“So, happy Thursday, right? We made it past the damn hump day.”
“Where’s Khil?”
“Sick! Sick as a dog! Almost summer and people are still getting sick as dogs.”
Charlie brought his hand to his forehead.
“Not you, though, Mr. Albrecht. You’re looking like a picture of perfect health. Like always.”
It was enough to be so obnoxiously loud at seven in the morning, but now the man was mocking him. Charlie was sensitive about the bags growing under his eyes. His senior year superlative in high school was “most likely to get ID’d at forty.” He was aware of the fact that he had started to look old.
“I have something to read before I get in.” Charlie goofily lifted a pile of papers, a useless set of notes assembled by an assistant from last week’s status meeting, so that Alan could see them through the front mirror. Alan wouldn’t be able to discern what they were.
“I’ll drive nice and easy,” Alan said. “Don’t get carsick on me.”
As Alan drove, Charlie relaxed his head back. He could see his thoughts as if peering through droplets on a windshield—everything was obscured. Suddenly, Alan coughed, and it was as if a wiper ran over Charlie’s mind. He saw her again. Seventeen.
He held her image in his mind like a still snapshot until finally it became a reel: him lifting the hem of her shirt.
With this fantasy in focus, Charlie felt his face flush. Sometimes Charlie talked about women with Khil, only because Khil always shook his head in compassion, like a priest willing to offer absolution. I know we’re married men, Charlie would say, but how about her? In front of them, a young woman, no doubt somebody’s intern, would be crossing in a too-tight pencil skirt. And Khil would chuckle, the slow flicker of his eyes looking into the rearview mirror as he changed lanes down Fifth Avenue. Oh boy, Khil would say, and he sounded so earnest, Charlie would go on and on. Khil’s measured chuckles reassured him his bad behavior only made him a man, not a monster.
Charlie wouldn’t dare bring Seventeen up with Alan, whose mannerisms were tasteless and depraved. Charlie was sure that Alan would stick out his tongue or lick his lips or do something even more ludicrous and disgusting that would only mortify Charlie. She was his own daughter’s age, after all. But his daughter was moody and difficult and mean—whereas the girl wasn’t anything like that. She’d quoted Emerson to him for God’s sake. He didn’t know that second poem she recited, the one about planets and strangers, but it was adorable how much she wanted to impress him. If he hadn’t dismissed her, if he hadn’t sent her away, she would’ve followed him like a puppy to bed.
When they pulled off the highway, Charlie folded up the papers he was no longer even pretending to read. He stuffed them back into his briefcase.
“Tell Akhil I hope he gets well soon,” Charlie said, reaching for the door handle.
Alan laughed uproariously. “Akhil! Who’s that?”
Charlie’s eyes incised the mirror through which he could see Alan’s fatuous grin.
“No, no, I know what you mean, boss,” Alan said, who only now, after a half-hour drive, seemed to care that Charlie was irritated. “Akhil will be back tomorrow.”
Charlie opened the door and stepped out, anxious to light his cigarette. He was still a block away from his building because there was a cobblestone pathway that led to the entrance and that, for historical preservation reasons that the firm’s staff cursed whenever it rained, couldn’t be driven on. He thought of how many days Khil had picked him up over the past nine years, when he decided to hire a permanent driver, rather than rely on vomit-soaked yellow cabs. He thought of the number of tips he had given him over the years, like for Christmas, when he slipped him hundred-dollar bills for most of the month. Khil always asked him how work was going, and Charlie went into long tangents about deals that would or wouldn’t come through, numbers and derivatives and terms that he knew Khil couldn’t possibly understand, but that he would listen attentively to, anyway. In addition to Charlie’s tall cup of coffee and the occasional shot—very occasional shot—of gin, Khil was an integral part of Charlie’s mornings, a part that Charlie missed when it was gone. So he had his name wrong, but so what? He had been close enough.
