Vida

by Patricia Engel

  You met Maureen at a diner by the train tracks. Ordered yourself a salad and watched her watch you eat it while she ordered herself nothing.

  She said, “I’m not sure if you know I’ve got a problem with food.”

  You said you had a vague idea. Didn’t say it’d been all over the town wires for years already, how she dropped out of some crap college to get treatment, was working a few hours a week gift-wrapping at a local children’s clothing store. Not to mention the road map of fat veins that looked like they were trying to break out of her face.

  She said, “I remember you did, too. Back in high school. You were so thin.”

  You don’t know how this ended up being about you. Until then, you thought maybe the world was becoming a place of justice and Maureen was looking to repent for her cruelty. But all she really wanted were your diet secrets from the eleventh grade when you decided to carve your soft caramel flesh down to its essence. You went from a cherubic kid to teenage flamingo, one who couldn’t go to her tennis lesson without having to endure an hour’s worth of comments from the coach about the freakish length of your legs sprouting from your shorts, but no matter how hard you starved, your mushy, unruly breasts refused to shrink. Some girls find pride in their chest but you were ashamed of yours. The concept of a bra embarrassed you and you wore your brother’s old sweaters to cover traces of straps. Your mom was always saying a woman should cherish her femininity but you wanted to destroy yours—never wore makeup, always bit your nails and knotted your long hair into a bun.

  You overheard two male teachers talking about you once when you sneaked into the teachers’ lounge to use the soda machine. Mr. Testa, your AP history teacher, a dork in Dockers who graduated from this very high school ten years earlier, telling the other guy about the black stretch pants with ankle zippers you were wearing that day, how your blue panties showed when you sat at your desk and he circled the room during test time to steal looks, and if there was one girl in the school he’d pay to fuck, it would be you. You felt filthy and when you got home you gave the pants to the housekeeper so she could send them to her daughter in El Salvador. Even without those pants Mr. Testa offered you a ride home from school several times, asked you to come to his office during lunch hour to talk about your plans for the future. You had a rep for being sort of a nerd even though you also held the cutting-class record for every year that you were in school. But you were a good kid and only skipped class to stay home and read books about women with interesting lives who lived in foreign countries.

  One day Mr. Testa invited you to his house to watch a movie and you decided to go to the guidance counselor. Instead of reporting Mr. Testa, you said the class was too hard and you wanted to go back to regular history. You got the worst seat, next to Jerry, the kid who fingered a special-ed girl in the back of the school bus in seventh grade while his friend took pictures. When the teacher wasn’t looking, Jerry would mouth dirty things to you and you pretended not to notice.

  That was the year of the Great Suicide Epidemic. Not that people were actually dying. There was only one successful case, and it was a parent, not a student. But that death, a pill-popping mom, gave everyone ideas, and soon every Monday at school the halls were filled with talk of who tried to off themselves over the weekend, mostly with prescription pills, vodka, and Tylenol. The latest victim always got a load of attention, until the next weekend when someone else took the spotlight. The theater kids were really into suicide that year. Hardly ever the athletes. And the pudgy unwanted girls with hopeless crushes on popular boys were always a sure thing. The fact is you even had a go of it. On your sixteenth birthday. Thirty sleeping pills, but they were herbal, so it wasn’t like you were serious about dying either. And nobody noticed anything except that you happened to sleep for a few extra hours.

  Your parents are immigrants who don’t really understand the concept of depression and who decided to throw you the birthday party of the year, hoping you’d crack a smile. Maureen brought up that party when you saw her that night at the diner, talking like those were the days. The hotel ballroom, the music, the custom-made dress. The only thing you remember about that party is that after the cake, you went out to the parking lot and cried in the bitter January chill because not one person except your brother and cousin asked you to dance. You wished someone would realize you’d fled your own party and come looking for you, but nobody did.

