Marcelo in the Real World

by Francisco X. Stork

I am still holding the letter in my hands when I hear Jasmine say, “I heard you got fired.”

  She is standing in the doorway of the office, her arms crossed.

  I fold Arturo’s letter. “I got fired,” I repeat.

  “Were you going to tell me or were you going to leave without saying anything? If I hadn’t gone to get your father to sign a check, I wouldn’t have known. Why didn’t you say anything to me? And where have you been hiding? Ever since we got back from the camping trip I’ve hardly seen you.” It never occurred to me that she would be upset, but she is.

  “What did my father say to you?”

  “He told me what you did. And that’s another thing. Why didn’t you share with me what you were going to do?”

  “Maybe you would have told my father.”

  “Is that what you think? Are you forgetting who gave you the memo?”

  I don’t know why I said that. I am confused as to how to speak to Jasmine.

  “So you are off to Oak Ridge High?”

  “I have three weeks. I will use the time to prepare for next year.”

  “You gonna be okay?”

  I shrug my shoulders. This means, I’ll survive. Then I ask, “Is Arturo upset?”

  She raises her eyebrows as if to say, You have no idea. “They’re all scrambling around trying to figure out how to rescue the Vidromek litigation from disaster. It’s good to see Holmesy walk around like he has stomach cramps and there’s no bathroom in sight. I think your dad is enjoying the fact that his son is responsible for Holmesy’s misery.”

  “Maybe the law firm will close and everyone will lose their jobs.”

  “No, they’ll figure something out. It suddenly dawned on them that the best strategy is to have Vidromek spend the extra money to make safer windshields.”

  “I have the CDs you lent me,” I say. I can hear a strand of coldness in my voice.

  I see her cocking her head trying to figure out if something is wrong. So I say it. “I know about you and my father…at the Christmas party. Wendell found your note in my father’s files. He gave it to me. Wendell said it was the gift of truth.”

  “Oh God,” she says. She pulls out a chair and falls into it. “The gift of truth.” She places both her hands on the side of the chair as if she could fall off at any second. In the brief second that I glimpse her face, I see the color drain from it. I know immediately that my words have hurt her.

  “Is there something in particular you want to know about that?” Her tone is reserved, subdued. The warmth she first brought into the room has been pulled back.

  Last night I decided not to speak of this, never to say anything to her. I decided it was not for me to judge her. How did it happen that my resolution buckled? What else simmers down there unnoticed?

  “My father…” I start to say but have no idea how to finish the sentence.

  “Is a man,” Jasmine says. “He hired me, we worked together. I had a crush. He could tell, I guess. Men like your father can tell. Then there was the Christmas party. I had been in Boston only a couple of months. I had a few drinks. Your father came by and told me he had a small present for me. That it was in his office. I knew I shouldn’t go. He said things that flattered me, that made me feel less lonely. We kissed. The next day I wrote him that note. Sounds like I’m trying to make excuses. I don’t mean to. I know I don’t owe you an explanation, but that’s what happened.”

  “You kissed.”

  “When I realized what was happening, what was about to happen, I ran out.”

  “You kissed? You ran out? He used force to kiss you?”

  “Not really. Is it force when half of you says no and half of you says yes? I could have stopped it. I shouldn’t have let it happen.”

  “But you were my age.”

  “I was eighteen. I was old enough to consent.”

  “It was wrong of him.”

  “It was wrong, period. He knows it. I know it. The subject has never been brought up again. He came to me after he got the note and asked me to stay. I agreed but on condition that the matter be forgotten, as if it never happened, and our dealings with each other would always be professional. He agreed. He has kept his promise. Enough said.”

  “I hurt you just now,” I say.

  “Yeah,” she says. “I don’t know why, but you did. No so much that you mentioned it, but that you know. Still, the truth is best. ‘The gift of truth,’ as Wendell says.” But she doesn’t sound as if she truly believes that.

  “Do you love him?” It is what I most want to know, I realize, the real reason I blurted out what I blurted out.

  “No. Of course I don’t. What I did was insane. Temporary insanity. I had a childish crush. The thing about crushes is that afterward you see how silly they were.”

