America's Dream (4 page)
Correa climbs in, carrying her purse and her shoe. He throws them at her feet and roars off down the street. Behind them, Yamila still screams, proving to anyone who didn’t know it that
her upbringing was neither as genteel nor proper as she would have them believe.
“They left in the early ferry,” Correa says, as if continuing a conversation that had been interrupted. “I figured that’s what they’d do.”
América tries hard to ignore him. She sits on the farthest edge of her seat, hands crossed atop her handbag, eyes trained on the familiar scenery whizzing by. Fifteen years ago she and Correa had run off on the 7:00
A.M
. ferry to Fajardo. She had been a virgin when she left with Correa, but she can’t be sure that her daughter is.
“I’m going over in the afternoon ferry,” Correa continues. “They’re kids. They can’t get too far.”
She and Correa had hidden out in his aunt’s house. They re- turned to Vieques after a month, to live in a shack he’d inherited from another aunt. The day they arrived, Ester came to see them, carrying all of América’s things in pillowcases. She dropped them in the middle of the floor. “You made your bed, now lie in it.” Then she left. Eight months later, when América was seven months pregnant and Correa had begun an affair with another woman, América wrapped up her things in the same pillowcases and moved in with her mother in the house she had grown up in, where eight weeks later Rosalinda was born.
“What do we do if she’s pregnant?” América asks, her voice calm, even to herself.
Correa slaps the steering wheel. “I’ll make him marry her.” “She’s fourteen, Correa. People don’t get married at fourteen.” “What are you suggesting then?” He looks at her with real
curiosity, as if he has no idea what she’s going to say.
“I’m not suggesting anything. She’s fourteen, that’s all I’m saying. She’s too young to get married.”
“Son of a bitch! It’s illegal to do it with a girl that young. I’ll kill that son of a bitch.”
América hummphs. Men are so stupid! Doesn’t even occur to him that she was that young when he took her off the island.
And there has never been any talk of them marrying, not before, not after Rosalinda was born.
“You’re my woman,” he said to her. “We don’t need a paper to prove it.” He’d gone on to prove it to the whole island, how- ever, in other ways. She examines her face in the side mirror. Her cheeks are puffy, her lower lip swollen. Correa’s woman stares back.
They pull up in front of América’s house. Correa waits for her to climb down from the passenger seat. “Stay home and don’t get into trouble,” he warns. “I’ll take care of everything.”
He waits until she’s gone into her house, then roars away as if he can’t wait to get out of there.
Ester has made a thick asopao, but América isn’t hungry. She changes out of her torn clothes and takes a shower. 1-Ier arms, neck, and shoulders are etched with deep red scratches that sting when she soaps. The first tears she sheds are of pain. But the ones that follow come from a deeper place than the surface scratches on her skin. She beats her fists against the tiles and sobs until it seems her insides rip.
The look of disdain in Yamila’s eyes is hard to erase. Yamila, who as a girl went around with her nose in the air, like she was better than anyone else in the barriada, then married a Nuyorrican who can’t even speak Spanish, a civilian consultant to the U.S. Navy who built her a house high on a hill, looking down on everyone else. América has cleaned her house too, has done her laundry, and once walked in on her by accident and saw her shaving her pubic hair. A week later Yamila fired her and has had it in for América ever since.
She raises her face to the stream from the shower and lets the water mingle with her tears, fill her mouth, enter her ears, trickle down her neck, between her breasts, over her belly.
“What are you doing in there?” Ester bangs on the door, her speech slurred.
“Go away, I’m taking a shower!” “I have to pee!”
She stumbles out of the shower, grabs a towel, wraps herself
in it, and leaves the bathroom. Ester stares at her as she goes by. América can barely see where she’s going, her eyes so swollen they can hold no more tears.
“I told the boy’s family that if he runs away, there’s nothing we can do. These are family matters, understand?”
Officer Odilio Pagán sits at the kitchen table, eyeing Ester’s frosty beer. América puts a tall glass of lemonade in front of him. “But she’s underage. There must be a law—”
“Of course there are laws, but these things are better handled privately” Ile gulps the drink down, avoids her gaze. “There was no coercion involved. They’re mixed-up kids who think they’re grown up.” He sets the glass down delicately, as if afraid to break it. “Of course, it’s something else if you or Correa start making trouble.” He looks at the scratches on her arms, at her puffy cheeks.
