America's Dream (29 page)
“The poor guy is afraid of you,” Carmen suggests.
“You haven’t given him any encouragement,” adds Teresa. “I don’t want to encourage him.”
“Good men with steady jobs are hard to find,” warns Carmen. “I’m not looking for a man.”
“But it’s good to have one on hold in case you change your mind,” says Teresa, and the girls laugh and high-five one another. “Here’s what you do,” Carmen says. “Be nice to him. Smile every once in a while. Let him take you out for dinner, or to the movies or someplace where you don’t have to talk to him if you
don’t want to.”
“Ay, Carmen, that’s terrible.” Elena pouts. “You’re telling her to use him.”
“Why not? Men use women all the time!”
“But that wouldn’t be good for América,” Teresa pipes in. “She’s still recovering from a bad relationship.”
At this the other two women avoid looking at América, whose face has turned a bright red. “Excuse me,” she says, and leaves the room.
“What did I say?” Teresa asks the others in a plaintive tone.
América locks herself in the bathroom. The mirror over the sink reflects her reddened face, eyes shadowed by a deep frown. She’d like to wash the shame with cool, fresh water, but that would mess her makeup. She turns her back on the reflection.
A bad relationship, she said. Fifteen years of my life summed up in three words. As if “a bad relationship” were a disease, like cancer or the flu. Something to recover from.
There’s a scratching at the door, followed by a soft “Can I come in?”
“I’ll be right out,” América calls, flushing the toilet. As she opens the door, Teresa enters without letting América come out.
“I’m really sorry if I offended you,” she says breathlessly. “I didn’t mean to—”
“It’s all right.” América avoids looking at Teresa’s wide and lively eyes.
“It’s not all right. You’re insulted and hurt and wish I would leave you alone. Don’t protest, I know it’s true.” Teresa leans against the door, her skinny arms crossed in front of her nearly flat chest.
“I’m a little sensitive about it, that’s all,” she apologizes. “You have every right to be, and to tell people like me to mind
their own business.”
Then mind your own business, América thinks but doesn’t say. “Look at me,” Teresa says. “It bothers me that you won’t look
me in the eye when we talk.”
América is startled. Does Teresa read minds? She lifts her eyes to Teresa’s. They’re kind eyes, large and round, as if they see more than other people’s.
“I’m sorry,” América says. “You apologize too much.” “I’m sorr…” América laughs. “You should laugh more.” “You have a lot of opinions.”
“My mother is psychic,” Teresa says nonchalantly, as if every- one’s mother were. “She doesn’t speak. She makes pronounce- ments. I guess that’s where I got it.”
“Are you psychic?”
“No way! I couldn’t tell you what I’m doing in the next five seconds.” She looks at América. “But I can tell you something about yourself that you may not know.”
“What?”
“Everyone here is your friend and wants to help you make a fresh start.”
“Thank you—”
“I won’t pretend I haven’t heard all the stories about that man you lived with…”
“Correa…”
“And I can tell you no one here blames you for leaving him.
So you should stop feeling guilty about it.” “I don’t feel guil—”
“It wasn’t your fault that he beat you. Men like that don’t need an excuse to hit women. And just because he’s like that doesn’t mean all men are the same.” Teresa unlocks the bathroom door. “That’s all I wanted to say.” She reaches behind América and flushes the toilet. “See you later,” she says with a grin and leaves. Now it’s América’s turn to be breathless. As Teresa spoke, América felt herself grow faint with rage. Who does she think she is, lecturing me as if I were a child? She turns to her reflection again, only this time the reddened face looks fierce, the eyes
sparkle with fury. She scares herself.
Ay, Dios mío, she murmurs as she brings her hands up to her face. This is the face Rosalinda sees when I’m angry. She rubs her hands across her warm cheeks, presses her lips, tightens her eyes, as if all this effort were necessary to reclaim the untroubled face she thinks she presents to the world. When she opens her eyes again, there’s the familiar América with the lined lids and rouged cheeks. She swallows hard several times, as if the lump formed in her throat by frustrated rage were solid as food and fed a part of her buried deep, deep, deep in her entrails.
aren Leverett wears expensive underwear. The first time América tidies Karen’s dresser she finds five pairs of panties and three bras with the price tags still on. Each panty was fifteen dollars, each bra thirty. There are fifteen other panties with the same brand name, and twelve other bras. In underwear alone, América calculates, Karen Leverett spent $750, not including tax.
