They Could Have Named Her Anything

by Jimenez, Stephanie

  “So your whole family goes? Every year?”

  “Me and my mom.” Rocky stared at the TV. “Nick’s too young to come.”

  The picture of Rocky and Laura was still open, but Maria could hardly see it now that the laptop was angled so that it was almost closed. She’d been jealous of Laura a moment ago, but now, there was another feeling: desire. It was alcohol soaked, and blurry, and heavy, and if she wasn’t careful, it would become known. Maria would blurt it out.

  What about your dad?

  Maria stifled the question by putting down the wineglass, which squealed with a giddy clink. She took a sip of her strawberry milkshake instead, which made the sound of emptiness, of hot air.

  Maria walked into the house on tiptoes. Her mother stood in the kitchen alone. Her father was napping in the living room. Asleep, he was oblivious to the way that Maria hummed around her mother like a fruit fly, buzzing about her excitedly as her mother worked her way around the kitchen, packing up the remains of dinner.

  “Who’s going to pay for that?” Maria’s mother said, speaking in an uncharacteristically quiet voice. She shoved the lid of a Tupperware container into the grooves where it fit, and opened the fridge door, pushing the plastic container inside. Littered around it were other boxes and bins. Inside them, there were things to be eaten later. The fridge was always a jigsaw of edible objects that huddled together indiscriminately to try to withstand the cold. Maria had noticed more than once that at Rocky’s apartment, aside from full bottles of ketchup and jars of blueberry jam, the fridge was always a carcass, empty.

  “Rocky’s mom said it was fine,” Maria attested, not actually knowing what Rocky’s mother would say, and knowing that Rocky had yet to ask. “We’re going to go in July.”

  “In July! That’s next month!”

  “I know, Ma, but they go every summer. All they have to do is buy my ticket.” Maria brought her hands together in a faux prayer. “Please, Ma? It’s only three days. Not even! It’s only two nights.”

  “Sheesh,” her mother said. “I wish I could go to Vegas.”

  “So I can go?” Maria paced an inch away from her mother. She was so close she could smell the gel her mother had used in the morning to slicken and straighten her curls. “I can go?”

  “Only if her parents are going with her.”

  Maria gave her mother a forceful kiss on the cheek.

  “Maria, have you applied to a job already?”

  “I did, Ma. I did. I applied to Taco Bell.”

  Maria fluttered away to call Rocky, her feet pounding on the floor. As soon as she crossed the linoleum patch that separated the kitchen from the dining room, she froze, remembering to lighten her steps. In the living room, in the faded summer light, her father was still asleep on the couch, impressions of corduroy like lanes of a racetrack running down the length of his face.

  CHAPTER 7

  As her departure date drew nearer, Maria realized there were many things she needed to do before leaving for Vegas. She unearthed her passport because even though Rocky said she wouldn’t need it, she wanted to use it, anyway. She started packing and bought travel-size versions of shampoo and conditioner, despite her mother’s reminder that they’d have them at the hotel. But there was something else now that she needed to do: she’d decided to get on birth control.

  Maria didn’t like doctors. Her suspicion of them was solidified recently, on the last day before finals week. Mr. Willoughby had finished writing the morning “Do Now” on the board. There was murmuring in the room, and Mr. Willoughby twitched his head like a cow, as if a fly had threatened his ear.

  “Have you finished the assignment, Maria?” he had asked, a vicious rip in his voice. Ever since she had started sitting in the back, he’d become nasty to her. She was twisted around the back of her desk, speaking in loud, harried whispers to Rocky.

  “Um,” Maria said. “Not yet.”

  “Then you shouldn’t be talking.”

  Maria glanced at the math problem on the board. When she was done reading, she read it a second time. She didn’t have anything to consult; when she took notes—if she took notes—it was always on loose sheets of paper that either wound up in some unrecognizable form at the bottom of her bag or were lost somewhere incomprehensible, like in the folds of her living room couch. It was 8:20 a.m., just the start of the day, and Mr. Willoughby’s eyes were incising her. Whether at school or home, everything felt like war. Everywhere she went, she was forced onto the defensive.

