by Mira T. Lee
We sat for a long time. We sat with weight in bent torsos. Without burden of words. And when at last he looked up, I caught his eye, and he reached over to place his good hand on mine, and it was rough and dry and warm.
“Jie,” he said.
I’m sorry. My words, barely a whisper.
He did not say more, but it occurred to me then: This Yonah is my family.
We are bound, for better or worse.
2
Manuel
I met Lucia at the Big Apple Laundromat on Main Street. I was there to do my monthly wash. She was looking for a room. Carlos saw her first. Serge whistled. Hector yanked my head out of the dryer. “That one,” he said, pointing.
She had short hair and peach skin, wore big silver hoop earrings. Browsed the flyers on the bulletin board, rubbing a pink panty to her chin. I noticed her calves, their shape, not thick like the white girls or spindly like the Latinas. And the smooth notches in her shoulders where the bra straps sit. And those tetas, just enough. Round and tender, the kind you want to test for firmness like a fruit, feel the weight of them settle in your fingers.
She said, “Eres Ecuatoriano.”
“Sí,” I said. “How did you know?”
She said, “I love Ecuador.”
She had taught English in Quito once, tutored schoolkids in Guayaquil. “Happy times,” she said. Smiled wide and her teeth were white and lined up straight so I knew she was an American. “Twenty-six minutes,” she said. She licked her lips and I went rock hard. She pointed to a dryer. “Enough time for a drink,” I said. “Why not?” she said. I liked her pretty Chinita eyes, all shiny with surprise, like the world was still new or maybe she just bumped into something.
I ducked into the bathroom, scrubbed my hands, washed my face, patted my hair with baby oil. “Yee-ah, Manny,” said Hector. Serge and Carlos pounded me on the back with their fists.
We walked down the street to the Dominican bar where they serve two-dollar beers and play bachata, and I saw she could move her hips.
I invited her to my house. We lived eleven of us in four rooms. Not all related, but we called ourselves Vargas. We said we were cousins. It made us feel safe. A week later, she moved into the fifth room, the largest, with sloped ceilings, on the third floor at the top of the stairs. We Scotch-taped her name to the mailbox. She paid one month’s rent. Brought in a plastic-wrapped futon mattress, a metal dresser, two suitcases, a TV, a bunch of appliances packed in a garbage bag, three milk crates full of files. She went shopping at C-Mart. Filled the refrigerator with vegetables, the freezer with meats, her bedroom with banana plants. She put her rice cooker in the kitchen. The thing was shaped like an egg but opened up like a toilet, cooked twelve cups of rice at one time. She made tofu stir-fry with rice, fried rice with shrimp, sticky rice with pork. Shared with us, though Serge and Carlos didn’t eat tofu and Susi didn’t eat shrimp and Hector ate mostly beans. We made rice and beans with plantains, rice and beans with steak, sopa de pollo with cilantro and rice. We sat in the kitchen, eating. Watched the small TV on the counter next to the microwave. Carlos said, “No wonder we get along, Chinas and Latinos—inside we are the same, full of rice!”
A week later, I took her out on a date. Brought her to the Ecuadorian buffet. The place had no name, only a blinking red-yellow-blue sign: COMIDA TÍPICA. Inside it smelled spicy, like cilantro and cumin and vinegar. She made neat piles on her plate, a little of everything. Went back for seconds. Her favorite was spicy goat stew. Later, we stopped at the Dominican bar. They were playing salsa so I asked her to dance and Chinita was some great dancer—light as a bird, nailed the turns, responded to the slightest touch. Then we walked in the night and her dark eyes glowed and just when I wondered if I should grab her hand, she slipped hers into mine. All the way down Main Street I was sucked into that hand. She rubbed my thumb with her thumb, stroked my palm with her finger. The rest of my body dangled, like extra. We passed the Pizza Palace, packed with loud teenagers, and the hardware store and the barbershop and the Korean grocery that sold back-scratchers and flowers and toilet brushes, all in those tall buckets outside. El Pollo Loco was standing in front of the police station. “Chiquita bonita!” he said, bowing. Chinita dropped my hand to slap his wing a high five.
