America's Dream (40 page)

“Okéi.” América nods. “I take care everything. You no worry.” When she returns to her room, she’s glad she went down, be- cause if Karen had come up to talk to her, she would have seen the clothes stacked in neat piles on the couch and chairs. One pile is clothes she will take. One pile she will leave in the closet for

the next empleada. Another pile she will drop off at

the Community center box where Karen donates the children’s outgrown clothing.

“So you can’t come this weekend either?” Paulina asks.

“I’m sorry, Tía, the Leveretts are going away, and I have to take care of the kids.”

“You’re working too hard, mi’ja. Two weekends with no days off.”

América’s face reddens. Paulina has been kind to her, has tried to help her.

“I’m sorry, Tía,” she repeats.

“Is everything all right with your mother? Did you call her?” “Yes, everything’s okéi.”

“She’s an alcoholic, then?” Paulina says as if this were a person- al disappointment.

“She’s been drinking more and more the last few years.”

Paulina sighs. “What are you going to do?” she asks, and at first América thinks she’s asking her for a real plan, then realizes it’s just an expression.

“Así son las cosas,” she agrees.

“Well, I guess we’ll see you next Saturday, then? Orlando is singing at the club again.”

“That sounds wonderful,” América says. “You have been so kind to me, Tía,” she adds. “I’ve really appreciated it.”

“Ay, mi’ja, we’re family. Don’t embarrass me by thanking me.” But América can tell she’s beaming. “We’ll see you next week.” She will not be able to say good-bye to them. To Carmen with the foreign boyfriends that no one has ever met, to earnest Leo- poldo, to Orlando whose voice can wake the dead, to Teresa, the Puerto Rican yoga teacher. I will miss the scent of roses whenever Elena goes by, she thinks as she stuffs the give-away clothes in a

plastic bag. I’ll even miss Darío.

She wonders if she should call him. But what would she say to him? She doesn’t think she should apologize. But then why does she feel so guilty?

She continues with her packing, folding all but the necessi-

ties in the suitcase she brought from Puerto Rico. There’s the photo album with the pictures of Rosalinda. The first picture in it is of América, pregnant, standing on the porch of Ester’s house. She looks so young! Her belly looks false, as if she had stuck a pillow under her dress to pretend pregnancy. She tries to remem- ber what it felt like to be fourteen and pregnant, but the only image that surfaces is of a guanábana. She craved guanábanas, and Correa had to go to Puerto Rico to find her some, because there were none to be had in Vieques.

A few pages later there’s a photo of América, Correa, and an infant Rosalinda at her baptism. América is sitting on Correa’s lap, Rosalinda on hers. He has his right arm around her waist, his left hand, almost as big as the baby, on her knee. She still looks like a little girl, and it occurs to her that Correa was a pervert. No, she shakes her head. He’s stayed with me even after I’ve be- come a woman. But she wonders if there have been other little girls she doesn’t know about, and the thought chills her. Could he have touched Rosalinda? No, it doesn’t seem possible. She thinks she would have noticed. No. Correa is cruel and violent. But he’s not a pervert. She can’t bear the thought.

She puts the photo album on the bottom of the suitcase, wrapped in a pair of jeans. When the phone rings, she’s deep in her own sadness, as if running away from Correa again were a leaving of herself. When his unmistakable, seductive voice whispers her name, she shivers, rubs her arms to calm the goose bumps.

“I’m coming to see you, baby.” “Yes, I know. I’ll be there.”

“No, baby. I can’t wait. I’m coming to New York.” She gasps. “Why?”

“Don’t you want me to come?”

And she must recover, must not allow him to suspect her real plans. “No, yes, I mean, of course.”

“I’ve come into some money,” he says with a snort, “and I thought to myself, I’m taking my baby on vacation. You’d like that, baby, wouldn’t you?”

“Wh…where? A vacation where?”

“Nayágara Fols,” he says. “We’ll go on an advance honey- moon.” Is it triumph in his voice?

“But Correa—”

“We’re going.” A command, and then he remembers this is a new albeit old conquista. “I rented a car.” Smooth, seductive. “It’s only a couple of hours away from where you are.” A promise.

“Where are you, Correa?”

“You get ready, baby, I’m coming for you.” “Where are you?”

