The Secret Side of Empty

by Maria E. Andreu

  “You give me such good material,” I say.

  “So what’s the secret?”

  I look around, running my fingers over the grass, waiting for inspiration. “She . . . cheated on her SATs. So she feels like a fraud.”

  “But you said she was brilliant.”

  “Yeah, but deep down inside she doesn’t believe it. So she paid someone to take the test for her. Now she feels terrible about it. Like everything she’s accomplishing doesn’t matter. It’s eating her up inside.”

  The blue-haired woman with the plaid shirt tied around her waist makes her way through the park, past a juggler with a small crowd around him. She doesn’t know she’s just been a character in my game with Chelsea.

  “I’m glad you suggested the city. It’s definitely better than getting manicures, which is what I was going to suggest. We don’t come here enough,” says Chelsea.

  “Yeah, it’s pretty cool. Let’s recap. We learned how to play singing bowls.”

  “Ate the best pizza in the history of pizza,” breaks in Chelsea.

  “Flirted with those NYU guys.”

  Chelsea looks around. The NYU Library is behind us. “We could come here, you know. NYU. Wouldn’t it be fun to live right here? We could do this every day.”

  “I don’t think this is what NYU students do every day.”

  “Where are you going to go? Have you thought about it? We have to start applying soon.”

  “Let me enjoy the last warm days of summerlike weather.”

  “But it might be nice to apply to some of the same schools. That way we can keep being, you know . . .”

  “An awesome and formidable force?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Her,” I say.

  “What?”

  “It’s your turn. You do her.”

  Chelsea looks over to where I’m pointing. Which means it works and I distract her.

  “The freaky gypsy?”

  “Yeah. Come on, she’s an easy one.”

  We both look at her. She’s got some flyers in her hand and a purple headband holding her unnaturally mahogany red hair squashed onto her head. She’s wearing a cheap-looking belt of gold coins over her ripped jeans and a black lace shirt over a hot pink bra. She’s of that indeterminate age, post-teenager but pre-too-old-for-everything-fun.

  She catches us looking at her. We look away too fast. Too obvious.

  “I think she’s coming over here now,” says Chelsea.

  “She’s handing out flyers.”

  She is, in fact, walking over to us. She walks down the path to us, and when she gets to the grass, she takes off her flip-flops to walk on it. It’s weird that she’s making a beeline for us, but I guess that’s why we come here, for weird things that don’t happen in Willow Falls, New Jersey.

  “Hi,” she says, like we’ve been waiting for her, like we had plans to meet.

  “Hi,” I say. Chelsea nods.

  “I feel like you need a reading.”

  “A what?” I ask.

  “A reading.” She pulls out a tattered deck of oversized cards from a beaded bag with an elephant on it. A receipt flutters to the ground.

  “Oh, you’re like a tarot card reader?” asks Chelsea.

  “Thanks, but we’re all set,” I say. “We’ll take a flyer.”

  “No, I don’t think you need a flyer. You need a reading,” says the tarot woman. I am trying not to make eye contact, but I can feel her stare on my cheeks.

  “I don’t have any money, so . . . no thanks.”

  “Well, you do have money, because little suburban girls don’t come into the city penniless. But it’s not about money. I just get these feelings about people. Maybe something in the way you were looking at me.”

  “We were playing a game. People watching. I told my friend here to make up a story about you. Not in a bad way. It’s just this thing we do.”

  “How about this? I give you a reading. If after it you feel you got something of value, you pay me whatever you think is fair. If you don’t, you make up the story about me and we just had a nice chat. I’ll even give you material. I was born in Kenya while my father was working there. My mother died giving birth to me. My father came home and bought an adobe house in the desert. I’ve had three lovers in my life, each of them missing something vital which I couldn’t live without. There? See? I did half the work for you. So . . . a reading. What do you say?” She smiles, showing a full mouth of gorgeous, blindingly white teeth.

