down at the body, then shook his head impatiently. Only my grandmother's voice rose above the sound of the waves.
“Edgar,” she cried when she finished, “call the civil police.” My father nodded gravely and accompanied my grandmother and her entourage back to the house without giving Rita a second look.
The men dragged Rita's body farther up the beach so that the tide, which was steadily rising, would not wash it away. The crowd thinned out slowly, knowing that it would take the police hours to arrive. Aunt Annali and Aunt Gilmara went back to their respective houses. The coconut man went back to his stand at the top of the beach. My cousins and my brother Edgar slowly scattered, only after daring each other to touch the corpse. The Brennand ladies went back to sunbathing and their servants went back to work. Soon it was only me and Rita under the hot sun.
My grandmother Dulce was my father's mother. I always believed she was part Indian, because of her dark skin and her silence. When she did speak, her language betrayed her origins-she used perfect, precise, old- fashioned Portuguese. She gulped her vowels up into her nose and the back of her throat, and her sentences had a musical rhythm. On rare occasions she would suddenly seize my arm in her bird-of-prey grip and tell me random things.
“Lucia,” she would hiss from her wooden wheelchair, “when I came from Por-tu-gal we stayed in the first- class cabins,” or “you must learn to speak cor-rect-ly, girl,” and she often went on to say that she had not been tainted like the rest of us, that her language had been kept pure.
My grandfather Chico had left her everything-the deeds to the houses, the furniture, the cars, even the title to his import business. Grandmother Dulce was the one who placed Uncle Paulo at the head of the business. Grandmother Dulce was the one who pressured my father, who was still a bachelor at forty, to get married and start a proper family or else she would cut him off. And she was the one who, in the months after Rita died, insisted I be sent away to a Catholic boarding school because, she said, I was an animal and had to learn manners.
By the end of that summer at the beach house, I had punched a Bren-nand girl and knocked out her front tooth because she had called Rita a tramp. I had convinced Artur to help me steal our fathers car and take it for a ride into the city, where we could find Rita's grave and put flowers on it. I controlled the steering wheel and the gearshift but could not reach the pedals. Artur sat curled on the floor and pressed the clutch and the gas when I told him to. We only made it a mile down the road before my father caught up with us.
The summer ended and I turned thirteen and was sent away to a school run by Belgian nuns. The nuns wore tiny habits that framed their faces and made them look pinched and small. In those days, you had to take everything with you to boarding school. My mother had to make a mini dowry for me-towels, sheets, blankets, and pillows. The nuns only gave us the bed and the mattress and we had to provide everything else.
Breakfast was bread and coffee. You could have one egg but you had to pay for it-it came out of your parents’ pocket. Lunch was always some awful kind of stew. Dinner was bread and coffee again, with a mashed green banana. We had etiquette lessons on which fork to use, which knife, which spoon. During meals, if you did not eat with the right utensil, or if you talked to the girl next to you, they took away your food. I went through a lot of hungry days at that school. We were not allowed to talk- not during meals, not in the hallways, not in classes, not even in the showers. There was a nun who stood on a stepladder and looked over the tiled wall of the community shower to monitor us. She wore a metal whistle around her neck and would blow into it to warn us when the water was about to shut off. We had six minutes. It was hard to take a bath in such a short time because we were required to wear cotton camisoles that buttoned at our necks and our arms and went all the way down to our ankles. The camisole would get very heavy with soap and water, but we were never allowed to lift it up. We had to preserve our modesty.
That's why my father chose that particular school for me-because of its concern with modesty. They even made us change under our bedsheets each morning so as not to reveal ourselves to each other. It was silly really, because I could still see the other girls’ bodies under their camisoles, and they could see mine. The water made the cotton fabric cling and everyone could see the outlines of everyone else. The water hit the camisoles of my classmates and over the years, it revealed breasts and hips and dark patches of hair. I mentioned this to my mother once, when I was home for vacation, and when I went back to school for my next term, I suddenly had a private shower at the end of the hallway with no monitor, and with hot water. My father had given the school extra money each month for this luxury. Even in my private shower I still wore the camisole, I was so used to it. After my grandmother passed away my parents took me out of the boarding school and placed me in Agnes Erickson, a modern Presbyterian girls’ school near our home, and even then it took me a long time to get used to taking a bath in the nude.
I was her only female grandchild, so Grandmother Dulce had no choice but to leave me every feminine thing she owned-old silk fans, beaded dresses, a pearl necklace, and a collection of ornate brooches that I would never wear. The only thing she left me that I’ve kept is a picture of her as a girl in Porto, standing primly beside a boat on the Rio Douro. Written in faded ink on the back of the photograph is,
That summer, in the days before Rita died, Grandmother Dulce seemed deceptively frail and required constant attention. It was Rita who dressed her each morning and put her in the sun. It was Rita who rubbed lotion onto my grandmothers hands and wrapped her long, thin piece of white hair into the smallest of buns. And it was Rita who held the wooden tablet with pegs in it steady while Grandmother Dulce made lace doilies, hooking strands of silk through one peg after another for hours on end.
I stood staring at Rita's body on the beach. Her dress was beginning to dry off and white salt caked over the fabrics small purple flowers. Her eyes were shut and her mouth slightly open. She looked trapped, frozen in the position in which she had washed ashore, like a starfish or a coral that becomes petrified when taken from the sea. I remembered how that morning Rita had not come back from her daily walk. My mother had had to dress and bathe Grandmother Dulce, and leave her on the porch with Artur. During their breakfast I heard my mother complain to my father about Rita's absence.
“Fire her, Edgar. Now you will have to fire her.”
I stood under the burning sun until I couldn’t bear looking at Rita's body any longer. I felt dizzy and hot, my throat stung, and my eyes watered from the reflection of the sun off of the bright sand. I ran to Aunt Annali's house and into her kitchen.
My aunt had a skinny cook named Doralice. Doralice was the darkest woman I had ever seen. I liked to watch her, because when she sweated her skin would shine and it looked like she was made of stone. She got mad when I stared at her so I had to watch her secretly, through the hole in the screen door, or from the open window. If she caught me she ran after me with a wooden spoon and swore she was going to beat me if I looked at her again. Doralice made desserts-fabulous creations that made me salivate every afternoon. She made chocolate cakes that oozed warm fudge from the inside and were covered with a white cream sauce on top, made of condensed milk. Once I had begged my mother for condensed milk. I begged for days, until she went to the store, bought seven cans of it, and made me sit and eat each one until I got so sick I couldn’t leave the bathroom for a whole day.
That day, I did not hide from Doralice when I came in from the beach. I walked right into the kitchen and sat down on a stool by the butcher block. She was making my favorite dessert-a guava pudding, the color of bubble gum and decorated with blue-black prunes. Doralice arranged the prunes without acknowledging me.
“Rita's dead,” I told her, my voice breaking, even though I tried my best to sound flippant about the whole thing.
“I know,” Doralice said mechanically, arranging the prunes.
She and Rita used to smoke cigarettes together in the afternoons, on their breaks. Rita rolled the cigarettes and licked them. Doralice yelled at her not to get her red lipstick on them. They laughed and giggled a lot. Doralice was having an affair with the coconut vendor's son-a muscular young man who met her by the shed behind Aunt Annali's house once a week. I watched them once-I saw them kiss. I saw their pink tongues move in and out of
