“Maria!” Maria was startled to see her mother’s face wedged in the tiny crack between the bedroom door and the doorframe. It made her uneasy to wonder how long she’d been standing there, watching, without saying a word.
“Jesus!” Maria said.
“Don’t say that! And what are you doing? Come on! We have to go!” Her mother’s eyes were poised like a pair of open scissors, ready to come down and cut through her.
“Get ready,” she whispered, as if she hadn’t already woken everyone up.
Maria got her things together, and when they were about to leave the house, she remembered her books. She dashed inside and picked the only one thin enough to fit into her bag, a collection of Emerson’s essays.
The station wagon was the color of sand, and through its center ran a thick line the color of stained wood flooring. It was an old car, one that her family had driven for as long as Maria could remember. When they were younger, Ricky and Maria would sit in the back, their shaggy heads hanging out, and the two of them would wave like pageant queens to anyone who walked by.
As Maria brought down the trunk door with all of her weight, she thought of Diana. What was this car really worth?
“Mija, you don’t have to close it so hard!” Maria’s mother stared at her as she climbed into the passenger’s seat. Maria avoided looking down, where her bare legs had ballooned out onto the leather, and when she closed the side door, this time, she did it slowly.
“So what, Ma? This car is so old.”
“Old? What does that mean?” Maria’s mother started to drive. “Don’t you see how I take care of my things? This car will last me another ten years.”
“Yeah.”
“How could you even say that—so what? Don’t you see how I always park away from the other cars? Don’t you see how much I take care of it?”
“Okay, Ma. Sorry.”
“You don’t know how to take care of anything, that’s why. Look at your room. When are you going to pick up all those books and those dirty clothes off your floor?”
Maria stared out the window. It was early in the morning, and the sun still hadn’t risen completely. Outside, the city was a bleary blue, the color of muddled paint water. For being so early, it was already hot, so Maria leaned over and cranked the lever of the window down until the glass had fully retreated. She watched the signs on the highway whiz by. Her mother pushed a button on the dashboard and voices filled the car.
“Are you nervous?”
“For what?” Maria looked at her hands, where the cuticles of her fingers were ripped.
“To get on the plane. These terrorist attacks. It’s just—you never know.”
“I’ve been on a plane before.”
“It’s different these days. You were three years old.”
Maria brought her nail to her mouth and bit down. “I survived that time. I’ll survive again.”
Her mother clicked her tongue. “Maria Anís, why do you think you know everything?”
A man’s voice rose from the speakers. It was the news report that her mother always listened to in the morning, the one that operated on a loop. It replayed the same headlines after a terse twenty minutes. Maria hated listening to this program because it did more to create gaps in knowledge than fill them. It’s where her mother got all her ideas about rapists who lurk inside parks after sunset and killers who massacre teenage girls.
“I’m not nervous,” Maria said. “I’m excited to go somewhere new.”
“I’m jealous.”
“How come? You said you hate gambling.”
“I just want to go on vacation.”
According to the news, there was a mugging at four in the morning in the Bronx. Maria sucked on the sweet taste of blood on her finger.
“I’ll bring you something back,” she said.
The left turn signal started ticking as her mother merged onto the highway. The sound rocked Maria like a lullaby. She leaned back in her seat and closed her eyes.
“No, don’t spend your money. I don’t need no gift.”
Maria opened her eyes. “I don’t need a gift.”
“What?”
“You said it wrong. It’s ‘I don’t need a gift.’”
“That’s what I said.”
“You said you don’t need no gift. You can’t say that.”
“What do you mean I can’t say that? Why do you always try to prove me wrong?”
Maria couldn’t help it—she was protecting her mother. She thought of the next time they’d be at Bell Seminary, going through the racks at the used-skirt sale.
“Did you tell Andres you were going to Vegas? What does he think about it?”
“He’s jealous, too.”
They pulled into the airport. On the long expanse of tarmac, Maria could see the airplanes from a distance, lined up in rows, unmoving. They looked slightly dusted, like a set of toy cars. Maria looked on with disbelief that in a couple of hours she’d be hurtling through the air in one of those funny planes that looked exactly like they did in movies.
