“Just button your fly, Henry. I’m warning you.”
“You want me to tell Juanita you been making eyes at me?”
“She wouldn’t believe it.”
He gripped her shoulders, pressing her until she was kneeling. “Suck me off, you little cunt.”
Her early memory surfaced. “I’ll bite you, Henry.”
“She’ll throw you out on that pretty can of yours. Baby, come on, a little blow job. Who’ll it hurt? You’ll still be cherry.” He pushed himself at her mouth.
For the second time in her life, she bit a penis. Not as hard as she could have, but sharply enough for him to sag back, whimpering, “Jesus!”
• • •
One July morning the thermometer sheltered by the nearby barn read 113. Alice sprawled on the big bed in the front room, wearing white shorts and halter that were hand-me-downs from the youngest Taylor daughter, reading the same girl’s discarded Seventeen. Absorbed, she didn’t notice Henry watching her from the doorway until the sound of his breathing grew audible.
The instant she looked up, he was a blur. Before the screen door closed, he was on top of her, mashing her with his wet, odorous, squat, strongly muscled body.
“Mr. Taylor says it’s too damn hot to work,” he panted. “The perfect day to have us a wonderful bang.”
She struggled to escape, panting and gasping, but his hard-muscled thighs and one of his arms held her down.
“You’re going to love it.” His free hand fumbled with her shorts.
“No!” she cried.
He reached under the waistband, popping the button, which spun onto the floor as his fingers wriggled downward on her flat, silken skinned stomach.
She attempted to squirm away. “Get off me!”
“Been like a father to you,” he muttered. “You owe me this.”
He gave her halter a yank, tearing the strap in the back. Thrusting his face between her bared breasts, he dragged down her shorts and tore at the riveted buttons of his jeans. His engorged penis sprung out at her.
While she twisted violently, his fingers plunged inside her. Ragged nails cut the soft flesh. Parting her vulva, he thrust forward his erection. Alice thought frantically of gouging his eyes, then Juanita’s long-ago advice presented itself. Her knee went up.
He grunted loudly, rolling off her, curling in a half circle as he clutched at himself.
“Puta,” he whimpered, continuing to clutch his groin.
His pain cut through Alice’s panic. Retreating to the curtain that separated the rooms, her top dangling between her breasts, her shorts around her thighs, she asked, “Can I help? Get you some aspirin?”
Henry hunched on the edge of the bed, his dark, narrow-jawed face assuming the same righteous cast as when he beat up on Juanita. “You been begging for it ever since I known you,” he muttered. “Only one thing worse than a puta and that’s a prick tease.”
As he lurched heavily down the uneven steps of the narrow porch, Alice began to shake uncontrollably.
She knew where he was going. To tell Juanita that she had made a pass at him. The thought that Juanita, who was everything to her, would believe this, increased her shakes. Sobbing, she changed her clothes.
• • •
At five Juanita came down the road, her flapping sandals raising puffs of dust around her bare brown ankles. She held one hand to the small of her back. Alice, going to meet her, concluded that the Taylors must be blind not to realize that their housekeeper was pregnant.
Juanita said nothing as they moved through the hot afternoon to the cottage.
Alice, filled with dread, chattered aimlessly about how she had started the lamb burrito mix and had put the refried beans in the oven. Then she heard herself ask casually, “Seen Henry?”
“I seen him.” Juanita pushed open the screen door. Spicy aromas vibrated in the day’s accumulated heat. “He came by the house. Said you was giving him the eye, and rubbing up against him.”
Alice blinked rapidly, not denying the allegation. She wasn’t about to hurt Juanita by telling her that her husband was a liar and an attempted rapist.
Giving a small shrug, she said, “I’ve been thinking of going to LA, getting a job, maybe an education.” Then held her breath, praying that Juanita would nix the plan.
Instead, Juanita said, “Sounds like a good idea.”
Alice’s hands were shaking as she changed to her good outfit, a tight-topped red sun dress with a matching stole, and packed her possessions. Everything fitted in one large brown grocery sack.
Juanita, who was at the stove, fished a wad of bills from her apron pocket. “Here,” she said.
