Chapter 18

Carlita's turn:

It is funny how a paper makes a difference. Without a paper, I am fourteen. With a paper, I am eighteen. Without a paper, it does not matter how much I love Dave and Dave loves me, we are not married. With a paper, we are married.

I think, though, that fourteen or eighteen, those numbers do not matter, and I think that paper or no paper, I am married to Dave and we have honored our family and our church by a wedding ceremony and I am Carlita Johnson and those things that are behind me are things to think about as I count my blessings.

I wake up on the first day after my wedding and I look at my husband, my Dave. What a good man. I am fortunate that he has an enormous heart to love me with, and I am fortunate as well that he is pleasant to look at. Little girls often dream of their future lives. A little girl in Guatemala dreamed of going to school and being a working person and having a husband who had a good job and who could buy a house for children. I had that dream.

I have a husband who owns a house. It has room for children. I have already been asked to work as a teacher for people who speak Spanish but not English. It may not pay money, but it is my first job since I left the orphanage.

You see? I have met my dreams. If I have met my dreams when I am fourteen or eighteen, then life may only get better. I must dare to dream bigger.

I look at Dave lying beside me. In sleep, he still has some of the smile that I love. It is morning and soon we will go to breakfast. I am naked. So is Dave, as is proper for a man and his wife on a honeymoon.

Also it is proper for me to slide back under the covers and touch him. Places on a man ... I have been curious and have asked a lot of questions about myself and about Dave and about the two of us together and one of the things that I find he enjoys is ... he's lying on his side, turned partly away from me. If I push my hand down there, I can cup his sack and tug gently.

He makes a noise, a happy noise, and rolls onto his back.

"Mornin', my love," he says.

"Good morning, my Dave," I answer. "I was just beginning to play..."

"Yes, you were ... I didn't want to be asleep and miss it." He pulled me gently on top of him. He says 'light as a feather'. He likes me there. I like being there.

"I am not finished playing," I tell him.

He holds my face between his hands, kissing my nose. I like being kissed on the nose, but not nearly as much as I like being kissed on the lips. I do not tell him that. I show him. After the kiss, I rise up on him and point to a spot above my right nipple. "Bite here. Not too hard." I smile for him.

Yes, that spot likes to be bitten. I know now. I know many things about myself that were not revealed until I became Dave's wife. My breasts. I think they are too small. Dave says they are perfect and he kisses and sucks and nibbles. The first time he nibbled, he hit that one spot just above my right nipple. It was like touching fire. "There, Dave. Bite harder."

He bit. I was consumed with fire ... I forced him. Maybe he wanted to be forced, because he was very hard, but I was in charge.

After we both exploded, he was holding me.

"Am I a strange person? I liked being bitten."

"You are not strange. You are my Carlita. My Carlita is perfect."

"It is normal?"

"Carlita, little one," he said, "what we do for and with each other, not a bit of it is strange. You get to say what you like. As long as it doesn't hurt you, it is okay..."

"That is how it works? If I like it, it is okay. If you like it, it is okay, also?"

"And you get to say that you do NOT like something, as well..."

"I like it all, Dave. All of it. I like being a woman with a man. I like making love..."

"We're supposed to like it."

"No, you do not understand what I am saying. This is something between you and me."

"There's supposed to be."

"Maybe it is so, but this is something I did not anticipate," she said. "I saw some movies, some TV, heard talk about being in love. I did not understand." I bent over a little to kiss him. "Now I understand. At least I understand more..."

"I'm still learning, too, Carlita," Dave said. "It is a very happy discovery to find that YOU are part of me..."

Dave's turn:

I survived the honeymoon. Make that WE survived the honeymoon. As it has been since that head popped up from behind the seat of my truck, I came away even more impressed with Carlita.

I watched her with others. We'd go to a restaurant or a shop together. She had poise and presence. Bumping around Texas, the Latino influence was evident, and she flipped back and forth between English and Spanish easily. I'm starting to pick up Spanish myself, but her conversations tend to bring smiles with others.

I remembered her corralling my family to show up at our wedding. I see Carlita now, hear her words in that matter of fact, measured tone as she lays out ideas and facts when we talk, and I imagine her doing exactly that with my family.

