On a Clear Day (18 page)

The water was cold, and I shared the shower with a spider hanging from a long spider thread. That cheered me up a little.

Down to dinner.

It was
pollo guisado
, simple and good. Mrs. Rosario had invited Rafael; Ramón, the old man who lived on the first floor; a woman I didn’t know; and Lydia, the young girl.

“Lydia made the dessert!” Mrs. Rosario said. “Sugar cookies for everybody who cleans their plates!”

Lydia was wearing jeans and a sequined hoodie. She looked over at Anja and me and gave us a half smile.

“So what have you been doing?” The old man jumped right in. “You save the world yet? Because I didn’t hear anything.”

“Ramón, shut up until I introduce our guest. Anja is a friend of Dahlia’s and a friend of mine. Isn’t that right,
chica
?”

“Yes, it is.”

“And this old man is Ramón, who died ten years ago but is too stubborn to lie down. This is Isobel, a saint. This is Rafael, not a saint. And this is Lydia, an angel. We are lucky in this house to have one saint, one angel, Dahlia, and now you.”

“I still didn’t hear nothing about the world being saved!” Ramón said.

“You can’t even hear the television without blasting it all over the house, Ramón.” Mrs. Rosario was ladling out the stew. “If Dahlia saved the world and everybody was talking about it, you would be the last to know!”

“You can’t save the whole world at once,” I said. “You need to save a little piece at a time. Tonight I’ll try to save the chicken stew.”

“You need to give the chicken some mouth-to-mouth, but I don’t think it’s going to help him!” Rafael said. “He looks kind of tired to me.”

“Dahlia, Isobel is Ramón’s niece.” Mrs. Rosario gestured toward the woman, who nodded and smiled at me. “She doesn’t tell stupid jokes, but she has a job working for a car service.”

“Wonderful,” I said.

“What do those boys do?” Mrs. Rosario sat down and handed a large slotted spoon to Ramón.

“First, we have boys and we have girls,” I said. “Like Anja.”

“Is she smart?” Lydia asked.

I looked toward her and saw that she had her head down.

“Anja’s very smart,” I said.

“¿Habla español?”
Head still down.

“I’m afraid not,” Anja said.

“But she’s been all over the world—Africa, South America, St. Paul—and she does good things,” I said.

“And the boys?” Mrs. Rosario.

“Michael is the leader,” I said. “He used to have a rock
band. He’s kind of rich, and he’s dedicated to making the world a better place.”

“All rich people say that!” Ramón had made a circle of rice on his plate and was now filling it with stew. “They want to make it better for themselves.”

“That’s kind of what we’re doing,” Anja said. “Trying to point out that what’s good for the very rich isn’t always good for everybody else.”

“So it’s a band? What do you play?” Rafael was having fun with me. Okay.

“It’s not a band and I don’t play anything,” I said. “I more or less do the math for the group.”

“Are there any other girls in the group?” Lydia. Still looking down.

“There’s one other girl. Her name is Mei-Mei,” I said. “She’s very good at chess.”

“So she’s smart?” Lydia asked.

“All the people in the group are smart, Lydia,” Mrs. Rosario said. “Dahlia likes to be with smart people.”

“Mei-Mei’s very smart too,” Anja said. “Like you.”

“Lydia is going to make some man a wonderful wife.”

The woman Isobel agreed with herself by nodding. “She already cooks well. You’ll taste her cookies tonight. They’re much better than anything you can buy.”

“When I was a little girl, my grandmother—who was more of a mother to me than my real mother—told me that if a woman can cook and comb her hair, she’ll make a good wife,” Mrs. Rosario said. “They used to say that if a woman came out of her house with a wooden spoon and a comb, she was looking for a husband.”

“What’s the hardest part about saving the world, Dahlia?” Ramón again. “Because if it’s easy, I may take it up myself. I need a hobby to keep me young.”

“What do you think, Anja?” I asked.

“Figuring out who the enemy is,” Anja said. “Sometimes that’s hard.”