“It’s Delta,” Maria said. Overhead, there were big blue signs. One after another they listed the names of different airlines, and some of them made Maria’s heart flutter—Japan Airlines, Aerolíneas Argentinas, British Airways—there were so many places Maria had never been. She looked but didn’t see Delta. “I think you need to go farther up.”
“Maria, are things okay with Andres?”
Maria brought her finger to her mouth again and bit until the nail ripped off. She held the strip between her teeth. “Yeah. Why?”
They pulled up to the Delta terminal and stopped directly in front of the glass doors. There was nobody standing outside, and even inside, the place looked deserted, though the lights were pumped full of power and blaring. Are they open? Maria thought, just as the sound of a plane taking off flooded the car and rattled its old tinny insides so much that it trembled that way for a full minute until the sound of the radio surfaced again. There was a mugging at four in the morning in the Bronx.
“I heard you crying last night.”
Maria felt herself sink as if the seat had given way beneath her. She hadn’t thought that anyone was still awake once she came back into the house after her conversation with Ricky.
“It’s fine,” Maria forced herself to say. “It wasn’t about Andres.”
“Maria.” Her mother took her hands off the wheel and turned her whole body. “I don’t know what you’re always crying about. What I really think is that you should save all those tears para cuando yo me muera.” She sighed, and it took an eternity to come out. “But I know something’s going on with you. You have to tell me what’s going on.”
Maria stared out the window, yearning to get out of the car. “Nothing is going on, Mom. I don’t know what you think is going on.”
“I just don’t really think you know what you’re getting into.”
Maria’s pulse quickened. “What are you talking about?”
“Maria, you’re too young to even think about having sex—”
“Ma!”
“—but if that’s what you’re doing, then you need birth control.”
Maria looked at her feet in horror. Ricky must’ve told her about what he saw last night in her room.
“I don’t agree with it,” Maria’s mother continued, “I don’t agree with it at all. But it’d be worse if you were to get pregnant. Just don’t tell your father we talked about this. And make sure he never finds out that you’re—”
But Maria wasn’t listening. She was thinking of all of the times her mother had told her that she needed to wait until marriage. Of the women at church who told her that she should treat her body as a temple. Maria was sure her mother was setting her up, but Maria wouldn’t confess, and she surveyed her mother now as she spoke: she was still in her pajamas, a waffled powder-blue long-sleeve shirt and a pair of basketball shorts. As if she’d only needed to adjust a stray wire to tap into the frequency, Maria could he
ar the crystalline voice of her own inner rage. Why did they always tell me to not have sex? Was it because they didn’t want me to end up like you? Did they think Maria would end up a powerless woman, a woman who was constantly cleaning up after, who didn’t graduate college, who got pregnant too young? A woman who didn’t speak the truth to her daughter until the men were no longer in the room?
Maria’s thoughts became aggregate, until they became heavy, a sodden mass in her mind. Her mother was a housewife, a cleaning lady, and Maria didn’t need her mother’s advice.
“Stop!” Maria had angled her body so far away that her shoulders were pressing against the side of her door. “I’m doing everything you want me to do! I got a job for you even though I didn’t want it! Why can’t you just leave me alone?”
Maria’s mother squinted, as if she was trying to think of what to say next and couldn’t come up with anything.
“Rocky’s waiting for me.” Maria opened the door of the car, and when she tried to lift off from her heels, the force of the seat belt holding her back by the waist was so strong that it made her gag. In her throat she tasted what she could only imagine was her raw stomach, and without waiting another second, she unbuckled the seat beat and bolted toward the back of the car. Her mother came out to meet her, but by then Maria had pulled her luggage out, and the two said goodbye hurriedly, just as a police officer strolled up to the car and a plane flew so close overhead that Maria almost lost her anger as she watched its frightening underbelly move past them, like a strange and horrible fish.
