American Chica_ Two Worlds, One Childhood - Marie Arana [13]
THE FIRST TIME I SEE HER, he tells me, is through the frame of a window. He is inside a dormitory, she is walking along the Fenway, a gaggle of women around. He registers her as a color in a rainbow, one swift stripe on a variegated field. She is stately in her fern-green suit, hair smoothed into a golden roll, a brown feather quivering somewhere above. Her companions are fresh-faced girls. She is a decade older, seasoned, a different flux in the well of her eyes.
He sees her often after that. Every day into winter. He is in a houseful of Latinos now, three stories of them, in a building rented out by the Boston Conservatory of Music. In the spirit of wartime frugality, the musicians are sharing a basement dining room with the MIT men.
She comes up the stairs of 24 Fenway with her violin wedged under one arm, shakes the snow from her fur coat, steps into a roomful of dark-eyed lotharios, darts past to a table in the back. She marks the din and the laughter but is removed, disconnected somehow.
She’s unmarried, he can see that from the unadorned finger; she’s sleeker, more studied than the rest. She has the preened, perfumed air of a woman who has been in the world for a while.
At first he sees she’s well-courted, walking briskly from the conservatory with a series of suitors. He notices only in passing. There are more-pressing concerns on his side of the window. Science has swept romance from his prospects, into a far corner of life. Others like him are washing dishes, waiting tables, taking odd jobs, earning money for a weekend jink. He spends his days in a library, in a laboratory, between a dictionary and a stack of books. Some Saturdays he puts on fiestas, mixing punch in a bathtub, ordering up rhumbas and mambos, navigating the dancers with his drink in the air. The Latins at MIT are known for their parties, for scoring champagne, for serving it up in shoes. Mostly, however, he sees the world from a third-floor window, decoding gibberish he’s copied from a blackboard, digging his shoulder into a wall. Everyone knows how America rids itself of Latino students who do not make the grade: They ship them to Ellis Island or, worse, to holding camps, before deportation home.
Between sirens and blackouts and rations of horse meat, there’s a night of conga and rum. Come here, he beckons, when to his surprise she appears at the doorway. Let me teach you. He puts one hand on her waist, draws her in. She’s warm with a strange phosphorescence, with a glow on the nape of her neck. She tilts her head to one side and laughs back at him, and then there’s a point when the air is still.
Who can say when the first strand crosses the arroyo? The filament is flung. A fragile span arches down on the other side. The stories differ on the fine points of timing: Is it when she brings him ice cream on a late night before examinations? When he sits waiting for her on the steps of the conservatory building? When he asks for her help with a puzzling phrase?
His letters home say Americans are clever, industrious, admirable in every way. But they are an alien form of life. He cannot imagine himself with a woman of this dryasdust, pallid race. By spring he can imagine it. They are together, sunning themselves in the park, listening to the Boston Pops, stretching out on the grass, imagining life together in Peru.
Now, tell me about your family, Marie, he says, stroking her hair.
Nothing to tell, she answers simply. My name is Campbell. I was born in 1921. I have a mother and a father, that’s all.
Well, start at the beginning. Where are you from? he says, piling bricks from the bare ground up.
Seattle. The conversation stops there. She’s from Seattle. By way of Canada. From out there.