They Could Have Named Her Anything

by Jimenez, Stephanie

  “Parece a Miguel,” her grandmother said. “Tiene la misma cara.” Her hands were on Maria, but her face was angled toward Maria’s mother, as if she weren’t addressing Maria at all.

  Her mother smiled. “Grandma says that you’re starting to look like a woman.”

  “Okay.”

  Maria’s mother cocked her head. “What’s wrong with you? Don’t you think you’re beautiful?” She laughed, and with her open palm, she smacked Maria’s butt.

  Maria felt a wild emotion shoot through her arms and her legs, as if the blood that ran through her veins had turned to concrete, and suddenly, she couldn’t breathe. It was like the Bell Seminary dances where she knew they were laughing at her, pointing at where her footsteps made the dance floor sink in the same places where Rocky floated, leaving behind clouds of glittering dust. They were making fun of her.

  “Don’t touch me,” she hissed, without looking back at her grandmother. She pulled away from them and fled toward the living room, to the front door of the apartment.

  “Malcriada,” her mother said, lingering on the hard sound between the c and the r. It sounded like a pair of dice being rolled. She heard its echoing clatter even as she flew down the staircase, skipping several steps as she tried not to trip over her feet. You are empowered, she reminded herself. You are a strong woman! Strong! She hoped the lines of her face, creased in emotion, would be smoothed into place by the time she reached the first-floor landing. The last thing she wanted to explain to her father was why she had started to constantly oscillate from rage to despair, why she looked like she was always moments from breaking down. The truth was she could hardly explain it to herself.

  CHAPTER 5

  Maria liked art, but she wasn’t a great visual artist like Karen. At Bell Seminary, they had enrolled in the same drawing class, and Maria could have learned a lot more about how to mix oil paints if she spent more time looking at her own canvas. Instead, Maria would abandon her easel to gawk over Karen’s shoulder, at the underpainting that she’d yet to fill in. “How do you get it to look like that?”

  “It’s not done yet,” Karen would say, but Maria would keep on lingering until the teacher coaxed her away. Maria hardly ever completed her own paintings. She left the apples in her still life half-formed, and she erased the mouths in her portraits so often that they always looked like they had five o’clock shadows. “Hey,” Karen said one day as Maria went over the same stroke again and again, drawing an indefinitely blacker and blacker eyebrow over her charcoal self-portrait. “I’ve been taking art classes since I was like two. Your stuff really isn’t bad.” After that, Maria stopped looking over Karen’s shoulder as much, and even though she knew Karen was so good that she accepted commissions from her parents’ friends, Maria didn’t feel as bad anymore.

  “I’m getting on the train right now in Harlem,” Maria said to Karen, into the phone. Karen had been waiting for Maria for an hour after her Saturday painting class had ended. “I’ll be right there. Just wait for me at the train station,” Maria said as she stepped onto the gum-splattered curb, still carrying the plastic bag filled with plastic forks from the supermarket where the rank was distinctly of plastic.

  When Maria’s parents appeared at the landing only a few moments later with Jonathan, they all walked over to the parked car. Aside from Jonathan, who lived in an apartment not far from Maria’s house, nobody else in her father’s family had left Harlem. Her father rarely complained about it, but sometimes, when he was around his cousins, he did like to joke. “A lot of Ecuadorians and Mexicans in the neighborhood, sure,” he’d say, “but what do they know about New York City when they haven’t even lived here long enough to run out of their first bag of rice?” Maria’s mother, who was in fact Ecuadorian, rolled her eyes.

  “You know what train you need to take?” Maria’s mother had asked as she took the bag full of forks from Maria.

  “Of course,” Maria said, refusing to look at her mother. She tried to suppress the snarl in her voice. “I go to school around here, remember?”

