Vida (10 page)

I met her at my boyfriend’s house, a small pink stucco cube in El Portal. He’s Hungarian and has a cluster of compatriots that get together at his place for weekly barbecues in the backyard. I was one of the newer girlfriends and Vida had been with her guy, Sacha, for at least a year or two. But when she showed up she always had those same skittish eyes, like a stray cat who knows it’s about to be chased off. She hardly spoke to anyone. It was her man who did the talking with a fixed hand on Vida’s waist, and you’d almost
think she was his prisoner if it wasn’t for the way she always dipped her mouth into the curve of his neck and marked him with kisses. Sacha never broke away from her except to hover around the grill with the other Hungarians, poke the steaks, and talk in their language about the old days in Veszprém.

I didn’t mind those barbecues. The boyfriend and I were doing well at the six-month mark, and I had beaten out the other two girls he was sleeping with when I met him: a Mexican and a Nicaraguan. Didn’t take a genius to see that the boyfriend and his friends had a thing for girls with a tan but I didn’t care. I’d been living in Florida for three years already and only had a few ex-boyfriends to show for it. No female friends, and a community college teaching job that always left me fearing for the future of our youth.

Vida raised an eyebrow at me the first time she heard I was Colombian. The boyfriend said it when he introduced us, as if that’s all we needed to become like sisters. I had to clarify that I was U.S.–born, it was my parents who were true Colombians, and Vida accepted that, even appreciated that I took the time to authenticate myself to her. She found my Spanish amusing. Said I talked like it was the seventies. That’s the Spanish my parents left with, I told her, the Spanish I learned in our house mixed with the telenovela talk I picked up on Telemundo. The other girlfriends, a Russian
girl named Irina and two Hungarian sisters named Valeska and Zora, mostly kept to themselves. That left Vida and me to take refuge in each other during those long afternoons around the picnic table.

Vida didn’t work officially. I knew she was illegal like my boyfriend, most of his friends, and about half of Miami. She was pretty: lean with high hips, dollar green eyes, and bouncy black hair. I didn’t see why she couldn’t get a job in a restaurant or a store. She told me she cleaned houses sometimes, even offered to clean mine for cheap. She said she did makeup nice, too, and if I had a party to go to I should give her a call. I asked her where she learned and she got a faraway look in her eyes and said, “I used to do pageants.”

I told her my mom was a beauty queen in her former life. She was a plain Bogotá nerd till some guy pulled her off the street and into a pageant and she ended up a Miss Colombia finalist. The following year, she married my father and moved to Queens and later to New Jersey, where she traded in her tacones altos for driving shoes. Vida seemed to be doing me the favor of listening and when I was through she only asked me where New Jersey was in relation to Florida.

One day, Vida moved past the usual light talk about the weather and food and asked me flat out what I was doing with my boyfriend.

“I don’t see you with him,” she said with such authority that I felt childish, which was absurd since I was five years older.

“I just like him,” I told her, which was true. The boyfriend and I met at the gym where he worked out aging divorcees, sometimes sleeping with them to lift their spirits. He admitted that to me on our first date. We didn’t have much else in common—that was no secret. And logistically it wasn’t ideal because the boyfriend was in a green-card marriage to a Cuban girl that cost him ten thousand, of which he still owed five.

He was a boyfriend for the shadows, somebody my parents didn’t know existed. A boyfriend I spent nearly every night with but with whom I didn’t envision any other life. He drove me to the doctor when I had the flu. Took me to the movies and let me pick them. Once I found a text message on his phone from a woman named Claudine, inviting him over for a Parisian lunchtime superfuck, and something in me split, though I never mentioned it.

Vida asked me if I still believed in love. Asked me as if it was something like Papá Noel or El Coco, an imaginary creature sent to taunt us as kids and inspire fantasies. I shook my head and it hurt my heart a little to do so.

“Me neither,” she said with a pride that I wanted for myself.

The boyfriend worked days at the gym but ran a little side business at night as a private driver. When they wanted to get fucked-up on South Beach, the clients called and he’d drive them around in their own car. The boyfriend and Sacha were partners and they rotated jobs, but on some nights they’d both get stuck working. On one such night the boyfriend suggested I hang out with Vida. Told me she was lonely, had no friends, and couldn’t drive herself anywhere. I picked her up at her apartment complex, which I’d never been to because she and Sacha always met us when we went out together.

The apartment was a shoddy place on upper Collins near the banged-up motels and right off of drug dealer’s row. She was sitting on the front steps smoking a cigarette when I drove up, her hair pulled into a ponytail, wearing jeans and a pink blouse. Almost looking like a private school girl who got lost in the wrong neighborhood.

I thought we’d go for a drink or maybe get dinner, but Vida only wanted to go to the beach, even started begging me to take her there like I was her mother or something. We bought some medianoches at a little Cuban place and parked just before Haulover Beach. Though clouds covered the moon and the shore was dim with night, Vida pulled off her sandals and ran toward the water, went in up to her knees and splashed around in the foam. I sat on the sand and watched her lose herself, shouting things at the clouds.
When she came back to my side on the sand, she ripped into her sandwich and told me she still couldn’t grasp the immensity of the ocean, that until last year she’d only seen it on film and on the plane ride over.

“I thought you’ve been here for years already,” I told her. Which was true. She’d told me she came to Miami at twenty-one and I knew she was already twenty-three.

“That’s true,” she said, rubbing the sand off her ankles with her free hand. “But they didn’t let me out of the house the first year.”

“What house?”

“Where I was working.”

I imagined a horrible employer. A family who hired her as a muchacha. I saw tons of young girls in white maid’s uniforms all over Miami, pushing strollers at the park and grocery carts at the supermarket. Maybe she had a boss who locked her away. I’d heard of that. My mom’s muchacha was full of terror stories.

