Dance Lest We All Fall Down - Margaret Willson [81]
I pulled out the last letter. “PAULA.” Beneath the name in someone else’s hand, Madalena’s I presumed—it wasn’t Rita’s—was written, “Lidia has decided to call herself Paula now that she is a teenager.” I laughed and continued to read.
“Bahia Street is more organized. Thanks for giving us the space to talk about us. I love Madalena. She helps us in doing our homework and she explains to us about teenage life and helps us to understand things our parents do not explain to us.
“The room is great! Here we have a library, kitchen, refrigerator, and nobody bothers us and here it is as if we were in a home. Everyone respects us.
“Bahia Street is being a help to us in our personal life. It means—it helps us to avoid being on the street, getting pregnant early, and other bad things that can affect our lives. Bahia Street will make my dreams come true—to be a doctor. Bahia Street opens a big door to bring happiness to us.
“Bahia Street is my life now. It is my opportunity and I do not want to throw it away.”
I put down the letters and leaned against the wall. A year ago these girls could hardly write. I got up and walked into the kitchen. It was carpeted in purple and brown paisley. I poured some water into the tea kettle, jiggled the burner to make it connect properly, and began to boil water for tea. The floor in the kitchen felt a bit spongy as well.
My mother wasn’t going to be happy about me going down to Brazil over Christmas again.
I turned in my grades for the classes I was teaching that term, packed a bag, and caught a plane from Seattle to Los Angeles to São Paulo to Salvador. The trip lasted twenty hours total. I had been exhausted when I left; I was catatonic when I hit Salvador. I went straight to the borrowed room we used for the tutoring program and met Rita for lunch.
“Leave your bags here,” Rita said. “It’s safe.”
We went to a comida a quilo or “eat by the kilo” place nearby. These buffet lunch restaurants had recently sprung up all over the city. You got a plate, piled on what you wanted and paid by the weight at the end. Prices varied depending upon how fancy the restaurant was. Rita had discovered a moderately priced one that specialized in salads and “natural” foods.
“You’ll love this place,” she said as she led me through the throngs of people that crowded Avenida Sete de Setembro, the main business street of Salvador. “It’s in one of the old municipal buildings from the early eighteen hundreds. They haven’t destroyed it.” She turned into a narrow entrance, went up some stairs, and we were in a high marble-floored hallway. At the end of the hallway, a marble stairway curved to the cool dim spaces above. Through glass doors we entered the busy comida a quilo, still marble floors, but with casual Formica tables and plastic chairs, noisy, and full of life. A waiter shouted a greeting to Rita. She waved at him and laughed.
We got our food and sat in silence while we ate. Then Rita asked me about my flight. Finally, after the waiter had cleared our plates, I asked Rita what was going on.
“It’s amazing how easily this whole project could fall apart,” she said. “I can’t do this alone.”
“What’s wrong, Rita?”
Rita stared at the wall. “About a month ago, Claudia came to tutoring very sick. She’d missed a few days, and when she returned she could hardly sit in her seat. Then she fainted.” Rita sighed. “At first she wouldn’t talk. Then I made her tell me what had happened. Thank God she came in. I don’t know how she made it on the bus.” I waited. “She got pregnant, Margaret.”
“Oh, fuck.” I put down the juice I’d been drinking.
“Then she gave herself an abortion by drinking an overdose of this medicine that’s supposed to be used for treating ulcers. You can buy it over the counter.”
“The same one her friend, the neighbor who died, used.”
“Yeah. Eduardo told you? For some reason, all the kids are using it now. They don’t know what else