“Andres?” Maria asked, when she saw him going up the stairs with the other boys.
“I’ll be back,” he called. Brian got up and turned on a speaker, and the room was flooded with music. Karen didn’t touch her beer again, so Maria picked it up. The bell to the house started ringing, and Brian got up each time to let a new person in. Maria recognized no one, and as each minute went by, she took another sip of Karen’s beer. When Andres finally came back, it felt like he’d been gone for an hour. It felt like every cell in Maria’s body was drunk.
“Andres, where were you?” she said, getting to her feet, swaying.
“You’re fucked up,” he said.
“No. I’m just hungry.”
“Well, that’s what happens when you don’t eat. Stop trying to be like those white girls at your school.”
“Andres,” Maria cried. “Do you even love me? No! Do you think I’m pretty?” Maria was slurring. Pretty took such a long time to come out, it took on an extra syllable. “I mean pretty,” she said, loudly. She grabbed his hand.
“Fuck, Maria. You know the answer to that.” He pulled away and her wrist fell to her side. “Stop asking stupid questions.”
Suddenly, Karen was off the couch. Standing between Maria and Andres, Karen took Maria’s hand in her own.
“I’m taking her home,” Karen said.
“But you just got here. I mean—whatever. You’ll be okay, right?” Andres asked. “I would go with you, but I should probably stay here.”
“We’ll be fine,” she answered, leading Maria away.
Outside, blue slivers of light bubbled from the streetlamps and slipped like water into Maria’s eyes. Looking into the glass storefronts was like looking into the surfaces of puddles and rivers, a glazed film through which Maria could see herself. Cars whooshed by. A diner hummed. The world looked like it was painted over in some sort of sheen. Maria lifted her hand like she could reach out and touch it. It was all so beautiful.
“Are you all right?” Karen asked.
“Yeah.”
“I hate boys,” Karen said. “They’re idiots.”
They continued to walk in the dark and didn’t speak again until they crossed Queens Boulevard. Sometimes, when Maria walked down Queens Boulevard, she felt as if she were in front of an ocean. Twelve lanes wide and spanning far into the horizon, it provoked a similar sense of awe. In those rare moments when she had it to herself, when the sun had gone down and even the cars were sporadic, fleeting like flies, Maria was overcome with emotion. She felt so deeply her full humanity then. Some people had backyards, other people mountaintops, but Maria had Queens Boulevard to help her appreciate the ample beauty of existence.
“I think,” Maria said now, dropping her head onto Karen’s shoulder, “he likes me. He likes me more than Andres does.”
“Who? Rocky’s dad?”
“His name is Charlie,” Maria whined.
“Sorry,” Karen said. “Charlie.”
“He called me beautiful, Karen.”
“That’s such a dad thing to say.”
Maria frowned. It was true that her parents called her beautiful. But what Charlie felt toward her had to be more than just paternal affection.
“It’s not just that,” Maria said. “He—he knows my poetry. He knows I’m a poet.”
“Maria, what are you talking about?”
Maria’s body lurched forward, and Karen fell with her, and suddenly Maria was vomiting. In front of them was a three-family apartment that didn’t have a walkway, just a front door that spilled right out to the curb. Karen got up from the ground in horror.
“Jesus, right in front of their house! What is your problem, Maria?”
Maria was having trouble getting up on her own, but Karen didn’t move any closer, so she sat for a while on the concrete while Karen stood a few paces away. Finally, Karen offered her hand.
As they walked, Maria pulled Karen toward her and placed her head where it had been before, resting atop Karen’s shoulder. Karen sighed, but she didn’t shake her off.
“Do you really think I could do better than Andres?”
“Yes, Maria. Of course you can.”
“Thank you,” Maria said, just beneath Karen’s earlobe. “I feel much better now.”
CHAPTER 6
Miguel could hear his heart thrumming inside his head. His shoulders made a frame around his ears, deepening the shell of his collarbones until they became like an echo chamber, the sound growing tinny and loud. He had been thrashing in bed—the way he sometimes did after leg days at the gym, when he’d wake up with his quads stinging and begging to be stretched. But it’d been weeks since he’d last worked out, and his muscles, which were always so easy to feel, were starting to disappear, getting submerged under the skin, like a valuable coin sinking farther and farther into the ocean floor.