  “I hate this,” she said, and her classmates looked up now, their pencils still in their hands. She dropped her head to the desk and stayed that way until Mr. Willoughby asked another student to demonstrate the answer on the board. Maria looked up and watched the chalk move across the board. Whenever the student was unsure of her next step, she lowered her fist and smudged the numbers into baby-powder clouds. When Maria was younger, she had learned how to simulate a baby’s footprint by pressing her paint-doused fist onto paper and drawing five dots with her fingertips. When the student was finished, Mr. Willoughby erased the “Do Now.” Maria spent the remainder of class wondering what would be served for lunch.

  That afternoon, the dean of students called Maria into her office.

  “We want you to start talking to Dr. Beth,” the dean said. “We’re worried you’re not meeting your full potential. We’d like to help you figure out why.”

  “But school ends next week!” Maria shouted. She wondered if they’d already called her parents.

  “Exactly,” the dean said. “It hasn’t ended yet.”

  At lunch, Maria saw Karen. “It won’t be bad,” Karen said. “Dr. Beth’s office has candy.”

  Maria imagined it not being bad. She knew she wasn’t like those girls in her class who ate the lettuce and tomatoes off their sandwiches and left everything else untouched on their plates. She wasn’t like the other ones who came to school with lines on their ankles that made crags like lightning bolts and were dark as prunes. There was no reason she needed to see the psychologist, and by the time she went into the office to meet her, she knew that Dr. Beth would chuckle at the misunderstanding and tell her she needn’t come back. She hoped there’d be candy she liked.

  “I can’t say with certainty,” Dr. Beth had said, during their first session, “but you could be depressed.” Maria sat up in her seat. She was so shocked she became sullen, and later she told her mother what happened as they cleared the table after dinner. Her father had already gone to his room.

  How? Maria’s mother had turned off the faucet. Tears sprouted in her eyes. When she wiped them away with her dishwashing gloves, her whole face became lacquered with liquid. What did I do to make you unhappy?

  Maria had to speak to Dr. Beth every day for the rest of the week. She didn’t want to be reminded of her new diagnosis, so she decided she wouldn’t tell the psychologist a single genuine thing. The silences weren’t easy to create. Dr. Beth paused so deliberately after her questions that Maria always found herself saying more than she wanted to. At the beginning of their sessions, Dr. Beth asked, Maria, how do you feel today? Maria would try not to roll her eyes, and later, she would make her mind into a white slate on which she would write the same question over and over. How do you feel? How do you feel? Maria came up with snarky responses, ones that would give nothing away. Fantastic! Just getting over a fever! But it was only a fantasy—Maria’s bad attitude was what landed her in Dr. Beth’s office in the first place, and she knew she shouldn’t push it.

  On one of those days, the temptation to answer Dr. Beth honestly was too much to resist, and Maria felt herself slip into conversation the way she curled into a ball after getting out of a shower on a cold winter day. She mentioned Andres, and the fear that she had fallen in love. It felt so nice to say Andres’s name aloud, and Maria wanted to go on and on about him, about identifying isosceles triangles not in her textbooks but in his abdomen, about being terrified of pregnancy but feeling her body expand like a thousand ope
n mouths whenever he was near, about the time she’d run a comb through his hair and wished that she knew him in a different capacity, in a way that surprised her, like father to son. But then she remembered how Laura, whom they’d forced into rehab for refusing to eat, had spent a lot of time in Dr. Beth’s office before they took her away for two months, and she suddenly became angry, her face tightened and sealed like the margins of a laminated page. Maria wished that talking to Dr. Beth hadn’t constituted a betrayal, but it was clear that talking to her meant she had failed her mother, and now, telling the truth carried too much risk to herself—and was it really impossible to find any adult who would be on her side and her side alone? Maria flinched like she’d been called a bad name and stopped talking about Andres. She kicked her sneakers off Dr. Beth’s candy table and reached for her backpack, unzipped it.