  “My mother never found out,” I say.

  “I doubt very much he would tell her. I would have seen it on her face when I picked you up.” She covers her face briefly with her two hands. “If I could redo that Christmas party to the point where your father and I are having a conversation by the bar and he asked me to go to his office, I would say ‘Thanks, but no thanks.’” She stands up. “Well, I think I’m going to go back to my little mailroom and try to finish out this day.”

  “Is Belinda a better worker than Marcelo?” I ask.

  “Yes,” she answers quickly. “Faster, anyway.”

  “That is good. In the real world, fast is better.”

  “In the real world,” she says.

  There is a pause and I think: I don’t want to say good-bye. She pauses as well. Is it that she doesn’t want to say good-bye either? Is she waiting for me to speak first? As she turns to leave, I say, “I saw Ixtel yesterday. Jerry García took me.”

  She hesitates a moment before speaking. “How was she?”

  “The reconstructive surgery has been scheduled. After that is the cosmetic surgery so she can look like a movie star, she says.”

  “She’s a beautiful girl.”

  She waits for me to speak. I talk fast, afraid that she will walk away. “She lives with the Sisters of Mercy permanently. We talked about how she had found a place where she belongs. It reminded me of the time you told me how your house in Vermont was the place where you belonged.”

  “May I?” She points at the chair.

  “Yes.” She doesn’t know how happy it makes me to see her sit down.

  “I was just thinking about the time you asked me how we can live with so much suffering. Remember?”

  “Yes, I remember.”

  “I thought a lot about it. I don’t have an answer. But your question reminded me about composing a piece of music. I start off with a feeling and this feeling leads me to find notes and a tempo that match the feeling, and then I expand and respond to the initial notes. After a long, long time and much work I end up with something that I can’t take any further. The thing is, when I reach that point, I feel terribly frustrated because the end product never fully reflects the feeling that I started out with and is for sure never as beautiful as I wanted it to be. At the end I have to accept that this is all I can do. I’m no Keith Jarrett and never will be. I’m Jasmine. So I let the piece go, hoping that the music will make someone feel what I felt.” She laughs a short, nervous laugh, and then before I can say anything, she says, “You must be wondering what all this has to do with Ixtel?”

  “No. Vermont is where you belong.”

  She shakes her head yes. “You made me wonder whether my house-slash-studio was just a place to hide. I thought about it constantly after you asked me that question and after you started trying to help Ixtel. I realized that if I was going to live there, it needed to be a place where I could make the best of my special interest, as you call it.” She pauses and takes a deep breath.

  “Did you mean what you said when you told me I could go to Vermont whenever I wished?”

  “Do I look like the kind of person who would say something like that and not mean it?”

  “After I
graduate from Oak Ridge, that is what I want to do. I can help Amos with the farm chores. Namu can come also.”

  “Do you see me somewhere in that picture or is it just you, Amos, and Namu?”

  I smile. “I see you also.”

  “Amos would work your bones off.”

  “I can do all that.” Then I look at her. “You are crying,” I say, amazed.

  She continues without seeming to respond to me, “You’ve seen so much this summer. Good and bad. It’s only natural to want to exclude the bad.”

  “No.” I know what she’s going to say.

  “Let me finish. What I want to tell you is that there are no places to hide, not anywhere.”

  “That is not why I want to go to Vermont. There is a college forty-two miles from your house that offers a degree in nursing with various specializations. Physical therapy is one of them. After college and after I am a licensed nurse, I could get some Haflinger ponies and provide hippotherapy to autistic and disabled kids. Amos can help me breed and take care of the horses. It is not possible to have this be a full-time job, so I will also be a nurse like Aurora, working with children. Vermont will be the place where I can follow my special interests.” Then I remember the quote from Abraham Joshua Heschel that Rabbi Heschel read to me. “Vermont will be the place where Marcelo plays his counterpoint,” I say.

  “Plays his counterpoint?” She grabs the box with her CDs, stands up, and looks to the heavens as if asking for God’s help.

  “God will help you,” I say, trying to be funny. I stand up as well.

