Standing up, I smoothed the wrinkles off my skirt. “Not so good actually.”
“Oh yeah?”
“I don’t really want to go to school here,” I admitted, instantly regretting my impromptu confession.
“Why’s that? It’s a nice school.”
I sighed and saw her arching an eyebrow. “Well, it’s a long story,” I added.
That wasn’t going to satisfy her either. She continued to watch me inquiringly, as if to say ‘I’m not going anywhere.’ I sighed again, tentatively coming down the stone steps and crossing over to where she stood.
Seeing her close up, I was struck at how her tanned skin glowed with the shade of warm olives and was just about as smooth as a riverbank stone. The shape of her face was a perfect oval, curved cheekbones flowing into a strong jaw line accented by full, arched lips. And I’d never seen eyes like hers, large and as dark as the blackest night. Someone could drown in eyes as deep as hers.
“So what’s the story, morning glory,” she asked, flashing a grin. Her teeth gleamed white as pearls. Her voice had the faintest trace of a Spanish accent.
I swallowed hard. “I’m from Boston actually…we moved here some months back and I really want to go back and study there.”
“Not so crazy about California, huh?” she asked, peering down at me. I was a good three inches shorter than her.
I shrugged, not wanting to say anything that might offend. She was the toughest-looking girl I’d ever seen in my life and I felt terribly shy all of a sudden.
“Hey, it’s okay. Nobody’s forcing you to like it here,” she said, prompting me to return her gaze. She crossed her arms casually and stared at me sideways, the mocking smile still playing on her face.
I bit my lip. Without any warning, just as my eyes traveled up her body, scanning a pair of well-worn boots, mud-splattered jeans, the steel belt buckle, her muscular biceps, an inescapable conclusion occurred to me – she must be one of those queer girls I’d heard my mother laugh about, the ones who bed women and go to clubs where they can dress like men.
I felt my face turning beet red. What in tarnation was I doing here talking to someone like that? I must be losing my mind. “My mother is, actually,” I heard myself answering despite the instinct to spin around and run away as fast as I could.
“Your mother’s what?”
“She’s forcing me to like it here – but I don’t,” I said, realizing as the words were leaving my mouth that I must have sounded like a spoiled child having a tantrum. I felt instantly guilty for the admission and looked down at my shiny Mary Janes.
“Why don’t you?” she asked, no sign of judgment in her tone.
“Everything I love is back in Cambridge – my father, all my friends, everything. I’m only here because my mother found herself a new man and had to drag me along with her…” I said, instantly regretting my words. How could I tell all this to a perfect stranger? I looked away, my eyes watering.
She remained silent, so silent that after a moment I burst out again: “We’ve had another huge fight just this morning. God knows how I’m getting home….” My voice trailed off.
“Are you sure you want to go back east?”
“What do you mean?” I snapped back.
“Well, do you think you gave this place a fair chance?” she asked evenly. “I grew up in the Valley and I know it like the back of my hand. I can’t imagine anyone hating it once they get to know it.”
I felt instantly embarrassed, recognizing I had just insulted her home turf. “Look, I’m sorry…I didn’t mean to talk about any of this,” I said, taking a step back. “I wasn’t thinking straight.” Biting my lip again, I added: “I guess I should go, it was nice meeting you.”
I swiveled to walk away, when she spoke again.
“What’s your name?”
“Uh…Diana. Diana’s my name,” I repeated dumbly as I turned back around.
“My name is Rosario. Rosario Vargas.” She gestured toward the conservatory. “I work with the horticulture department here – I bring them fertilizer, seeds, whatever they want. I drive the stuff in from the farms up in Sun Valley. Come by here maybe a couple times a month.”
I nodded again, not sure of what to say.
She paused for a minute, thinking. Then she asked, “Where do you live? I’m headed back to San Fernando. I can drop you off if it’s on my way.”
Danger signs flashed through my mind. What would mother say if she saw I’d hitched a ride with a Mexican in her cargo truck? Could it get any worse? I hesitated. “Oh…that’s all right. I don’t want to trouble you.”
