Dreams Are Not Enough

by Jacqueline Briskin

  “Barry . . .” she murmured. “First can we shower?”

  Disappointed, yet recognizing that after the desert drive in an un-airconditioned car, she was right, he touched his lips to her forehead. “I should’ve thought of it.”

  As the water began running in the tiny bathroom he felt the champagne combine with the previous night’s lack of sleep. Sprawling on the dust-odored chenille bedspread, he lit a Tareyton and examined the barren, ugly cubicle. He imagined a future anniversary when they would clink their crystal wine goblets and chuckle at the crazy kids they’d been. By then he would be the main partner in a prestigious law firm (Cordiner, Etc., Etc., and Etc.) with a white streak in his hair and a couple of exceptionally fine novels under his belt. Alicia would be even more stunning in a long black sheath, the simple, elegant kind that his aunts wore to display their diamonds.

  The shower was turned off. He stubbed out his cigarette expectantly.

  Ten minutes passed with excruciating slowness before the door opened and she emerged, makeup complete, black hair atumble over her shoulders, a skimpy towel hiding the torso of that astonishing body.

  “Your turn,” she said.

  Resisting the urge to yank off her towel, he stepped under the shower, rubbing the sliver of soap under his armpits, not taking time to dry himself. In deference to his bride’s innocence, he wrapped the other threadbare towel around his waist.

  The spread was folded onto a chair. She lay with the sheet pulled up to her throat.

  Sitting on the edge of the double bed, he said, “Hi.”

  She managed a small, nervous smile.

  Kissing her, he slowly drew down the sheet. Necking, he had become acquainted in a tactile fashion with her body. Seeing it took his breath away—no figure of speech, he felt as if the air had been suddenly forced from his lungs.

  That astonishingly luminous flesh seemed to collect all available light in the dim motel room. She was all slender, supple curves, the young breasts full and firm with nipples the pale pink of tea roses, the waist deeply indented, and the black leaf of hair startlingly explicit between the white hips. Gazing at her, his mind filled with names and images of love goddesses: Astarte, Venus, Aphrodite. . . .

  He found himself kneeling at the foot of the bed, kissing each of the crimson nails of her small, soap-scented, high-arched feet.

  Stretching out next to her, he pulled her nakedness to his own. He was incapable of holding back to put on the rubber. Moving on top of her, he forgot every technique he’d studied in sex manuals.

  Penetrating her, he moved back and forth three or four times, sweat pouring from him as he ejaculated.

  He held her, gasping. In a few minutes he’d calmed enough to reach for another cigarette. “Everything okay?” he asked tenderly.

  “Fine . . .”

  “I didn’t hurt you?”

  “Now I’m truly yours.”

  Her murmur held the emotional intensity of their exchange of vows.

  Smiling, he closed his eyes.

  • • •

  For a full five minutes after his breathing lengthened into the steady rhythm of sleep, she lay very still, then slowly disengaged herself from his loosened grasp. Getting out of bed, she brushed a kiss on his forehead. He stirred. She poised, scarcely seeming to breathe until he rolled over to clutch a pillow with a long, contented, snorelike sound. Reaching for her large, shiny new imitation patent purse, she tiptoed into the bathroom, locking the door.

  She unzipped the largest of the interior pockets, taking out a half-finished tube of contraceptive foam. She squatted to use it, her expression intent.

  She was rinsing herself free of the medicinal odor when the hammering blows started.

  “Open up, damn you!” shrieked a female voice from outside. “This is the manager!”

  Alicia wrapped the towel around her nudity, running into the other room, where Barry was hastily skivvying into his shorts. His face was pale and guilt-ridden.

  “What’s going on?” she whispered.

  “In the office nobody answered, so I took the key,” he mumbled. “How am I going to explain?”

  “Don’t worry.” Alicia yanked the covers into a semblance of order, lying down and pulling the sheet over herself. “I’ll help you.”

  The shouts and hammering grew more overwrought.

  Barry unlocked and unchained the door. The manager, whose platinum hair was wound around pink curlers, stood there, the sags of her face set as if in one of those primitive masks of rage.

