The chapter “Rafaela Who Drinks Coconut & Papaya Juice on Tuesdays” describes a young neighbor whose husband locks her in their apartment when he goes out to play dominoes on Tuesday nights. Rafaela wishes she could dance in the bar where she hears the music wafting up to her window. She asks the children to buy her sweet drinks at the store as a treat, so she drops down a dollar, and they send up a bottle of juice on a paper bag pulley. Then “Sally” is about a neighbor girl who also feels trapped inside her house by her father who worries because she is too beautiful. People spread rumors about her, which are untrue, so she stands alone by the fence pretending she was invisible, dreaming about a life where she felt loved.
“Minerva Writes Poems” is about another neighbor who has two children, and her husband keeps leaving and coming back. Minerva struggles to feed her children and writes poems in her free time. It’s hard to say if it’s worse when her husband is there and beats her or worse when he’s away. In “Bums in the Attic” Esperanza wishes she could live in a house on a hill, so she could be closer to the stars. She would let homeless men sleep in her attic, and she would be happy. Even though Esperanza knows she is the ugly daughter, in “Beautiful & Cruel” she thinks about how she will someday escape her parents’ house. She knows she can’t use her sexuality to attract a man, so instead she tries to act like a man.
