More Than Allies (11 page)

She hears herself babbling. “Do you know what time it is?”

Dulce turns around to read a little clock on the stove. “A quarter to five,” she says.

“Oh no, I've got to go. My mother-in-law—there's this other baby—”

Dulce gets up with her. “Texas is not the end of the world, is it?”

“But it has dragons, remember?” She has a fierce urge to hug Dulce. Then she thinks: “You never said why you were at school. Was Gus in trouble, too?”

“They want to send my son to the college for three weeks to study Spanish,” Dulce says. “They want him to be Mexican.” For some reason, that makes her laugh. “I might as well send him to Texas, too.”

“Oh Maggie!” Polly says. She looks more frazzled than Maggie can ever remember seeing her since Mo's father died. Stevie is on the living room floor, nested in an enormous pile of toys and pots, bowls and books. The baby, in the hall crib, cries in shrill bursts, stopping to gulp, whimper, then explode again. “All I asked you to do was pick up a loaf of bread!” Maggie turns and runs to the car. When she comes back with milk and bread and a quart of strawberries, Polly is draining spaghetti, and Jay is setting the table. Stevie is in her high chair, chewing on a chunk of cheese. The baby is asleep. Maggie has decided that the best thing is to pretend that nothing is wrong. She doesn't know what else to do.

Polly empties the spaghetti into a dish and comes to put her arm around Maggie. “I'm sorry I yelled at you,” she says. Maggie squeezes her waist. The bad moment is gone, but the baby is not. Polly had to know this would happen, but it didn't keep her from taking the baby.

Polly turns the TV so she can watch the news as they eat. Jay moves his spaghetti around with his fork and steals glances at Maggie. Maggie makes much of helping Stevie with her messy meal. Then she takes her children to their own beds in the cottage, opens a book she is too sleepy to read, and waits for Mo to call.

“What do you think?” she asks him when she has explained about the counseling groups.

“I think I should come soon. They mean well, but we need to solve our own problems.”

“I wish we were in a book with a really good ending.”

She's glad he doesn't make fun of her.

He just says, “Maybe we are.”

Dulce reads her dream book, and tells herself she will know what to do, when it's time.

Gus is working on his map. He has to know she can see it, see that it is Texas, so he probably expects her to say something, but unless she's angry, she is a person who holds her opinion close and waits until she knows the best thing to say. She washes and dresses for bed. “Don't stay up too late,” she tells her son. He tells her good night and raises his face to her kiss.

She has an idea. “What will you be doing Saturday?”

He shrugs. “Hanging out.”

“With Hilario?”

“Sure.”

“Could you ask your friend Jay along? Is there any reason you couldn't do that?”

Gus shakes his head, but it isn't really an answer. “He's really weird lately,” he says. He considers the matter a moment longer. “Sure, okay.”

He waits until she is in her room to say one more thing. “I'm going to write Dad.”

She nods, even though he can't see her. “You should,” she says. And so should I.

Dulce says she dreams tales she knows her father told her when she was a small child. Like the chicken party
.

The boy's grandmother tells him to kill a chicken for dinner. He creeps out to the yard in front of their house where the chickens scratch in the dirt. All over the yard he runs, until he is tired and excited, until the chickens, too, are tired, until they run together in a huddle like turkeys and make a mound, their black chicken eyes fixed on him. He has never killed a chicken, but he has watched his abuela and his mama, and he knows he must wring the neck. From inside the open door of the small house, his grandmother calls out, Salvador, bring me the chicken. He reaches into the mound, and the world blurs with flying feathers. The air fills with the sounds of squawks and flapping, and when he is done, he has killed eight chickens
.

Oh now his mama will say his name shamefully, and his grandmother will put him on his pallet all day and all night. He weeps over the chickens at his feet. He cries, so sorry! I feel it so much! But when the women come from the house and see what he has done, they hold their sides, laughing. They cry out, Oh no, Salvador, all the chickens? They call their neighbors on all sides, they make a feast
.

