The young girl couldn’t answer. She had turned into a marble sculpture. It felt as if an invisible hand had torn her chest open and squeezed her heart like a lemon.
“She will go,” the drunkard raised the envelope. “We need the money.”
“Excellent!” the vampire responded. “I must go now. I’ll visit again, I promise. Tomorrow is not a good day for me, but next week, or the next, at the latest. I will return, I promise. Where is the exit?” The vampire turned his head from one side to the other.
The drunkard pointed to the front door and the vampire hurried out of the house without further ado.
“That’s a relief,” the drunkard scratched his groin. “For a moment I thought that that fudge-packer clown was coming to get you.”
If life gives you lemons, you should make lemon juice—and hope one day for sugar. The young girl took the letter to Mrs. Lydia Green, and, as her godfather had told her, Mrs. Green hired her immediately.
“I am so grateful Mr. Wehr sent you, Miss Rivera,” the young wife said, addressing the young girl by the name that her godfather had used for her in the letter, the mother’s maiden name. She took her to the kitchen and pointed to a bunch of unpacked boxes. “A few things broke during the move,” she added guiltily.
The young girl spent the day arranging the kitchen cupboards and folding linens. Then she prepared dinner. Mrs. Green’s gratitude was immense. In a day, the young girl achieved what she hadn’t been able to do in weeks. She did not know how to cook, the young woman confessed, and had been feeding Mr. Green with cold meats and pickles.
“My mother says that if I don’t learn how to cook a decent meal, Athanase will get tired and leave me.”
Her appreciation felt the greatest because Lydia Green was one of the most beautiful women the young girl had ever seen: black hair, pale skin, eyes to inspire a sonnet; the young girl had grown to think that all beautiful women were evil. How could Mrs. Green not detest her? However, she remained silent. She did not know how to respond to Mrs. Green’s kindness other than to remain still, awaiting her next order. Sadly, her silence struck Mrs. Green as insolence. Who did this ugly little girl think she was to judge her? the young wife began to wonder, and by the end of the day she stopped being solicitous.
Still, she couldn’t hide her enthusiasm for having found help from her husband.
“I found a servant,” she announced the moment that Mr. Green opened the door that night.
“You did?” Mr. Green asked in reply, dropping his hat and his suitcase on the floor, then lifting up his wife in a hug and giving her a resounding kiss.
What a wonderful man, the young girl thought, spying on the couple from the kitchen. Tall and strong, not at all like an accountant, but more like one of those aerialists she had seen walking on tightropes at the boardwalk.
“She’s going to help me become a better wife for you.”
“But you already are the best wife in the world!” Mr. Green replied, without looking around to confirm if the house was clean. “I love you so much, I’m going to squeeze you!”
And his wife was so beautiful! Mrs. Green couldn’t cook, mend clothes, or do laundry. She didn’t really have any talent. But her skin was so even, her teeth were so white! Our little friend spent many days scrubbing her own so hard, trying to attain the same whiteness, until she made her gums bleed.
There was a lot that the young girl didn’t not know about cleaning houses, especially rich houses, with lots of vitrines, and chandeliers, and gilded furniture, but she was a fast learner. She proved to be a hard worker, dexterous in the use of a duster and a broom. Soon enough, Mrs. Green recommended her services to her friends, and they did so to others. In a few months, she had a few regular employers that paid a fair wage and did so punctually.
Don’t think that because you work hard you’re earning your way to paradise, Rosa wrote her after receiving news of her newly acquired profession along with a crisp five dollar bill. You need to repent and do penance. Maybe one day, if you’re good, God will forgive you. Like he will forgive us.
Maybe one day, our little friend thought, folding the letter. And maybe one day her godfather would return too.
Maybe one day she would become rich. Maybe one day she would wake up with a smaller nose, with a less pointy chin, and with thinner eyebrows. Maybe one day she would get rid of the pimples. Maybe, if she wished for it hard enough, if she waited patiently, she would become beautiful. As beautiful as Mrs. Green. As beautiful as either of her two sisters. And then a man like Athanase Green would lift her up from the floor, squeeze the air out of her lungs, and kiss her.
Now, not all had been flowers and candy for Rosa and Victoria in the city. The day after their arrival, a day the girls expected to spend eating cake and playing board games, Magnolia revealed to them her plans of getting them enrolled in school so they could learn all sorts of important subjects, “like geography,” the woman explained with a big smile, “that will help you become better persons and better Christians.”
Magnolia’s intentions were to help them finish grade school then get them enrolled into Normal School so they could become teachers. In the two sisters’ opinion, education could do nothing for them in their quest for marriage. “Who cares about this shit?” they complained with clenched teeth after the woman gave them a syllabus. “We don’t for one, that’s all!”
Fortunately, they said this in a low voice, for they soon learned that Magnolia had no patience for rude or rebellious people.
“Elbows, please. Off the table… Don’t scratch. A lady never scratches in public… Keep your hair up and in a bun… Stay out of the sun, you’ll get freckles… The meat is only for Harris.”
In that respect, she and her husband couldn’t be more different. School was boring, Harris agreed. Perhaps unnecessary.
“Second grade. That was it. Never liked it.”
But he kept from expressing his opinions in front of his wife for fear of starting a quarrel. Harris hadn’t had a steady job in ten years, the girls learned, and the couple relied heavily on Magnolia’s wages.
Magnolia worked as the deputy headmistress at the Immaculate Heart of Mary, an all-girls Catholic school. As her position demanded, she was a rather strict, restless disciplinarian, who kept in high regard the feminine virtues of diligence, submission, and obedience, virtues that, she waited no time in letting the two sisters know, albeit with an ear to ear grin and a mellifluous tone, hard to battle, the two lacked abysmally.
In addition to a series of rules at the table, Magnolia forbade the girls to leave the house unescorted, to enter her bedroom or the kitchen without permission—the icebox was especially off limits—and to ever put a foot inside the attic, the door to which remained, in any case, always locked. That left the bedroom that the two sisters shared and the living room as the only spaces in which Rosa and Victoria could roam freely. However, the only activities allowed inside the living room were “to pray, to study, or to work your embroidery.” Therefore, the girls preferred to remain inside their bedroom, where they could do as they pleased. More often than not, what they did was to keep their noses stuck to the window, wishing they were outside.
“We’ll never meet a man, locked up in here.”
“We’ll never marry!”
Outside abounded temptation. The bars and the theaters on Broadway were just a few blocks away. They could see the lights at night from their window. But temptation “leads to damnation,” Magnolia reminded them often, often enough to make them scared, sometimes after smacking their hands with a ruler.
And Rosa and