The First Rule of Swimming (12 page)

He knew other Croatians who had visited home. They spoke wistfully of selling their apartments and their businesses in the United States and returning, buying property perhaps, and recouping the lives that had been denied them. But he found these plans far-fetched and vaguely pathetic.

Most of all, he imagined stepping from the ferry onto the island’s
riva,
greeted by blank faces and eyes that took in the American cut of his clothes.
Zimmer frei! Camere!
he could imagine the old women calling to the foreigners emerging from the ferry’s dark belly. He remembered how they made a beeline for those passengers who exuded the unmistakable glow of the West, forsaking their countrymen for Germans or Swiss. He imagined their hopeful faces, the way they would tell him in English:
Rooms!

Young men would be tying up their boats on the
riva,
just as he had done. He wondered then if his own eyes had ever passed over one of the island’s returning sons, who had stood for a time in disappointment on the waterfront where nobody now knew him.

S
he reappeared one day in June, an early summer heat wave bending the air above the pavement so that the city appeared like some rendering of a Martian landscape, the sky hazy and sunless. Although it was only nine in the morning, Marin was walking slowly, his shirt already damp with perspiration, cursing New York’s humidity with every step.

After nearly thirty years he had yet to grow accustomed to the oppressiveness, to the dead weight of the city’s heat. He did not mind winter’s bitterness or the torrential rains of autumn, but there was something about summer that made him feel trapped.

He recognized her from a block away. She sat on the bus stop bench in front of the restaurant’s entrance dressed in cutoffs and a T-shirt, and for a perplexed moment he took in the whiteness of her elbows and knees, the hair that hung lankly about her face.

He stopped at a distance, observing her. At first he thought she had fallen asleep, a backpack stationed between her feet, but then he realized that she was studying something on the pavement: a crack in the concrete or a slow-moving insect.

He did not know how long she had been waiting for him, or even if she was waiting for him at all. She might have planned to take a bus, her appearance in front of his restaurant a mere coincidence. But when a bus halted in front of her, she did not look up.

Even in profile he could see the hollows beneath her eyes, blue circles that made him think she had been sitting there since before dawn, biding her time on the plastic bench. When she looked up at last, she held his gaze for a long moment, and though a tiny voice inside his head whispered that it all spelled trouble, the larger part of him was already unlocking the door to the restaurant and inviting her inside. Seating her at the bar the way he used to seat his sons at the end of school days when they drank frothy
batidos
and swung their legs from the high stools. Assuring her that whatever the complication, she would see, these things had a way of turning out all right in the end.

She stood in the middle of the dining room as he made her a coffee behind the bar. He was aware of the way she studied the walls, her gaze lingering on the paintings by Cuban artists, some their patrons, some their friends. He repainted the walls—the aqua, the green, the blue—every year or two, whenever the city’s grime and the smoke from their own kitchen conspired to dull the Caribbean lagoon they had created in the heart of Brooklyn.

“There’s nothing from home,” she told him.

He poured her coffee in a shallow white cup.

Her voice had been neutral, but there was a deflated look on her face. “I hadn’t noticed that before.”

She needed a job, and while he did not, strictly speaking, need another waitress, he did not have the heart to turn her away. His earlier self—the one who asked nothing of his countrymen and offered nothing in return, the one who sensed betrayal behind every word spoken in the ghost language he so rarely used—had disappeared. He imagined his own sons in some kind of trouble, so that there was a strange relief in showing kindness to this girl. The equation made sense to him today, the heat rising in the street outside so that the people who passed the restaurant’s windows resembled sleepwalkers.

“You’re too soft,” Luz said when he telephoned to tell her, although he sensed only minor reproach in her voice.

“I think she’s all alone,” he said in his basic Spanish, watching as Jadranka cradled her coffee cup in both hands. The fine lines at the corners of her eyes were visible for the first time today, like the invisible-ink trick his wife had shown their boys with lemon juice, the letters appearing beneath a lightbulb’s heat.

She sipped methodically, shoulders hunched, eyes fixed on the sign beside the cash register that read,
Occupancy by more than 125 persons is dangerous and unlawful.

“What did you say her name was?” Luz asked him.

“Jadranka,” he said.