  This party was like all the others your parents made you have as a kid, inviting the whole class to your house for magicians and games. At these parties, the parents hung around the living room inspecting your family’s furniture while their children were supposed to be playing in the den. But the kids ignored you even though it was your party. The girls came together in little gangs and did cartwheels for one another across the floor. “You try one, Sabina,” they’d taunt, knowing full well you couldn’t do one. You were always too tall, taller than all the boys even, and you could hardly master your long limbs walking, forget about upside down. The other girls were compact gamines who did round-offs for fun while you were kicked out of Tumble Tots when you were five for your inability to do a proper somersault. The teacher, a frizzy-haired retired professional cheerleader, told your mom you were hopeless and didn’t need to come back, even offered to refund her money. Your mom responded in her rich, layered Spanish accent that she and your father weren’t planning on selling you to the circus anyway, so there really was no need for you to learn how to roll around on the ground like a potato bug.

  The height would come in handy later, much later, when you went to the city with your parents for a Broadway show and had dinner afterward at a nearby restaurant. You went to the bathroom to barf up your meal, and when you came out, a Euro-looking guy in a sharp suit asked if he could talk to your parents, followed you back to your table, and told your dad that you should be a model. Gave them his card and he was a legit guy, one whose name you recognized from fashion magazines. Owned an agency and wanted you to come in for photos. Put his hand on your shoulder and said, “What do you think about that?”

  You liked the idea of being beautiful—of being admired without being touched. But you felt like a farce and your dad was quick to insult the man by saying you were meant for better things.

  Maureen was wearing a green sweater that day at the diner and for that reason you will always remember her in green. Her once thick hair was a clump of threads tied by red elastic. She wore makeup but on her leathery face it looked clown-ish and you remember feeling embarrassed to be seen with her. She was talking about when you were kids as though you were best friends.

  “Remember in fifth grade when we worked at the gold-fish booth at the village fair?”

  How could you forget? That was the year Maureen told everyone in class that if they were nice to you, she’d have her dad arrest their parents. And they believed it.

  Maureen’s dad was a sergeant in town. At one point you thought maybe he or somebody else was touching her and that’s why Maureen acquired her armor. Randy, who you befriended in French class, was molested by her stepfather and became a straight-A student who vacuumed her room five times a day. And Nicole, who you knew from horseback riding, had a boyfriend whose uncle raped him his whole life.

  “How did you stop?” Maureen wanted to know.

  It’d been a long time. You tried to remember.

  Your parents got sick of watching you move your food around your plate at dinner, chewing slowly and spitting mouthfuls into a napkin to throw away later, staring at the wall while your dad’s eyes watered. Your parents said, How dare you push away your food when the German ancestors you never knew starved to death in a concentration camp, killing an entire branch of your clan, when, for the early days of their marriage, your parents subsisted on sardines and canned beef. How dare you? At the time, the words meant nothing to you. Your mom and dad sent you to a shrink, this incredibly pale English woman who let you call her by her first name. As long as you kept going, your parents kept their
hassling to a minimum, paid the shrink bill, and only occasionally bugged you about your diet. You eventually gained a few pounds. Got floppier, fuller boobs. But the discipline to starve was gone.

  You gave Maureen all your processed therapy talk. You thought about talking tougher, like your brother did at the height of your famine: No boy will want to kiss your shriveling lips or love your weak body and that chest so sunken that you can almost see your beating heart.

  But you held back. Told yourself it wasn’t your problem.

  Instead you said you had to be on your way, that you had to catch the next train back to the city. Made it sound like you had a really exciting life waiting for you.

  Silly to think of it now but before you left each other that day, you still hoped, in that strange space of reminiscing and advice-giving, that Maureen would ask you to forgive her for hurting you, for doing her part to keep you on the town margin. But she only stared at you from across the table with buggy eyes, wrinkled and dehydrated, her flimsy hands shaking as she tried to hold her glass of water.

  You told her to write or call you whenever she wanted, said you’d always be there for her if she needed a friend. She hugged you and it felt like air, the mere idea of a hug instead of the real thing even though you could smell the puke on her breath. When another letter did come, you read it quickly, tossed it into the trash, and never thought of Maureen again.

