by Mary Morris
But she had looked for a week and in the end settled for a room with a view of the next building, where the smell of burning kerosense and frying fish entered, mingled with the groans of old people and the muffled sounds of couples making love in the tropical heat. She’d taken a room where she had to wipe the cobwebs off her face in the morning and fight the bugs that crawled across her arms as she slept in damp sheets on a damp mattress with the smell of old mold and the impression of sad bodies.
She’d stared at herself in the cracked glass when she moved in and knew that she was pretty, but not like Teresa. Teresa had silky black hair and ivory skin. Teresa didn’t have a mole on her right cheek, and her face was sculpted, not flat and round like Raquel’s. Raquel moved into the room and unpacked her things. She unpacked the tortoiseshell combs the boy she loved back home had given her. She unpacked her shell beads and the white dress her mother had embroidered. She unpacked the fotonovelas she liked to read at night and pictures of Clark Gable and John Travolta. She put these beside the pictures of her family and of Teresa. She unpacked the rosary her grandmother had given her and the small statue of the Virgin in a blue robe, her trouble dolls and the amulets from the fortuneteller in her town. She wiped away the cobwebs that would return each morning and she settled in.
Raquel had also brought with her a small porcelain doll with no arms. When Raquel and Teresa were little, they’d kept a secret place. It was under the porch of an abandoned house, and they kept all kinds of things in their secret place. They kept small stones and the feathers of birds, pits of fruit and bones of animals they’d eaten. They kept old forks and pieces of tin. And they kept the porcelain doll, which they dressed in scraps of cloth their mother gave them. They built the doll a house out of cardboard with large windows and a patio. But when Teresa got older, she lost interest in the secret place. So one day Raquel collected all their things and moved them in a sack into their house.
That was when Teresa introduced Raquel to the world of boys. Teresa was five years older, and sometimes when their parents were at church, Teresa would sneak boys into the house. Once Teresa had gone out back with one of the boys and had returned breathless, her skirt slightly twisted around her waist. Another time Raquel had lain in her bed and listened to her sister’s soft laughter in the night.
Now, every evening, Raquel lay on her bed in the rented room. She studied the webs of spiders, the places where the beams didn’t meet. The tiny footprints of mice on the walls.
At times Raquel was late for work because of her search for her sister, but Mrs. Randolph didn’t seem to mind when Raquel arrived or when she left. Once Mrs. Randolph, who sat staring into the goldfish pond, looked up and startled Raquel when she said, “Why don’t you find your sister and get yourself out of this dump?”
One morning Raquel boarded a bus that had a man playing a guitar painted on the back. It also had a small house with domestic animals. In the windows, as in all the buses, it had the names of the women the driver loved. Salsa music played when Raquel got on, and people were dancing. People always danced and sang on the buses of Panama. And a man she didn’t know dropped coins into the bus driver’s change box for her, in exchange for a dance. She showed the driver the picture and he nodded. He knew the bus and he told her where to go in the city to wait for it.
Raquel was going to be late for work, but she was sure Mrs. Randolph wouldn’t care, since she was probably sitting in her darkened bedroom, sipping a cool drink. She went to the place where the driver said to go, and she waited. She waited for an hour or more, and just as she was about to give up, she saw a bus approach. It pulled up like a great beast, spewing exhaust, and on the back of it she saw her sister’s picture.
For a moment Raquel stared. She felt close to Teresa for the first time in three years. She felt her sister’s dark eyes, looking at her from the back of the bus. When the bus began to pull away, Raquel yelled for the driver to wait. It was an early-morning bus filled with workers on their way to the hotels, to the Canal, to construction sites. The driver was old, with tired brown eyes, and he had crucifixes and statues of the Virgin on his dashboard.
When Raquel showed him the picture, he shook his head. He said he’d never seen her before. Except on the back of his bus. But he told her where to find the bus dream man. The dream man’s name was Jorge and he didn’t live in a good part of the city. But the driver told her how to get there and he told her to go in the heat of the day. He told her that the bus dream men were strange and filthy and he cautioned her to take care.
