I fell in love with a boy who came from Chicago in July. His name was Will and his dream was to catch one of our rainbows, or so he said. Then after a while he said I was his dream. Maybe that was why I let him do things to me I’d never let anyone do before, but it was only part of the reason. I felt caught up in something when I looked in his eyes. I didn’t understand that love is something that can ambush you, and there you are at the mercy of the forces of nature, like the wolves that had continued to come to the river to drink when they should have run as far as they could.
We met at night, in the parking lot of the motel, where he and his father and brothers were staying. I’d worked there one summer cleaning rooms, but I complained about some of the things I found, and they didn’t hire me back. After that, I just worked in my father’s shop. I’d wash my hands with lemon juice at the end of the day. I’d take off my clothes and change into clean jeans and a T-shirt that smelled of soap instead of fish. I’d let my hair out of the tight braids I usually wore and brush it till it shone. Then I’d walk to the motel. I’d try to walk slowly, so as not to give my heart away, but I’d always wind up running. I was fifteen, an age when a girl can be stupid and smart at the same time. We would go to his father’s truck to be alone. The nights were starry in July and the trees whispered. There was a plum tree I knew about and sometimes, after we were done in his father’s truck, we would walk to that tree and steal plums. Will believed things that I didn’t. He was glad that the wolves had disappeared and he didn’t care that polar bears were now found wandering down the streets in northern Scotland, and that the bees were all but gone. He didn’t pay any attention to the lasts of things, but I did. I figured my little sister wouldn’t even know honey had ever existed. Will had his eye on the future, he said. I, myself, didn’t like to think about what would happen next. I was here now, with him, at the plum tree, listening to the cicadas and wondering why their song was so hard to hear. When I was a little girl they were so loud you could barely talk to each other outside at night. Now we could whisper and hear each other just fine.
I was in love with Will and with July and I never wanted the night to end. I dreaded the next day, which would force us further into the future. When I walked home alone on the dirt road that led to our house I was often dizzy. It was love that had done that to me, and the stars, and the way I knew that something would happen to ruin everything.
My mind is made up there’s going to be trouble.
Will’s father caught the biggest trout on record. I cried when I saw him on the dock, being photographed by the newspaper, with Will and his brothers flanking him. The fish was every color blue from sapphire to turquoise to cobalt. It shimmered in the sunlight, but its eyes were white. People said it was the granddaddy, the ancestor of all the other fish. Our mayor took Will’s family to dinner. I was in the crowd but Will didn’t wave. The truth is I don’t think he even saw me. I was no one, after all. A girl he’d met by accident. I didn’t go meet Will that night. Instead I went down to the river. My father always said it would take a day and a night to swim all the way across and that a person who tried to do so would likely drown. I took off all my clothes and I dove in. It was dark and the water looked black and I realized I was crying. I thought about a girl I knew who had once ruined her life with love. Ten years later, no one talked to her, although I always did.
Will came looking for me and told me I was wrong to think he’d forget me. He was still here, wasn’t he? We held each other in the woods. I knew he would be leaving, but I did it anyway, as if this were the only day we would ever have. Still, I knew I’d have a price to pay.
My father found a letter I was writing to Will and he took me out and beat me with his belt. He told me I would thank him someday, but I doubted it. Someday didn’t matter to me. I had welts on my skin and something had broken inside me. I packed a bag and ran down the dirt road, ready to leave town and everything I had ever known, but when I got to the motel, Will’s father’s truck was gone. I went into the office. Anna was there, the woman I worked with when I cleaned rooms. She was the one no one talked to, unless they were from out of town.
“Off to Chicago,” she said. “You couldn’t have thought he’d stay?”
I went to the river instead of going home. I knew what happened to girls like me. Everybody did. My secret hurt me, like a stone in my shoe. But worse. Much worse, because it was my heart.
I sit in my house for days on end and stare at the roses in the closet.
