Dreams Are Not Enough Read Online Free PDF

looie in the tank corps, one gorgeous hunk of man with big baby blues. Whoever, you only had to look at Alice to see he hadn’t been some Mex like Juanita’s old man.
    “God, that older gal of mine looks pure pachuco, don’t she?”
    May Sue was one of the migratory farm workers who shifted up and down California in rattletrap trucks or ancient, trembly yellow buses that had been declared unsafe for schoolchildren. She worked the fields, stoop labor, twelve or fourteen hours a day of it. Many ranches had a row of plumbing less shacks for the seasonal labor, but others lacked even these minimal facilities, and then May Sue, with her girls, would cover the bare earth with corrugated cardboard and hang a makeshift tarp. She shopped at shabby, badly lit grocery stores, paying exorbitant prices for stale, fat-laden hamburger and white bread whose soft crust occasionally was green with mold. On payday she splurged on dago red or beer or candy bars or milk. Clothes came from cavernous Goodwill shops. (Decades later Alice would see a rerun of Harvest of Shame through a blur of tears: she knew only too well the way of life Edward R. Murrow had been exposing. ) Despite the grueling life that was reflected in her sagging body, May Sue retained a yen for pleasure. Traces of her girlhood prettiness remained and men were still drawn to what she called a little party-party. She had no energy left for her daughters. Alice’s remembrance other mother was not visual: Momma meant the mingled smells of beer and sweat and cheap perfume, the sting of a slap.
    It was her half sister, Juanita, eight years older, who supplied the hugs, the warmth, the soft lullabying.
    “Nita, Juanita,” she would croon, pressing her cheek against Alice’s soft black hair.
    “Li-ingering falls the Southern moo-oon.”
    Other than the thick, lustrous black hair, the half sisters had no feature in common. Alice could have posed for a Gerber’s ad with her enormous blue eyes, glowing pink and white skin, cute button of a nose, her wide smile that soon displayed perfect milk teeth. Juanita’s face was too wide, her complexion large-pored and sallow, her teeth crooked. Her one good feature, beautiful dark eyes, were set in a perpetual squint because of uncorrected nearsightedness and astigmatism.
    When Alice was five and Juanita thirteen, May Sue found herself in need of yet another abortion. The old woman with the pink wart on her nose required a ten-dollar bill in advance and Juanita’s assistance.
    Both of May Sue’s daughters witnessed the gush of crimson that bore away the mouselike creature, their half sibling, saw the blood spread and spread, dripping between the planks of the old table as May Sue’s cries grew feebler.
    After May Sue’s death, Juanita earned their living. The other pickers helped her as much as possible, telling her where the crops were coming in, whom to see about being hired. During the height of the strawberry season the younger children picked too, and Alice labored under the summer sun. At these times, foremen often refused to pay a child who didn’t pick steadily. Alice would grow dizzy and the endless, plastic-shielded fields would shimmer and waver in the blazing sun, but she never quit.
    Local authorities paid lip service to California’s educational laws, not supplying teachers for the children of migratory workers but insisting they enroll in school. Neither Hollister girl attended any one school for more than three successive weeks. Juanita, with her feeble eyesight, never did learn to make out more than a few simple words, and May Sue’s demise ended her education. Alice, though, was a quick study. She learned to read more fluently than most of her classmates, to spell with reasonable accuracy, to add and subtract so rapidly that she astounded her teachers. Otherwise her education showed startling gaps—she did not know George Washington had been the first president, she never learned cursive writing, she believed