America's Dream (24 page)

“I do,” she says, turning Meghan around to face her. She pins up the overalls, stuffs Meghan’s arms into the jacket. Meghan resists her, crying that she can do it herself. “We have to go,” América explains, ducking Meghan’s little hands as they try to push her away. “We no have time you do yourself.” Meghan wails her frustration, but América is determined. She hoists her up onto her hip and runs out the door, Meghan pushing away from her with surprising strength, screaming, “Let me go, let me go, let me go.” She forces her into the car, straps her in the car seat with difficulty because Meghan is struggling to get out of it, kicking and screaming to leave her alone.

América is nearly in tears herself. She hates having to use her strength against the little girl. As she fastens the safety belt

around Meghan, the child scratches her face, and América slaps her hand before she realizes what she has done. Meghan screeches even harder. América closes the car door and leans against it, her hands over her face. “Ay, Dios mío,” she mutters, “I hit Meghan. Ay, Señor.” She composes herself, enters the driver’s side with a sidelong look at Meghan, who is still crying and struggling to get out of the car seat. América starts the car, her head buzzing with the knowledge that, should Meghan tell her mother that América hit her, América would be out of the Leveretts’ house without a second chance.

“Meghan.” She turns around to face the girl. “Plis stop crying. I sorry. I so sorry.” América reaches for Meghan’s hand, but she pulls it away. “Plis, baby, América very sorry. You pardon América, yes?” Meghan’s crying becomes softer. América reaches for her hand again, and Meghan lets her hold it. “I no do again. I promise, baby.” She’s aware of the sound of her voice, the soft pleading tone Correa uses when he’s trying to pacify her. “I love you very much,” she tells Meghan, ashamed at having to borrow from Correa the one thing she always resented most. His use of the word
love
as blackmail.

With Karen and Charlie gone all day and the children in school, she has the house to herself most mornings and is able to tidy the rooms, load the dish and clothes washers, iron the children’s and Karen’s and Charlie’s casual clothes.

The Leveretts spend most of their time at home in the kitchen, their bedrooms, the family room, and den, so that the other rooms don’t get as messy and don’t require deep cleaning as frequently. By the middle of the second week, América has settled into a routine. The children start school at eight-thirty, and most days Karen drops them off on her way to work. Meghan is dismissed earlier than Kyle and often has a play date, either at home or at a friend’s house.

América gets in the car at eleven-fifty in the morning and spends most of the afternoon driving Meghan to or from a play date, picking up Kyle from school, driving them to swimming lessons at the health club, Meghan to gymnastics, Kyle to karate.

They don’t usually return home until 5:00
P.M
., at which time América prepares and serves dinner for the three of them and lets them watch a half hour of television before Karen arrives, which signals the end of América’s workday.

The first time she goes to the supermarket by herself, she finds the Goya section. When Karen comes home, a whole shelf in the cupboard is filled with products that weren’t there before.

“What is this?”

“Adobo, sazón, achiote, I don’t know how to say in English. I need for to cook Puerto Rican.”

Karen examines the labels. Her lips are pursed into a critical pout as she squints at the small print. “Hmmm…”

“You like food in Vieques?”

“We ate a lot of fried food,” she says regretfully.

“Tourist food not good. Puerto Rican food healthy. Rice and beans. You see, I make for you.” As she speaks, she realizes why salespeople have to smile foolishly as they talk and why the words tumble from their mouths so fast. They can’t give customers a chance to think until the sale is made.

“We don’t eat a lot of meat…”

“I cook without.” Ester, if she heard this, would roll her eyes. Her rice is sautéed in sizzling salt pork before she pours in boiling water, her beans are generously seasoned with diced smoked ham.

“But what if the kids don’t like it?” “Don’t worry, they like.”

“I don’t know,” Karen says tentatively, still reading labels. “If they no like, I make American food.”

“You’re planning to cook two meals at once?”

“No. If they no like Puerto Rican food, I make something else.

But I think they like. In Vieques they eat tostones.”

Karen returns the jar of achiote the the shelf. “What else do you eat besides rice and beans?”

“I surprise you tomorrow, okéi? I make something good.” “Just don’t get insulted if we don’t like it.”

“You like it, no worry.”

