America's Dream (38 page)

She backs out of the driveway, into the dirt road.

I was lucky to have the last three months. Three months away from my real life. The life with the embittered mother and the resentful daughter and the man who says he loves me as he beats me up. Three months, two longer than I spent away from my life then, when I was just a girl and he was a man like no other man I knew.

She turns right onto the paved country road, curving this way and that, bordered by stone fences with electronic gates.

Both times I’ve left Vieques, I’ve been so full of hope, and I come back disillusioned.

She drives past the village common with its subdued antique shops, real estate offices, fragrant gourmet stores where a pound of coffee costs eleven dollars.

It’s destiny, I suppose, that my life should have turned out this way. One home, one man, one child, three months of freedom. She sighs.

The road curves downhill, past the sprawling high school with playing fields, a track, a pond, its own theater. Beyond it, the highway, south to the city, north to she doesn’t know

where. She’s never been on it, but she turns onto it now, heading away from the city, toward where she’s never been. She looks down at the gas gauge. Full. She wonders how far the road ex- tends, what’s at the other end, and whether it’s any different from what she has seen in the only places she’s ever been: Vieques, Fajardo, the Bronx, Madison Square Garden, Mount Kisco, Bed- ford, Westchester County, New York.

She drives for about three hours, on a wide, clean highway that rolls endlessly up and down a countryside broken now and then by small towns. I won’t stop until I run out of gas, she promises herself, but when she passes the city of Hartford, the stretches in between towns seem longer and lonelier and she’s spooked by the darkness along the side of the road. She gets off at the next exit, follows the arrows pointing to Food Gas Lodging. She drives through a Burger King and munches her Whopper as she enters the highway heading south again, in the direction from which she just came.

I can’t run away. Where would I go? Besides, if I did run away, I’d get arrested for stealing the Leveretts’ car. She laughs out loud. This is the farthest I’ve ever gone for a hamburger.

By the time she gets to Bedford, it’s past eleven o’clock. The Leverett house is dark, except for the faint glow of the nightlights in the children’s rooms. She has a key to the back door, and as she steps behind the garage, a light goes on by itself, brightening the rear yard. She fumbles with the key before inserting it in the lock. As she enters the dark kitchen, a shape looms toward her from the back stairs landing. She screams, drops her purse, falls back against the door.

“América!”

The light goes on. Charlie, wearing nothing but rumpled boxer shorts, stands in the landing, Karen behind him.

América sobs hysterically, propped against the door, her handbag at her feet. Karen comes over, puts her arm around her. “We’re sorry, we didn’t expect to see you. We’ve had all these hang-up phone calls. We thought you were gone for the night,

like the other times. We’re sorry.”

She leads América to a chair. Charlie disappears and returns

with a robe on. América can’t stop shaking, sobbing as if all the tension of the past two days reached its climax when she saw the dark shape move toward her.

Karen and Charlie exchange a look. “Do you have a Valium?” he asks, and Karen nods. He disappears again.

“I’m so sorry, América. Please stop crying, we didn’t mean to scare you. Here’s a glass of water, here’s a pill. It will help you feel better.”

“No, no. I okéi. No pills plis.” She pushes their hands away, stands up, searches for her purse. “I okéi now. I go my room. Is okéi.” She picks up her handbag and runs up the stairs. Karen and Charlie are left holding the glass of water and the Valium.

The room is dark, stifling hot. She closes and locks the door be- hind her, stumbles in the dark toward the bed, throws herself into it, hides her face in the prickly fur of her stuffed white cat with the blue eyes. The drive to the Burger King was soothing to her nerves. She listened to the radio most of the way there and back, kept her mind occupied by the scenery whizzing by, thinking how nice it would be to live up here, in the woods, where no one knows her. She would change her name to Margarita, in honor of her great-great-great grandmother. Her last name would be Guerra, for war. Margarita Guerra. She practiced saying the name out loud as she drove down the highway toward Bedford. Margarita Guerra. Margie, Maybe, if she were to Americanize it, but changed her mind because it didn’t have enough syllables. Margarita. She likes the name because it’s also the name of a flower. My name is Margarita Guerra, she said in different voices. Margarita Guerra is my name. I am Margarita Guerra. She said the name so many times that, when she entered the house and heard the loud “América,” it was as if she’d been found out. As if all the planning she’d done, all the fantasies of a new life, incog- nita in the woods of Connecticut, had been discovered. The dark shape looming toward her, the name América yelled in a man’s voice, broke through the dream of safety she’d formed in the long drive to and from a Burger King in another state. I am América. América Gonzalez. And everyone knows it.

