They Could Have Named Her Anything

by Jimenez, Stephanie

  “Hi, Dad.” She leaned in to kiss him, but only because she had to, or else. His face was oiled with sweat like a turpentine rag. On his place mat, there was only a knife and fork. There was a dense silence between them, and she wished the music were back on. Unlike the silence of freedom at Rocky’s apartment, there was only the silence of tension at Maria’s.

  Her mother pounded a serving spoon on the kitchen sink to clear off the rice that had stuck. “How much do you want, Pa?” she asked.

  “Hi, Maria.” He looked at her face first and then her school skirt, so short that it hit the middle of her thighs. At school, even the teachers didn’t bother reprimanding the students for rolling up their skirts. It was different in front of her father, though, and Maria moved her hand as if to smooth the pleats out and pulled down hard at the hem. She turned back toward her bedroom with her tailbone tucked.

  “Pa,” Maria’s mother said.

  Maria dragged her sneakers across the bare floor. They made the squeaking sound they sometimes did in gym class, and that made her feel more athletic than she was.

  “Pa!” Maria’s mother’s voice was louder. “Do you hear me? One or two scoops of rice?”

  Just as Maria opened the door to her bedroom, she heard her name. It was her father who called, but Maria looked at her mother instead.

  “Come,” her mother said.

  “I’m not hungry.”

  “Sit,” he said.

  At the table, she slowly pulled out a chair. There were only four chairs, which meant that nobody was ever at the head of table, no matter which seat was picked. Her mother came around with a plate and set it down. It was swimming in orange liquid. Meals at her house were always some variation of rice and stew. At school, they served solids: toasted bagels, hard wedges of lettuce, wraps. They never served meals like her mother’s—meals that were dripping, that had to be slurped from the small bowls of spoons, that called for endless napkins.

  “Where’s Ricky?” Maria asked. She hadn’t seen Ricky in a long time. They weren’t as close anymore as they were when they were younger because now all he did was play video games, and when he wasn’t doing that, he was out playing basketball. Still, Maria liked when he was around. It took some attention off her.

  “He’s out,” Maria’s mother said.

  “How was school?” Maria’s father scraped his spoon against his bowl.

  “Fine.”

  “Where were you last night?”

  “At my friend Rocky’s house. She let me come to her math tutoring session.”

  “Did you get your working papers?”

  She pushed some rice to the corner of her plate.

  “What jobs are you applying to?”

  Maria picked at the white runner, stained and frayed at the ends. She hated this conversation because she knew what was being said. At Bell Seminary, everyone lived on campus for college, and Maria wanted that for herself, too. Ideally, she wanted to be far from home—at least a few states away. In that distance, she would be able to actualize herself. She would study and write and do art every day. She would meet boys who would also be painters and poets who could teach her how to perfect her perspectives and arcs, so that her landscapes stopped coming out skewed and inflated, like a novel whose pages have dried after being drenched in the rain. The only image she used to have of college was from movies, but when Bell Seminary started taking her on trips to prospective campuses, Maria got to see for herself that there were other people, aside from her current, stifled self, that she could aspire to be. There were other landscapes that were still mysteries; they could incite in her the same thrill she once had with Andres from the train. She wanted to experience more of the sublime.

  Her parents stared at her with the same expressions they wore early in the morning. She wondered if this was why they had turned the music off, so they could have this awful conversation again, so they could hear with no difficulty the sound of her dreams being crumpled. What if instead of asking what jobs she was applying to, he asked her what colleges? What if instead of asking, Where do you want to work, he asked her, Who do you want to be?

  “Maria?”

  “I don’t know yet.”

  He looked into her face, and Maria didn’t know what to do with her hands, so she drove them into her jaw. What are you hiding? his gaze seemed to ask. Maria thought of Charlie, and for the first time in her life, she wondered if she had an answer that would merit her father’s reaction, which was always, unrelentingly, anger. The last time she was grounded, it was for coming home three hours after curfew because of Andres, and it had lasted an entire month. She took her hand away from her mouth, and when she swallowed, it tasted like kettle corn on her tongue.