  She doesn’t laugh as I expected her to. She stops and says seriously, “You checked all this out, the college, the physical therapy degree? The nursing? You really thought about it?”

  “Yes.”

  “When?”

  “Last night.”

  “All of last night?” She pretends to be amazed. I don’t know whether the gesture means she thinks this kind of decision needs more time or maybe she likes the fact that I was checking out ways to be close to her.

  “No. Yes. Not just last night but also before that. Last night was when I first thought about Vermont. But the ponies and the kids and the nursing, I thought about before.” I decide that she wants me to go on, that she is enjoying hearing about my plans. “It will be five years before I can be a nurse. I plan to work with the children at the medical center you took Amos to. I won’t have to wait until I get a degree to do that. I can start right away as a volunteer. And with the ponies, I’ll get a job at Paterson this year working weekends, to get experience. Then in Vermont, I will start with one pony. Then we’ll get more and eventually we will need an indoor track because of the winter. I made a list. Would you like to see it?”

  “Mmm.” I see unmistakable happiness illuminate her face. When she speaks, this is what she says. “You will always be welcome there, regardless of why you come. But if it’s to be your home, you need to make sure you come for the right reason.”

  “It has to be the right note,” I say.

  “Yes. In the overall piece.”

  “But how do I know the next note is the right one?”

  “The right note sounds right,” she says, laughing.

  Then she looks at me in a new way. It is a serious and tender look I’ve never seen before, and I want to rest my eyes in hers for as long as I can. Then she walks to where I stand, and she kisses me softly on my cheek.

  And when she steps out, I hear or I remember, I can’t tell which, the most beautiful of melodies.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  Thirty-four years ago, during my junior year at Spring Hill College in Mobile, Alabama, I got a job working weekends for the Department of Mental Health. From Friday evening to Sunday evening I lived in a halfway home for the “mentally handicapped” (the term used then) while the regular staff person rested. During my senior year, I moved full-time into a newly founded home that was part of L’Arche—a faith-based community where persons with developmental disabilities and “normal” persons lived together and learned from each other with as few barriers between them as possible. In those days, autism as a diagnosis was reserved for those persons in the very low-functioning end of the spectrum. And even in those cases, likely as not, the diagnosis would be of a known mental illness rather than autism. Looking back, however, I know that some of the young men and women I lived with were persons who fell within the autism spectrum, including Asperger’s syndrome. This book in a small way acknowledges the gifts of these young people and in particular the gift of love I received from them.

  I want to dedicate this book to my nephew Nicholas, who I know will one day read this book with pride in his ability to overcome the negative aspects of autism. I want to thank Ann and Jack Syverson for their support; Faye Bender, my agent, for her unwavering faith through the many years it took to bring this book to life; and Cheryl Klein, my editor, for her dazzling vision, solid direction, and in-the-trenches hard work. She is a co-creator. And finally, I thank my wife, Jill Syverson-Stork, for her insight, her patience, her contagious hope.

  Text copyright © 2009 by Francisco X. Stork

  Jacket illustration © 2008 by Dan McCarthy

  Jacket design by Christopher Stengel

  All rights reserved. Published by Arthur A. Levine Books, an imprint of Scholastic Inc., Publishers since 1920. SCHOLASTIC and the LANTERN LOGO are trademarks and/or registered trademarks of Scholastic Inc.

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Stork, Francisco X.

  Marcelo in the real world / Francisco X. Stork.—1st ed.

  p. cm.

  Summary: Marcelo Sandoval, a seventeen-year-old boy on the high-functioning end of the autistic spectrum, faces new challenges, including romance and injustice, when he goes to work for his father in the mailroom of a corporate law firm.

  ISBN 978-0-545-05474-4 (hardcover : alk. paper) [1. Autism—Fiction. 2. Asperger’s syndrome—Fiction. 3. Interpersonal relations—Fiction.] I. Title.

  PZ7.S88442Mar 2009

  [Fic]—dc22

  2008014729

  First edition, March 2009

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of publisher.

  E-ISBN: 978-0-545-23184-8