“I called you earlier and there was no answer,” Correa says in the middle of the night.

She’s groggy, half asleep, half awake from a dream in which she was being chased by butterflies through a field of daisies. “What?”

“Are you alone?” he asks. He’s drunk, she can hear it in his voice, the slurred speech, the stumbling over simple words.

“I was asleep. You woke me up from a dream.”

“Were you dreaming about me?” He laughs lasciviously, wetly. “I don’t remember,” she says, forgetting that it’s a game, that

she should play with him.

“Where were you?” Angry now, his voice a threat. “I’ve been calling all night. I called all their numbers.”

She shakes her head, tries to clear it of daisies and butterflies and his voice. “What numbers?”

“Char-less Leverett. Karen Leverett. They have a lot of num- bers.” He’s exasperated, as if Information were out to thwart him. “You’ve been calling them?” Panicked, her voice sounds like

a screech.

“I was looking for you.”

“What did you say to them?” Calm down. Don’t let him know you’re afraid.

He takes a breath. Liquor slows his reflexes, and while he can hear the fear in her voice, it’s taking him longer to process it. “Nothing. I hung up, like the other night when the gringito answered.” He’s confused. They’ve never had a fight on the phone. He prefers to fight her in person, where he can’t be con- tradicted.

América sits up, clearheaded now. “This is my number. The other numbers are for the house.”

“You didn’t wait for my call.” He’s recovered, remembers why he’s calling at one-thirty in the morning.

“I was hungry. I went out to eat.” Keep your answers simple and straightforward. Don’t add fuel to his fire. Change the subject. “Are you with Rosalinda?”

“You shouldn’t be out alone at night. You know I don’t like that.”

“It’s very safe and quiet around here. I didn’t go far.”

He’s tired. He speaks at the speed of a slow record. “I got you a ticket. For Monday. You come home Monday. I’ll be waiting for you.” A threat.

“Okéi.”

“Are you bringing me a present?” Lewd, suggestive, she can almost see where his hand is as he speaks.

And she plays with him, her voice low and syrupy. “Yes, of course. Something very special.”

“Oh, baby!”

“Something you like very, very much,” she whispers, and his breath quickens. As she tells him what he wants to hear, she listens, alert to any variation in the sound of his breath, in the growled professions of his love. “Over and over again,” she promises. Anything to keep him seduced to the image of his lover América, not América the woman who left him. She pacifies him with words and listens for sounds that will give her a clue to where he is. For a radio on a Spanish station, or familiar voices, or better yet, the distant, soothing sound of a coquí.

Sunday morning she sleeps so late that she wonders once she’s up if she did take the pill the Leveretts offered her the night be- fore. But she doesn’t feel groggy so much as exhausted. She drags herself to the bathroom, runs a cool shower, and still that feeling of exhaustion, as if she were towing a great weight with each step.

Johanna and the children are at the play structure in the back of the house, and they too seem languid and slow, not really committed to what they’re doing. She dresses and prepares to have breakfast out, so as not to interfere with anything the family might be doing. When she comes down, the kitchen is cleared and Karen is cooking.

“Good morning,” Karen says warily. “Are you feeling better?” “Yes, sorry I was so scared.”

“Oh, I don’t blame you. I would have fainted, if it had been me.” Karen throws some vegetables in the Cuisinart. Over the din of the motor she explains, “We have friends coming.”

“Is okéi I go?”

“Yes, of course. Johanna is with the children. We’ll be fine.” “I see you tonight.” She leaves quickly, waves at the children

when they see her.

Karen is like a new woman, bright, cheerful. She and Charlie have made up again. All last week he slept in the guest room, but the last two nights they were together. They wear the assured glow of lovers. Ten years of marriage and they don’t have to pretend to love each other. They can fight and make up and fight again and make up, and stay in love.

