Isabel narrowed her eyes, but Alice just laughed and accepted the compliment. Isabel lifted a corner of the aluminum foil. “What are these?”
“Oh, quesadillas!” Alice said. “I love them.” She smiled warmly at Marco. She was so happy lately, she smiled at everyone.
“A man who cooks,” Isabel said. “You’ll make some lucky girl a good husband.”
“Actually, my upstairs neighbor made them,” Marco said. “She knows I like them. My mother is a terrific cook, but I was a bad student. She tried to teach me how to make rice when I was ten, but I let the pot boil over. Maybe accidentally on purpose!” He laughed, and they laughed with him.
Isabel went into the kitchen and came back with a tray. She had put the quesadillas on plates beside the teapot and cups. Alice and Marco were talking about neighborhoods. It turned out they lived not far from each other, south of Washington Avenue near the Vietnamese fish markets.
“I wouldn’t have guessed you lived there,” Marco said. He’d pictured her in a better part of town, like this one.
“One day,” Alice said, “if I marry a rich man, I can live in a nice neighborhood, like Isabel.” She said it jokingly, but she couldn’t help flushing as she spoke, and in an effort to turn her mind from her train of thought, she put her hands together and said, “Tell me about the motorcycle.”
“It belonged to my father,” Marco said. “Oscar Alberto Peña.”
Just saying the name brought his father back to him, as though the big man had fluttered invisibly into the room, angel’s wings straining over his bulk. See, he seemed to say—I told you to get an education! He had been a big man with a big, square face scarred from smallpox, a face that could look stern when Marco had disobeyed his mother or joyful when Marco brought home an A on a history paper. He had been a secondary school science teacher in El Salvador before he got in trouble and had to flee, an educated man who had given his son the complete set of junior biographies of American heroes for his eighth birthday. Marco read them, although he preferred books about Babe Ruth and Joe DiMaggio and Roberto Clemente. Baseball was all he cared about. School was all right, he was quick enough. He could do very little work and get by. But he knew what he wanted, and what he wanted was to pitch. Anyone could see how good he was, even at ten or eleven. In high school, the cheerleaders with their red-and-white uniforms and their bare white legs and their silky blond hair made up a cheer just for him:
He has an ñ in his name
And Marco P will win the game!
He had never had any problems because of being Salvadoran. Anglo people might say things behind his back about his father who stirred up trouble down at the pork parts plant, but Marco was a star who had led the Warriors to the state championship three years in a row. If he wanted to take their daughters to the movies, or hang around in their basement rec rooms playing video games with their sons, that was all right with them. He used to date high school seniors when he was only a sophomore, and by the time he was seventeen he was involved with girls from Marshalltown Community College. He never got any grief from anyone except his father, who thought he was wasting his talents. Marco used to laugh at that. “Wasting my talents?” he would repeat in English to his father’s Spanish admonition—or warning, or curse, or whatever it was. “I’m out there on the mound honing them!”
“And what about your mind?” his father asked. “And what about your heart? What good are you doing in the world?” That was the way his father talked.
At sixteen, Marco thought the answer was self-evident. You only had to look around the bleachers when he was pitching. You only had to look in the trophy case in the lobby of Neil Kinnick Senior High School. It infuriated Marco’s father that the high school was named for an athlete and war hero. “It used to be called Benjamin Franklin High School,” he said. “A bunch of idiots changed it in 1955.” Benjamin Franklin was one of Oscar Peña’s personal heroes. Marco had liked him, too, when he was little, the exciting story of the kite and the key and the thunder-storm, although his father was more interested in the invention of the volunteer fire department. “Before Benjamin Franklin,” he told Marco, “if your house caught fire, you were on your own, an ant struggling against an inferno. For centuries no one had the simple, civic-minded genius to see that if you got a lot of people together and made a social compact—”
Marco could see his father’s thick finger raised in emphasis, his broad face frowning with seriousness. Marco used to make his sisters laugh by imitating that frown, that wagging finger with half the top joint missing because of an accident at Connolly Pork. His father was dogmatic and moralistic, a Salvadoran Don Quixote tilting at the establishment of American capitalism. And Marco was the shining son, quick and silvery as a fish, slipping through the ragged net of his father’s discourse out into the hot Iowa July, swinging his arms to loosen up his pitching shoulder.
