He furrowed his brow in his particular way. “Why are you so sure she can’t get what she needs here?”
“¡Qué vergüenza, Arturo! I’ll take her there myself if you won’t go.”
“It’s just … So much has changed already. We’ve been through so much.”
“So it’s just one more thing.”
“I don’t know if she can handle one more thing.”
“Well, she can’t stay here, doing this. Don’t you want her to get better?”
“Of course.”
“Then … ?”
He nodded. But when I looked at him, I understood. He was the one who wasn’t sure he could handle one more thing.
“We have to do this,” I said. “All I need is for you to say yes, and I promise I’ll take care of everything after that. You won’t have to worry about anything.”
“I want to do what’s best for her,” Arturo said.
“I know. This is it.”
And finally Arturo agreed, and the decision was made.
Mayor
What can I say? She grew on me. Those Sundays after church, instead of sitting on the couch with our parents, Maribel and I started hanging out in the kitchen by ourselves. She wasn’t always good at keeping up a conversation—she lost her train of thought sometimes, and she talked slow in order to find the right words as she went along, and sometimes she forgot that we’d already discussed something, so I had to repeat myself—but a lot of the things she said were smart. Besides, I had learned that she was listening even when it seemed like she wasn’t. When I had met her in the Dollar Tree, before I knew anything about her, she had seemed intimidating and aloof. But now that I knew better, I understood not to take it personally. She would trace her fingernails along the top of the kitchen table or look at the ceiling sometimes, but when I stopped talking, she would respond in a way that proved she’d been paying attention all along and, even better, that she was actually interested in what I’d said. Which was more than I could say for most people and definitely more than I could say for any girl I’d ever known.
My dad didn’t like it. “Why can’t you talk to normal girls?” he asked me once after the Riveras left.
“What is that supposed to mean?” my mom said.
But we all knew what he meant: Why couldn’t I talk to a girl that wasn’t brain-damaged? I did talk to the so-called normal girls, of course. I mean, I asked them to pass me a paper in class or I mumbled an apology when I bumped into one of them in the hall. But it was never easy for me, at least not the way it was easy for me with Maribel, maybe because she was brain-damaged, maybe because she didn’t seem so intimidating because of that. In another life, one before whatever had happened to her had happened, I was pretty sure she would have been just another girl I was scared of. And I was pretty sure, too, that she wouldn’t have given me the time of day. I had a feeling she’d been one of the popular girls, the one all the guys lusted over. But this was a different life, one where I was getting a chance with her. Maybe it was terrible to think of it like that, but I wasn’t going to pass it up.
“Do you remember that girl Enrique used to date?” my dad went on. “What was her name? Sandra? The one who wore headbands. You can’t find someone like that?”
“I don’t want someone like that,” I said.
“Leave him alone,” my mom chimed. “Maribel’s a nice girl.”
“Maybe,” my dad conceded. “But not for Mayor.”
My dad’s narrow-mindedness only made me feel more connected to Maribel, though. Like maybe I was the only one who understood her, the only one who was willing to give her a chance.
I started stopping by her apartment sometimes after school. Her mom wouldn’t let Maribel actually go anywhere with me, so she and I just sat on the floor in the bedroom she shared with her parents and talked. They had clothes folded in piles along the wall and a mattress wedged into the corner. Maribel had a sleeping bag that she rolled up during the day and set under the window. But the atmosphere was uninspiring, to say the least, and I found myself wishing that I could take her somewhere, even just to Dunkin’ Donuts down the street, where I knew we could score free doughnuts if they were about to throw them out anyway, or maybe to the movie theater, where I could show her how to sneak in the side door, which William and I had been doing forever. I thought she deserved it, you know, getting out into the world. As far as I knew, she only went to school and came straight home, which made her seem a little like a caged bird who no one trusted to fly. But her mom wouldn’t budge. The rule was that if I wanted to see Maribel, it had to be at either her apartment or mine—no going outside, no taking a walk, no nothing.
Most of the time I found her sitting on the bedroom floor, writing in her notebook or standing and staring out the back window. I’d ask her what she was looking at or what she was writing about. Sometimes she told me. Other times she didn’t. Either way, it didn’t matter much to me. I was aware that my original reason for talking to Maribel, which had been fueled by a sense of responsibility, had been replaced by something else: I just wanted to be around her. I still wanted to take care of her in certain ways, but it was more than that now. I liked her. I liked her more than I’d ever liked anyone.
We talked about nothing mostly, like what she was doing in school and about music and our parents. I would tell her the most random things—“Did you know that the average person drinks sixteen thousand gallons of water by the time they die?” or about the time I saw Vicente Fox on TV—and she would smile sometimes, which was always my goal.
We talked about the weather because now that it was getting colder she was waiting for it to snow, to see what it was like.
“I guess there’s no snow in México, huh?” I said.
“Yes.”
“ ‘Yes’ there’s no snow or ‘yes’ there is snow?”
“There is snow.”