When did I fall out of love with Correa? Was I ever
in
love? At fourteen it can’t be love. I was impressed with him, and he was so handsome! He conquered me with his beautiful green eyes and manly voice. And the promises. I can’t even remember them. Does Charlie make Karen promises? If he does, she believes them still.

She drives to Mount Kisco, parks near the Christopher Columbus statue. The couples that three months ago induced such loneliness now seem girdled by a dark cloud. The women whose looks were like a challenge seem pathetic. As she passes, they eye her a warning, hold on to their men as if they were a prize of conquest, instead of its price. América stares them down. There’s a reason, she wants to yell at them, men call a successful courtship la conquista.

She spends the afternoon at the movies, watching what she thinks are the two most stupid-looking men she’s ever seen act even more stupid than they look. The theater is full of parents and children. The empleadas, América muses, are off, so even though it’s a nice day out, the local movie theater is full of parents whose idea of spending time with their children is sitting in a movie theater eating popcorn and watching obnoxious men do fart jokes.

When she gets back, there are four cars in the driveway. It’s dusk, but Kyle and three children América has never seen are

chasing one another around a tree, while Johanna pushes Meghan on the swing. She’d like to slip into the house unseen, but there are people in the family room. When she enters they look at her curiously, then avert their eyes, the way the tourists do in Vieques. She walks through to the back stairs quickly, wishing she were invisible. As she’s going up, Karen peeks around the corner, as if someone has alerted her that there is a stranger in the house, and she waves and says to no one in particular, “Oh, it’s just América.”

She locks herself in her room, changes clothes, and gets ready to call Ester and Rosalinda. When she’s done, she gives herself a clay-mask facial and sits watching an old Argentinian movie on the Spanish television station. Tomorrow there will be a lot to do in the house. The children have tracked in mud from the yard, and she noticed that the adults in the kitchen and den seem to have a problem keeping their dip on their potato chips.

Everybody Has Problems

onday morning dawns dank and cold. She would like to stay in bed, curled up inside the warm comforter, but she

has to get up and cook breakfast.

Being in this country has made me lazy, she reflects; I never had such trouble getting up in the morning.

She showers, dresses, slips downstairs in the dark to the kit- chen. She brews coffee, toasts two slices of Wonder bread, which she likes better than the gritty stuff Karen and Charlie eat. She keeps her loaf of Wonder bread in the downstairs freezer, where Karen rarely ventures.

¡Ay! She moans out loud as she comes up the basement stairs. Every bone in my body hurts, like an old woman’s. Four days past my thirtieth birthday and I’m already falling apart.

She sits with her toast and coffee and waits for Charlie to bound down the stairs. When he does, with his usual, “Hi, how you doing?” which requires no response, she washes her dishes and, as soon as he leaves, goes upstairs to get the kids ready for school. They’re cranky, overtired from yesterday’s party, which lasted until after ten.

Karen, as usual, comes down at the last minute, hair freshly blow-dried, eyes sparkling. They must have made love again last night, América guesses.

Then they’re all gone and she has the house to herself, and she has to clean, to wipe, vacuum, and scrub this house that is not hers. To change bed linens and pick up dirty underwear from the floor and gouge dried swirls of spilled toothpaste from the sinks. She works slowly, methodically, feels herself moving in slow motion to the lyrics of her favorite danza, which repeat over and over in her brain.

Siento en el alma pesares que jamás podré olvidar tormentos a millares

que hoy me vienen a mortificar.

The family-room floor tiles are crusted with crab dip, and she has to get down on her hands and knees to scrub it with a plastic sponge. Bread crumbs pulverized into the pile of the dining room rug have to be vacuumed with the upholstery attachment. Used wine and beer glasses on the tables and mantelpieces must be retrieved, washed and dried by hand. The granite tabletop in the den is gritty from dried spilled wine, the surface dull like the original rock from which it was quarried.

She has worked clockwise starting in the kitchen and is now back by the stove, not even halfway done. In another twenty minutes she has to pick up Meghan, but first she must answer the phone. Mercedes invites her to bring the children over.