Usually a sensation of repetition upon waking was a waking to: again bills, again hunger, again pain, again loss, again trouble. Again no Claud, again no Angelina, again the rent due, again no job, no hope. But now she tasted in her morning mouth something of sweet. The wan light leaked through the window that gave on an air shaft between buildings. “No! No, mamacita, no hágalo!” Something fell hard upstairs. She shut her eyes.
Under the smooth surface of sleep what drifted? Face of a young man, hand outstretched. Pointing to something? Trying to take her hand? Young man of middling height with sleek black hair to his shoulders, an Indio cast to his face. More than her, even. Eyes close together, black and shaped like turtle beans. Long nose. Cheeks clean-shaven, skin smooth-looking as hers … had been. Never again. That smooth bronze skin with the touch of peach, the hint of gold: how beautiful her skin had been. Chicanos were more apt to call brown skin beautiful today than when she had that perfect skin. La gente de bronce. Depression rose like fog in her throat and she rolled over, began to cough. Coughing shook her hard. Riding on a back road in the cab of Tío Manuel’s truck, with dust stretching an enormous plumy tail behind them for miles across the parched land. She groped for the squashed pack; still one, two cigarettes. Lit it, sucked the sweet smoke and coughed more and then, feet on the floor, stood. Her sight prickled out, then cleared. Cold floor. She fumbled into her shoes bowed out on the sides with age. She would love to have slippers, yes, silly fluffy slippers. Then she saw tiny baby slippers pink on Angie’s feet. Present from Luis, who called himself Lewis. Prick! My brother the Anglo. Angelina seven years, four months, twenty-two days … eight hours. She sucked smoke hard, burst into coughing and padded into the kitchen, to face the day already bleeding at the edges. Straighten, clean, tidy, make perfect the rotten surfaces. Her welfare worker, Mrs. Polcari, came today.
She had a breakfast of coffee light and sweet with a scrap of stale bread dunked in it, the heel of the last bread in the house. Then carefully she figured her budget, refigured after every trip to the superette brought higher prices. She was still hungry but she played her stomach an old trick and drank two cups of hot water, washing out the last good taste of her coffee cup with it. Then she cleaned her two tiny rooms slowly and thoroughly. Made the bed as smooth as it would go, even picked out of the pretty wine bottle with dried grasses and flowers in it, a few whose stems had broken. At the picnic whose souvenirs they were, Nita, just beginning to walk, had fallen asleep exhausted in Connie’s arms. She had sat on the blanket burning, transfigured with holding that small sweet-breathing flush-faced morsel. An orange and black butterfly had lighted on her arm and she had remained so quiet hunched around Nita that for several moments the butterfly stood flexing its wings, opening and shutting those bright doors.
At eleven the knock. Mrs. Polcari was slim, with short brown hair smooth as a polished wooden bowl to her cheeks. Today she wore silver earrings with little green stones that might be jade. Large hazel eyes with long sweeping lashes looked out surprised from gold wire-rimmed glasses. She had once asked Mrs. Polcari why she didn’t wear contact lenses and been rewarded with a cold stare. But such pretty eyes. If you had the money, a young girl like her, why not? Her large ripe mouth opened to a glitter of good regular white teeth when she, very occasionally, smiled. Girlish, modish, like one of those college girls she used to see when she had worked for Professor Silvester. Mrs. Polcari smelled of Arpege.
Today Mrs. Polcari was pushing a training program that sounded like someone’s bright idea for producing real cheap domestic labor without importing women from Haiti. “Ah, I don’t know,” she said to Mrs. Polcari. “When you been out of a job so long, who’ll take you back?” Cleaning some white woman’s kitchen was about the last item on her list of what she’d do to survive.
“You’re too … negative, Mrs. Ramos. Look at me. I went back to work after my children started school. I didn’t work all those years.”
“How come you had children so young? You got married in high school?” How unusual for a white woman to have children before she was eighteen.
Mrs. Polcari made a face. “Don’t butter me up, Mrs. Ramos. I didn’t get married until I was twenty-six. My mother was sure I was going to die an old maid.”