Miguel got up, out of bed, and paused in front of the fan. The house was scorching. He stood in front of the spinning blades, each pore of his skin wide open. Before he knew it, he was no longer hot, and the wet pieces of salt-sodden chest hair now were making him shiver. Even with the blinds down, a hazy mist of light filtered in from the streetlamps and made it so that the room was never so dark as to make things invisible. He found the knob to his bedroom door without fumbling and went into the living room.
He paused when he saw the futon mattress pulled out. He had not been expecting to see Maria and Karen huddled beneath a thin crumpled sheet, their arms outstretched to each other, like children. Maria was such a thing full of life—rivers of it coursed through her. He had heard women’s voices like hers described as gravelly, but Maria’s was bigger than that—there were boulders in her voice. But asleep here, in her oversize pajamas, with her mouth parted in an underbite, Maria looked so young. She looked, shockingly, like the little girl they had put in special dresses for the holiday sermons at church. Miguel rubbed his eyes. It was an apparition, a mirage. In front of him was the daughter he once had, the one whom he couldn’t reconcile with the young woman he knew that she was. There was the past and the present, and he knew they were two distinct things. But he had a hard time keeping them separate.
It was the other thing, the past thing, that worried him when he thought about her getting a job. She was seventeen and she needed to work, but still, it made him anxious. When he’d pressed her, she’d said she could apply online to Taco Bell, but it made him uncomfortable to think of her dressing in those two-button polos, her hair swept behind a greasy visor, staying well past midnight at the twenty-four-hour drive-through. He’d rather she stay in school. He’d rather she go straight to college. When Maria was accepted to Bell Seminary, the all-girls Catholic school, he thought he’d been blessed. He didn’t want her behind a cashier counter, taking orders from boys who had barely just gotten their license, boys who’d invite her to get into their cars, boys, who in other contexts, under other lights—on government tax forms, as military recruits, in court proceedings—were not boys at all, but men.
Maria didn’t want a job, either, no matter how much he tried to convince her it was a good idea.
“Don’t you want money? It’ll be good for you to have some money. We’ll only take half. You can keep the rest.”
She had pushed her plate away from her, where she’d left two pink vienna sausages uneaten. Like little life vests, they were buoyed by a pile of rice.
“I don’t care about money! I’d rather go straight to college!”
“But I’m not saying you’ll never go to college, Maria! You’ll go to college! We’ll send you to college! But now, you can get experience. Won’t that school help you find something? Can’t someone get you a job in an office, where you can start building your career?”
Maria puffed her face out, her cheeks big like water balloons. “Everyone graduates college now, Dad,” she said. “The only thing I can get in an office is an internship. And those don’t pay!”
Finally, Miguel lost his temper. “My house!” he thundered.
“My rules!”
Now, as the blue light made ripples on his daughter’s face, he felt a tinge of remorse. She still had the peculiar look of her eyes being too big for her face, of her rounded, curved forehead too prominent. It was undeniable: she resembled a baby. Before he’d lost his job, they had just finished paying off two rows of her braces. Her life was still full of promise and possibility. She deserved to study and become whatever she wanted. It made his heart sink that right now, he was asking her to act like an adult, and put her dreams on hold.
In the darkness, he wondered if everything in his life was really a Rorschach inkblot, a passing cloud, that maybe it was in his power to see one thing and not the other, to see Maria as either woman or child, and this thought made him cold, as if he were standing in front of the fan again, wet with sweat and shivering, all the pores of his skin tiny and stiffening.