“That’s what the boys do,” Rafael said. “A boy always knows who the enemy is. You look at a man and the man looks at you, and right away you know if he’s a friend or somebody who’s out to kill you.”

“You could be wrong, Rafael,” Mrs. Rosario said.

“How do you know if somebody is smart?” Lydia asked. “Do they give you tests?”

“Smart people kind of recognize other smart people.” Anja smiled as she spoke. “Maybe it’s a kind of radar. What do you think?”

“Could be.” Lydia. Now she was smiling. I liked her more and more.

“A man just has to open his mouth one time to me and I know if he’s smart or if he’s stupid,” Rafael droned on. “Even if he just says hello, I can tell. You got to feel it.”

“If you feel sick and you go to a doctor, is he your friend or enemy?” I asked Rafael.

“If he’s a good doctor, he’s your friend.” Rafael was pleased with his answer.

“And if you can’t afford him?” I asked.

“Then he’s neutral,” Rafael said. “To you, he’s not a doctor anymore.”

I didn’t bother answering. Rafael didn’t get it and maybe never would.

“This stew is wonderful!” Anja.

“You look like a girl who eats a lot,” Ramón, the old man, said. “That’s okay in a girl, because you never eat as much as boys do.”

“How do you sleep when you’re away so much?” Mrs. Rosario asked.

“Michael has this huge house in Morristown,” I said. “We all have separate rooms, and they’re pretty quiet, so I don’t have trouble sleeping. You put chili peppers in this stew?”

“Not enough?”

“I think it’s enough,” I said. “I just wondered. My mother never liked anything too spicy. There’s a lot of flavor in this stew.”

“It’s the lime juice that brings it out,” Isobel said. “She could be a cook in a fancy restaurant. Easy. I mean the kind they have in the big hotels in New York.”

“If you could get a job in one of those hotels,” Mrs. Rosario said. “Jobs don’t grow on trees, you know.”

“Maybe the man who takes away your jobs is your enemy,” I said.

“Rafael, she has a point,” Mrs. Rosario said. “You have stew on your shirt.”

Rafael grunted. Perfect answer.

“If you don’t know who the enemy is, how can you fight them?” Lydia.

“We know what they do, and we can fight against that,” I said. “If you go to a doctor and you can’t afford to pay to be treated, you can fight against the high fees.”

“You’re too young to get sick, Lydia,” Mrs. Rosario said. “And Dahlia and her friend—Anna?”

“Anja.”

“What kind of a name is that?” Ramón asked. “Is that Jewish? I don’t have anything against Jewish people.”

“It’s Czech,” Anja said.

“He’s got nothing against Czech people either,” Isobel said. “The only people he doesn’t like are Germans, Haitians, French because he thinks they’re white Haitians, Canadians, Italians, and everybody from the Middle East.”

“I don’t like Japanese people either,” Ramón added proudly.

“Dahlia, do you have sex with the boys?” Lydia.

“Lydia! Oh, my God!” Mrs. Rosario slapped the back of Lydia’s head. “You
never
ask that kind of question.… Dahlia, I’m so sorry.”

“It’s all right, Mrs. Rosario,” I said. “No, honey, we don’t have sex with the boys.”

“We don’t kiss them or anything,” Anja said. “We’re all very serious. There are a lot of bad things going on, and we don’t have a lot of time to fool around.”

“She doesn’t mean anything, but today’s children are too bold,” Isobel said. “When I was a child, we didn’t say anything at the dinner table. We didn’t even ask for another serving.”

“You lived in Brooklyn, Isobel,” Ramón said. “When you were young—which wasn’t yesterday—things were different. Who can afford to live in Brooklyn now?”

“Dahlia, does Anja like black beans? She’s not eating them.” Lydia. Again.

“I’ll get to them,” Anja answered.

“So how much are they paying you?” Mrs. Rosario asked.

“They’re paying our expenses,” I said. “It’s like volunteer work.”

“Are you actually going to fight somebody?” Lydia asked. “You’re going to hit them?”

“Ladies don’t fight, child.” Isobel.

“We might fight when we go to Florida,” I said.