The next day she makes a thick chicken asopao, taking care to remove the skins so as to cut down on the fat.

“What is this?” Kyle asks when she sets it in front of him. “Chicken rice potato soup.”

“It doesn’t look like soup.”

“You eat. Is good, make you strong.” “There’s a leaf in mine!” Meghan whines. “Is laurel leaf. Give taste. I take out.”

The children stare at the asopao suspiciously. “You eat everything, I give surprise.”

“What surprise?”

“In my room I have surprise if you eat everything.” “I want my surprise now!”

“No, Meghan, surprise in my room after if you eat asopao.” “Come on, Meghan, it’s not so bad,” Kyle says, spooning a bit

into his mouth. “Uhmm, it’s good.” At first he’s pretending, but after the third spoonful, he means it.

Meghan dips her spoon in and tastes the broth that sticks to it. She makes a face. “I don’t like it.” She sets her spoon down, crosses her arms on the table, and begins to cry. “I want the sur- prise.”

“You’re such a baby,” Kyle taunts her. “I’m not a baby!” she screeches.

“You stop molest little sister,” she warns Kyle. “Come on, baby, don’t cry.” América tries to pick her up, but Meghan pushes her away.

“I’m not a baby!”

América strokes her hair. “No, I sorry, you not baby. You my baby.”

As usual when they’re confused by what she means, both children look at her as if she’s lost her mind. Meghan’s blue eyes get bigger, and Kyle stares as if trying to get into her brain. “Meghan América baby, sí?” she repeats, and the little girl falls into her arms, burying her nose into América’s bosom as if seeking a long-lost fragrance. “You eat asopao América make for you?”

“It tastes funny,” Meghan insists but with less conviction.

“If you eat five spoon, I give surprise.” “Five spoons?” Kyle gasps.

“Five spoons with soup inside,” she corrects herself, and Kyle giggles.

“How many spoons do I eat?” he asks, and América doesn’t understand that he’s laughing at her until he cracks up. Then she realizes her mistake and laughs with him. Meghan spoons up some asopao.

“I ate one spoon.” She giggles, and Kyle announces that he’s on his seventh, and counting spoons, they finish their asopao to the last kernel of rice.

“Tomorrow,” América says, “you eat forks.” And the children’s laughter is like music to her, the empty bowls the happiest sight since she left Vieques.

The promise of a surprise after dinner works. They eat her asopao, or rice with beans over it, or spaghetti Puerto Rican-style, garlicky and not as slimy as Karen’s. Every night after dinner, they go up to her room and she pretends to search all over for a surprise and finally comes up with a handful of M&M’s, or a couple of Her- shey’s Kisses, which they eat sitting in front of the TV in her room. Afterward she makes them brush their teeth, so their mother won’t see chocolate stains when she comes home.

Later that week, she’s hungry around 10:00
P.M
. and goes down to get a snack. She thought everyone was asleep, but when she reaches the bottom step, Karen scuffs out of the den in her bear- paw slippers and sweatsuit.

“Oh, it’s you.” “Sorry. I scare you?”

“No, it’s all right…I just…it was so quiet here. Good night.” She scuffs back to the den and sits in the corner of the couch, where, to judge from all the papers and books scattered around, she’s been working.

América takes an apple up to her room. Charlie was not home for dinner tonight, nor the night before. In the ten days

she’s been working here, he has only been home for dinner three times. The other days, she’s heard the garage door under her room rise and drop after midnight, but the next morning, when he comes down, he looks as fresh and ready as if he’d had ten hours’ sleep.

Karen, too, works hard. She’s up late most nights, reading on the couch, even though she has an office on the third floor and another at the hospital where she works. Most mornings she comes downstairs with the portable phone to her ear, scribbling notes as she sips the first of three cups of coffee before she drives the kids to school.

Do they ever have fun? Two of the nights she’s been here, Karen has told her that she’s meeting Charlie for dinner in the city. They arrive late at night, and the next morning the bed linens are rumpled more than usual and there are faint stains in the middle, where neither of them sleeps. She wonders if Karen, who is so organized, schedules their lovemaking the way she schedules the kids’ play dates, then chides herself for being disrespectful.

