scene in a nightclub, rough draft

Scene in a nightclub:

The suffocating crowd readjusts and I am dancing next to four Brazilian girls, cousins, friends, or sisters, who align themselves in a tight semi-circle.  Three have long, heavy hair that lies straight down their backs; one wears curls around her shoulders.  Their round acne-scarred faces are carefully made up.  They dance with a purpose.  A common ideal flickers behind their eyes.  I remember suddenly how it feels for tight sequined jeans and satin tops and Payless shoes to be enough, to come and dance and drink and go back to work, to meet someone perhaps and go back home to a cramped house smelling of lime and cilantro and jabón Foca and all the other people living there, to work and cook and have babies and get too fat for the sequined jeans but probably wear them all the same, to long for my country and to bow my head and to accept deep pain as my share of an inevitable destined path, to swallow or to lose all.

02.15.09