They Could Have Named Her Anything

by Jimenez, Stephanie

  At the pool, Charlie watched as the waitress walked away. He had asked for another whiskey because not only would it help him fall asleep, he was also celebrating a personal triumph. He couldn’t believe what he’d just done.

  Really, she had fallen into his lap, had appeared before him conveniently in those moments in which, in a former life, he would have been in the throes of devouring his wife. Magically, she had been standing in his living room, in the hallway just before he retired to bed. Miraculously, she had been dawdling outside the elevator just as he returned to his room. Even Veronica would’ve never thought it possible: that Charlie could be this much of a scumbag.

  In reality, it hadn’t been hard. It was made easier with all of the noise. It had draped the mind like a woolen blanket, tucking his better judgment to sleep. When he pulled his face away from hers, the chatter of women and the sound of glass clinking took up the space he may have otherwise used to reflect on what he was doing. Out went the lighted fire of thought; dead went the TV-screen glare of contemplation. Doubts, which may have come meandering into his conscience, were snuffed out between the thumb and the ring finger of the humming of busy bodies, busy laughing at wicked jokes. He looked side to side expecting eyes he could challenge, but nobody was looking.

  In this state of blank thought, in the muteness that followed, he kissed her again, and this time his hand sprung from his knee onto her shoulder. But while Charlie was doing the unthinkable, nobody had even turned. He was cheating on his wife with a teenage girl, and it was exhilarating.

  “Um,” Maria said, when they had separated, running a hand through her hair. “Are you gonna get in trouble?”

  “Trouble?” He fought off a smile, the way he sometimes had to when coworkers announced that a pet, or an uncle, had died.

  “You’re married,” she said.

  “Yes,” he said. “But believe me. It’s fine.”

  She frowned. “What do you mean?”

  Charlie thought of the ways he could say it, of where and with what he could start. He could ask the girl what good was a wife who wouldn’t even give him a peck on the cheek? Or a wife so oblivious to his desire that she walked in the house in a bathrobe time after time? Could she even understand? Either way, she wouldn’t care.

  “Just trust me,” he said. “We’re not doing anything wrong.”

  “But you kissed me.” As if startled by her own voice, her eyes fluttered away from his like a pair of frightened birds.

  “Would you stop me if I did it again?”

  “No,” she said.

  “We’re friends. You do understand that?”

  “Yeah—what else would we be?”

  “Exactly,” he said. “You see things the way they are.” He brought his face against hers again, this time without meeting her lips, and went down to her neck instead. He had the thought that she’d likely never felt a man’s stubble before, and that she wouldn’t complain if he scraped her. “That’s the reason I like you,” he said. “You’re so smart. You are going to amount to so much in life.”

  She laughed. Her eyelashes fluttered. Then she bit down on her lip. And somewhere in the process of observing all of those motions, Charlie had grown very excited.

  “Wait,” she said, when he’d put both hands on her waist. “Don’t you want to hear my poem?”

  “Your poem?”

  “You told me to learn a new one for next time.”

  Charlie blinked. He had forgotten about that.

  “I would love to hear your poem.”

  “Okay. Are you ready?” She was breathing a little bit quicker.

  “I’m ready.”

  She cleared her throat, straightened her back. “This is called ‘Letters,’” she said.

  “‘Every day brings a ship, / Every ship brings a word; / Well for those who have no fear . . .’” She was looking into the water. The light in the pool reflected onto her eyes, dancing. “‘The word the vessel brings / Is the word they wish to hear.’”

  Charlie took her hand. “That’s wonderful.”

  “You think so?”

  “Perfect. Your voice belongs on a radio program.”

  Maria laughed. “Okay. Your turn.”

  “But I won’t sound as lovely as you do.” He brought his face close to hers.

  “Come on.” She straightened herself so they were no longer as close. “Recite something to me.”

