3:30 am
Millie Perdomo woke up to find that she had slept again with the smartphone on her forehead. It had become an annoying habit since she bought the damn thing at a coworker’s suggestion to unwind in bed before going to sleep. But, more often than not, she would place it on her forehead to stretch her arms and torso and end up dozing off to her favorite Dancing with the Stars episodes on YouTube. But she was hooked on the idea of taking a hot shower, then lying in bed and tuning in on her show of shows, instead of falling off the sofa at one in the morning and slothing off to bed all hot and sweaty. She just had to learn to put it to the side instead of on her damn head, she thought. And since she had given her old alarm clock to the neighbor, she was also blinded by the flashing strobe lights and intermittent wail and whistle of her smartphone alarm. Her cousin Justino had programmed the alarm and everything else on the smartphone so there was nothing she could do about it. But that smartphone meant progress and that was what it was all about, as far as Millie was concerned. That was what it was all about since she arrived on the damn island from the neighboring island. Millie Perdomo believed in the progress she had made since she arrived in Puerto Rico some twenty years ago, herself barely twenty, on a powerboat she and eighteen other Dominicans from the town of Nagua had paid to board in San Pedro de Macoris and that had left them on a beach in the northwest sector of the island. They were crammed head to foot or ass to face before they were heaved overboard when the captain sighted an approaching Coast Guard vessel and only twelve of the eighteen had made it to shore. There they hid among a cluster of sea grape trees clustered in a tangle as the searchlights cut rapid swaths of light from the hovering helicopters looking for survivors. She had the address of her uncle in Barrio Obrero, which some called the second capital of the Dominican Republic, in a plastic bag pinned to her bra. They all separated in groups of two or three to escape suspicion, but she stayed behind, too nervous to move, having lost all her belongings and one shoe when they threw her overboard. So after that first harrowing day, Millie was not going to complain if she woke up stiff and blinded from a smartphone. She was glad she had made it at all.
She put the smartphone on the pillow as she stood up from the bed and looked at the kitchen clock which read 3:30 am. She changed the water and put more flowers on the vase below the altar she had to Anaisa Pyé, her patron saint. She put on the radio to a station that gave the news tailored to its Dominican audience and pulled out one of the six blue uniforms she used for work at the two cafeteria where she now prepped the food and worked the counters until three in the afternoon. She had worked her way up from washing dishes in a slew of cafeterias from one end of the capital to the other, doing the graveyard shift as a bar maid in every rinky dink joint with two red light bulbs on the sign, even after she overstayed her welcome at her uncle’s house after she rejected his advances and was accused by the wife of being a marriage breaker.
The goal then was the green card, and after that citizenship. In the meantime, she kept a low profile as befitted an illegal immigrant and accepted the low pay and racism and prejudice, as many before and after her had done, in the name of progress, which in Millie’s case as in many meant anything above the hovel in a sea of mud and sewage, fated at best to be a maid in a rich man´s house for bed and board, or at worst to be permanently pregnant from whomever did not find her too ugly to screw. She was not new to racism, having suffered at the hands of those who still remembered her Haitian grandmother. So whatever they threw at her she was willing to take as long as they paid her wages and for as long as it took to get her American citizenship.
She set up the ironing board, and inspected the blouse for any wrinkle that might have escaped her eye, remembering when she had to make do with hand-me-down tee shirts and jeans, and cheap sneakers from the discount store. She opened the closet and admired it end to end, and looked down and saw a rack stock full of shoes for all occasions and color combinations. No matter that she hardly got to use any of it except when she went back home. That was not the point. The point being that they were in her closet and not on some mannequin as she passed by a store window. She liked her apartment small though it was. She had moved there recently from up the same street where she had a full house, but it proved too big when her daughter left with her grandchild, only deepening the wound that her ex-husband had left years before. But she liked it small, just as long as it had the essential comforts such as an indoor bathroom, living room, bedroom and water and light. It had got to the point where she had lived on this island almost the same amount of years, if not more, she feared the count, than she had lived on the other one. The years were adding up and she felt now more at home here than there, aside from the fact that wherever she lived there was a growing population of Dominicans, which was not the case when she first set foot on the beach that night. She felt at home but she knew it wasn’t really home. The people on the island were nice enough and spoke Spanish but she knew and felt what the locals thought about people like her, but after a while she got used to it, except for some remark from a customer, or a joke from the back of the bus she took to and from her jobs. But her place and her air-conditioned room where she slept was to her buffer enough. She knew things could be worse. They always could and always were.