“How old are your kids, then, Mrs. Polcari?”
“The older boy is ten now, the younger just turned eight.”
So she had to be at least thirty-six.
After Mrs. Polcari left she stared in the mirror over the sink, touching her cheeks. How did they stay so young? Did they take pills? Something kept them intact years longer, the women with clean hair smelling of Arpege. The women went on through college and got the clean jobs and married professional men and lived in houses filled with machines and lapped by grass. She had not looked that young since—since before Angelina was born.
Envy, sure, but the sense too of being cheated soured her, and the shame, the shame of being second-class goods. Wore out fast. Shoddy merchandise. “We wear out so early,” she said to the mirror, not really sure who the “we” was. Her life was thin in meaningful “we”s. Once she had heard a social worker talking about Puerto Ricans, or “them” as they were popularly called in that clinic (as were her people in similar clinics in Texas), saying that “they” got old fast and died young, so the student doing her field work assignment shouldn’t be surprised by some of the diseases they had, such as TB. It reminded her of Luis talking about the tropical fish he kept in his living room, marriage after marriage: Oh, they die easily, those neon tetras, you just buy more when your tank runs out.
At least her dour pride kept her cleaning for Mrs. Polcari, who was not subject to the same physical laws, the same decay, the same grinding down under the scouring of time. Let Mrs. Polcari look down on her as a case with a bad history, a problem case; but no dirt would Mrs. Polcari find on the chair she set her little behind on and no dirt would she find on the table from which she would sometimes agree to drink a cup of instant coffee with no sugar.
After two days of scrubbing floors for the city (welfare work program), she woke very early with morning pain low in her back but found herself smiling from sleep. La madrugada—daybreak—a word that always left honey in her mouth. That taste of sweet. The face of the young Indio smiling, beckoning, curiously gentle. He lacked the macho presence of men in her own family, nor did he have Claud’s massive strength, or Eddie’s edgy combativeness. His hands as they clasped hers, however, were not soft. Shaking hands? Absurd. Warm, calloused, with a faint chemical odor.
“What should I call you?” the voice had asked. High-pitched, almost effeminate voice, but pleasant and without any trace of accent.
“Connie,” she had said. “Call me Connie.”
“My name is Luciente.”
Strange that she had dreamed in English. Me llamo luciente: shining, brilliant, full of light. Strange that with someone obviously Mexican-American she had not said Consuelo. Me llamo Consuelo.
“Come,” he had urged, and she remembered then the touch of that warm, gentle, calloused hand on her bare arm. Trying to draw her along.
Mostly she dreamed in English, but even yet she had an occasional dream in Spanish. Years ago she had tried to figure out the kinds of dreams she had in each language, during her precious nearly two years at the community college when she had taken a psychology course. She should not have drawn back timidly from the young man with his high, pleasant voice and his workman’s hands. She should have sidled up to him and rubbed her fat breasts against his chest. Even in sleep, she got nothing. She rubbed her arm idly where his warm hand had touched her. Coaxing. She had taken to dreaming about young boys. Maybe as she got older the boys of her dreaming soul would grow younger and more beardless, slender as matches.
She rolled over, began to cough, to choke on phlegm. Cursing, she spat into a square of toilet paper and reached for the crumpled pack on the chair. Then she froze. Her fingers. That scent. She smelled her arm. Yes, her arm gave off that chemi
cal on Luciente’s fingers. The hair rose on her nape.
Idiot! They’d soon be locking her up again. So she’d got her arm in something, probably cleaning that office, and dreamed about it, like making the ringing of an alarm into a bell tolling. The phlegm she coughed up was brown. A little blood from her throat; that’s what she ought to be worrying about. She was too nervous to stop smoking, even though she knew it was hurting her. Oh, well, a taxi would run her down before she could die of cancer. A mugger would bash her head in. She would get cancer from eating garbage on the little money from welfare.
