Maria yawned with relief, stretched, and ran fingers through her loose hair. “I was sleeping,” she complained because she longed to return to her dreams. “And I’m not dressed.”

“Nowadays it doesn’t take a girl more than a minute to get dressed.” Anita giggled. “Hurry, and I’ll wait for you.”

“Bernardo is angry?” Maria asked.

Anita pursed her lips as she raised a shoulder. “When isn’t he angry? Maria, hurry, please. There are other girls who would like to be Bernardo’s. Don’t worry about shoes and stockings. An old pair of flats will be all right.”

Chino had placed his small transistor radio on an empty egg crate and several of the boys and girls had removed their shoes to dance in their stocking feet. But Bernardo, his elbow on a parapet, puffed hard at a cigarette, and stared with cold, dead eyes at the city all around him.

It was so large, so vast, but refused to make even a little place for him. What sort of life could he make for himself in this city? Nothing he cared for, nothing he was proud of. He would fail, but others, damn them, would suffer for his failure.

“It’s about time,” he replied to his sister’s greeting. “I’ll bet if it was that Polack, you’d have been here on the double.”

“She was asleep, ’Nardo,” Anita said, defending his sister. “And it seems to me you like everything on the double.”

Bernardo reached out as if to pinch Anita’s breast. “Since when are you complaining?” Suddenly confused, because his sister was present, Bernardo snapped his fingers. “I want to talk to you, Maria. Not like a brother, like an uncle.”

Anita covered her breast by crossing her arms. “Some uncle! Lucky she has a father and a mother!”

“Who don’t know this country any better than she does.”

“Since when are you such an expert?” Anita challenged him.

Pepe paused in his dancing with Consuelo. “You leave it to ’Nardo,” he said. “He knows the score.”

“So why doesn’t he write a book about America?” Anita said. “None of you is so smart. In this country girls have as much right as boys to have fun. Girls can dance with anyone they please in America.”

“Really?” Bernardo bowed. “You talk as if Puerto Rico isn’t part of America.”

“Not for you it isn’t, you immigrant,” Anita flung at him. “And don’t start calling me all my names because in America, I’ve changed it to one, and if you don’t like it…”

Bernardo snapped his cigarette aside and wound his right hand into Anita’s hair above the nape of her neck. Fingers spread, he held her so that she could not avoid his lips.

“You like?” he asked her when he ended the kiss.

Anita fluttered her eyelids. “I like.”

“So behave yourself,” Bernardo said, as he pushed Anita aside and beckoned to Chino. “Chino, how was my sister when you brought her home?”

Chino shuffled nervously. “All right. A little upset. But they were only dancing.”