Laura Furman - The O Henry Prize Stories 2005

That summer, in the days before Rita died, Grandmother Dulce seemed deceptively frail and required constant attention. It was Rita who dressed her each morning and put her in the sun. It was Rita who rubbed lotion onto my grandmothers hands and wrapped her long, thin piece of white hair into the smallest of buns. And it was Rita who held the wooden tablet with pegs in it steady while Grandmother Dulce made lace doilies, hooking strands of silk through one peg after another for hours on end.

I stood staring at Rita's body on the beach. Her dress was beginning to dry off and white salt caked over the fabrics small purple flowers. Her eyes were shut and her mouth slightly open. She looked trapped, frozen in the position in which she had washed ashore, like a starfish or a coral that becomes petrified when taken from the sea. I remembered how that morning Rita had not come back from her daily walk. My mother had had to dress and bathe Grandmother Dulce, and leave her on the porch with Artur. During their breakfast I heard my mother complain to my father about Rita's absence.

“Fire her, Edgar. Now you will have to fire her.”

I stood under the burning sun until I couldn’t bear looking at Rita's body any longer. I felt dizzy and hot, my throat stung, and my eyes watered from the reflection of the sun off of the bright sand. I ran to Aunt Annali's house and into her kitchen.

My aunt had a skinny cook named Doralice. Doralice was the darkest woman I had ever seen. I liked to watch her, because when she sweated her skin would shine and it looked like she was made of stone. She got mad when I stared at her so I had to watch her secretly, through the hole in the screen door, or from the open window. If she caught me she ran after me with a wooden spoon and swore she was going to beat me if I looked at her again. Doralice made desserts-fabulous creations that made me salivate every afternoon. She made chocolate cakes that oozed warm fudge from the inside and were covered with a white cream sauce on top, made of condensed milk. Once I had begged my mother for condensed milk. I begged for days, until she went to the store, bought seven cans of it, and made me sit and eat each one until I got so sick I couldn’t leave the bathroom for a whole day.

That day, I did not hide from Doralice when I came in from the beach. I walked right into the kitchen and sat down on a stool by the butcher block. She was making my favorite dessert-a guava pudding, the color of bubble gum and decorated with blue-black prunes. Doralice arranged the prunes without acknowledging me.

“Rita's dead,” I told her, my voice breaking, even though I tried my best to sound flippant about the whole thing.

“I know,” Doralice said mechanically, arranging the prunes.

She and Rita used to smoke cigarettes together in the afternoons, on their breaks. Rita rolled the cigarettes and licked them. Doralice yelled at her not to get her red lipstick on them. They laughed and giggled a lot. Doralice was having an affair with the coconut vendor's son-a muscular young man who met her by the shed behind Aunt Annali's house once a week. I watched them once-I saw them kiss. I saw their pink tongues move in and out of each other's dark mouths. I saw his hand go under her skirt and her long leg wrap around his waist. I left when I saw that. I backed away from my hiding spot and ran, more afraid of seeing what they were going to do next than of getting caught.

During their breaks, Rita would tease Doralice and she would tease Rita right back. “He might not be rich, but at least he's mine and mine alone,” she would say, growing serious. “You had better be careful, Rita. That's all I’m going to say. You’re a grown woman, you can do what you want. You don’t have to listen to me-but you have to know your place.” Rita would puff on their cigarette and change the subject, asking Doralice what she was going to cook for dinner that night. Then Rita would smile and nod, and listen, just listen, until it was time for them to go back to work again.

“I said Rita's dead. Don’t you care?” I yelped, hitting my fist against the wooden table. Doralice looked up, her eyes narrowed on me.

“What business of yours is it if I care?” she barked. “How do you know if I care or not? How does a spoiled little girl like you know anything at all? You didn’t even know Rita.”

She went for a spoon, but I jumped from the stool and yelled at her, “I knew Rita. I knew her better than anybody!” I ran from the kitchen out onto the porch.

My cousins, Uncle Paulo, and Aunt Annali ate lunch in their dining room and I watched them from the porch windows, wiping my nose on my shirt collar. They ate as a family, together at the same table. They did not have to keep their napkins in their laps or chew twenty-five times before swallowing. They got to drink real bottled Brahma Guaraná soda. My father only bought powdered Guaraná for us. Our maid Raimunda stirred the powder into a huge pitcher of water every day. It was chalky, not fizzy like the bottled soda my cousins got. It made me so mad.

Rita was a dark woman too. She had thick legs and tan skin-caramel-colored skin like Grandmother Dulce’s, like my own. Every day she wore bright red lipstick, which she would reapply after lunch. She was ten years older than my mother and had small spider veins on her calves. Despite this, Rita liked to wear knee-length dresses and black high-heeled sandals with little flowers embroidered on the straps. Once, my grandmothers wheelchair ran over her foot and broke her middle toe. Rita limped into my father's study, where he was teaching me to play chess. “Edgar,” she’d called him, “Edgar, I’ve hurt myself.” And then I watched from the doorway as she sat in a chair across from my father, her foot in his lap, his hands shaking as he made her a splint from a Popsicle stick and gauze.

Rita would not help in the kitchen. She would not do any cooking or cleaning. She was educated, she said, trained as a nurse and would not do a maid's work. This infuriated my mother. Rita always smiled when she passed me in the hallways, or when she caught me watching her with my grandmother. In the afternoons, when Rita sat with Grandmother Dulce on the terrace, I liked to sneak into her room at the back of the house. It was at the end of a long hallway behind the laundry area, five doors down from Raimunda's room. Rita had a patchwork quilt on her bed and her pillows smelled like her perfume, a baby cologne that sat in a huge glass bottle on her dresser. She had celebrity magazines stacked in a corner and a thin book about Rio de Janeiro on her dresser. When I looked in her dresser drawers, I saw large brassieres and cotton underpants that were like my own, except her initials were not sewn into the corners.

One afternoon, as I sat cross-legged on the sandy wooden floor and looked through her things, I found in her bottom drawer, hidden under an old sweater, two gold boxes tied with pink ribbons. I opened the one box and there was nothing in it except for ten empty tinfoil cups. The other box had three chocolates left in it: one with a pink swirl, another in the shape of a heart, and a white one with a stamp of a coin in the middle. My mouth watered. Where had Rita gotten these chocolates? They were expensive and fresh, not covered in a white dust like the old chocolates I had once found in our pantry and tried to eat but could not. These were smooth and rich and as dark as Doralice's skin.

On another afternoon, while Rita cared for my grandmother, I snuck back to Rita's room and I caught my mother coming out of it. We were both flustered-trapped in a dead-end hallway with no excuses to make.

“What are you doing back here?” my mother asked, her face flushing.

“I… I… was looking for you.” This was a lie and she knew it. I only looked for my mother when my father would tell me to get her. He was in Recife on business that day.