How much, she wonders, does Karen Leverett pay for the clothes people can see?
One of Karen’s three closets is filled with tailored business suits in muted colors and fabrics. There are ten silk shirts and four cotton ones, twelve dresses, three pantsuits, twenty-three pairs of shoes, six pairs of boots. In another closet she keeps her dressier clothes, with their own beaded shoes, tiny handbags, two cashmere wraps, and two fur coats, one short, one long. Then there are the casual clothes, which she keeps in the third closet of her dressing room. A stack of jeans, sweaters, turtle-necks, thick woolen socks, four pairs of sneakers, three pairs of flat shoes, black, brown, olive green.
“I love clothes,” Karen told her as she showed her around, and América, who loves clothes too, wonders what it’s like to wear fifteen-dollar panties and thirty-dollar bras. They can’t feel that different, she muses as she fingers the delicate lace, the tiny
bows, the miniature pearls stitched between the bra cups. She folds and arranges them in rows by color, so that the whole drawer is a rainbow of shimmering silk and satin.
Seven hundred and fifty dollars, she mutters, in underwear. It would take me two and a half weeks to earn enough to hold up my breasts and cover my culo. Karen Leverett must make a lot of money at that hospital.
She examines the shoe boxes in the closet: $260 for a pair of suede slip-ons, $159.99 for sneakers, $429 for a pair of boots. América turns these items over in her hands, strokes the inside where Karen’s toes have pressed against soft leather, creating gentle bumps and valleys. They feel different from my twenty- dollar shoes, she concludes, but not that different. She dusts and vacuums around the three closets, rubbing up against the rustling silks, the warm woolens, the soft prickly furs. If you add it all up, she figures, the clothes in this closet alone probably cost as much as a house in Vieques, maybe more. She stops to wipe the sweat off her brow. One week of my work puts her out the price of a pair of shoes. She pulls the vacuum out of the lighted closet, presses the door shut with her rear. It doesn’t seem right, she concludes. When my three-month trial period is up, she determ- ines, I’m asking for a raise.
“Why would you work interna if you’re Americana?” Adela asks one day while they’re watching the children at the playground. “But I’m not Americana,” América protests, “I’m Viequense, Puerto Rican I mean. It’s just that Puerto Ricans have citizenship.”
“But doesn’t that mean you’re Americana?”
“No, I’m Puerto Rican, but I’m a citizen. It means we don’t need permission to live and work here.”
Adela doesn’t understand the distinction, and until Adela started asking her questions about her legal status, América hadn’t given it much thought.
“So your social is real?”
“Yes, I got it when I was born.” A legal social security card,
which she has taken for granted, turns out to be as coveted as a green card, which she’s heard about but has never seen.
“If I were Americana like you, I’d be able to practice my trade as a nurse. I told you I was a nurse in Guatemala, didn’t I?”
América nods. Almost every time they talk, Adela mentions how the work she’s doing is beneath her because in her country she worked as a nurse.
Because on her first meeting with Adela she didn’t get a good impression, América resisted calling her for a few days. But fi- nally, out of loneliness and curiosity, she relented and agreed to meet Adela at the park. Through her, América has met other women who work in the mansions and large homes tucked at the end of long driveways that light as you drive up. Liana, from El Salvador, was a bank teller. Frida, from Paraguay, was a schoolteacher. Mercedes, from the Dominican Republic, was a telephone operator. They see one another at the playground, or when they drop off and pick up their charges at one another’s homes. They all have one thing in common. They’ve entered the United States illegally, and they’re amazed that she, an American citizen, would work as a maid.
“I don’t mind the work I do,” América tells them, and they seem horrified, as if her American citizenship entitles her to aspire to greater things. “I like taking care of a house, and I like chil- dren.”
“But you can be a schoolteacher,” Frida suggests.
“I don’t like being cooped up all day long,” she protests, “having someone watching my every move.”
“I wouldn’t mind taking care of my own house,” says Liana. “But doing it for someone else is different.”
“It’s a job like any other,” América says. “There’s no shame in it.”
“I didn’t say I was ashamed,” huffs Adela.
“But it’s true,” says Frida. “All work is valuable in the eyes of God.”