Pollo was one of those neighborhood characters, wore a giant chicken suit and walked up and down Main Street every day. His costume had no feathers. It was like rubber, pale, a bloated version of what you find in the poultry aisle: raw, sad, plucked. They said he showed up after the first Gulf war. I saw him wandering the streets, or down by the train station, or along the playing fields next to the river. It was some spectacular view there, especially at sunset, the Tappan Zee Bridge over the Hudson. Sometimes El Pollo Loco stopped to talk. Mostly he talked to himself. Once, on the hottest day of summer, I saw him take off that giant yellow chicken head, carry it under his wing like a helmet. That time I saw his face, it wasn’t old or dirty, he was like handsome, almost, and then a couple of the local businesses started paying him to hand out flyers—pizza joints and sushi restaurants and Italian bakeries—places that didn’t even sell chicken, but they made him keep his chicken head on. Some things don’t make any sense.
“Está loco,” I said to Lucia.
“Why?” she said. “Because he’s friendly?” Her forehead creased right between her eyebrows. Sexy.
We crossed the street. This I noticed about Lucia: she was kind. And with her, instead of my usual slouch, eyes down, I noticed more of what was around.
• • •
First time we made love was up in her room, under her banana plants. She was good with her hands. Liked to give head. Then our bodies pressed together and it was like falling into warm, soft bread. After, we looked up, fronds above us like a lush green canopy. She said, “Imagine Esmeraldas.” We would climb coconut trees, spear squid, lie in hammocks listening to waves. Never been to Esmeraldas, but I saw my youngest brother Fredy, born retarded, with a defective heart, and Mami chasing chickens, and Papi knee-deep in mud from the wet season.
One day Lucia said, “Come with me to Ecuador.”
“I don’t have papers,” I said. I’d never told an American before. But this girl was Chinita Americana, different somehow. I trusted her. Anyway, it was no big surprise.
“Do you miss your family?” she asked.
“Yes,” I said.
She looked at me like waiting to hear a story.
“I love my family,” I said. “I have more tías and tíos and cousins than you can count. Like enough for an entire village.”
“When I was little, I thought I had seven grandmothers,” she said. “One on each continent.”
“Why?”
“Why not?” She didn’t say any more but she smiled.
Two days later, the phone rang in the kitchen. I answered it. She said, “I am in Ecuador.”
“Ha, ha, bet you are,” I said. She was joking for sure. Figured she was visiting friends in the city, but then she didn’t come home that night.
Two days later the phone rang again. “I am in Esmeraldas,” she said, and this time I believed her. “Manny, I am blindingly happy,” she said.
“When are you coming back?”
She said, “Maybe I will stay in Ecuador forever.”
• • •
One day a woman knocked on our door. She wore a dark blue suit. I was afraid. I thought she could be with police. She tapped her foot, stared at our mailbox, all the names ending in Vargas. She said, “I am Lucia’s sister. Is Lucia here? Where is Lucia?”
She stood straight, her head seemed to float, hair scraped back so tight it stretched out her face. She looked too old and too serious to be Lucia’s sister. But I knew she wasn’t lying because she had Lucia’s eyes.
I said, “Lucia is in Ecuador.”
She nodded. Raised one hand to her chin. I could tell she didn
’t believe it.
“Is she all right?” she asked.
“I think so.”
“Has she been acting strange?”
“I don’t think so.”
I invited her in, showed her up to Lucia’s room. I’d been sleeping up there instead of with Carlos and Serge, so my clothes were everywhere.
“How long has she been away?” she asked.
“Maybe two weeks?”
Then she looked me up and down, squinting, like my body hid a clue. She dug around in her purse. Tore a sheet of paper from her notebook and wrote something down, pushed it into my hand.
“If she is acting strange, please call me,” she said.