  “Ay, por Dios, Maria! Stop that already, you’re ruining your lip!”

  Maria’s mother had come over to the table and was staring at Maria with disdain. Between her thumbnail and her forefinger was a piece of dead skin, flat and dehydrated like seaweed paper and translucent as a window.

  “You see what she does to herself?” her mother said. “And what’s the big deal if she took a year or two off before starting college? It’s just for now. College can wait, but family can’t, right, Papi?” She picked up Maria’s plate. “It’ll be a good lesson for you, Maria Anís. You’ll know what it’s like to have to make your own money.”

  The whole time that she spoke, she stared at Maria’s father. He had slowed down since his first ravenous bites, and there was still plenty of food left. Now, he looked into his napkin, darkened with a blot of canola oil, as if he were trying to discern some message there.

  “Look at Jonathan,” Maria’s mother continued as she dropped Maria’s plate into the sink. “Jonathan got his associate’s, and now he has an apartment with roommates and everything. And look at Ricky. Ricky isn’t going to go away to some fancy school. He’s starting his new job at Verizon next week. He’s going to help out and stay right here in Queens.”

  On the wall, a second hand ticked.

  “More rice, Papi?”

  “No,” he said.

  “But there’s still a lot left.”

  Maria got up from the table as discreetly as she could before her parents could tell her to sit down again. Going to college, as far as Maria understood, would determine everything. It was a matter of becoming a person like Rocky or having a sensible job in a sensible apartment in Elmhurst, like her uncle Jonathan. It was a matter of life, or something that came just short of it. Her mother was right in one sense, that Jonathan and Ricky hadn’t done it, and Maria would be the first. She would be the first in her family to make something of herself. She’d be the first to really be free. Her mother’s assessment was right when she walked in on Maria dancing to Selena—Maria had been in a good mood. Now that it was gone, Maria noticed.

  “Maria,” her father said. “When I’m done eating, I need you to help me type something up.”

  “Okay.”

  When she reached her bedroom, her lip was still bleeding, but he hadn’t called after her again.

  Behind her closed bedroom door, Maria collapsed into her computer chair. Finally, she unrolled her school skirt. In her backpack, crumpled among pens that exploded like overripe bananas squeezing out of their peels, were the books she’d checked out of the library earlier that day. She’d never read Emerson’s essays before. She was starting with one called “Self-Reliance,” and as she opened it up to page one, she thought of the way her father looked at her, as if searching for something terrible on her face.

  It’d been worse ever since she’d been accepted to Bell Seminary. Maria, her father, and her mother had been among at least two hundred families in the auditorium of the community college, and all of them were anxious to know if their child had been accepted into the after-school program, the one that guaranteed a full scholarship to some of the city’s best private schools. Any seat that could have been empty was occupied by the padded arms of winter coats, and Maria was squashed between her parents, he
r knit cap pulled down just above the eyelid, so that it neither fully obstructed nor fully allowed her a clear view of the stage. She knew that this was a decisive moment, and she preferred to be there, but also not there, and the cap seemed to understand that desire, and it became an accomplice to her indecision by only slightly obscuring her view.

  There were nine whole syllables of it, a mouthful of a name. Maria Anís Rosario took a full 2.6 seconds for the woman hooked up to the microphone to stumble through, and Bell Seminary cost her another 1.2 seconds, and somewhere within the passing of those seconds, Maria’s eyebrows stood up and shrugged the knit cap right off them, and Maria looked up at her father, whose face was going from the place where he usually held it to an expression that Maria had never seen before. It was like butter softening fast in the microwave—any longer like that, and he’d be rendered useless, a puddle of oily sweet on a plate. Maria couldn’t understand why he was crying. I’m so proud of you, Maria, he told her when he had recovered, and it was the first time she’d heard him say that. Maria didn’t know how to answer. All that she knew was that she never wanted to see her father, that man whom she drew in elementary school portraits with V’s for eyebrows, that close to melting away again.