In the middle of the day Raquel left Mrs. Randolph and went to the slums in the old French quarter where the bus driver had told her to go. In this part of town the houses had been condemned long ago, but the poor just moved into the empty rooms. Four or five families lived in a room that had once been occupied by one. Raquel knocked on the molding where there’d once been a door. A man with greasy hair and no teeth came to her, and Raquel said, “Excuse me, but I’m looking for my sister.”
The bus dream man smiled and said, “I just paint buses. I don’t know many women.” Raquel held out the photograph she’d been carrying for weeks. The man named Jorge touched it with his dirty hands. He smiled again through his rotten teeth and said it had been a mere coincidence.
He told Raquel how a bus driver had come to him with his new bus and he’d described a woman to him. “He told me,” Jorge said, “she had eyes like the evening skies and hair as thick and dark as the forests. Skin smooth as stones on the beach. Her mouth was a cave at the bottom of the sea and her scent like the wind through the jasmine trees. Her body was the Isthmus, wide in some places, narrow in others, winding with many curves and treacherous places. A body whose distance you travel in no time, but it is a journey like the trip through the Canal that must be undertaken with great care.” He said that he painted the woman the bus driver described and it happened to come out like Raquel’s sister.
Raquel stood for a moment, thinking. Then she said, “You are telling me a lie.” She clenched her fists, and her small, tight mouth spoke very clearly. “You know where my sister is. You can’t just paint a picture like that.”
The bus dream man shrugged. “I just do what I imagine. People have their wishes and dreams, their secret longings. I reveal them. That’s all I do.”
Raquel moved closer to him so that her face was up against his. He stank of paint and sweat and his hair was matted on his head. But he had dark, translucent eyes and he stared straight into hers. “Tell me where she is.”
He smiled again. “Living out her life’s dream.”
The next day and the day after that Raquel left Mrs. Randolph sitting in her darkened room or counting the goldfish in the pond. She went and sat at the door of the bus dream man. She watched him as he worked. He was painting a huge bus in his backyard and he was painting the back with a house by a lake with six children in the lake for a man whose three children had each died at the age of three months and who had had no more.
On the third day, when Raquel was going to leave, Mrs. Randolph said to her, “What are you going to do when you find your sister?”
Raquel looked at her in surprise. “I’m going to take her home.”
Mrs. Randolph shook her head of hair, which she dyed different shades of red and yellow. “Now it’s too late. She won’t go with you,” Mrs. Randolph said. “Girls, when they come to this city and stay this long, they never leave.” Then Mrs. Randolph sighed. “I had a dream last night. I dreamed I saw bones walking by the sea. They were beautiful and white like porcelain and they had flowers growing out of them. But slowly veins appeared, then blood, and it was a horrible body. Then skin. And for an instant, I saw my daughter again. My little girl. I hadn’t seen her in so many years. I wanted to reach out and touch her . . . If I were you, I’d go home now.” Then she added as Raquel headed to the door, “That’s what I’d do if I could.”
But Raquel went back to the bus dream man that day and the days that followed. She sat witho
ut speaking as he painted the children on the back of the bus. And finally he turned to her and said, “All right, you win. I’ll tell you where to find her.”
The Crossroads of the World Club was located at the edge of the Zona, just below the hill where Raquel worked. She walked by it every day as she headed up the hill to the Randolphs’. It was a fairly well-known club, to those who knew about such things. It was run by a man named Eddie, an ex-Marine, who’d once swum the Canal and had been charged a quarter for his cargo potential. It was a famous story about the Canal, and they say that Eddie, after he swam it, could never leave.
Jorge told Raquel to find Eddie. He’d told her that Eddie would tell her where her sister was. “Has she gone to America?” Raquel asked, and Jorge had smiled that same smile. “You might say she’s gone to America.”