The water boiled and she spooned in the coffee in the traditional way her mother did when she was young. She always had that cup before she left even though she was allowed to eat for free where she worked. In fact, she could, if she so wished, have a full breakfast like the ones she made for herself and Rogelio when they first started living together. She enjoyed feeding her man, seeing him happily eating away before he left to the construction site. She had met him during a trip home at a dance. It was her first trip home as a United States citizen which meant that she could breeze through customs without as much as a shakedown. Millie came by this citizenship and its coveted passport by finally convincing one of her bosses to pledge for her and be her sponsor for a green card. It cost her $800 and two blowjobs and one anal penetration. It didn’t start that way, but when she accepted his invitation to celebrate the application for the work visa, and the sponsor got carried away and demanded that she be more grateful for his gesture, that she thought, as the island saying goes, so much swimming but to die on the shore, so she agreed. But she had been groped and finger fucked before behind the kitchen sink and under a bar. That citizenship promised a change of fortune. One of the first things she bought as a citizen was a small and very sharp switchblade she carried in her purse and in her hand when walking lonely stretches of dark streets. Rogelio was a few years younger but according to her friends was quite a catch as a lover but not as a spouse. She knew the risks but she was now a citizen of the United States and wanted to celebrate by doing something crazy. Fuck the hometown hunk and take the plane back on Monday. They told her, careful, he doesn’t want your ass, he wants your citizenship.
They got married in a small protestant church close to the Barbosa Plaza in Barrio Obrero. Everyone she knew came, including her visa sponsor, and to give him his due, Rogelio did try. They rented a small house in Stop 15 in Santurce which was becoming popular with her countrymen as a cheap and nice place to live. The honeymoon lasted a year and ended on the day she told him she was pregnant. The next she heard of him he was living with a cousin in New Jersey. She hired a lawyer and got a divorce after he failed to show. She filed a complaint with Immigration hoping that that would get him kicked all the way back to the Republic.
So, she thought, here I am, a United States citizen expecting a baby who would in turn be a true citizen, born and raised as such. She didn’t ask for the minimum wage but more hours on the payroll because she also wanted all the benefits that come from it. She wanted her pension from Social Security that by her reckoning would permit her by age seventy to live leisurely in a mansion in the Romana sector of her nation of birth.
She rinsed the cup and dried it before putting it back in its place. Millie let the hot water from the shower fall on her back as she massaged her shoulders. She wrapped herself in a body length towel she had just purchased the past weekend on sale in Sears and walked to the window and looked out at the street. It was still dark and hardly any lights in the neighboring houses were on. Most had the luxury of sleeping a few hours more because they drove to work. That was the one thing she failed to get, a driver’s license and save up to buy a used car. She’d only need it to get to work and back, and maybe to get to a store. But she chose to move to Puerto Nuevo precisely because it was near bus routes and close to most places she would need to go. At the beginning, when her daughter Vicky was born, she continued living in Santurce but as the girl was nearing puberty she started looking around and found that first house in Puerto Nuevo, an old urbanization that Dominican families had started to move to in the eighties. Too many bar and whore houses were cropping up near Stop 15 and it was slowly turning into a crime-ridden slum where the old henchmen of the dictator Trujillo had set up businesses and ran drugs. She closed the window when the pit bull across the street caught her scent and began his daily yowling and wailing behind the neighbor’s iron-wrought gate. Millie never understood why people would buy such giant dogs that posed more of a threat to decent law abiding United States citizens than to thieves that easily silenced them with the famous Dominican tres pasitos, the tree step poison they used to kill stray cats and dogs. The whole trek to the bus stop she would be startled by attacking dogs that the owners left out in the street.