“That woman has a mouth on her,” América says, turning away from him.
“I bet you can keep up with her.”
“I don’t let anyone insult me, if that’s what you mean.” She sniffs.
“You can get arrested for assaulting a person, especially in their own home.”
She faces him again. “But some people’s sons can’t get arrested for raping someone else’s daughter.”
“Who said anything about rape?”
“When a girl is fourteen years old, it’s rape.”
“América, you’ve been listening in on too many conversations at La Casa.”
“The people who stay there are well educated. They know what’s going on. Doctors stay there, and lawyers.”
“And they’re on vacation. And the last thing they want to do is bother with the problems of a maid.” He stands up. “Where did Correa go after he dropped you home?”
“How should I know?”
“I can find out if he was on the ferry.” “Good for you.”
He stands so close to her his lemon-scented breath fans her bangs. “You don’t get it, do you? I’m trying to help you. If he does something stupid, we’ll all be sorry.”
“Correa is all talk, nothing else.” América bites out. “If he finds them, he’ll give them a lecture and bring them home.” She feels the lump on the inside of her lip with her tongue. “Besides, Correa thinks the sun rises and sets on Rosalinda. He wouldn’t do any- thing to make her hate him.”
“Did he do this?” Pagan asks, touching her lip with his index finger.
She moves her face away, and he backs off.
“He took the afternoon ferry to Fajardo,” Ester grumbles from her end of the table. América glares at her.
“Do you have any family there?”
“No,” América responds, aware that Pagán is just doing his job as investigator. Everyone knows she has no family in Fajardo. Everyone knows that’s where Correa comes from.
“I have a sister in New York,” Ester mumbles out of nowhere. “Haven’t seen her in years.”
Pagán and América stare at her for a second, then exchange a look that might make them both smile under other circumstances. América is the first to recover.
“Rosalinda sold her clothes, probably her jewelry and boom box, too.”
Pagán seems startled that they’re not still talking about Ester’s long-lost sister. He blinks uncontrollably for some seconds, as if mentally searching for what it is he’s supposed to be doing. “The boy took two hundred dollars out of his savings account yester- day,” he says finally. “Didn’t know there was that much money in bagging groceries, did you?”
“Who knows what else he’s been bagging.”
Pagán doesn’t smile. He’s an investigator again, on official business. “I’d better get going,” he says briskly, moving to the door. América walks him out.
It’s early evening. The street is empty, but from inside the houses, televisions drone competing programs and commercials, drowning out the sounds of insects hiding in the grass. In a few
minutes the church across the street will begin its nightly services, broadcast to the neighborhood over speakers placed near the front and side doors of the church. The air is scented with roses. On the porch, Odilio Pagán puts his hand on América’s shoulder, squeezes it gently. “Don’t worry,” he says softly, “everything will be all right.” She turns her face away from his gaze. He dodges the gauntlet of spiny roses to his patrol car, opens the door, looks at her longingly, then steps in and drives
off.
She could have had this man with the black eyes, the slight paunch, the stubby, delicate hands. As children, they played to- gether in this very neighborhood, before it got built up, when every house was set back behind broad yards, surrounded by mango, breadfruit, and avocado trees. Before urbanization. They didn’t have running water then, or electricity. The road was a dusty path in winter and a treacherous, muddy trail when it rained.