She did not look up at this, her eyes fixed on the sign as if it alone might save her.

“I don’t know her last name,” he added.

“Is she legal?”

Marin considered this. “I don’t know.”

Luz sighed. “I hope you know what you’re doing,” she said. “Hector won’t be pleased at having to train somebody new.”

“No,” he assented. “He won’t.”

There was a moment of silence. “But I suppose we all needed to be trained in our time. Even Hector.”

“Yes,” he agreed, and smiled into the telephone.

She needed very little training in the end. She had worked as a waitress in Split, and so she knew to serve from the right and to clear from the left. She was as skilled at uncorking wine as she was at deboning fish, and once dressed in the white apron that all their staff wore, she was an unobtrusive presence in the restaurant. She quietly refolded napkins and retrieved fallen forks in such a way that conversations between customers never flagged.

“She’s like a ghost,” Hector told him towards the end of service on that first night, clearly meaning his words as a compliment.

Marin turned to watch her pour wine for one of the tables.

“—which is strange for a beautiful woman.”

“Trust you to notice,” he told Hector.

She had spent the afternoon studying the menu. It was not an extensive list, but in the space of a few hours, she had memorized its entire contents, and several times Marin eavesdropped as she described the pork
jus
or the
ropa vieja.
Only occasionally did she get tangled up in the Spanish words, or the English descriptions, and he was on hand to clarify things, hovering behind her like a mother hen.

“Leave us,” Luz finally told him, taking the girl into the kitchen to sample the
ropa vieja.

“Pašticada,”
Jadranka pronounced when she emerged, so that Marin laughed at the comparison.

“It’s similar,” he conceded.

All during that first evening, Marin studied her movements, pleased and yet somehow puzzled by her single-minded dedication to each task presented her. Gone was the slouching girl of their first meetings, the one who had told him with some annoyance that she had never expected things to be easy in America. The nose ring had been removed, and in its absence something else had shifted as well.

“Slow down,” he had to tell her several times. “Take a sip of water.”

But she only took breaks when he told her to, and only ate when he insisted, although a meal each shift had been part of their agreement.

Luz watched from the bar as the girl traversed the dining room. “She’s a hard worker,” she told him approvingly.

He placed an arm around his wife’s shoulders, pleased that she had noticed. He sensed that Luz had left her observation unfinished. “But?” he prodded.

She did not answer right away, watching as Jadranka took drink orders from a table of four businessmen, her brow wrinkled with concentration.

“Her eyes, Mio,” she said at last.

He frowned. “What about them?”

But his wife only shook her head and disappeared into the kitchen.

It took him a week to realize that she needed a place to sleep. He did not know where she had been going each night at closing, but one morning Hector discovered her in the bathroom, brushing her teeth at the sink.

“You can stay here for a little while,” Marin told her, showing her the small office in the back, with its narrow, sagging couch.

“I’m sorry,” she told him, unable to meet his eyes.

“Why are you sorry?” he asked her. “All beginnings are difficult. Mine was. My wife’s. Hector’s. Nobody is spared.”

She said nothing to this.

“I lived from church donations in the beginning,” he told her with a laugh. “We were so poor that my cousin received a bag of socks for her first Christmas present in America.”

Jadranka looked up.

“She was five. Now, I ask you: what kind of gift is that for a little girl? But she needed socks, and that was what the charity could give us.”

She considered this. “You were never tempted to just go back?”

She had asked something similar before, and he marveled for a split second at stubborn youth, at a generation for whom things appeared just that easy. “There was no going back. Going back meant jail, or worse.”

She swallowed.

“But
you
could go back,” he said, watching her carefully. “There’s no reason you couldn’t.”

“There is,” she said just as quickly, and something about the decisive way she said it made him believe her.

He worried about what it might mean, although he did not press her for an explanation. He continued to imagine a jealous boyfriend, someone who was lying in wait for her should she return. He had witnessed such incidents himself. In his youth one of their neighbors had beaten his wife with such regularity that his mother had secretly bought her a ferry ticket back to her parents on the mainland.

“She doesn’t seem the type,” Luz told him doubtfully. “Look at how she is with Hector.”