  “You punk bastard!” she shrilled. “Don’t you know there’s laws against breaking and entering? I got friends in the sheriff’s department! You’ll get six months!”

  “Nobody answered the buzzer. I left a note for you.” Grabbing his trousers, he drew out his wallet. “Here, let me give you the money.”

  “You damn rich suck-ups, you think you can wave a buck and get away with everything!”

  “Please?” The tremulously unhappy girl’s voice belonged to a stranger.

  Barry turned to ascertain that only Alicia was in the unit.

  The manager stared at her. “Jesus, and you got a kid with you. For that you can do life, buster.”

  “She’s my wife,” Barry said.

  “Yeah, sure.”

  “We are married,” Alicia said, holding up her left hand with its shiny new sterling ring. Then she raised up the sheet around her, whispering, “My parents wouldn’t think we’re married either. We went to that wedding place up the road. A justice of the peace did the ceremony. No . . . priest. . . .” She buried her face in her hands.

  “Hey, no need to carry on like that.” The manager’s voice had softened.

  “It’s . . . a . . . a mortal sin. . . .”

  “Dearie, it’s okay, okay.”

  Alicia’s head remained bent. Unconsolable little sobs drifted from the black veil of tousled hair.

  The manager touched Barry’s naked arm. “Pay me later,” she hissed. “Go make it up to the kid.”

  When the door closed, he stared at Alicia. Her body shuddered as if with sobs.

  “Hon, don’t, please don’t. I know how you feel. Remember, I told you my mom’s parents disowned her because Dad wasn’t Jewish. Listen, if you want, I’ll become a Catholic. Religion’s a big deal to Beth, but it means nothing to me.”

  Alicia looked up. She was convulsed with laughter. “The old bag,” she managed to gasp out.

  For a moment he was devastated that she had fooled him so completely. After three UCLA creative writing classes he considered himself possessed of a seasoned author’s acute powers of perception.

  Then he was realizing that Alicia, naked and unprepared, had gotten the witch manager off his back. He never could have pulled it off. He was fairly certain that few girls could have done so superb an acting job.

  “You deserve an Oscar,” he said. “Can I count on you to always come to my aid like that?”

  “Of course,” she said happily. “Aren’t you my husband?”

  Her remark aroused him. He was her husband. Pulling back the sheet, he lowered himself onto that lush body. “Barry Cordiner and Alicia Lopez Cordiner,” he whispered.

  3

  Her name wasn’t Alicia, her father hadn’t been a Lopez, she didn’t come from Texas and she wasn’t eighteen but barely fifteen.

  Her earliest memory was of endless rows of strong-smelling celery. “Now don’t you go straying off,” her mother had said with a slap. The pickers and packers had no time to smile even when she did her little dance. As the great yellow sun rose to the middle of the sky she felt like melting into tears, but she was nearly four, too old to be a crybaby. A distant clump of eucalyptus promised shade. Forgetting her mother’s warning, she went toward the trees. A line of ants carrying fragments of green distracted her, and she knelt to watch. She was too absorbed to hear the footsteps. A heaviness on her head was her first inkling of the man.

  “Ain’t you the prettiest little tad of a thing with
this black hair and them big blue eyes.”

  She had never seen him before. He had no teeth in front and his smile frightened her.

  “I have to get back to my momma,” she said as politely as possible.

  He laughed in a funny, rusty way, squatting near her. “I buy my friends things. How’d you like a nice big cold Coca-Cola?”

  She hardly ever got so much as a sip of Coke, and she was remembering how hot and thirsty she was. “Where is it?”

  “First you gotta show we’re friends.” He stroked her leg. His breath smelled like doody, and his fingers felt slimy, terrible, as they crawled up her thigh.

  “I’m not your friend!” she said in the tone her mother deplored as her Miss Snotty voice.

  “Ain’t long before you will be,” he said. Now he was fingering his grubby pants. “Then you’ll get your Coke.”

  She tried to move, but he gripped her leg tighter, and pulled out his pee-pee. The men often relieved themselves in the field, but they always turned away decently. This thing was an ugly red, fat and stiff as a baseball bat.

