America's Dream (11 page)
“All of them, or just the uppity ones?” “What difference does it make who it is?”
“Would you please lower your voice?” América asks, even- toned, trying to maintain her own composure. Rosalinda starts back to her room but thinks better of it and slumps on a chair.
“I wish you could understand,” she sniffles.
“I’d like to,” América says, “but it’s hard for me to understand how leaving your home and family is necessary. Running away from your problems doesn’t make them go away,” she concludes as if ending the discussion.
“I’m not ‘running away from my problems,’” Rosalinda says, mimicking her mother’s tone of voice. “I want to start over, and I can’t do it here.”
Why not, América wants to ask but knows the effect that will have. “You haven’t given it a chance,” she says. “I want to help you, but you haven’t let me talk to you.” She can’t hide the tears in her voice. “I’m your mother. We should go through this togeth- er.” She tries to go to her daughter, to hug her, but Rosalinda pushes her away as if she were infected.
“This is not your problem, Mami. It’s mine,” she says with a vehemence that stuns América.
“No, mi’ja, no. It’s ours, you’re not alone in this.” Again América tries to embrace her daughter, who steps back. Ros- alinda’s expression is angry, but América doesn’t know what she has done to deserve such fury. “You won’t even let me touch you,” she whimpers, reaching for her once more. But Rosalinda stands firm, a fourteen-year-old child who looks like a woman, who thinks herself a woman because she’s had a man. América drops her arms to her side, hardens her stance, swallows her tears. “You think it’s so easy,” she warns, but Rosalinda doesn’t hear the rest of what she’s about to say. She’s run back to her room and slammed the door shut.
or as long as La Casa del Francés has been standing, a member of América’s family has been mopping its floors, making its beds, washing its walls. The first owner, the Frenchman whose name is lost to memory, designed the house while still a bachelor, appointing it with the finest details that the time and his wallet could afford. He lived in a rotting wood shack while his casa was raised by the peons inherited with the hacienda from a relative he’d never met. When it was finished, he returned home with the intention of buying furniture and finding a wife, both of which he could now afford due to his shrewd management of the acres of sugarcane planted in long rows stretching in every direction
from the hill where his stone casa stood.
He envisioned his bride floating through the airy rooms, tending flowers in the central courtyard without having to mingle with the dark natives whose work made his fortune possible. He found a wife and filled her head with stories of the mysterious land where they would make their life, the jungle at the edges of the fields, the turquoise ocean at whose foot lay a town he had named himself, Esperanza, town of hope. For their wed-ding trip they toured France and Italy, buying furnishings, linens, delicate china, all shipped to the house he had built as a
monument to his good luck and careful administration in the New World.
Madame brought Marguerite, her sixteen-year-old maid, the fatherless daughter of her mother’s maid. The long journey across the Atlantic was plagued by storms and rough seas even on sunny days. When Madame arrived at her beautiful home, she was pregnant and suffering from fever. After a prolonged delirium in which she thought she was home in Vichy, she died, taking the heir with her, leaving Marguerite stranded in a new land where she couldn’t even speak the language. The Prenchman grieved for many weeks, but soon discovered gentle Marguerite, who shared his sorrow and loneliness. They had a daughter, Dominique, who was never legitimized by her father, who couldn’t bring himself to admit he had fallen for his dead wife’s maid. When he died, the hacienda passed to a Venezuelan who visited the casa in the summers. Marguerite was retired to a cabin at the edge of the property, within walking distance of the house, where she was housekeeper to the new owners. Over the years, La Casa changed hands many times, and each time, one of Mar- guerite’s descendants, a woman with a child and no husband, appeared at the back door claiming to be the housekeeper. No one ever questioned her right to clean its hallways, tend the courtyard, dust its rooms, scrub its tubs, polish its tiles. Don Irving is the latest in a long history of foreigners to own the house that is still referred to as La Casa del Francés, The Frenchman’s House. América is the daughter of the great-great-great-granddaughter of the resourceful Marguerite.
