America's Dream Read online

  América’s Dream

  Esmeralda Santiago

  Hija fuiste, madre serás

  según hiciste, así te harán.

  You were a daughter, mother you will be

  as you did, so will be done to you.

  Contents

  The Problem with Rosalinda

  The Man She Could Have Had

  A Fuerza de Puños

  Correa’s Gifts

  Krazy Glue

  It’s Not Forever

  Distant Thunder

  Five Days a Month

  I Could Kill Him

  No Balls

  There’s a Phone Call for You

  Going Blind

  I Wonder If He Knows

  Hungry

  Learning Their Ways

  Asopao

  He Likes You

  Homesick

  Las Empleadas

  A Night Out

  A Walk to the Park

  Firm but Fair

  Happy Bird Day 2 Ju

  How Correa Knows

  Margarita Guerra

  Everybody Has Problems

  No Coquís

  Dingdong

  What Happened?

  América’s Dream

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  The Problem with Rosalinda

  It’s her life, and she’s in the middle of it. On her knees, scrubbing behind a toilet at the only hotel on the island. She hums a bolero, a love song filled with longing. She’s always humming, sometimes a ballad, sometimes a lilting cha-cha-chá. Often, she sings out loud. Most of the time she’s not even aware of the pleasing music that comes from her and is surprised when tourists tell her how charming it is that she sings as she works.

  The tiles are unevenly laid behind the toilet, and she catches a nail on the corner of one and tears it to the quick. “Ay!” Still on her knees, she moves to the sink and runs cold water over her middle finger. The bright pink crescent of her nail hangs by the cuticle. She bites it off, drawing salty blood.

  “¡América!”

  The scream bounces against the concrete walls of La Casa del Francés. América scrambles up, finger still in mouth, and leans out of the bathroom window. Her mother runs back and forth along the path at the side of the hotel, peering up at the second floor.

  “What is it?”

  “Ay, nena, get down here!” Ester wails and collapses into a squat, hands over her face.

  “What is it, Mami? What’s the matter?” From above, Ester is a circle of color on the path, the full skirt of her flowered housedress a ring around narrow shoulders, brown arms, and pink curlers on copper hair. She rocks from side to side, sobs with the gusto of a spoiled child. For an instant América considers a shortcut through the window. Seeing her mother from above, small and vulnerable, sets her heart racing, and a lump forms in her throat that threatens to choke her. “I’m coming, Mami!” she yells, and she runs through the guest room, down the stairs, around the courtyard, out the double doors of the front verandah, past. the gardenia bushes, through the gate to the side garden, and down the path, where Ester still squats, still wails as if the world were coming to an end.

  Sleepy guests lean out of their windows or step onto porches, concerned expressions clouding their vacation faces. Don Irving, the owner of the hotel, runs heavily from the back of the building, reaching Ester at the same time as América.

  “Whasgononere?” he bellows in English. “What’s all the screaming about?”

  “Ay don no!” América kneels next to Ester. “Mami, please! What’s the matter?”

  “¡Ay, mi’ja!” Ester is hyperventilating and can’t get the words out. América’s breathing quickens, and a whirling pressure builds around her head.

  “Please, Mami, what is it? What’s happened?”

  Ester shakes her head, sprinkling the air with tears. She presses both hands against her chest, as if to control its rising and falling. She gulps air and, in a halting voice that rises to a final wail, gives América the news. “¡Rosalinda se escapó!”

  At first she doesn’t quite understand what Ester means by Rosalinda has escaped. Her fourteen-year-old daughter is not a prisoner. But the words echo in her head, and the meaning becomes clear. América covers her face, squeezes her fingers deep into her flesh, and sobs. “Ay, no, Mami, don’t say such a thing!”

  Ester, who has gained some composure now that the problem is no longer hers, wraps her arms around América and rubs her shoulders, her tears mingling with those of her daughter. “She went with that boy, Taino.”

  América stares at Ester, tries to make sense of what she’s heard. But the words and images are distorted, go by too quickly, like a movie in fast-forward. And at the end there’s a pause, a soft-focus portrait of her daughter, Rosalinda, and pimpled Taino with his innocent brown eyes. She shakes her head, trying to erase the picture.

  “What the hell’s going on here?” Don Irving stands over them, blowing great gusts of cigar-scented breath. Behind him, Nilda, the laundress, Feto, the cook, and Tomás, the gardener, run up from different directions. They surround América and Ester, and the men help them stand.

  “Ees my dohter,” says América, avoiding Don Irving’s eyes. “She in trubel.”

  “Rosalinda ran away with her boyfriend,” Nilda interprets, and América cringes with shame.

  “Oh, fahcrysakes!” Don Irving spits into the oregano patch. “Geddadehere, c’mon.” He steers the sobbing América and Ester out of earshot of his guests, to the back of the building, where he leaves Feto and Tomás to escort them to the path behind the stables. Don Irving walks back to the front garden, mumbling. “Every day it’s something else. A damn soap opera. Jesus Christ!” He waves at the curious tourists at the windows and porches. “It’s okay, everything’s fine. Relax.”