Finally, he went into the bathroom. He switched on the light and caught himself in the mirror. All over his skin were indicators of age—new wrinkles appeared all the time. He knew Maria looked like him, but it was hard to believe he ever looked like Maria. He couldn’t remember a time being so awash with innocence, you could see it just from the sight of his face. He sighed noisily. It jarred Miguel to see how sallow and sunken he looked. He feared his skin might tear from where it strained to hold up the sharp corners of his face. He imagined his skin flying open like a brown paper bag ripping from the weight of too many groceries. Age, he could see, was just the physical traces of pain, grief, sorrow traveling around the eyes in rivulets, in wrinkles as deep as the depth of experience. He had thought he looked older since he’d lost his job. Now, he could see it was true.
On his way back to bed, he tripped. He made a noise and put his hand out, and luckily, he caught the back of an armchair before he could really fall. Regaining his balance, he looked down and squinted at something hard and square at the foot of the futon. It was glittering purple, a prism of color and light like the back of an abalone shell. He had seen it tucked away in Maria’s bedroom before and knew it was her journal. He knew Maria wrote in it all the time because she left her chewed-up pens everywhere, and he had wondered what she was writing about before. He wouldn’t dare touch it when it was in her room, but now it was out in the open. He stooped to pick it up. He placed his fingers on the front cover. He had the book right side up in his hands when he creaked open the spine to look inside. On the first page, she had written her name and phone number. He turned it to look at the opposite side. The paper made an imperceptible swoosh through the air, and when he looked up, he saw Maria’s friend, Karen, staring.
Miguel said nothing. He lowered himself, but his entire body had clenched, making it difficult to return the book to where he’d found it lying faceup on the floor. He opened his mouth, readying for an excuse. She had seen it, his moment of weakness, how in the dead of the night, he had tried to sneak up on Maria’s secrets. He had to say something. He had to apologize. And then he saw Karen’s chest falling into itself, and at the corner of her mouth, almost invisible, a tiny bead of saliva.
He hurried back to his room. When he got back into bed, he no longer noticed how hot it was. He no longer noticed how the fan spun. He no longer noticed the pain that had taken up residence in his body, making all his recent nights sleepless. He was too intent on trying to rid himself of Karen’s face. If the look of a thing was merely a reflection of what was inside it, then what was inside the girl? What did she know that was so horrible that she had taken to sleeping with her eyes open? But it was something else that was making loops around his mind like a carousel. Miguel knew she’d been asleep; there was no other way to account for the drooling or that thickness of breath. What he didn’t understand was how it was possible to have your eyes wide open, pupils dilated to full moons, and still not be able to see the thing standing in front of you.
At the grocery store near the school, Rocky purchased a midprice bottle of a California red blend to celebrate the end of finals week. School was officially over. Summer had begun. She poured two equal glasses and had just set them out on the table when she suggested they should also order some food. When the bell rang a half hour later, Rocky went to the door to receive the doorman, and Maria followed, carrying the bags inside, leaving Rocky alone to pay. In the kitchen, Maria separated Rocky’s chocolate milkshake from her strawberry. She took her first bite of a cheeseburger just as Rocky stepped into the room.
“As always,” Maria said. “Patrick’s is so good.”
Rocky grinned. At the table, she collected what was hers, and with one limp french fry in her mouth, she walked to the living room. There was a set of long wooden doors that separated the dining room table from the living room, and when the doors were flung wide open, their yellow-brass knobs in line with the yellow-brass hinges, you could see the living room TV. But instead of sitting next to Maria in the dining room, she sat on the couch and squeezed a mound of burgundy ketchup onto a napkin, despite the ivory-colored carpet just beneath her, that ran from wall to wall. She picked up the remote controller and started flipping through the TV guide. “What should I put on?”
“MTV,” Maria said, gathering her burger and milkshake, and ambling to the couch. Once she had set them down, she hurried back to the kitchen for her glass of wine.
“What about Grey’s Anatomy?”
“What’s that?”
“You don’t know Grey’s Anatomy? God, Maria, how? What world do you possibly live in?”
Maria tasted salt in her mouth. She brought the glass of wine to her lips and imagined Andres. Whenever Andres surprised her by not having heard of a book or a song, he always said the same thing. You are such a white girl.
“Well,” Maria said, gingerly placing the glass on the table. “It’s probably just a white-person thing.”