  Only months before she was accepted to Bell Seminary, that same year as a rising eighth grader, Maria had gotten her period. Her mother demonstrated just how she should curl the sticky wings inward, folded up in layers of toilet paper so that nobody would see the dark stains. She packaged Maria’s pad into a white bundle the way she might tie up a Christmas tamal, unflinching, in steps. When she showed Maria how to bury it at the bottom of the trash can, Maria understood then that it was the men in the family from whom she was supposed to be hiding. It was the men for whom her body was doing something wrong. And it wasn’t just her body—she soon learned that everything about her was wrong—her questions, her values, her dreams. By the time she was a student at Bell Seminary, there were countless things Maria struggled to hide, and she also knew that she would never succeed, that whatever was so upsetting about her was something she felt on a cellular level. On the day that Maria Rosario was accepted to Bell Seminary, on the day she made her father so proud, even then she foresaw in that terrible glimpse of emotion what a struggle it would be to be who she was when it came at the risk of someone else’s disappointment.

  In her bedroom, Maria could no longer concentrate. She put her book of Emerson essays down because she wasn’t reading a word, only listening to herself think as her eyes scanned the page. She went to her purple notebook instead, and as she lay on her belly on the hardwood floor, avoiding the itchy striped carpet beneath her bed, she held her pen tentatively in the air, unsure of where to begin. She could start by describing the air mattress, how it had deflated so her elbows and knees were like bedposts on the ground when she awoke. She could write about how in Rocky’s bathroom, she stared at her reflection, and felt that her breath was arid and her tongue was thick like the finger of an aloe vera plant, but still, miraculously, she looked beautiful. She could write about how she hadn’t meant to be cruel to Rocky in the kitchen, but after she was, she liked it. Guilt, where it should have made Maria apologetic, made her defensive instead. It felt good to point out that the bread had gone bad. It felt good to put her down. Maria knew it could be useful to put a little distance between them because it was in this distance that Maria would be able to decide that yes, of course, she wanted to see Charlie again, Charlie who’d seen what was truly in her heart and told her it was not only good, but special. He’d only looked at her once, and he immediately understood that Maria was meant to be immortal.

  Just as her pen met the paper, her father barged into the room, and her hand sprung from the page. She slammed the book shut and shoved it under her bed. Here at home, hiding was second nature. She didn’t need to think about it. It’d become a reflex. She had written only a single letter—I—but even that seemed like more than enough to hide.

  CHAPTER 3

  “Ready?” he asked, his hand clenched around a sheet of loose-leaf. Without waiting for her to answer, Miguel dragged the wooden stool his daughter used to reach the top shelves of her closet and placed it behind the computer chair. He sat down close enough behind her where he could read the text on her screen. At the bottom of her browser, a little box flickered in orange.

  When they first came to tell him he was being fired, he was sitting in the shop where they received the maintenance calls in the building. He had just finished eating, and the Tupperware container that his wife had packed him was still stained red from spaghetti sauce. A stranger appeared at the doorway and asked if he would step out. There’d been some complaints, the stranger had told him, once they settled down in a nearby conference room. Even then, he didn’t know what was going on. As they continued to talk, as he sat face-to-face with this man in a suit and tie whom he’d never seen before, not in the lunchroom, not in the lobby, nowhere until right now, he realized he was listening to his own words read aloud, typed and pulled from a manila folder. Months before, they had hired two new guys, and one of them was his supervisor’s nephew, an insolent boy who sucked his teeth and gave him long glances whenever Miguel gave him an order. What’s wrong with you? Miguel had yelled more than once. Hurry the hell up! The commands had been empty, innocuous, the kinds of things he always said. Now, as he heard his own words from the mouth of a stranger who enunciated so clearly, without any affect or any identifiable accent, he remembered those scenes with a sinister edge, saw himself with face red, arms flexing together in anger, puffed up like a bear on hind legs. When the man in front of him mouthed harassment, he was convinced so totally that he was a monster that he didn’t dispute it, for fear his words might come out not as words at all, but something indecipherable, a roar.

