Vida

by Patricia Engel

  “Not even by someone else’s dad at the town pool or anything?”

  “Lucho … you’re such a perv.”

  “I’m just asking.”

  He got quiet, and then I felt kind of bad for calling him a pervert. He threw his cigarette stub into the dry soil and lit a new one right away.

  The way the court arranged it, my dad could buy my uncle out of his half of the company and make monthly payments that would go straight to the parents of his dead wife. My uncle got life in the slammer and Papi got thirty years of payments. And those people got a dead daughter. My mom said that on our end of it, it meant we had to watch our spending.

  “Does this mean we can’t afford to send me to college?”

  “No,” said Mami. “It means we’re being audited by the IRS.”

  Summer vacation hadn’t even started, and I already thought I was going to kill myself from overexposure to my parents. One Saturday, I went over to Lucho’s and knocked on the door. His mom answered. She was a nice-looking lady with fake blonde hair and a tan that you know nobody is born with. She had some kind of accent. I asked Lucho where she was from, and he said she’s a Jew, which means she’s from everywhere. Bulgaria. Denmark. Turkey. Israel. A bunch of places.

  Her name was Shula, and the thing I liked best about her was that she let me call her Shula, not Mrs. Whatever like all the other stiff moms in town. My mom was a first-name kind of lady, too, and it wigged out all my friends when she told them to just call her Maria. Shula waved me in and told me Lucho was out by the pool, so I trekked through the doctor’s fancy house and found him under an umbrella, shirt off, wearing cutoff jeans I’d never seen before. He was stringy and tan, and then I saw them. Scars all over his arms, long welts and bruises on his back, and a big bruise on his chest.

  “Lucho, what happened to you?”

  “The doc kicks the shit out of me.” He laughed.

  My parents never laid a finger on us, even when my brother made my mom cry, which was often.

  “What does your mom say about it?”

  “She tells him not to but he doesn’t listen.”

  Just then Shula came out and said she had to go to the mall and that she’d bring us back some Kentucky Fried if we wanted. We said okay and when it seemed like she was really gone, Lucho stood up, peeled off his shorts, and jumped in the pool. I caught a glimpse of his wiry behind, the shadows of his groin, and I swallowed hard. It was the first time I saw a boy naked in real life except for babies and once when my brother left the bathroom door unlocked.

  “I don’t have my bathing suit, Lucho.”

  “So take your clothes off.”

  I don’t know what came over me but I started peeling off my clothes right there, dropping my shirt, then my shorts, onto the plastic lounge chair. I was down to my underwear, some pink cotton ones my mom bought with a matching pink bra. I was unhooking the bra when Shula reappeared, looking like she forgot something, setting her eyes on me and her naked son in the pool.

  “Sabina, I think you’d better go.”

  “I forgot my bathing suit …”

  “Go now, please.”

  I got dressed quick-style and flew down the block to my house, terrified that Shula was going to call my mom and tell her I was trying to get naked in her house, but then it occurred to me that if she did such a thing, I could just shoot back that her husband beat the crap out of Lucho and that would shut her up good.

  That night I heard clanking on my window while I lay in bed thinking about Lucho’s stinky naked body and how badly I wanted to see it again. I went over and opened it and saw him in the shadows of our yard, flinging his sneaker up at my window.

  “Hey, I got the doc’s car! Come on, I’ll take you for a ride!”

  I probably would have jumped right out the window if it hadn’t been for the fact that two years earlier when my brother was fifteen, he tried to sneak out of his own bedroom window next to mine to go to a party and broke his collarbone in the process. Our neighbors heard him screaming before we did and called the police. I told Lucho to wait for me. I hadn’t taken three steps out of my room when I heard my mom call out to me, “Sabina? Are you going to the kitchen?”

  Fuck. I told her yes, and she told me to bring her a glass of water. Lucho met me by the back door, and I told him I couldn’t go anywhere with him. I was standing there in my nightshirt, one that my dad got me on a business trip. It had a big fat cat on it and HONG KONG printed across the chest. The maid shrank it so it barely covered my butt.