But he’s hung up.

And it’s Friday. She hasn’t slept all night. She called Rosalinda, but she hasn’t seen Correa since last Sunday, when he left for Vieques.

“Are you all right, Mami?” she asked, and América was tempted to confide in her but didn’t. “See you next week, then,” Rosalinda added brightly, as if they were girlfriends planning a shopping trip.

“He sold all our stuff,” Ester said when she called her. But no, she hasn’t seen “that sinvergüenza. If he dares show his face around here…” The threat dies in a fit of coughs and sighs.

América prepares her coffee and toast. Two small leather suitcases lean against the door to the garage. Karen is so organized, América marvels again. She leaves nothing to chance. She plans her life, every moment fitting into the next like links on a chain. Why is it that, when I try to do the same, the links are all different sizes, don’t fit together, or break?

At the time Charlie usually comes down, he appears, dressed casually, shirt open at the collar under a daffodil-yellow V-neck sweater that brings out the gold in his hair. Karen follows him, in a soft yellow pantsuit, as if to dress alike underscores their at- tachment to each other. They look radiant, and América is so jealous it hurts to look at them.

“I’ll take the bags out to the car,” says Charlie, and Karen smiles at him lovingly.

“Uhm, coffee.” She pours herself a cup.

“Karen, I need say you something,” América begins, so softly that Karen doesn’t catch the end of it before Kyle appears at the top of the stairs, rubbing his eyes and crying.

“I thought you were gone.” He throws himself into his mother’s arms.

“I wouldn’t leave without saying good-bye, honey.” She holds him, caresses his tousled hair, kisses him. As Charlie comes in from the garage, Karen looks up. “He thought we were gone,” she explains, but it sounds like an apology.

Charlie takes his son from his mother’s arms. “Come here, buddy.”

And then Meghan comes down, wailing. “Don’t go, Mommy!

I don’t want you to go!”

“I told you,” Charlie says under his breath, “we should have left earlier.”

Karen sends him a dirty look over Meghan’s head, and Charlie’s face hardens. They have forgotten América, who stands against the counter, reluctant to come near the children clinging to their mother and father while the two adults glare at each other.

“All right, guys.” Charlie puts Kyle on the ground. “Mommy and Daddy have to go now.”

Kyle leans against his mother as Meghan sobs in her arms, and Karen looks as if she’s about to cry herself. América stands by, unable or, perhaps, unwilling to intercede.

“Meghan, sweetie, you go with América, okay?” Karen tries to disentangle Meghan’s octopus grip in a replay of the scene in Vieques. “Mommy and Daddy will be back the day after tomor- row, okay? We talked about this, remember?”

It takes them fifteen minutes to calm the children with the promise of presents and the wonderful things that will happen when Mommy and Daddy return. As they drive off, América wishes she had added her voice to that of the children begging Karen and Charlie to stay home and not leave them alone this weekend.

No Coquís

nce their parents are gone, the children sniffle and whimper as América gets them ready for school. She makes them a warm breakfast. They eat in depressed silence, enhanced by América’s gloomy presence. After she drives them to school, she

performs her usual chores, her thoughts on Correa.

If he called from Vieques, the soonest he could leave the island would be seven this morning. Then he’d have to get over to the airport in San Juan. She imagines that, even if he were to arrive in New York late this afternoon, it would take him at least an hour to find his way out of the airport, and who knows how long to find Westchester County, a place he’s never been. She begins to relax. Chances are he’ll be driving around in circles for days before he figures out the numbered curvy routes that lead to the unlit dirt roads of Bedford. But then she remembers that Vieques, too, has a system of curvy dark routes and rutted dirt roads leading to mansions. She tenses again.

Fridays Kyle has a half day of school so that he’s out at the same time as Meghan. América has barely enough time to finish the housework before she has to pick them up. They don’t have play dates today, so she takes them out for pizza.

“Can we go to the playground?” Kyle wants to know. “No, we go home.”

“But it’s boring there!” he complains. “You have million toys to play.”

“I don’t want to go home,” pipes in Meghan.

Exasperated, she takes them to a different park, so as not to run into the empleadas. The children play dispiritedly, as gloomy as she is, and after a while they ask to go home.

