After many admonitions that the girls were to make certain both doors were securely locked, and the iron shutter drawn and secured across the front window—to keep the Anglos from stealing the dress on the dummy in the window—the Señora departed.

She hurried toward the tenement in which she lived, not because she was late, but to minimize the amount of time she had to spend on the streets. Much too often the Señora had been a target for the mouths of dirty, filthy boys. They were blondes, redheads, some with freckles, all of them Irish, Polish, God-knew-what-else, and why He had created these countries and their people was a mystery she would never understand.

Both doors of the store locked securely, blinds drawn, Maria came out of the dressing booth in her white dress. “Do you think you can make the alterations by tonight?” she asked Anita.

Anita nodded because she had several pins in her mouth. Almost eighteen, with dark, savage eyes that became brighter in the dark, Anita was an inch or two taller than Maria and several inches fuller across the breasts, hips, and seat. Bernardo swore that his girl had to be melted down and poured into the dresses she wore, that they fitted her like a second skin—molded, man, molded.

Anita wore her hair long, loose, and wild, and used eye-liner even during the day. Her lips were heavily lipsticked and enlarged, so that they always appeared to be full blown with passion. During the day she worked in flat-heeled slippers, but wisps of plastic shoes with three-and-a-half-inch heels stood beside the sewing machine.

“Now will you please hold still?” Anita cautioned in Spanish.

“Talk with me in English,” Maria replied.

“If you want to speak English, you have to think in English. But I like to think in Spanish,” she rolled her eyes expressively, “because that’s the nicest language for thinking about love. But please, right now, I want you to stand still.”

Maria reached up to unfasten a button at the collar and turn under the high neckline. Her communion dress was of soft, white rayon with eyelet embroidery at the neck, at the cuffs of the three-quarter-length sleeves, and the hem. Around the waist had been a white sash which Anita had promised to replace by something dark red or blue and Maria could wear a complementing band in her hair.

But the neckline was too high and the sleeves too long; still, if she had to make a choice between the sleeves and the neckline, she wanted something done to the neck.

Maria reached for a pair of scissors. “I want you to fix the neck,” she said. “Make it like the dresses you wear.”

“You’re going to make me swallow pins,” Anita said. She was working with a ruler to mark the new hem of the dress, which would be slightly below the knees. If Maria had been someone else, not Bernardo’s sister, she would have recommended a length two inches above the knees, but that would have made Bernardo furious, and not in the way she looked forward to that night.