Hard Red Spring (16 page)

“No hope?” Dorie asked too hastily, her mouth full. “But I thought the fire was supposed to be redemptive. Destructive, yes, but also redemptive.”

“Redemptive?” Naomi flipped through Dorie's copy. “I know it's been a while since I read it, but I certainly don't recall anything like that.”

“Don't mind Dorie,” Marcella said. “I'm sure you're right. I'm sure everyone burned to a hopeless crisp at the end. She's just in love.”

Dorie straightened, panic rising in her chest like a caged bird, flapping.

“With an Indian!” Marcella added, flashing her teeth.

Dorie finished her wine. Marcella always said appalling things to
entertain herself. At least, in the past, these pronouncements were both shocking and funny. But these days, she mostly laughed alone. Naomi, perplexed, gave up on the book and focused her attention on her sandwich. She frowned, the corners of her mouth stained yellow with mustard, like a child's. The unpleasant sound of chewing overtook the table, making Dorie self-conscious.

“Oh my, I'm so sorry, we haven't even offered you a glass of wine!” Dorie reached for the bottle.

Naomi raised a cool, stiff hand. “No,
thank you
.”

Marcella took hers up and sipped through her grin. At that moment, Dorie realized that Naomi was not a nun, but a Protestant missionary. And she realized that Marcella had known all along.

Emelda ignored her steak, being too preoccupied with the round, crusty roll on her plate. Holding this roll in her hand, she turned it over and over, studying it.

“If someone wants to marry an Indian, that's none of my business,” Marcella said. “That's their choice. But what happens after that?” She pointed directly to Emelda now, the girl's pale eyes flashing like a distress beacon. Dorie refilled her glass, steeling herself. “What happens in three generations when a nice white American missionary comes to Guatemala and falls in love with a dashing Hispanic man?”

“Are we done with
Burning Hearts
? Is this another book?” Naomi asked.

“What happens when they have their first baby and it comes out brown? It happened to a Fruit family six years ago. A successful Fruit man. His baby came out so dark, no one could believe it was theirs. So dark that either they both had Indian blood and didn't know, or she was cheating on him with a laborer. In this country, which is more plausible? And now the States are on the same course. With this Brown decision. Brown! Ha! In a century, the whole world will be brown.”

The Indian girl took the first bite of her roll. She kept her blue eyes down.

“Marcella, we know.” Dorie tried in vain. Since her life-threatening miscarriage, Marcella had begun to say aloud what they all were thinking. Yes, this may be the last time she ever saw her best friend and, horribly, Dorie was happy for it.

“They fired him, of course, for some small thing a tasteful amount of time after. Ruined the family. It wasn't their fault, they had no idea. We're going to suffer the effects of this revolution for a hundred years, I'm telling you now. Don't worry, it won't affect you, of course,” she said to Naomi. “As long as you don't fall in love down here.”

“I came to work in the government's literacy program,” Naomi clarified, offended.

Quickly finishing her sandwich, Naomi left, claiming to be late for “class.” Another government idea, where Indian women made traditional crafts to sell to tourists. She thanked Dorie and Marcella for the lovely lunch. “You really should come to Sunday service sometime. It's a shame you don't have a church down here. Are you saved?” Naomi looked at Dorie when she asked this.

“Saved from what?” Marcella asked.

“My church isn't far from the embassy. You really should stop by, just to say hi. And even if you've never considered it before, well”—and here she patted Dorie's hand in a baffling display of sympathy—“we all need a new start at least once in life.”

Naomi then pulled her hat back on her head and left, weaving around the empty tables in her pointed coolie hat, to the patio exit and down the street, like a child's top let loose upon the city.

—

Emelda actually was a maid, though she was not Dorie's maid. The girl had practically been thrust upon Dorie minutes before she left for lunch, by Jim, her husband. How funny, for all his responsibilities in Guatemala, all the important work he did, the American ambassador also happily served as a maid service for United Fruit. It happened often enough, Dorie knew. A Fruit man, out on assignment in the highlands, would come across some young barefoot Indian girl one-third his age and decide to hire her as his “maid” back in the States. Jim, of course, was vital in securing these girls an uncomplicated passage. Before Arbenz, McCarthy, and the Communist takeover of Guatemala, it had been much easier to get papers. Now, Jim said, it was almost impossible. He had never before involved Dorie. It seemed this Emelda would be going to the United States illegally and Jim enlisted Dorie to take her out, buy her clothes, and try to make her look like less of an Indian.

