Sabrina & Corina: Stories

The narrator opens the story, telling us about Dolores “Doty” Lucero. Doty took her vision for granted during the weeks before it was taken from her: “She didn’t pay special attention to her younger sister, Tina, slumped on her side and snoring loudly in her bedroom, one of her breasts sleeping out of her satin nightdress” (47). She didn’t stop to soak in any part of her surroundings on the North side of town where they lived, in a residential neighborhood located on Federal Boulevard.

One morning, a slew of flyers appeared across town. They had the face of a local 19-year-old Filipina woman named Lucia Barrera, who worked at Montgomery Ward and had gone missing. Doty arose that morning to find one of the flyers on the tree in her front yard. Seeing it filled her with sadness. She remembers seeing the beautiful Lucia in church: “Lucia was very beautiful, with strong precise eyes, and Doty felt an urge to know her” (49). Tina, however, is dismissive: “Maybe she’s dead,” Tina offers (49). When Doty chastises her, Tina offers that perhaps Lucia had a boyfriend whom she ran off with. Doty replies that she doesn’t think Lucia was interested in all that, and Tina’s rejoinder is that Doty is the only one who doesn’t care about finding a man. The narrator writes, “Doty said nothing. She reached for the flyer, running her fingernails down the missing girl’s eyes as if putting her to sleep” (49).

Tina and Doty have lived together for two years, since they left south Colorado at ages 16 and 17. Their mother had taken up with an older White rancher named Weiss. When Weiss began making sexual advances toward Tina and Doty, their mother defended him. Before the girls left, she counseled them to get married, as they were pretty enough to do so.

The girls soon found work as receptionists for a downtown hematology practice. Four months ago, Tina met her boyfriend, Randy. She feels certain that he will soon ask her to marry her. Doty, for her part, doesn’t “plan on the servitude of marriage” (50). Having no interest in men, she feels that she may actually never get married. 

The day that the flyers appeared, Tina forces Doty to join her and Randy for a double date. Tina informs her that they will be going to “the other theater,” which never plays Spanish-language movies, for the date. Tina has found another White man with whom Doty can join her on a double date. The narrator explains: “[Tina] had a thing for Anglos. They made more money, they could live and go anywhere in the city, and Tina believed each of the sisters could end up married to one. After all, they were both light-complected. However, Doty felt White men treated her as something less than a full woman, a type of exotic object to display in their homes like a dead animal” (51). The last time Tina had set up Doty with a White man, he smelled like rancid mop water and aggressively tried to kiss her even though she clearly did not want to.

Tina insists on the double date. She has set Doty up with a man named Joey Matthews, who works with the trees outside of the hematology office. Tina fawns over Joey’s sound employment as an arborist and his blue eyes: “Maybe you’ll know him for the rest of your life,” she tells Doty (51).

Joey Matthews arrives at the girls’ apartment on the night of the date. He wears a cowboy hat and his upper lip bears the scar of a corrected harelip. Tina and Randy crowd into the backseat of Joey’s Ford pickup truck while Doty sits in the front. Inquiring about Doty’s music taste, Joey says, “I bet you like a lot of that Spanish junk” (52). When Doty informs him that she actually is partial to Patsy Cline, he says nothing.

When they arrive at the drive-in, Doty longingly scans the crowd for Lucia’s pretty face. She does not find it—instead, she sees the white flyers plastered across the fence nearest to the segregated section meant for non-White spectators. Doty spends the night in cold reservation, engaging minimally with Joey’s advances. When Randy and Tina return from a trip to concessions, Tina accidentally falls off the end of the truck while trying to get back into it. Her arm is cut quite badly and gushing blood, but neither of the men move very urgently to help her: “She’s a graceful one, your sister,” Joey offers before laughing (55). Doty is shocked by this. She feels that she is the only one who is rightfully allowed to laugh at Tina, who is her sister. On the screen, “the platinum-blond actress [cries] out in agony as the queen ant [hoists] her from the earth. The sounds of flesh tearing [fills] the night as the image of a severed arm, dripping with blood, [cascades] across the screen” (55).

The next day, Tina comes home from work carrying a bouquet of lilies. Doty assumes that they are from Randy, but they are actually for her, sent by Joey: “I guess he likes his women uptight and unaffectionate,” Tina quips (55). Doty hopes that Joey does not feel entitled to anything in return for his gift. Tina dismisses this remark, and then informs Doty that Lucia Barrera’s jacket has been found near the Platte River. Tina assumes that Lucia is dead.

