Under the Skin

dressed for the weather in a light yellow blouse much like the one she had worn the night before—without sleeves and with small scoops in front and back—a white skirt, open-toed leather sandals. As we started up the lane I apologized for not having a car, but she said she wouldn’t have wanted to ride anyway, she liked to walk, especially on such a lovely day. Her black hair hung long and loose and she swept it back over her shoulders.

I had spoken in Spanish, but she had answered in her slightly stilted English. I asked which language she preferred we use.

“In what country are we?” she said, giving me a sidewise look that made me laugh.

“Okay, girl. Whatever lingo you want.”

“Lingo?” she said. Then brightened and said, “Ah, lengua…lingo. Yes.”

We went along Mechanic and then turned toward the rail station, chatting all the while about what a pretty day it was and how the smell of the sea was especially sweet in the early morning. She said she loved the sea. She had grown up breathing its scent in Veracruz and she missed it when she went to Matamoros, which was more than twenty miles inland.

“In Matamoros the smell was always of dead things and the river mud,” she said.

In daylight her hair looked even blacker than it had the night before and it gleamed dark blue when the sun struck it at a certain angle. Her eyes seemed darker, brighter. Her skin was the color of caramel. I took her hand to cross the street to The Steam Whistle, which stood opposite the train station. She had a strong cool grip and she laughed as we scooted through a break in the traffic.

The cafe was small—a half-dozen tables, a row of stools along a short counter, four booths in the rear. Except for the rare mornings when I ate at the Casa Verde, this was where I always came for breakfast. I liked the place so much that I paid the owner, a balding guy named Albert Moss, fifteen dollars a month to reserve a particular table for me every morning from six to nine o’clock, in the corner by the big front window. All the regular customers knew whose table it was.

I hadn’t been in for the past few days, and when Albert saw us he raised his spatula in greeting from the grill behind the counter. I gave him a nod and held Daniela’s chair and then sat across from her. The table’s little hand- printed RESERVED sign couldn’t have looked more out of place except in front of a barstool but it was necessary for warding off strangers who stopped in. I turned it facedown. She didn’t remark on it—or on all of the sidelong attention we’d attracted from the other patrons. She was the first one I’d ever brought in here.

The cafe was a family business run by Albert and his wife, and on Saturdays their teenage daughter Lynette came in to lend a hand. The girl brought us coffee and checked-cloth napkins and sets of silverware. She said, “Hi, Jimmy,” but couldn’t keep her eyes off Daniela. I introduced them and they beamed at each other.

I knew the little menu by heart but Lynette had brought one to the table for Daniela in case she wanted to look at it. Daniela asked what I was going to eat. I said the fried tomatoes were pretty good—they were coated with bread crumbs seasoned with garlic and pepper—and I was going to have them with scrambled eggs and toast. “I’m eating light this morning but I recommend the smoked sausage to you,” I said.

“Then that’s what I will have,” Daniela told Lynette. The girl gave her another radiant smile and took our order to her father.

“Why do you eat…light…this morning?” she said.

“Gotta be quick on my feet today,” I said, and made a little running motion with two fingers along the tabletop.

She was about to say something to that, then checked herself. I asked where she’d learned to speak English and she said in a Catholic school called Escuela de Los Tres Reyes. She had practiced every day with her teachers and classmates, and with store owners along her route between home and school who spoke English well.

I asked if she’d mind if I smoked and she said no, then shook her head when I offered a cigarette. We looked out the window at the people passing on the sidewalk, the cluster of traffic in front of the train station, then turned to each other and started to speak at the same time—and both laughed.

I said, “You first,” but she said, “No, you,” and insisted on it.

“I only wanted to say I’m sorry about the loss of your parents,” I said. “Your mother…I mean, having lost your mother so recently must be hard for you.”

“Yes,” she said, with no tone at all.

It was obvious she didn’t care to talk about it, so I said, “Why did you leave Veracruz? Since you liked it so much, I mean. Didn’t you have kinfolk there, relatives you could’ve stayed with?”

“No, there was no one.” She looked out the window and then back at me. “I am happy to be here.”

“I can understand why. Galveston’s an interesting place.”

“Yes, I like Galveston, but I mean I am happy to be here.” She patted the tabletop.

“Oh. Well, I’m glad.” More Mr. Smooth.

“This town reminds me of Veracruz. Where we lived, you could see…el malecon?—the seawall?”

“Yes. Seawall.”

“The seawall,” she said. “You could see the seawall from the window of our house. You could see the beach. I went swimming every day, from the time I was a little girl. Do you swim?”

I told her of never having seen the ocean until two years ago and how I had learned to swim, and of my habit of going for a long swim every two weeks. I left out the part about how much the gulf had scared me when I first saw it.

She was awed by the idea that I’d not looked on the sea until I was grown, and was impressed that I had taught myself to swim. But she couldn’t understand why I didn’t go swimming more often.

“Every day since I have been here,” she said, “I have felt such…gana. Como se dice gana?”

“Urge,” I said. “Hankering. Desire…”

“Desire, yes. I have felt such desire to go swimming. I asked the senor and Senora Avila if they would escort me to the beach tomorrow when they do not have to go to work, and the senora said yes but the senor said no. He believes the women’s bathing suits are indecent. His face became red when the senora said he enjoys to look at the other girls on the beach but could not bear the shame if a woman in his company exposed her legs to the world.”

She turned her palms up and made a face of incomprehension.

The thought of her exposed legs deepened my breath. I cleared my throat. “What about Rocha? Why doesn’t he take you to the beach?”

“That one.” She rolled her eyes. “He will not go to the beach. He does not say why but I think he is afraid. I think he fears even the sight of the sea. Can you imagine?”

I shook my head and made a puzzled face to convey inability to imagine a man afraid of the sea.

“I suppose I will have to go to the beach by myself, if no one will accompany me.”

She gave me a look I’d seen from other women. From them it had been a clear invitation to an invitation, but with this one I couldn’t be sure.

“Well,” I said. “Maybe I shouldn’t ask, but…I mean, we just met and I don’t want to offend…”

She gave my shin a light kick under the table and said in a low voice, “Be brave!” She covered her smile with her hands but it was still in her eyes.

I had to laugh at her boldness. “All right, then. Would you like to go swimming with me?”

“I should very much like to go swimming with you,” she said. “When?”

“Well, I’ve been going at night, but I can arrange for—”

She said she loved to swim in the sea at night. “It’s so beautiful at night,” she said. “I have done it only one time but it was wonderful. It was like…like all the sea belonged to me.”

“Actually,” I said, “I was thinking of taking a swim tonight.”

She leaned over the table and said in a whisper of mock conspiracy: “And I may join you in swimming in the darkness?”

“Yes you may,” I said. “But I’m warning you, the water can be pretty chilly this time of year.”

She did a little bounce in her chair like an excited child. “I don’t care. I am very brave.”

Lynette came to the table with a platter in each hand and set down our breakfasts.

“It all looks very good,” Daniela said, examining the oozing sausage and the fried tomato slices, the eggs thoroughly scrambled the way Albert knew I liked them. She watched me pick up a crisp slice of tomato with my