Hard Red Spring (19 page)

Jim danced marvelously, passionately. Their success required no effort on her part. He let her body fly, but could bring her back in with the slightest movement of his wrist. She'd never danced like this before, had never felt a man sweating so closely, or moving so confidently, powerfully. All the dancing she'd ever done had been wary and stilted, with boys.

Rather than spinning through the party, it seemed that the party was spinning around her. She was drunk for the first time in her life, and as the song built more and more harmonies around them, Jim and Tomás flung Marcella and Dorie back and forth between them with ease. The women, drunker than them, passed each other in bright, laughing blurs, sometimes touching hands.

When the band stopped on an unexpected beat, Dorie found herself paired with Tomás. She stood staring at his breathing chest, while the crowd clapped for the invisible band. Sweat traced down the middle of her back. She felt embarrassed at Tomás's hands still on her waist. She felt embarrassed to find a priest so sexy, sexier than her initial impression. But when she looked up to catch his eye, his meaning, he was staring over her shoulder, at the paper volcano. He had forgotten her completely, even as she panted in his arms.

“This,” he said to himself, “is not good. It's never good when a volcano stops smoking.” He looked down at her, but without a glint of interest or flirtation. “So, we've finally found a girl just as beautiful as Marcella.” He lifted her chin with his finger. “Wait. No, I can't believe it. This—” And she felt his finger touch the mole on her chin, below the corner of her uneasy smile. “Don't tell Marcella, but this”—he tapped again—“sets you a millimeter ahead of her.” He glanced again at the breathless volcano. “I give this double date an hour until it blows sky-high.”

—

They talked, danced, and drank for the rest of the night, in alternating, cozy pairs. Dorie met a number of Marcella's girlfriends, all Americans. Surprisingly, Marcella did not interact with any of the Hispanic women at the party. All these girlfriends claimed either Fruit or Radcliffe connections, or both. Many seemingly smart, single, and beautiful enough to have made a fourth for Jim. Why had Marcella chosen her?

Well into the night, Dorie found herself sitting in a corner with Tomás, while Jim and Marcella enjoyed some unheard conversation—probably about her—at a nearby table. Still reeling from drink, Dorie tried to recall the maneuvers that led to their pairing.

“What are you studying at Radcliffe, Dolores?”

Panic must have seized her face, not only for the terrible urge to lie, but also for the prospect of lying to a priest.

Seeing her distress, seeing everything in that moment, Tomás revised his question. “What would you
like
to study at Radcliffe?”

She smiled in relief. “I'm not sure. I don't even know all the subjects there are to study,” she admitted with drunk gratitude. She wanted to explain the frustrating sense of a world of happiness all around that she could not even daydream about, let alone name. Just a week ago, she had picked up in casual conversation with Marcella that people could study parties like this. Sociology, it was called.

“Knowing that you don't know is the first step to wisdom,” he said with a nod.

“What was your favorite subject in school?” She wondered if this was a dumb question. Did they study more than one subject at Weston? Or, more likely, he believed God to encompass all subjects. She prepared herself for some strange Jesuit answer.

“Hope,” he answered simply, with a dazzling, very unpriestly smile that sent his nose at a funny angle.

“C'mon, Dorie. Let's go to the ladies'.” Marcella pulled her out of her chair.

In the restroom mirror, Marcella retraced her mouth with a pencil, while Dorie watched. When their eyes met in the glass, Marcella spun away, reaching for her zipper.

“Hey, I have an idea! Let's switch dresses!”

“What?”

“You wear this.” Marcella had already wiggled out of one shoulder strap of her dress. “And I'll wear yours.”

“Why?”

“Tomás has been giving me grief all night, saying I didn't warn you about the temperature on purpose.”

“But I'm taller than you. I don't think we wear the same size.”

“You're a bit taller, but I'm a bit bustier. I bet you. I bet that I'm just the same amount rounder as you are taller.” By now she'd peeled her pink satin dress down to her waist like a skinned animal. “Jim likes you,” she teased. “He called you refreshing!”