“You’re going to Florida?” Mrs. Rosario asked.

“I don’t like Cubans either,” Ramón said.

“You don’t mean real fighting—she doesn’t mean real fighting, Lydia,” Mrs. Rosario said. “She means like a debate. Isn’t that right, Dahlia?”

“No, the people we’ll fight against in Miami have guns,” I said. “And we’ll have guns.”

“Oh, my God!” Isobel. “Oh, my dear sweet God!”

“You don’t have to go to no Florida,” Rafael said. “You can stay right here. No man lets his woman go fight with guns. That’s stupid. You stay right here. Why do you have to go fighting and shooting for some rock star? You tell me that! There’s no sense to it. You can stay here and get a husband who’ll take care of you. Why do you have to go with this stupid shit?”

“We’ll take care of each other,” Anja started, but Rafael cut her off.

“What do you know?” Rafael was getting angry. He had his head turned toward me, and I could see the vein in his
neck bulging. “You’re a white girl and you’ll go back to being a white girl when the fighting is over. We’re Dominicans. With us it’s different.”

I listened for a while as Mrs. Rosario told me that it would be all right
not
to go, as once she had told me that it was all right
to
go.

I didn’t think Rafael, or for that matter any of them, would fully understand what I had to say, but I had to try.

“Rafael, when I came home this time, I saw the barbed wire piled between the buildings. It was as if the strands of wire were a kind of crazy evilness that had replaced the laughter of the kids who used to play there. It told me things were getting worse for our little neighborhood, and for everybody like us. Either I fight against this, in any way I can, and for any reason I can bring myself to, or I just give up. I feel powerless, and when we feel powerless, we stop trying to find a better way. I know that. You know that.

“The group I’m with is still trying to find that better way. We have our reasons, and sometimes they’re not the same reasons, but we each have something we want, and we’re ready to fight for what we want.”

“What do you want?” Rafael.

“I think I want to wake up on a clear day and see a world full of hope and comfort. A world in which what we want will be private and special and fuzzy and warm or whatever we want it to be. My grandmother had a cup she kept on a special shelf and she’d have tea in it or coffee
or whatever she felt like having. Everybody needs a cup like that. It’s not a lot to ask, Rafael. Just a little private comfort for everybody.

“What we have to do is to stop the corporations and the political groups who want to tell us what to think, and what we should dream about, or what we should eat or wear, or what should amuse us according to what their accountants are telling them. On one hand, it’s not a lot to ask to be free to struggle on our own; on the other, it’s affecting the whole world, isn’t it?”

“I think you’re being foolish, but I wish you luck,” Rafael said.

“Thanks, Rafael.”

We ate the rest of the meal with the kind of light conversation people save for good food and good friends. I loved it, even though I knew everyone was thinking on some level about what I had said and none of us was comfortable.

Finally, the dinner was over and Mrs. Rosario asked Lydia to bring out her dessert.

Lydia went into the living room and came back with an enormous plate piled high with sugar cookies. She looked at me and smiled, and then the plate fell from her hands and crashed onto the linoleum-covered floor.

“Oh!” Mrs. Rosario cried.

“All this talk about fighting has her upset!” Ramón said as Isobel and Mrs. Rosario started picking up the cookies.

Over coffee, Rafael and Ramón agreed that the Mexican football league was prejudiced against other Latino teams.
Anja asked Rafael if he knew that they played football in the Czech Republic. Ramón said that they might play it there, but they weren’t really serious. Anja and I listened to football talk until she was falling asleep.

Upstairs. Text message from Michael.

Before we drifted asleep, there was a knock on the door. I opened it and it was Lydia. She came in and looked around the room.

“How you doing?” I asked.

“Did you know I was smart?” she said.

“Yes,” I said.

Anja hugged Lydia.

F
lorida. It was sticky hot, and two minutes out of the airport, I was beginning to stink. Michael had made reservations for us downtown, but Drego wanted a different place to operate from.

“The people I deal with don’t do well with security cameras,” he said.

“Whatever.” Michael shrugged it off. “We go to our hotel first and make plans.”