“Definitely play up her eyes, they're her best bet at passing.”

“What is this,
Pygmalion
?”

“Please, Dorie. This is important,” he had said. “You've no idea how important.”

“You're right, I've no idea how important. Why don't you tell me, Jim?”

In response, he had handed her money for shopping.

Dorie agreed because she preferred to agree with him rather than endure his cool and total displeasure. She had two choices in this marriage: to be his cherished child or his enemy. He rarely deemed anything “important” to
her, though when he did, she was often surprised by it. Illegal maids, newspaper stories, some minor Honduran official.

“This is just your sort of thing,” Jim had said, bafflingly. Dorie hated the city, the whitewashed half-rot, the Indians squatting shamelessly in the streets. She hated the pathetic imitations of American goods in the shops, the crippled beggars and half-dead dogs trailing her with hopeful eyes. Marcella was the shopper, moving about the city, walking around rain-swollen trash, and declaring the children picking through it “adorable.”

“I'm not canceling lunch. I'm almost late already, Jim.”

“That's fine. Just take her along.”

“Can Marcella help?”

“Of course,” Jim said, “but I will trust you two to be absolutely discreet.”

“Yes, of course, bringing a barefoot Indian girl into the nicest restaurant in the city for a book discussion, I'm sure, will go completely unnoticed.”

“Just tell people she's your maid,” he said, kissing her lightly on the white line where her golden hair parted down the middle. “It's natural enough.”

—

Dorie now wondered who the lucky Fruit man was. Marcella had a guess—one of the big suits from Boston who'd been sent in to handle the messier land disputes. Tomás had been helping him in the highlands all week.

“Why else would they go to so much trouble? He has to be high up.”

They both stared across their uncleared lunches at the girl, who had not touched her wine or her steak. Eating her fourth roll, she pitched forward in the café chair, smiling and chewing and not caring about the mess she made with the crumbs. Sitting exactly how Dorie would be sitting at the moment, if she had the freedom to. No one paid attention to Indians, they had no audience, but the whole world, it seemed, was watching Dorie, and she had to be careful.

—

The first thing to get, Dorie and Marcella agreed, was shoes. Of course, the shoe store they chose was not one where either of them would shop, but it struck Dorie as completely adequate for a first pair of high heels.

“I'm sorry.” A harried Hispanic clerk emerged from a fortress of shoe boxes. “I'm sorry,” he said again. He pointed to the standardized sign hanging in all the shops, of a bare foot smote by a red
X
. Since the passing of the discrimination laws, the
NO INDIANS
signs in all the shops had been replaced by this one, to the same effect. The man continued, in Spanish, to explain, while pointing repeatedly at Emelda's bare feet.

Every time he pointed, the girl's face darkened into an angry bruise. She pressed her stare, like two ice cubes, on the clerk and said, in English, “We understand the sign, señor, but how do you expect someone like me, who has lost her shoes, to be able to replace them if she can't go into a shoe store? You, obviously, have no business sense at all.”

No one said anything for a moment—an Indian who speaks English?

“Christ,” Marcella whispered to Dorie. “For a maid and a shoe clerk, these two are both quite uppity.”

“She speaks English? She understood our lunch conversation?” Dorie blanched, recalling her joke about reparations and Communists. What else had she said? Beyond simple embarrassment, she feared she may have made fun of Jim during lunch. She sometimes did.

“She should be your maid,” Marcella said, obviously unconcerned about this revelation. “Can't ever find a girl who speaks English that well.”

What, Dorie wondered, would she do if she had a maid? What would she do if no laundry, cooking, or dishes awaited her? She'd just sit around all day waiting for
him
to call. She suspected she'd start drinking as much as Marcella, inventing betrayals, and slapping the girl because there was nothing else to do. Anyway, she could not help but see a maid as a spy, reporting to Jim. Though she knew Jim would never believe an Indian, and surely not over her. She had to stop being so paranoid.