—

Marcella was right. Their small differences in frame canceled each other out. Giddily, they returned to the table to the men's applause. With this new perspective, Dorie saw how terribly she must have stood out, to provoke Tomás's pity. Looking just like a typist, Marcella took the seat next to Tomás with a poise that suggested she'd be taking his dictation. Dorie, feeling looser and freer, floated back to her date. Her retrospective embarrassment proved fleeting, as she felt herself drawing the gaze of the entire party with her reentry.

The rest of the night fell into the more familiar dynamics of a double date. Jim spoke to Dorie almost exclusively of his job with the Education Department of Fruit. He talked about creating banana meatloaf recipes for home-ec classes—recipes she had to memorize in school!—and said funny things like, “The trouble with bananas is that everyone loves them, but no one takes them seriously.” Later in the night, he escorted her home in a dark cab and whispered theories on the Garden of Eden. How scholars were beginning to believe that Eve did not tempt Adam with an apple, but with a banana.

“I hope you get your gray dress back,” Jim told her, as a goodbye.

“You don't like this one?” She patted the silken fabric beneath her coat.

“I like you. I like that you don't act or dress like a girl as beautiful as you are. I told Marcella that, and immediately she switched dresses.”

Dorie had no idea what to say to this.

“She can't help it,” Jim said. “She always has to complicate things, to entertain herself. To rile me. Don't take it personally. She adores you. We all do.”

