They Could Have Named Her Anything

by Jimenez, Stephanie

  What if she could walk from one end of the boulevard to the other end? What if it went on forever? What if it led to China, the way they said tunnels dug in the ground could? Here she was, in one of the most populous cities in the world, and she had this expanse of concrete all to herself, and it dwarfed the trees and the buildings and even the clouds, and suddenly, Maria knew how lucky she was. Maria wanted to keep it with her, tuck it into a pocket and paste it inside her purple journal under her bed, so that one day she could come back to what it was like to walk down Queens Boulevard at this very moment. She could tell she was overwhelmed with emotion, and she wondered what was happening inside her. Could it be that because she’d been changed on the inside, because she’d glimpsed her own beauty, everything around her had also changed?

  Emerson said that you could find infinite beauty in nature, but Maria knew you could do the same thing in the city, only that nobody really knew how. Nobody knew how to look at Queens Boulevard like she did, and it was special that she’d been able to develop this taste. Nobody said it was easy to like a big, ugly blip of asphalt and pavement, but nobody said it was easy to like a quiche, either. It was when you closed your eyes, and you imagined the person who kneaded the dough for the crust, whisked the cracked eggs and the cream, scraped the mixture into the pan, dotted the butter on top as it baked, that finally, you understood that your mind needed to step ahead of your tongue, of your feeling. That’s how Queens Boulevard was, in a way.

  At least, that’s how Charlie might have explained it. When she told him that she thought Las Vegas was fine and that the big fountain outside the hotel was fine, too, he wouldn’t let her upstairs until she saw it again. Close your eyes, he had said, once they were standing in front of it.

  And so Maria had closed her eyes and listened, again, to a song she couldn’t understand. She’d already stood in this exact place with Rocky, and they had watched the water rise and fall in a series of slaps, their chins in their hands. But this time, she felt Charlie’s presence behind her, warm, and right as she was about to lose faith, a tremendous gust of wind made her open her eyes. The water shot several yards in the air, and as the song soared, her heart leapt and flew away with it. Oh my God, Maria said, turning around. She looked into his eyes. I felt it.

  He grinned, but afterward, she kept wondering about why it felt so different the second time around, the time that she wasn’t with Rocky. She wondered what had changed, as she got on the flight home. She wondered on the drive back from the airport. She wondered in the morning when she woke up and got dressed in front of her mother for her first day of work.

  It was hope, Maria realized, walking down Queens Boulevard. It was simple, innocent hope. She saw herself, for the first time that whole year and perhaps her whole life, racing toward a brilliant future.

  At Taco Bell, the manager hurried her inside. She was holding a thin white binder.

  “This has everything you need to know,” she said. “Take a look at it when you have a chance. But for right now, just shadow Jimmy as he takes the gentleman’s order.”

  Maria looked at the boy her manager pointed at. Jimmy was tall and dark; he looked like he’d spent every day of the summer so far lying on Rockaway Beach. He was trying to keep eye contact with Maria and the manager even as he was taking someone’s order. Something in his posture changed as he was looking at Maria. Maria could tell he was interested.

  Maria stood with him, like the manager told her. She watched him press so many buttons so fast, she was actually somewhat impressed. She was just about to ask Jimmy if she could give it a try herself, when someone started screaming.

  She wasn’t even old. She wasn’t too shabbily dressed, either. Maria could understand bits and pieces of what she said, enough to understand she was speaking not in Spanish, but in the language of the insane. Around her, people’s eyes were growing wider, and mothers hugged their kids closer to their chests.

  The manager’s eyes were bulging. “This shit again! No!” She looked at Jimmy like he’d just made a suggestion. “I’m not calling the cops. They only make things worse!”

  Maria and Jimmy both stared at the manager in silence, but it was Maria whom she took a step toward.

  “What’s she saying?”

  “I—I don’t know.”

  “Aren’t you Mexican?”

  Maria’s cheeks burned. “I’m Ecuadorian. And Puerto Rican.”

  “That’s close enough.”