Once there, she locks all the doors and checks the windows to make sure they too are locked. Meghan is tired but will only take a nap if América lies down with her. Kyle goes into his room to build a Lego city, and América and Meghan curl up together in Meghan’s narrow bed.

When Meghan drifts into a dream, América carefully gets up. As her chest and abdomen separate from Meghan’s warmth, she feels a cold emptiness encroach, an agonizing pain like the memory of childbirth, of pushing forth a creature that no longer belongs to her, that in this case never did. She kisses Meghan’s head, and the child holds her bunny closer, and América strokes her hair and kisses her again and wonders how Meghan will be- tray her mother, and when.

Dinner is asopao, because the children like it and it’s so easy to cook that América doesn’t have to concentrate much. It’s six of clock, the hour she has decided is the earliest that Correa will arrive in New York if he wasn’t playing with her when he said he was coming.

It’s possible, she has told herself often today, that he was just testing me, to see how I would respond. It’s possible that today, Viernes Social in Puerto Rico, he’s out carousing with his buddies and the putas who flatter him.

They eat, and afterward she plays Barbies with Meghan while Kyle adds height to his Lego city, which now sprawls horizontally in one long line from one end of his room to the other.

Her phone rings, but by the time she gets to it, the caller has hung up, and she waits by it for a few minutes, as she did several nights ago, waiting for Correa to dial again, if it is him calling. But he doesn’t.

They go downstairs to watch the same stupid situation comed- ies she watched last week, with the same white Yanquis

embroiled in similar misunderstandings with the same results. The shades are down in every window of the house, and it feels as if they’re all inside a huge warm cocoon from which she doesn’t want to emerge.

Karen calls, as promised, and Meghan and Kyle talk to her and Charlie, crying, begging them to please come home soon. More gifts are pledged, more hours of fun, and then Karen asks América how things are going, and she says, “Everything okéi. You have good time.”

The children don’t argue when she shoos them to bed. They seem shell-shocked after the conversation with their parents. Like América they’re suspended in time, which for them doesn’t move fast enough. But for her every breath feels as if she were being sucked into an unseen black hole. She leaves the door to her room open, in case the children should wake up in the middle of the night. Then she goes to bed, hoping the phone will ring and it will be Correa, drunk in Puerto Rico, asking her once again if she’s his baby.

But he doesn’t call.

It’s morning, wet and blustery. Kyle and Meghan wake up and seem surprised their parents aren’t home. When reminded it’s only one more day until their return, they seem confused, not sure whether to mourn their absence or celebrate their impending arrival. She feeds them, gets them ready for their karate and gymnastics lessons.

She can only wait. Correa will either show up at the Leveretts’ door or will call and make a joke about Nayágara Fols. If he finds Bedford, she thinks, he will probably not do anything stupid. He’s intimidated by wealth. She will calm him down if he’s ex- cited and tell him she can’t leave until the Leveretts arrive. Then, when they do, she will tell them she’s leaving with her husband and take him away from there as fast as she can. Whatever he does to her, she hopes, he’ll do in Nayágara Fols, or wherever he takes her. Not in front of the Leveretts. Not in front of the children.

Driving the kids to their classes, she can’t help looking at every driver in every car that passes. Especially the few Américan

cars. Correa’s unpredictability is one thing, but his habits are another. He loves Américan cars, and even in a jealous rage she believes he will show up at the Hertz counter and ask for a Buick. The drivers of the Land Rovers, Mercedes Benzes, BMW’s, and Toyota Land Cruisers that pass her are not used to being scrutin- ized by an empleada in a Volvo. They return her stares with cautious belligerence and that look of entitlement she has come to recognize so well.

On one side of the Américan Gymnastics building Meghan learns to tumble, while on the other, Kyle delivers futile punches and kicks, fantasizing perhaps, about the damage he’ll do when he grows a couple of feet and gains a hundred pounds.

Maybe if I knew karate, the first time Correa hit me would have been the last. She imagines herself hurtling through space, one leg aimed at Correa’s crotch, her fists tight, ready to punch if she misses the kick. It’s a satisfying image, pummeling Correa with her fists the way Kyle is now doing to a foam pad held by his teacher. Punching him and kicking him until his virile face is pulpy, like those boxers on television, their features swollen beyond recognition.