It was a quarter to five when she received a call from her daughter to continue the fight they had the night before. All the love that moved her to have two jobs, pay her tuition in a private Catholic School, and give Vicky all that she could not even dream about when young had slowly dissipated to a lingering hurt that had of late began turning to an anger that would grab her throat until she lost her breath. Vicky was a timid and beautiful teenager that maintained a decent enough average at school. She had inherited her father’s height and good looks and many friends advised her to place her in a modeling school. Millie had finally agreed with Vicky promising to get good grades. The modeling school was more than delighted to take her on and convinced Millie that modeling would give her the poise and elegance, self-confidence and social manners that would enhance any profession she would choose. All Millie´s hopes for college and to see her daughter as a professional went up in smoke when one night she confessed that she was pregnant. How she got pregnant Vicky would not say. Instead, she blamed her mother for everything, past, present and future. The Catholic school suspended her during the pregnancy, the modeling school did likewise and Millie was only able to convince Vicky to enroll in a secretarial school that would also give her a high school diploma. The shame Millie felt only worsened when she felt all her neighbors reveling in her tragedy and laughing behind her back. Millie had to pay someone to care for the baby and when Vicky graduated and got a job she would take long coming from work and Millie would have to care for the baby as if it were her own. She could not believe what was happening to her. Vicky had broken every promise she made to arrive early from work and take care of her baby. They spent days fighting and arguing all the finer points of whose real fault all this was until finally when Vicky got home late one night drunk, Millie gave her a week’s notice and threw her out. She did not see her daughter and the baby for a full year. And when the fences were mended, she still had to cope with the fact that Vicky had somehow contacted her father and now had to hear how Rogelio and his present wife were so loving and caring for the baby, showering her with presents and money. Millie, according to Vicky, was a bad grandmother and told her so at every opportunity. The fight the night before was precisely about Millie’s refusal to babysit for her daughter whenever her daughter wanted to take a night off with her new boyfriend. The call that morning was to say that Millie would never see her granddaughter again.
Millie dropped the call and took a deep breath. Outside the skies were clear. She closed the door and began walking up the street at 5:15 as she always did. She felt so angry and distraught that she felt that if a dog even looked her way she would batter it to death with her umbrella. What Vicky did not know was that Millie Perdomo was used to loss, accustomed to ungrateful relatives in the Republic who were not satisfied with the money she sent them but also wanted her to give board and lodging to whomever they wanted to send over, expecting Millie to support a host of cousins in the home of a United States citizen. The nerve, Millie thought, let them lose a shoe and everything she had on a dark beach, go without a bath for a week and work fourteen hour shifts. Her daughter did not know, nobody knew.
As she turned on the final street that led to the avenue where she took the bus she saw someone trying to open the gate of a house. She knew the guy for years though they had never talked. He was an old man now, half-drunk all the time since he retired and his last woman had left him. Millie had at one time fancied him but she felt that he believed that maybe her interest was in his citizenship because although well-mannered the old man was curt and stooped returning her greetings all together. People had told her that he had lived there forever, that it was where he was born. He was one of only two white Puerto Ricans who still lived on that street. She shook her head and smiled at what she avoided. What a hell to live with that grumpy old fool who probably couldn’t get it up anymore. She laughed. She had not realized how old he truly was.
She had been nervous lately walking that last stretch between the health clinic and the avenue because there had been talk of robberies. A lady that worked at the clinic had been assaulted three months before. She saw the shadow dart behind a pole. She was thinking that she would probably never see her granddaughter ever again. She took the knife from her purse as the man approached from her right side. She turned quickly and stabbed him in the ribs, turning the blade in the same manner that she deboned the chicken in the cafeteria where she worked. As the man fell she stabbed him again in the neck. She looked around as the man lay dying at her feet. She knew that she had to go home and change her clothes. She thought maybe she would call in sick. She didn’t do it often, hardly ever. But she was a United States citizen after all and knew her rights. Who knew if the man at her feet was an illegal immigrant, a lowlife like Rogelio. Who no one would miss. Probably came over on a boat.