Raquel hesitated before entering the club. She looked up at the Zona, so green and beautiful. Parakeets flew overhead. She heard them screeching, but she couldn’t see them. She looked at the American flag she passed every day and at the Marine who guarded the entrance to the Zona. He smiled at her, the way he did every day, but he looked at her strangely when he saw her hesitating at the club.
It had no windows. There were no windows on any of the floors above it, either. Raquel had never known a building that had no windows. Even in her town in the poor houses where no breeze blew there were windows. On the outside there were pictures of dark-skinned girls and a sign that read AMERICAN SERVICEMEN WELCOME.
As her eyes adjusted to the darkness, Raquel noticed the smells of the bar. It smelled of stale flowers and darkness and of the bodies of men. Raquel didn’t know the bodies of men, but when she entered the bar, she knew. It wasn’t a smell like her father’s or brothers’ or the boy with the mustache who waited for her at home. This was a bitter smell, strong but not entirely unappealing. At night back in the Interior, Raquel had sometimes wondered about the bodies of men, wondered how she’d know them in the dark, but now she thought she’d just know.
When she could see in the darkness, she saw a bar with several men at it and a few women in the back. At the bar she asked for Eddie, and the bartender looked her over.
“You want work?”
She shook her head. “I’m working,” she replied. “I want to find somebody.”
The bartender shrugged and gave a call. A large burly man appeared from the back and he held out his hand to her. “I’m Eddie,” he said. “What can I do for you?” She held out the photo and told him how the bus dream man had sent her here.
Eddie looked at the picture and smiled. Then he paused and stared at her. “I can see the resemblance.” Raquel looked away. She’d never been the pretty one. “She’ll be here tomorrow,” he told her. “Come back then.”
But the next day was a holiday and Raquel didn’t know it. She was on her way to the club and to her job in the Zona when she got caught up in a procession. It was the day the people were carrying the bones of their leader who had died in a helicopter crash into the Canal Zone. They’d dug up his grave and they were marching, thousands of them, with his bones into the Zona. They carried banners with his words: “I don’t want to go into history. I want to go into the Canal Zone.” As Raquel walked, she got caught up in the crowds and they carried her along. She followed them as they wound their way up the green hill where the servicemen lived. She followed them as they proceeded past Colonel Randolph’s house, where she saw the colonel and his wife, sitting on the porch, staring at the procession with the leader’s bones.
At the Randolphs’ house, Raquel left the procession, but neither the colonel nor his wife greeted her. When she went inside to begin her work, the colonel followed her in. He said to her, “We built it. We should keep it.” And Raquel nodded and said, yes, they should keep it. But he went on. He said, “But we’re going to give it back to you. We’re going to give it back and watch the whole country go down the tubes.” The colonel was a very tall, strong man, with his hair clipped short against his head. He reminded Raquel of a cartoon she’d once seen of Popeye the Sailor Man. Now he looked ridiculous, all puffed up and red.
Mrs. Randolph came in and sat by the pond. She glanced at Raquel and her husband, then looked at the goldfish. Her husband said something to her in English and Mrs. Randolph shrugged. She replied in Spanish, “Do what you want.”
When Raquel finished her day’s work, Mrs. Randolph thrust a fistful of money, all in dollars, into Raquel’s hands. “Go home,” Mrs. Randolph said. “Or I’ll see your bones walking by the sea.” And she gave her a white blouse that Raquel had admired and she told her, “Now find Teresa and promise me you’ll go home.”
It was the late afternoon when Raquel waved to the Marine who guarded the Zona, and she felt his eyes on her as she walked into the Crossroads of the World. It was dark inside and it took Raquel’s eyes a few moments to adjust to the dark. The bar was filled with servicemen in uniform and sailors on shore leave, waiting for their ships to make the journey through the Canal.
And there were women. She saw many women sitting in the rear. They all had thick black hair and high-pitched laughs. They wore tight dresses and, from the back, they all looked the same. From the back Raquel couldn’t tell one from the other. But as she approached, she heard one laugh that seemed to rise above the others.
