each other's dark mouths. I saw his hand go under her skirt and her long leg wrap around his waist. I left when I saw that. I backed away from my hiding spot and ran, more afraid of seeing what they were going to do next than of getting caught.
During their breaks, Rita would tease Doralice and she would tease Rita right back. “He might not be rich, but at least he's mine and mine alone,” she would say, growing serious. “You had better be careful, Rita. That's all I’m going to say. You’re a grown woman, you can do what you want. You don’t have to listen to me-but you have to know your place.” Rita would puff on their cigarette and change the subject, asking Doralice what she was going to cook for dinner that night. Then Rita would smile and nod, and listen, just listen, until it was time for them to go back to work again.
“I said Rita's dead. Don’t you care?” I yelped, hitting my fist against the wooden table. Doralice looked up, her eyes narrowed on me.
“What business of yours is it if I care?” she barked. “How do you know if I care or not? How does a spoiled little girl like you know anything at all? You didn’t even know Rita.”
She went for a spoon, but I jumped from the stool and yelled at her, “I knew Rita. I knew her better than anybody!” I ran from the kitchen out onto the porch.
My cousins, Uncle Paulo, and Aunt Annali ate lunch in their dining room and I watched them from the porch windows, wiping my nose on my shirt collar. They ate as a family, together at the same table. They did not have to keep their napkins in their laps or chew twenty-five times before swallowing. They got to drink real bottled Brahma Guarana soda. My father only bought powdered Guarana for us. Our maid Raimunda stirred the powder into a huge pitcher of water every day. It was chalky, not fizzy like the bottled soda my cousins got. It made me so mad.
Rita was a dark woman too. She had thick legs and tan skin-caramel-colored skin like Grandmother Dulce’s, like my own. Every day she wore bright red lipstick, which she would reapply after lunch. She was ten years older than my mother and had small spider veins on her calves. Despite this, Rita liked to wear knee-length dresses and black high-heeled sandals with little flowers embroidered on the straps. Once, my grandmothers wheelchair ran over her foot and broke her middle toe. Rita limped into my father's study, where he was teaching me to play chess. “Edgar,” she’d called him, “Edgar, I’ve hurt myself.” And then I watched from the doorway as she sat in a chair across from my father, her foot in his lap, his hands shaking as he made her a splint from a Popsicle stick and gauze.
Rita would not help in the kitchen. She would not do any cooking or cleaning. She was educated, she said, trained as a nurse and would not do a maid's work. This infuriated my mother. Rita always smiled when she passed me in the hallways, or when she caught me watching her with my grandmother. In the afternoons, when Rita sat with Grandmother Dulce on the terrace, I liked to sneak into her room at the back of the house. It was at the end of a long hallway behind the laundry area, five doors down from Raimunda's room. Rita had a patchwork quilt on her bed and her pillows smelled like her perfume, a baby cologne that sat in a huge glass bottle on her dresser. She had celebrity magazines stacked in a corner and a thin book about Rio de Janeiro on her dresser. When I looked in her dresser drawers, I saw large brassieres and cotton underpants that were like my own, except her initials were not sewn into the corners.
One afternoon, as I sat cross-legged on the sandy wooden floor and looked through her things, I found in her bottom drawer, hidden under an old sweater, two gold boxes tied with pink ribbons. I opened the one box and there was nothing in it except for ten empty tinfoil cups. The other box had three chocolates left in it: one with a pink swirl, another in the shape of a heart, and a white one with a stamp of a coin in the middle. My mouth watered. Where had Rita gotten these chocolates? They were expensive and fresh, not covered in a white dust like the old chocolates I had once found in our pantry and tried to eat but could not. These were smooth and rich and as dark as Doralice's skin.
On another afternoon, while Rita cared for my grandmother, I snuck back to Rita's room and I caught my mother coming out of it. We were both flustered-trapped in a dead-end hallway with no excuses to make.
“What are you doing back here?” my mother asked, her face flushing.