He looked up into the women’s faces now, the pale solemn one framed in light hair and the frowning thoughtful one with the bumpy nose. He had forgotten where he was.
“The motorcycle?” Alice prompted, her pencil poised over a yellow pad.
Her arms were so thin and white, they reminded him of bird’s bones. She moved the sweet cornmeal cake around on her plate without actually eating it. Probably she was just being polite when she said she liked them. It was unbearable, women being polite to him when once they had competed for his attention. He felt his charm, his confidence, his sense of life as a plush carpet into which he could bury his feet, draining from him in the way that had become so familiar since his father’s death. His voice was flat as he said, “My father died five years ago. I rode the bike here last summer. It broke down outside of Toledo, and it took me almost a week to get it fixed. Once I got to Philadelphia and started working at Rudner’s, I used to ride it there and park it in the lot behind the office. But the day Rudner accused me of taking the money, it wasn’t there when I went to go home. Rudner had locked it up. He said it was to make up for the money he said I had taken.”
Alice took notes. “How much money was missing?”
“I’m not sure. At first he said two hundred dollars, but when the police came he told them three hundred. They didn’t seem to think they could do anything. Rudner didn’t like that.”
“Mr. Rudner told the police he thought you had stolen the money?”
“Yes. They wanted to see my wallet, and I showed it to them.” He looked at the rug.
“Why did he think you had taken it?”
“I don’t know,” Marco said. He really didn’t. There was always race, but he was reluctant to point his finger at it. For one thing, he didn’t know if it was true. For another, he didn’t like to admit to himself that the rules of that game applied to him now.
“Rudner was jealous,” Isabel said. “He’s a businessman who thinks he knows about horticulture, but he doesn’t, and Marco knows everything. People would come into the nursery, and if they had questions, they wanted to talk to Marco. One time I was there and Rudner was talking to a customer about camellias and she kept saying, ‘I wish Marco were here, he’d know.’ He got so mad, he yelled at her! He said he was the owner of the place and she should listen to him.”
Marco looked at the picture on the wall behind Isabel as she talked. It was a watercolor of cows grazing on yellow hills, and it made him nostalgic for Iowa, although the hills on the farms around Marshalltown were green. He wanted a cigarette. He never should have moved here. He should have stayed at home with his mother and taken care of her. There she was, all alone in the rattling house, shoveling her driveway in the winter in his father’s wool overcoat and big leather gloves, drinking instant coffee all day long, and driving his sisters crazy on the telephone. He had felt as if he were suffocating there those four years in his old room with his mother and without his father and without baseball, hiring himself out to a local farmer in the summer, working at Jergen’s Greenhouse in the winter, resisting his mother’s hints that he enroll in classes at MCC
. People had stopped him on the street at first to say how sorry they were about his dad, about his arm. But after a while no one said much of anything to him anymore.
It was better here in Philadelphia, the city he had chosen to honor his father’s devotion to Benjamin Franklin. A foolish reason, no doubt, but there it was. He had thought he could start over. No one would know him—know about his pretensions to greatness. No one would know he had meant to be a star and failed.
How his father would have hated to see him working with his hands in the dirt! The thing was, though, he liked the nursery work. He liked transplanting seedlings, popping them out of the trays and burying them in fresh potting mix. He understood what the plants needed. The percentages of nutrients stuck in his head, potash and nitrogen, how much water, what kind of light. In the back room at Jergen’s in Marshalltown, he had read books about plants—perennials, vegetables, vines, shrubs—and the information stuck. He could tell you Willie Mays’s batting average in every season of his career or recite league leaders in all the important categories. This wasn’t any different. He soaked up botanical names, soil requirements, and hardiness zones as though they were slugging percentages. He got to work before the sun rose and walked through the artificial daylight of the greenhouse gladly, touching the leaves around him, absorbing their different textures and temperatures, able for the hours he was there to forget the past.