She hasn’t had sex in over two weeks. The last time she saw Correa he came to the house after an evening of dominoes and drinking with his buddies. She was awakened from a deep sleep by his hot breath on her neck and his hands crawling under her nightgown. “Baby,” he whispered, “baby.”

Her breasts feel overfull, like when she first nursed Rosalinda and made more milk than the baby could drink. Correa drained her breasts then, and on those days when he didn’t come to her, she had to pull them up to suck them herself or they would hurt. She closes her eyes now and imagines a lover touching her as she’s touching herself, her nipples hard and erect, a pillow between her legs. A lover who whispers “baby, baby” in her ear. A lover who looks, feels, and touches her the way Correa does when he’s not angry, when he’s tender and loving.

She has only had one lover, but he has been like two: the rough, violent man who batters her, and the sweet, gentle lover who swears he adores her. Tonight she holds on to the latter image as if the other didn’t exist, as if his violence were a thing

of the past, an aberration, a fault of judgment, a part of his nature that he can’t control. Tonight the beatings are forgotten as she remembers his large hands on her breasts, the weight of his hips against hers, his fleshy lips on hers. In those few seconds when her body snakes against the mattress, when she has no control over her thoughts, she forms his name as if he were a deity. But then it passes, and in the half sleep before dreams, her hands, which for a moment felt like his, form into fists and she drifts into darkness cursing his name.

He Likes You

n Sunday América wakes up early, packs a change of clothes into a shopping bag, and drives to the station. She’s never been on a train, and her image of one has been formed by the iron black locomotives in westerns, the kind that chugs into the station whistling a mournful “choo-choo.” She’s disappointed when a steel gray, squarish car dragging other cars like it whishes into the station, its horn bleating like a hoarse goat. Inside, the train is clean, its red-and-blue seats padded, the windows large and clear. She holds a ticket Karen bought her for the round trip to the Fordham station, and when the conductor comes through, he punches it smartly and nods at her as if he agrees with her destin-

ation.

The countryside whistles by like a movie in fast forward. Her eyes capture fleeting images, and before she interprets them, they catch another, until she has a sense of the whole that bears no resemblance to the way things really are. When they go over a bridge, she remembers that she’s never been on a bridge on a train, and for the first time in two weeks she realizes how she’s already taking this new life for granted, as if it has always been and always will be this way.

I am América Gonzalez, she tells herself, the same woman who fifteen days ago folded her maid’s uniform and put it on

the bottom of an empty dresser, in case she needs it again. Just because I’m driving around in an almost new Volvo and I live in a big house and I can take a train into the city…she’s smiling. She catches her reflection in the window and sees a big, self-satisfied grin on her face. She chides herself for forgetting that her life now is the same life she brought with her. But it’s different, she argues with herself, it’s different. For the first time I can remember I’m in control. I couldn’t say that two weeks ago.

Leopoldo meets her at the station. He takes her shopping bag, insists on carrying it to a battered Subaru, opens the door for her with old-fashioned gallantry. He’s older and more deliberate than she remembers.

“How long has it been?” he asks, “since we saw you?” “About five years.”

“That long?” He sighs regretfully. He’s a quiet man, a few inches taller than she is, with a solemn manner that suits him better now that he’s in his fifties than when he was younger. In the family photographs he’s always in the background, hovering behind his wife, a content smile on his lips. “It’s hard to believe we haven’t been to Puerto Rico in so many years.”

She doesn’t know how to respond. Leopoldo has always seemed to her like a man whose mind is never where his body is. It’s not that he’s absentminded. He is, in fact, the most solicitous, delib- erate person she’s ever met. But talking to him reminds her of the only time she ever went to confession. The priest sat behind a screen, and she could only see his silhouette. As she began to talk, she had the feeling that the priest was totting up the take from the previous week’s collection. She didn’t know why she had that feeling, but she did. She stopped midsentence and left, never to return to church. Leopoldo’s absent manner gives her much the same feeling that the faceless priest did. He appears to be paying so much attention to her that she suspects he must be faking it.

They drive along a broad avenue between rows of three-and four-story buildings, the bottoms of which are storefronts: a bo- dega, a botánica, a check-cashing service. It’s Sunday. Most of the stores are barricaded with corrugated steel garage doors