Rocky glanced at Maria’s glass of wine, and then looked back up at Maria’s face. She crossed one arm over the other, and then rearranged them so that her chin rested in one palm.
“A white-person thing?”
“Yeah. Like Grease. Or Clueless. Or scones. Or,” she said, exaggerating a British accent, “English Breakfast.”
“Clueless is a classic,” Rocky said, the double ss in both words pronounced with fervent intent.
“I guess.”
Maria brought the wineglass up to her mouth. The only other time she’d tasted wine was when Ricky turned eighteen and the whole family went to dinner. At an Italian restaurant in Corona, a few doors down from the famous Lemon Ice King, her mother had let her take a sip. Maria asked for more, but her father frowned, and by the end of the night, the corners of her mother’s mouth were stained in a brown outline, like henna. It took a while for Maria to realize it was the alcohol, because when she rubbed it away with her napkin, it looked like clumps of dried food. Maria glanced at Rocky’s lips now, but they were pink and pristine, so she smiled, in relief.
“Do you hate white people?”
“What?”
“Do you hate white people,” Rocky repeated, flatly.
“Is that a serious question?”
“I just think that’s a prejudiced thing to say. Not all white people like the same things. There aren’t any white-person things.”
“Okay, Rocky. It’s a joke.”
“It didn’t sound like a joke.”
Rocky inspected her nails. Her mouth was perfect, but her eyeliner was running. At the corners of her eyes, there were deep pockets of black, and it made Rocky look extremely sleepy. Maria wanted to get up and rub it off for her.
“Your makeup is running. Here.” Maria got up and posed a finger tentatively toward Rocky’s face. “Can I?”
Slowly, Rocky closed her eyes. Maria took great care to run the pad of her fingers as gently as she could under Rocky’s eyes, until the black was all gone. She didn’t want to hurt her.
“Thanks. You’ve got something right there.” Rocky gestured to her own lips.
“Where?” Maria asked, but Rocky kept her
hands to herself. Maria frantically wiped at each corner, and when she took her fingers away, there were purple clumps under her fingernails. Streaked in Rocky’s eyeliner and with scoops of dried wine under the nails, her hands were a splatter of black and purple.
“Better?” Maria asked.
“Better,” Rocky said.
Side by side, the girls walked over to the wine bottle on the kitchen table and filled their glasses again.
They lost count of how many episodes of Real World they’d watched by the time Rocky pulled a third bottle of wine from the cellar behind the pantry. In front of her, on the glass table that Rocky had pulled close to the couch, two wineglasses sat next to two milkshakes from Patrick’s. Even though Maria had long finished her milkshake, she occasionally picked it back up, hoping that something sweeter than air would come out of the straw. Beside her, Rocky scrolled through Facebook on her laptop, looking for a new profile picture. Maria looked away from the television just as an old photograph appeared on the screen. It was Rocky and Laura in front of a stadium-size fountain, and Rocky’s arms were draped around Laura’s spaghetti-strapped shoulders. Rocky spent more time with Maria these days than she did with Laura, but still, Maria couldn’t help it when her face screwed into an envious pout.
“Where’s that?” she asked.
“That is Las Vegas.”
“I’ve never been there before.”
“It’s kind of a white-person thing.”
Maria pulled her straw out of her mouth, and Rocky erupted into laughter. “I’m just kidding,” Rocky said. “God, you should’ve seen your face!”
She lowered the computer screen as she looked Maria in the eye. “How about we go together?”
Maria smiled. “Really?”
“We go every summer. I’ll just tell my mom.”
The two girls fell quiet. Maria picked up her wineglass again. The silence between them was interrupted only when a woman on the reality show suddenly bellowed. Even though Maria was looking directly at the TV, she wasn’t able to tell whether the sound came from a place of pleasure or fear. The images and figures danced in front of her, but it was impossible to follow a story line, and it was only getting harder. Finally, she shifted her legs so that both feet lay flat on Rocky’s carpet.
They Could Have Named Her Anything Page 9