makes a noise like biting on hard candy. “No, not the boys I dance with, but that’s only where the people are, the teachers.” Rosa nods, holds out her hand to touch Teresa’s legs.
“Don’t touch, it hurts. Listen to me, Rosa. This is a secret.” Rosa really must concentrate. The pink comforter is no help. She bites down on her lip, tasting her own blood, hot and salty.
“Some boys don’t listen when you’re alone with them. Don’t be alone with a boy.”
“You have problems because you’re pretty,” Rosa says, touching her tongue, blotting at the blood with her finger. She and her sister both have dark eyes and hair, but Rosa’s is cut short since she can’t brush the tangles by herself. Rosa’s face is defined by the same long eyebrows and oval face, yet it’s stretched wide, making all her features larger than Teresa’s. Rosa has larger breasts and thighs, too, a version of what Teresa might look like one day in middle age. Only the one leg has never grown into the shape of a woman.
“Oh Rosa, what did you do? Did you bite your tongue? Who told you that?” Teresa frowns, stroking the top of Rosa’s head, blotting at her lip with the sponge.
“I heard Mamma and Papa say it about you. You get problems when you have a pretty girl in a big city. I’m not pretty like you. No problems for me.”
“Rosa, a boy might ask you to go alone with him sometime. You don’t go. You understand?”
Rosa taps her foot. She can’t imagine any boy asking her to go away with him, although there had been the boy who offered to walk her to the washroom at the dance. Miss Brown said he was a nice boy, and he was. He smelled like pine cones, and he took her to the bathroom upstairs, the far one, he said, because Rosa must like to have fun. Rosa giggled, said she did, and he put his hand on her blouse to fix her button. Rosa laughed, because he missed her button. Then the door opened, a young girl came out drying her hands against her yellow dress, and so she went in after and then he took her back to the dance. He hadn’t asked her to go away with him. He hadn’t asked her anything, not even her name. One day, Rosa knows, Teresa will go away. Go away with a boy, marry and have babies like their mamma.
“It’s hot there, Tera?” Teresa nods. “I know,” Rosa says, taking the tube of cream off Teresa’s end table, “I’ll put this on your legs and you’ll feel better.”
Rosa opens the bottle and squeezes the white liquid into a mound onto Teresa’s sponge. Teresa stretches out her legs, and Rosa smells the flowers, but another smell, too, something Rosa can’t make out, a strong smell, not very nice, maybe the smell of an animal, like her sister said, like the smell on your clothes when dogs get too close to you. Then she remembered walking one day with Teresa when a dog peed on the fence next door. Rosa laughed at the funny streak it made, and Teresa told her dogs do that to show where they’ve been. Now Rosa, too many images in her mind, is confused. Berries. Wolf. Boys. Trash. Dogs. She can’t imagine everything together. Better to concentrate on Teresa’s legs.
“You smell nice, Tera,” Rosa tells her, but Teresa isn’t looking at her. Her face is covered with her arm and she curls herself up into a ball.
When Rosa goes back to bed, instead of looking at her picture book, she takes out her hairbrush and pretends to shave her legs until the bristles scratch her skin. “Look at me. I’m here,” she says to the wolf and the girl in the red dress. Then she turns off the light, and thinks about her secrets.
Tear Stains: You’re the only one who notices them.
The week before Magdala married all those years ago in Portugal, her mamma passed down her wedding dress and her mourning dress. Her own husband had been dead almost twelve years so she didn’t need to wear the full black suit with the veil. She only needed to wear black. Magdala had been staring at the white frilly fabric, the delicately beaded cuffs and collar, wondering if the women had already altered the waist and the lace on her shoulders to suit her own figure when the black attire was thrown on top of her already full arms: an ankle-length starched skirt, a long billowy black knit blouse, and a short veil. “Every woman needs to prepare, Magda,” her mamma told her. “My mamma did the same for me. She wore both of those. You’re next.” She hugged her daughter in rapture, the dresses collecting under Magdala’s chin and bristling her ears, the black veil crossing her face like a net. She could barely see her mamma hunched over, arms wound tightly as string, pinching her ribs. As the smell of the bread rising in the kitchen mixed with the sting of the boiled onions and zucchini, mother and daughter thought of all the preparations that still had to get done before morning. Suddenly, they both started to cry.
Now Magdala sheds her tears on paper, the letters she receives from back home. News about the others, cousins she’s never met, and her only sister, Maria, who stays home with her mamma. They try to keep in touch, offer news about the weather, gardens, weddings, or births, and Magdala smells each sheet of paper as it passes behind the next one, as if Portugal were contained in the neat lines and could be unzipped like a package. Then she carefully folds the papers, ties them with string, and adds them to the others neatly stored in the shoebox of her closet. She received another letter today, but won’t read it until all the laundry is hung and she can retreat to the basement with a cup of hot tea.
As Magdala clips another white undershirt to the line, she wonders, not for the first time, why they decided on this house over twenty years ago. There were other houses made of brick on the same street, but they were red, not grey, and this house’s driveway was clearly marked by two stone walls on each side of the entrance, two stone lions carved at the foot of the road. She wanted the house because of the privacy, the black gates around the front and back, and those grey walls. Now she wishes she had chosen one of the houses with a shared driveway or an open front yard where the children could have played ball or skipped and not run into gate or stone. But there was the issue of money. That’s why they’d picked the Italian neighbourhood in Toronto instead of the Portuguese one. It was closer to Tonio’s work and they didn’t have a car. She thought it wouldn’t matter since they were sending the children to English schools and teaching them bits of Portuguese around the house. But now Teresa knows more Italian than Portuguese, picked up from years of talking to other children and their parents on the street, and Rosa, well Rosa, when they realized what was wrong with her, they were thankful she would grow up in a neighbourhood where the children might tease her in a language she wouldn’t understand. But Rosa too learned Italian. It was only Magdala who did not, and when she hangs her laundry, she can barely see the neighbours, let alone speak to them. Shaking out a wet sheet, Magdala tries to remember the last time she spoke a word outside the house or the grocery store, when she didn’t just wave curiously over walls. Was it last summer? Last fall? Yes, it was last fall, when the Korean couple who run the corner store were robbed. A teenager in a ski mask hit the man over the head and asked for all the money. They called the police, Teresa told Magdala, but nothing could really be done about it, except that the Korean man had four stitches on his scalp. The next time Magdala went to buy a carton of milk, she’d said, “Sorry. So sorry to you and your wife.” She felt like she was about to cry, and he looked confused, asked her if she needed help with something. “No. No. It’s just good that you’re in the neighbourhood,” she said, but she knew she’d said everything wrong, should have made herself clear that she had heard about the robbery. Stunned to be talking to someone, Magdala could barely drop her change in to her purse and walk home.
There was another Portuguese family that lived down the street, beside the parkette, but they moved. They had an extra-large garden and even grew pumpkins in the fall. For a while, Magdala and the other woman exchanged vegetables, recipes, and sympathy cards, although they never went for walks or had tea unless there was a chore involved. Children and husbands had to come first. But it was nice to buy bread or compare fabric prices together, to speak the language of her mamma and her sister with someone besides