  Maria raced away from the car before her parents could think to call out with her curfew. As she crossed the avenue toward the train station, careful not to step onto the circulars and Chinese food menus that collected in potholes all over the street, Maria knew that what she’d said was untrue. Bell Seminary was near her grandmother’s apartment, in that it was closer than her home in Queens was, but it was certainly not in the same neighborhood. Before going to private school, Maria would have never known the difference. She had taken for granted all the obvious clues, the catcalls, the smell of fish frying, the stomped lotto tickets all over the curb. She had taken for granted the skunky smell on the train that slid and wove through her head like a silk ribbon, and made her mother go, fo! She hadn’t taken note of how dirty the streets were as she descended 125th Street and how much cleaner they were once she approached Eighty-Sixth. It was only after the day she told her friends at school that her grandmother lived on the Upper East Side, too, in a one-bedroom apartment off Fifth Avenue, that she was able to distinguish the differences.

  That’s not the Upper East Side, a classmate had said, gesturing with her wrist. That’s Harlem.

  I know, Maria said, and the immediacy of her response surprised even her. I’m just kidding.

  But it hadn’t been her first mistake. There was the time, when she was still just a freshman, when she went to Genevieve’s house and didn’t know what to do with the papery pouch on the table. She sipped and sipped at the hot water in her mug until halfway through biting into a croissant, Genevieve shrieked. No way! she said, her cheeks rising up to her eyes. Do you not know what a tea bag is? Genevieve’s mother was born in London, and within hours, all of Maria’s schoolmates had heard a variation of the story, a couple times told within earshot of Maria, and more often as she stood directly in front of them, nodding her head, nervous and laughing. I knew what it was, she protested. I just didn’t know what I was supposed to do with it. At this, her classmates laughed more. At Maria’s house, it was the coffee pot that was attended to first thing in the morning. Karen was the only one who’d listened silently and hadn’t laughed.

  When Maria saw Karen standing on the corner of Sixty-Sixth Street with her leather messenger bag slung over one shoulder, she went to her and gave her a hug, wrapping her arms around her whole back. From the way Karen stiffened, like the trunk of a tree, Maria could tell she was angry.

  “Okay, I’m sorry I’m late! But I’m here now! Forgive me?”

  “You need a hair tie,” Karen answered, extending her hand. A pale-yellow hairband, now gray from endless use, was the only thing that circled her wrist. Maria tugged it off. It left a concave imprint on Karen’s skin that suggested something essential was missing.

  “It’s that bad, huh?” She held Karen’s hairband between her teeth as she pulled her hair back into a french braid. She knew that sometimes her hair was so frizzed and crazed, she gave the impression of a cartoon struck by lightning.

  “It must be really bad,” Maria said, tying the elastic into place.

  Karen began leading the way down the subway stairs. A current of people stormed by, threatening to overtake them. Amidst all the noise and the chaos, Karen needed to shout over her shoulder to make sure she was heard. “It was pretty bad,” she called out, honestly, like the good friend that she was. “But I forgive you.”

  On the train platform, Maria leaned against a white-tiled wall and kicked an empty bag of chips from beneath her. A man with no shoes on sulked past them, muttering aloud. Maria avoided looking him in the eye, and Karen picked at her cuticle. Andres had said that whole populations of people lived underground, that they had even gone blind and hairless, like babies born premature. What advantage being blind or hairless would give a person who lived in subway tunnels, Maria did not know.

  “Um . . . ,” Maria started to say, once the man was out of earshot. “So, can I tell you now?”

  “Oh yeah.” Karen la
ughed. “I forgot.”

  Maria leaned into Karen’s face and moved a strand of hair away from her ear, as if they were a pair of school children. Karen laughed, jerking away, and looked at Maria with one eyebrow raised.

  “Come on,” Maria said. “It’s important.” They weren’t far from Bell Seminary after all, and it was possible that someone would overhear them. With her hands cupped into a bowl against Karen’s ear, Maria whispered. Immediately, Karen’s face changed.

  “Rocky’s dad!” Karen shouted.

  “Someone will hear you! Shh!” Maria brought both hands up to her face as if shielding herself from view. “Charlie,” she whispered. “His name is Charlie.”

  “You’ve got to be shitting me. He’s married,” Karen whimpered.

