The World Doesn't Work That Way, but It Could

by Yxta Maya Murray

  “Mommy hates me,” Heather said.

  “I know,” Sabrina said.

  “You guys,” I said. I looked around briefly and saw that the grandmother / old mom with the dark-haired son was staring at me or my kids, maybe because we’d stolen her table. She and her son were sitting at a table next to us, but it was a worse one, because it was smaller and jammed up by a wall.

  I ignored grandma / old mom and pivoted back to my work. In verbally writing my memo, I was getting all of my information out of this one case I’d found in the file, but the case cited to a lot of other cases, and if I just cited to those cases and quoted the parts that were quoted in the case I was reading, then it would seem like I’d read them all. “As the First Circuit held in Aguilar v. U.S. Immigration & Customs Enforcement Division of Dep’t of Homeland Sec., Kevin, cite, ‘such an incidental interference, standing alone, is not of constitutional magnitude. To rule otherwise would risk turning every lawful detention or arrest of a parent into a—’”

  “AHAAAAAAHAHAHHAHAHAAH!” Heather started screaming.

  “Shit,” I said. I just realized that I’d been reciting into the recorder function of my phone, instead of the Notes function, and so it was just a verbal record that I’d then have to play all over again and then type out as I listened to it, instead of just having a nice rough Notes version that I could email myself and then clean up on my computer.

  “Dad,” Sabrina said. “She’s doing it again.”

  “AAAAAAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHA!” Heather screamed. She threw her ice cream on the floor and then herself on the floor after it and then started to roll around in it.

  “Okay,” I said. I clicked off my phone and put it back on my belt clip—did you have to save recordings? I didn’t do that or even know how to do that. I stuffed the papers back into the dented file and then stood up and put the file on the seat. I bent over and picked up Heather, who was making like a furious pistachio angel on the floor. I threw her over my shoulder and grabbed the file and put it under my free armpit. “Let’s go.”

  Sabrina stood up. “Mom’s going to be mad.”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  As we started to wind through the tables, the old mom / grandma with the dark-haired son looked at me again, or had been looking at me all of this time, like a stalker. She had black-and-silver hair and wide cheekbones and dark skin. She gave me the most scary angry lady look, but I’ve lived with Marjorie for fifteen years, and so it takes a lot more woman aggression than that for me to really take any notice.

  “Table’s free,” I said, over Heather’s screams.

  “Jesus Christ,” she said.

  “That’s not a nice thing to say,” I told Sabrina, as we left.

  “Hey, babe, we’re home,” I said, opening our front door. I threw my keys on the big Empire secretary in the foyer and the files on the floor. It was a full forty minutes later. I’d had to stop twice on the side of the road to deal with Heather, who had started tearing shit out of my folders and getting the pistachio on her sweater all over the car. She was better now, and it was like nothing had happened. The girls ran through the foyer, which was littered with toys and clothes and junk because Conchita was gone. I didn’t even have Conchita’s email or phone number, and so I didn’t know how to get in contact with her without Marjorie knowing, and if Marjorie was mad at her, then if she found out that I was trying to mend fences to get the housekeeper back, that would be a whole conversation that I just didn’t want to have.

  “Did you bring dinner?” Marjorie asked. From the sound of her voice and tinny sounds floating toward me, I could tell that she was in the TV room, watching TV.

  “Oh, uhhho, oh,” I said, or something like that.

  “No!” Sabrina said.

  “No!” Heather said.

  “I asked you to bring dinner,” Marjorie said, still invisibly, from the TV room.

  “Okay,” I said. “Pizza.”

  “Yes!” both Heather and Sabrina shouted.

  “Okay,” Marjorie said, which was a great sign.

  “Okay, okay,” I said. I ran through the foyer toward my office, which had a PC that I didn’t know how to make jive electronically or internetishly with my special one at work, which had a lot of government privacy blocks and was complicated. But I could draft something on this one and email what I wrote to my work address, which is what I usually did when I had to work on nights or the weekends.

