America's Dream (9 page)
“Rosalinda, I’m giving you a compliment, not trying to start a fight.”
“But it’s one of those left-handed compliments, like you mean something else.”
“I didn’t mean anything other than what I said. It’s not going to be easy for you to go back to school today.”
“Well, you can’t go with me.”
“That’s not why I’m saying it!” She can’t check the exasperation in her voice. “Look, if you need me, you know where 1’11 be.”
“Yeah, I know where you’ll be.” Rosalinda turns the page of her book, as if she’d been reading all this time instead of staring at her mother wishing she’d disappear.
América walks to La Casa del Francés. She feels like crying and slaps her side, as if to bring her attention elsewhere but inside her head, where words and looks and memories lurk like worms in compost, hidden in the darkness until one little scratch sends them squirming to the surface.
When she returns home from work that afternoon, Correa and Rosalinda are sitting on his couch side by side, talking. As she comes in, they fall silent, not bothering to disguise that they’re doing it on her account. As usual when Correa is around, Ester is nowhere to be seen. América crosses to change clothes, and Rosalinda disappears into her room. Correa follows América into the bedroom. He throws himself face up on her bed, head on
the stuffed animal leaning against the headboard.
“Don’t squish my cat,” she says, pulling it from under him. “You love that cat more than you love me,” he teases her, with
a hint of resentment.
She fluffs it up, props it on her dresser.
“What were you and Rosalinda talking about when I came in?” He sighs, looks at the ceiling. “She wants to go live with Tía
Estrella and Prima Fefa.” “In Fajardo?”
“That’s where they live.”
“Well, she can’t.” She makes it sound as if Correa has no say in the matter.
“I told her you’d never agree to it.” “That’s not what she said to me.”
He sits up, leans on one elbow. “It’s probably good for her to get away from here for a while.”
“Since when do you know what’s good for her and what isn’t?” “I’m her father.”
She has many responses to that statement, all of them starting with
what kind of a father
…, but restrains herself. When Correa is this calm, this controlled, he’s waiting for any little thing she might say or do that will make him explode, that will make it her fault if she ends up bruised and swollen.
“This is her home. She should stay with us. We can keep an eye on her.”
“That’s just it. She says you don’t trust her now, and that you and Ester are always spying to see what she’s up to. She wants to be where people are not always reminding her of what she and Taino did.”
A white-hot fury races up her spine to the top of her head, setting her on fire. She can’t breathe, is suffocated by a savage sorrow that gnaws at her from deep inside her womb. She turns away from him, grabs the bedpost as if it will ground her, will keep her from being consumed into ashes. There is nothing she can say or do that will keep this from happening. The elope-
ment with Taino is the event around which everything in Ros- alinda’s life will now turn, for which there are no right answers, no right feelings, no right course. It is the anger that makes her cry, the knowledge that she’s lost her daughter, the certainty that Correa will take her away even if América doesn’t give her per- mission to go. He will show América quién manda, even in her house. If she resists, he will bruise and batter her. He will call her names and make Rosalinda hate her more than she does now. Her helplessness is enraging. América doesn’t want to give in, can’t give in one more time to Correa. But her fear of his hard fists tempers her fury, and she leans into the bedpost, sobbing, wishing she had been born a man and could fight him and have a chance at winning.
Correa tries to touch her, one of those times when her tears makes him tender. She shakes him off, grunts at him, pushes in- effectually against him, all the time shielding her face from his kiss or his fist, whichever comes.
“It’s not forever, América.” He tries to reassure her with a lie. “Just let her have some time away from here. She’ll be back in a couple of months.”
She wails from the depths of herself, as if the pain she’s feeling is not just the pain of losing her daughter. As if she were crying for herself, for the day she was lost to her mother, and for the day Ester was lost to hers, and for all those women in her family going back countless generations, daughters who run away from their mothers as soon as their breasts grow and the heat between their legs becomes insupportable. Mothers who look at their daughters with resentment, seeing in them their own betrayal as if it were avoidable, as if a nameless, faceless prick dangling between hairy legs were not waiting around the darkest corners of each of their lives.