  Your plan was to forget. But you did think of her, often, while wishing you could cull your memory to craft a provisional mercy. You never managed. Told yourself, In time. In time.

  DESALIENTO

  Diego was this guy that I met on Washington Avenue at three in the morning the summer I quit my job at the art gallery and decided I needed a month in Miami to evaluate my next move. Elsa and I had just come out of a nightclub, sweaty, half-drunk, and stinking of cigarettes, because that’s how we did it back then. We needed to sober up before driving home, so we went to Gino’s for a slice of pizza. Elsa’s Ukranian, a magnet for Russian guys, and within seconds she was showing off her Moscow slang to some guy named Vlad who was handing out flyers for the full moon party. Vlad pulled up a chair, and then his friend showed up: a shirtless Argentino—there are millions in South Beach—wearing camouflage shorts and a pair of blue eyes like they were all he needed to get by. He spotted Vlad and dropped his own flyers on our table, sat next to me, and said this is where he needed to be.

  You know how it is when you’re twenty-three and looking for meaning. I was so empty back then that Diego seemed prescribed by the gods. We gave him and Vlad a lift to Opium because they were supposed to hand out flyers outside the club. They got paid twenty dollars a night for that work. When they got out of our car Diego stuck his head in through my window and kissed me like some kind of satyr, deep, wet, and fast. Before I knew it, he was halfway down the block.

  We were staying in my parents’ condo. Told everyone we were reflecting on our lives. But really we were just tanning and partying. We made a ton of beaded jewelry and tried to sell it on Ocean Drive but we always ended up giving it away to guys who flirted with us. And when we weren’t smoking cigarettes on the beach, we were at Diego’s place. He lived in a one-bedroom apartment in the craziest building on Collins, where they rent by the month and the lobby is a revolving stage of drag queens, college kids, hookers, and the men who love them. And then there were the illegals: kids who should be in school or something but they were exiled from wherever they came from by either a shit economy or a miserable home life. Diego shared his apartment with fifteen others. The bedroom had eight mattresses on the floor and they all slept there like it was war times. Most of these kids were from Argentina, like Diego, fleeing last year’s collapse; backpackers-turned-refugees working valet parking at the hotels and clubs while the girls waited tables at the cafés on Lincoln where they don’t ask for papers.

  Vlad lived there, too, and while he and Elsa huddled on the couch talking about how he fled Lithuania by stowing away on a cruise ship and jumping off at New York harbor, Diego and I sat on the balcony smoking and drinking yerba maté from his special gourd. He didn’t try to kiss me again after that first night. I was mad for his fat lips and clear eyes, his choppy singsong Spanish and the way he thought shirts were optional. When I complained to Elsa she just rolled her eyes at me and said, “You always do this.”

  Even when we got sloppy drunk in the pool, beer cans floating next to us, me on his shoulders for a chicken fight trying to knock Elsa off of Vlad, Diego never made a move. Even when we ended up sleeping in the same bed, like that time we all drove down to Key West in nothing but our bathing suits and ended up staying for three days. We washed our swimsuits in the bathroom and let them dry. Vlad and Elsa in one bed doing God knows what, and me and Diego in the other, chaste as virgins.

  I knew Diego slept with tons of other girls. There was this one, Valeria, a Uruguayan fox with long black curls, who seemed to own only hot pants and halter tops. She was twenty-six, and I pointed out that she was older than Diego and me every chance I had. She gave him a hundred bucks to buy herself a spot in the aparto/hostel for a couple of weeks, and when we’d all be hanging in the living room, the guys strumming Soda Stereo songs on their guitars, Valeria would dance along like it was her only currency. Diego, like all the other guys, watched her tiny thighs jiggling and the way she was always picking the spandex out of her crack.

