Sleep now, you’re dreaming, negra.
Teresa shuffled about like a mouse. The night was ripe with chirping, screeching, croaking, miserable frog mating sounds, right outside our window. Papá says it’s because love hurts.
What if Mamá doesn’t let you come back? What if something happens to you? I said, already worried about our parents hurting later. Because where we live, there’s nothing but dark. Not a house for at least a mile. And the electricity always in some kind of mood. On and off. On and off.
Teresa’s eyes shone. Come see, El Guardia’s right on the road, waiting for me.
I tiptoed to the window. Bright moonlight illuminated the top of the palms.
I’ll be back before everyone’s up. Don’t you worry about me, little sister.
But why can’t you wait and be with him in a proper way? He can announce himself and ask for your hand. How do you know if he has serious intentions?
Teresa smiled. First of all, Mamá will never accept him. One day you’ll understand. When you fall in love, you have to play it out even if everyone calls you crazy. That’s why they call it falling. We have no control over it.
I don’t ever want to fall in love, I said but then thought of Gabriel, who can’t look me in the eye without blushing.
Love’s not a choice for you to make, Teresa said, and blew out the sage burning in the hotpot to kill the funky boy smell Lenny and Yohnny make in the night.
Teresa glided out of our room. She looked back at me and winked, licked her lips as if life itself is the most delicious thing she ever tasted. I imagined my mother, young like Teresa, cut from the same cloth, how much they look alike. Pin-pún, la Mamá, is what everyone says when they first see Teresa. Pin-pún!
Everyone has an arrival story. This is Juan’s. The first time he goes to New York City he has only an address and twenty dollars in his pocket. The bus drops him off at 72nd and Broadway on an island filled with benches and passed-out junkies. His heart races when the cars honk and helicopters fly overhead. He has always liked adventures, but the way the city is already pushing him to move so quickly, he knows that to gain control of such a place will require time. He locates the building number and finds a busted front door. Climbs the five flights of stairs hauling his suitcase. The lightbulbs in the lobby, missing. The musty smell of the damp rugs reminds him of caves he visited as a child. Oh, how he loved the caves—the slippery rocks, the darkness, the pounding of the waterfall—the sweetest reward, after the trek through the muck.
He takes a deep breath. He can do this.
When he finally knocks on the door, a scruffy old man answers.
Ju, ju, Frank? Juan asks. Frank is the Italian man who rents rooms.
Yes, yes.
And with that he waves Juan into his first apartment: a small room with two mattresses. One stripped down, topped with a neatly folded pile of sheets and a towel. On the neighboring mattress, a man asleep, with a pillow covering his face, to block the streetlight coming through the bare window.
Ten dollars a week. Every Sunday. You understand?
Jes. Thenk you, Juan answers in English. He had learned Yes, sir. Thank you. Dollars and cents. No, sir. Numbers one through ten. OK. Time o’clock. Taxi, please. Trains.
Gotta girl back home? Frank asks.
Oh shit, you speak Spanish? Juan almost cries in relief.
Because we don’t allow girls in here, Frank continues. Not for a week or a night.
Up until now, Juan hasn’t really thought about me. But he does plan to marry me because, as Ramón says, a good country girl is what a man needs to keep him out of trouble.
Frank prepares coffee and serves them in two mismatched espresso cups.
Heard there’s some good work at the hotels down on 34th Street, Juan says.
Frank juts out his chin. Is that all you got to wear?
Juan’s thin wool coat doesn’t even have a liner. From a closet in the hallway Frank pulls out a three-quarter-length coat, thick wool herringbone with a furry collar.
You don’t want to die of pneumonia waiting on that line.
Juan notes the worn-down cuffs, the exposed layers of muslin. The lining ripped to shreds.
We try and keep the lights off to keep the electric bill down. Everyone minds their business here.
A boom goes off outside. Juan jumps.
Be careful at night. The junkies will kill you for a buck. A desperate man is a dangerous one.
Juan gives ten dollars to Frank for the week’s rent. Sips the coffee and realizes he hasn’t eaten dinner. The portions on the plane were small. It’s already dark, and he doesn’t want to spend his money on food in case he can’t find work right away.
Maybe I should sleep.
Bathroom at the end of the hall. Good luck tomorrow.
Juan tucks his baggage upright next to his mattress. The medium-size towel on the bed is thin and frayed at the edges but smells clean. He lies down fully dressed. His shoes by the bed. The other man snores. Juan’s stomach growls. He looks at the clock and thinks about the chocolate cake they served him on the plane. Or was it a cookie? It was crunchy outside and moist inside, like nothing he had had before.
Years go by and Juan keeps coming around with his brothers for free beer at all hours of the night, flooding me with promises. Come with me now? Let’s get the justice of the peace, Juan says to me more than once. Never did I see a green-eyed bird like you, and his bloodshot glassy eyes would stare into mine, making the fuzz on the back of my neck rise.
From birth, Mamá says, my eyes were a winning lottery ticket, inherited from my grandfather from El Cibao. She talks proudly about Papá’s family, even though they’d cut us all off after Mamá married Papá thinking he would take her far away from Los Guayacanes. Ever hopeful, Mamá had ignored warnings that those people don’t mix with blacks. And here we are, still in Los Guayacanes.
Maybe with Juan we can all get the hell out, she says.
Teresa had already stepped in it by getting knocked up by El Guardia. Their eyes only had to lock once, she told me, for her to feel the burning low in her stomach and between her legs, his desire like a fist pushing up into her crotch. This is how Teresa talks.
One day you’ll discover it, she says to me in secret and winks, knowing that Gabriel’s no longer a boy just running after freight trains. He’s awake, Ana, and if you allow it, he’ll bite.
Her teeth gleam whenever she talks boys with me.
Mamá too. It doesn’t matter if Juan’s intentions are serious or not. Mamá has lived long enough to learn a man doesn’t know what he thinks until a woman makes him think it. So right when I get my period at twelve and eight months, she undoes my pigtails and pulls my hair back tight so no kinks escape, so my eyes pull at the ends. When he visits, she makes me wear my Sunday dress I had outgrown a while before. It pushes the little fat I have up and around my chest for all to see. Juan’s often too drunk to know the difference between a dress and a potato sack, but she colors my lips pink. When I talk the lipstick bleeds onto my teeth. Unlike Teresa, I don’t smile easily. Mamá makes me sit with the brothers, my dress rising high up, the backs of my thighs sticking to the plastic chairs.
Pregnant Teresa is made to stay in the house with Juanita, who is sixteen, and Betty, who is fifteen, so Juan has no distractions. Yohnny, who’s a year older than me, and Lenny, who still doesn’t know how to blow his own nose, sit a ways away and make faces, imitating the Ruiz brothers, who are in their fancy suits and stumble and slur all their words. The men talk in a loop: about papers, the value of the dollar, the baseball games they gamble on. One year they complain about President Balaguer’s inability to keep his promises, the next they celebrate the coup and how Bosch won the election. We finally have a democracy! they cheer. And then it’s back to money, papers, money, papers, money, papers. They talk as if we aren’t even there until Mamá changes the subject.