“But some work is more valued than others,” Adela insists. “Maybe it’s different in this country, but where I come from a nurse is more important than an empleada.”
She doesn’t use the word
maid;
none of them do. They call
themselves employees, or say they work in houses, or call them- selves baby-sitters or nannies even though housework is as big a part of their job as watching children.
“You have a point,” says Frida. “It’s the same all over.”
“We don’t have a choice when we come here,” Adela persists. “We have to take whatever work we can find. But you, an American citizen. And you speak good English—”
“My English is not that good.”
“Still…you can go to school, learn a trade. You don’t have to do this kind of work the rest of your life.”
Maybe, América thinks the next day as she vacuums the downstairs rugs, Adela is right. I’m not ambitious enough. All those women, living in fear of being sent back to their countries, have big dreams for themselves. I don’t. Did I have dreams as a child? Did I ever want anything more than what I had? I wanted my own home, but every woman wants that. I wanted a husband and children, nice furniture, a car. That didn’t work out. I wanted to be taken care of. The whine of the vacuum cleaner is like a lament. That’s all I ever wanted, to be taken care of.
“Do you know what you might like to be when you grow up?” She asks Rosalinda when she next calls.
“What kind of a question is that?”
“A normal question. The kind of a mother should ask her daughter.”
“It’s the kind of thing you ask a little kid.” “Have I never asked you before?”
“I don’t know.” The sullenness in her voice says no.
“Well? Do you have any ideas?” She wants to sound playful, to make it seem as if she’s making conversation. But Rosalinda’s suspicious nature doesn’t buy it.
“Why do you ask all of a sudden?”
“I was wondering, that’s all.” In spite of herself, it sounds like an apology.
There’s silence at the other end, as if Rosalinda were going through a list of possibilities before answering. “You can’t laugh.”
“Why would I laugh?” she giggles. “I want to be a vedette.”
“A what?” She laughs out loud, delighted with Rosalinda’s sense of humor.
“I knew I shouldn’t have told you.”
She’s serious. Oh, my God, this isn’t a joke. “No, nena, no, don’t get me wrong. It’s just such…a surprise.” Images of scantily clad women shaking their buttocks at a television camera, and above the rhinestone-studded nipples, her daughter’s face, darkly made up, hair teased into a mane threaded with feathers. “Tell me more,” she says, hoping she misunderstood.
“I’m in a play, and the teacher says I’m a good dancer. And Dina says I have the look.”
“Who’s Dina?”
“You don’t know her, she’s my friend’s mother.” “And she told you you look like a chorus girl?”
“She’s a choreographer. She’s worked for MTV and for Iris Chacón.”
The words are out of América’s mouth before she can stop them. “But those women are little more than prostitutes. How can you even consider—”
“How can you say that? You don’t even know her.” “But I know what a vedette is, I wasn’t born yesterday.”
“You don’t know anything!” Rosalinda slams the phone down. This can’t go on. She shouldn’t hang up on me every time she doesn’t like what I say. A vedette! She wants to be…A rumble of laughter begins deep inside and erupts in carcajadas. This is what you get for asking a question like that. Your fourteen-year-old daughter aspires to be a chorus girl. She laughs, alone in her room, deep, satisfying laughter that brings tears to her eyes. This is my life. I start out with such good intentions, and this is what happens. She’s laughing so hard her stomach hurts. I fall in love with a man, he beats me up. I try to take care of my mother, she drinks herself to sleep. I work like a dog cleaning up after other people, and they pay me less than they spend on underwear. And
my daughter wants to be a vedette when she
grows up. It’s too funny. Now I know what God was thinking when he made me. My life is supposed to be a joke. It’s not meant to be taken seriously. That has been my mistake all along. I take everything seriously. This beats all. A vedette. I wonder what Correa will say when he hears. His precious daughter a vedette for every man to ogle! It’s too ironic. He probably won’t even get it. He might even be proud of her.
She turns over on her bed, and the laughter subsides, replaced by the image of Correa’s smiling face.
One morning she looks out the window and the dead trees have come to life. They are covered with an intense green fuzz that, on closer look, is budding leaves. A yard two houses down is a sea of daffodils. Birds chase one another in and out of trees. Deer emerge from the foliage to munch on budding tulips. Shopkeep- ers, the school crossing guard, the fuel delivery man, all seem to have a smile on their faces. América, too, finds herself smiling at nothing.