Rosario watched the conflict in my face. “It’s not a problem. You sure you don’t need a ride?”
My voice jumped out of my throat and cut ahead of my brain, which was telling me to run away, run fast, run now. Impulsively, I burst out: “Oh, what the heck, all right. But I’m in Panorama City. Is that on your way?”
“Panorama City? Sure, that’s close to my grandmother’s place in Pacoima. I’m staying with her these days,” she said. “But if you don’t mind, I have to pop over to Reseda for fifteen minutes – one last drop-off, then I’m done for the day.”
I nodded, a huge sense of excitement suddenly coursing through my body. Rosario went around to the passenger’s side and opened the door and I jumped in. The interior of the Studebaker was a treasure chest. Stretched across the back seat, a scuffed guitar with painted roses alongside its body shared a place with a ratty leather jacket, a beat-up amp and a multitude of strewn music papers.
On the double, Rosario hopped into the driver’s seat and smiled at me as she turned on the engine. We were instantly flooded with the bouncy notes of Be-bop-a-lula. Apologetically, she reached over to turn down the volume.
“Sorry about that. I really like this station, KFM98. Keeps me company on the road.” Turning to me, she asked, “Do you listen to rock’n’roll?”
“Who doesn’t?” I answered. “But I can’t stand Elvis.”
She pretended to look horrified. “A sacrilege. Why?”
“The way he shakes his hips around all the time just doesn’t do it for me. A gimmick to sell records, my mother says.”
She laughed out loud. “Si, but he plays real good dance music!”
“I prefer doo-wop songs. I’ll take the Platters any day. As a matter of fact, I just bought Doris Day’s new record last week and I’ve been driving everyone crazy playing it over.”
She seemed amused. “So you like Spanish songs?”
I blushed. “I really like Que Sera, Sera.”
“You should hear it sung in Spanish. Even better.”
I gestured toward the back seat. “Do you play the guitar?”
“I wouldn’t be riding around with that thing if I didn’t,” she replied, turning onto Wakefield Avenue. “Never go anywhere without it.”
I felt stupid. “Of course, that’s what I meant.”
She laughed again. “I’ve had that one since I was fourteen but I taught myself how to play much earlier.” She glanced at me. “Some things you always know, right? Like how to tie your shoelaces or ride a bike? Well, that’s me and music – I can pick up just about any beat. My grandmother says I was born knowing how to play the guitar.”
“That’s neat. You must be pretty good at it by now.”
She shrugged. “I get asked to play at weddings and birthday parties now and then. But I do it because I enjoy it, you know, not just ‘cause I’m good at it.” Tapping her fingers against the wheel, she darted a glance toward me. “Do you have something you’re really good at, Diana?”
I searched myself for an answer but found none. There wasn’t anything I was particularly gifted at and frankly, I hated having to admit it. “I write poetry, but I don’t think it’s any good,” I answered at last.
“I’m sure it’s better than you think,” she replied cheerily.
I smirked. “You haven’t read it.”
“Can’t be that bad.”
“Trust me.”
“You’d be surprised how much people underestimate themselves,” she replied. “’specially girls like you.”
“What do you mean, girls like me?” I asked, frowning.
She shrugged, a little smile playing on her lips. “You know, good-looking middle-class white girls who can have everything, they’re always the ones who are most unsure of themselves.”
I was torn between trying to decide whether to take this as a compliment of an insult. She called you good-looking! a gleeful little voice piped up in my head at the same time as I felt a twinge of anger at being judged as a wishy-washy white girl.
“That’s not true,” I protested.
“Isn’t it?” she said, looking at me for a second, then back to the road. “Well, I guess you know yourself better than I do.”
“I mean, there’s lots of things I’d like to do that I can’t. And no, I don’t think you can say that I can have everything. That’s just pigeonholing all white middle-class girls.”
I stopped myself, realizing how defensive I sounded. An uncomfortable silence fell between us. She rested her hands atop of the wheel and took a breath.