• • •
A week later two men knocked on our door. I opened it. They said, “We are police.” They held up their badges. I was the only one home. They came inside, stamping dirt on the floor with their heavy black shoes. “Mind if we look around?” said one. I knew it wasn’t a question so I didn’t answer. Didn’t say a word. I stood like a stone, next to a mop, in the corner of the kitchen by the pantry where it smelled like mildew and rice. Thought I could run outside, duck behind the hydrangeas, or jump into the dumpster in the back alley—I’d rehearsed these routes in my head before but they seemed childish and stupid now. I tried to pretend I wasn’t there, that I didn’t care. I listened to them clomp from room to room. Then they left. I didn’t understand—unless it was drugs, not Lucia or illegals, they were looking for.
After, I stayed standing, frozen in the corner, for almost two hours more. Only after Carlos came back, I forced my ass to sit down. Then my whole body shook.
My Vargas cousins worried. Worried about migras. Worried about INS. Worried about rent. They hung blankets over the windows so the house was like night even when the sun was out. Every day it was time to put Lucia’s things in boxes, put the boxes on the street. “Manny, she is not one of us,” they said. I said, “Please, let’s wait until the end of the month.” But I understood, they were afraid of being sent back to their countries, the ones Americanos liked to visit so much.
We watched TV, local news. Hector liked a chica named Mindy Griffin who reported on channel 9. She had crazy blow-out hair that swooped around her face like a golden halo. Hector said she had a beautiful mouth, heart shaped, got off on the way she moved her lips. One day it was a seven-year-old girl attacked by a pit bull, then a gas leak on Main, or a three-alarm blaze pulverizing some old Baptist church in White Plains. “The handiwork of an arsonist,” said Mindy Griffin. “What is handiwork?” said Serge. “What is arsenic?” said Susi. Hector said bad news may as well come from a pretty face. Carlos said right. And blond hair and tight blazers and big boobs.
One day we found an envelope in the mailbox. It was full of cash. I counted two months’ rent, exact. “From Lucia’s sister,” said Mrs. Gutierrez, who lived in the basement apartment of the house next door. Mrs. G always wore the same terry cloth bathrobe and dark glasses and smelled like vitamins. “Be careful, Manny. Your cariña is trouble,” she told me, when Lucia first moved in. I shouldn’t have cared, but her words upset me, the way she said them so matter-of-fact. We shared the same landlord—a bald guy named Harry who wore little round glasses and owned a bunch of houses on our street. Ñaño knew we weren’t cousins, but didn’t care, as long as we paid rent on time. Mrs. G was the only one of us who dared complain to him, about the busted heat or clanging pipes or the heaps of garbage piled up in the back alley that never seemed to get taken away. Every morning she swept the sidewalk in front of our houses, chased the cockroaches and mice with a broom. “Qué vergüenza,” she said. Disgrace. She coughed, tapped her chest with two fingers, complained of black mold in the walls. “Like a poison, making me sick.” But she always waved to me when I left for work. She liked me because one time I helped make party banners for her grandniece’s quince. “I gonna get things fixed around here,” she said. “Don’t you worry, Manny.” For some reason that made me feel good, knowing Mrs. G kept eyes on everyone in the neighborhood.
• • •
My boss and I painted signs and shopwindows all over the county. I liked the work, but the driving made me nervous, though Boss almost always drove. The only one of my Vargas cousins with a real driver’s license was Carlos. He got his in Oregon, using a fake social security number he’d bought from a guy at a Burger King. “I’ll get you one,” he said. “No big deal.” But I wasn’t all that comfortable with lying.
Every month, I sent money home to Ecuador. Cash, rolled in T-shirts with cracked logos or superheroes; Ricky and Juan liked X-Men best, Fredy got Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Took weeks, even months, for a package to reach them. I always worried it would be lost.
But it wasn’t only for money I was in the U.S. of A. Mami hoped I could find a way to bring my youngest brother to this country. Poor Fredy, born retrasado, but that didn’t matter in America, Mami said. “In America, his kind are special. They treat them well.” And no one accused a woman of carrying the spawn of the devil, and doctors would still give him the operations needed to fix his heart. “They take a piece of muscle from the leg and mold it like clay,” she said. “Then they drill a hole in the chest. Verdad! I saw it on TV.” I didn’t tell her I’d never seen a doctor in America, not even the time I sliced my hand open, thumb to wrist, falling out of a second-floor office window. Boss drove me to the hospital, but I refused to get out of the truck. “I don’t trust hospitals,” I said. “It’s just the ER,” he said. But he could tell I wouldn’t budge. In the end, he had to bring me back to the shop, wrap my hand in bandages himself.
