Dinner at Sanita’s every Sunday night, for three years.

Vanessa was a tomboy and loved hiking through the hills with Ben, Jeff and Willy. In the dry season they’d slide down the steep hill below my house on cardboard sheets, as fast as skies on snow. She was as tough as the boys and made no girlfriends, though there were some around. They played with dolls and didn’t tumble down hills, so she ignored them.

One Saturday morning, as I picked her up with Willy for another day at our house, we stopped at a panaderia for a one-dollar breakfast sandwich and a scene I’ll never forget. Having just arrived here from Spain, she spoke pure, Castilian Spanish in her sing-song childish voice. Now Puerto Rican Spanish was a crude slang compared to it, devolved over four-hundred years and degenerated over time, as American is to English.

When she ordered her sandwich, the old woman behind the counter was so struck by the beauty of it, like some sort of miracle, that she ran to get her husband in the back and they both asked her question after question, just to hear her talk in that pure, beautiful accent. The old woman was holding her hands together, as if in prayer, delighted with her speech. This went on for ten minutes. I’ve seen strange things in my life, but the strangest of all is when old people display wonder. With children it’s common. But with old folks, you’d assume they’ve seen it all. Something is striking a very deep chord in their hearts and minds. Perhaps it was some long buried nostalgia for the old country and that pure language lost. I surmised that this old couple came from the very same place, fifty years before.

Rachel was smitten with Mike. She invited him into her bed one night and her apartment the next. She didn’t work but had some savings from Spain. She had no specific reason for moving to this place. I suspected she just wanted to get away from her life in Spain. She didn’t search for a job. She found love right away and that became her full time job.

But Mike was spiraling down swiftly with his crack addiction. When he first met her it was still just starting. He’d buy a few five dollar vials and that was it for the day. But he’d smoke it right in front of her, as I witnessed it. I’d drive him to her place and sit around for a half-hour at their kitchen table. He’d call up his buddy, Miami Dave, just down the street and when he showed up they’d light the pipe and start puffing away. After a half hour they were done. Dave and I would split and Mike devoted the rest of his evenings to Rachel. She never touched the stuff or even drank. She was a strict Catholic, not going to the cathedral in the center of Rincon, but some little church in a house, some sect I suppose, but every Sunday without fail.

I had a big project in San Juan a little later and rented motel rooms for my best workers with the credit card, to stay there all week and work long hours. This was before Victor was smart enough to rent a large, cheap apartment, four bedrooms, with two beds in each, to put up eight workers. Most of our jobs were in San Juan and our best employees were Jaime’s finds, from Rincon and Mayaguez, three hours away.

Rachel and Mike were so much in lust at this time that she parked her kid one week with an older lady from her church and came with Mike to San Juan to share his room, me driving them both as neither had a car. Now crack was everywhere in S.J. and on one Tuesday night he went on a binge. When I went to get him the next morning I found him lying in bed looking deathly ill and covered in red hives. He’d really overdone it. But I needed him to work. The store had to be finished by Friday. It nearly was but there were thirty 2 by 4 fluorescent lights in the ceiling to be wired up, among many other details that I had to attend to. I could tell he wasn’t getting up and they both saw the disappointment in my face.

Rachel was laying there beside him and upset at this sad scene, and my dilemma. Then she offered to take his place. I pondered this for a few seconds. It was a simple, repetitive job and perfectly safe, as all the power was still off, so I agreed.

She gets up, topless, in her undies, right in front of me, (that’s European women for you) puts on some loose green jogging shorts, a white tank top, no bra, her sneakers, and off we go.

On a bakers scaffold, the platform five feet high, I set her up with wire nuts, wire strippers, screw drivers, a box of light bulbs and show her what to do. It’s simple, the whips to feed the lights were already in place. She just had to take off a small plate on the top of each fixture, attach the whip with a connector, strip the wires and attach black to black, white to white and the green wire to a green ground screw, then put the plate back on with one screw. Then she had to kneel down on the scaffold, put in four fluorescent tubes and close the lens, job done. She could even roll the scaffold to the next light on its wheels, grabbing the ceiling grid and pulling herself along.

As I glanced back at her every thirty minutes or so, finishing my panels, I noticed she was making incredible progress, working non-stop and totally focused on her job. But I also noticed one other thing. Many of the other young workers in the store, including my friend Cecil, Frank the sheetrock taper, the painters, the plumber even, who was supposed to be in the back, kept walking right by her scaffold slowly, always glancing up, as if to admire her work, repeatedly. So I finally walked over myself and took the look up to resolve this mystery.

Her jogging shorts were oversized. Looking up you had a perfect view of her bright red, lacy, skimpy underwear, brought especially from Rincon for Mike’s pleasure. You could also catch glimpses of her tits, inside the short tank top, as it flopped around as she moved. I had my full view of them when she stepped out of bed, along with her very shapely legs and beautiful, round behind.

Everyone else there did too, many times over, partial glimpses, their overactive, male imaginations filling in every detail.

She finished over twenty lights that day, more than any of my other employees would have. I told her I’d pay her eight dollars an hour and that she could work with me any day she wanted, which she gladly accepted, telling me she enjoyed the work. The only suggestion I made was that she wear sweatpants in the future, for the sake of the store’s progress, that she might be distracting some of the workers. Other than that I told her she was a great employee.

She never did abandon the half tee-shirt or adopt the bra, so her tits some days showed quite visibly. But when Mike returned the next day he worked right next to her, teaching her other aspects of store wiring, (which made her an even more valuable help to me over the following weeks). He was protective of her but couldn’t always be at her side, so she came to know and talk with and befriend the other employees. All of them loved her company, sitting close together on the floor over lunch break, and she with them. She was garrulous to a fault and curious about their lives, asking many questions and getting long, friendly replies. They prattled away pleasantly, always in Spanish, while Mike and I wondered what was being revealed.

Puerto Rico is a very conservative and patriarchal society and nobody there had ever seen a female construction worker, (or dreamed of one). But they all liked her and thanked me for hiring her on. She was one of the best workers I had, always busy and focused on the task. The general foreman from the States also complimented me for hiring her. He saw what a good worker she was and also noticed how much less swearing and goofing-off there was amongst the others when she was on site. I broke the mold, (by pure chance) and hired two other women in succession later on, with the same benefits and compliments all-round.

Rachel worked on and off with us over the next two months at two other stores but finally had to quit. Her daughter was unhappy with the aged babysitter, saying she was mean to her. That took precedence over everything. But the short time she worked with us she told me she loved it, learning a trade and gaining pride and a camaraderie and respect from the other workers, as an equal.

Sorry this is such a poor picture, but it’s the only one I have of Rachel, a woman I might have married.

It occurs to me that this is the exact opposite of the gender-based abuse and prejudice most females experience in other workplaces, especially offices. But there they dress up and wear perfume, inviting lewd comments and discrimination. She had an athletic build, the glow of every twenty five year old in great shape, along with the confidence of knowing it. She reminded me of a Spanish farm woman of a hundred years earlier, with the strength for hard physical labor all day long and the mentality to accept that joyfully, as a condition of life.

She was the best with her hands of the three women I hired over the next years and would have made an excellent trades person, putting some male electricians I know to shame, doubling their best performance.

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