“I think you can do anything.”
The straight-forwardness of her words took me by surprise. A simple sentence, loaded with interpretations. Did she mean I could do anything because I was a white middle-class girl, or just because? I didn’t dare ask her to clarify. But she’d read my mind. “Yes,” she repeated, nodding. “I think you can do anything. I don’t know why someone like you wouldn’t believe that.”
“Someone like me. You don’t even know me.”
“I can tell a lot by what I see,” she answered.
“And what do you see?” I asked coyly, lifting my eyebrows.
She threw her head back and laughed while I waited. “Do you really want me to answer that?” she looked at me, eyes dark and unreadable. I nodded, but part of me didn’t want to hear the answer and she could see that in my face. “No, you don’t. You don’t want to know what I think. Ain’t that right?”
A shiver ran through me. She was silent for a long time, ignoring my discomfort. When she spoke again, she sounded like the Dean of Arts interviewing me. “Ok. Tell me something you’d like to do but don’t think you can.”
I laughed. “Are you serious?” I looked up, furrowing my brows. “Hmm…dance, I think. I’ve always wanted to dance but I’m hopeless at it.”
She grinned and shook her head. “Nah, don’t tell me you can’t dance. I don’t believe you.”
I nodded, eyes wide. “Honest to God,” I said earnestly. “No jitterbug, no lindy hop, not even ballroom.”
“Nobody can’t dance.”
“Well, now you’ve found someone who can’t. I have two left feet – I’m the ultimate toe-stepper.”
“Maybe you haven’t found the right person to teach you.”
“But I went to two dance studios for lessons last year….” My voice trailed off as I suddenly realized that by ‘the right person’ she meant a sweetheart. “I don’t think anybody could ever teach me to dance,” I muttered stubbornly.
“I could teach anybody to dance,” she said, winking at me. “It’s all about feeling the rhythm of the music.”
My cheeks burned with embarrassment and I frantically tried to push away the image of her body pressed against mine in a dance. As it was, her bare arm was uncomfortably close to me. For the umpteenth time, I told myself there was no reason for such foolish nervousness around a girl. I was almost as bad as how I’d acted around Tommy Christianssen at the ninth grade formal.
“Maybe it’s easier for you,” I said. “Everybody says Mexicans dance real good.”
“So that’s not pigeonholing?” she asked, still smiling. “I’m not even Mexican, for your information. I was born right here in California. Hey, don’t worry about it,” she added, noticing my guilty expression. “I get that a lot. Truth is, lots of us are born with music in our blood, but that gift skipped over my aunt Ines. She’s so bad, you’d have to see it to believe it. Not that it stops her from getting up on the dance floor.”
“You see? There are people who can’t dance at all,” I pointed triumphantly.
“If you say so,” she conceded. “Hey, I’ve always said – whether you believe you can or believe you can’t, you’re usually right.”
She exited the highway and we now rode on a narrow country road. “We’re almost there,” she said, then looked at me again. “How old are you anyway?”
“Seventeen. And you?”
“Turned twenty-two last month.” Pause. “You seem awfully young to have decided you’ll never be able to dance. Who knows, maybe you’ll change your mind someday?”
It was time to turn the tables on her. “Is there anything you can’t do?”
Pulling off to the side of the road in front of a dilapidated shack and a gas station, she turned off the engine and winked at me before jumping out of the truck.
“Nope.”
Leaning my elbow on the window ledge, I poked my head out and felt the breeze tousle my stray curls. I sucked in the air, as happy as a golden retriever out for a country drive. I watched Rosario repeating the same unloading task she had done at Pierce. This time there were only about five crates. She rolled the dolly over to a chap in blue overalls who came out of the gas station. They exchanged words and the man nodded, all the while staring at me from afar with a puzzled look on his face.
I felt giddy all of a sudden, like a kid up to all sorts of mischief. If you hadn’t figured it out by now, all my life I’d been a goody two shoes kind of girl, and being here in Rosario’s dusty Studebaker made me feel like I was on some wild and perilous adventure.