Dulce says: When I wake from such a dream, I can remember my father the boy, but I cannot well remember the father of the girl Dulce. When he left, I was younger than Gus is now. He went away, back to Zacatecas, because his mother was dying. Like Hilario's father, in May; oh, now that made me remember lying on my bed in the dark, listening for his step. He went away, and he never returned. My mother never spoke of it. She's smart, and she worked hard. She learned to be a medical clerk in a hospital. She said, we speak only English now. When I was thirteen, she married a man she met at the hospital, a respiratory therapist. When I was sixteen, and she was pregnant with my sister, I met Gustavo. He had come up for the pear harvest. He had long silky hair and he said things to me in Spanish I had never heard. He said he would be my lover and best friend, my father and my brother. He said he would take me away from my Anglo stepfather's house, to my own house, and I believed him
.

When I dream of Gustavo, he sings to me. When I dream of Papa, he is a boy
.

Dulce heard Gus let himself out quickly. She looked at the clock. Eight-fifteen. She had no work today—no paid work—but she had promised Lupe she would take her and the babies to the Clínica in the next town. (Lupe loved the U.S. idea of the well-baby checkup.) She should wash clothes, shop, mend. She wanted to cook a special chicken dish for supper, simply because there was time. Maybe a movie. Like a holiday; after all, it was Friday. Maybe there would be time for a nap. She stretched. A nap would be so pleasant—she had to laugh—even if she was just getting up!

She fluffed her pillow and checked inside the case for the two hundred dollars Gustavo sent her. She had not decided what to do with it. Her car was falling apart, her stove had only one burner, Gus needed jeans and shoes, but the money wasn't quite real. She didn't know if she would need it more, later. She had sent him a postcard recently:

Gustavo, the money is here. I am glad you are with

your family. I will write, but I need time
.

She washed her face with cold water and brushed her hair with long hard strokes. All week she wore it in a long braid, but at night, and on a day like this, a day of her own, she brushed it out and felt it on her shoulders and back and around her face where the short wisps escaped. Gustavo used to run his hands over and through her hair. He used to bury his face in it and take deep draughts of its scent. He bought her shampoos that smelled of flowers. He said he loved her right away for her hair, though her hair had been bound up in a net the first time he saw her behind the counter at the cafe.

Maybe she remembered wrong. Maybe he said he loved her for her eyes, and the hair came later, when she let it down in the alley behind the cafe, when she let it fall over his face while he kissed her breasts in the brush behind the cement camp house where he lived that summer. He came into the cafe with his compadres, half a dozen hot shots from L.A. up to pick pears. She was an alien in her stepfather's house, and he was beautiful, with a bandana tied around his forehead, and the pride of who he was in his face. When the season was over, she went with him. Her mother cried, then screamed at her. You learn nothing! she said. Dulce screamed back: I'll never come here again, never! It was a long time before she understood what her mother meant, understood how hard it was for her mother to see her make the same choice she had, letting her love for a dark boy send her nowhere in a white world.

The coffee jar was empty. The empty bread sack lay crumpled on the counter—had Gus really eaten a loaf of bread in two days? She made a list: coffee, bread, peanut butter, oranges, beans, a chicken, a frozen vegetable for tonight.

She tucked the list in her skirt pocket and locked the trailer. It had rained some in the night. The ground was still damp, though not soaked, and water had puddled in the rut at the bottom of her step. She stepped over it. A neighbor's cat meowed and rubbed against her ankle. She bent to pet it. “Sorry, gatito,” she said. “I have nothing for you but my pity.”

A few doors up, Mrs. Alder peeked out of her trailer. She was frail and suspicious. She survived, Dulce thought, only because Meals on Wheels brought her something once a day. Dulce had tried to look in on her, but Mrs. Alder always pretended she couldn't hear, and didn't let her in. Dulce thought she was afraid someone would remove her from her pitiful home, though in all the time she had lived in the court, Dulce had seen only one visitor, a son with Portland plates on his car, and he came infrequently.

She waved at the old woman, who abruptly withdrew and slammed her door. No one else was in sight. The trailers, tucked so close together you could hand something from a window into your neighbor's bedroom, looked deserted. Of course, it was a weekday. Tenants worked or went to school.