  He left the building early that day, took the train home as usual with only a few extra things in his backpack. They reassured him they’d mail the rest, and Miguel said nothing because at the time, he thought the union would help him. After all, there had been no warnings, and in the days that followed, he learned that the same supervisor’s nephew who accused him of wrongful conduct had been promoted to fill his place. To Miguel, no evidence could be more damning that his firing was an injustice. But after countless phone calls, after dozens of times of being transferred and put on hold, of dizzying instructions involving acronyms he didn’t know the meaning of, he understood that he’d been naive. He learned that the union had two hundred thousand members and only two union representatives who decided which grievances they would pursue—apparently, his was not one of them. For reasons they refused to disclose, they didn’t think he was likely to win. When they emailed him with a list of open positions that were well below his paygrade, they signed the message “regards” and Miguel knew this was the last he would hear from them for a while, so he applied to them all.

  Miguel was down to his very last option when he met with a private attorney that Saturday, who told him the first step was to write everything down. The lawyer was kind and explained to Miguel that he would represent him on a contingency basis so that he wouldn’t have to pay anything other than the slight percentage of whatever Miguel won—in case he did in fact win. Miguel was used to asking his kids for things like making doctor’s appointments for him or booking the occasional hotel room when they went on small vacations near the Jersey Shore, if not because they were better at it, then because he thought it was important they know how to do things themselves. But he had never asked for their help on something like this, and it was his wife, Analise, who knew even less about computers than he did, who finally convinced him. The only difference asking this time, Analise told him, is that now you actually need it.

  Initially, he thought he’d ask Ricky because over the past year, Ricky had been coming in on weekends to clean desks and empty trash cans on the slowest day of the week. But when Miguel lost his job, Ricky quit the next morning in what Miguel had first thought was a touching act of solidarity. Rac
ist Italians, Ricky had said, and at first Miguel agreed, but when Ricky started coming home complaining about their clouds of cologne whenever he went to get pizza in Astoria, Miguel thought it’d be better to not have Ricky involved in filing the grievance. He asked for Maria’s help instead. And he asked a week later than he wanted to because when he came home from that first meeting with the attorney, Maria had overheard him talking about her to Analise, and stormed to her bedroom, crying. She refused to speak to them for the rest of the day. Analise advised him to give her time to cool off.

  As Miguel said “wrongful termination,” Maria typed it out.

  “What are you writing? Read it to me.”

  “I think you should change this to ‘notwithstanding,’” she said, highlighting a word with her cursor. But she continued typing before Miguel could focus, and more letters unfurled as her fingernails clicked and clacked against the keyboard. She was no longer typing what he’d been dictating to her from his paper, and he knew because there were at least twice as many words on the screen as there were on the page. He had started drafting this letter while commuting home, and the words glided and jumped like a train hurdling over debris, rising like bumps of brail, the topography of his journey home, mapped onto college-lined loose-leaf.

  “I’ll read it to you in a second,” Maria said, pounding down on the plastic keys. “Let me finish this sentence.”

  Miguel didn’t know how to type like Maria did, with both hands, without even glancing down at the keys, but the way she jabbed at the buttons with so much violence struck him as wholly unnecessary. When he first bought the house, Maria was still an infant and she had spent her formative years punctuated by summers spent sitting in inflatable pools and sandboxes constructed from recovered plywood. She collected scabs from the paved concrete yard as if they grew there in bushes like azaleas. They had cookouts and a clothesline. A perennial litter of kittens came back every summer with doubled abundance, like morning glories. It wasn’t the suburbs, and there were tenants upstairs, but still, Miguel was proud. He treasured all of it, and he even liked when things went wrong, the endless spackle and varnish. As Maria pressed on the keys, he felt his back muscles tense. He could see how the loss of the job would engender further loss; it was already happening with sleep, with weight. If the letter worked and he had a case, he could at least collect thousands of dollars in damages. If the letter didn’t work, he thought, and then he tried to stop thinking. He brought his hand to his temples and pressed. His head was pounding. Finally, Maria stopped typing.