  “It’s not like that.” Maria wanted Karen to stop looking at her. It was making her nervous to see that much consternation on the face of a person who was usually unaffected by everything, who usually just blinked at Maria’s antics. “They don’t even sleep in the same room. Most of the time they’re not even in the same apartment. Actually,” Maria said, with the sly smile of a person who’s confessing something that isn’t hers to confess, “I don’t think Rocky’s mom lives there anymore.”

  “What would your parents say?”

  “They won’t find out unless you tell them.”

  Karen’s eye roll was violent, the black pupils skyward. Maria noticed the red veins that crept around the whites of her eyeballs, like red vines of ivy.

  “Maria,” she said. “Think about what you’re saying.”

  Maria knew that this rational Karen was a Karen she learned to be from talking to the school psychologist. Maria had seen her there countless times through the little window of the closed wooden door. Whenever she confronted her about it, Karen brushed it off, saying that she liked eating from the candy tray that the psychologist always kept there. Maria knew that wasn’t the full truth. There’s only so many Twizzlers you can eat before you’d rather not be divulging your life story to a person who only needed to walk down the hallway to the dean’s office to have your parents’ home and work numbers on speed dial.

  “I’m not pursuing anything.”

  “And Andres?”

  “As if he would care,” Maria said, if only to indulge Karen’s contempt for Andres. She knew how much Karen disapproved of their relationship, how many times Karen had asked what Maria saw in him. He probably would care, Maria thought, but Maria’s response had incited in Karen the tiniest grin, almost imperceptible. Maria knew better, knew Karen, and saw it.

  “But aren’t you worried? What if Rocky finds out?”

  “She won’t,” Maria said.

  On the opposite side of the tracks, a train rumbled by, cutting their conversation short. The girls stared at the tonnage of weight flying past them, its roar so bestial and primitive, it was hard to believe there was a person inside it, controlling its trajectory down the platform. As soon as it passed, Maria spoke again. She spoke before Karen could.

  “Andres says we should bring our own stuff to the party unless we want to drink rum.”

  But Karen hadn’t looked away from where the train had been passing, and now, as if in a daze, she stared down the black tunnel. “Why do I always have to go with you to these things?” Her voice was airy and contemplative, as if she were posing the question to herself. Now, she turned to Maria, and her tone became heavier. “Why don’t you ask your new best friend, Rocky?”

  “Because! Queens isn’t safe enough for her.”

  Karen looked hard at Maria. “She said that?”

  Maria frowned. She couldn’t remember now if it had been Rocky or someone else in the grade, or if the comment about safety was concerning something else entirely, like after Maria had inadvertently divulged that her grandmother lived in Harlem.

  “No,” she said. “I don’t think so.”

  “So then?” Karen dipped one leg, and stood in a defiant contrapposto, like a Grecian sculpture. “Am I just gonna be your backup plan for whatever Rocky won’t do?”

  “You know it’ll never be like that.” Maria came closer to Karen and gently put her hand on Karen’s elbow. “It’s just, can you imagine Rocky at one of these parties? With all of Andres’s friends? She’d lose her mind around all those Latin lovers. And that actually is something she said.”

  “Jesus, Maria.”

  In the distance there was a light approaching. The girls felt the breeze of an oncoming train. “Maybe we can get forties tonight,” Karen said. “Use that ID you bought.”

  “There’s this place I go to that never cards.”

  “What was the point of buying that ID if you were never going to use it?”

  When Maria first tried to show off her new ID at school, one of her classmates pointed out the font was Calibri. Maria’s ID wouldn’t work at McFadden’s, the joke went, but it would work at McDonald’s. When she realized that the thirty dollars she had saved up to spend on the ID was as good as if it had been lost on the curb, Maria wouldn’t stop beating herself up. I am so stupid, Maria kept saying over and over again, until Karen chided her. Okay, Maria, she said. Stop that.

  “I’ll use it in college. Nobody will know what a Florida ID looks like there.”

  Karen smirked. “Unless you go to college in Florida, right?”