“Nita, I can’t take that, you’ve been saving it for the baby doctor.”
The sweat on Juanita’s face highlighted the dark splotches under the eyes as she made a sad smile. “A girl that looks like you needs a little cash to stay good in LA.”
Here was her admission that she knew Henry had lied.
After a long moment Alice reached for the money, hugging her sister. She could feel the hard knot of the unborn infant. “Nita, it’s going to be awful without you.”
“Alice, look, I got something you oughta use.” Reaching to the top shelf she came up with a partially used tube of vaginal foam. “Squeeze it into you.”
Alice was too miserable to explain what actually had transpired. And besides, what if Henry had pushed it in far enough to start a baby? She retreated to the bathroom.
• • •
In Los Angeles, Alice tried for waitress jobs. After three days and fourteen turndowns on the justifiable grounds that she had no identification to prove her age was indeed eighteen, she started riding the RTD busses to answer the ads listed under Help Wanted, Domestic.
Matrons examined her at their front doors, not allowing her across their threshold. “Oh, thank you for coming out, but the position’s already filled.”
The toll calls and fares to fancy suburbs, her slit of a hotel room, the chili dogs and Orange Juliuses that were her meals, rapidly depleted Juanita’s money.
On the morning that Alice set out to answer the lowest-paying job in the column, she hadn’t eaten in a day. The fumes and heat in the bus giddied and nauseated her. An old black woman wearing a shiny reddish wig plopped down next to her. Opening a paper sack, she said, “Have a donut.”
“I just ate a huge breakfast, but thanks.”
“I done did that big breakfast routine myself. But you looks like you’ll pass out. Go ahead.”
Faced with simple kindness, Alice broke down. Devouring a chocolate donut, she confided her problem.
“You ain’t going to get no kind of housework, girl. You too pretty. And they sees you’s very young. Now, they ain’t so fussy about Mexicans and us colored.” The kind, bloodshot eyes examined her. “Mmm, you is very light. But with all that pretty black hair, you could pass as Mex. Can you speak it?”
“Sure.” Who couldn’t, in her line of work? “But what about my blue eyes?”
The face wrinkled into a smile. “You ain’t got a thing to worry about. Talk that to them, and they’ll never look you in the eye.”
That morning Mrs. Young, mistress of the small, Mediterranean-style house in Brentwood, hired Alicia Lopez. Because of her lack of ingles, Alicia was underpaid and overworked.
Alicia had been with the Youngs two months on September 23, her fifteenth birthday. Since it fell on a weekend when the Youngs were out of town, she treated herself to a burger, fries and a Coke at Ship’s in Westwood. Everyone else in the big coffee shop was laughing with their companions or deep into a conversation. Alicia, wearing her new red mini and five-inch red heels, felt even more miserably lonely than she did on the job. Quite apart from this devastating loneliness, Alicia missed Juanita in a manner so deep it was a constant, arthritic ache in her bones. Most nights she cried herself to sleep.
When the tall, skinny, redheaded man sitting next to her smiled, she smiled back. He had a class look, and she dec
ided, correctly it soon turned out, that he was a college man from nearby UCLA. She pursed her lips around the straw.
“You don’t look like you’re enjoying that hamburger,” he said.
She glanced down at the almost untouched bun. “I guess I don’t have much appetite today,” she said, discarding the Spanish intonations she put on with the Youngs. “But the food here’s terrific.”
“For hamburgers,” he said authoritatively, “Tommy’s is the tops.”
“Tommy’s?”
“You’ve never been there?”
“I’ve only been in LA two months,” she admitted softly.
“Where are you from?”
After a long moment, she said, “El Paso.” She had been reading about Texas in the National Geographic, which the following month would be in Dr. Young’s waiting room.
“I’m Barry Cordiner,” he said.
Another slight pause, and then she said, “Alicia Lopez.”
Intuitively she accepted that disclosing the truth of her childhood would prompt him to pick up his check and leave her to her icy loneliness. Besides, hadn’t she left Alice Hollister and the sickening smells of over-ripe crops far behind? Besides, she already liked this college man with the freckles and curly red hair.