A head turned slightly in her direction. Raquel saw a woman with eyes painted like parrot eyes and lips red as a sun rising on the Atlantic and setting on the Pacific. Her skin was smooth as stones on the shore, and the scent of jasmine rose from her body. Her body was winding and treacherous as the Isthmus. It was just as the bus dream man had said. It was what Raquel expected and what she knew she’d find. For an instant, their eyes met. Then that was all.
When Raquel left the bar, the procession was gone, and it was quiet. It was very quiet. The Marine smiled at her, and she waved faintly at him. She looked up at the hill and over to the Canal. A flock of parakeets circled overhead, screeching, flying through the palm fronds of the Zona. Raquel watched them dip and swirl and shriek as they traveled back and forth across the Canal. She decided she would go home and tell her father he should be proud. She would tell him that Teresa had made it into pictures.
Orphans of the Storm
I HAVE A SISTER named Alice who’s only eight months older than I am. The reason for this eludes most people. My parents adopted Alice before they figured out my mother was already pregnant with me. And people, when they hear we’re sisters, say, “Oh yes, you look just alike. Around the eyes.” Alice and I don’t look anything alike. She is a tall, buxom redhead and the rest of us are tiny brunettes. Alice has always stood out in a crowd.
On holidays, I usually don’t have any place to go. Our parents retired to a desert community in the southwest, so I go to Alice’s house. It is a standing invitation and I only have to call if I’m not coming. It has been this way ever since Alice married Jim. Actually Jim says he was hooked by Alice, but this isn’t true. She simply told him he had two years from the day she finished college to decide if he was going to marry her. When the date rolled around, Alice told Jim she loved him but it was over. For a month she wouldn’t see him or speak to him on the phone. Then he proposed.
Alice tells me I need a strategy with men. Every once in a while, when something doesn’t work out for me, I wind up on Alice’s doorstep, and she always takes me in.
A few days before Christmas I call Alice to say I’m coming. Normally this isn’t necessary, but originally I’d called to say I wasn’t. The man I’ve been seeing on and off this past year decided at the last minute to go skiing in Colorado. I don’t really understand the reasons, and Alice doesn’t ask questions.
It is snowing when the train pulls in. On the train an old man sits in front of me. He has two paper bags filled with gifts, all wrapped in a sloppy way, with dirty bows stuck on. The man seems confused and keeps asking me if we’ve reached Wilmette. When we get to Wilmette, he gets off and wanders away into the snow.
I
want to see if someone is there to meet him, but Alice comes up and hugs me, and the old man is gone. Alice never hugs me very hard. In fact I’ve always thought, since I was old enough to think such things, that Alice’s hug feels more as if she’s pushing me away. She has a sharp, angular jaw and I can feel it press sharply against my cheek.
I didn’t always love Alice, but one day I suddenly did. We were walking down a street together in Oak Park and a tall, red-haired woman who looked just like Alice walked right by us. Alice looked at the woman and the woman looked at her. The woman paused, hesitated, started to speak. But Alice just grabbed my hand and quickly walked away with me. Alice was crying by the time we got home and she told me to never tell our mother what we’d seen. It was the first time I really knew she belonged to us.
Alice lives in a big stone house with a fireplace that’s always going in winter. Stockings hang from the mantel, and Alice tells me they’ve decided to wait and open their presents when I’m there. We walk into her house arm in arm. She says, “So this guy’s in Colorado skiing, huh?”
“I don’t want to talk about it. I wasn’t nuts about him, anyway.”
Alice nods but doesn’t comprehend the notion. She has been nuts about Jim for fifteen years. Once she told me that, to this day, whenever he touches her, she goes wild. Jim works for Sunbeam and helps develop small appliances. Alice’s house is filled with these appliances. Little filter machines to clean the air. Hand vacuums. Tiny electric fans you can carry in your purse.