Growing plants was all about finesse. No need for overwhelming strength, for flash, the currency he was used to dealing in. Those were a young man’s tools anyway, and Marco, at twenty-five, no longer felt like a young man. It would have been different if he were an Anglo. It would have been okay that he liked working with plants. But as it was, he was just another Latino nurseryman, and he didn’t like that. He didn’t like the way people looked at him—white people—their eyes sliding off his brown face and his dirty hands and not seeing the person who had taken Laura Jansen to the senior prom, the person who had had Neil Kinnick Stadium on its feet. He didn’t like dating girls like Mari and Vivi, the girls he met in the neighborhood bars he went to with the men he worked with at Rudner’s. He found himself, as he had done with Isabel, dropping into conversation the fact that he had gone to Georgia Tech, that he had had a scholarship. That he had been somebody: somebody else.
Tonight, sitting in this room with these two privileged, affluent women who looked at him not as though he were a star, but at least as though he were a person, he felt relieved and comforted. At the same time, the fact that he drew comfort from their attitude toward him made him uneasy. It was wrong to judge himself by this standard, but he couldn’t help it. It was the standard he had.
Isabel said to Alice, “Do you think you can do anything?”
“I don’t see why not,” said Alice, to whom the possibilities of life right now seemed boundless. She smiled at Marco, a smile like the sun coming up, and Marco felt the tight, sealed bud of his heart begin to open.
CHAPTER EIGHT
After Marco left, Alice wandered around the house, picking up her things and putting them down again, trying, not very convincingly, to get ready to go home. At last she gave up the pretense and sat on the sofa with her open handbag on one side, her legal pad on the other. Rain beat steadily on the window behind her. “When will Theo be home?” she asked.
“God knows,” Isabel said. “It’s not even ten.”
“It seems like he’s always at work.”
“There’s a lot going on right now. He’s working on this one particular deal. An office building, or a series of office buildings.”
“Too bad,” Alice said.
“Well, corporate lawyers work a lot. Do you want to borrow an umbrella?” She did not talk with Alice about how things were with Theo. How could she tell Alice that as she and Theo sat at the dinner table and talked (or didn’t talk, or watched the news), the air around them seemed to coalesce, holding them fast like two insects caught in solidifying amber? How could she complain to her sister about her marriage while Alice cheerfully, but with the growing awareness that it might never happen, kept her eyes open for someone to share her life with? When she looked at her parents’ marriage, or at her own, she felt only cynical about the idea of romantic love. But when she looked at Alice’s face, and when she thought about Alice and Anthony Wolf, she felt hopeful, as though anything were possible after all.
Alice accepted the offer of the umbrella, but still she sat on the sofa with her things around her.
“Okay,” Isabel said, relenting. “Tell me about Anthony.”
Alice leaned back and sank voluptuously into the cushions. “He’s called me every day this week. I’ve seen him three times! He has tickets to things, he thinks of things I might like to do. It’s very nice. It’s lovely.” She sighed and looked wrung out and at the same time alert, as though a part of her were expecting him every moment to walk in the door.
“But you like him. You’re happy,” Isabel said, a little impatient with Alice for second-guessing the first potentially good relationship in years.
“Yes! I do—it’s just, what if I think I like him, but really I don’t? What if I’ve unconsciously lowered my standards because I’m so grateful that somebody half possible likes me so much?”
“Oh, sure,” Isabel said. “No doubt this is all about gratitude.”