©2015 j.a. morales-santo domingo
Millie Perdomo woke up to find that she had slept again with the smartphone on her forehead. It had become an annoying habit since she bought the damn thing at a coworker’s suggestion to unwind in bed before going to sleep. But, more often than not, she would place it on her forehead to stretch her arms and torso and end up dozing off to her favorite Dancing with the Stars episodes on YouTube. But she was hooked on the idea of taking a hot shower, then lying in bed and tuning in on her show of shows, instead of falling off the sofa at one in the morning and slothing off to bed all hot and sweaty. She just had to learn to put it to the side instead of on her damn head, she thought. And since she had given her old alarm clock to the neighbor, she was also blinded by the flashing strobe lights and intermittent wail and whistle of her smartphone alarm. Her cousin Justino had programmed the alarm and everything else on the smartphone so there was nothing she could do about it. But that smartphone meant progress and that was what it was all about, as far as Millie was concerned. That was what it was all about since she arrived on the damn island from the neighboring island. Millie Perdomo believed in the progress she had made since she arrived in Puerto Rico some twenty years ago, herself barely twenty, on a powerboat she and eighteen other Dominicans from the town of Nagua had paid to board in San Pedro de Macoris and that had left them on a beach in the northwest sector of the island. They were crammed head to foot or ass to face before they were heaved overboard when the captain sighted an approaching Coast Guard vessel and only twelve of the eighteen had made it to shore. There they hid among a cluster of sea grape trees clustered in a tangle as the searchlights cut rapid swaths of light from the hovering helicopters looking for survivors. She had the address of her uncle in Barrio Obrero, which some called the second capital of the Dominican Republic, in a plastic bag pinned to her bra. They all separated in groups of two or three to escape suspicion, but she stayed behind, too nervous to move, having lost all her belongings and one shoe when they threw her overboard. So after that first harrowing day, Millie was not going to complain if she woke up stiff and blinded from a smartphone. She was glad she had made it at all.
She put the smartphone on the pillow as she stood up from the bed and looked at the kitchen clock which read 3:30 am. She changed the water and put more flowers on the vase below the altar she had to Anaisa Pyé, her patron saint. She put on the radio to a station that gave the news tailored to its Dominican audience and pulled out one of the six blue uniforms she used for work at the two cafeteria where she now prepped the food and worked the counters until three in the afternoon. She had worked her way up from washing dishes in a slew of cafeterias from one end of the capital to the other, doing the graveyard shift as a bar maid in every rinky dink joint with two red light bulbs on the sign, even after she overstayed her welcome at her uncle’s house after she rejected his advances and was accused by the wife of being a marriage breaker.
The goal then was the green card, and after that citizenship. In the meantime, she kept a low profile as befitted an illegal immigrant and accepted the low pay and racism and prejudice, as many before and after her had done, in the name of progress, which in Millie’s case as in many meant anything above the hovel in a sea of mud and sewage, fated at best to be a maid in a rich man´s house for bed and board, or at worst to be permanently pregnant from whomever did not find her too ugly to screw. She was not new to racism, having suffered at the hands of those who still remembered her Haitian grandmother. So whatever they threw at her she was willing to take as long as they paid her wages and for as long as it took to get her American citizenship.
She set up the ironing board, and inspected the blouse for any wrinkle that might have escaped her eye, remembering when she had to make do with hand-me-down tee shirts and jeans, and cheap sneakers from the discount store. She opened the closet and admired it end to end, and looked down and saw a rack stock full of shoes for all occasions and color combinations. No matter that she hardly got to use any of it except when she went back home. That was not the point. The point being that they were in her closet and not on some mannequin as she passed by a store window. She liked her apartment small though it was. She had moved there recently from up the same street where she had a full house, but it proved too big when her daughter left with her grandchild, only deepening the wound that her ex-husband had left years before. But she liked it small, just as long as it had the essential comforts such as an indoor bathroom, living room, bedroom and water and light. It had got to the point where she had lived on this island almost the same amount of years, if not more, she feared the count, than she had lived on the other one. The years were adding up and she felt now more at home here than there, aside from the fact that wherever she lived there was a growing population of Dominicans, which was not the case when she first set foot on the beach that night. She felt at home but she knew it wasn’t really home. The people on the island were nice enough and spoke Spanish but she knew and felt what the locals thought about people like her, but after a while she got used to it, except for some remark from a customer, or a joke from the back of the bus she took to and from her jobs. But her place and her air-conditioned room where she slept was to her buffer enough. She knew things could be worse. They always could and always were.