  “But I’m not going to eat too much because of Lacie’s party tomorrow,” Marjorie called out, while I grabbed the laptop, which was on a big mahogany desk that I’d inherited from my grandfather, who was an oil lawyer from Houston and had thought that government lawyers were illiterate cretins who didn’t make any money.

  “Do you really feel good enough to go?” I yelled back to her.

  Marjorie didn’t answer.

  “Sorry,” I said.

  I got my keys from the secretary in the hall and went out again. Then I ran back inside and got one of the files that I’d thrown next to the secretary when I’d first come in. After that, I went out again a second time to go get the pizza.

  “The only possible counterargument against the constitutionality of Option 3,” I wrote on my computer while sitting at a picnic table in the outdoor eating/waiting area of Doohickie’s Pizza Garden, on Tuckerman Lane, “would begin with the settled principle that aliens possess the constitutional right to substantive due process when on US soil. Mathews v. Diaz, 426 U.S. 67, 77 (1976). Such substantive due process rights include the right to family integrity. Quilloin v. Walcott, 434 U.S. 246 (1978).” Along with the laptop, I had brought the file that Heather had gooed with ice cream and ripped up. I’d opened it up on the picnic table, with the papers sort of spilling out and all crappy. “However, the standard for finding such a violation requires that the government action complained of ‘shocks the conscience,’ a standard that creates a high hurdle for any complainant, as only government behavior that is ‘so “brutal” and “offensive” that it [does] not comport with traditional ideas of fair play and decency’ will trespass aliens—”

  “McConnell,” the pizza guy said, walking out with two pizzas and a little electronic card-reading machine.

  “Here,” I said, raising my hand. I started rummaging through my pocket to find my wallet. I got out my Chase and stuck it into the little machine that the guy held out. He was like twenty years old and handsome and black with big shoulders and sort of perfect skin, and it made me think about my stomach.

  Brrrp brrrp

  “It doesn’t work,” the pizza guy said.

  “No, it does,” I said. “Just do it again.”

  Brrrp brrrp

  “Sorry,” the pizza guy said.

  “It’s okay,” I said. I guessed I’d have to call that in when I had free time, which would be never. I took the AmEx out of my wallet even though it doesn’t give as many points. I stuck that in.

  “Okay,” the pizza guy said.

  We sat there and waited.

  Beep

  “Eureka,” the pizza guy said, laughing.

  “Oh, good,” I said. I took the pizzas from him. “There’s no sausage on one of them, right?”

  He blinked at me. “I thought you ordered two Sweet Pigs.”

  “I did,” I said. “But didn’t I say, ‘One without sausage’?”

  He shook his head. “No.” He shrugged. “It’s okay. I can just get another one on the fire. It’ll take like twenty, twenty-five minutes.”

  “I’ve got to get home,” I said. “Do you have, like, a lot of bread?”

  “Yeah, we have bread.”

  “Can we have some extra bread?”

  “Yeah, totally,” he said. He pointed at the file and the computer. “You working hard?”

  “Oh my God,” I said. “I’m doing this brief on this thing with immigration, where there’s this huge constitutional question on whether you can . . .” I looked at his name tag, suddenly. It said “Pablo.” “Like, whether
you can . . . do stuff.”

  “Oh, yeah, that sounds hard,” the pizza guy / Pablo said.

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “I’ll just get you some bread,” he said.

  A couple minutes later he came out with a huge bag of focaccia, and I went back home.

  “It’s fine, I didn’t even want to eat a lot,” Marjorie said. She was in a good mood. She wasn’t green anymore and had taken a shower. She’d lost probably six pounds from the flu and looked like a different person. We were sitting at our dining table eating the pizza, except that Marjorie didn’t eat pork because pigs wag their tails, and so she was eating the bread and drinking some wine.

  “I don’t want to eat a lot either,” Sabrina said, digging into her slice of Sweet Pig.

  “Me’en either,” Heather said, actually not eating.