  “We’re not going anywhere,” Chelsea says, a little nervously, like she’s trying to figure out the woman’s angle, whether she’s some front for a white slavery ring or a drug dealer.

  “Right here on the grass,” says the woman, still smiling.

  I look to Chelsea. “It’ll be fun.”

  “You,” says the tarot lady, waving her cards in my direction. “I like doing the skeptics.”

  “Okay,” I say. Not sure how she knows I’m a skeptic, which I am.

  She shuffles the cards with her eyes closed for a freakishly long time. I look around, wondering what we must look like to people passing by. Finally, she stops, pulls a shiny purple scarf out of the elephant bag, then spreads it carefully on the grass. She starts putting down cards.

  “The Fool,” she says. Wait, is she calling me a . . . “See this card here? It’s called the Fool. You’re starting a journey, leaving things behind, looking for what’s next.”

  I try to keep my face blank so she won’t read anything in it. I know people like her are good at getting clues from things like clothes and facial expressions. I want to give her as little as possible. I want to stump her.

  “Lots of swords, the cards of intellect. You like school; you’re good at it. You’ve got it figured out.”

  Chelsea blurts out, “M, you’ve got to admit that’s amazing.”

  I want to shush her but I don’t.

  “You’re all here,” she says, pointing to my head.

  She looks down at the cards. She’s looking at one that’s dark, with something that looks like the Leaning Tower of Pisa on it, except it’s not leaning. It’s surrounded by flames and badly drawn little people are either falling or jumping out of it.

  “What’s that?” I ask.

  “Your obstacle. The Tower.” She takes a deep breath in, like she’s trying to figure out how to tell me something.

  Despite wanting to stay cool, I say, “What is it?”

  “Most people consider this a very negative card. But I think that’s shortsighted. See how over here you got the Wheel of Life? Things come, things go. Life is like the wheel, going around and around.”

  “But what does the Tower mean?”

  “Some people think it means disaster. But it just means a big change. It can feel like a disaster, but in the end, after it’s over, it’s what was supposed to happen.”

  “But what is it that’s supposed to happen?”

  “The cards don’t work that way. They give you clues, but it’s not like a detailed news report or anything. I just see a change.”

  “That feels convenient. It’s not hard to predict that something will happen.”

  “Oh, little one who wants it all to make sense.” She smiles, putting her hand on mine, although she can’t be more than ten years older than I am. “Just remember that when someone tells you that things aren’t going to end well, that’s just because they want you to be afraid. Things always end well. Because they never end.”

  She puts down a few more cards.

  “You are . . . starting school?”

  “It’s September and we’ve established I’m a little suburban girl, so . . .”

  “Not college yet.”

  “Senior year,” chimes in Chelsea.

  “I see delays for you,” she says, looking at me with her eyes, so dark they’re even darker brown than mine. But hers are huge, not beady like mine.

  “Delays?” I ask.

  “Things not going the way you think they should.”


  “But you said it all works out in the end, right?”

  “Is that what I said? Something like that.”

  Well, that stinks. Now I’m in a bad mood.

  “Thank you very much,” says Chelsea sweetly. The woman starts to pick up her cards and the purple scarf, but slowly. Chelsea pulls out a ten-dollar bill and hands it to her before I even realize the woman is waiting to get paid. Once she gets the ten, she walks away quickly.

  I reach for my wallet, half to check if the tarot card woman was some kind of super-talented pickpocket. “Here, let me pay you.”

  Chelsea says, “I would tell you that was my back-to-school gift to you, but she was kind of a bummer. So let’s just ignore her.”

  “All right, then I’ll buy you an ice cream. Let’s go.” I pull Chelsea up off the grass. “And let’s go back to play those singing bowls and find more NYU boys.”

  She gives me a little hug and smiles. She still smiles exactly like that first day in kindergarten. And she’s still trying to make me feel good.