“Please be helpful. It’s terrible to be thirty-eight, and the minute you meet someone you’re wondering if you could spend the rest of your life with him! I don’t know what to think. I can’t eat. I barely sleep. My mind keeps circling around and around.”
“That’s what they call love,” Isabel teased.
“He’s so sweet,” Alice said. “And he’s so good-looking! I never thought I’d end up with someone handsome.”
“Let’s count his looks against him, then.”
“He sent me roses. Roses! He says I’m the woman he’s been looking for all his life. But how does he know?”
“You’re right,” Isabel said. “Probably he’s making a mistake.”
“Isabel,” Alice begged. “I’m trying to be rational.” She paused. “Did I tell you he’s divorced?”
Isabel sat, swallowing this information. Did it make a difference? Her mind whirred, unable to decide. “No,” she said. “But so what? Lots of people get divorced. They make mistakes, recognize them, try to rectify them.”
“Yes,” Alice said doubtfully. “But you don’t think maybe it’s a sign of something? Someone who makes a mistake once—don’t you think maybe they’re more likely to make a mistake again?”
“Maybe less likely,” Isabel said. “Maybe it should make you feel better about him. He’s not someone who’s afraid of commitment, he’s just someone who made a mistake.”
“Maybe,” Alice said.
“Does Doc know?” Isabel said.
“I told her.”
“What did she say?”
“Pretty much what you said.”
This didn’t make Isabel feel any better. She shifted the conversation to firmer ground. “Anyway, I don’t see what you’re worried about. It’s not as though you have to decide tomorrow whether you want to marry him. Enjoy yourself and see what happens in a couple of months!”
Alice said, “You know how they say if something seems too good to be true, it probably is?”
But Isabel just laughed at this. “Anthony Wolf is not a stock tip. He’s an attractive, intelligent man who’s old enough to know what he wants. And your impulse, when he tells you you’re the woman of his dreams, is to cross-examine him!”
“So you think it’s my problem,” Alice said.
“I didn’t say that. I’m your biggest fan. And I’m a very critical person.”
“Yes,” Alice said. “But you have blind spots.” She was half persuaded by her sister, but, on the other hand, she had come tonight intending to let Isabel persuade her. So it was hard to know.
CHAPTER NINE
When she answered the phone, it took Isabel a moment to under
stand that it was Alice on the line, her voice was so faint and groggy. “I’m at Anthony’s,” Alice croaked. “I’m sick. Anthony had to go to work.”
“Where does he live?” Isabel said.
Anthony’s apartment was in an anonymous ten-story building on 15th Street and would have had a spectacular view of City Hall if it had faced the other direction. Alice, looking haggard, her dress mussed and wrinkled, let Isabel in.
“He couldn’t lend you a shirt!” Isabel cried.
“I wanted to wear my own clothes.” Alice sank miserably into the big leather couch that was virtually the only piece of furniture in the room. Her hair was pulled back in a thin ponytail, and her face and legs were the color of ash against the black cushions. “I feel ridiculous,” she said weakly, shutting her eyes. “All I want is to go home and get into my own bed. I can’t drive! I couldn’t stand the thought of a taxi.”
“Of course not!” Isabel sat beside her sister on the sofa and felt her hot forehead. She drew the thin hands into her lap and stroked them. “What happened?”
“We went out to dinner,” Alice said, holding her body very still. “We had a nice time. He asked me to come back here for coffee, and I said I would. But almost as soon as we got here I got sick. It was so awful! I felt so terrible, I almost didn’t care how humiliating it was. I spent the whole night in the bathroom.”
“He poisoned you.”
“Don’t,” Alice said. “He was so nice. And then he had to go to work after being up most of the night. He made me promise to call someone.”
Isabel, gratified that she was the one Alice had called, looked around at the boxy living room, the small dining alcove, and the tiny kitchen. Three doors led, presumably, to two bedrooms and a bathroom. “Isn’t that friend of his staying here?”
“He’s away. Did you park close by?”
This Side of Married Page 5