  “You look cute,” Lucho said. “Want to sneak me into your room?”

  “My dad will kill me if we get caught.”

  “Fuck it. Your dad doesn’t hit for shit.”

  “I’ll be grounded.”

  “So what? You never go anywhere anyway.”

  “Lucho …”

  “Okay, you give me no choice. I gotta go throw my sneakers at Courtney’s window now.”

  This made me jealous. Courtney with her hot ballet body and country-club tan. The country club where they only let in Mayflower people. I told Lucho how they didn’t let Jews in there either and he laughed and said Courtney lets Jews in, no problem.

  He left, and I got my mother her glass of water, crept across the creaky floors, and went to sleep with the window open.

  My mother came into my room that morning and told me, just like that, you don’t have to go to school today if you don’t want to, Sabina. Something terrible happened last night.

  Lucho drove into the highway divider. No car got in his way, nothing pushed him in that direction. It was just one of those things. The poor kid lost control of the car, is how my dad put it. The poor kid. That’s what everyone called him. Most people didn’t even know his name because he was still so new to the town. But everyone in school put on a sad face, went to see the guidance counselors, and took advantage of the school’s lenient attendance policy for poststudent deaths. I went to my classes.

  Then there was the funeral. You’d never guess it but kids love a funeral when it’s for one of their own. They dress up in black, and the girls cluster together and cry, cry, cry like preemies. All the parents came, too, showed support, and looked concerned, although nobody really gave a fuck. Lucho was the good-looking smelly kid, the one all the moms said needed a shower. The one who lived with the rich doctor who, with all his loot, wouldn’t buy his new stepson some new clothes. The doc looked really upset at the funeral, and Shula sat there crying her eyes out. The casket was closed, though I’m not sure if it’s a Jewish thing or because he was so mangled from the wreck.

  My brother stole my dad’s car years earlier and went on the highway, got pulled over, arrested, and sentenced to a million hours of washing fire trucks with a sponge. That was reason enough to keep to the back roads. My Lucho never had a chance.

  What’s worse is that at the funeral, people got distracted by the sight of my parents and the whispers started. Every detail of my dad’s payout to my uncle and the victim’s family had been offered up by the stupid local papers that always implied Papi was a trafficker. My mother was dressed to kill, as always, in some designer getup that was way too much for a town like this where all the mothers were doughier versions of their husbands.

  I sat between my parents at the funeral. Mami cried, but she cries for anything nowadays. I think she felt bad because, just the week before, she told me Lucho looked like a criminal waiting to happen. My father held my head close to his chest and kissed my hair. “He was a nice kid, Sabina. He knew you loved him.”

  Papi surprised me. I didn’t even know I loved Lucho till that second. But I did. Because so what if he was a little smelly and weird. He came looking for me when I was invisible. And when he was with me, he acted like I was the only thing he could see.

  Courtney didn’t come to the funeral because people said she was way too emotional, which I didn’t really buy. I thought she got more attention than if she actually showed up and had to sit in the rows of chairs with the
rest of us. This rabbi came out and said some Hebrew prayer. I heard kids giggling behind me. I thought of Lucho and how he’d say that was fucked.

  REFUGE

  This morning the towers were hit and I was in bed—not at the office in Tower One—because I called in sick again. My brother phoned, said turn on the TV, and I watched it all, everything I don’t need to describe now. Before the phones went dead, I made contact. Parents, a few friends. Trying to decide how to handle this mess, but I’m in no position to make a decision, which is a good thing because Luscious Lou (his stage name), my guitar teacher of these past few months, showed up at my door, all seven feet of him in his usual black leather and suede, leaning on the frame, that sleeping crow of hair on his head, diagonal nose like a dragon’s tail, tiny gray eyes folded into hard wrinkles. Moist, bellowing voice: “Sabina, I knew you’d be home.”

  He told me to go with him, that I live too close to the scene. I packed some clothes and followed him down to the street, his massive hand pulling mine. My neighbors, my party people, all out on the stoop with eyes like this day might last forever. For a second I felt I finally belonged to this city—the broken-down horizon matched my bombed-out heart.