  The train whistled and screamed as it arrived. When the doors opened, nobody got off. Men and women were draped over each other, their limbs crossing their faces to hold on to the nearest pole. Maria and Karen each took a deep breath. Clutching their bags with both hands, they stepped into the mass and stood so close to each other that Maria could see straight through Karen’s concealer to a pimple just between her two eyebrows.

  “So,” Karen said, cracking her gum again. Maria noticed the pause and deliberately said nothing. “Are you going to tell Andres?”

  Maria grabbed at her lip. She imagined her mother swatting her hand away from her mouth, clicking her tongue.

  “Tell him what?” Maria asked. A small sliver of skin came away from her mouth between her thumb and pointer finger.

  “You know. About Rocky’s dad.”

  “His name is Charlie,” Maria said.

  “I still can’t believe you went to his bedroom.”

  “Wouldn’t you have been curious?”

  “No.” Karen popped a gum bubble. “Isn’t he gross and old?”

  “Karen!” Maria saw a woman turn her head. She stopped just short of looking. “It’s not like I’m having sex with him,” Maria whispered. “We didn’t do anything.”

  Karen cocked her head at Maria.

  “But you have a crush on him.”

  Maria rolled her eyes. “Is it wrong that I find him interesting?”

  Under their feet, the train rolled noisily forward.

  “Well,” Karen said, folding her arms over her chest and leaning on the door for balance. This was the clinical Karen—the Karen who strove to be objective. “Do you think anything good will come out of it?”

  “Nothing is going to come out of this at all,” Maria said, without hesitation. She wouldn’t admit to Karen that she’d been fantasizing about him since then. She wouldn’t show Karen the books of poetry she had highlighted and starred in search of the perfect quotation. The train rolled forward with a steady thump-thump that lulled the girls into silence.

  “I guess,” Karen said, after a while. “It wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world. Rocky’s family is so rich, maybe he’ll fall in love with you and want to buy you a helicopter.”

  “Are you kidding? Of course he won’t fall in love with me! I’m not that stupid, Karen!” Maria stopped peeling the skin off her lip. She made a face like she was angry, but in seconds, it had dissolved. Edging away from the woman who had glanced over at them, she flashed Karen a sidelong smile.

  “But even if he did, I wouldn’t ask for a helicopter,” Maria whispered. “I can’t live in a helicopter. I’d ask for a country house.” The train lurch
ed forward, and to the ire of everyone around them, the two girls fell over, bumping into countless bodies until they found each other again. They fell into each other’s arms, laughing.

  When they got to Brian’s house, it was only half past nine and nobody was home. Karen and Maria were early. The streets were quiet save for the scraping noises that the heels of Karen’s boots made against the sidewalk. A light breeze ruffled the saplings that lined Brian’s block. Sparse and wobbly, their leaves waved like teeth in a very old or a very young person’s mouth. The emergent summer weather was uncomfortable; the socks the girls wore made their feet sweat, and their denim jackets made pools under their armpits. They felt cooler as they took off their jackets and spread them to sit on Brian’s doorstep.

  Karen and Maria waited for what seemed a long time before Brian arrived with Andres. They were with several other boys whom Maria had never met before. Maria looked on giddily, confident from the forty-ounce bottle of beer that she had opened and already finished on Brian’s front porch. She and Karen were like stray cats crouched under tires, pupils fierce and dilated and legs tucked underneath, ready to spring at the faintest sound. Maria was on her feet as soon as she saw the boys.

  “We’re celebrating!” she yelled. “School’s almost out!”

  “Private school sounds nice,” Brian said, leading the pack of boys. He stopped on the porch to kiss Maria hello. “We won’t get out for a month.” He looked over at Karen and stooped toward her. Karen tried to hug him, even as Brian stuck his head out for a kiss. When he saw that she shirked from his cheek, he attempted to put his arm around her, but by then Karen had already lowered her own. Maria regarded the two with bemusement; together, they hadn’t accomplished any sort of proper greeting.

  “I love you guys!” Maria said as they walked up the steps into Brian’s house. She pushed Karen into Brian with so much force that she nearly fell on top of him. Karen scowled, but when she sat down on the living room couch, Brian immediately took a seat beside her, and Maria sat on the other side.