As Charlie approached the blue turnstile doors of his building, a sharp breeze reached him from the river, nearly knocking him over. The wind spooled around him like a thousand threads and yanked him back at the joints like a puppet. Fighting, he stumbled forward into the lobby. He skipped steps on the escalator and looked down at his BlackBerry. Instantly, Khil was forgotten, replaced by meetings, reminders, phone calls, calendar invites, more phone calls, and a few meals. Seventeen blew out of his mind, too, like a mandala blown into oblivion, though later that day, it did make him smile again. Out of all the people to woo a teenage girl. He chuckled. Emerson.
Rocky woke up smearing the saliva off her face with the back of her hand. It was no use—whether she fell asleep on her side or her back, a steady stream would find its way from her mouth to the center of her pillow, blooming like a hydrangea head alongside her face.
Maria was still asleep. She had seemed wide awake when the tutor left the night before, but now she looked unshakable. When she’d come back to the room, she looked wide eyed and scared. Maybe she’d been arguing with that boyfriend, Andres. There was so much Rocky knew she could teach her about men, starting with her own mother’s mantra: “They’re dirt.”
Rocky sat up and watched how the sun stretched long rectangles of light across the carpet. If she stared at the space just above the ground, she could see clouds of dust suspended in air. They seemed to be making their own tiny orbits as if circling some invisible planet. She sat like that for a while, watching the dust float in space, and thought about her mother. Her parents usually slept on different sides of the apartment, but recently, her mom hadn’t been coming home at all. She’d been staying at their country house in Long Island for the past several weeks. Rocky liked having the apartment to herself, but sometimes, she felt compelled to call her, just to say hello, just to talk. The last time she’d done that, her mom sounded annoyed. Yes, Rachelle? she’d answered. Rocky was put on the spot, so she whined about not having anything to wear. Veronica told her to call Isabel if she needed the laundry done, and Rocky said that she would, and Veronica promptly hung up.
Rocky’s jaw clenched. Her chest became tight, as if she were wearing a corset. She didn’t want to be sitting in bed anymore. She kicked out her legs from under her sheets and swung her feet to the ground. She didn’t even feel how creamy and lush the fibers were under her toes.
She went to the kitchen, wanting coffee, but once she was standing by the refrigerator, she noticed the hunger instead. She opened the fridge and found an entire loaf of bread, unopened. She pushed aside a jar of mayonnaise, past a tub of margarine, but didn’t see any eggs. She located a jar of blueberry jam instead. With a big, suctiony kiss, the top came apart from the bottom. The lid was crusted over in blue, and her fingers were now stuck together with jam.
Rocky knew it’d been a long time since Veronica had been home just by looking around the kitchen. On the stand where there were usually paper towels, there was only a cardboard cylinder. They’d been out of napkins for weeks.
But two nights ago, Rocky had ordered chicken wings for dinner and stuffed what was left of them into the garbage can. She opened the lid now and dug. Inside, a safe distance away from the greasy bones, was an unused plastic knife as well as a stack of square napkins. They looked clean enough. With her arm still plunged into the trash, she wiped her fingers clean of blueberry jam.
“Breakfast?”
Maria had changed out of Rocky’s pajamas and into her uniform. She was wearing the polo she’d worn yesterday and the Bell Seminary blue kilted skirt. Rocky dropped the napkin and pulled her arm out of the trash.
“Help yourself,” Rocky said, just as the toaster’s bell rang.
Two slices of bread leaned out of the mouth of the to
aster oven. Maria grabbed one and hurried to the table. Rocky watched as she smeared the jam on in thick slabs. Suddenly, Maria let go of the bread.
“Ah!” Maria screamed, pointing.
Right at the edge of a lumpy streak of jam, Rocky saw it—an aquamarine lump, textured like a piece of gum flattened on concrete. Rocky stared but didn’t understand what she was looking at. She had an idea, but still, she wasn’t sure.
“How did you not notice?” Maria got up from the table and went to the toaster. With both hands, Maria yanked.
“This one, too,” she said, her voice harsh. “They’re all bad. It’s disgusting!”
