by Carmen and Elena, to whom they belonged. “I have surprise for kids too.” América singsongs toward Meghan, who looks up, tear-stained and hopeful. “You come América room?”

Meghan looks up at her mother, who smiles encouragement, and reluctantly leaves her lap to follow América up the stairs to her room over the garage.

“He hit me,” Meghan explains when they go past Kyle’s

door, through which they can hear him plaintively calling out, “I’m sorry, Mom, I’m sorry.”

In her room, América searches the bottom of one of the shop- ping bags and pulls out a cellophane pack of Cien en Boca.

“What are these?”

“Cookies. They good.” She takes out a few fingernail-size cookies and eats them. “Mmmm.”

She sets Meghan in front of her television set to munch on the treats, then runs downstairs. Karen is on the phone.

“Just a minute…Yes, América?” “Kyle can come out?”

Karen looks at her watch. “Yes, he can, it’s been ten minutes.” “Okéi.” She runs up. When she knocks on Kyle’s door, he opens it, scrunches his face in disappointment to see her rather than his

mother. “Mami say you come out.” “No!” He slams the door.

She swallows a breath to squelch the anger that has risen up and tightened every muscle in her body. She knocks on the door again. “Kyle, plis open door. I no angry with you. Plis open.”

“It’s not
plis,
” he says, opening the door, “It’s
please.
You’re not saying it right.”

“Plees.”

“Please, please.” He stomps his foot.

“Plees. I no can say better.” It’s preposterous. She’s standing in a hallway being given pronunciation instructions by a tearstained seven-year-old. “I come in you room?”

“Can you come in? No.”

“You come out? I need say you something.” She stands in the hallway. The door to her room opens, and Meghan peeks out. “You wait for me, baby. I come soon.” Meghan closes the door.

“She’s not a baby.”

“I like call her baby because she little girl. You big boy. You no baby.”

“She’s a brat!” “What means brat?”

“It means she’s stupid and spoiled and dumb.” “Not nice call people names. Not respect.” “She always gets me in trouble.”

“Is no good hit little sister.” “She hit me first.”

“Is no good. You stronger, bigger.” “She’s a brat.”

“You no hit no more, promise?” “I hate her.”

“Promise you hit little sister no more.” She holds his shoulders, seeks his eyes. “Promise to América you no hit sister. Promise you never hit girls. Promise.” Her eyes are wild, insistent, scary. “Okay, I promise.” He shakes loose from her, frightened but pretending not to be. “Jeez!” He presses his back against the wall.

“It was just a little push.”

“Never, okéi?” She’s still looking at him with that wild look, those wild eyes.

“Okay, okay.”

“Good boy. Come, I give surprise in my room.”

After the children have been put to bed she takes out all the clothes from the shopping bag, trying to determine which sweater goes with which pair of pants. There’s a knock on the door.

“I need to speak with you,” Karen says.

“One minute, plis.” América clears the couch for Karen. “Is mess here.”

“Nice things,” Karen remarks absently, not really looking. She plops on the couch, exasperated. “This is just not working.”

América’s heart drops. “I do best I can.”

Karen shakes her head, brings her hands up as if to appease América. “Oh, no, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean you. I meant the ar- rangement.”

“Arenge-ment?” She feels stupid. Two days of speaking Span- ish, and it seems she has forgotten what English she knew.

“Let me start over.” Karen presses her hands on her knees,

takes a deep breath. América sits on the chair opposite, waits for Karen to collect her thoughts, wonders how Karen can be so successful in her work when she’s this tentative in her personal life. “Okay. The problem is that Monday is a very busy day at the hospital, and I can’t afford to have the same thing happen next week that happened today.”

“What happen?”

“Johanna has the flu. She was sick all weekend but didn’t call me until just before I expected her here. I didn’t have any way to reach you…” This time it is said with reproach.