  I HAD DREAMED ABOUT KINDERGARTEN FOR SO LONG, PACKING and unpacking and carefully repacking the little purple backpack my mother got me. But the reality of it had been nothing like what I’d expected. The first day, the teacher had introduced us to taking attendance.

  “Okay, kids, I’m going to say your name and you have to sit very quietly. When I get to your name, you have to say, ‘Here.’”

  “Here!” screamed out about five or six kids.

  “Wait until you hear your name, okay?”

  “Janet?”

  “Here!”

  “Chelsea?”

  “Here!” chirped the blond, tall girl sitting across from me.

  “Quinn?”

  The tiny redhead at my table shot up her arm and screamed, “HERE!”

  “Sarah?”

  Silence.

  “Sarah?”

  Someone elbowed a curly haired girl across the room and she stopped looking at the picture of the giraffe family and said, “Can I go to the bathroom?”

  “Are you Sarah?”

  “Yes.”

  “Okay, we’re getting to know each other, so just give me a minute, okay?”

  “Okay.”

  “Munsee . . .” I saw the teacher start to struggle. Oh God. My name was next. Monserrat Thalia. The name no one on the playground could ever learn how to say. She started again. “Munsayratt? Munsayratt? Is that right?”

  I sat there frozen, eyes wide. Maybe if I didn’t say anything she’d never know it was me. But I guess the look on my face gave me away.

  “Is that you, sweetheart? Am I saying that right?”

  “Wait, hold on,” said Quinn. “Her name is Mousy Rat?”

  “Quinn, now, in this classroom we’re kind to one another.”

  “I’m just asking what her name is.”

  “We also don’t speak out of turn, please. You wait to be called on. Okay?”

  I shivered a little, wondering if the teacher was going to keep trying to get my name right. But she moved on. And I decided I hated kindergarten.

  Later that afternoon, Mrs. Yarrow made us color. I usually got the box of eight and colored with them carefully. But for kindergarten my mother had gone all out and bought the impossibly big box, with colors like chartreuse and cadet blue. And silver. My favorite. In the week before kindergarten started, I had worn down the silver crayon the most, always being careful to color around all its sides so as to not ruin its point. I had drawn a fish and a microscope and a magical little planet floating in space in a sea of deep blue, which really brought the silver out.

  That day, while we colored, Quinn had zeroed in on my silver crayon and had snatched it out of my box without asking. My English was still spotty then. I’d learned most of it from commercials and TV shows. I wasn’t sure I knew enough to ask Quinn to give it back. I tried to think of the words.

  Suddenly, I heard the silver crayon snap in two. Quinn gave a little shrug and dropped it back on my desk.

  I wanted to tell her she was a jerk. I wanted to tell her my mother had had to save up for those and I didn’t know how long it would take until I would get another box. I wanted to tell her that crayon was good for making rocket ships and crowns on princesses and magic moon flowers and that she had ruined everything. But I couldn’t.

  So instead I burst into tears.

  “What is it?” said Mrs. Yarrow.

  I pointed to the broken crayon.

  “Mousy Rat’s stupid crayon just snapped. It was already broken. I don’t know why she’s making a big deal of it. It’s just a crayon,” said Quinn.

  “Now, Quinn, let’s be respectful of other people’s things and also their feelings. Say sorry.”

  “Sorry,” she said, narrowing her eyes and scrunching up her old-looking mouth. Looking about as unsorry as you can look while saying “Sorry.”

  Mrs. Yarrow turned to me, “And sweetheart, you’re a big girl now, so stop crying. Use a different color. Look how many you have!”

  I looked at the empty spot where the silver one should be and cried some more. I had spent an hour taking each crayon out and putting them back in rainbow order. Now there would always be a hole where the silver one should be. I cried harder.