“I’m moving right now,” Maria’s mother said to the officer once they could all hear again. Regaining composure, Maria started toward the glass doors. “Maria,” her mother called. “Be careful! Comportate bien! Okay, Maria? Be safe!” But Maria was moving away from her mother, from the policeman, the old station wagon, the highway back home, walking farther and farther until she was inside the airport, as safe, of course, as she always was, but now she was also alone.
CHAPTER 9
On a sweltering afternoon in late June, Charlie had been downstairs in the lobby of his office building, eating a peppered turkey and swiss sandwich, when he rolled his BlackBerry cursor over the envelope icon and opened an email from Veronica. For months, he had been unnerved at how transactional their relationship had become, but he was also keenly aware that there was only a certain extent to which she could ignore him. As a piece of mustard-streaked lettuce fell from his lip and onto the table’s metallic surface, he saw a new message at the top of his in-box: FW: Your Trip to Las Vegas (LAS). Veronica’s name skittered along the subject line, the letters in her message all lowercased, evasive like a row of bare toes avoiding the cold tiles of a public shower. The first line of the email read: “hope this works for you.” He knew that Veronica had booked their rooms at opposite ends of the hotel, had even put them on separate flights, but it did seem nice of her to hope that something would turn out well for him.
Still, Charlie didn’t understand this email. Hadn’t she already forwarded him the flight details? Without double-checking, he was sure it would work. Years ago, he had granted her permission to view his calendar, and it was updated compulsively by his secretary, so Veronica would know if he needed to be in London on one weekend or if on the next, he’d be in Hong Kong. It was once he scrolled past her sentence that he realized that she hadn’t been referring to the time of his flight at all, but to the fact that, without having consulted him, she had purchased a ticket for Nick, and not on her and Rocky’s flight, but on Charlie’s.
Charlie groaned. It was, from all angles, a terrible idea. Nick couldn’t sit at the tables when Charlie went out to casinos, and Veronica would refuse to take him to her spas and shows, and even if it turned out that Isabel, their sometimes housekeeper, had a passport, even she wouldn’t want to babysit Nick in Las Vegas. In fourth grade, Nick had been getting in trouble for riding the staff elevator at school until finally Charlie suggested they get him a doctor’s note for something severe but not debilitating, so that the teachers would stop sentencing him to detention. When the doctor, after meeting Nick, mentioned Adderall instead, Veronica gave Charlie a knowing look that infuriated him. She had lately been of the mindset that Charlie had ADHD. Charlie said it was ridiculous to treat mental illness as if it were only a fad that would eventually go out of vogue, like Rocky’s velour Juicy jumpsuits or Veronica’s Atkins diet. He knew it was only her newest way of rationalizing his drinking, his working, the things that she’d told him she hated about him. He got even more annoyed when he googled adult ADHD, and was told, by the pop-up banner, that it was time to take charge of his life, as if he’d spent the past forty-six years flailing somewhere just behind it, as if he hadn’t made his family millionaires before Rocky’s first year on earth.
“Is this seat taken?” A young woman in a shapeless black dress was pulling at the chair opposite him, its heavy feet dragging so that it made an unbearable squeaking across the floor. The sound was awful, like his hair being pulled. Lift it, Charlie wanted to yell. Everywhere, there were people around him, and everywhere, they never failed to irritate him. He liked to eat in private, but unless he sat upstairs behind his closed office door, it was impossible to avoid the crowds. Upstairs, he liked to put on NPR and listen to the news. When he was younger, he hated the news, found it a bore. But now, the world they were talking about seemed so far away that it was more like listening to grim fairy tales, and fairy tales were something he’d always enjoyed.
But even upstairs, he was liable to someone’s phone call or knock, and he would put his lunch on hiatus until it went cold. Anyway, how did this young woman know the seat wasn’t taken? She hadn’t waited for him to tell her no.