The water boiled and she spooned in the coffee in the traditional way her mother did when she was young. She always had that cup before she left even though she was allowed to eat for free where she worked. In fact, she could, if she so wished, have a full breakfast like the ones she made for herself and Rogelio when they first started living together. She enjoyed feeding her man, seeing him happily eating away before he left to the construction site. She had met him during a trip home at a dance. It was her first trip home as a United States citizen which meant that she could breeze through customs without as much as a shakedown. Millie came by this citizenship and its coveted passport by finally convincing one of her bosses to pledge for her and be her sponsor for a green card. It cost her $800 and two blowjobs and one anal penetration. It didn’t start that way, but when she accepted his invitation to celebrate the application for the work visa, and the sponsor got carried away and demanded that she be more grateful for his gesture, that she thought, as the island saying goes, so much swimming but to die on the shore, so she agreed. But she had been groped and finger fucked before behind the kitchen sink and under a bar. That citizenship promised a change of fortune. One of the first things she bought as a citizen was a small and very sharp switchblade she carried in her purse and in her hand when walking lonely stretches of dark streets. Rogelio was a few years younger but according to her friends was quite a catch as a lover but not as a spouse. She knew the risks but she was now a citizen of the United States and wanted to celebrate by doing something crazy. Fuck the hometown hunk and take the plane back on Monday. They told her, careful, he doesn’t want your ass, he wants your citizenship.
They got married in a small protestant church close to the Barbosa Plaza in Barrio Obrero. Everyone she knew came, including her visa sponsor, and to give him his due, Rogelio did try. They rented a small house in Stop 15 in Santurce which was becoming popular with her countrymen as a cheap and nice place to live. The honeymoon lasted a year and ended on the day she told him she was pregnant. The next she heard of him he was living with a cousin in New Jersey. She hired a lawyer and got a divorce after he failed to show. She filed a complaint with Immigration hoping that that would get him kicked all the way back to the Republic.
So, she thought, here I am, a United States citizen expecting a baby who would in turn be a true citizen, born and raised as such. She didn’t ask for the minimum wage but more hours on the payroll because she also wanted all the benefits that come from it. She wanted her pension from Social Security that by her reckoning would permit her by age seventy to live leisurely in a mansion in the Romana sector of her nation of birth.
She rinsed the cup and dried it before putting it back in its place. Millie let the hot water from the shower fall on her back as she massaged her shoulders. She wrapped herself in a body length towel she had just purchased the past weekend on sale in Sears and walked to the window and looked out at the street. It was still dark and hardly any lights in the neighboring houses were on. Most had the luxury of sleeping a few hours more because they drove to work. That was the one thing she failed to get, a driver’s license and save up to buy a used car. She’d only need it to get to work and back, and maybe to get to a store. But she chose to move to Puerto Nuevo precisely because it was near bus routes and close to most places she would need to go. At the beginning, when her daughter Vicky was born, she continued living in Santurce but as the girl was nearing puberty she started looking around and found that first house in Puerto Nuevo, an old urbanization that Dominican families had started to move to in the eighties. Too many bar and whore houses were cropping up near Stop 15 and it was slowly turning into a crime-ridden slum where the old henchmen of the dictator Trujillo had set up businesses and ran drugs. She closed the window when the pit bull across the street caught her scent and began his daily yowling and wailing behind the neighbor’s iron-wrought gate. Millie never understood why people would buy such giant dogs that posed more of a threat to decent law abiding United States citizens than to thieves that easily silenced them with the famous Dominican tres pasitos, the tree step poison they used to kill stray cats and dogs. The whole trek to the bus stop she would be startled by attacking dogs that the owners left out in the street.