  “First, you gotta stroke this.” He grabbed her hands, pulling them to that ugly thing.

  She used the only weapon she had, her even white milk teeth. Leaning forward, she bit him hard.

  He gave a high squeal, releasing her. She ran as hard as she could in the direction of the truck and her momma.

  • • •

  Her mother, May Sue Hollister, wasn’t sure where to put the blame for her younger daughter, Alice, but she’d had the hots for a looie in the tank corps, one gorgeous hunk of man with big baby blues. Whoever, you only had to look at Alice to see he hadn’t been some Mex like Juanita’s old man. “God, that older gal of mine looks pure pachuco, don’t she?”

  May Sue was one of the migratory farm workers who shifted up and down California in rattletrap trucks or ancient, trembly yellow buses that had been declared unsafe for schoolchildren. She worked the fields, stoop labor, twelve or fourteen hours a day of it. Many ranches had a row of plumbingless shacks for the seasonal labor, but others lacked even these minimal facilities, and then May Sue, with her girls, would cover the bare earth with corrugated cardboard and hang a makeshift tarp. She shopped at shabby, badly lit grocery stores, paying exorbitant prices for stale, fat-laden hamburger and white bread whose soft crust occasionally was green with mold. On payday she splurged on dago red or beer or candy bars or milk. Clothes came from cavernous Goodwill shops. (Decades later Alice would see a rerun of Harvest of Shame through a blur of tears: she knew only too well the way of life Edward R. Murrow had been exposing.)

  Despite the grueling life that was reflected in her sagging body, May Sue retained a yen for pleasure. Traces of her girlhood prettiness remained and men were still drawn to what she called a little party-party. She had no energy left for her daughters. Alice’s remembrance of her mother was not visual: Momma meant the mingled smells of beer and sweat and cheap perfume, the sting of a slap.

  It was her half sister, Juanita, eight years older, who supplied the hugs, the warmth, the soft lullabying. “Nita, Jua-nita,” she would croon, pressing her cheek against Alice’s soft, black hair. “L-i-ingering falls the Southern moo-oon.”

  Other than the thick, lustrous black hair, the half sisters had no feature in common. Alice could have posed for a Gerber’s ad with her enormous blue eyes, glowing pink and white skin, cute button of a nose, her wide smile that soon displayed perfect milk teeth. Juanita’s face was too wide, her complexion large-pored and sallow, her teeth crooked. Her one good feature, beautiful dark eyes, were set in a perpetual squint because of uncorrected nearsightedness and astigmatism.

  When Alice was five and Juanita thirteen, May Sue found herself in need of yet another abortion. The old woman with the pink wart on her nose required a ten-dollar bill in advance and Juanita’s assistance. Both of May Sue’s daughters witnessed the gush of crimson that bore away the mouselike creature, their half sibling, saw the blood spread and spread, dripping between the planks of the old table as May Sue’s cries grew feebler.

  After May Sue’s death, Juanita earned their living. The other pickers helped her as much as possible, telling her where the crops were coming in, whom to see about being hired. During the height of the strawberry season the younger children picked too, and Alice labored under the summer sun. At these times, foremen often refused to pay a child who didn’t pick steadily. Alice would grow dizzy and the endless, plastic-shielded fields would shimmer and waver in the blazing sun, but she never quit.

  Local authorities paid lip service to California’s educational laws, not supplying teachers for the children of migratory workers but insisting they enroll in school. Neither Hollister girl attended any one school for more than three successive weeks. Juanita, with her feeble eyesight, never did learn to make out more than a few simple words, and May Sue’s demise ended her education. Alice, though, was a quick study. She learned to read more fluently than most of her classmates, to spell with reasonable accuracy, to add and subtract so rapidly that she astounded her teachers. Otherwise her education showed startling gaps—she did not know George Washington had been the first president, she never learned cursive writing, she believed Spain to be located south of Mexico.

  School personnel understandably disliked having these transients foisted on them.