  Chelsea looked at me with her big Chelsea eyes. She waited for Mrs. Yarrow to walk away. Without saying anything, she took her silver crayon out of her box—her box was even bigger than mine—and slipped it in exactly the right empty spot in mine. Her thin fingers were graceful. She had chipped Granny Smith−green nail polish. I stopped crying and looked at her, then at the crayon. Her silver crayon was pristine, untouched. She smiled and looked down at her paper, going on with her work. I sucked my boogers back into my nose and went back to coloring mine, too.

  It was then I knew I wanted to stick by this girl for life.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  My room is narrow, with Jose’s little twin bed on one side and my folded-up futon on the other. It doesn’t feel mine much, maybe because it’s the fourth bedroom I’ve had in as many years. I bump my head into the model airplane hanging from a clear wire. I’m pretty sure that big chunk of dust has been on it since about three apartments ago.

  We are what people would call poor. People around here, anyway. The trouble with having parents with no papers: they can’t get very good jobs. You need a Social Security number for everything from garbage man to clerk at Walmart. So being an office dude with health insurance and paid vacation time is definitely out. There are some jobs that pay cash that look the other way if you don’t have a Social Security number. I’m not sure how information about those jobs spreads, but somehow my dad hears about them.

  In Argentina, my dad dreamed of being an architect. But no one in his family had gone to college, and he left school after his sophomore year in high school. At twenty-two, he came to America. He wanted to save up money and go back home to start a little business. He might not be able to be an architect, a professional, but he’d be a businessman.

  But even when I was little, he still used to talk about architecture. He loved drawing and dreaming things up. He used to get architecture books and sketch late at night. I’d find his drawings scattered all over our little plastic table.

  Now he is thirty-nine, and he is still a waiter. And he doesn’t draw or make models anymore.

  I sit on the futon and look at the model airplane for a second. It’s got to be about six or seven years since we built that model together. The day we made it, it was raining outside. I remember because he came in out of the rain and his jet-black hair drooped a little over his forehead, but he was still handsome. He turned and half-handed, half-threw me the box under his arm.

  “I found a Messerschmitt,” he said.

  I wasn’t quite sure what that meant. My brother hadn’t been born yet. I was still young enough to want to be the boy he’d never had.

  “Let’s build it,” I said.

  He moved some of my mother’s sewing off the Formic
a table and spent a long time organizing all the parts, sending me for glue and paper towels and cotton swabs. Finally, he started building.

  “Okay, hand me the propeller.”

  “Can I glue this one, please?”

  “You want it to be perfect, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well then, just let me do it.”

  “But I want to help.”

  “You’re helping me by getting me the stuff.”

  “What kind of plane is this again?” I asked.

  He pointed to the box. “A German Luftwaffe Messerschmitt twin engine. This is an old model. I got lucky at the craft store.” His eyes lit up. “You know, when we move to Argentina, we’re going to have one whole room in our big house just for all our models. That will be cool, right?”

  I said nothing.

  “You love Argentina, right? You can’t wait to go back?”

  “I don’t really remember Argentina. It wouldn’t be like going back.”

  “No, of course, silly, you were a baby when you came here.”

  “So how can I want to go back?”

  “Because it’s where I’ll be. And your mother will be. It’s where all your people are. It’s where you’re from. We’re only here temporarily.”

  “How will I see Chelsea when we go to Argentina?”

  “That doesn’t really matter. You have cousins over there. Your real blood. You love your cousins, don’t you?”

  “Well, I . . .”

  “Of course you do. Hand me the plastic part, the top of the cockpit.” I did, and he picked it up carefully with my mother’s tweezers while holding the little glue tube in the other hand. “You’re going to have the best life in Argentina. We’re going to be rich and build our round house. Remember the round house blueprints I showed you? With that big room? The secret staircase? Mendoza is the best place on earth. Not gross and humid like here, with all these bossy people.”

  “But I’ve only ever been here. This feels like home to me.”

  He looked away from the model and raised his eyes to meet mine and straightened his spine slowly. I felt his mood change, like a cold wind that gets in your mittens and up your coat.

  “This isn’t home. You’re just a kid. You don’t know what you’re talking about.”