America's Dream (14 page)

“Little words,” she says. “You remember too, Meghan?” The girl smiles at América through the thumb in her mouth, shakes her head shyly. América pats her shoulder. “Where Mami?”

“She’s resting,” Meghan says through her thumb. Her father pulls it out of her mouth impatiently.

“Meghan, it’s rude to talk to people with your mouth full.” The little girl clams up, sucks on her thumb again.

“Okéi,” América says. “Adios,” she says to Kyle. “Uhdeeos!” he responds with a grin.

She really likes the boy, his openness, his intelligence, his eagerness to please. Unlike so many of the Arnericanitos who stay at La Casa and are wary of strangers, he seems to get along with everyone.

Later in the afternoon, as she’s leaving, the Leveretts are return- ing from the beach, sand stuck to their arms and legs, the backs of their necks. Mr. Leverett is slightly sunburned.

“Hi!” Mrs. Leverett sings out. Kyle jumps out of the Jeep and runs toward América, lugging a plastic beach bucket.

“Look, I found about a million seashells!” His sister follows him with her own bucket full.

“Me, too. A million!”

They display the many shells in shades of pale pink and ivory, some burgundy striped, others with mustard-colored streaks. “They beautiful!” América exclaims, picking one from Meghan’s bucket and examining it. “So pretty.”

“Look at mine! In this one you can hear the ocean!” He holds a conch shell to América’s ear, and she winces. She’s always imagined an animal will come out of one of those shells and pinch her ear. “Ooh! Thank you.” She pulls it away.

“We’d better get going,” Mr. Leverett says. “Do you want to cool off in the pool?” he asks his son.

“Sure!”

They walk up the path lined with flowering hibiscus.

“I’ll be there in a minute,” Mrs. Leverett calls after him, turning to América. “We were wondering if you could baby-sit again to- morrow night.”

“Yes. Same time?”

“A little earlier, six maybe.” “Okéi.”

“And if you wouldn’t mind having dinner with the kids. Irving doesn’t start serving until then, and last time we had to rush—” “No problem,” she says, hugging Meghan to her side. “You stay with América, no cry?” Meghan sticks her salty, sandy thumb in her mouth and looks doubtfully at her. América pulls her closer

and kisses the top of her head. “You good girl.”

“See you tomorrow, then,” Mrs. Leverett says, grabbing Meghan’s shell bucket. “Let’s go swim with the boys, okay?”

América watches them go toward the pool. Mrs. Leverett is fashion-model pretty, and young. América guesses she must be in her early thirties. Her wide, deep blue eyes and short golden hair make her look childlike, but the hardness about the mouth is that of a woman, and the eyes, after the first look, are not inno- cent so much as wary. It’s a look América has seen many times. Américan women cultivate a girllike body, hair that never grays, unlined faces. But their life experience is some-thing that can’t be erased. You can see their age in the curl of the lips and the knowing looks. In the set of their shoulders. In the hands, which, although manicured and soft, are webbed with wrinkles.

Correa says he can’t understand how Américan men can make love with those “bags of bones.” América agrees that women should be soft and round, not sharp and angular. Her own body is full at the hips and buttocks, ample in the breasts, with enough flesh to cushion the bones, but not so much that it jiggles. Well, some parts jiggle, but only if she makes them. She’s proud of her sinuous walk, which she developed after much practice before she met Correa, in the innocent afternoons of her early adoles- cence. She registers men’s admiring glances when she passes, listens for the mumbled piropos or soft whistles for confirmation that she looks good, that all the trouble she takes in the morning dressing, brushing her hair, putting on makeup is worth getting up a half hour earlier.

“A woman should smell good and look good,” the men she knows have said many times, and she agrees, and has taught this to her daughter. Rosalinda spends most of her allowance on cosmetics and perfumes. Like Ester and América, she’s particular about her clothes, spends a great deal of time selecting what shoes to wear with what dress or pants.

Every time Rosalinda enters her thoughts, América feels an invisible fist land between her breasts. It sets her heart racing, and tears threaten. It is then that she sets her jaw against her

skull, as if she were biting something hard that requires a great deal of force to break in two.