“I give my aunt phone.” América moves to the bedside table, her back to Karen, so that she won’t see her resentful face. It’s my day off, she thinks, I can go where I please without having to check with you.

“You don’t need to do that now.”

“I have.” América writes the numbers on a pad that was put in the drawer, doubtless, by Karen, who thinks of everything.

“Thank you,” Karen says, studying it as if to check that the handwriting is neat. “Anyway, I wanted to talk to you about changing the days you work. Instead of Tuesday to Saturday, could you work Monday to Friday? I’ll have Johanna cover on weekends.”

“Okéi.”

“Oh, good!” Karen seems surprised, as if she expected an argu- ment. “So let’s start this weekend?” Tentative again, prepared for América to change her mind.

“Okéi, no problem.”

“Great!” She pushes off the couch with finality, glances at the clothes scattered on the floor, the bed. “Those are really nice,” she repeats, and América again has the feeling that she’s not really looking at them, that she just needs to say something. “Well, good night,” Karen says, moving to the door. She looks at the thermo- stat, smiles, and shuts the door behind her.

América doesn’t remember when she got up to follow Karen, but she’s holding on to the doorknob with great force. She studies the clothes scattered on the bed and floor, the tops and bottoms lined up one next to the other in stiff-armed, stiff-legged attitudes.

Just the way she feels, rigid and stiff and peculiarly cold, even though the thermostat is back up to its highest setting.

“I tried calling, but the line was busy.”

Rosalinda mumbles something at the other end, and even though América doesn’t catch it, she decides not to pursue it.

“Are you feeling better now?” “I wasn’t sick.”

“You were mad at me.”

“Yeah.” It’s both a statement and a challenge. “Are you still mad?”

“Yeah.” Positive. “Can you get over it?”

“Yeah.” Unsure, quivering with held-back tears. “I’m not doing this to hurt you, Rosalinda.”

“I know.” Small-voiced, childlike.

“If I thought I was hurting you, I’d come back.” “You would?”

“I would.”

There’s an intake of breath, a gasp without surprise. “How come last week you said you wouldn’t?”

“Last week you were asking me to come back for your father’s sake.”

“Oh.” Rosalinda considers this. América can almost see her biting her lower lip, her eyes cast down in the attitude she takes when she’s thinking very hard about something. “Are you happy there?”

Now it’s América’s turn to bite her lower lip, to finger the pattern on the comforter. “I’m not as nervous about things.”

“What’s it like?”

América pushes the pillows behind her back, gets in a comfort- able position, and tells her daughter about snow, about icicles shimmering in cold sunlight, about trees that look dead but that everyone says will have leaves in another month or so. She tells Rosalinda about the Leveretts’ enormous house with its swim- ming pool, summer cottage, sloping lawns.

“Are you near a town?” Rosalinda asks, and América tells her

about the beige statue of Christopher Columbus and the brown one of the Indian looking in the other direction, about Spanish- speaking Chinese women and rutted dirt roads lined with man- sions. She tells about going to the Bronx to see her aunt and cousins, the clothes Paulina gave her, and how some of them don’t quite fit so she will send them to Rosalinda because they’re more her style.

They laugh about how serious Leopoldo is, and about how Paulina thinks it’s strange that her daughter-in-law is a yoga teacher. She describes riding on a train. “It goes so fast,” she says, “you can hear the wind whistling.” It is the longest conversation she’s had with her daughter in months, one in which Rosalinda learns something and seems grateful for it.

When she hangs up, after over an hour, América hugs herself, rocks back and forth on the bed in the large room with the sloped ceiling and many windows, rocking and laughing and crying at the same time, astonished that Rosalinda listened and seemed happy for her and didn’t ask her to come back.

Charlie is like a visitor in his own home. If she didn’t wash his clothes and clean his bathroom, she’d never know he lived there. Over the weekend, she finds his casual clothes in the basket, wrinkled, sweaty, man-smelling. During the week, his cotton shirts, each identical to the other except for color, seem not so much wrinkled as stroked. As if the body in them moves so sel- dom that it leaves no impression, even in the clothes he wears. She wonders what he does in his office in the city. It has some- thing to do with hospitals, like Karen, although neither of them is a doctor.