“I… I… was looking for you.” This was a lie and she knew it. I only looked for my mother when my father would tell me to get her. He was in Recife on business that day.
“What do you want?” she asked.
“I’m hungry.” It was the only excuse I could think of. It was four o’clock and Raimunda had strict instructions not to let us into the pantry after lunch. My mother knew this. She looked relieved-it was a chance for both of us to escape. We went back to the kitchen and my mother cut open a mango for us.
“Lucia,” she said as she sliced the fruit with her knife, “there's a slip of paper in my skirt pocket. I don’t want to touch it because my hands have juice on them. Take it out for me and tell me what it says.”
My mother could not read or write very well. She tried to write grocery lists by herself, but always gave up and handed me the pen and paper. I would cross out her shaky writing and begin the list again as she stood in the pantry and called out the items we needed to buy. She was raised on a sugar plantation in Paraiba, and as the oldest girl among eight children, she had to quit school early to help her mother. She used to tell me that as a teenager she had gone into the city and had seen a car for the first time in her life. “After that,” she’d said, “I told myself that one day I would ride in one of those machines. That one day I would have one of my own.” So, when my father came into town in his white suit and convertible to sell imported machines to the local sugar mill, she saw her opportunity. She never phrased it that crudely, though.
This is her story of how they met: She was standing under an orange tree near the road and he saw her. He pulled his car alongside the tree and asked if he could have an orange. “One?” my mother said. “You can have the whole tree if you want it.” She was seventeen. He was forty-one. They were married one year later, and a year after that, Edgar was born, and a year after that, I was born.
“What does it say?” my mother asked. I unfolded the paper, which looked as though it had been ripped out of a book.
“It's a poem,” I said, recognizing the shape of the typed lines. Some of the words were too big for me to understand, but the ebb and flow of the rhymes made me recall the kiss between Doralice and her coconut boy, their tongues swirling in and out of each other, their hands and mouths and bodies moving in a perfect rhythm.
“What is it about?” my mother asked, placing the mango slices on a plate for us.
“Nothing,” I mumbled, folding the paper up, and putting it back in her pocket. “It's about the ocean, that's all.”
I always believed my father's family liked my mother-why wouldn’t they? My mother had dark hair, an hourglass figure, and perfect skin except for the mosquito bites on her legs. My mother smelled like soap and talcum powder, and she carried a handkerchief in the belt of her dress to wipe her brow and neck on hot days. My mother taught Aunt Annali how to knit, and she used to rub aloe vera on Aunt Gilmara's back to relieve sunburns. But when my aunts had afternoon luncheons at their homes in the city, my mother never attended, even though she was always invited. She said she had too much to do at home, that she was too busy with the children. Once, when I pressed her on why she didn’t accept an offer to go to lunch, she snapped at me and said, “The invitation is just a formality, Lucia.” Sometimes my mother would laugh with our maids, but would immediately catch herself and then leave the room to let them finish their work. When I was a girl, I believed she was just a shy and silent person. Many times she tried to teach me how to sew, how to make jam. But I was never interested. I wanted to read, to play chess, to hide and observe everyone except her.
The mango was the sweetest thing we had in the house that day, and my mother and I sat in the kitchen for a long time peeling back its red skin and sucking on its insides, without saying a word.
I wiped my eyes and left my aunt Annali's porch after they had finished eating dessert. I went back to the beach to check on Rita's body. My older cousins were playing football at the top of the beach, showing off for the sunbathing Brennand girls who had turned to watch them. My brothers were in the surf, starting a game we all liked to play in the afternoons, as the tide got higher. We liked to build forts by the edge of the water. We would dig moats in the sand and build barricades out of palm fronds, coconuts, and driftwood. Anything that was natural could be used; those were the rules. The waves would pound the forts when high tide would come and whoever s structure was left standing would win. We would scramble to keep our forts up the longest. Sometimes we stayed on the beach so long my mother had to send Raimunda to bring us in.
The tide was rising that afternoon. The water lapped up to Rita's toes whenever a wave hit. Her raised arm