  Charlie tried to remember. He hadn’t read a book in a very long time, never mind commit a poem to memory. He had a few fragmented lines, Shakespeare, that were left over from college, but nothing he could recite in entirety. Ah! He remembered one he used to love. Whoever hath her wish, thou hast thy Will . . . Oh, but that wasn’t the right one for Seventeen . . . The girl was looking at him with pleading eyes.

  “I’m afraid nothing is coming to mind,” he said. “I’m so sorry. I hope you can forgive me. But what if I offered you something other than poetry? Would you accept something else instead?” He wasn’t sure what he was talking about, but he was curious as to whether it’d work. The poetry had served him well up to this point, but he’d run out of all that now. Even though she kept giggling and batting her eyes, her knees were still locked together so tightly, and he was willing to try a more novel approach.

  She looked into his eyes. “Like what?”

  “You tell me,” he said, bringing his hands to her navel.

  “Like what? Dinner at Denny’s?”

  He laughed. “More than that,” he said, the tips of his fingers finding the zipper to her pants. Behind him, he heard men’s laughter, and the sound jolted him. He blinked his eyes as if he’d just woken up. His whiskey, the most recent one anyhow, was still nearly full.

  “How about we move over there,” he said. He pointed to the opposite end of the pool, toward a bunch of white tents lined up in rows like buttons. He helped her to her feet with his hand, and together, they walked over to the cabanas.

  “Leave them like that,” she said, as they pushed the curtains aside and stepped in. They sat on the mildly damp cushions and kissed.

  “Tell me what you want,” he said. “I’d like to give you whatever you want.”

  “There’s a lot I want.” She giggled. He buried his face into the crook of her neck. Suddenly, the smell of her overpowered him, and he recognized it instantly. It made him think of suntan lotion and plastic wrap, a scent he hadn’t known he still carried a memory of after so many years. There were very few people who knew that before Charlie ever said “mama” or “dada,” his first word had been “ah-ti,” which was his effort at pronouncing Tatiana, the name of the Brazilian woman who had come to live with the family after Charlie’s older sister was born. It was the intoxicating scent of Tatiana’s shea butter—a smell he could only identify by name because as a boy he used to sneak into her bedroom and peek through her nightstand—that he detected as he licked at Maria’s neck. He reached his hands into her jeans.

  “Hey, wait,” she said, pushing him away. “Don’t you want to know what I want?” She crossed her hands over her neck, forcing him to lift up his head. The curtain blew slightly in the breeze, and from behind the flap, there were a few bodies, distant and blurred in the lights of the pool.

  “Yes,” he said, even though he’d already forgotten he’d said that. Instead, he was thinking about Tatiana. Tatiana making him tuna sandwiches with potato chips crushed between two slices of soft Wonder Bread. When he brought his friends over, they’d fall silent as soon as they’d seen her, and then they always gravitated back toward the kitchen as soon as they realized it was Tati’s domain. When they first told him Your maid is hot, it felt like a belt across Charlie’s chest unfastening, and finally, he could admit to having grown up and into a crush on Tatiana, this woman who undoubtedly was the first to change his diapers, to lift his bum in the air to wipe away at his shit. “Tell me,” he said, right beneath Maria’s ear, breathing in Tatiana’s smell, “as I kiss you.”

  But again, she pushed
him away. Now, he righted himself to a seat and looked at her squarely. Her eyes were darting from left to right, as if trying to see his whole face at once, and he suddenly felt a full tenderness toward her. He grabbed her palm with his left hand and held it to his lap. “How about this,” he said, his fingers wet from sweat. “Squeeze my hand when you’re uncomfortable.”

  He kissed her carefully, then pointed his chin toward her chest. He lifted her shirt with his hand, his mouth hovering over her bright-pink bra.

  “I want a pair of blue Uggs. And a real leather jacket.”

  “Doable.”

  “And a leather clutch to go with it.”

  He moved the cup of her bra away. His tongue pressed down on the skin until he had the sense that something collapsed between her legs. When she squeezed his hand, Charlie moved his mouth toward her shoulder, folding the bra back into place.