Correa had come to the barriada with the contractors improving the roads, stringing electric wires from tall poles, digging up ditches to lay pipes for running water and sewers. Correa was a man, Odilio Pagán a boy, and América a girl who hadn’t seen much. La conquista, the seduction, didn’t take long. She ran off with Correa, and even though eight months later she returned to her mother’s house, she is still Correa’s woman. He lives on the other side of the island, has other women, has, in fact, a legal wife and kids in Fajardo. But he always comes back to América, under the pretext of seeing his daughter. And when he does, he stays in her bed. And if any other man dares get too friendly, he beats her up. In the fifteen years Correa has been in her life, no other men have dared enter it, for fear he will kill her.
t rains all night, but she doesn’t realize it until the next morning, when she comes out of her windowless room and the air feels moist and new. The house is dark, but through the slats of the front windows a frail gray light seeps in like mist. América sets the coffeeinaker on brew, slips two slices of white bread into the toaster, goes to the bathroom to wash her face and mouth. The swelling on her lip has gone down, but her eyes still feel heavy, and the scratches on her arms and shoulders rub painfully against her nightclothes. When she returns to the kitchen, the coffee is ready, the toast crisp. She brings her cup and toast smeared with grape jelly into her room, switches on the light, changes into her uniform in between bites and sips. She doesn’t put on makeup, avoids the mirror. The radio is tuned to a station that plays salsa, and she hums the familiar rhythms absently as if her mind were empty and her heart light. Ester pads in, her greñas sticking out in every direction because last night she didn’t set her hair in
curlers.
“You going to work?” “Sí.”
“Have you no respect? Your daughter is missing, and you’re going around like nothing’s happened.”
“What am I supposed to do? Sit around all day waiting for them to show up?”
“What will people say, with you running all over town…” “I’m not all over town, I’m at work. And I don’t care what they
say.”
“You say that—”
“Since when are you so worried about the neighbors’ opinion?” Ester sniffs and retreats to the kitchen, pours herself some cof- fee. América brushes her hair into a ponytail held with a barrette in the shape of a colorful fish. She folds her white apron and stuffs it into her pocket, puts on white sneakers with short socks. Her movements are quick and determined, with the authority of years
of practice. Ester appears at the door again.
“When you left I ran all over town looking for you.”
América looks up. Ester stares into the fragrant liquid in the brown-and-yellow mug she holds in her hands, the fingers laced around one another as if to draw warmth. Her face, still creased from sleep, has the softness of a child’s, but the deep diagonal lines from her nose to the corners of her mouth, the crow’s-feet scratched around her eyes, the furrows etched between the eye- brows are those of someone who has lived hard in her forty-five years. América turns her gaze from her mother’s face, walks past her to the front of the house.
“Mami, you didn’t have a man to help you. Rosalinda has a father.”
“Bah!” Ester responds, and scuffs back through the kitchen into her room.
América stands at the door, waiting. The moment is so fleeting, it’s gone before she knows it was there, and unmourned, it passes. It is their dance, a brief coming together in which they follow the same rhythm, hear the same music, perform the same steps. But each time, the dance gets shorter, and they exit in opposite direc- tions, into the wings, to gather strength for the next combination. América steps into the cool early-morning moisture. Rainwater
drips from the broad leaves of a breadfruit tree at the side of the house. The branches of the rosebushes curve down heavily. Red, yellow, and orange petals are strewn over the front walk, and it seems a pity to tread on them in her grooved sneakers.
The street is shiny wet, the gutters fast-flowing rivulets, the potholes clear puddles that reflect gray sky. In the dark recesses of foliage, invisible tree frogs sing happily. Her sneakers squeak wetly against the pavement, and as she enters the path at the rear of La Casa, they sink into a squishy, sandy mud that’s not slippery but splats against her legs as she walks. A slight breeze shakes more moisture from the leaves of mango and avocado trees as she passes, drops on her like holy water on a pilgrim. Fog rises from the green hollows where vines have engulfed an abandoned car and the skeletal remains of a house long uninhabited. Beyond them is a mound that sprouted from the ground seemingly overnight a couple of years ago, its steep sides like an infant vol- cano consumed by thick vegetation. América quickens her step as she passes it.
When she arrives at the back door of La Casa, the house pulsates with the even breath of sleeping bodies in the rooms around the central courtyard. The flower garden shimmers, the ornate cement balustrades around its perimeter like midget sol- diers watching over the warblers caged in the center, covered with a sheet so that they will not wake up too early and rouse the guests. Shallow puddles of rain collect in the walkways around the courtyard. Above, a square sky brightens from steel gray to the color of a dove’s breast, purple gray, soft. And rain- water drips into every hole and crevice, a sibilant gossip of re- proaches and complaints.