I did nothing for as long as I could, and then I went to the doctor. I’d known him all my life, so I kept my eyes lowered as I spoke to him. I told him I wanted to go to Chicago, where I’d heard they could free me of my misfortune. I knew someone who had been there, and she’d told me the address. I didn’t tell him it was Anna, and that I had the address written down in my notebook. The doctor listened to my secret, then he told me to wait where I was. Instead of helping me, he called my father.
My father came in like a storm, cursing. He told me I had no right to do what I wanted to do. I was underage and my body belonged to him and he should have known I would turn out this way.
My father locked me in my room. I sat in the closet, thinking things over. When it was dark, I climbed out my window. I took the money my mother had buried in the yard in a coffee can. I felt bad, but not too bad, because she always said she was saving it for me and this was my time of need. I don’t think about what happened after that. I don’t think of the men in the cars, or the place I went to where they locked you in a room so you couldn’t make a phone call, or the man they called Doc who wasn’t a doctor. There were other girls there, but we didn’t speak to each other. I heard them crying, but I swallowed my tears. I wished I weren’t fifteen. I wished none of this had ever happened. I never think about the pain now, except when I still have it. They said that due to the circumstances, I would not be able to have children. I don’t think about that either.
When I went home my father didn’t speak to me, but my mother let me in. I didn’t go back to school, I sat in my closet and thought about things that had passed. In time it was April and I could see the plum tree blossoms from my room. I thought of myself as the plum tree, standing alone in the woods. I would be sixteen eventually, not that I cared. When it was July again people started coming to the river, but not Will, which was just as well. The trout were gone. People searched for them, they rented boats and came from all over the country, but there were no blue rainbows to be found. We didn’t even have the last one in the historical museum. That one was on Will’s father’s wall in Chicago.
After that the future crept up on all of us, though I still try to keep it from my thoughts. Now when you go to the market, they sell trout that they paint with blue dye, but it doesn’t fool anyone any more than the honey they make from sugar water and molasses. These things are lost. I know what it’s like to disappear. I go to the river at night. It’s mostly deserted now, but I swim out as far as I can. I swim until I’m hurting. I think about not going back, but I do. I can always find my way because the stars are still there.
ALICE HOFFMAN is the New York Times bestselling author of thirty novels, including Faithful, The Marriage of Opposites, and The Dovekeepers, which Toni Morrison called “a major contribution to twenty-first-century literature.” Her newest novel, The Rules of Magic, is the prequel to her cult classic Practical Magic.
SUSAN ISAACS
* * *
Getting Somewhere
“Sure,” I told my husband, Jeffrey, “over my dead body.” That was when he said he wanted to buy something spectacular in Boca. He’d always been Jeff, but he hit it big, owning forty shopping malls just before he turned fifty. The combo of true wealth as opposed to just lots of money plus his increasing girth (words like girth make everyone hearing me think four-year college) . . . Where was I? Oh, right. People just began calling him Jeffrey, like he was too important for a nickname. He didn’t exactly object. He even thought about spelling it Geof
frey, but too much stuff was monogrammed. He took to playing golf, to say nothing of talking about it. He was getting that thick-waisted, bronzed, rich-guy look and once, as I caught a rear view of him going into the shower, I thought, His ass looks like a schnecken. Anyway, I said: “Boca Raton? So I can wear Missoni and join a book group?”
Palm Beach was out because Jeffrey knew the guys there were bankers and hedge-funders who thought a discussion of differential monetary policy was conversation. Also they made him feel insecure, because his malls weren’t anchored by a store like Neiman Marcus. Not even Dunkin’ Donuts. I told him: “Right. Me in pastel Chanel. Toots, you got me mixed up with your next wife.”
So we picked Miami and when people asked us, basically, Huh?, we told them we loved that it was a real city. Culture and world-class restaurants. Also it was sooo international. That was true, and actually both of us had taken Spanish in high school, and when we spoke it, people were complimentary, but that’s because Latinos have good manners, even the guys in the car washes, so I was glad I didn’t take French.
Anyway, the first house the real estate agent wanted to show us was on Key Biscayne, over the Causeway from Miami, but Jeffrey said he didn’t want to see it because the Key only had a public golf course, but then he said all right, he’d look at Paraíso—a house with a name! Was it gorgeous? At first glance his jaw dropped so low I had to give him the elbow before Marilyn, the agent who wore Armani, could see. Totally drop dead, so you could sit at the pool and, right ahead of you, there was the ocean. The house? I still can’t believe it’s ours.