Vida faced me but all I saw was the outline of her hair and the car lights flashing in the distance behind her.

“Una casa de sitas.”

If my second-generation Spanish was correct, she said a brothel. A place where they take appointments with women. I didn’t know how else to say it, so I asked her as plainly as I
could what she was doing there. And just like that she said they’d made her a puta.

She pulled her hair out of its tie and wrapped it back up again.

“You think differently of me now, don’t you, Sabina?”

“No, of course not.”

“I was a nice girl once. Nice family. Everything.”

There were so many things I wanted to ask her. Did her family know? Did Sacha know? How did she end up in there and how did she get out? How long did she stay?

“I’m so sorry,” I said, like an idiot.

We started talking about other things. She told me that Sacha agreed to pay for her to go to beauty school to learn how to do hair and nails and that he knew a Polish lady in Aventura who would give her a job off the books. Her eyes shone as she told me that her dream was to open her own salon one day.

On the walk back to my car she told me it was her hairdresser who brought her over to Miami. A transvestite named Fito who always did her hair and makeup for the beauty pageants gratis because he said Vida was the best investment in her town, Usme. He told her family he had contacts in Miami and would get Vida auditions at all the Spanish networks so she could be a presentadora on Sábado Gigante or something.

“And your parents let you go?” I was so used to the overprotective pair I’d been dealt, unable to imagine how they could just send her off.

“Oh, my mother had me drinking water from the Flower of Jerusalem. It was supposed to bless me and send me on a journey, so when Fito offered to pay for my ticket, Mami thought it was the work of God.”

I had to ask. Flower of Jerusalem?

“She kept it in a glass bowl next to the television and we had to feed it fresh river water every week or it would curse us. It was only when I went to an American grocery store for the first time that I realized I’d been praying all my life to a shiitake mushroom.”

I was laughing but Vida just shrugged it off and went on with her story. Said that when she and Fito landed at Miami International he disappeared, and some other guys ushered her into a car, stuck a gun into her stomach, and informed her that Fito had sold her for seven thousand dollars that she had to pay off starting now.

I couldn’t sleep that night. The boyfriend returned from work exhausted, rolled around next to me, pulled the blankets off of me, pulled me close, trying to initiate more but I feigned indigestion. I couldn’t stand the night or his touch. I’d sworn
myself to silence, not wanting to betray Vida’s confession. If I told the boyfriend, he would tell Sacha, who I was certain would then reject her, since I’d known many a man who loved to hold a girl’s past against her.

The boyfriend grew up in a two-room house on a dusty patch of land with chickens that became dinner. His father left his mom when she was pregnant with him and she never remarried. They had a cat that was constantly pregnant, but the kittens always disappeared within days of their birth. When the boyfriend was seven he caught his mother drowning them in a bucket, something that still caused him nightmares. When he took me to the winter carnival that year, we spotted a cat stranded in the middle of the Palmetto Expressway crouched against the highway divider. The boyfriend stopped the car, nearly causing an accident, and ran into the darkness to rescue it. The cat lived with him now and often left decapitated mice on the kitchen floor. “Because he loves me,” said the boyfriend. “He knows I saved his life.”

The boyfriend was tall, with enormous thigh muscles and a back that was wide and defined like the smooth ripples of the Sahara. He had stretch marks on his biceps from a few cycles of teenage steroids, and more wrinkles around his blue eyes than you’d think a guy his age should have. No
matter how many showers he took he still had the musty smell of a workout, and sometimes I left bite marks on his shoulders and neck just to keep the other women away. I didn’t used to be this territorial. The boyfriend thought it was cute: a Latin thing.

When he and Sacha convened and fell into their Hungarian slang, sounds and intonations reminding me that we would never really understand each other, I looked to Vida. She was sitting on the lawn chair with her knees curled into her chest, a cigarette propped to her lips by her long red nails.

“They could be brothers,” she said.

It was true. They looked like twins with their creamy complexions, shaved heads, and box-smashed noses.

She asked me how I met the boyfriend and I told her the prepackaged story: I was sweating on the treadmill and he picked me up. Most people laughed when I said that but Vida gave me her still eyes, then offered a half smile as if to appease me.

“How did you meet Sacha?”

“You don’t know?”

“No.”

“The house. He worked there, too. He was the guard.”

We were speaking Spanish, so I know that he couldn’t have known what we were saying, but Sacha appeared within seconds, pulled Vida up by the elbow, and dragged her toward
the driveway. She seemed defiant as he talked into her face. She crossed her arms and looked away, at the ground, up to the sky, even to me on the other side of the yard. When she came back, I asked her if everything was all right and she rolled her eyes as if bored to death. “Such a big production,” she said, “just to tell me he loves me.”

I was exaggerating before when I said that I had no female friends in Florida. I had one: Jessamy. A thin-lipped strawberry blonde. The kind of gringa that doesn’t know what she is but if you ask will probably say Scottish and Welsh. This is odd to me because my parents know our family lines five generations wide and ten generations back, down to the last conquistador.

Jess and I were new teachers together but she couldn’t stand it, so she left after a year, got her real estate license, and now all she talked about were interest rates. Usually we’d meet for coffee because she was only willing to break away from her new fiancé for one-hour blocks at a time.

She’d never ask about the boyfriend because she thought he was a loser and whenever she got on my case about him I avoided her for a month or two. I wanted to tell her about Vida because Jess did a stint as a social worker before teaching and I thought she might have something to
say about it, but when I started she got that look like she wished I’d cut it and finally said, sighing, “I don’t know why you hang around those people, Sabina.”