“In México? No way.”
“In the north, yes,” she said.
“You know there’s different kinds of snow, right? There’s wet snow, which can get crusty and freeze. And then there’s really light snow, which is soft. And don’t even get me started on snow-flakes. There are four classes of those: columns, dendrites, needles, and rimed snow.”
She pulled out her notebook. “Say it again.”
I did, and she wrote it down.
“You liked that?” I asked.
She nodded.
“Can I see?” I held out my hand.
Without hesitation, she gave me her notebook. On the page that was open, she’d written, “Wet snow is hard. Light snow is soft.” Her handwriting was small and tight, and she pushed down so hard with the black pen she was using that she made indents on the paper. Everything was centered—one line at a time—down the middle of the page. At the top, way up in the margin, she had written her name and address. I kept reading.
Close the door behind you.
Mrs. Pacer is room 310.
My room is 312.
How much does the bus ride cost?
What is the name of the bus driver?
Look at the bus driver’s badge.
Crystal.
The school bus is free.
The city bus is not free.
I flipped back a few pages and read:
This is Newark, Delaware.
Delaware is 3,333 kilometers from home.
I feel the same today as I did yesterday.
I handed the notebook back to her. “What happened?” I asked.
“What?”
“Was it a car accident?”
“When?”
“Sorry. I mean, what happened to you?”
“I fell. I was on—” She stopped. “It’s long.”
“It’s a long story?”
She shook her head. “A long thing. Of wood.”
I racked my brain. “A bat?” I hated it when I didn’t know what she was getting at. I wanted to show her that I could follow her. I wanted to be the one person that it was easy for
her to talk to.
“A ladder,” she said finally.
“Oh, a long thing made out of wood. Right. You were up on a ladder?”
“I broke two”—she held up two fingers—“of my ribs.”
“And you hit your head?”
She lifted a flap of hair and showed me a scar, pink and waxy like a gummy worm, behind her ear.
“Does it still hurt now? Like, can you sleep on it?”
“I get headaches.”
“So that’s what the sunglasses are for.”
“Yes.”
“Do you even remember it?”
“I was on the …”
“Ladder,” I filled in.
She nodded. “And then I was in the hospital. I don’t know where I went in between.”
“Well, someone must have taken you to the hospital.”
“I mean … I lost myself. In between.”
“Oh,” I said, and then I just sat there, because something about that idea—that you could be one person in one moment and then wake up and be completely different—punched me in the gut.
“You don’t ask me how I’m feeling,” Maribel said. “I hate it when people … ask me that.”
She’d told me that before, but I didn’t point it out. I just said, “It probably gets old, huh?”
“I want to be like everybody else.”
“Yeah,” I said, because I knew just what she meant. I’d spent my whole life feeling like that. Like everybody else was onto something that I couldn’t seem to find, that I didn’t even know existed. I wanted to figure it out, the secret to having the easy life that everyone else seemed to have, where they fit in and were good at everything they tried. Year after year, I waited for it all to fall into place—every September I told myself, This year will be different—but year after year, it was all just the same.
I didn’t say anything in response to Maribel that day. We moved on to another topic. But later that night, when I was lying in bed, I realized what I should have said, because for her at least it would have been the truth: “You shouldn’t want to be like everybody else. Then you wouldn’t be like you.”
ONE DAY I walked back from her place to find my dad sitting on the couch, watching television. He had his sweat-socked feet up on the coffee table and a bottle of beer in his hand. Usually he didn’t get home until later, so both of us were surprised to see each other.
“What are you doing here?” I asked.
He sat up, startled. “The diner closed early today. Not enough customers in the afternoons anymore. Aren’t you supposed to be at soccer?”
I tensed. “I was,” I said.
“You’re not wearing your soccer clothes.”
“Yeah.” I scrambled through excuses in my head. “My clothes were dirty, so I borrowed someone else’s stuff.”
“This is someone else’s? This? What you’re wearing?”
“Well, I had to give it back after practice, so I changed into my regular clothes again.”
“You gave dirty clothes back to someone?”
I nodded.
“Who?”
I said the first name I could think of. “Jamal Blair.”
My dad pushed out his lips. He was sitting on the couch, twisted to look at me. “I never heard that name.”
“He’s good. He’s a midfielder.”
My dad squinted like he was studying me with X-ray vision. I tried to stand as still as possible.
“When’s the next game?” he asked, like he was testing me.
“I need to check,” I said.
“You don’t know?”
I didn’t say anything.
“You don’t know?” my dad asked again, his voice booming this time.
This was how things went with him. One minute you were having a conversation and the next minute he was blowing up.
There had been one other time that my dad had mentioned wanting to go to a game, but the fact that his work schedule wouldn’t allow it had saved me. It was basically the only thing that had been saving me all along. By the time he came home each day, I just said I’d been at soccer and he didn’t know the difference.
But it was over now, I thought. He’d finally seen through me.