Rocky stomped over to the refrigerator and opened the door for the third time. Again, she pushed past the mayonnaise and margarine, and finally looked at the bread. Each slice was a unique shade of blossoming green. She tried to think of the last time her mother had been home but couldn’t remember. The last person who’d stopped by that week was Isabel, the cleaning lady whom the doorman knew to let upstairs. Isabel should have found the bread first. Isabel should’ve been stopping by more often. Rocky remembered her last conversation with her mother. Why should Rocky be in charge of the chores? Why couldn’t Veronica do that?
She pulled the green loaf out of the fridge and put it on the counter.
“Aren’t you going to throw it out?” Maria asked.
“No,” Rocky said. “The cleaning lady will.”
As they rode down the elevator, Rocky saw a look on Maria’s face, a certain intonation she used when she commented that she was still hungry, that made Rocky angry. Before reaching the school, they stopped at the Dean & Deluca’s near Rocky’s apartment, and behind a set of see-through doors, Maria picked up a chocolate chip muffin and inspected it for excessively long, tilting it from various angles, as if Rocky couldn’t see what she was doing. “This one looks okay,” she finally said, and Rocky gritted her teeth. After enough time, she thought, everything goes bad, but still, she said nothing to Maria. As Rocky collected the change from the cashier, Maria wandered ahead of her, her mouth already full.
For the rest of the day, even when they went downstairs for lunch, the two girls hardly spoke. At three, Rocky saw Maria coming out of the bathroom and walked past her, toward her locker. Her face was pointed into her books when she heard Maria’s voice.
“Hey, Rocky,” Maria said. “I’m going home now. Thanks again for breakfast.”
Rocky grimaced, but if Maria knew how annoyed Rocky was, there was nothing in her voice that showed it.
“You mean that muffin?” Rocky said, without looking away from her textbooks. “That was nothing. I’ll see you tomorrow.”
Only after she heard Maria’s footsteps down the hall did she close her locker door. Who does she think she is, Rocky thought now, judging me for just a bit of mold?
On the train to Queens after school, there were too many people. There were always too many people on the ride home. Maria hated having to balance her book bag on her lap, hearing the grumbles of the people sitting next to her, their annoyance with her stinking like bad breath.
With its balustrades and bougainvillea, its carved, wooden doors and secret gardens, the Upper East Side existed as if caught under the thin glass of a snow globe, and it always took Maria a while to adjust after exiting this tiny terrarium to enter the jungle of regular city life, full of its wild inconveniences and unexpected smells and millions and millions of people. She could feel it, always slightly painful and jerky, like her body was changing gears. Something would have to click into place before she could go on being her usual self, pushing through crowds on the subway, walking as if she were in a footrace, operating in a constant state of low-level fear and frustration.
Her mother was outside the house, sweeping the porch. She stopped as soon as she saw Maria heaving toward the house, her backpack swinging so low Maria had to be careful it didn’t lift up her skirt.
“Long time, no see!” Maria’s mother called out into the street, raising her voice so that it cut through the sounds of everything else—a car blowing its horn, a teenager biking down the sidewalk, a dog barking from where it was imprisoned behind a window. She held the broom in one hand and posed the other on her hip. “Was the tutor any help?”
Maria climbed the two steps up to the porch. The Rosarios lived on the ground floor of a two-family home, and Maria’s parents, as the property owners, saw fit to decorate the house however they liked. Aside from a multitude of tiny American flags stuck into the soil of a row of potted geraniums, there were various plaster statues painted and molded to resemble animals. On each step there was a plaster statue—the first was a puppy holding a daisy in its mouth, the second was a bespectacled frog holding up a sign that inexplicably read “Wellcome.” When her mother first brought it home, Maria railed against it, demanding they get rid of it, and she may have even been successful had the tenant upstairs not told Maria’s mother que el coquí era precioso, and after that, the little frog had officially cemented its position on the porch. Every time Maria passed it, she still heard the questions in her head, like how many frogs had been shipped out to retailers before the manufacturer realized the mistake? How many women like Maria’s mother had purchased the frog without even noticing? Why didn’t anyone care as much as she did? She tried not to look at the frog today when she stood next to her mother and leaned into her face for a kiss.