  Supported by Feto and Tomás, América and Ester go in the opposite direction. The tourists stare long after they have all disappeared behind the outdoor bar.

  América and Ester shuffle home through the path at the rear of La Casa del Francés. Nilda accompanies them, rubbing the shoulders of one, then the other.

  “Calm yourselves. If you don’t control your nerves, you won’t be able to help the child,” Nilda reminds them. Her voice vibrates with the joy of a busybody who has stumbled into the middle of the action.

  “You can go back, Nilda,” América suggests between sniffles. “We can manage on our own.”

  But Nilda is not so easily dissuaded. América is not like other women. She’s not willing to talk about her life, to commiserate with other women about how tough it is. She goes around humming and singing like she’s the happiest person in the world, even though everyone knows different. No, Nilda will not leave her side. It’s not every day she can plunge into América Gonzalez’s reserve.

  “I’ll just get you home and make sure you’re all right,” she insists.

  América doesn’t have the energy to argue. Her head feels stuffed with cotton. She wants to clear it, to enter into her own brain and figure out what to do. But it’s as if she were facing a door she doesn’t want to open.

  Their house is a ten-minute walk from the back gate of La Casa. América walks this path five days a week, once in the early morning and again when her job is done in the late afternoon. It is so familiar, she’s sure she can get home blindfolded if necessary and won’t stumble or step into a ditch or crash against a mango tree or a telephone pole.

  But today she’s on the path at a time when she should he mopping the tile floor of one of the guest rooms. Her uniform seems out of place at midmorning, on the way home. The sun is too bright for her to be out on the street. Curious neighbors come to their porches or stop watering their plants to stare, mocking her. She doesn’t look at them, but she knows they’re watching. She feels Nilda, bloated with consequence, between her and Ester, guiding them home, smiling kindly at one, then the other, mumbling worn sayings as if words, and not her legs, impelled her forward.

  On the other side of Nilda, Ester whimpers like a hurt puppy. Fifteen years ago it was Ester who had to be found and told that América had run away with her boyfriend. They’ve never talked about that day, and América wonders where Ester was, what she was doing when told that her only child had run away with the handsome young man who had recently come to the barriada to lay pipes for a sewer system.

  Thinking about Correa, América’s skin pimples into goose bumps. What will he do when he hears that Rosalinda has run away? She envisions his handsome face redden with anger, his green eyes disappear under thick eyebrows, his nostrils flare over his well-tended mustache. She raises her arms as if to ward off a blow or perhaps to cover her eyes from the sun, and Nilda strokes her shoulders and leads her through the gate Ester left open.

  The thirty feet to the front steps are a fragrant gauntlet of roses, and as usual when she goes past them, América sneezes.

  “¡Salúd!” Nilda wishes her, and she steers them up the walk, dodging the invading rose branches, whose spines catch in her clothes and hair. At the top of the steps she looks resentfully at the distance separating her from the sidewalk.

  “Here we are,” she announces cheerfully, pushing the door open, making herself at home in their house as if she were a frequent visitor. “Have a seat, I’ll get you something to drink.” She pulls out chairs for them. América and Ester flop dumbly at opposite ends of the dining table and stare at the tile floor. In the kitchen, Nilda opens and closes
more cabinets than seems necessary to find a glass. “Here, this will help you feel better.” She places a tumbler of water over ice in front of each. América drinks in long, thirsty gulps. Ester eyes her drink suspiciously.

  The cool water revives América. As she rises, the chair legs scrape angrily against the tiles, making Nilda grimace and cover her ears. Ester emerges from her silence with the attitude of someone who has been rudely awakened from a restful nap.

  “Some people should mind their own business,” she says, lurching past Nilda into the kitchen, where she dumps her ice water down the sink.

  Nilda’s obsequious smile is replaced by a resentful tightening of the lips. “I’m just trying to help.” She sulks, but Ester ignores her.

  América gently guides Nilda by the elbow to the door. “Don’t take it personally. You know how she is.” She opens the door and stands aside to let Nilda pass. “Thank you for your kindness, but you’d better get back to the hotel, or Don Irving will fire us both.”

  “Yes, I should go,” Nilda agrees reluctantly. “I’ll drop by later to see if there’s anything I can do.”

  América smiles thinly. “Don’t worry about us, we’ll be all right.” She pulls herself up straighter, stands solid at the threshold looking down at Nilda.

  “Well, all right, take care.” From inside the house, Ester snorts in disdain.

  América all but pushes Nilda out and closes the door behind her.

  América leans her hack against the door and breathes a sigh of relief. On her right is Rosalinda’s room, its walls papered with posters of rock and roll and salsa singers. She enters it stealthily, as if afraid to wake up a sleeper. Rosalinda has taken most of her clothes, her boom box and CDs, the gold jewelry Correa has given her over the years, and the stuffed blue pelican Taino won for her at the midway in last year’s patron-saint feast days. There is no letter telling them where she has gone, but it’s clear she’s left with no intention of coming back. She’s taken the Cindy Crawford wall calendar on which she charts her menstrual cycle.