  I don’t know why Lou, of all people, came for me. The whole long walk up to his place on Riverside Drive—trains were paralyzed—I kept thinking how I wished Nico had been at the door instead. Last I heard, he was in L.A. doing his musician thing. Probably not doing so well, because, I can say this now, Nico’s not really that talented. Didn’t change the way I loved him, though—like he was some kind of genius— and maybe that’s why he started to act like I was lucky to be with him. It made him hard to be around sometimes. But those lashes. They could split your will into shards.

  I’m at Lou’s house, which is really the house his wife inherited from her deceased first husband. When he brought me here, he introduced me to her and the kids as his favorite student. The wife, Olive, is striking: equal parts Snow White and Nancy Wilson. A cocktail of a woman small enough to fit in Lou’s jacket pocket. She looks at me like I’m a sick person, pitying and fearful of catching what I’ve got. She has still, glossy Valium eyes and floats around the house like a spirit while the toddler twin boys roll Tonka trucks on the shag carpet, Lou makes burgers, and I sit on the sofa with Sierra, the thirteen-year-old daughter leftover from the first marriage. She’s fat-faced but thin of body, greasy-haired with a nest of chin pimples covered in drugstore foundation, the kind I used to stuff up my sleeves along with nail polish and lipsticks with my junior-high friend Alina. We never got caught, but somehow I’ve always felt guilty, and when I go to drugstores now I want to walk up to the cashier and say, Look, I didn’t steal anything.

  I’m not good with young people, or any people, really, so I ask Sierra what she wants to be when she grows up.

  “A stripper, because they make a lot of money.”

  I ask if her parents know and she looks at me like I’m an idiot. Asks me what I do for a living, and I think, I’m only twenty-two. I don’t do anything for a living except smoke cigarettes and throw my heart around. What I’ve got is a job, not a living.

  “I’m a receptionist at an investment bank.”

  Her eyes lower, mockingly. “Is that your dream come true?”

  I could say investment banks happen to pay very well, but instead I try to sound adult and unaffected. “Actually, I’m looking to make a career change.”

  I can’t help focusing on her clothes. Tight low jeans. A ratty blue tank with BABYGIRL painted in shiny stones across her cupcake-size boobies.

  She wants to know about my love life.

  “Do you have a boyfriend, Sabrina?”

  I tell her it’s Sabina, not Sabrina, and I’m single, which sounds corny, like I’m on a dating show, and I wonder why Sierra is talking like she’s my social worker.

  “Were you a virgin when you were thirteen?”

  I’m trying not to embarrass us both, so I answer her as if I get asked that question at least once a day.

  “I was. Yes.”

  “I’m not. I’ve had sex with four guys already.”

  She goes on about how the guys were older, like eighteen. I’ve got one eye on the tots on the rug, wondering if they’ll register any part of this conversation.

  Another dumb question: I ask if she was in love with any of the guys, as if love is the reason everyone does the things they do.

  “No. I kind of love this guy who lives on the third floor, but he’s married. Besides, I think he likes my mom, because he hangs around here a lot when Lou is in the studio. Or at your house.”

  Nico thought it was strange that Lou would come over for lessons after midnight and that the one-hour lesson would extend to two or three. I explained that Lou had a packed recording schedule and his only available slots were late at night, which suited me fine since I was a recent insomniac. Nico didn’t like that I was learning to play. I’d asked him to teach me himself a hundred times, but he always refused, so I had no choice but to find myself a teacher, and it happened that the guy who cuts my hair knew of Luscious Lou because his own wife took lessons from him.

  “You just don’t want me to learn,” I said.

  Nico shook his head. “You’re the one they say is unteachable.”

  This was a personal jab—Nico’s area of expertise— because I’d confided in him that as a kid, I had shit skills for music. The same teacher who deemed my brother a musical prodigy said I was hopeless, which I thought meant homeless, and then my mother had to explain the difference to me. In elementary school, I couldn’t string together three notes on the recorder. In sixth grade, I was told to quit the clarinet, and when I tried out for the school choir, I was told to leave it to the girls with smooth, far-reaching voices.