  “No?”

  She craned her neck and looked past him, toward the pool. But they were far from everyone else, from where all those tall women were slinking.

  “Go slower,” she said. “A little slower.”

  When she eased up on his left hand, he returned his right hand to her zipper.

  “I also want a minifridge.”

  He laughed as he undid the button. Go slower, she’d said, and he was trying with all his might, but it seemed ludicrous. How much slower could they possibly go? They’d been kissing so long it was no longer charged but sensuous, almost numbing, and now, forcing himself to go slower, he remembered past escapades, he recalled the most confident women he’d ever been with. How those women knew how to correct his primal instinct to run, to get pleasure over with. How they were the ones who had taught him to go not just to the edge, but over it. For so long, Charlie had envied the way women seemed to reach astral planes in orgasm, until finally he crossed over himself, and it was like he’d become a new form of matter somewhere between liquid and solid and soul. The thought of one of those sessions made Charlie lose his place, and he didn’t know what she’d just said. But before that, she didn’t say stop—she said slower.

  “Huh? You said a minifridge?”

  “For when I go away to college.”

  “What else?” The zipper came open. When he went past the fabric, she squeezed again.

  “Maybe a futon.”

  “For college, right?” He rubbed a fold of cotton together, waiting. “It’s good that you’re thinking of college right now. I can tell you’ll get into every college you apply to.”

  She smiled. This time, she didn’t squeeze, not even gently, and Charlie realized he’d found the key. He got up and drew the curtains to the cabana closed.

  “How about tuition? What if I took care of your college tuition?”

  “My tuition?”

  “Why not?” He brought himself down to his knees and pulled at her jeans with both hands so that she no longer had one to squeeze.

  CHAPTER 14

  Maria crept out of the bedroom and into the dining room awash with morning light. She had awoken with a pain in her pelvis that didn’t quite feel like hunger, but since she couldn’t think of anything else with which to remedy the pain, she reached for the Snickers bar she found at the minibar and sat down at one of the upholstered chairs to eat.

  She’d left the pool alone. He was staying downstairs for one last drink, he’d told her, before heading to bed. On the walk to the elevator, it felt as if something were balled up between her crotch and underwear. She stopped at the bathroom in the lobby before going upstairs, and it took two flushes of toilet paper until she came away dry.

  Now, she wondered if she’d made a mistake in denying him sex. Take my number, she’d said, instead, and she took his phone so she could type it in herself. He didn’t offer his.

  The light crept into the room from below the drawn curtains, and as the text message history for each one of her contacts went blank, Maria took nibbles from her chocolate, chewing it over excessively, savoring it until she was left with a heap of pasty wet mush at the back of her tongue. In one of Rocky’s Cosmopolitan magazines, an article advised that one should always try to eat slowly since it can take up to twenty minutes before a person realizes they’re satiated. Maria didn’t really care too much about dieting—she was eating a Snickers for breakfast—still, there were certain things that she couldn’t help thinking about whenever she sat down to eat. Whenever she hung out with Rocky, those thoughts became more frequent.

  As she waited for her in-box to clear, she looked up from her phone. She saw her suitcase, propped against the bedroom door. Affixed to the top was a name tag her mother once bought from an amusement park. Her mother had put it there so Maria would know which bag was hers at the carousel. “María,” it said in big bubble letters. America’s stock Latina name. The one time she had asked her parents about it, they said they just kind of liked it, it just sounded pretty. She wondered what her name would have been if they’d consulted one of those baby-name books that they sell at the supermarket checkout. With those swollen pregnant fingers, her mother could’ve pointed at random, she could’ve started at the very first page at the letter A. Abigail it could’ve been, and if that didn’t sound pretty, they could’ve named her Adeline, and if that was too obscure, they could’ve gone with Agnes, that perennial old-lady name. Maria’s parents spoke and understood English. They could have named her anything.

