‘American Dreams’ A Poem by Julia Alvarez

Queens, NY, 1963

All day I dreamed of candy from the store
on Hillside Avenue: barrels filled with
caramels, tins of pastel mints and tiers
of chocolates beckoning in the window, and
a tinkling bell that tattled I was coming in the
door, a skinny girl, who didn’t look
thirteen, still reeling from the shock of
losing everything, and hungry all the time
for candy, more candy than I’d ever seen,
a whole store dedicated to delights,
proof we had arrived in the land of Milk
Duds, Chiclets, gumdrops, from the country
sugar came from but candy never got to.
I roamed the aisles, savoring the names:
Necco Wafers, Atomic Fireballs, Butterfingers,
while the fat man owner watched me, sitting on
a stool by the cash register; his pale eyes
like ice mints behind his foggy glasses, lingering
at my chest, as if the swelling buds under
my uniform’s white blouse were Candy Buttons,
Jujubes I’d shoplifted; while his tiny, perfumed
mother in black pumps and white lace collar
waited on older patrons, boxing chocolates,
petit-fours, assortments made to order
for wives and sweethearts, May I help you, dahlink?
in a heavy accent, an immigrant herself from
some past purge or pogrom; her “boy”
born here, the obese product of an American
dream gone greedily awry. He chatted as I
lingered over barrels, asking none-of-your-
business questions about my parents, grades,
what my people did on holidays. He knew
my favorites, commenting as he rang me up, I
see you like those SweeTarts. Candy Necklaces
sure are a hit with your set. A hit? My set?
It was an intimacy I resented; my cravings
were dark secrets I didn’t want to share. Will
that be all today? he asked, as if he hoped I’d
say, Actually, I would like something else,
to marry you and help you run your candy
store. Outside, my new America was
waking up to nightmare: freedom fighters
marching; storefronts, some with candy
stores like this one, burning; girls like me in
bombed-out churches; dreams deferred,
exploding; dreams I didn’t know
still needed fighting for; all I knew was
hunger, as I learned the names that
promised sweeter dreams beyond these
candied substitutes, Juicy Fruits,
Life Savers, Bit-O-Honey, Good & Plenty.

*

Of “American Dreams,” Alvarez writes: “When we arrived in New York in 1960, refugees from the dictatorship in the Dominican Republic, my parents kept telling my sisters and me that this was the land of freedom where we had the opportunity to become whatever we wanted to be. They believed in the American Dream. I wish I could say that I shared their high-mindedness. But I was a kid, and my American Dream was all about candy. I couldn’t get enough of it. In Queens where we lived there was a whole store dedicated to candy, owned by an immigrant mother and her son, earlier-generation versions of us. I roamed the aisles, pronouncing the alluring names under my breath, the son watching me in a way that unsettled me. (Now, I wonder if he was just worried about shoplifting, not interested in my skinny—despite all that sugar—prepubescent body.) During those early years of my sweets-fixation, Martin Luther King was marching; demonstrators were being attacked by dogs, getting jailed, lynched; girls my age were dying in bombed churches. I’m astonished that those scenes on the news didn’t register. Or maybe I was subliminally aware, and that’s why I didn’t buy the un-nuanced version of the American Dream. The violence on TV was not unlike the violence of the regime we had escaped. The American Dream was not equally accessible to all. The Land of Good and Plenty was still just the name of a candy.”

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From The Best American Poetry 2018, edited by Dana Gioia, series editor David Lehman. Copyright © 2019 by David Lehman. Reprinted by permission of Scribner, an Imprint of Simon & Schuster, Inc. This poem originally appeared in America Magazine