• • •
One month later, Lucia returned. Chinita’s skin was brown. She had a small belly. Rubbed it all the time. “At first I thought it was the water, I wasn’t used to the water. But then I knew,” she said. “Of course, I knew.”
She’d vomited every day, she said. In the cafés of Quito, at the markets in Otavalo, on the bus to Atacames, in the sands of Súa, on the sides of the streets of Esmeraldas.
We made love. Her eyes glowed. Her brown skin, too. She was giddy like a breeze.
“What will she look like?” she said.
“How do you know it’s a girl?” I said.
“She told me,” she said, giggling.
I pushed my ear to her belly button. Didn’t hear anything, so I licked it. Chinita slapped me, but we laughed.
I didn’t really believe it. There was no sign of this human supposedly growing inside her. No proof it belonged to me. And Lucia was different from the other girls I’d been with before, confident she could get whatever she wanted. I supposed this was part of being American. I wondered if I loved her, but it didn’t seem like the kind of thing that should take so much thinking. I always imagined I’d just feel it, and know.
“You have a big family?” I asked her.
“Just a sister,” she said.
“Are you close?”
“We used to be,” she said.
“And now?”
She was quiet. She patted her middle. Puffed up her cheeks and let out a sigh. “She doesn’t approve of me anymore,” she said. “She lives in Switzerland.”
I remembered how the sister had looked at me, checking me out, like I was a bug under a microscope.
“And your mami and papi?”
Lucia shook her head.
Not sure why I didn’t mention her sister’s visit, or the envelope with the cash, but it didn’t feel right. Clearly she didn’t care to talk about her past. This much I understood about other people’s families: They were complicated. You didn’t pry.
When I was thirteen years old, I dreamed I would have six babies. In the dream I was chasing a rabbit, but it disappeared into the ground. I got a shovel, dug up the ground, but I unearthed a crying baby. Soon as I picked up the baby, the rabbit reappeared, so I dropped the baby and went chasing the rabbit aga
in. I dug up three girl babies and three boy babies before finally, I caught the rabbit. I brought them all to my house with a wheelbarrow. While I boiled the rabbit to make soup, the babies crawled outside and cried. Then I fed them soup and they stopped crying, came in and sat around a big table. Multiplied until there were so many I couldn’t keep track of them.
“That’s really creepy,” said Lucia.
“I love babies,” I said. It was true. Ever since that dream I’d imagined it, six shiny faces around a kitchen table, slurping hot soup. This seemed to cheer her up.
“So you are happy?” she said.
“Are you?”
“Yes.”
I squeezed her hand. But I was nervous. Afraid. I worried I could not be a proper father without papers.
• • •
Fredy was Mami’s last baby. She had two before him who died at birth: twins. The first was blue, coiled like an earthworm, not bigger than a mouse. The second was alive, a baby boy, six pounds on the butcher’s scale. His mouth opened but he didn’t cry, couldn’t fill himself with air. Tía Camila cleared his nose with an eyedropper, pumped his chest, sealed his mouth with her lips, tried to inflate him like a balloon. His tiny limbs thrashed, his body jerked. A minute later, he lay still.
We buried the small one in the garden. Papi marked the site with a stone. Mami named the second one Alamar—it meant “to the sea.” Mami loved the sea. She wrapped him in white linen, brought him to Canoa, where we hired a fishing boat. Papi and I rowed. Juan and Ricky couldn’t yet swim, so Mami hitched them each to empty milk jugs, scared to death they’d fall in. When we were far enough out and people onshore looked like mosquitoes, Mami dipped the body into the water. I watched it drift away, bouncing on the waves. “Your brothers are a part of you,” said Mami. “When one hurts, you all hurt.” Her voice was quiet, far away. She sat in that boat, still as a statue, held my hand while Papi rowed. Juan hiccupped to hide his sobs. Ricky asked Mami what would happen to us brothers when Alamar got eaten by a fish. “Shut up, pendejo,” I said.