On the second night she baby-sits Kyle and Meghan, América takes them on a walk around the grounds of La Casa before they go in to have dinner. They pick flowers from the gardenia and hibiscus bushes, which they put in a glass on their mother’s bedside table. They climb the mango tree near the picnic table and visit the shed where the laundry gets done. They sit on the high stools of the Bohío, and the bartender gives them each a Coke and a bowl full of popcorn. They visit the ramshackle stables where Don Irving keeps five Paso Fino horses for guests who want to ride along the beach. Felipe, the groom, is brushing Sil- vestre, the oldest horse in the stable. He lets the children pet the horse, gives them a handful of oats, and after much giggling and coaxing, they let Silvestre eat out of their hands, laughing at the sensation of his thick lips against their palms.

“It tickles,” screeches Meghan, pulling her hand away, drop- ping most of the oats in the dirt.

“Can we ride him?” asks Kyle.

Felipe lifts him onto Silvestre’s broad back.

“Be careful no fall off,” América calls out as Felipe leads the horse around.

“Me too, me too,” says Meghan.

“You too baby go horsy,” América tells her, but Meghan insists. “It’s an old horse,” Felipe reassures her, “she’ll be all right.”

He hoists Meghan up behind her brother, wraps her little hands around his waist, and leads the horse in a tight circle, while the children laugh and squeal in delight.

América is a little nervous, but she trusts Felipe. What she doesn’t trust is the horse. She’s never been fond of horses. Their big eyes seem to her to look resentfully at humans, and she thinks they’re waiting for the opportunity to buck and drop their riders, stomp on them with their broad hooves.

“Ya no más, you get off,” she calls out, and the children

protest, but América comes over and helps lift them off the anim- al. “The horsy tired,” she explains to them.

“Can we do it again tomorrow?” Kyle asks, and Meghan joins him. “Can we?”

“We ask your mami y papi.”

“They won’t mind,” Kyle says, and she promises to ask their parents and thanks Felipe as she takes the children away.

At dinner she orders tostones. After much urging, the children taste them and say they like the crispy plantain rounds. They even try them the way she eats them, with a drip of olive oil and garlic. Afterward, they go back to their room, and she helps them glue some of their shells onto a piece of driftwood. She talks to them in her broken English, and they delight in correcting her pronunciation. When tired or bored, they become cranky, and Kyle lords it over his sister, who cries in frustration.

“You be nice little sister,” América warns, but Kyle loves to torture her. “If you no be nice, I no take you see horsy tomorrow.”

“Daddy will take us, then.”

“No, he won’t,” Meghan warns, “’cause I’m gonna tell.” “Tattletale! Tattletale!”

Meghan throws a crayon at him, and he throws it back, and América is beside herself trying to figure out how to keep them from hurting each other. If they were her children, he’d get a good spanking and a talking-to for abusing his sister, who’s much younger and weaker. But they’re not her kids, and so she finds ways of distracting them until they’re too tired to protest when it’s time for bed. She tucks each of them in, sings “La Malagueña,” and kisses them good night, smelling the garlic on their breath.

She tidies the room for the second time today, puts away toys, folds clothes, straightens books on shelves. This room is as famil- iar to her as her own, and she moves around it as if it were and these her children sleeping peacefully on the screened porch.

After the Leveretts return from their evening out, she walks home, a small flashlight in her hand. She will turn it on only when she comes to the dark stretch where two trees on opposite

sides of the path block the light of the moon. She’s not afraid of the dark but wouldn’t like to stumble and hurt herself. The moon is so bright it illuminates the familiar stretch, creating long shadows blacker than the ones the sun makes. The air is silver gray, cool, filled with the night sounds of invisible creatures that hop and dart and fly as she walks, as if making way for her, as if she were a queen, and they, the toads, the snakes, the owls, her subjects. The only ones to touch her are the mosquitoes, who, finding a soft spot, prick her and suck her blood before she real- izes she has to swat them.

The next afternoon, once she’s done with her work and is ready to go home, América finds Mr. and Mrs. Leverett and the children by the pool.

“I promise take kids see horsies,” she explains to Mrs. Leverett. “Can we go, Mom?” Kyle asks, and his sister hops around her

mother crying, “Horses! Horses!”

Mrs. Leverett looks uncertainly toward her husband, who’s swimming laps. “We went earlier, and they were all gone.”

“Silvestre is there,” América tells her.

“Okay, let’s go then,” she says, throwing a T-shirt over her swimsuit.

América leads the way with Kyle, and Meghan and Mrs. Leverett follow on the path behind the outdoor bar. Felipe is walking Pirulí, a reddish horse that confirms all of América’s worst fears. She’s a spirited filly, her gait proud and aggressive. She rears her head and neighs for what seems to be no reason at all. They watch Felipe take her around a couple of times, then lead her into her stall, where, it seems, she doesn’t want to go. He has to persuade her, to the amusement of the children and to América and Mrs. Leverett’s worried expressions.