  By the time I linked up with Lou, Nico and I were already headed for trouble. But there were nights when I was in bed with Nico and I’d get up to answer the door and strum chords with Lou for hours while my man slept. I’d written lyrics for Nico to set to music, but he wouldn’t even look at them, so I gave them to Lou. One night, I had wet lashes, not unusual, because Nico kept me in a state of panic. Lou looked at my sheets of paper and said, “Lets turn those wet eyes into music,” and we spent the whole night drawing melodies over chords until it sounded like a real song.

  It always seemed like Lou didn’t want to go home and I never asked why, because people have their own reasons and God knows that for most of my life, home is the last place I wanted to be. Yet our lessons always felt like stolen time. When Lou left, I’d get back into bed with Nico. He’d feel me slip under the covers, reach for me, bend his head into my chest, curl into my torso for the length of the night. But in the morning his eyes would shift to derision and he’d say, “This is all wrong. We are all wrong.” And one day, he was gone.

  After dinner, Lou reads the boys a story and stays with them until they fall asleep in their little twin beds with Snoopy sheets and padded side rails. I used to have rails like that as a kid, but I still fell out of bed all the time, landing on the rug with a thud, and sometimes I waited a long time to see if either of my parents would come running to make sure I was okay but they rarely did. Sometimes my brother would appear, because his room was just next to mine and our shared wall was as thin as tissue, even my sneezes would wake him, and Cris was very protective of his sleep. I’d be on the floor, wrapped in my blanket and looking like a runny enchilada with the bed bumper on top of me, but he wouldn’t do anything to help me.

  Lou and the wife keep talking about how lucky I am that I called in sick or I might be dead right now. Lou, who has become very religious since he turned fifty, says I should say a prayer of thanks and go light some candles at St. Patrick’s or something. He used to play with Bowie, Dylan, the Stones, all the greats. He told me he’s slept with a million women, done every drug under the sun, and it was all for nothing; at the end of the day that shit has nothing to do with music. Now Lou mostly records studio tracks for these young bands
from Brooklyn, but he says they don’t have the heart needed to live music. It’s all about the heart, says Lou. The bloodier the heart, the better the music.

  We’ve been watching the news since the kids went to sleep. Those images of people covered in dust. The repeated loop of the towers collapsing like a deflated carnival castle. I think of all my coworkers, people I never really took the trouble to know. Shalonie, the Jamaican mommy of two who worked the reception desk with me. All the horny banker guys would say, “Shalonie is so pretty. It’s too bad she’s all crooked,” just because one of her legs is shorter than the other and half of her drags when she walks. I hope she made it down the stairs okay.

  And Wanda Rios, the HR lady who looked out for me when the executive assistants got together to complain that I should be fired because I take one-hour lunches—more than my allotted twenty minutes—and read fashion magazines on the job. The Polish girl before me was way more serious and responsible, but she got promoted to accounting. Wanda likes me because we have the same last name though we are no relation—she’s Puerto Rican and I’m Colombian stock— and she says us Latinos have to stick together although she doesn’t speak Spanish.

  These are people who had it in them to be faithful servants of the bank, hoping for holiday bonuses, a little recognition, and eventually a promotion, while I spent my days trying to get fired. Their survival is certainly worth more than mine. It’s hard to feel grateful knowing I should have been with them today. And that I cheated.

  I can’t help thinking of Nico. I picture him sweaty and tan, every bit the rocker, sitting in some Silverlake bar watching the news over a beer, telling the people around him how he used to live right there, that his girl worked right there in the towers. I wonder if he’s worried about me and if, under that, there’s a trace of something more.

  The last time I used the word terrorist in normal conversation was when I called Nico an emotional terrorist for missing my college graduation because he took his ex to get an abortion and told me to stop being so selfish. Never mind that the news byte came from her, not him. The baby was his—the result of what he called an isolated incident. He managed to convince me not to give up on him, on us, even if for a while we weren’t rapturous lovers but more like two slabs of beef in a meat locker.