The Parachutists

THE PARACHUTISTS / Sandra Scofield IT IS ABILENE'S IDEA to try an Arab restaurant. She has never had Arabic food, and the idea, in Mexico City, has particular appeal. She has heard of a place just off the Zócalo, in a neighborhood where cheap yard goods are sold. Isabel's sister Ceci and her voluble student friends go along, knowing that Isabel, a money-lender, will pay for it. The students talk all through the meal, especially several boys who are majoring in geology, and who talk half an hour at a time about rocks. The girls, who, Isabel whispers, are smarter and in better colleges than the boys, pose and mew. Like Ceci, they dress as North American as they can manage. One girl wears her hair in a frizzy Afro style; Abilene thinks if she fell on her head, she would bounce. Isabel and Abilene exchange wry, indulgent looks. They talk, too, about the coming Olympics. It seems the entire city is mobilized. The girls speculate on what it would be like to be a hostess, while they dip their fingers in couscous and flirt with the boys. Ceci pouts a little. She would rather talk politics, but she has invited students who are less serious than she, knowing it will please Isabel if they act more like kids than radicals. She knows why Isabel has offered this night out. It is Abilene's idea, too, to go some place to dance. Isabel shrugs. Why not? The young students say yes; they laugh and shout ole! and they go to a mariachi cantina. The music is very loud. The cantina crowded. Girls in cheap bright clothes stand on the side, bouncing on their toes, waiting to dance, odd with their solemn faces and wiggly legs. They stand in clusters, smoothing their rayon skirts, their tortured hair. The boys—they do seem very young to Abilene—walk around the room as if they are at a livestock show, stopping to look boldly at the girls, who twist their heads and lower their eyes nervously. "Are they whores?" Abilene asks Isabel in a whisper. "Not yet," Isabel whispers back. The floor is crowded with couples dancing, their arms chopping the air, up and down like water pumps. One of the geology students asks Abilene to dance. She feels awkward, she knows that she isn't pretty the way Mexican girls are, and she is older, too. But she also knows if anything will make her feel good, it is dancing. The music never seems to stop. The musicians take turns away from their guitars, trumpets, and cornets, one at a time, to drink pulque at the end of the bar. The young student, whose name is Jorge, is lithe. He dances from the crotch, and when he sees that Abilene notices, he rolls his hips provocatively. They dance until perspiration runs down Abilene's face and arms. The musicians stop suddenly and go out of the room. Jorge leads Abilene The Missouri Review · 49 back to their table, where the boys say she is a good dancer. The girls look at her with blank round eyes. Business at the bar picks up, and all over the room voices yell for more music. Soon another band does appear. As soon as it starts to play, Abilene looks at Jorge, expecting to dance again. Jorge asks Ceci instead. He sees to it that they stay near the table, so Abilene can watch, but he never looks at her. At one point, he dances very near her, facing away, so that his undulating hips are directly in her line of vision. The music is Afro-Cuban, much better for dancing than the mariachi; it pulsates, drives its beat, throbs. So, Abilene notes, does Jorge. He moves his legs loosely as though they were liquid, and his shoulders move up around his neck, his head bending this way and that, and then he throws his head back and closes his eyes as one might do when in pain. He pays almost no attention to Ceci, who is not a bad dancer herself, except that she dances with her feet instead of her body...