Her neighbor Mrs. Silva knocked on her door shortly after she came back from shopping, from buying two rolls of toilet paper, bread, bananas, spaghetti, eggs. She wanted hamburger but she hadn’t the money for meat. Her niece Dolores, called Dolly, was on Mrs. Silva’s phone: Luis’s oldest, by his first marriage. Luis had got married a lot and by every wife he had kids. Her favorite was Dolly, who was twenty-two, plump and sweet as a candied yam. When Dolly had to get hold of her, she called Mrs. Silva.
Dolly asked her to come down to Rivington Street and she grabbed her old green coat and her battered plastic purse and headed for the subway. On the express down to Brooklyn Bridge, she had a little piece of luck. As she was getting into the car she saw a ballpoint lying at the foot of a seat, and when she tried it, it worked. It had the name of a midtown stationer on it and wrote with blue ink. She had not had a pen that worked in months. She had to write her letters in pencil. Now she would write in ink, the way it should be. Tonight with her new pen she would write to both her sisters. She tucked it carefully in her purse before she changed to the QJ train, checking that the tape was still making a repair so the pen would not slip out. She also picked up a Daily News that a man had left in his seat.
At Essex and Delancey she headed north to Rivington, aware with a heavy lopsided sense of Norfolk a block over, where she had lived that year with Angelina in one room, that bad year after Claud had been sent to prison. That room like a box of pain. Dolly had found it for her after she had been kicked out of the apartment she had shared with Claud, three big rooms with their own bathroom just two blocks from Mount Morris Park. Dolly had lived then with her husband on Rivington, where she lived now with her daughter Nita, and the occasional presence of her rotten pimp, Geraldo. There was the bodega where Connie used to try to get credit till her check came, there was the liquor store she had known too well, with its racks and racks of cheap sweet wine.
It was steamy hot in Dolly’s apartment, it always was. Nita was eating in a highchair getting to be too small for her, finishing coconut instant pudding and putting most of it into her mouth by now.
“Ahora comes como una santa!” Connie hovered over her grandniece. “She eats real neat now. She’s such a good girl. Give me a smile, Nita? Hazme los ojitos! Yes? Qué preciosa!”
Dolly’s face was swollen with tears and she rolled up the ruffled sleeve of her blouse to show a bruise.
“Some john did this to you?”
“Geraldo did it!”
“Why do you put up with him? He’s bad to the core.”
Dolly sighed and rolled a joint in the licorice-flavored paper she liked. “You know how when I got back from San Juan you told me I was carrying?”
Connie nodded, accepting the joint. As she let the smoke seep out she said, “You knew it already. You wanted a baby real bad.”
“I still do! I went, I got one of those tests? I haven’t had my time since then.”
“What did the test say?”
Dolly patted her belly. “I told Geraldo yesterday. He starts yelling at me, that it’s by some john. He starts hitting on me!”
“He makes me so sick. He makes you go with men and then he puts you down for it. It’s his kid. You came back from Puerto Rico with that baby.” She had known as soon as she saw Dolly.
Dolly drew herself up. “The johns are a business thing. Don’t put it down, I make good money. I don’t bring the johns here—I do them in hotels or at Geraldo’s. Listen, every woman sells it. Jackie O. sells it. So?”
“So how do you like it with them?”
“It’s a job.” Dolly sucked in the smoke, glowering. The minutes thickened between them. Finally she sniffled. “You hate yourself, you hate the trick. I never met one woman yet who didn’t hate every stupid trick.”
“Leave him, carita, leave him. Never mind him. He’s not worth your little fingernail.”
“He’s smart, Connie, his mind works like that.” She snapped her fingers. “He has style. The other whores all standon their heads to catch his eye when he comes around … . I thought, why not have a baby with him? Then I can quit. It’ll be like it was before, only better. A man respects you more if you have his baby. Why not?”
“So you didn’t take your pills in Puerto Rico?”
“I left them here. I didn’t even put them in my purse. I thought too it might be lucky, a baby made on the island. I want to have this baby, Connie!”
“Why not? One child is lonely. Why not have another? You’re a good mother. You quit this whoring and have the baby.”
“He won’t let me! He says I got to have an abortion!”