América cries and Correa stands impotent by her, unable to comfort or nourish her, hulking over her like an insult. He’s si- lenced by her grief, a sorrow he can never know, nor tries to un- derstand, nor can.
he wakes up at ten minutes to three in the morning, sweating and gasping for air. She’s alone in her windowless room but doesn’t remember going to bed. She stumbles in the dark to the door and opens it, gulps fresh air into her lungs. Her heart is ra- cing, and she leans against the doorjamb, eyes closed, listening to the pounding in her ears. When it has diminished and her heart regains its normal rhythm, she walks to the back door, slides it open, and barefoot, steps onto the wet grass. Her nightgown captures the cool night air, flutters around her knees as if kissing them. She fluffs her hair, pulls it up, then lets it cascade around her shoulders. A soothing breeze dries off the sweat at the back
of her neck, behind her ears.
The air is fragrant with Ester’s herbs, which are planted along narrow paths or on raised beds lined with logs and rocks. Pigeon- pea bushes grow along the fence. Two lemon trees reach their spiny branches into the neighbor’s yard. Every bush, plant, and vine is edible, or useful in treating burns, headache, or stomach upset.
At the far end of the garden, chickens cluck softly inside their coop, questioning who’s walking around this time of night. Four houses away, Nilda’s dog barks a warning, then settles, satisfied that no one is invading his territory. América sits on a
rusty wrought-iron bench that once stood under a mango tree. The tree was felled by Hurricane Hugo, and when its remains were taken away, Ester put the bench next to the cut-off trunk as if expecting it to sprout branches and take the place of its broken- down parent.
“What are you doing out here?” Ester’s voice is a hoarse whisper.
América jumps in her seat. “Ay, Mami, you scared me!” “How do you think I felt when I heard someone walking
around?”
“It never occurred to me. You always sleep so soundly.” “Not tonight,” she says resentfully.
“lt was so hot in my room,” América apologizes.
“You’ll get sick, out in el sereno without a robe…and you’re barefoot!”
América pulls her damp feet up on the bench and sits with her arms wrapped around her knees. Ester rummages in the pockets of her robe and comes up with a crumpled box of cigarettes and a lighter.
“Another couple of days and it will be full,” she observes, pointing at the moon with her cigarette.
It’s a clear night. The dark blue sky is sequined with diamond sparklers. From time to time the sky flashes red, a dull thud is heard, and the ground trembles. Somewhere off the eastern shore of the island, the Navy is using the beaches for t get practice.
“What time did Correa leave?” América asks. “He left early. Didn’t even have supper.” “Did Rosalinda eat?”
“She wouldn’t come out of her room. I left a plate of rice and beans in front of her door and told her it was there. She opened it just wide enough to get the food.” Ester chuckles.
América smiles, shakes her head. “Was I like this when I was her age?” she asks.
“You had just turned fourteen when you…” Ester draws an invisible image on the ground with the toe of her slipper. “You were never as rude as Rosalinda is,” she concludes, taking a long drag from her cigarette.
América is silenced by guilt. She tries to remember herself at fourteen. She was not deliberately trying to hurt her mother when she ran home from school, tore off her uniform, changed into shorts and a T-shirt, put on makeup, brushed her hair, then sat on the porch with a schoolbook. She was not thinking of Ester when she pretended to do her homework and waited to be noticed by Correa, whose job it was to guide the bulldozer that dug the trench for the sewer pipes in front of the house.
América sighs. I was so willing to be seduced, she remembers with amazement. As willing, I suppose, as Rosalinda. She’s so used to anger when she thinks of her daughter that it surprises her when she’s filled with pity. She looks at Ester, who is absently blowing smoke rings toward the moon. She too was fourteen once, let a man seduce her, returned to this very house when América’s father abandoned them. Did Ester, when América ran away fourteen years later, stand in el sereno in the middle of the night with her mother, Ines, wondering what to do about her?
“Rosalinda wants to live with Correa’s aunt in Fajardo.” América says, a catch in her voice.
“Are you letting her?” Ester’s tone says she certainly wouldn’t allow such a thing.
“I don’t have a choice. Correa already gave his permission.” She hates herself for sounding so defensive, so childlike.