Doty agrees to another date on a Saturday soon thereafter. She, Joey, Tina, and Randy go to Lake Dillon, in the mountains. As they fish and picnic on the lake’s edge, Doty explains to Joey that with her mother living her own life and her father dead, Tina is all the family that she has. However, she also does not like the pity that he shows to her after she says this. He asks her if she likes her job, and she confesses that she’d rather do something more artistic. She says that she sometimes walks by department store windows and knows that she could do a better job dressing them than whoever currently has that responsibility. She then also thinks of Lucia. She recalls a time when she walked by Montgomery Ward’s and saw Lucia working inside: “[Lucia] was bent over in such a way that Doty could see her neck, the place where fine black baby hairs ended and the broad length of her back began. Lucia had turned around, and in an endearing bristle of movement, waved to Doty. She was too flustered to go inside and say hello. Now Doty wondered if she’d ever get the chance” (59). After pulling a small salmon from the water, killing it, and then throwing it back, Joey tells Doty that she’s too pretty to spend her life slaving away at either her current or preferred jobs.

Later, at home, Tina tries to convince Doty to like Joey. However, “something feels wrong [with him],” Doty insists (60). Tina tells Doty that she, not he, is the one with the problem. She regards her sister harshly: “I know you think we can afford to live in this duplex forever, but we can’t. You need to find yourself someone, and what you do in your own time, away from him, well, that’s your business” (60). Doty then, hopelessly, agrees to yet another double date.

This time, the date is at a dance hall. Joey succeeds in throwing Doty around on the dance floor with a few spins, and Doty soon sees that both Tina and Randy have become drunk and sloppy. Then, Doty notices a small diamond ring on Tina’s finger. Tina confirms that it is an engagement ring. Lucia Barrera’s mother then makes her way through the crowd and onto the stage: “Oh God […] This isn’t the place,” Tina says (63). As Mrs. Barrera makes her plea about her missing daughter to the audience, Tina shows off her ring to a bunch of girls: “Can you just shut up?” Doty screams at her sister: “I don’t care about your stupid ring. A girl from our neighborhood is missing” (63). Doty then asks Joey if they can leave.

Joey obliges Doty’s request, but purposefully turns the other way when it is time to turn onto Doty’s street. He pulls into a dirt lot, filled with abandoned cars and jagged machinery, that overlooks the city. He gets out of the truck and tells Doty that she must come out to enjoy the view. Doty reluctantly joins him. He points to a group of trees in the distance, and tells her that he and his father planted them. He can’t help but feel that they are his trees. He puts his hand underneath Doty’s dress, and she tells him not to.

Joey presses Doty about Tina’s remark, asking her if it bothered her. She confirms that she is not feeling very good at the moment: “Don’t worry. You can prove her wrong,” he says, while fingering her collarbone (65). He tells her that Tina will soon be gone and married, that Doty cannot live in the duplex, and that her dead-end job and aspirations will not sustain her: “You’re a beautiful girl. If you let someone help you, they will. Do you understand what I am saying?” (66). Doty grows angry and tells Joey that she does not care about what he is saying. She demands that he bring her home—or else she will walk: “It’s not safe to be out alone. At this hour. In this spic neighborhood,” Joey says (66): “I’m perfectly fine […] I live in this neighborhood,” Doty replies (66). When Joey does not relent and demands a kiss, Doty takes off in a run. Joey comes “at her with the force of a rabid dog gnashing into her flesh” (66). He soon snatches her up as she screams, “her voice echoing across the hillside” (66).

Doty kicks and twists, trying to get out of Joey’s grip, but soon realizes that resistance is futile against his strong grip. She screams in his face with all of her strength, but he reaches up and “[muzzles] her face like an animal” (67). He tells her to shut up and then throws her to the ground. She lands face first, “her head loudly splitting against a severed car door” (67). She reaches up to feel a cascade of blood leaking from her head, and finds that she can no longer see.

Joey picks Doty up and puts her back in the truck. It is only through her other senses that she places where she is: En route to her home: “You’re not very bright […] Drinking so much you fell […] Lucky for you I was there. Just the two of us, and I saved you,” Joey tells her (67). Doty passes out before they reach her home.

The flyers bearing Lucia Barrera’s face and name fall and are forgotten. However, in mid-September, word reaches Doty that Lucia has been found: “A mailman had spotted [Lucia] north of the city, exiting a highway diner with glass doors. The Rocky Mountain News printed a photo of Lucia flanked by her parents, her shoulders bent inward, her chin tilted down” (68). There is more to the story, but it is being kept secret.

About nine months later, it’s Tina’s wedding day. During the reception, a girl “with an easy, somewhat deep voice” asks Doty if she wants a drink (69). The girl sounds “familiar, and the unseen parts of her, her voice and perfume, [are] musical and sweet in the way they [collide]” (69). The girl soon asks Doty about her eyes— “[it’s not] that they [are] ugly, just turned every which way,” she says (69): “I had an accident,” Doty replies (69). When the girl says that she’s sure that everybody tells Doty she’s lucky it wasn’t worse, Doty replies: “As a matter of fact […] no one says anything about it at all” (69).