David faced Luz in the dark. “Are you okay?” he whispered.
Terrified to speak, she nodded.
“Good,” David said, and placed his palm on her right knee, cupping inward along her thigh. “Luz,” David said quietly. He then put his mouth on her neck, sending a pleasant shock from his lips all the way to her thighs, where his hand moved gradually beneath her dress, underneath her panties, and inside her body. Luz’s breathing changed, quickened and deepened. It happened so quickly. She had never experienced such a heavy want, and it pulsated through her entire body until a murmur of a moan fell from her lips. David covered her mouth with one hand and Luz found herself opening her lips to taste his palm. When he removed his hand, he pushed the whole fat worm of his tongue into her mouth. He began to remove her dress, working the zipper with such knowledge of women’s fashion that it was alarming. He moved his hands around her body, squeezed hard along her breasts.
Luz was jolted into dread. If she let him, David would take her virginity right there on his office floor, in the middle of a Klan march. “Stop,” Luz said. “We have to stop.”
“I understand,” David said, and slowly moved forward, biting down on her lip before moving out from under the desk and briskly standing up. It appeared the hollering outside had quieted.
“It seems to have cleared up,” he said. “I imagine we can go home now.”
TWENTY-SEVEN
A Day Without Work
It was Sunday and Luz had gotten up early and had a fried-eggs breakfast with Maria Josie before her auntie had gathered picnic supplies and fishing poles, heading out the door to meet her new friend, a woman named Ethel who drove a shiny Standard car. They were going to the mountains, to a blue lake. Ethel seemed to work as much as Maria Josie, and Luz rarely got to spend time with them, but she had taken a liking to the woman, a physician with a steadfast gaze behind dark-framed glasses. She had a wave of chestnut hair, and Maria Josie always came home from Ethel’s smelling of her gardenia perfume. Though Luz would never admit it to Maria Josie, she worried that Ethel could take her auntie away from her. Ethel lived in an Eastside bungalow, a far cry from the ramshackle Hornet Moon. It was only a matter of time, Luz feared, before Maria Josie packed her bags and left for good. Then where would Luz go?
At a little past eleven o’clock, Luz was startled by banging on the front door. She was shocked to find Lizette standing in the hallway, holding a garment sack, as if she had lugged a bagged corpse all the way from the Westside to Curtis Street.
“What’s that?” Luz asked.
Lizette was out of breath and sweating through her light blue dress, wet spots seeping around her underarms and in a line beneath her breasts. “It’s ready,” she said, and pushed her way past Luz. “Let’s open it in the kitchen, where the light is best.”
Luz figured inside the garment bag was another one of Lizette’s creations. Since she had gone to work for Natalya, the dressmaker had given Lizette the freedom to design several dresses and blouses and bring them to life, straight from her mind. In some ways, this seemed nothing short of a miracle—to be able to think something up, labor away, until one day that piece of clothing existed in the physical world.
Lizette scanned the kitchen with a critical eye. “Oh, that awful smell,” she said. “I don’t know how you get used to it.”
“Like the Westside smells any better with the train yards.”
“For one thing,” Lizette said, “it does smell better than carcasses. Most things do.” Lizette got to work shutting the kitchen window.
“What’re you doing?” Luz asked. “It’s hotter than hell!”
“I don’t want the smell seeping into my dress.”
“What dress?” Luz asked.
Lizette smiled in a mischievous and beautiful way. She returned to the garment bag and slowly lifted the bottom. A honey-colored wedding dress spilled forth.
“My goodness,” said Luz, stunned. “You made this?”
“Natalya taught me how to do some of the trickier stitches. We worked on it together.”
“And the cost of the fabric?” Luz couldn’t take her eyes off the dress. It was as if a piece of liquid gold floated through the air of her sweltering kitchen.
“She gave me an advance, said I’ve been doing good work at the shop.”
Luz asked if she could touch the fabric, and Lizette motioned of course. Luz wiped her hands across her cotton blouse and then moved her fingertips along the wedding dress’s buttons and seams. It was exactly as Lizette had planned. A simple satin silhouette with hidden clasp buttons along the left side, a fine grouping of lace around the bodice, and capelet sleeves. “Wow. You’ll be a beautiful bride,” Luz said, frankly.
“Are you kidding me?” Lizette puffed out her hair. “I’m gonna be a dime. Everybody is gonna be mad they ain’t marrying me.”
“I’m so happy. You made the dress you wanted.” Luz stepped toward Lizette and they embraced, their sweaty faces smearing saltiness across each other.
“Let’s get it back in the bag and open up these windows. It’s hotter than fresh dog shit in here.”
“Lizette…” said Luz with a frown.
The cousins hugged once more and stood together with their joy. Sometimes, when Luz looked at Lizette, it was as if she were peering into a speckled mirror at pieces of herself rearranged in another person. It was her shyness distorted into assertiveness and her delicate features pulled into the beauty of a masculine femininity. Luz reached up and moved her hands through Lizette’s black curls, and they were cooler than the air between them. Luz thought of when she first came to Denver at eight years old and how Lizette seemed to instinctively understand the heartbreak Luz had experienced in losing both her mother and father to something different than death. She remembered how Lizette noticed that Luz’s clothes were stained and ragged when Maria Josie first brought her and Diego over to Tía Teresita and Tío Eduardo’s Fox Street home. Lizette, in a sly manner, brought an embroidered dress from her own closest to the front room, wrapped in a white washcloth, which she passed discreetly to her newfound cousin.
* * *
—
Once a date was set, things happened quickly. Alfonso found a small two-bedroom home to rent on Inca Street that had a square yard and a blossoming peach tree. The landlord had given him a special deal for being Pinoy, or so Alfonso claimed. He was a man named Buck Valdez, originally from the Lost Territory, a village called Antonito. He took great interest in Alfonso’s collection of ten-gallon hats and bolo ties and said that once in his youth, when he traveled as far as California, he worked the fields alongside Filipinos, enjoying their humor and taste in clothing and women.
After he paid the deposit, Alfonso brought Luz and Avel along for a tour, each of them whistling with echoes throughout the empty stucco rooms.
“Do you think she’ll like it?” Alfonso asked as he stood in the blue kitchen. The stove was a new gas-range model with two ovens and Luz thought if Lizette ever learned to embrace housework, that stove alone was enough to make a girl’s dream house.
“The question is,” said Luz, walking under the low archway into the front room, “will she be able to throw her parties here?”