In his third-floor office there are pictures of Karen and the children, of an older couple, whom she assumes are his parents, of Charlie atop a snowy peak, ropes dangling from his waist. In another picture, he’s suspended by what seems to América a very thin rope over a rocky chasm, a distant flat horizon way below him. One of the closets in the basement is filled with ropes, long straps, boots, colorful metal hooks and rings. Another contains camping equipment.

“That’s Charlie’s stuff,” Karen pointed out. “You don’t need to go in there.”

But América loves looking at the bundled sleeping bags, the tents, the elaborate backpacks with sturdy frames and loops and straps and mesh pockets. She admires the craftsmanship of tight seams, the cleverness of Velcro fasteners. She loves the colors, deep purple and forest green, burgundy, fuchsia.

His job is probably boring, she tells herself; he needs some ex- citement in his life. She imagines him climbing mountains spiderlike, attached by a thin rope that someone else must have tied at the top, but then she can’t figure out how that someone got up there to tie the rope in the first place. It’s crazy, she con- cludes, the things people do for excitement.

His collection of knives still frightens her. She supposes he needs them to cut the ropes when he goes climbing. But why would he want to cut ropes? If anything, América reasons, he would want the ropes holding him up to be as long as possible. When she dusts the case, she avoids looking at the knives. Even though they’re locked behind glass, she can’t help but think of them as a threat.

América wonders how Karen and Charlie were ever able to conceive two children. The sheets on the master bed are seldom rumpled from lovemaking. Karen’s diaphragm stays in its little case inside the drawer of her bedside table night after night after night, forgotten, unused.

Some nights their muffled voices wake her up, not because they’re loud, but because the silence until then has been so com- plete. They argue briefly, and then Karen cries and it’s over. The next morning Charlie appears downstairs as chipper and cheerful as ever, and Karen comes down in her usual hurry, made up and ready for work. On the days after a fight, he comes home early enough to have dinner with Karen and read the children a bed- time story, but then he either works out in their home gym or holes up in his upstairs office while Karen spreads her papers on the leather couch in the den.

I wonder if he hits her, América asks herself. The first time she heard them arguing, she pressed her ear to the door, her

hand on the knob as if ready to run out. She couldn’t understand their words, only the high notes of their raised voices, hers accus- atory, his defensive, and then the roles reversed and he sounded wounded and she hard. But there were no screams, no sounds of struggle, no choked gasps of pain. They argue, and one of them leaves the bedroom to sleep in one of the guest rooms. Sometimes it’s Charlie, other times Karen. She can tell by the hair on the pillow.

On those mornings when she knows they were arguing the night before, she can’t look them in the eye. Charlie comes down, ready for work, and she trembles so hard she has to hide her hands in her pockets, or run water and pretend to be rinsing the bottom of the sink. He doesn’t seem to notice. He fetches his coat from the closet, tugs his tie left and right, grabs his suitcase and gloves from the corner of the table, and leaves.

Karen, too, behaves as if nothing has happened. She sits with the children and waits for América to serve one of the elaborate breakfasts she has decided the family ought to have. Fluffy om- elets with onions and cheese, blueberry pancakes, cream of wheat flavored with cloves and cinnamon, crunchy french toast topped with strawberry preserves. It’s as if what happens behind the closed doors of their bedroom stays there, doesn’t spill into the rest of the large house, doesn’t affect the rest of their lives.

How can they do that? América wonders as she dusts the shelves, vacuums the rugs, wipes down the counters. How can they fight and then the next day neither of them is angry? Her own fights with Correa lasted for days. The rage, the resentment, the revenge fantasies, stayed with her long after she had forgotten why they fought in the first place.