Ester compresses her lips. “Esc hombre,” she starts, as if calling him “that man” explains everything about him.
“His aunt is a good woman,” América interrupts, not giving Ester a chance to say more about Correa. “She’s old, though. 1 don’t know if she can handle a teenager. Rosalinda will run all over her.” Like she runs over us, she thinks but doesn’t say.
“You’re not going to let him take her, just like that?” Ester’s voice drips with contempt for América’s weakness.
América hugs her knees tighter to her chest, drops her eyes to a dark corner of the fragrant garden, feels more than hears the bomb exploding on the distant beach, the trembling of the ground beneath her.
“I don’t know what else to do,” she says in a voice so soft she’s sure Ester hasn’t heard. She looks at her mother, who has gone back to blowing smoke rings at the moon with a calm that América finds eerie because of its contrast to her own inner tur- moil.
“Why don’t you send her to Paulina?”
“’lb New York?” Ester could as easily have suggested she send Rosalinda to China, and América would have responded with the same astonishment, the same trembling fear of the distance between Vieques and anywhere else in the world farther than Puerto Rico, which seems far away enough.
“At least she would be with our family.”
A family whose smiling faces adorn Ester’s wall of memories in a chronological sequence of photographic greeting cards with “Merry Christmas from the Ortiz Family” printed at the bottom. Ester’s sister, Paulina, moved to New York a week after her wed- ding. She writes, sends clothes, gifts, sometimes even money. The whole family visits Vieques on infrequent vacations. They all speak Spanish with an accent and sometimes use English words that they make into Spanish by adding an o or an a. Paulina used the word liqueo to tell Ester the faucet had a leak.
“Rosalinda doesn’t speak English,” América says as if that were the only consideration, and Ester doesn’t respond. In the silence, América hears herself say the real reason why she won’t consider sending Rosalinda to New York. “Correa will never let her go.” Ester takes one final drag from her cigarette, drops and steps on the stub. She grinds it into the dirt fiercely, until América thinks she’s made a hole deep enough to bury much more than
a cigarette stub.
“He doesn’t have to know,” Ester says quietly, as if testing the sound of her own voice. América drops her feet onto the damp ground, seeks her mother’s eyes. But Ester has turned away, aid América is faced with the grotesque shape created by the pink foam rollers on Ester’s head.
“Mami, he’s her father. I can’t send her away without telling him.” She tries to leave all emotion out of her voice, so that it
doesn’t sound like an excuse, so that she doesn’t have to hear Ester’s contempt again. But Ester is silent. “And who knows what he would do to me,” she adds, unable to hide the tremor in her voice. Ester still doesn’t say a word. She stares at the almost full moon as if it held the answer. She’s so still and silent that América thinks she’s fallen asleep on her feet.
Finally, Ester takes a deep breath through her mouth, as if she were still smoking. “You should go with her,” she says.
“Are you crazy? What am I going to do in New York?” América’s hands shake, and her body breaks out in a fine sweat, like dew on a blossom.
“The same thing you do here. Irving knows people.”
“What does he have to do with this? Have you been talking to him about me?”
Ester looks guiltily away. “He asks, I answer. Sometimes he makes suggestions.” She rummages again in her robe, pulls out the crumpled box of cigarettes, lights one with unsteady hands. “Correa doesn’t have to know where you are. No one will tell him.”
But América is so focused on an image of Ester and Don Irving drinking, smoking, and discussing her and Correa that she hasn’t heard. She stands up close to her mother, anger replacing fear.
“My life is none of your business,” she hisses, “and I wish you’d stay out of it.”
Ester won’t look at her. She turns on her heel and walks back into the house saying something América doesn’t hear.
América stares after her mother’s slender figure, the lit cigarette a punctuation against the shadows of the garden. Fights with her are unsatisfying, because they usually end with Ester walking away, mumbling to herself. Having stoked her anger in prepara- tion for a quarrel, América is left smoldering to think of different ways of saying the same thing: It’s my life, stay out of it.
But even as she mutters that Ester is no great example of how one should lead one’s life, even as she discounts the message be- cause the messenger is unreliable, América feels the
