Saving the World Read Free

Then there are Alma’s cousins back in the Dominican Republic, fading beauties having their hair colored and their faces lifted, joining Bible study groups led by young, attractive Jesuit men from Spain, while their cocksure, cologne-scented husbands go off to their mistresses in designer guayaberas. Alma wavers, wanting and not wanting to know more.
    â€œI know what you must think …” The woman’s voice trembles. “But I’m not some whore. I’m just calling everyone to be sure.”
    Whore? How old-fashioned the word sounds. There are no whores in the USA anymore, Alma feels like saying. Everyone has a new name now. Flight attendant, waste disposal engineer, sex worker. And what does it mean that the woman is
calling everyone to be sure
? To be sure of what?
    â€œAIDS is just the last stage,” the woman goes on. She sounds tired, worn out with trying to reconstruct all that some health professional has told her. “I’ve probably been HIV for some time. But I don’t have no health insurance. So I didn’t know myself till I got real sick.”
    It’s only now that Alma notices the woman’s bad grammar. Oddly, it makes her feel safer. Richard wouldn’t risk their happiness for someone who can’t talk right, would he? Like a lot of former farm boys, Richard can be a snob about certain things. Then, too, the womanmight not be smart enough to have gotten the details right. Maybe she had sex with Richard years ago. HIV doesn’t lie dormant that long. Or does it? Alma knows so little about it—a pamphlet she read while waiting for her flu shot at the hospital. She actually knows more about Balmis and smallpox than about her own millennium’s epidemic.
    But this is irrelevant: Richard has told her about everyone he has slept with, and among the modest handful there are no quick affairs, ladies who might later call up with bad news. Alma recalls their first days as lovers (she was thirty-nine; Richard, forty-seven), the thrilling sense that even as middle-agers they could still be the principals in a love story: the long, housebound days on weekends the boys were with their mother, the rumpled sheets, the life stories they shared, the lights of the little town beyond the window, snow beginning to fall. “Okay,” Alma says finally, as if granting the woman some point. “Just tell me, when did you and Richard get together?”
    â€œPlease don’t get mad at me, Mrs. Huebner.”
    â€œMy name is not Mrs. Huebner,” Alma says, her voice rising again. “I’m Fulana de Tal.” Her professional name, necessary camouflage upon family request. “It sounds too much like a title,” Lavinia had objected, finally relenting when Alma explained that
fulana de tal
actually meant a nobody, a so-and-so.
    â€œWhat?”
    â€œFulana de Tal,” Alma repeats. She doesn’t try to Americanize the pronunciation. This woman will probably assume that Richard found her during one of his third-world consultancy trips and brought her back to be the good wife it is now difficult to find in this country.
    â€œYou don’t give a shit, do you? As long as you’re safe.” The woman’s voice has turned nasty. “I hope you get exactly what you deserve! Go to hell!”
    â€œWait! Please!” Alma is the one pleading now. She wants the woman to take back her curse. But the woman has hung up her end.
    Alma is still at her post at the window. She looks out as if she might spot the woman racing across the back pasture toward Helen’s house. She thinks of the stranger she saw earlier. It’s as if in her gloominessshe has mistakenly wandered into some twilight zone, among the bruised and broken with no way to defend herself from their intrusion or ill will. This woman’s curse is an infection she won’t be able to shake off.
    Only, Richard—loving him, being loved by him, if he hasn’t