The lot sat in a hollow, rising on one end to the busy street that ran by the college, and on the other end to the alley behind the Coffee Bliss Cafe. The trailer belonged to her. When she returned from California with Gus, her mother put them in the “guest bedroom” of her lovely Anglo house, next to her younger daughter Karen, who was a year older than Gus. We don't speak Spanish in this house, she said one morning when she came in the kitchen as Dulce gave Gus his breakfast. She said, what good will it do him? Six weeks later she gave Dulce a set of keys and said, if you have your own place, you can always manage. Dulce knew what that meant.

She had not seen her mother now in two years. The last time, she ran into her in a discount store. Dulce was buying oil for the car, and washrags; her mother was buying a computer for Karen.

When she arrived at Lupe's, she found the babies (nine months and two years old) dressed in frilly dresses, with bows in their hair. Hilario had walked the four-year-old to his Head Start class. Lupe was wearing a pink dress with a wide white belt around her ample waist. She had taken pains with her hair. The trailer, hardly bigger than Dulce's, and home to four children, was neat. Outside, at the foot of the step, Lupe had built a tiny stone grotto, and in the recess had placed a laminated holy card of the Sacred Heart, a crucifix, and a plastic statue of the Virgin of Guadalupe. As they stepped out of the trailer, she stopped to kneel and kiss the crucifix. Dulce thought Lupe would be happier in one of the two towns farther north, where there were neighborhoods of Mexican families, a Mexican grocery store, and the clinic, but fate had plopped the family down, like Dulce, in Lupine, and Lupe made do, relying on Hilario (and Gus) for errands and English, Dulce for transportation, the trailer for home base. She didn't seem to mind asking for help. She seemed to think it a practical and sociable way to live. She had come from a large extended family, and was working on one of her own; people were supposed to hold each other up. For Lupe, the family was everything, and friends were family. She was the first person besides Dulce to be close to Gus.

“What do you hear from Cipriano?” Dulce asked when they were settled in the car. Lupe was in the back with the children. She could belt only the older child, and hold the baby on her lap, but at least it wasn't in the front seat.

“His mother will die very soon,” she said calmly. “Then he will return.”

At the clinic, where they had to wait for an hour, she was delighted to talk with other mothers. The last time she was here, she met a woman who was a second cousin of her own godmother's daughter, in Chihuahua. It was the Virgin, she later told Dulce, reminding her that it was a small world, and they were all bound. The cheerful Spanish chatter was festive. The babies clambered over their mothers' feet, and one another. The clerks went about their business as if the office were a haven of calm. The nurse came and went, smiling and joking. She wore a red blouse with her white nurse's pants. The doctor peeked out. She was East Indian; she spoke Spanish.

Dulce excused herself and went for a walk. When she returned, Lupe, beaming, said the doctor had confirmed the good health and beauty of her children. The baby had received a booster shot, and had just calmed down from crying. Her face was still red and wet. “You are so good,” Lupe said, clasping the babies. Dulce didn't know if she spoke to the children, or to her.

The car was making its ragged, clanky noises, and, as they entered Lupine, the temperature gauge moved steadily toward H. Dulce slowed to a crawl and prayed for luck, at least until she could pick up Lupe's son and get them home. She refused Lupe's offer of lunch, and Lupe's face crumpled. She knew she had hurt her feelings, but she wanted to be alone again. She wanted to be busy. She headed home, driving so slowly that other cars zipped around her. One young woman came alongside and waved her middle finger obscenely. Dulce knew it was silly to be bothered, but she was. She gripped the steering wheel so hard her palms smarted.

She parked on the street and sat a moment, trying to decide if she was going to do something about the car now. If she walked to a station and asked for help, they would treat it like an emergency; it would cost more than if she made an appointment. And she didn't feel like taking care of it now. She didn't really want to know what was wrong. It was too likely to be expensive.

Thought it was rare for her to enter the Coffee Bliss—she felt out of place among its student and leisure clientele—she decided that a cup of coffee would do her good. She had enjoyed the coffee she had with Maggie. She had enjoyed sitting at her table with a woman for a little while, though she had not known what to say to Maggie's woeful stories.