She thinks about this history as she polishes the tiles the women in her family have polished for more than a hundred years. América had hoped that Rosalinda would break from her history, that she would educate herself, marry above her station, like Yamila Valentín, and live in a house where she would employ maids, not be one.
She shakes her head. I’m not ashamed of being a maid. It’s housework, women’s work, nothing to be ashamed of.
She’s never known anything else, has never wanted to learn to type or work computers, like so many of the girls in the town
are doing. She’s not embarrassed to say she likes taking care of a house, enjoys all the little tasks that are sabotaged the minute a human enters a room she has worked hard to put in order. That’s what I like about housework, she often says; there’s always something to do.
She dreams of someday having her own house, like the ones in the magazines the turistas leave in the garbage cans, with car- peting and drapes, wallpaper and formal furniture. A house in which the living room is as big as the house she now lives in, and candles are set on the dining room table in ornate candelabra like Liberace used to put on his piano.
She had a tape of Liberace at his piano, but it broke, and then she couldn’t find another. He appeared on television every once in a while, and that was the only time she sat in front of it, en- thralled by the music, tunes which she remembered accompany- ing the cartoons she watched as a child.
It doesn’t seem so long ago I was watching cartoons on televi- sion. And here I am, a grown woman with a daughter who thinks she’s grown up. Ay, how it hurts to be a mother!
América doesn’t often escape into flights of feeling sorry for herself, but she has her period, and she can’t help it. For twenty- five days a month she takes a white pill, and for the next five the little plastic bubbles contain a blue one. The day the birth control pills change color, her whole personality does, too, from white to blue for five days. She’s sure something in the pill makes her depressed, but the doctor at the family-planning clinic says she’s imagining it.
“Then I must have been imagining I’m depressed five days a month for thirteen years,” she told the last doctor she talked to, and he laughed and patted her on the shoulder and wrote her another prescription—for the same thing.
But something happens those five days. All the hurts and anger, the fears and frustrations accumulate, to be released five days a month in fits of crying and a hypersensitivity to the smallest irrit- ations. Correa knows not to come around when América has her period. Ester cooks soups and rice with milk, which América eats with an abstracted expression, as if she were watching
an internal travelogue. On the sixth day, when she starts a new box of white pills, she’s back to herself, humming and singing.
The guests in room 8 are horny. They have left two condoms on the floor near the bed, all snotty and slimy. She picks them up with a paper towel, rolls the whole thing into a ball. “¡No les da vergüenza!” she mumbles as she dumps the mess into the trash can. That’s one thing she has never understood about Yanquis. They do things like leave their used condoms on the floor, or bloody sanitary pads, unwrapped, in the trash cans. But they throw a fit if there’s hair in the shower drain, or if the toilet is not disinfected. They don’t mind exposing other people to their germs, but they don’t want to be exposed to anybody else’s.
In her irritated, critical mood, she notices things that she usually overlooks, like the wet towels on the bed, the toothpaste smears on the bathroom sink and mirror. When on vacation, people leave their clothes all over the place, as if knowing this is only a tem- porary situation, they don’t want to hang anything up or store it away in a drawer. Worst of all are the people who decide they don’t like the arrangement of the furniture in the rooms. More often than she’d like, América has come into a room to find the mattress on the floor. She knows the beds in La Casa are lumpy, but the least people could do is put things back.
It might be different if Don Irving bothered to make the rooms nicer. Some have no screens in the windows, and every so often a shriek is heard from a guest who has come face to face with a bright green lagartijo parading across the headboard. None of the linens match. If a sheet or blanket is torn or too faded for use, Don Irving simply goes to the market in Isabel Segunda, Vieques’s largest town, and buys whatever fits. It irritates América that the pillowcases don’t match the sheets, and that the towels are all different sizes and colors and don’t match the facecloths. The furniture is nothing to look at, odd pieces Don Irving has found who knows where and places wherever there is a need. Ester says that when she was a child, there were still magnificent Colonial- style furnishings in the house, but they were taken away by the last owner.
