Her knees felt rubbery, her back ached low down. Wind off the East River chafed her face. The dark railroad like the walls of an ancient city, the cars going under in tunnels. Home was at least a refuge, as a mouse must feel about its hole. To crawl in and collapse. Yet she was not safe there from Luciente any more than she had been safe in her apartment in Chicago from El Muro, who had simply shaken down the janitor for the key. I have lived in three cities, she thought as she turned on to 111th Street with its three straight lines–and seen them all from the bottom. Kids played in the street outside–P.S. 101; mothers fetched their little ones from the day care center in the sawed‑off‑looking church across from her, Spanish Methodist. Drumming everywhere. It was spring, although she could hardly believe it, with the mutter of salsa music as loud as the roar of traffic, the growly pulse of the ghetto.

At fifteen she stood in the kitchen of her family’s railroad flat on the near West Side of Chicago, braced against the sink in blue jeans and fluorescent pink sweater. She could remember herself at fifteen and it did not feel different, only louder, more definite. “I won’t grow up like you, Mamб! To suffer and serve. Never to live my own life! I won’t!”

“You’ll do what women do. You’ll pay your debt to your family for your blood. May you love your children as much as I love mine.”

“You don’t love us girls the way you love the boys! It’s everything for Luis and nothing for me, it’s always been that way.”

“Never raise your voice to me. I’ll tell your father. You sound like the daughters of the gangsters here.”

“I’m good in school. I’m going to college. You’ll see!”

“The books made you sick! College? Not even Luis can go there.”

“I can! I’m going to get a scholarship. I’m not going to lie down and be buried in the rut of family, family, family! I’m so sick of that word, Mamб! Nothing in life but having babies and cooking and keeping the house. Mamacita, believe me–oнgame, Mamб–I love you! But I’m going to travel. I’m going to be someone!”

“There’s nothing for a woman to see but troubles. I wish I had never left Los Calcinados.” Mariana closed her eyes and Connie had thought she might burst into tears. But she only sighed. “I’ve seen hundreds and hundreds of miles of a strange country full of strange and violent people. I wish I had never seen the road out of the village where I was born.”

From her mother she inherited that Mayan cast to her face,the small chin, the sensuous nose, the almond eyes. They had all traveled far, and all of it bottom class. She knew her mother’s family came originally from Campeche, near Xbonil. Troubles had driven them north, and north again, and again north, generation after generation plodding northward into the cold, into bondage, the desmadrados: taken too early from the mother; or the mother cannot nourish. Her mother had died when Connie was twenty, the year of her first abortion. Year of blood. At fifteen, at seventeen, she had screamed at her mother as if the role of the Mexican woman who never sat down with her family, who ate afterward like a servant, were something her mother had invented. She had shrieked how much better she was going to live her life, until her father came in and gave her the force of his fists. Yes, like the teachers she admired in her high school, she was not going to marry until she was old, twenty‑five even. Like Mrs. Polcari, she was going to have only two children and keep them clean as advertisements. Those beautiful rooms, those clean‑looking men who wore suits, those pretty sanitary babies, not at all like Teresa and Inez when she had to change them and clean up their spilled food.

Yet she understood now, climbing her stoop, that she had wanted her mother’s approval. She had wanted her mother’s comfort. She had wanted Mariana to come with her in her pursuit of knowledge and some better way to live. She had never been mothered enough and she had grown up with a hunger for mothering. To be loved as Luis had been loved. Only the very youngest girl, Inez, had had that. After Mariana had been robbed of her womb, she had lavished affection on the youngest.

So who was the worst fool, then–herself at fifteen full of plans and fire, or the woman of thirty‑seven who had given up making any plans? Despair had stained her with its somber wash and leached from her all plans and schoolbook ideals.

In her box she found a letter from Teresa, married with four kids in Chicago, several miles farther west than their childhood flat. Teresa lived near the old Midway airport in a little house on a street of identical boxes. That Connie should sneer was absurd! What did she live in but a stinking slum? Teresa wrote in her large handwriting with all letters of one size: “Little Joey is sick with a cold and sore throat again, the poor thing. It seems it is one thing after another. I hate to see him so sick. Laura had it too but not so bad, she is big for her age and strong. The dr. says he may have to have his tonsils out. I hope not, not only the expense but it costs so much and the pain it gives him. For kids to go in the hospital. I have been going to Mass whenever I can except lots of times I can’t get away from the house because of children. I don’t want to have to take Joey to the hospital and leave him there.

“Marilyn’s birthday is April 28, I know you remember. What she likes best is dolls with real hair the kind you wash and set … .”

Connie put down the letter on her kitchen table. Now, what did Teresa think she could do? She couldn’t come up with money for any kind of present. She hadn’t had money for a birthday or Christmas present since she and Claud had been busted, almost four years. Teresa had married young, from high school, and never had she worked. Her man drove a bus. Connie wanted to remember her nieces and nephews, and when she had been working she used to send every one of them presents twice a year, to bring toys and pretty clothes to Luis’s various families, all conveniently located in the Greater New York metropolitan area. Number one wife (Carmel, the Puerto Rican) was in the Bronx. Number two (Shirley, the Italian) was on Staten Island. Number three (Adele, the Wasp) was with Luis in Bound Brook, New Jersey. She scanned the rest of the letter for catastrophes and decided to read it carefully later on. She had an urge to go back out, tired as she was. If she lay down she would get more depressed. She turned on the kitchen light. Evening thickened in the noisy streets.

In the refrigerator she found pinto beans in chili sauce, good still. With reheated beans she would fry a couple of eggs. She was tired of eggs and yearned for meat. How she would like to sink her teeth in a pork chop. Her mouth watered in faint hope. She turned on the little black‑and‑white TV she was always hauling back and forth from bedroom to kitchen. The news came on. She listened with half an ear; she did not have it turned loud. The set was company, a human–or almost human–voice. She tended to leave it on even when she was cooking or reading. It was her family, she had once wryly told Mrs. Polcari, who had not understood.

She stood slowly stirring the beans and waiting for the oil in the black frypan to heat up so she could break the eggs. She was in no hurry. What would she hurry toward? Below in the street evening hummed to the rhythm of high and low drums, a rising tide of dealing and hustling, the push of the young and not so young to score, to get laid. At a simmer, the slow bubbles rising through the thick air, sex and traffic quickened El Barrio. In thousands of meetings–accidental, accidental on purpose, clandestine, dating and courting–men were picking up women on corners, on stoops, in the family apartments, couples were going down the rotten stairs shoulder to shoulder, to restaurants and movies and bars and dancing. Women with no money were working magic in front of dim mirrors, frowning with concentration, as they waited for men to arrive. Couples climbed into cars and shot off into the night. Couples picked up barbecued ribs and chicharrones, couples carried packages of Chinese‑Cuban takeout and beer upstairs to their rooms. Men met their pushers and their dealers, or missed them and turned to ash. On the roofs pigeons were released to fly, to circle together fluttering like clean handkerchiefs among the chimneys where kids turned on and shot up and packages and money were exchanged.