  But for a household that was all but bleached white in English, somehow her name remained. And now every time she enrolled in a class, or she met someone new at a party, or she heard herself being called from tongues that could never roll r’s, never mind say her name the way her grandparents had at the hospital when they first saw her, she had to live up to Maria. A Maria who was undoubtedly from meaner streets than she was. Maria who retained only the indigenous features and none of the Indian ones. A Maria whose skin was pale as a pillow, whose hair was as thick as a horse’s mane, whose eyes changed in the sun like an opal stone or an ear of ancient flint corn, each kernel a different autumnal color. The same Maria they sing songs about. Maria, immaculate, whose body could not be contained. Maria, forever voluptuous, whose body was made for containing. All around her, Marias worthy of praise. No—this Maria would never live up to her name.

  The night before, when Charlie first started undressing her, Maria, this underwhelming Maria, had been entirely ashamed. With her pink bra strap digging into her shoulder, an old relic from when she still shopped at the junior’s section at Kmart, she knew she looked like a child, an overweight kid on the cusp of puberty. Baby fat, her mom always said. Her flats were worn out, and on her feet was an ugly patch of long hairs. It was things like this that she hated about herself: things that were entirely inelegant. But if Charlie noticed, he hadn’t commented; he made no mention of too much or too little hair. He didn’t comment on the noises she made, like Andres always did. Instead, he kept going, despite how many times she tried shying away, and it was then that she saw he didn’t care.

  Suddenly, Maria understood. When he started to take her underwear off, she was no longer there by the pool. Instead, she was in Rocky’s bedroom on the Upper East Side, gazing down at Fifth Avenue. She had stood in that spot enough times now, a cigarette poised in her hand, that she could point out the Eighty-Fourth Street Central Park entrance without looking. She knew exactly how things were positioned from the Albrecht apartment, down to the number of trees from their view. The Albrechts had enough and more to share.

  When he started to ask over and over what she wanted, she didn’t think he could be serious at first. It had all seemed like a tremendous joke until then, until she realized perhaps he meant what he said, and then somehow, the punch line became even funnier. All this time, and she’d never realized how easy it could be. She thought of Karen on the train, Karen telling her to accept. Maybe he’ll want to buy you a helicopter, Karen had said. But what if, Maria thought, he wants to buy me more?

  When his tongue met her, she felt her person convulsing
like the roll of a crashing wave. It took all of her strength to stop him. What was it that her uncle and brother always said? What was the one power that women could harness, as long as they knew when to withhold? Emerson said give all to love, but Maria also had learned that love only grew stronger the more you denied it. She brought her jeans up and with her open palm, she pushed his face off her. He had made her a promise, but she had to make sure that he meant it. She had to make sure he would keep it.

  “Not now,” she said firmly, sitting up. “Later. Once we’re back home.”

  This was Maria, the Maria she was, the Maria who had just woken up from that night, from that memory, for better or for worse. Something small and nagging tugged at her conscience, but she didn’t care. Being rich wasn’t about how she could dress or what she could eat—it was about having a ticket of admission to college—to the kind of life she knew she deserved. And Charlie would give it to her because Charlie saw her potential. She had shown Charlie a glimpse of her heart, it flashed before him like a jewel of rose diamond, and he was a learned man, the kind of man who knew exactly what it was worth.

  Casting the empty wrapper aside, she stood up from the table. She went back to the room where Rocky was still sleeping and climbed into bed. From under the sheets, she couldn’t see the name tag, its ridiculous í studded with an acute accent. She did not, and would never, stress the i in her name. She would not click out the r so it came out like the sound of two claves hitting each other, or the sound of a domino arrogantly placed. She was Maria—the r like the pair in cherries, smooth and silky as the single r in cream. Maria, the English way. She didn’t need to resort to giving out fake names. She didn’t need to shrink when introducing herself. In fact, she never would again. With that resolved, she kicked her feet into the comforter and wondered if, at this time in the morning, Charlie might be awake.