“No.” Connie banged her fist on the table. A strange gesture for her. Dolly stared. “You have it! Tell him to o.d. and sell his body to the city for rat bait. You come live with me. I’ll help you with the children. I’d love that, you know it’s the truth—”
The phone rang. It was a john. Dolly ran off to the bathroom to fix her face and get herself together. Connie kissed her, fussed over Nita for a couple of minutes, and then reluctantly picked her way down the stairwell. In the street a damp, jagged wind off the East River scraped her face. She pulled her old green coat closer. The lining was gone. She felt high and loose with the grass, too stoned to endure the subway just yet. She decided to walk all the way over to the Spring Street stop on the IRT and take the local uptown, even though it was ten blocks of walking.
In a playground on Elizabeth, some little girls were playing red light, green light. She hunched against the wind, not deciding to walk closer, to stop and stare, but finding herself pressed suddenly into the fence. Brown-skinned mostly, about the right age. Angie would be one of the lighter, one of the shorter girls. Eddie, her father, had been light and short. She could be that lean quick one with the black hair and creamy skin and big love-me grin. Getting caught and making a big show of kicking herself. Yes, the girl who kicks herself would be mine!
Two men wheeling a cart on the sidewalk looked at her, and one spoke laughing to the other. Tears were rolling down her face. Rotten dope making her sentimental. Crazy Connie. She started to walk while the street bellied out before her. With the sleeve of her coat she tried to rub her face. The tears ran from her sore eyes, faucets that would not be shut off. Warm and wet over her cheeks. She turned onto Prince and sat down in a doorway, on a cement step recessed into the entrance to a loft building, the door big as a barn door behind. She spread the newspaper for her butt. Nobody around. She blew her nose hard in a wad of toilet paper. Anybody would think she had loved her daughter.
A shadow across her. She began to get up but that hand was extended again. “What’s wrong? You’re weeping. Connie, did I frighten you?”
Shorter than in her dream, just a few inches taller than she would be, standing, he bent toward her, moon face, black turtle bean eyes, that gentle smile.
“I’m going crazy! But it could be the dope. Really powerful—”
“I’m here. I’ve been trying to reach you. But you get frightened, Connie.” Luciente grinned. Really, he was girlish. Mariquita?
“What do you want from me?” Childhood scary tales of brujos, spells, demons. A lot of garbage, but how could this boy creep into her dreams?
“Just to talk. For you to relax and talk with me.”
“Ha! Nobody ever wants to talk to me. Not even my caseworker, Mrs. Polcari. I depress her.” Connie rose stiffly, brushing off the seat of her old coat, and
folding her paper, she slipped past him. Her arm grazed his. He was real enough, his arm muscular through the leather jacket. Her belly hardened with fear. El Muro and the way he would wait for her. Then she had been young and succulent as a roasting chicken. Now she was what Geraldo always called her, a bag—a bag full of pain and trouble. She wanted a cigarette bad but she was scared to open her purse in front of him; so easy for him to snatch. She had the plastic pocketbook tucked along with the newspaper between her elbow and her body on the side away from him as he walked beside her with a casual springy step. No, he didn’t walk in a swishy manner. He had a surefooted catlike grace. He moved with grace but also with authority. In her purse were seventeen dollars, some pennies and two subway tokens, also her welfare ID and the keys to her apartment. Where would she replace the seventeen dollars? He could steal her little TV set to pawn. She had two weeks to wait till her next check, if she got it on time.
He wasn’t dressed like a bum. Although nothing was new or flashy, his clothing was substantial and well made. Big heavy boots like the kids wore, black pants cut something like jeans, a red shirt she could glimpse at the throat, a worn but handsome leather jacket with no insignia of gang or social club but instead a pattern in beads and shells in the sleeves. He was without gloves and his hands she remembered. She would have liked to take the hand toward her and lift it to her nostrils. The skin was stained but not with nicotine. What kind of work would stain hands purple? Like the dye used to stamp grades on meat.
She made her voice harsh. “How long you planning to follow me?”
“I’d rather talk to you at home, if you’ll let me.” Luciente recoiled as an ordinary truck roared by. He covered his nose.
“No. Why should I? Who are you?”