  “Can you help me study?” She pulled out her Spanish workbook, and when Dr. Beth saw that Maria was serious, together they conjugated verbs.

  Even though Maria gave all the right answers, inside, the sadness was careening. Her eyes stayed on Dr. Beth, but her attention was drawn to that space in her mind where she would attempt to escape. All of her classes were unbearable because any moment that wasn’t hers to decide what to do with always felt like a complete waste of time. Judging from the way her father talked about it, adulthood seemed to be more of the same thing—waking up every morning with a resistance so stubborn she’d have to wrestle it to the ground just to get to the front door. And death didn’t seem much better, either, because then her life would be reduced to a single grain of dust in God’s mansion, and in no time she’d be wiped up and erased, the way Rocky’s cleaning lady wiped up her moldy bread, the way her mother did the same for other families, too. Maria tried to return to the present perfect tense, and she stared at the candy bowl. It was filled with Snickers bars ever since Dr. Beth asked what she liked to eat. There were still six minutes left of her session, practically an eternity.

  What’s the point of therapy? she wondered. It wasn’t making her feel any better.

  But despite her disdain for doctors, Maria couldn’t avoid them entirely. She and Andres had been going at it again, and now Maria was equipped with Rocky’s advice. Practice with a cucumber, Rocky had advised. Make sure you make lots of sound. Maria thought she’d been doing better, but Andres was still unsatisfied. He made his dissatisfaction even clearer when halfway through having sex, he rolled off the condom and threw it across the bed, where it hung off the side of the mattress like a used sock. When she called Rocky, distressed, Rocky told her what she needed to do. For that, Rocky said, you should go to the clinic.

  In the waiting room at ten in the morning, Maria was given a form to fill out and there was a box that asked if it was okay to contact her at her home address. She made a giant X next to “NO” and went over it three times, and thinking of the stacks of letters they received every day at their door, Maria told the receptionist that she didn’t think she had insurance.

  “That’s fine,” the receptionist told her, “but can you find out for sure next time?”

  They called her name and escorted her to a hallway where a young nurse with two french braids and a set of bright-pink scrubs weighed her and took her blood pressure. The nurse handed her a little blue cup, and after she peed, Maria was taken to another small room, where she was instructed to wait on the examining table. When the nurse left, she had kept the door open. On the wall was an illustrated poster of the fetal cycle. She took a picture of the watercolor image of a baby attached to an umbilical cord and tried to send it to Andres as a joke, but she didn’t have any service. When Maria looked up from where she sat on the edge of the table, she saw a girl walking past her room, another patient. There’d been a boy slumped beside her when Maria first saw her, but now that she was alone, her smile was slack. The girl’s eyes watered, and Maria was pinched with remorse. She deleted the photo, and just as she did, she heard a voice.

  “Maria?”

  The doctor said her name the Spanish way, and Maria’s face quirked into a smile. What did this white doctor with her neat auburn bun know about saying her name? Even Maria’s parents usually said it the English way unless they were furious. The doctor closed the door behind her. She was holding a clipboard and pen.

  “You wrote that you’ve only had intercourse with one person?”

  “Yes.”

  “Only one?”

  “Yeah.” Maria brought her hand to her chin. There had been a pimple forming there, but she had stalled its growth by scratching it until it became a wound. “He’s my boyfriend.”

  “How many partners has he had?”

  Again, Maria’s smile twitched. Andres was more experienced than she was—she had heard about some of his escapades directly from him. As Maria continued to pick at her pimple, she stared at the floor to think.

  The doctor clicked her pen against her clipboard so that Maria was startled into looking up.

  “Do you know how many partners he’s had?”

  “No.”

  “Is he older than you? Your age?”

  “Yes.”

  “Older?”

  Maria tried to concentrate. She was still on the last question, trying to figure out how many girls Andres might’ve had sex with.

  “No,” she said. “We’re the same age.”

  “What’s your current method of protection?”