His headwaiter—impervious to the charms of other women and, in truth, a bit of a snob—was now smitten with the young, red-haired woman. He watched her pass from dining room to kitchen, from bar to hostess station. His eyes followed her through the mirror behind the bar like the pining subject of a Cuban song.

Jadranka did not appear to notice when he trailed after her. She teased him, but subtly and without cruelty, which only made him redouble his efforts, one day leaving a red carnation in the pocket of the backpack she hung in the office. The busboys sniggered at this act, which might have remained anonymous had one of them not opened the door at that very moment.

All that evening the restaurant’s staff was abuzz with the story that played out before them, watching both the lovelorn Hector, who appeared not to care that he had been found out, and the expressionless Jadranka. Each time the office door opened, the restaurant held its collective breath, but halfway through the evening, the same busboy reported, the flower had disappeared from the backpack’s pocket and was no longer anywhere in evidence.

Until closing, it was clear that Hector awaited her reaction. He searched Jadranka’s face. He followed her to the kitchen door, then nearly collided with her when she emerged with a tray of food. She smiled at him a little sympathetically, stepping around him in the next moment.

“The women from your country are a mystery,” he told Marin in disappointment as he left that night.

She had few possessions, as far as Marin could tell: the backpack and a small suitcase that she kept zipped in the corner of the office. Luz had brought her a sleeping bag from home, and each morning it was neatly folded at the end of the couch.

“I’ve found a place to stay,” she announced on the morning after Hector’s flower.

“With a friend?” he asked.

“Something like that.”

And although he was relieved—it was technically illegal for her to continue sleeping at the restaurant—the vagueness of her answer bothered him.

“Do you trust this friend?” he pressed.

She looked surprised at the question. “Yes,” she told him. “Why shouldn’t I?”

It was because she could not be running from politics that Marin cast her unknown hunter in the shape of a man. He was not conscious of his own chauvinism in this regard, and would have been alarmed to hear his theory characterized as paternalistic. His intentions were good, even if his vision was limited.

But her eyes widened when he asked her outright. “What makes you think I’m running from anything?” she asked him.

“It’s as clear as the nose on your face,” he told her.

She was folding white napkins into flowers, and for a moment her nimble hands slowed over the half blossom in front of her. “Well, it’s certainly not a man.”

“No?” he asked uncertainly.

“The day I run from any man is the day that gravity reverses itself.”

He swallowed. “I’m glad.”

Her eyes traveled to the family photograph that sat behind the bar, then back to the pile of folded napkins she had amassed to one side. “Your sons are lucky to have a father as protective as you,” she told him. “Everyone should be so lucky.”

He felt a sudden sharpness in his chest at her words. “You weren’t?” he asked.

She shook her head. “But don’t feel sorry for me. My sister nearly poisoned our stepfather. He’s lucky he got out with his life.”

A smile pulled at the corners of Jadranka’s mouth, so that he did not know whether to believe her.

“It was her job to make his sandwiches for work, and she put rat poison in them.”

“You’re joking, surely.”

“No.”

He watched the top of her head, the way she matched up the corners of the linen, folding and rolling so that she reminded him of the women he had seen working in Caribbean cigar factories.

“What about your own father?” Marin asked. “Where was he in all of this?”

Her hands had regained their momentum, and now they made him think of a musician’s, the long, tapered fingers making a stringed instrument sing. But she did not answer.

She was not a musician, but one day she showed Luz the sketchbook she carried in her backpack, the renderings of subway passengers and of nannies on benches in Central Park. There were pictures of the children she had taken care of. One, a little boy, looked out from the page with a near-radiant expression of adoration.

“What happened?” he overheard Luz ask. “Why did you leave?”

But Jadranka only mumbled something halfheartedly about wages.

There were also pictures of the restaurant. Of Marin standing behind the bar and talking to his customers, of Hector in his apron and Luz sampling something from the stove. There were pictures of the young men who worked in the kitchen, the delivery boys, the customers.

“These are good,” Marin said, looking over his wife’s shoulder. “Where did you learn to do that?”

But Jadranka only shrugged. “It’s just a hobby,” she told him.

“It should be more than a hobby,” Luz told her, looking carefully at each of the pages. When she had reached the last, she asked, “Do you think you could draw something for us?”