América leans against the wall, takes a few breaths. She’s so tired! The five days of the month in which she allows herself to feel depressed are also the five days in which she feels her exhaus- tion, the aches and pains caused by hours of lifting, scrubbing, mopping, polishing, bending, and straightening up numerous times as she picks up the clutter tourists leave behind.
She has one last room to finish before she goes home. Number 9 has to be readied for new guests. Tomás has taken out the crib and put in another cot, which América makes up with tight corners that will hold a child should he be in the habit of falling out of bed. Last year, a little girl hurt her head on the tile floor, and since then América wraps the blankets around so that, once a child crawls under them, he or she is swaddled against the mattress. Better that than a concussion.
She straightens up, places her hands on her waist, and bends backwards to let out the kinks. The motion makes her momentar- ily dizzy. She sits for a minute, something she rarely does in a guest room, and holds her head in her hands until the feeling passes. Then she takes her pail and mop, cleaning supplies and rags, out to the supply closet downstairs, where she stores everything in its place so that tomorrow, when Ester comes to work, she can find everything she needs.
Every step away from La Casa toward her own home is like walking in a swamp. Her feet feel heavy and seem to resist the motion of her stiff knees. This is what a fly must feel like on fly- paper, she thinks, and smiles at her own cleverness. As she exits the back gate of La Casa, she’s in the middle of a group of children playing tag. They whirl around her, throw off her balance so that she stretches out her arms to steady herself, like a tightrope walker. They laugh at this movement, and once again she smiles, and they think she’s smiling at them. Their cheerful voices fade as they run away from her, through an alley between two houses. She follows them with her eyes, recalling her own childhood in these streets. She played tag, she laughed, she got dirty. But it seems like such a long time ago! When, she asks her
self, was the last time I laughed? It takes her a while to remember. It was at the movies, with Correa. “Don’t laugh so loud,” he whispered in her ear after a particularly funny scene, and the rest of the movie lost its humor.
Ay, she sighs as she opens the gate and contemplates the tunnel of spiny rose branches leading to her front door. She takes a deep breath before thrusting herself through the invading branches, avoiding the bigger thorns, careful not to bruise the enormous blossoms that sway as if intoxicated by their own perfume.
“Mami,” América says as she comes in, “you have to do something about those roses.”
“What’s wrong with them?” Ester asks, rousing from her seat in front of the television.
“They attack everyone who comes in.” “All right,” she says, “I’ll trim them.”
At another time of the month, Ester would have argued with América about the fate of the roses. But not during América’s blue days. It’s as if, during those five days of the month, mother and daughter change personalities. Ester, irritable and set in her ways, becomes as compliant as América, who takes on her mother’s prickliness.
Ester serves them fish broth with corn dumplings. “Rosalinda ate when she came home from school,” Ester in-
forms, as if to prevent América from needless worry.
América looks in the direction of Rosalinda’s door. “What’s she doing in there?”
“Redecorating,” Ester guesses. “She’s taken out three bags of garbage in the last couple of hours.”
América nods. “I’m going to bed,” she says, stacking her dirty dishes in the sink.
On her way to her room, América stops . in front of Rosalinda’s door, listens to the muted activity inside but doesn’t knock.
She burrows into her room with single-minded purposefulness, like a bear going into hibernation. She falls asleep in
stantly, even though it’s not yet dark. Sometime later, she hears Correa’s voice just outside her door. But she doesn’t wake up enough to make out what he’s saying.
She sleeps fitfully the rest of the night, wakes up several times in the middle of unpleasant dreams. In one she’s trapped in a room full of mirrors. In another, she’s on an open raft hurtling toward foamy rapids, afraid to jump out and afraid to stay on. In a third, she’s searching for needles in Ester’s garden and the rosebushes attack her. After the last one, she decides not to sleep anymore. She showers, makes coffee, then sits at the dining table going through her magazines until Ester comes out of her room to get ready for work.
“What day is it?” she asks hopefully when she sees América awake, and is disappointed when América confirms it is indeed Tuesday and she has to go to La Casa.