  “Right now, we’re pulling out,” Maria said. “Sometimes condoms, but he hates wearing them.”

  The doctor jotted something down on the page, and Maria kicked her sneakers together. One of her laces was untied, the same one on the left foot that always came undone. It annoyed Maria how people on the street would always yell after her as if she couldn’t feel the loose strings dancing around her foot. Maria looked at her fingers, where she’d pulled off her skin’s latest attempt to scab over her pimple. What was the point of all of these questions, and why did they make her pee in a cup even though she had told them her period had just ended? She stared up at the walls, but there was no clock to be found. She felt its absence profoundly. She felt like she was taking a test she was failing.

  “Maria,” the doctor said. “What’s your partner’s name?”

  Without anticipating the change, she became very hot, and the word came out scalding from the roof of her mouth. “Andres,” she said. It burned like hot soup.

  “Have you ever been intimate with Andres when you didn’t want to?”

  Maria heard a ringing in her left ear, a sound that she recognized from hearing tests every year at the nurse’s office. She closed her eyes tight, but once it was gone, she heard the same ringing in her right ear. She saw her mother crying in the kitchen, and when she blinked, she saw how the makeup coursed down her cheeks like twin rivers, black and poisonous.

  “Have you ever been intimate with Andres because you were afraid of what he might do or say?”

  Maria thrust her arms against her chest. With both hands, she clung to her elbows. There was no reason to make her mother sob. There was no reason to be depressed, and there was no reason to talk to this white woman doctor, who pronounced her name as if she knew who she was, as if she’d wanted Maria to believe she’d grown up down the street, with Maria’s aunts and uncles. There was no reason to trust this woman and no reason to tell her the truth.

  “Are you crazy?” Maria said. “No. I’m not afraid of Andres.”

  The white paper on the examining table was darkened with sweat when Maria stood up to leave with a month’s worth of birth control pills. The doctor said that the next time she came back, she would give her three times as many, but for now, she wanted her to try out a month and see how her body responded.

  Outside the clinic, Maria’s phone rang.

  “Hello?” she said.

  “This Maria Rosario?” A woman’s voice boomed.

  “Yeah.”

  “Can you come in today for an interview? This is the general manager at Taco Bell on Q
ueens Boulevard.”

  It was still very early. Maria had nothing to do.

  “What time?”

  “I’m free now.”

  Maria wondered, with some embarrassment, if the manager would remember her. Taco Bell was where Maria and Andres had their first date, and now that they were both out of school, they had been spending their afternoons getting high and eating gorditas with extra sour cream. They both loved unwrapping those meals tightly packaged like candies, the tacos sweating inside. They would meet in the parking lot, where Maria would be forced to watch six thousand attempts at a kickflip or a heelkick or an ollie, or something. Then, they would take a hit from Andres’s pipe that looked like a cigarette—which was one of the coolest things Maria had ever seen—and splurge on cinnamon twists with money they pooled together. Taco Bell was where Andres and Maria plotted their adventures. In the parking lot, they’d shared their first kiss. Maria didn’t write any of that on her online application, but the truth was that she only wanted to work at the fast-food restaurant out of sentimental value, and now, as she approached the faux adobe walls of the building, she couldn’t help but feel a little humiliated. She looked away from the black orb of the camera affixed to the front door, but that wouldn’t change anything. They would recognize her as the girl who gets stoned in the parking lot and immediately turn her away.

  Inside, she went to the counter as usual and asked for the manager.

  She was wearing her hair back in a tight coiled bun. She was younger than what Maria expected. Maria had never seen this woman before.

  “You’re the first person I’ve called that has showed up today.” She smiled. “That’s good. I’ll need to be able to rely on you.”

  Maria followed her through the kitchen. Back there, she looked around in awe. Everything was made of stainless steel, and despite the heat emanating from the stoves, it was surprisingly cool. She saw someone assemble a gordita with gloved hands, sprinkling lettuce that was shredded like confetti. From a pump that seemed to lead into the ground came out sour cream, like water from a well.