  Maria looked pleadingly at Jimmy.

  “I don’t know Spanish,” he said.

  With her legs feeling like lead, she maneuvered around the counter. As she got closer to the woman, the smell got worse. Around her, people glared.

  “Señora . . . ,” Maria said, hesitating. “Por favor . . . deje de gritar.”

  The woman spat on her. The whole fast-food restaurant took a collective breath, even the walls, even the tiles on the floor. In that vacuum of sound, the spit trailed down Maria’s shirt at a rapid rate. The woman saw then how Maria’s face changed. Triumphant, she sat down and opened the taco she’d ordered several minutes ago.

  Maria ripped the shirt off, revealing her white spaghetti-strap tank top. She let the Taco Bell polo fall to the floor.

  “I quit,” she yelled. The whole store could hear her, but the manager didn’t say anything as she stormed toward the door.

  Once there, Maria looked back one last time. This time, Jimmy waved.

  When he came downstairs to meet her outside his apartment, Andres’s mouth was tight: a zipped line that ran from one cheekbone to the other. People were lingering out in the park, and a woman was scooping red chunks of sugary ice into a paper cup across the street, and everywhere there was the sound of people celebrating, but Andres’s eyes were mean.

  “Nice sunglasses,” he said in a way that suggested the opposite. He looked her up and down.

  “Thanks,” she said. Using her thumb knuckle, Maria pushed the sunglasses farther up her nose. Facing Andres behind the tinted lenses, she felt a little braver knowing he couldn’t see all of her.

  “There you go acting like one of those white bitches.”

  “I don’t even know what that means.”

  “Like, I don’t even know what that means.” He spoke in an exaggerated Valley Girl accent, rolling his eyes and flipping an imaginary tuft of blond hair. “Fucking cigarettes are disgusting.”

  “Smoking cigarettes does not make me white. I’m not white.”

  “No, you’re just trying to be.”

  Maria was used to the accusation. If she wanted to straighten her hair, it was because she wanted to look like a white girl. If she didn’t want to eat his mom’s dinner, it was because she thought she was white. If she smoked cigarettes on an excruciatingly hot summer day, it was for no other reason than that she thought she was white—it was among the many ludicrous, inexplicable things that only a white girl would do. Usually, Maria just quietly laughed him off.

  “I’m sorry I go to a good school.” She glanced at him, assessing the potency of her words before continuing, like measuring some spice for a debut dish before deciding to pour it all in. He didn’t look upset yet, so she continued. “And that I’m gonna go to a really great college.”

  Andres turned away and walked down the street.

  “Hey! Where are you going?”

  “Fuck you!” he yelled over his shoulder.

  “Andres! Wait for me!”

  He must have been pleased to know he’d made her run after him, because when she caught up to him, the tightness was gone from his mouth.

  “You’re mad condescending,” he said. “Your brother’s the same way. My boy says hi to him and he doesn’t even respond.”

  “What does my brother have to do with anything?”

  “I’m saying, it must run in your family.”

  “Ricky doesn’t think he’s better than you,” she said, trying to ignore Andres’s incredulous face. She thought of Ricky standing in the doorway to her room, his
wet sneakers crunching against the hallway floor, and remembered the last thing he’d said to her. It still was a tender wound. “He’s just looking out for me,” she said.

  They reached the end of the block and were standing outside a deli. A couple of other boys were standing there, watching bicycle wheels spin by.

  “That’s why he can’t say hi? Because he doesn’t like that we’re dating?” Maria could tell that the boys next to them were listening to their conversation. They seemed to be pausing between their sentences every time Andres spoke.

  “You don’t have a sister,” she said, her voice lowered. “You don’t get it.”

  Inside the deli, Andres picked up a bag of BBQ chips as Maria looked around, inspecting all the offerings. There were speckled bananas and plums in cardboard boxes on the floor. Hovering over both piles of fruit were little black clouds of flies. She looked up at a wire crate full of pastries, their white frosting smeared all over the faces of their plastic wrappers. She flipped them over to read the calorie counts, and then flipped over a few more. From behind her, she heard Andres groan.