It was a quarter to five when she received a call from her daughter to continue the fight they had the night before. All the love that moved her to have two jobs, pay her tuition in a private Catholic School, and give Vicky all that she could not even dream about when young had slowly dissipated to a lingering hurt that had of late began turning to an anger that would grab her throat until she lost her breath. Vicky was a timid and beautiful teenager that maintained a decent enough average at school. She had inherited her father’s height and good looks and many friends advised her to place her in a modeling school. Millie had finally agreed with Vicky promising to get good grades. The modeling school was more than delighted to take her on and convinced Millie that modeling would give her the poise and elegance, self-confidence and social manners that would enhance any profession she would choose. All Millie´s hopes for college and to see her daughter as a professional went up in smoke when one night she confessed that she was pregnant. How she got pregnant Vicky would not say. Instead, she blamed her mother for everything, past, present and future. The Catholic school suspended her during the pregnancy, the modeling school did likewise and Millie was only able to convince Vicky to enroll in a secretarial school that would also give her a high school diploma. The shame Millie felt only worsened when she felt all her neighbors reveling in her tragedy and laughing behind her back. Millie had to pay someone to care for the baby and when Vicky graduated and got a job she would take long coming from work and Millie would have to care for the baby as if it were her own. She could not believe what was happening to her. Vicky had broken every promise she made to arrive early from work and take care of her baby. They spent days fighting and arguing all the finer points of whose real fault all this was until finally when Vicky got home late one night drunk, Millie gave her a week’s notice and threw her out. She did not see her daughter and the baby for a full year. And when the fences were mended, she still had to cope with the fact that Vicky had somehow contacted her father and now had to hear how Rogelio and his present wife were so loving and caring for the baby, showering her with presents and money. Millie, according to Vicky, was a bad grandmother and told her so at every opportunity. The fight the night before was precisely about Millie’s refusal to babysit for her daughter whenever her daughter wanted to take a night off with her new boyfriend. The call that morning was to say that Millie would never see her granddaughter again.
Millie dropped the call and took a deep breath. Outside the skies were clear. She closed the door and began walking up the street at 5:15 as she always did. She felt so angry and distraught that she felt that if a dog even looked her way she would batter it to death with her umbrella. What Vicky did not know was that Millie Perdomo was used to loss, accustomed to ungrateful relatives in the Republic who were not satisfied with the money she sent them but also wanted her to give board and lodging to whomever they wanted to send over, expecting Millie to support a host of cousins in the home of a United States citizen. The nerve, Millie thought, let them lose a shoe and everything she had on a dark beach, go without a bath for a week and work fourteen hour shifts. Her daughter did not know, nobody knew.
As she turned on the final street that led to the avenue where she took the bus she saw someone trying to open the gate of a house. She knew the guy for years though they had never talked. He was an old man now, half-drunk all the time since he retired and his last woman had left him. Millie had at one time fancied him but she felt that he believed that maybe her interest was in his citizenship because although well-mannered the old man was curt and stooped returning her greetings all together. People had told her that he had lived there forever, that it was where he was born. He was one of only two white Puerto Ricans who still lived on that street. She shook her head and smiled at what she avoided. What a hell to live with that grumpy old fool who probably couldn’t get it up anymore. She laughed. She had not realized how old he truly was.
She had been nervous lately walking that last stretch between the health clinic and the avenue because there had been talk of robberies. A lady that worked at the clinic had been assaulted three months before. She saw the shadow dart behind a pole. She was thinking that she would probably never see her granddaughter ever again. She took the knife from her purse as the man approached from her right side. She turned quickly and stabbed him in the ribs, turning the blade in the same manner that she deboned the chicken in the cafeteria where she worked. As the man fell she stabbed him again in the neck. She looked around as the man lay dying at her feet. She knew that she had to go home and change her clothes. She thought maybe she would call in sick. She didn’t do it often, hardly ever. But she was a United States citizen after all and knew her rights. Who knew if the man at her feet was an illegal immigrant, a lowlife like Rogelio. Who no one would miss. Probably came over on a boat.
©2015 j.a. morales-santo domingo