Dreams Underfoot

to be boring?

3

I do a lot of thinking about decisions—not so much trying to make up my mind about something as just wondering, eque si? Like if I hadn’t decided to skip school that day with my brother Pipo and taken El Sub to the Pier, then I’d never have met Ruth. Ruth introduced me to Lori and Lori introduced me to more trouble than I could ever have gotten into on my own.

Not that I was a Little Miss Innocent before I met Lori. I looked like the kind of muchacha that your mother warned you not to hang around with. I liked my black jeans tight and my leather skirt short, but I wasn’t a puts or anything. It was just for fun. The kind of trouble I got into was for staying out too late, or skipping school, or getting caught having a cigarette with the other girls behind the gym, or coming home with the smell of beer on my breath.

Little troubles. Ordinary ones.

The kind of trouble I got into with Lori was always mucho weird. Like the time we went looking for pirate treasure in the storm sewers under the Beaches—the ritzy area where Lori’s parents lived before they got divorced. We were down there for hours, all dressed up in her father’s spelunking gear, and just about drowned when it started to rain and the sewers filled up. Needless to say, her papa was not pleased at the mess we made of his gear.

And then there was the time that we hid in the washrooms at the Watley’s Department Store downtown and spent the whole night trying on dresses, rearranging the mannequins, eating chocolates from the candy department .... Ifit had been just me on my own—coming from the barrios and all—I’d’ve ended up in jail. But being with Lori, her papa bailed us out and paid for the chocolates and one broken mannequin. We didn’t do much for the rest ofthat summer except for gardening and odd jobs until we’d worked off what we owed him.

No muy loco? Verdad, we were only thirteen, and it was just the start. But that’s all in the past. I’m grown up now—just turned twentyone last week. Been on my own for four years, working steady. But I still wonder sometimes.

About decisions.

How different everything might have been if I hadn’t done this, or if I had done that.

I’ve never been to Poland. I wonder what it’s like.

4

We’ll e’ll set it up like a scavenger hunt,” Lori said. She paused as the waitress brought another round— Heinekin for Lori, Miller Lites for Ruth and I—then leaned forward, elbows on the table, the palms of her hands cupping her chin. “With a prize and everything.”

“What kind of a prize?” Ruth wanted to know.

“Losers take the winner out for dinner to the restaurant of her choice.”

“Hold everything,” I said. “Are you saying we each go out by ourselves to try to snap a shot of this thing?”

I had visions of the three of us in Upper Foxville, each of us wandering along our own street, the deserted tenements on all sides, the only company being the bums, junkies and cabrones that hung out there.

“I don’t want to end up as just another statistic,” I said.

“Oh, come on. We’re around there all the time, hitting the clubs. When’s the last time you heard of any trouble?”

“Give me the paper and I’ll tell you,” I said, reaching for the Journal.

“You want to go at night?” Ruth asked.

“We go whenever we choose,” Lori replied. “The first one with a genuine picture wins.”

“I can just see the three of us disappearing in there,” I said. “‘The lost women of Foxville “

“Beats being remembered as loose women,” Lori said. “We’d be just another urban legend.”

Ruth nodded. “Like in one of Christy Riddell’s stories.”

I shook my head. “No thanks. He makes the unreal too real. Anyway, I was thinking more of that Brunvand guy with his choking Doberman and Mexican pets.”

“Those are all just stories,” Lori said, trying to sound like Christopher Lee. She came off like a bad Elvira. “This could be real.”

“Do you really believe that?” I asked.

“No. But I think it’ll be a bit of fun. Are you scared?”

“I’m sane, aren’t I? Of course I’m scared.”

“Oh, poop.”

“That doesn’t mean I’m not up for it.”

I wondered if it wasn’t too late to have my head examined. Did the hospital handle that kind of thing in their emergency ward?

“Good for you, LaDonna,” Lori was saying. “What about you, Ruth?”

“Not at night.”

“We’ll get the jump on you.”

“Not at night,” she repeated.

“Not at night,” I agreed.

Lori’s eyes had that mad little gleam in them that let me know that we’d been had again. She’d never planned on going at night either.

“A toast,” she said, raising her beer. “May the best woman win.”

We clinked our mugs against each other’s and made plans for the night while we finished our beer. I don’t think anyone in the restaurant was sorry to see us go when we finally left. First up was the early show at the Oxford (you didn’t really think I’d stand you up, did you, Rob?), then the last couple of sets at the Zorb, where the Fat Man Blues Band was playing, because Ruth was crazy about their bass player and Lori and I liked to egg her on.

5

By now you’re probably thinking that we’re just a bunch of airheads, out for laughs and not concerned with anything important. Well, it isn’t true. I think about things all the time. Like how hanging around with Anglos so much has got me to the point where half the time I sound like one myself. I can hardly speak to my grandmother these days. I don’t even think in Spanish anymore and it bothers me.

It’s only in the barrio that I still speak it, but I don’t go there much—just to visit the family on birthdays and holidays. I worked hard to get out, but sometimes when I’m in my apartment on Lee Street in Crowsea, sitting in the windowseat and looking out at the park, I wonder why. I’ve got a nice place there, a decent job, some good friends. But I don’t have any roots. There’s nothing connecting me to this part of the city.

I could vanish overnight (disappear in Upper Foxville on a caza de grillos), and it wouldn’t cause much more than a ripple. Back home, the abuelas are still talking about how Donita’s youngest girl moved to Crowsea and when was she going to settle down?

I don’t really know anybody I can talk to about this kind of thing. Neither my Anglo friends nor my own people would understand. But I think about it. Not a lot, but I think about it. And about decisions.

About all kinds of things.

Ruth says I think too much.

Lori just wonders why I’m always trying to explain Poland. You’d think I was her mother or something.

6

Saturday morning, bright and early, and only a little hungover, we got off the Yoors Street subway and followed the stairs up from the underground station to where they spat us out on the corner of Gracie Street and Yoors. Gracie Street’s the frontera between Upper Foxville and Foxville proper. South of Gracie it’s all lowrent apartment buildings and tenements, shabby old viviendas that manage to hang on to an old world feel, mostly because it’s still families living here, just like it’s been for a hundred years.