Emelda and the clerk continued to argue, in Spanish now, since the clerk didn't understand English beyond the phrase “I'm sorry.” Outside, a few heavy raindrops knocked on the windows.

“Take off your shoes,” Marcella told Dorie.

“Why?” Dorie asked, kicking them off.

Marcella interrupted the argument, handing over Dorie's pumps. “Here, Emelda, put these on. Now.” She turned to the stunned clerk and delivered the line that could bring any argument to an end. “If you want to send the wife of the American ambassador into the rain for not having shoes, you can do your best.”

No response. But when she repeated herself in Spanish, the clerk relented. Emelda took Dorie's shoes, ran her hands over them, then inside the damp, sour interiors, before wedging them on her own feet. After taking two steps, her ankle twisted to the side. She fell down, laughed, and immediately got up again.

“How old do you think she is?” Dorie asked. Emelda, in a new pair of heels that fit her wide feet more properly, walked circles around the store, just barely holding herself together.

Marcella shrugged. “Fifteen? Why don't you ask her?”

But Dorie did not ask because she suspected she might be even younger. This whole venture made her uneasy, Jim asking her to whore up this child for some old banana baron. She imagined two desiccated, liver-spotted hands groping at the girl. It was hard, sometimes, not to see Jim in this way. Dorie had been young, impressed with his wealth and power. He was twenty-three years older than her.

Completing her second circle, Emelda began to admire herself in the tilted three-way mirror. She stepped into its alcove and saw herself projected back and forth between the two sides.

“Where should we go next?” Marcella asked. “What kind of clothes?”

“I guess it depends on where she's going. Emelda,” she called. “Do you know where you're going in the U.S.?”

Emelda shook her head fearfully.

“We know,” Dorie coached, “that you're going where you're not supposed to. If you don't have the right clothes, you'll stick out.”

Panic tugged the girl's face into many expressions at once. What would Jim have said to make her so afraid? Probably that she would go to jail if she told anyone about her new life. Just threaten the girl, Dorie thought, until she does what you want, just rolls onto her back and accepts the elderly American banana baron, telling herself all along how lucky she is.

“You can trust us,” Dorie said.

“Miami,” Emelda practically shouted, with her eyes squeezed shut. “Please don't tell anyone I told you.”

“Okay, well, you could have just said Florida, but fine.” She paused. “I guess she'll need some skirts and blouses, some light dresses. Maybe we'll find some good, cheap perfume.”

Emelda, less fearful now, turned around and around in front of the mirrors.

“She's just going to be a maid,” Marcella said in a low voice. “It's not like she'll be going to clubs and galas. Who knows if she'll ever even leave the man's house?”

As depressing as it was, Dorie agreed. Was this what it was like to have a child? she wondered. A daughter? Dressing a girl as a cheaper version of herself? She instinctively raised her hand to touch her stomach, but caught herself.

“Should we cut her hair?” Marcella asked. “With those eyes and short hair, she'd look Greek, maybe.”

They watched Emelda turning, faster and faster, her body amplified in the mirrors that reflected each other infinitely in a long line. Her hair, half up in its black, braided crown and half down, spilled to her waist. It flared as she spun, like a skirt, catching the sallow light of the store beautifully.

“I'm not doing a thing to that hair,” Dorie said. “It's gorgeous. The man can't want it gone. I can't imagine him wanting it gone. The eyes are enough. I've never seen an Indian with eyes
that
blue. Have you?” It was a phenomenon rare enough to take her aback when she saw it, though in retrospect she knew she should not be surprised, considering Guatemala's history.

“No. I've seen gray, hazel, dark blue, but nothing like this. I asked her where she got them, and she said from her grandmother. I'm guessing she really got them from a German coffee planter.”

Emelda was still spinning, verging on reckless, before she stopped abruptly and regarded hundreds of herself reflected in the two opposing mirrors. She stood straight in her garish Indian costume, like a line of soldiers at attention. And just when Dorie expected the girl to break into giggles and collapse onto the floor, Emelda became very serious. She clicked her heels together and saluted herself.