But that’s not the story.
This is what happened in 2002. Can you believe it was so long ago? I was driving my car, a BMW convertible since that was around the time it became chic to be unpretentious. So the last thing I wanted was a Bentley, which all but screamed faux modesty. Anyway, I was going over the Rickenbacker Causeway that’s named for somebody and the news is on. It was about those snipers around Washington DC who got caught a few days before and I was thinking, I am so sick of all this violence stuff, because a little more than a month ago it had been the first anniversary of 9/11.
Whenever I drove, I made myself listen to NPR. It paid off. When I stopped at a traffic light, people in the other cars could think, Intellectual. Also, it was great for going to a cocktail party and having specific things to say about why Vice President Cheney was a putz and how much I adored The Secret Life of Bees.
The Causeway was five miles of total gorgeousness, a high bridge over Biscayne Bay that went from the Key to Miami. That day the air smelled like clams on the half shell. The early afternoon sun lit the tops of the waves in the bluish-green water and made them give off gold sparks. So I started feeling a little better. Top down, Anthelios sunscreen, Dolce & Gabbana sunglasses, wind in my hair, which didn’t matter because I was on my way to get it done.
So I was over the Causeway and all of a sudden it’s like everybody goes crazy. Cars are swerving, the giant Winn-Dixie truck in front of me slammed on its brakes so I slammed on mine. I couldn’t see what was going on, just the back of the truck with a dumb slogan—“Beef, it’s what’s for dinner” and for a second thinking, Feh, that picture looks like the cheap, mealy roast beef my mother used to put Adolph’s Tenderizer on—but then I realized something was wrong for this kind of sudden traffic chaos. Maybe a giant piece of concrete crashed down from the bridge into Biscayne Bay and there’s a hole bigger than my car and theoretically I could survive crashing into the water as long as I remembered to take off my seat belt on the way down. Maybe it was something else. Could a car, God forbid, have hit a bike rider?
Very, very carefully, I inched the front wheels toward the left and moved up a teeny bit, so maybe I could see something beyond the truck. Nada. But all of a sudden there are people running across the road—black people, really black—coming up from the shore onto the Causeway. And I get from the way they’re running and how many there are that it’s not an accident or some kind of protest. They’re wet. And so thin, not in a good way, like an African supermodel. Scrawny, and most of the men were shirtless. You could see their ribs, knots of bone on their shoulders. And the women—hardly any had shoes, or maybe they’d been wearing flip-flops and lost them. And there were some kids too, terrified looks on their faces, and a little girl with a white hair bow on one side. She kept patting the other side of her head, unable to believe the other bow was actually lost. More kept coming, like they were using the Causeway just to run away from wherever their boat left them.
I turned off NPR and that’s when I heard some of the people shouting to each other, and police sirens in the distance. Miami stopped using regular sirens and now had those disgusting ones that make up and down sounds, like in World War II movies, Yoo-hoo, Nazis coming.
That’s when I put it all together. The runners were Haitians trying to sneak into the States, except something had happened to their boat. You heard that a lot in South Florida. Maybe it fell apart or the currents took it to where they could be spotted. They were running as fast as they could because the sirens were so close. Across and down on the other side of the Causeway near the tollbooths, around where the road met the land. They needed to spread out and go . . . Who knew where they could get to that would be safe? They must’ve known America was no refuge for them, but in their hearts they believed it was.
What the hell could they do now, call a cab? And no matter how fast they were, some had kids—petrified little kids—and the grown-ups were screaming. To each other or just crying out, probably to God, to help them.
I opened my car door and got out, and stood on the metal thing beneath it that you kind of swing your legs over getting out. And then I saw, oh shit, a couple of cops had gotten on the bridge and were holding up traffic. I guessed they were doing it so that more cops could come and grab the Haitians. Refugees, that’s what they were called. I’d been thinking immigrants, but that was like the island in New York that wasn’t where the Statue of Liberty was. Ellis Island.