  América sits on the edge of her daughter’s bed, neatly made as if she hasn’t slept in it. The dressing table has been stripped of mousses and gels, pimple creams and hairbrushes, blow-dryer, colognes. How long was she packing, América wonders, impressed with how well her daughter must have planned her escape to be able to take so much. She’s probably been taking things out of the house for days, and no one has noticed. Ester, whose room is on the other side of the wall from Rosalinda’s, sleeps, soundly, especially when she’s been drinking. Her snores are loud and hearty, and Rosalinda could have left in the middle of the night and no one would have heard a thing.

  América stands up, smoothes the edge of the bed, as if to erase all trace that she’s been there.

  “I made breakfast for her, as usual,” Ester says when América comes back to the kitchen, “but when I went to get her, she wasn’t there.” In the compost pail she has dumped Rosalinda’s Rice Krispies with sliced banana.

  América dries the dish Ester has been washing. “Was Taino here yesterday while I was working?”

  “He was here a couple of hours. They sat out on the porch doing their schoolwork. I made them sandwiches.” Ester takes the dish from América’s hands, puts it away, goes to the refrigerator for a beer.

  “It’s too early for that, Mami,” América warns.

  “Don’t tell me what to do,” Ester snaps. She pulls out a frosty Budweiser and goes into her room.

  América stares at the closed door, stained with grease, the knob hanging uselessly from the lock. The muted hiss of a beer can opening feels as if air were being let out of her.

  She splashes water from the kitchen tap on her face, dries it on her apron. It smells like ammonia. She leans over the yellow porcelain sink, fingertips massaging her temples. She’s exhausted. It’s an exhaustion she feels at times like this, when the whole world seems to have collapsed beneath her feet, leaving her at the bottom of a hole with sides so steep she can’t climb out. It’s the exhaustion of having attempted and failed so many times to crawl out that she’s just going to sit on the bottom and see what happens next. But she only gives up for as long as it takes tears to roll down her cheeks and plunk into the dirty dishwater, one two three.

  She crosses the house to her own room in the back, switches on the overhead light as she enters. A neatly made bed takes up most of the space. There is a phone on her bedside table, but service was disconnected long ago because she couldn’t afford to pay the bills.

  When Correa built this room out of a back terrace, he left space in the concrete wall for a window but never put one in. The rectangle where a window should be is covered with ply-wood. América leaned a mirror against it and keeps her cosmetics and hair preparations on the unfinished sill. At night she sleeps with her door ajar and a fan on for air. Correa didn’t put in a closet either, so her clothes hang from nails in the concrete walls or are folded inside two mismatched dressers.

  América changes out of the nylon uniform Don Irving makes them wear. It’s green, with a little white apron, also nylon (“so you can wash it easily”). In the humid days of summer the uniform feels like a sausage casing, tight and sticky. She hangs it up against the wall, in its usual place near the door. On days she doesn’t work she sees it every time she goes out of her room.

  She puts on a flowered dress cinched at the waist with a wide belt. Ester appears at the door of her room.

  “Es muy Ilamativo,” Ester says, “too festive for the occasion.”

  “What do you want me to do, dress in mourning?” She slips her feet into a pair of low-heeled sandals.

  “At least show some respect.”

  “Like the respect she’s shown me?”

  “She’s a kid. She’s supposed to be disrespectful.”

  “Since when are you an expert on teenagers?”

  Ester harrumphs. She turns a stiff back on América, retreats out of the kitchen door to the rear garden.

  América adjusts the bodice of her dress, runs her hands over her breasts, down to her waist, cinches the belt a little tighter. She’s not about to dress in black so the whole vecindario will know how she feels. Let their tongues wag if they want to talk about her. And besides, Ester knows what Correa does if she leaves the house looking unkempt.

  The soft crackplink of pigeon-pea pods being dropped into a metal bowl counterpoints the shuffle of Ester’s slippered feet on grass.

  América powders her face and hurriedly applies blusher and lipstick. She takes one last look in the mirror, fixes a stray curl by her left eye, and rummages in her dresser for the appropriate purse to carry with her sandals. She puts her things into a shiny black one that Correa gave her three Christmases ago.

  “I’m going,” she calls out the kitchen window at Ester, whose arms reach delicately among the curving branches, seeking out the plumpest pods. Ester looks toward the window, pouts in her direction, then continues her rhythmic chore as if the interruption had been a pause in a subtle dance.

  América dodges the rose branches arcing over the cement walk, sneezes, closes the gate behind her, pats down her hair one more time, and walks the half block down Calle Pinos toward the children’s park. A dog looks up from his spot under a tamarind tree, yawns listlessly, then settles back, a paw over his eyes. She crosses the street in front of the Asambleas de Dios Church where Reverend Nuñez, his tie askew under the open collar of his white shirt, prunes a hibiscus bush that has encroached on the parking space for the church’s van. He nods in her direction, and she nods back, quickening her pace as she turns left onto Calle Lidos. A rusting car rattles past. Its driver eyes her, slows down, sticks his head out the window to stare at her and to comment under his breath that he’d like to eat her. She responds that in her current state he’d die of indigestion, and turns left onto Almendros.