"I told them that you are family and I have no family of my own so they are MY family and that the greatest honor would be for them to be at our wedding, Dave." She looked into my eyes as if she was explaining things to a child. "They are our family now, Dave. If I was not married to you, they would be a fine family for me to adopt. But we are married and they are my family because I and you belong together."

Fourteen. Eighteen. Timeless. No words could describe Carlita adequately. She was like a forest goddess, able to change from sweet young girl to sultry big cat – jaguar, maybe, and while her hands excited my body, her mind pierced me to the heart.

I'm thinking too much. Home. We each grab a handful of luggage and enter the house as a married couple for the first time. I close the door behind us.

"Lock it," Carlita says.

I look over at her. Those dark eyes are sparkling. "It is time for us to make love in our house as an officially married couple," she said, "Although we were married in our hearts and in God's eyes weeks ago."

"Missus Johnson, would you like to choose where this is to happen?"

"The bed of my marriage, Dave. Where I gave myself to you the first time."

I picked her up. Next to nothing for weight, all of it a giggling tawny creature that was far more than my feeble fantasies ever imagined. I dropped her in the middle of the bed. Her hands went down to start working her jeans off and I started undressing myself.

"Shirt off? So you can see my inadequate breasts?" she giggled. She knows the answer. The breasts are perfect for her. Fourteen? Maybe they'll grow, but if they don't I'm good with it. Those eyes...

I'm naked now and so is she and when I crawl into bed beside her, her hands clasp my face.

"God gave you to me, Dave. You are something, someone, that I never dreamed of. I did not know how to dream properly." And she kissed me.

That's pure Carlita. Sometimes she's playful, giggly, still in that 'kid with a new toy' stage of marital relations, and sometimes she's like this, treating our mating like a sacrament. And delightfully, sometimes she switches modes in the middle of the festivities.

I love worshiping her naked body and now, she's learned that fact. No longer self-conscious, she bounces around the house at odd times... "como un indio", she laughs, teasing eyes flashing. "Catch me in my forest, Dave!"

She's not that hard to catch, you know ... I guess I wasn't that hard to catch, either, in retrospect.

Weeks pass. We've developed our routine in life together. Yep! Carlita's a licensed driver now, but on two evenings a week she's at a classroom teaching English to other immigrants. I've shown up, just to observe.

"Class, this is my husband, Dave," she says, introducing me. I stand, bow slightly, hearing a lot of low voices, "esposo de Carlita".

She's got poise as a teacher, despite her obvious youth. Of course, most of her class are people who WANT to speak better English.

Pat says that some of the officials at the school board are VERY happy with her performance. She's had observers from local, state and Federal government. Her name appears in a lot of correspondence, I'm told.

So I get a squeal of a phone call one day. "Hi, honey," I answer.

Another ear-piercing squeal. "Dave, my love, my husband, my rock. I am going to college."

"Of course you're going to college, baby. We talked. You have your GED. You've taken the tests. We've got you registered..."

"No! I know all that we've done. This is much better! I am being awarded a scholarship."

"Who?"

"The school board talked to the university. If I choose to do education ... Scholarship. Books. Tuition. All of it. And a stipend for continuing to teach as I have been teaching. Do you know 'stipend'?"

"I know 'stipend'," I say. "They are paying you."

Apparently Carlita was more affected by that bit of news than I was. Giggles. "I am Carlita Johnson and I have a JOB! In AMERICA! As a teacher!"

The oddball part of the story here is Brindy. Pat succumbed to the idea that Brindy would attend Carlita's classes.

"In a whole classroom full of 'English as a Second Language' Brindy is 'Spanish as a Second Language'. She helps because my students see that it is no easier to learn Spanish than it is to learn English, and much discussion takes place in both English and Spanish as they work with her."

Having Brindy and Carlita both in class puts me and Pat with time on our hands at the same time, so we talk.

"She's blossomed," Pat said.

"Which one? Carlita or Brindy?"

Pat smiled. "You're right. Both, really. Carlita, there's something about her that made this seem like her destiny. There's an indescribable undercurrent to her that I noticed that night when she tried spending the night here the first time. But Brindy..."

"Yeah, I can see changes."

"It's good, you know ... She was so beaten down when we started talking. There was that time where she would not leave her own house unless she was with me. Then she moved in. Now, it's like she's taking wing."

"Are you afraid to lose her, Pat?"

"I don't know what I fear here, Dave. My original intent, I swear, was to help this girl who was in a bad place in her life."