He took her to see Room at the Top at the Bruin. He arranged to dine with her on chili-burgers at Tommy’s the following night, which she had off since the Youngs were away. When he kissed her goodnight, she felt all warm and happy. Was this love?
• • •
On her wedding night she lay awake, the lusty whir of the air conditioner drowning out the gentle, regular breathing of her sleeping spouse. She knew she should feel guilty and rotten about deceiving him—but what choice had there been? He had led her from that awful, lonely pit, and she could not risk being thrust back there.
I’ll make it up to him, she thought lovingly as she touched his bony ankle with her toe. She had already considered him immensely rich and knowledgeable, an “almost” lawyer who wrote wonderful stories, a creature so far superior to her that it was impossible to ever bridge the gap. And today she had learned that his family owned Magnum Pictures! Magnum, where they made so many of those double bills she’d seen in fleabag theaters.
Thinking of his sister and cousins, she sighed. Only that large blond one, Hap he was called, had looked at her with any degree of warmth. The others had been snooty and superior. Hap, she thought. What a funny name.
Then she reached her arms around Barry’s thin body. His even breathing continued.
You’ll never be sorry you married me, she thought fiercely. I promise that you’ll never be sorry.
Alicia Cordiner was making a sacred vow. She was giving her husband her loyalty, which was boundless.
4
As Barry turned onto his mist-shrouded block, a jet roared overhead. This tract of modest bungalows, identical except for their gingerbread and clapboard trim, lay directly on the flight path into Los Angeles Airport.
He pulled into his driveway, parking behind his father’s eleven-year-old Onyx sedan. Alicia slipped her comb in her purse. When they had entered the Los Angeles sprawl, she had turned on the interior lights and ever since had been combing and recombing her hair, wiping away pale lipstick to reapply it, attempting to finger-press the creases from the red fabric of that horrendous dress. Her jitters had heightened Barry’s own uptightness about the coming encounter. Gripping the steering wheel, he wished that he’d been flush enough to take her shopping in Vegas, buy her a sweater and skirt and thus tame her exuberant beauty. By free association, he saw an image of Beth, so cool and conventional, the classic coed. Bethie, he thought. Thank God she’ll have already broken the news.
Alicia intuitively caught the drift of his thoughts. “Barry, will your sister be home?”
“Sundays she usually is. She lives at the AEPhi house.”
“Is she at UCLA, too?”
“No, USC.” He didn’t elaborate that his Uncle Desmond was paying his twin’s tuition at the private campus as well as her sorority dues. Drawing a deep breath, he touched Alicia’s arm. “Let’s go in,” he said.
Since there was no vestibule, they stepped directly into the living room. Beyond the pair of wing chairs and couch—all covered with the same worn maroon early American pattern—was the dining ell. Tim and Clara Cordiner sat opposite each other.
Clara’s hair, dyed an uncertain shade between red and brown, had been brushed back rather than carefully ratted into a bouffant, and she wore a navy housedress. Tim had on his old blue tee shirt with the bleach fade.
As his parents looked up questioningly, Barry’s stomach plummeted. They don’t know.
“Where’s Beth?” he asked stupidly.
“She stayed over at Uncle Frank and Aunt Lily’s,” Clara replied in that unfortunately pitched, nasal voice. “Dear, if you’re not coming home, I do wish you’d call. I was awake nearly all night listening for you. Saturday morning I found Beth’s note saying she was off to Las Vegas with you and the others.”
Tim’s eyes were going up and down Alicia’s curves. “Aren’t you going to introduce us to your friend?”
Barry grasped Alicia’s fingers. “Sh-she’s quite a bit more than a f-friend,” he stammered. “Mom, Dad—this is Alicia, my wife. We were married yesterday in Las Vegas.”
He might just as well have jabbed them with one of those electric cattle prods being used by Mississippi sheriffs against civil rights workers. Tim’s leer was replaced by slack-jawed surprise. Clara’s loud gasp faded into a drawn-out moan and her veined hand went to her chest. Since her coronary she had been preoccupied with the flurries and splutters of her unreliable heart.
