Crossing the River by Amy Ragsdale

both.
    One morning, Peter and I were sitting at Menezes, an open-air lanchonete near the river, and Dalan sauntered over and sat down. He barely talked. He just sat next to us, which I rather appreciated. It made me feel included. I had the feeling, however, that his body never fully relaxed into the chair, that he was always on alert. That day, one of the “Gypsy” women, in their trademark long, diaphanous dresses, lime green this time, asked to read our palms. I’d asked who these people were, and all anyone could say was, “They’re not from here.” I wondered if they were distrusted the way I’d heard Gypsies were in Europe. As she went on and on, tracing one line, then another in our palms, intoning incomprehensibly, I began to wonder what Dalan, sitting across from us in his muscle shirt and surf shorts, thought about all this.
    â€œ É tudo verdade. Elas sabem tudo ,” he whispered when she was finished, barely moving his lips. “It’s all true. They know everything.” Too badwe hadn’t been able to understand any of it. In retrospect, we could have used a heads-up.
    Sometime later, Peter was musing about Brazilian character. “They have an almost-animal quality. They’re always watching; they see everything.” That was certainly true of Dalan. He never missed a beat. When Peter was open in soccer and no one passed him the ball, Dalan did. When I struggled to swing my baskets of groceries onto the city bus, Dalan appeared to help. Our first week in town, that man who’d run across the praça to tell Peter his son had split his head open? That was Dalan.
    Somehow I could never bring myself to call him “Nobody.”

10 10
    â€œQuer Ficar Comigo?” “Quer Ficar Comigo?”
 
    L IFE SEEMED TO BE settling down, if more easily for some of us than others. Before leaving the States, I’d had my share of anxious visions about what could happen to our kids in a small town in Brazil. Among them, I’d wondered whether our beautiful blond teenage daughter would fall prey to sexually predatory men. Would her inherent celebrity status as an outsider protect her, or would she be seen as a special prize, a conquest, a target?
    My mind had been filled with the stereotypes one can have before getting to know a place. For Brazil, I’d imagined macho cruising men and scantily clad women. We would find that while the women were scantily clad, they, at least Molly’s friends, were much less likely to hop into bed than her sixteen-year-old American counterparts; that while a Brazilian woman might wear a “dental-floss” bikini, she would never go topless. The statistics on rape and the demoralizing debate about whether a woman, through her dress or behavior, “asked for it” are just as disheartening and confusing in Brazil as they are in the United States, but not any more so. Ultimately, we would get to know many protective, respectful men to whom I would gladly have entrusted my daughter.
    Nevertheless, Molly and I had been warned by a Brazilian friend in Missoula that it was a common practice at parties to be asked by someone you’d just met if you wanted to make out. “ Quer ficar comigo? ” No strings attached. It turns out this is not a prelude for anything more, as it can be in the United States. But still, with a stranger?
    So when Molly came home from school one day jubilantly announcing that she’d been invited to her new friend Keyla’s fifteenth birthday party, we thought we were prepared. Molly was excited. She barely spoke Portuguese and, so far, only two people we’d met spoke English,but she could dance, and, at a party in Brazil, dancing would get you a long way.
    â€œMom, what should I wear?”
    â€œWhat do you have?”
    At ten that night, another new friend, Leila, came to pick Molly up. Molly was wearing jeans, a T-shirt, and her favorite multicolored flat sandals.