  “God, this tastes good,” Marjorie said, drinking from her glass. Marjorie is five foot three and has light-blond hair and blue eyes and a triangular face. In her hand, she held a big glass of white wine, which she kept refilling from a bottle that she’d brought out from the fridge and opened up before I’d got home. “You know that feeling, after you’ve been sick, and then you can finally drink? My God.”

  I wasn’t drinking that much. I still had to write my fucking memo. “Yeah,” I said.

  “Heather screamed today,” Sabrina said.

  “Not a lot,” Heather said.

  “Oh yeah?” Marjorie said. She didn’t care. She looked at me with renewed interest. She probably wanted to have sex with the wine and not feeling so bad. She grabbed a chunk of the focaccia and chewed it and swallowed it and then had two huge gulps of wine. “Oh my God, this is so good.”

  “I have to write a memo tonight,” I said. I’d already had a glass of wine and eaten two slices of Sweet Pig. I just wanted to go to sleep.

  “On what, babe?” Marjorie asked.

  “We’re going to start separating kids from their parents at the border,” I said, rubbing my eyes, but my hands turned out to be not clean from the pizza, so then I had to wipe my whole face with a napkin.

  Marjorie was still smiling at me. “What?”

  “It’s a new initiative. They’re calling it Option 3,” I said. I rubbed my eyes again and then had to wipe my face again with a napkin. “It’s to combat human smuggling, or trafficking. It’s to protect things.”

  “But you’re not, like, separating little kids from their parents,” Marjorie said.

  “Yeah, yeah, but it’s not forever or anything. And the cells are good, they’re clean,” I said.

  “Oh,” Marjorie said. She drank some more wine. She looked at the kids, who were looking at me. Her face sort of rippled and then sagged. In the next instant, she smiled brightly. “Hey, what’s this I hear about somebody yelling today?” she asked abruptly, in a mock-angry voice.

  “Heather did,” Sabrina said.

  “Heather?” Marjorie said. “Heather would never do that.”

  Both girls started giggling.

  A few hours later, after I’d done some work on my memo, I went to bed. Marjorie wasn’t sleeping. She was lying down and staring at the ceiling. I looked down at her pretty body and started to feel affectionate. I sat down on the bed and kissed her mouth and then her cheek, because she moved her head.

  “I thought you were tired,” she said.

  “I am tired,” I said. “I’m beat.”

  “Yeah, I’m still a little sick,” she said.

  “Oh, I thought you were feeling better,” I said. “Does that mean you’re not going to go to the party tomorrow night?”

  “No, I told you, we’re going,” she said. “Lacie’s pissed at me for not going to the christening, and so I have to show up.”

  “She’d understand,” I said, getting into bed and curling up against my wife.

  “No, she wouldn’t,” Marjorie said.

  We lay there for a few minutes with me petting her hair.

  “That thing you’re working on sounds weird,” she said.

  “Mmm hmmm,” I said. “Gary is being such a dick.”

  “No,” she said. “The kids. The little ones not being with their folks.”

  “No, I know,” I said. “It’s really something, what they’re doing.”

  “Well, what you’re doing,” she said.

  “Me, I’m just filling in the dots,” I said. “It’s not my call.” I swallowed some phlegm. “And it’s for, you know, protection, of the kids.”

  “Right,” she said. She stared at the ceiling for a few seconds, until it started to get a little awkward, and I didn’t know what was going on.

  “What’s up?”

  She sighed. “Oh, nothing.” She kissed me on the temple.

  “So you’re not mad at me anymore?” I murmured, snuggling deeper into her neck.

  “For what?” she asked.

  “For, I don’t know,” I said.

  “Don’t get started,” she said.

  “Yeah, all right,” I said.

  “I’m always mad at you,” she said, laughing a little.

  “You are,” I said. “You’re like Heather. But I just love you.”

  Then she started saying something else, but I don’t know what it was, because I guess I fell asleep.