My dad raised his beer bottle and angled it toward the light. “Gone,” he muttered. He held the bottle over the back of the couch. “Get me another.” From where I stood, I could see four empties lined up next to the sink in the kitchen.
I took the bottle, and my dad slumped back down in the couch cushions.
Was that it? Were we done now?
Then from the couch my dad yelled, “Celia!”
I heard my mom’s footsteps move through their bedroom and down the hall. “Are you calling me?”
“You can’t keep up with the laundry?”
She walked into the living room, shaking her head. “What are you talking about?”
“Mayor’s soccer clothes. He says they’re in the laundry.”
My mom looked at me, confused. I just stared at her, trying to look as innocent as possible. But then her face changed, and for a split second I thought that maybe she had figured it out. But if she had, she didn’t give me away.
Instead she said, “Sorry. I’ll do laundry today.”
“¡Carajo!” my dad said, and that was the end of that.
Quisqueya Solís
Where should I begin? Venezuela is where I was born and where I lived until I was twelve years old. I was a very beautiful child, happy in every way. But when I was twelve, my mother fell in love with a man from California. He asked her to marry him, so we moved to his home in Long Beach. It was an enormous house with a pool in the courtyard. I believe a famous architect had designed it. Hollywood studios called us sometimes to see about using the house in a movie or for a commercial shoot. It was very glamorous.
I was content there for a while. My mother’s new husband had a son, Scott, from a previous marriage who was two years older than me. Scott paid no attention to me in the beginning, but soon enough, as my body began to change and I grew into womanhood, he took another look. He was always walking in on me in the shower, claiming he didn’t know I was there, or I would catch him watching me while I tanned by the pool. I tried to ignore him when I could. I kept the door to my room locked.
Scott and I were at the house one night. I was sixteen. It was a rainy evening. My mother and his father were out at dinner. I was in the kitchen getting a soda from the refrigerator when he came up from behind and kissed me. I remember very clearly he said, “It’s okay. We’re not really brother and sister, so it’s fine.” But it wasn’t fine with me. I tried to push him off, but he was stronger than me. I wasn’t a prude. I had kissed boys before. But this was not what I wanted. He came at me again. He knocked me to the floor and climbed on top of me.
He did unspeakable things, all against my will. I don’t know why, but he thought he could do whatever he wanted. That’s how boys are.
Later, I told my mother what he had done to me, but she didn’t believe it. She accused me of trying to ruin things for her. She said, “Look at this life they’ve given us.” She warned me not to be ungrateful. Of course, I was only more upset after that. And I felt I couldn’t stay there, in such proximity to Scott. I knew it was only a matter of time before he came for me again. I told my mother I was moving out. She didn’t fight it. She didn’t offer to go with me. I don’t think she had ever even wanted a child. She had me as a result of a one-night stand. I was less important than the things she had now—a nice house and diamond jewelry, an expensive car and a big refrigerator. It was the life she had always dreamed of—we were even citizens now—and in the United States no less.
I went to a shelter and told them that I was on my own. I lied and said that my parents were both dead and that I had been fending for myself. I stayed with a girlfriend for a little while, too. I lived in her pool house for months, and her parents never even knew I was there. I missed my mother, but the truth was that I had missed h
er even when we were together, so it was nothing new.
As soon as I got my high school diploma, I left California. The girlfriend I had stayed with was going to college in New Jersey. Her parents had given her a car for graduation, so she was going to fill it with her belongings and drive across the country to her new school. She offered to take me with her. I stayed with her in her dorm for a while until I found a job waiting tables and saved enough money to live on my own.
I met a certain man while I had that job. He used to sit at the counter and order blueberry pie. He used to flirt with me sometimes. I tried to resist him. I was suspicious of men by then. I wanted nothing to do with them. But he was persistent and he was kind and he made me laugh. He started staying after the restaurant had closed, talking to me while I cleaned up. He used to walk me home when it was dark. He didn’t know what he was getting into with me, though. He never did anything wrong, but it was a struggle for me to be truly close to him. It was difficult, because of my past, to trust him. I pushed him away—every time he came back to me, I pushed again—until finally he left.
But he’s the father of my two boys, and I’ve gone out of my way to make sure that they turn out to be good and respectful. When they were in my house, they never laid a hand on a girl, never a kiss, nothing. I was very watchful. It’s possible they’re the only good boys in the world. With the help of scholarships and financial aid, they’re able to attend university. They’re studying hard there.
Now I receive money every month as part of my divorce settlement. So financially I’m secure, but I also choose to volunteer my time on Mondays and Wednesdays at the hospital because I feel I should do something positive with my time, something to help people. It’s the least I can do. I have enough money that maybe I could live somewhere else, but my friends are here. Besides my boys, my friends are all I have.
Almost no one in my life now knows what I’ve been through, nor do I want them to know. Some things should be private. That’s what I always say. Besides, I don’t need anyone’s pity. My life has been what it has been. It’s not a wonderful story, but it’s mine.
The Book of Unknown Americans Page 10
