Dreams Are Not Enough by Jacqueline Briskin Page A

mortgage payments and maybe eating beans at the end of the month. He didn’t know about sleeping on the damp earth, going hungry until you were giddy, peeing in the fields. The reality would assuredly send him packing.
    She knuckled her eyes dry, tiptoeing into the bathroom to use Juanita’s vaginal foam. It probably would have been safer if she could have squeezed it in before and after as she had in Las Vegas, but this time he’d had on a Trojan, so she guessed it was okay. She wished Juanita were here to discuss the problem with. She doesn’t even know I’m married. Then Alicia thought, / wonder if she knows anything about Barry. Alicia had written glowingly about him, but Juanita, humiliated by her functional illiteracy, might not have asked Henry or anyone to read the letters to her. Alicia, barely fifteen, longing for the half sister who had been a mother to her, began to cry again.
    The following morning, when everyone had left the house, Alicia walked the mile and a half to San Vincente Boulevard to the nearest pay phone. She called the Taylor Ranch.
    Mrs. Taylor answered. Juanita and Henry, she said in a clenched tone, were no longer there. Mr. Taylor had been forced to fire Henry. The Lopezes had left no forwarding address.
    Of course they hadn’t left an address. Pickers don’t have addresses.
    There was no way of telling Juanita anything. No way of finding her.
    Ever.
    Dropping the phone so it dangled by its cord, leaving the little pile of coins on the shelf, Alicia blindly left the booth.
    Three weeks later Barry and Beth sat drinking coffee on the broad, crowded flight of steps in front of Ackerman Hall. Barry, who had not spoken to anyone in the family since the disastrous night he’d left his parents’ house, was surprised and delighted when Beth showed up just as he was getting off work at the Student Union. Since it was lunch hour, all available tables inside and out were taken, and students were eating on the red brick steps. Over the roar of laughing conversation and the clashing of crockery, he boasted about the fabulous cottage and about the three articles he was writing for the Daily Bruin on John Hersey’s The Child Buyer. He needed to prove to Beth-and the entire Cordiner clan—how excellently he was managing.
    “Barry, listen,” Beth said.
    “Things haven’t been going well since you left. Mom’s been in for an EKG. And Dad’s gotten into a running battle with the head grip.”
    “Now tell me what I’m meant to do about it? Come crawling back to beg their pardon for marrying a terrific, fine girl I happen to be crazy about?”
    “How are her parents taking it?”
    Barry’s defensive truculence faded momentarily. When Alicia had told him she’d phoned her family, her huge blue eyes had been wet. She didn’t say anything about the call, but he was positive the Lopezes were coldly unforgiving about her marrying outside the Church.
    “You see?” Beth said.
    “Everybody’s upset. Uncle Desmond, Aunt Rosalynd, Uncle Frank, Aunt Lily” — “Stop laying a guilt trip on me!”
    “I don’t mean to.”
    “Why else’re you here?”
    Playing with her narrow gold bangle, she said, “PD asked me to talk to you.”
    “PD? How’s he in on the act?”
    “He’s invited us all down to Newport.”

Frank and Lily Zaffarano
     
    owned a bay front house there.
    “This Sunday.”
    “Us?” Barry asked.
    “Define the word ‘us.” ” ” You, me, PD, Alicia, Hap, Maxim. “
    “Give PD our regrets,” Barry said.
    “Beth, you might as well be aware of this for future reference. Until Dad apologizes to Alicia, I’m not exposing her to the fatnily.”
    “PD wants us to get together, that’s all. Us. Not Dad and Mom—or any of the aunts and uncles.”
    “You’re sure?”
    “Positive.”
    “Well, let me see how Alicia feels about it.” Barry used a stern tone.
    But as far as he was concerned, a Sunday away from the dreadful room was one notch below paradise.
    Newport curves