  “Yo, can you hurry up?”

  She grabbed a bag of Cheetos and paid at the counter with change.

  Outside, Maria noticed a sign posted on the door. It spelled out the letters “E-B-T.” When Maria was far enough from the deli that she was sure the boys outside couldn’t hear her, past the Texas fried chicken shop and Fresca Tortilla food truck, and after they crossed the street near Chubby Taco, she looked up at Andres.

  “What’s ‘EBT’ mean?” she asked, waiting for his reaction.

  Andres turned to Maria, his face scrunched up like a dish towel. “Yo,” he said. “Are you—” But his voice trailed off, and he took a step back and squinted at her, as if there were something horrible on her face and he needed to step away to get a better look at it. Maria had the sense that he was trying to decipher her.

  “You know karma’s a bitch, right?”

  “Shut up. Nothing is going to happen to me.”

  “Yeah, that’s why you had to get a job at Taco Bell, right? Because everything’s fine?”

  Maria frowned. “I just quit, asshole.”

  “Yeah,” Andres said. “When you and your whole family is out on the street, don’t come crying to me.”

  “Fuck you, Andres.”

  “No, fuck you.”

  Maria felt her whole body rev up in rage. It was Maria’s mother who had said she never had to and never would use food stamps to feed her kids. She said she never was on Medicaid—and she said it with her head lifted, her voice unwavering, so that Maria knew that she should be proud. Maria understood, had understood from the day that she first met Andres, that these were the things that distinguished her from him, and she didn’t like when Andres tried to point out that maybe she was wrong, that maybe these things were fast disappearing, that maybe things could very quickly change.

  CHAPTER 16

  Her mother was vacuuming in the living room, wearing an old pajama shirt of Bugs Bunny’s faded face, when Maria unlocked the front door. Maria kissed her on the cheek hello. Usually she hated the sound of the vacuum—her mother used one of those clunky industrial ones from the 1980s. But today Maria stood in the living room for a long while until she finally noticed her mother’s stare—that even as she dragged the vacuum back and forth across the carpet, she hadn’t taken her eyes off Maria.

  “Where’s your Taco Bell shirt?”

  “I got spat at. I quit.”

  Maria’s mother was silent for a long time. “Your father is pissed at you.” Her voice was barely a whisper. “He’s in his bedroom.”

  “Pissed?” Maria sniggered. “Why?”

  Maria didn’t like seeing her mother dressed down. She was usually so careful with makeup whenever she left the house. The Anatomy of the Human Body was the name of the book they had studied in class last year, and her mother could be exhibit A, with all that unpainted fleshy skin around her eyes branching out into a perfect crow’s foot. As she looked uneasily at her mother’s eyes, she could see how their gaze had now lowered to where she pulled her jeans up by the belt hooks.

  “What? Are you trying to say I’m gaining weight?” Maria hated when her mother sized her up like a turkey to bake.

  “No seas tan exagerada!” Maria’s mother crossed her arms. “And even if you were, what’s the big deal? Why are you obsessed with that? Go eat before your father comes out here.”

  “I’m not obsessed,” Maria said.

  In the dining room, Maria closed her eyes as she ripped into her first bite. The steak cutlet was resistant to coming apart, so she chewed and chewed, savoring, enjoying, until she had sucked all the mayo out dry. She snapped the cap open for a second dousing. Then she took another bite, the tomato slipped under her tongue, and she clutched the rest of the bread in her hand. Strips of onions fell; she popped them into her mouth.

  Before she had finished swallowing, she heard the bedroom door open, and then the unmistakable sound of her father’s sneakers squeaking against the floor.

  “Maria.”

  She had already pushed her plate away.

  “Hey!” His voice was louder. She raised her eyes to meet his, and his forehead was drenched in sweat. The front of his shirt was dark from where the sweat had soaked through it. It wasn’t any less hot in the dining room than it was outside, and the insides of Maria’s thighs were so slick that they kept slipping off each other when she tried to cross her legs.