“Yeah,” Maria said. “The tutor helped.”
Maria went into the hallway and walked past the staircase that led to her neighbor’s floor. On the right was the door that led to the Rosarios’ apartment. Nobody left their shoes in the hall because Maria’s mother strictly forbade it. The hallway is not a storage unit, she told everyone. But once inside, there was nowhere to take off one’s shoes, and not even a closet for coats. It was one source of her mother’s seemingly unending frustration—how people walked right in, dragging in the mud, and everywhere they went things became dirty. It was also one of the reasons that Maria’s mother was always cleaning. Maria walked into the living room with her sneakers still on, to the sound of a brass-horn love ballad. It was always love ballads when her mother was cleaning. It was always women’s gravelly voices, horns like torrents of tears.
Even with the lights off, the heat coated everything, bubbling up the walls of the room like a pot of boiling water. Maria went straight for the corduroy futon, throwing herself onto the cushions. She poked her finger into the hole left by one of the uncles, sienna foam exposed from where he’d left his cigarette. Her mother had cried when she found it, but now it was part of the order of things, and she often passed the vacuum over the hole to gather up lint that collected there.
The couch sank under Maria’s weight. Her legs and her arms relaxed. The couch was her charging dock; she could feel herself gaining power. She closed her eyes, absorbing heat from the sunbeams that peeked past the blinds until she no longer noticed the way they cast bright spots on her eyelids like fireworks in a July night sky.
In those explosions of light, she imagined Charlie.
She saw the worry lines creasing his forehead when he laughed. He smelled faintly like citrus, lemon or lime. He’d been wearing shoes of the richest leather she’d ever seen. But none of those things were even the best of it. The best was the way that he’d looked at her. Not the way Rocky did, who only saw a shell. Not even the way Andres looked at her, like she was made of pure sugar. Actually, it wasn’t the way he looked at her at all.
It was the way she had been seen.
Suddenly the music changed, and Selena came on. Whereas everyone else liked the hits, the only song that Maria really loved was a manic song called “El Chico del Apartamento 512,” which was about one woman’s high-energy obsession with her forbidden neighbor. Maria sprung off the couch twirling. She cocked her hips to the left and the right. She thrust her hands up in the air and when they came down, first they went down the length of her neck, then her collarbone, then pushed on the flesh that curved there. Sh
e felt around her breasts. They seemed larger, and even though it hurt when she pressed, it was a pain that felt good. As she held her hands there, she sensed someone behind her. Her hands fell to her sides as if she’d been struck dead.
“So you still like my music,” her mother said. “You know, that’s the worst part about cleaning other people’s homes. You never get to play your own songs.”
Maria thought of Rocky’s rotten bread. She could think of much worse things.
“Why wouldn’t I like it? I love this song.”
“You don’t seem to like anything I do anymore.”
Maria could feel a fight coming on. “I don’t want to clean people’s houses! Those people in those neighborhoods go to my school!”
“It’s not that.” She clicked her tongue, the way Maria always did when she wanted someone at Bell Seminary to shut up. “It’s other things.”
She left Maria to attend to a pot in the kitchen. Maria went to the bathroom, and on the toilet, she flushed away a burgundy wad of toilet paper. Maria had already said a little prayer that morning when she saw the coppery trail of her period in Rocky’s toilet, but now, she brought her hands together and gazed up at the ceiling. Her mother had once warned her that she could get pregnant instantly, that one second was all the time it took. Maria had seemed to follow all the steps to prevent it from happening, but since first having sex with Andres, her paranoia that she was pregnant increased each day. From her squat on the toilet, Maria closed her eyes. Thank you, she said again.
Her father was sitting at the kitchen table when she came out of the bathroom. The music had been turned off, but she hadn’t heard him come into the house. His elbows were resting on a place mat. Maria’s mother fluttered around an assemblage of pots by the stove.
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