Jim did not seem prohibitively old to Dorie, merely for the fact that she did not know many young men in those days. The ones she did know, who weren't fighting, struck her as weak or broken in some way. And the ones who came home for leave seemed marked for death. Jim gave the impression of being too important to be wasted in battle. And with him, she felt for the
first time above it all, too. For the first time since her childhood, several hours passed without a single mention of the war.

~~~~~

“I'm pregnant, Tomás.” She'd been saying it over and over to herself for a week, and to say it aloud seemed, finally, to make it real.

“But this is wonderful, Dorie,” he had said, standing in the doorway, already late for his meeting with Jim.

“It is?” she cried, confusing both of them.

“Yes.” He tried to hide injury by maintaining his smile. “I think it was inevitable with us, don't you?”

She had never been pregnant before, though she had stopped taking precautions in her marriage long ago. She and Jim had tried to conceive for a few years, but had given up even talking about it. When Dorie suggested a doctor, Jim decreed that they should wait, anyway, because Guatemala was no place to raise a child. This became the explanation he offered readily to their families, friends, and colleagues. Without any medical consultation, Dorie wasn't sure if the problem lay with her or Jim. Now she knew. And, in retrospect, she suspected Jim knew all along.

“I do,” she said. She smiled, a watery, wavering smile, to reassure Tomás.

“Good, then we're on the same page. Let's meet up tomorrow, out in the city for lunch. We'll talk more then, we'll make a plan. But now I have to go.” He opened the door. “Jim knows I'm in the building, so I can't be late.”

“Will we talk more about Brazil?” she asked, her heart beating in her throat.

“That's what you want?”

“It is, Tomás. It's all I've wanted for the past year. Will you find me a book about Brazil?”

They could just disappear in the night. In Brazil, Tomás could still work for Fruit. Going home to the States was too scandalous to consider. No matter what Marcella insisted, Americans, even the U.S. Census Bureau, considered Hispanics a different race.

“Of course, Dorie.”

And just like that, Dorie was transformed. Everything around her—the apartment, the wasted city below, the savage, guilt-ridden lunches with Marcella, the Communists—now took on a conspiratorial shine. Suddenly she had everything, and her old life, though she was forced to inhabit it for a little while longer, no longer mattered.

—

Naomi had set up Dorie with a doctor. A white doctor with no connections to the embassy or Fruit families—a French gynecologist who'd come to Guatemala to make it easier for the lowest classes to breed safely. Another Communist program: breeding more Communists. But Dorie had been desperate, had asked Naomi in the imports store for help, assuring her new friend that she merely did not want to worry her important husband unnecessarily with some small problem. But desperation turned to humiliation, as Dorie sat in the damp waiting room with the obscenely pregnant, barefoot, and distressed Indian women all staring at her in amazement. At least she didn't have to pay for the doctor. Jim would not have parted with such a sum without questions.

She emerged an hour later with the confirmation she had been hoping for and dreading. She'd never particularly wanted children. At least, with her unhappy marriage, Dorie maintained a kind of freedom. Too busy to smother or control her, Jim allowed her to do what she pleased with her time. A baby would have ruined that, would have provoked his oppressive concern. But now this baby could secure more important freedoms than reading and shopping.

Naomi never followed up. At first Dorie believed her lie convincing, but after that strange “new start” comment at lunch, she guessed Naomi had seen this all before. Surely Dorie wasn't the first wealthy woman to come to her for help. She felt grateful now that lunch hadn't worked out. What would be the point of a new friend, anyway, now that she was leaving?

As Dorie dressed for the second time that day, she wondered how getting pregnant could be so easy for some and so difficult for others. Almost two years ago, Marcella had lost a baby she had desperately wanted, lost it the night Arbenz signed the land expropriation law. She had been four months along. The doctor asked her all about the previous few days: if she drank any lukewarm coffee at a restaurant, if she had eaten any fresh fruit. She had answered yes to both of those questions.

Since then, Marcella had slowly unraveled with drink. Any recognizable thread that Dorie tried to grasp and nurture came free in her hands. And though Tomás never said so himself, Dorie knew he felt Marcella slipping irrevocably away as well.

—

In the weeks after the United Fruit Christmas party, Marcella and Tomás wove an enchanting web around Dorie. Dorie had been impressed by Jim, but she'd really fallen in love with Tomás and Marcella that night. Their
marriage seemed to be everything Dorie wanted. She had mistaken their dynamic for hers and Jim's—an understandable mistake when nearly their entire courtship took place across some table from them. Powerful, playful, kind, stern, principled, and easygoing, Jim was everything and nothing all at once. Dorie saw what she needed in him, assuming that Jim, like Tomás, wanted an educated wife. They were so close, how could they not agree? Only a week after Dorie and Jim married did she learn he held strong beliefs on the subject.

“Why do you want to take classes, Dorie? Why do you think I'd pay for those?”

“Marcella takes classes.”

“And Marcella is the unhappiest girl I know. She's getting all this education and can't do anything with it but lose arguments with Tomás. What kind of job can she get? Only a typing pool would ever take her. Or a school. Can you imagine yourself or Marcella with a classroom of eight-year-olds? There's no point other than frustration.”

Dorie never considered Marcella's unhappiness back then, but she surely understood now what Jim meant. All her thwarted hopes had been diverted into the imagined, unrestricted life of a male child. But complications from the miscarriage had left her sterile, and since then, she'd grown indifferent to everything and everyone around her.

“Now, if the world was a different place, I'd be behind you all the way, Dorie. I'd be the first one to sign you up for classes. Believe me.”

In the end, despite her best efforts, her father's prediction came true: Dorie did not need an education to escape mediocrity, for she'd captured a bigger fish than he could ever hope for, with her angelic good looks.

A pounding on the apartment door startled Dorie out of this memory. She opened it, hoping irrationally for Tomás, but was surprised by a young Hispanic soldier. Gilberto, recently hired by Jim. The grave teenager gripped his holstered gun in one hand and a woman in the other. It took Dorie a moment to recognize Emelda.

“What have you done to her?” Dorie gasped, grabbing the girl and pulling her into the apartment.

Gilberto replied by thrusting a note into her hand. A note from Jim downstairs:

The clothes weren't enough. Gilberto said he'd cut hair in the military, but I should have known what would happen. Can you fix it?

Emelda, still bursting with excitement, obviously had yet to look into a mirror. She smiled and smiled beneath the ragged fringe of what was left of her beautiful black hair. A soldier's cut.