  “Hey,” Maria said, stopping just short of his name, and already she knew she’d made a mistake.

  “Where have you been?”

  “Here,” she said, not looking up from the table. She reached for her sandwich and took too big a bite. The bread was stale, hard to chew, the meat rubbery in her mouth.

  “You were in Vegas,” he said. “What were you doing there?”

  “Huh? Nothing.”

  “Maria, tell me something.” He waited until she finally looked up. He was wearing a backpack, as if he had forgotten to take it off when he came home from work. “Why did you quit your job today?”

  Maria looked back down at her plate. She put the sandwich down into the cesspool that the atrophied tomato now made. An ant ran across the table, making figure eights.

  “Because,” Maria said.

  “Because what?”

  She picked up the sandwich again. The ant circled the edge of her plate. She watched as it ran away from her crumpled napkin.

  “Because,” she said. “I wanted to.”

  Suddenly, something scraped by Maria’s face, kissing her eyelids so that it stung. A wad of chewed bread, sopping with juice, came out of her mouth and fell pathetically onto the plate. As if on call, water welled up to her eyes, and she stared at the deflated backpack that had landed near her feet at the floor.

  “Why would you do that?” She stood from the table, her fists clenched at her side. “What’s wrong with you!”

  “Let me make this clear to you. You will not leave this house anymore until you learn to have some responsibility. You are not leaving this house until you get another job.”

  “You’re crazy!” Maria said without lowering her voice, but her mind was racing. “You can’t make me do anything.”

  “We all do things we don’t want to do, Maria. It’s time you stop acting like a baby.”

  “But I don’t want to work!” Suddenly the room was a blur. Maria’s tears were pooling. “I don’t want to work at a fucking Taco Bell! I want to study for my SAT this summer! I want to go to college!”

  Maria charged past her father, letting the rickety screen door smash against the doorframe. Outside, she had just unlocked the front gate to the house when she heard him screaming after her.

  “If you leave right now, don’t bother coming back. Do you hear me, Maria? Oíste, Maria!”

  There were people out on the street, and Maria tried not to look as they stared at her running down the gray block, her legs pumping over the sid
ewalk where hardened pieces of dog shit were packed like caulk into the cracks and crevices.

  That night, Maria listened to her father. After stopping inside a deli and buying a few items of comfort—sour straws and Sprite—she headed to Jonathan’s apartment. Jonathan’s roommates constantly seemed to change, but it was the only place she could walk to in Queens where she knew she could stay for the night. She had to wait a long time before Jonathan answered the buzzer. He listened to Maria’s story, and when he hesitated before answering her, Maria was visibly hurt.

  “Where do you want me to go, then?”

  “Don’t be silly,” he said. “Of course you can stay. You take my bed, okay? I’ll sleep on the couch.” He took a blanket from the bed and left the pillow for Maria.

  Despite Jonathan’s goodwill, Maria couldn’t sleep. The bed was hot, and the mattress was harder than the one she was used to at home. When she checked her phone, it was only 2:40. She spent the next hours falling asleep in short, arid spells—down she’d barrel into them and then back up into waking. She’d check her phone and would be grieved to see that only ten minutes had gone by. Maria got up and went to the living room. The glare of the TV screen lit up the whole room—Jonathan must have been awake. From behind the divider, Maria announced herself, afraid of what she would find on the other side.

  “Hey,” she said.

  “Hey.”

  She stepped across and was relieved to see that it was only Tekken. Jonathan held on tight to the controller, even when she sat down across from him on the couch.

  “What’s up? Why are you awake?”

  “I can’t sleep. I can never really sleep. My head just starts racing.”

  “Same thing happens to me. That’s why I just stay up all night instead.”

  “What about when you work?”

  “When I work, I try to go to sleep by midnight.”

  The hardwood floor was unexpectedly cold, like the tiles in a public bathroom. Maria fidgeted. “Hey,” she said. “Remember how you said to hook you up with one of my friends? Do you really think it’s not that bad for a girl to get with an older guy?”