Wait until Debbie hears about this, I thought as I nibbled on a fingernail. My best friend Debbie who I knew since primary school was always the first one to be up to no good. I could just hear her belt out the impish giggle that always betrayed when she did something naughty. Several times my parents had had to telephone her mother and threaten that she couldn’t come over anymore on account of being a bad influence on me. Debbie would appreciate an adventure like this, I decided.
I fell back into my seat when Rosario came round and started the truck again.
“Having fun?” she asked, noticing my grin.
“Uh-uh.”
“You ever ride in a truck like this before?”
“Nope.”
She looked as excited as a proud momma. “It’s a 1951 Studebaker my cousin helped me put back together after it was traded in on account of a bad engine. We got it for next to nothing, fixed it up and now it runs like a dream.”
“Wow, that’s cool.”
Nodding proudly, she added, “It’s been a big help for the odd jobs. Before, we had to use the boss’ truck from the farm but he’d have us bring it back before the end of day. Now that it’s ours, we can use it for whatever.”
“Do you work at a farm?”
Her face darkened. “I used to. I still do now and again but don’t live there anymore.”
“You lived there?”
“My family moved around throughout California when I was a kid, looking for seasonal work. We lived on a lot of farms.”
“How was that?”
Swinging back onto the freeway, Rosario let out a deep sigh and I wondered if I made a mistake asking about the farms. Shifting gears, she also switched subjects. “So what do you think of Panorama City?”
I followed her cue. “Not much,” I shrugged.
“Right. You don’t like anything in California. How could I forget?”
I leaned my head back and thought it over. Do I actually hate California, or merely resent it for taking me away from Boston? But that isn’t the state’s fault, it’s my mother’s. “It’s just so different from out East,” I tried to explain. “People are so different especially. They’re more superficial here, just glossing over this and that. I can’t put my finger on it, but when I talk to people here I keep feelin
g like I’m putting my foot in my mouth. Maybe us Bostonians are too blunt…”
Rosario shook her head. “Nah, I like blunt people – people who express how they really feel. Nothing wrong with that. So tell me how you really feel.”
I gazed up at the cloudless horizon, an infinite sea of azure. “The sky is so blue here. I can’t get over how blue it is.”
“No sky is bluer than a California sky.”
“Do you think?” I took a deep breath and felt more content than I’d felt in the last five months. A smile spread over my face. “I’ve never seen sunshine like in the Valley.”
“You see? There is something you like here,” she snickered.
“Hey, watch it!” I wagged my index finger. “And it’s just this one thing. Other than that, I’m still miserable!”
By the time we turned on Sepulveda, I was intoxicated with a Christmas-ish giddiness that had come over me out of the blue. Rosario had cranked up the radio and we sang along with Johnnie & Jo – Over the mountain, across the sea, there’s a girl a-waiting for me. Singing at the top of my lungs, I felt invincible, light as a bird. Time lost all meaning as I looked into her dark brown eyes and, feeling a shiver run through me, couldn’t process what she had just said. Then she cleared her throat and repeated, “Is this your street?”
“Oh, you’re right,” I managed. Realizing we had turned on Freemont, I panicked. “You can let me off here. Pull over right there!” I insisted, pointing to the first bungalow on my side of the road. I’d be skinned alive if my mother or Albert saw me jumping out of a mud-splattered vegetable truck, much less if they saw who drove me home in the first place.
Rosario braked sharply. “Right, then,” she said, turning off the radio. “Off you go.” A glance to her darkened face told me she knew I didn’t live there.
“It’s not like that,” I stammered.
She snorted. “What, you’re not embarrassed of being dropped off at your front door?”
I was at a loss for words. She waited for me to get out, but I hesitated. In a flash, I was seized with the overwhelming realization that I didn’t want to get out of the truck. I’d never met a girl like Rosario before, and now that I did, I didn’t want to go back to the way things were before. I waited.
Follow the Sun Page 2