  The thing that I’d said at dinner about the cells being clean and good was actually just a guess, because I hadn’t done the research on it yet. The next morning, though, I looked it up, and it was fine. In 2008, the CBP had put out a memo detailing the national policy on short-term custody and hold rooms, which required that containment spaces be clean and sanitary and that pregnant women and moms and children got fed every four hours. There were mandates for sanitary beds and clean linens and toilets and soap. And children typically would get diverted under the regs required by the Trafficking Victims Protection and Reauthorization Act of 2008, which required that Health and Human Services give the children to the Office of Refugee Resettlement within seventy-two hours of determining that the minor was unaccompanied. I couldn’t figure out where exactly the kids were getting stored in that three-day period, but it wasn’t that long, and the ORR has a more shelter- or home-like situation than normal jails, and it didn’t have locked pods or anything like that. So the “shock the conscience” standard seemed not really in play, maybe.

  Anyway, that’s what I wrote up for Gary, though it took more time than I expected. I did have to wind up transcribing that recording I made at the ice cream shop. Also, I had to make sure to check the negative treatment of all of the cases that I’d cited but hadn’t necessarily read, and four of them were overturned, and three others had red flags, so I had to write around that. I was sort of scrambling at the end of the day to get it all done, but at six p.m., I was able to email it off, with a smiley face and a “Here you go.” Gary answered it with another smiley face, and so I thought that was good.

  After I sent it, I went to the bathroom and peed and washed my hands. It was already six thirty by then. I was already late for meeting Marjorie at Lacie’s party on time, so I got my jacket and jetted.

  “It’s just totally beautiful,” Marjorie was saying, after just having emptied her glass. I had entered Lacie’s big, mock-Tudor house on Connecticut Avenue and wandered through the crowded house until I got to the huge backyard. It was Friday at about seven fifteen, and all of these people were there. Marjorie used to be a lawyer with Morrison & Forester until she had the kids, and she still had all of these friends from law school and practice and also from her days in clerking. She liked to hang out with them and get a break from mommy time. Lacie was a younger friend of hers, whom she’d known at Morrison. She was a big, tall blonde with a nice laugh and a new infant and a husband who did Superfund defense, which is what apparently had paid for the epic aquamarine necklace she had on right then.

  “It was my push present,” Lacie said, fingering the blue baubles around her neck. “If you had gone to the christening, you’d have seen it.”

  “I know,�
� Marjorie said. “It killed me to miss it!”

  “Kevin!” Lacie said, when she saw me. “Hel-lo!”

  “Hey, Lace. Hey, ladies,” I said.

  “Hey, babe,” Marjorie said, threading her arm in mine and kissing me on the cheek.

  “Let’s get you a drink,” Lacie said. She made eye contact with a waiter who reminded me of the pizza guy / Pablo, and within seconds I had a chardonnay in my hand.

  About five other women were standing around Lacie and Marjorie, and all of the ladies were eyeballing the necklace, which had this huge center stone that made it probably cost like $300,000 if it was really real, which I would know because Marjorie likes jewelry and I’ve priced a lot of it on eBay. There were men at the party too, but they were drinking among themselves in little huddles and not talking about the jewelry. Lacie’s guy was rich, but a lot of people here were like me, in government.

  “How did he give it to you?” one of the women asked, a youngish brunette in tight white slacks.

  “He just gave it to me in the hospital, like in a cardboard box that had the red Cartier box inside of it, so the presentation was ruined,” Lacie said.

  “Still, it’s so pretty,” said another woman, a middle-aged blond lady wearing a dress with little purple flowers on it.

  “Yeah, it looks good on you, Lace,” I said.

  “Hey, are you two going to have another baby?” Lacie asked, still gripping her necklace.

  She was looking straight at me, but I didn’t understand that she could be talking about us, because Marjorie had told me in extremely certain terms two years ago that we would never have another child, and she illustrated her point by putting her hands in an X formation in front of her vagina. “Who, us?” I asked.

  “Maybe,” Marjorie said, squeezing my arm harder. She was flushed and her eyes sparkled, but there was a thin fake shine over everything, and I wasn’t really sure how tonight was going to shake out.

  “You know, Marjorie,” Lacie said, “you’re so lucky to be married to Kevin. He’s a man’s man, but you can see he has that tender side too.”