This was what got me. That when Cubans snuck into the U.S. on boats and made it, they were home free. But anybody else? Off to a detention center, then sent back to wherever they came from. Listen, I like Cubans and one of the women in my tennis group, Solana Diaz Ruiz, who for some reason didn’t have a hyphen, was a total sweetheart and we had lunch once a week and knew all about each other’s kids, and probably too much about each other’s husbands. Also, Cubans really revived Miami, bringing so much talent and life to it. Plus Jeffrey’s lawyer’s last name was Mendoza, okay? Cubans = good. But is it fair that they got to stay just because there are tons of them who got citizenship and they vote?
So I’m standing on that metal thing on my car and the Haitians’ screaming is cutting through me, though not my gut, but my throat. Like my air pipe is slit and I can’t breathe. Those poor people, I thought, I bet they smell after being on a boat so long. And then I saw more cops, and they were running and grabbing people and making them sit over on the side of the Causeway. A cop watching over the ones they caught walked back and forth like he was just waiting for one to move so he could give him a klop. Meantime, other cops ran back and snatched up more refugees. Weren’t their grandparents like mine, coming to America to escape something terrible? Listen, when things are okay, you stay put.
Bad to good. That’s America. Okay, not the slaves who got brought here, who were forced from good to bad. But here on the Causeway there were blacks willing to die on a boat to get from horrible to good and I stared at an Irish-looking cop dragging one of them over to the side. Like his great-grandparents didn’t cry out to come here when County Whatever ran out of potatoes and they were starving?
Oh God, the expression on one Haitian guy, he was no more than ten feet away from me when he sensed something and saw a big white hand circling the top of his arm. Sad, angry, defeated. But those are just three words. His long rectangle face showed thousands of emotions—every lousy feeling the human race has ever experienced. Oth
erwise, he would’ve been so handsome. Black satin skin, angled-up cheekbones and romantic Chinese-y eyes.
All of a sudden I was yelling out loud, “Fuck this!” Definitely not how I usually talk, though I thought it pretty often. Then I looked at that fat-ass Winn-Dixie truck and I blessed it—not because it’s my favorite supermarket; truthfully when a major occasion is coming up I ask my housekeeper, Gloria, to go over the Causeway to shop at Publix. I blessed it because it blocked me off from view. I turned and saw a couple of Haitians behind me, about two cars back. I waved them over.
A man and—oh my God, I couldn’t believe it—a pregnant woman who must’ve been at least in her sixth month. She wore cutoffs, khaki, and a T-shirt so faded I couldn’t even make out what the design or writing was. They looked at me for like half a second, and then were about to turn away even though I was gesturing Come here, come here. Could my hair have been such a mess from blowing in the wind that I looked witchy and was scaring them? They just stood there, trans-something, whatever the word—who could think?—paralyzed-like, and then . . . they were running toward my car.
Then another two came, a man and a boy, maybe ten or eleven years old. So fast I couldn’t believe it. I got the pregnant woman in the front passenger seat and the others in the back. Another guy came, close to old and so bony every rib showed. It was only then, Duh, I realized they weren’t speaking English. Okay, except not Spanish either. Right, because Haitians speak some kind of French. But I got back into my seat and shook my head at the old guy and tried anyway. “Sólo cuatro.” Because it was a 328i and even if you didn’t use seat belts there wasn’t enough room, but he climbed over the door into the back. I motioned at them to get down, then kind of hunkered down myself for a second to show them. They got it.
Now what? At least ten people must’ve witnessed this happening. A jury would say We have laws and who the hell is she to decide? I’d go through menopause and beyond in some disgusting Florida prison with no air-conditioning and palmetto bugs crawling over my feet. All I could do was be grateful that I’d given a major hint to Jeffrey that if he got me a convertible without automatic top-up/top-down, I would definitely not jump for joy. Because a gift is a gift. Either you give with a full heart or you just say screw it and hand over a Saks gift certificate.
It Occurs to Me That I Am America Page 18