The Short Sweet Dream of Eduardo Gutierrez Read Free Page A

carried clothes into the vacant bedroom that was formerly her parents’, shut the door, and the room became hers. Nobody thought of complaining. Silvia was a girl who with one long glance got everything she wanted. To make it permanent, Silvia had a lock put on the door. Such luxury, a bedroom where life can be lived in privacy and thoughts can remain personal and be protected.
    She put pictures on the wall of Enrique Iglesias, the singer, and her favorite movie star, Rosa Gloria Chagoyán, an actress who could sing. Silvia’s favorite movie of hers was Lola the Trucker .
    Silvia remembers hearing for the first time, at age nine, the lecture mothers gave to all daughters: “The boy must come after you. You are never to go after the boy. Better the man comes to you and talks. You do not go to them and talk. Never. Remember this all your life.” This was mixed with religious instructions so that the daughters believed any act of being forward with a boy was sacrilegious.
    Silvia needed no such lecture. If she had any early wild thoughts, only she would know of them and nobody else could even have the slightest notion. As for chasing a boy, that would never be her way, even if she was wounded by her stillness in the end. Who was a boy to expect her to follow him?
    As the mother inspected Eduardo, Silvia was next door doing schoolwork in the small house attached to the store.
    On the street corner outside Olivia’s store was a group of young men. Watching from behind her counter, Olivia could see that Eduardo was not rowdy like the others. He was tall and everybody else was short. He already had a thin mustache and brickyard arms. But he fought with nobody on the corner outside. She knew that he worked for his father in the brickyard right up the street, worked hard, and that spoke for the future more than any other quality that could be found in San Matías.
    The mother didn’t talk much to Eduardo. She watched and listened. To her, there was no question that he was the best of the bunch outside the store.
    She told her daughter Silvia, fourteen but almost fifteen, that Eduardo was good. Silvia was the rare one who made it to junior high school. But it was still time to tell her this. Silvia was old enough to start thinking of marrying and having children. And her bright body would bring the proudest young Mexican male crawling at her feet. Oh, she would attract many young men, the daughter would, just with her eyes alone, eyes that widened in laughter and then crinkled in joy and thrilled a boy at a glance.
    Then there were moments when her look reflected wisdom so far beyond a teenager. Even the young men who would have recognized intelligence were unable to sense the wisdom, for their attention was taken up by her long, curving neck, a neck as soft as a cloud. They had to remind themselves to breathe.
    Silvia had seen Eduardo before, at town dances. She danced and watched him stay against the wall as if nailed to it. At this time, Teresa Hernández was the girlfriend of José Luis Bonilla. One of her sisters married Gustavo Ramirez, who lived on the dirt street behind Eduardo in San Matías. Her other sister married Alejandro Huitzil, who wanted to be an upholsterer in Puebla. It was Gustavo who started it all by leaving his wife and child and crawling into America where there were construction jobs at the astounding pay of $6 and $7 an hour in Williamsburg, in Brooklyn, where there was a builder, Ostreicher, who was going to build many buildings on streets called Lorimer and, later, just around the corner, on Middleton.
THE CITY OF NEW YORK FIRE DEPARTMENT
1ST ALARM—PHONE (STRUCT)
02/06/96 E230 E209 L102 L119 BC 35 E216 RES
03 RC01 RS04
BOX 0341
LORIMER STREET MARCY AVENUE
STRUCTURAL BUILDING COLLAPSE
Found cause to be partial collapse of metal beams and building material at a new construction of homes from uppermost floors to cellar with two construction workers who were not injured, Henry Korl, mw39, and Thadeusz