  There was another one. Roberta the Chilena whose father owned a shoe store in Hialeah and who fell in love with Diego one night at Automatic Slims. I wasn’t around, because I was on a real date with some Peruvian UM med-school fool, son of a family friend, and if I didn’t go out with him I’d hear about it for a year from my mom. Roberta offered to marry Diego on the spot because she had her papers already. And Diego was considering it, which made me nuts. She said he’d have to work in the shoe store with the family though, and Diego wasn’t sold on that last detail. We were at the nude beach one cloudy afternoon when he was thinking it over out loud. I was topless and Diego was completely on display, which, looking back, should have been awkward for us, but it wasn’t.

  I asked him if he was going to go through with it, trying not to sound jealous.

  “I’d rather marry you,” he said, and I think he meant it as a joke but it didn’t come out sounding that way. Still, I laughed and he laughed, too.

  “I’m serious,” he said after a minute or two. “If it came down to it, would you marry me so I can get my papers?”

  I shook my head. “I’d only marry for love.”

  “Easy to say when you’re not illegal.”

  Diego didn’t believe in love. He read a lot of socialist lit and Osho, and he said love was an imagined condition of the weak. Elsa entertained his debates on the subject while I just turned my eyes to the sky. He said he’d never felt anything in his life that resembled the popular notion of love. Not for anyone except maybe his parents. I took this as a challenge. And when I got him alone one night, sleeping in my bed after another drunken barbecue, I poked him awake with my finger and said, “Diego, I’m going to break your heart one day.”

  He turned his big eyes on me and said, “I hope you do.”

  I wish I could say my life changed after that summer but it didn’t. I went back to New York and got another shit job in a gallery, this time uptown. Diego and I would talk on the phone a few times a week. He gave up handing out flyers and got a busboy job at one of the big clubs. He came up to the city to see me for a few days and I took him all over: Central Park, Chinatown, the Met, and the Museum of Natural History. He’d never seen a dinosaur and said the bones along with the skyscraper skeleton of New York City made him feel insignificant, like he could just disappear and nobody would notice.

  Diego’s mom was dying of cancer and he wanted badly to go home and see her but his parents insisted he stay here, that there was nothing left for him in Argentina. No jobs, no opportunity, and if he ever left the United States, he would not be able to come back. We were sitt
ing in my living room, rain pouring outside, turning the city into a giant puddle. He was eating choripán, the only thing he ever ate, and I was drinking a coffee from Abdul the Tanzanian’s place downstairs.

  “You’re my best friend, Sabina.”

  “I am?”

  He nodded, sausage filling his cheek.

  I’d go back to Miami when I could, see Diego who was now dealing pot although he didn’t want to admit it. He had to, though, when I asked him where he got the money to buy not one but two motorcycles, in addition to an Isuzu Trooper and kite surfing gear. He was rolling in the dough now, sending loads back to his parents, spending some, and saving the rest in a white tube sock in the back of his closet, which he said I should rescue if he ever got arrested.

  “How will I know if you’ve been arrested?” I asked him and he said that he’d use his one phone call to reach me.

  It was a cool November night and I’d taken a few days off from work to be there. I went to see him at his new place, a cute townhouse on Euclid with its own patio and everything. His new-arrival cousin Nacho was staying with him. The primo was another knockout, taller and tanner than Diego, with delicate features. He spoke English with a British accent, which Diego thought was ridiculous, and he was always asking me about art, which I liked. But Diego said it was just because Nacho was trying to land himself a rich girl and I felt instantly stupid.

  Diego had to go make a delivery, so Nacho and I were alone in his place. Diego had photos up on his wall of our Key West road trip with Elsa and Vlad. I missed Elsa a lot. After that summer, she decided she had had enough of life as a Manhattan financial analyst and went to Russia to teach English, but decided she hated it and went on to Israel to work in a kibbutz. She’d write me that I should go join her there, that working with your hands in a community kitchen is much better than it sounds. She said she was growing out her blonde hair, which, for Elsa, was a big deal. She was talking about getting her Israeli citizenship and I was like, “Elsa, you’re from Jersey,” but she said it didn’t matter, that she belonged over there now.