He looked at all the people standing by the deli counter, staring and typing helplessly into their phones. As he dislodged a compacted mass of bread that was stuck between his gums and back molars, he remembered how he had saved his son from a diagnosis that would have introduced him to uppers in early childhood, as if he didn’t already have the rest of his professional life to become acquainted with them. Standing next to Veronica, he had felt superior to her as they descended the doctor’s stairs onto Park Avenue, because for as much as she read and thought that she knew, there were just some things that she didn’t.
He rolled the ball compulsively over the email. Where did Veronica get off doing something like this? If he wanted to, he could leave her, but she would never be able to leave him. All of her threats were empty. If he and Veronica were to get divorced, he would still be the one putting Rocky through college, and then Nick would follow. As long as they stayed together, he’d support Veronica, too.
“Are you getting up?” A man with an impossibly clean-shaven face hovered over the table. He looked like he mustn’t have been a day older than twenty. Charlie sighed, balling up the parchment paper of his finished meal. Whereas everyone else left their trays on the table for the staff to clear, Charlie brought his with him to return at the counter. In the tip jar, he left a twenty-dollar bill and waited to make eye contact with the cashier so that he’d make sure to catch her smile. But when she looked up, her face was expressionless. Charlie looked away, a bit rankled. He opened the door to the lobby, and a flurry of sound overtook him. He wondered if next time he would leave a fifty. Then that bitch would smile.
She had remembered to wear deodorant, had applied it three times over, but Charlie was nowhere to be seen. When she saw Rocky and her mother standing outside the line to check bags, Maria’s breath was taken away. Rocky’s mother was more beautiful than she could have imagined. Maria tried not to stare as they passed through security, and when they finally arrived at the gate, Rocky’s mother sat down at the café. Maria watched as she smoothed the creases of her long silken dress, which was patterned with abstract oblong shapes, before sitting with both feet firmly planted. She called for the waiter without opening her menu. Rocky yanked on Maria’s arm.
“You seem so out of it,” Rocky said, lea
ding her to the newsstand.
They needed provisions: snacks, cigarettes, and reading materials. Maria leafed through copies of Teen Vogue and Seventeen and couldn’t decide what would be more useful to learn: the Hottest Trends of the Summer or the Best Makeup for All Shades of Skin. Rocky was paging through Cosmopolitan, whose cover boasted a new and improved guide to the Kama Sutra.
“Impossible,” Maria said, looking over Rocky’s shoulder as they stood in line to check out. On the page beneath Rocky’s finger, there was an image of a big ruby mouth frozen in tentative consideration of an apple. At the top of the page, in big black text, the headline read “How to Have an Orgasm (Every Single Time!).”
“You think it’s impossible?”
“Don’t you? I’ve never orgasmed with Andres.”
Rocky glanced at Maria’s hands. “Where’s your magazine?”
“I didn’t know which one to get.”
“Get both. It’s a four-hour plane ride, you know.”
Rocky underestimated—the total flight time was five hours and fifteen minutes. On the plane, they hardly spent twenty minutes looking through the magazines before they resigned them to the pockets of the seats in front of them. Rocky had already read the most interesting article in Cosmopolitan while she was waiting in line to pay for the rest of the pages, which were mostly an assortment of glued-up folds of paper that, once opened, were stained yellow on the inside and smelled, to Maria, like less-pungent versions of the Bath & Body Works lotions that Maria’s mother kept in a wicker basket in the bathroom.
“Let me try!” Maria yelled when she saw the perfumed sample pages, and Rocky watched in amusement as Maria reached over to grab the magazine from her hands and rub the paper all over her wrists and forearms.
“Try all of them,” she suggested. “Here. This one is Marc Jacobs.”
The stewardess offered them soda and complimentary snacks, and Maria accepted them all. “Let’s play a game,” Rocky said, caffeinated and jittery. “The favorite-thing game. Go.” They compiled a list of favorite superheroes and villains, favorite toppings on pizza, favorite type of mixed drink (which they both admitted was orange juice and vodka, a drink they agreed could be enjoyed for breakfast), as well as favorite seasons and three reasons why. Maria was on a roll, and in the middle of proclaiming why autumn was better than summer, when Rocky suddenly interrupted with a stark whisper.
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