  • • •

  The fourth grade marched along the pergola to the classroom marked LIBRARY. The pretty blonde librarian demonstrated how to make out their cards, how to sign the slips glued to the inside of every bookcover. Alice, excited by the incalculable wealth of books, couldn’t wait for her turn. “I’m checking this out,” she said, extending The Secret Garden.

  “Alice, you haven’t written an address on your card.”

  “It’s Harrow Ranch.”

  “Are your parents picking Mr. Harrow’s lettuce?”

  Alice nodded. She always lied about her orphaned state: telling the truth, Juanita warned with an anxious squint, would get her hauled off to what the pickers commonly referred to as facilities.

  “Then you’ll need a signature from Mr. Harrow.” The librarian, no longer pretty, yanked away the book as if Alice might infect it with cooties.

  “Thanks a whole big bunch.” Alice threw back her shoulders and stamped away.

  Though teachers, cops, foremen and people like this librarian terrified her, she’d die rather than let them know it. Most of the other workers kowtowed to the authorities. Much as she loved Juanita, she despised that head-bent humility of hers.

  • • •

  The men stared at her a lot, so she stuck close to Juanita. (The pickers were a decent lot, and though they glanced at the luscious Alice, they would never consider molesting a child.) Juanita took her fostering seriously.

  “Listen,” she said when Alice was around seven, “if any man tries to do things to you, touch you, don’t let him.”

  “That kind of thing? Don’t worry. Yech. It’s repulsive.”

  “If anybody tries, hit him hard here.” Juanita pointed between her ample hips—at nearly sixteen she was short and sturdily built. “Then run as fast as you can.”

  • • •

  When Alice was ten Juanita took up with a very short man called Henry Lopez.

  From the start Alice loathed Henry passionately. He was forever cuffing her for having a big mouth, and a few times a month he beat up on Juanita, which in Alice’s eyes was far worse—Alice’s loyalties would always be greater than her self-interest. Henry, however, possessed one admirable feature. When he and Juanita were going to party-party—he called it have a bang—he would drive Alice in his rattly pickup to the nearest picture show and give her ten cents. She saw approximately three double features a week.

  Adoring movies, she learned to do sharply honed imitations of Kirk Douglas, Ingrid Bergman, Rain Fairburn, Burt Lancaster. Sometimes during intermission a boy would buy her a Coke or an Uno Bar, and she felt an obligation to repay these munificent gifts by
permitting a hot hand to cup the shirt over her blossoming breasts. But no more, nada más. In the spring before Alice was fifteen, Juanita’s method of contraception failed. Henry Lopez, miracle of miracles, came through. They were married in Santa Paula. It was from the officiating priest that Juanita learned about a vacancy for a couple at the nearby Taylor Ranch.

  For their full-time services, the Taylors gave the Lopezes $200 a month plus a furnished frame cottage with a working refrigerator, a real stove and, treasure of treasures, a black and white television with a wavery ten-inch screen. The Hollister sisters had stepped up numerous rungs in the social scheme. They were now permanent people, they belonged. Juanita, now called a housekeeper, held her head high as she hurried up the dirt road to the big, two-story white ranch house—Mrs. Taylor was unaware of the pregnancy.

  Juanita would have done the work at the frame cottage, too, but Alice insisted on cooking, cleaning, doing a share of the Taylors’ enormous pile of ironing as well as fixing a home lunch for Henry.

  It was now that his attitude toward her changed drastically. He began following her as she moved between the stove and the refrigerator, stroking her arms, casually touching her breasts. She learned evasive tactics; he grew more impossible. To Alice, her brother-in-law’s mauling demeaned Juanita and therefore was infinitely more painful than his casual blows had been.

  She dreaded the lunch hour.

  • • •

  “Feel what you do to me,” he said, grabbing her wrist.

  “Cut it out, Henry!”

  But Henry’s large, dirty hand was extremely strong. Inexorably he drew her small hand downward, forcing her fingers around the hardness beneath his jeans. “Bet you’d like some of that.”

  With a violent effort she yanked away. “Your beans are on the stove!” she shouted, slamming out the front door.

  • • •

  “Here, baby, isn’t this something?”