“You no like horses?” América asks, and Mrs. Leverett smiles. “I grew up in a horsy town, but I never got into it.”

Felipe brings Silvestre out. América turns to Mrs. Leverett. “Can they go on horsy?”

“Please, Mom!” the children plead in unison.

“Be real careful and hold on, okay?” she instructs as Felipe lifts one, then the other.

“He very gentle horse. Old horse.” América reassures. Mrs.

Leverett’s worried expression doesn’t change.

Because of her fear of horses, América insisted that Rosalinda learn to ride when she was quite young, so that her daughter wouldn’t be paralyzed by the same fear. It occurs to her now that perhaps Rosalinda is too brave, too careless about consequences. América stares into the dirt at her feet.

Mrs. Leverett has been talking, and she hasn’t heard her. “…vacation. But I suppose to you it doesn’t feel like that, since you live here.”

América looks up, hoping that no answer is required to whatever Mrs. Leverett was saying. As they pass, the children wave, and they wave back.

“How long have you worked for Irving?” Mrs. Leverett asks. “Ten years. Since he came.”

“Did you grow up nearby?” “I live here all my life.”

“You haven’t lived anywhere else?”

América looks at her, waves at the children, looks at her again. “I left once, for one month, but I came back.”

“It’s such a beautiful island.” “Yes.”

“Too bad about the Navy base.”

América doesn’t know how to respond, so she sighs. “Are you married?”

“No.” She says the word as if she had just bit into the bitter skin of an unripe purple mombin, but Mrs. Leverett doesn’t seem to notice.

Felipe lifts the children off the horse. They come running to their mother, their faces ecstatic.

“Can we have a horse, Mom?” “Yes, Mom, can we?”

América and Mrs. Leverett chuckle. The children tug at their mother’s T-shirt, begging her to get them a horse. She looks at

América as if they were accomplices in some scheme. “We’ll talk about it, okay?” she says to the kids, smiling mysteriously.

América says good-bye, going in one direction as they go in the other, wondering about Américans’ habits of asking personal questions when they barely know you.

Correa is stretched out on the couch. “Where’ve you been?”

“I promised the kids I baby-sit that I’d take them to see the horses.”

“What’s with you and those Yanquis?”

“Nothing’s with me. I baby-sit their kids, that’s all.”

She goes to change. In the kitchen, Ester is making something that smells so rich and spicy, her stomach churns with hunger. She wishes she were as good a cook as Ester, who has a flair for mixing condiments and making even the humblest ingredients taste spectacular. It is her one gift she’s proudest of, the one people use to describe her. Oh, yes, Ester, she’s a great cook. She can make stones taste like butter.

Because she’s such a great cook, Ester is popular with the neighbors, who are willing to overlook her perpetual ill humor, attributed to her love of beer. Whenever there’s a wedding or a birthday party, Ester is invited, and her gift is always a caldero full of the best arroz con gandules anyone has ever had, or a Pyrex dish full of the creamiest flan, or if it’s someone she really likes or someone who has paid for them, a couple of hundred pasteles. “I could have been a cook in the best hotels in San Juan,” she’s fond of saying, but she never explains why that didn’t happen.

There is no pattern to Correa’s visits. He shows up when he feels like it. The fact that he has come around so many times in the past few weeks América attributes to “el problema con Ros- alinda.” At other times when he has come almost every night, it signals he’s jealous, his presence a message to América and her alleged suitor about who she belongs to. But América doesn’t think that’s why he’s here again tonight. One thing

about Correa, he doesn’t keep her guessing. He comes right out with an accusation, usually just before he hits her in the face if he’s drunk, or in her abdomen and back if he isn’t.

She thinks maybe the problem with Rosalinda has changed Correa, that he’s now ready to be the man she always wished he would be. He hasn’t hit her in two weeks, since the day he took Rosalinda away. She notes the days he comes and lies with her like any other man with his wife, makes no demands for sex, asks before he pulls up her nightgown and fondles her breasts. Of course, were she to say no, it might be different. But she doesn’t want to think about that. She has stopped thinking of ways to kill him. Has listened when he brings news of Rosalinda because he has a working phone and she doesn’t. His easiness with her, his verbal caresses are like a pledge. In the hopeful act of lovemak- ing, she believes he’s a changed man and for a moment forgets the swollen lips and bruises of days past, the blackened eyes, the tender scalp where he has pulled her hair.