Alicia broke the silence. “I’m very happy to meet you, Mr. Cordiner, Mrs. Cordiner,” she said softly.
Tim pushed to his feet. This being Sunday, he hadn’t shaved; his gray-blond hair had receded to the back of his pate, his belly bulged out in his faded tee shirt. Yet his height and the breadth of shoulders made him an impressive physical specimen, and now, in his anger, he was downright intimidating. “The hell you say,” he growled.
“Married?” Clara whispered, the tendons of her thin neck straining. “You’ve never mentioned her. How long have you known her?”
“A month,” Barry exaggerated.
“Alicia? What’s her other name?” Clara addressed Barry, as if Alicia were a mute.
Alicia said, “Cordiner. But it was Lopez.” Her voice held a note of defiant humor, but the hand that Barry held was shaking.
Clara went gray. Tim moved around the table to pat her thin shoulders with awkward tenderness.
Barry asked, “Aren’t you going to say anything?”
“It seems to me you’ve said it all, buster!”
“Please, Tim. . . .” Clara murmured warningly. She knew that the Cordiner temper was at its most unregulatable in her husband. When the twins were nine, he had gotten into a fight with another grip, knocking him cold. The man had died on the way to the Magnum infirmary. It had taken all of Desmond Cordiner’s considerable influence downtown to get his brother off without a prison term.
“Please what?” Tim bawled. “He barges in with some wetback chippy and tells us he’s married to her. What the hell does he expect us to say?”
Barry had inherited a small share of the family temper, and at this moment, brown eyes glaring, thin shoulders hunched, the normally invisible resemblance between him and his father showed. “Something along the lines of good wishes and congratulations.”
“For that, buster, you have to get married properly!”
“Like you and Mom did?”
A rumble came from Tim’s chest as he took a step toward his son.
Clara’s hand pressed tighter against her flat bosom. “Please don’t the two of you start again.”
“What do you mean, again?” Tim demanded. “When has this snotnose ever brought home a pachuco tramp that he’s married to?”
“Come on, Alicia,” Bar
ry said tightly. “We’re getting out of here.”
The Cordiners’ rejection filled Alicia with desolation, yet she said placatingly, “Barry, we took your folks by surprise.”
“You!” Tim turned on her. “If you’re expecting a free ride here, just forget it. We aren’t the millionaire Cordiners, we’re just plain, ordinary people.” He lowered his head like a bull at Barry. “And as for you, if you’re so damn grown-up, you don’t need any more bucks from me.”
“I work at the Student Union,” Barry said.
“That money goes on books and gas. You pay your own room and board and we’ll see how long you keep on with that fancy education of yours.”
“Tim, he’s got to finish!” Clara cried.
“Clara, you keep out of this. You’ve spoiled him long enough. It’s time Mr. Bigshot Married Man here learned what life’s all about.”
Barry’s nails dug into Alicia’s hand. “At least I know it’s not about picking up women in bars and passing out in their beds!”
“You little turd!” Tim shouted at the top of his lungs. “Get the fuck out of my house, and take your Tijuana hooker with you!”
“Tim,” Clara whimpered. “Tim, please. . . .”
Barry didn’t hear the rest. Grabbing Alicia’s upper arm, he propelled her down the short, unlit corridor and into his bedroom, where he yanked down the cordovan leather suitcase that had been a birthday gift from his Aunt Lily and Uncle Frank and began throwing in clothes. Alicia sat on the desk chair, her shaking hands clasped in her lap. The scene had destroyed what little there was of her self-esteem, yet she couldn’t repress a ripple of sympathy for Tim. Not Clara—she’d never liked or respected whiners. But there had been something infinitely pathetic about the infuriated bull of a man in his old tee shirt. She wanted to urge Barry to go in and make up with his dad, but in Alice Hollister’s world it was infra dig as well as downright dangerous to come between two furious men. She began folding the clothes that Barry had tossed into the suitcase.
The pencil jar jumped on the desk as the front door slammed.
“There goes Dad,” Barry said, his brown eyes glittering with tears.
Dreams Are Not Enough Page 4