They Could Have Named Her Anything

by Jimenez, Stephanie

“Yes,” her mother said. “One day.”

  But something was still bothering Maria, and hours later, she asked her mother for pictures.

  “Of what?”

  “Of you. When you were younger.”

  “How young?”

  “Like my age.”

  Her mother had only two pictures of her quinceañera in Ecuador, which she pulled out of the same folder kept under the bed. One was a photo of her sitting in a big wicker chair decorated in ribbon and purple organza. The other was a photo of several men and women lined up, staring solemnly into the camera, with Maria’s mother at the center. Months later, she explained to Maria, she was living in New York.

  “It was a going-away party as much as a quinceañera,” she said. In the photos, there were people Maria had never seen before. Women in bright ballroom dresses, men with bushy mustaches and severe looks on their faces. Maria’s mother showed her who her date was—a skinny, scared-looking boy standing off to the side in a pale-blue suit.

  “My father was already living in New York,” her mother said. “So that meant my grandfather thought it was his duty to protect me from boys. He spotted us down the street after the party. We were kissing, of course. And this man—keep in mind he sometimes used a cane to walk—started running. He ran so fast after my date, I couldn’t believe my eyes. Afterward, we joked that the day I tried to lose my virginity, my grandfather would run so fast to stop it, he’d never need a cane again.”

  Maria covered her mouth with her hand.

  “Who made that joke? You and your mom?”

  “No! Never! Mamí would not have appreciated that. That was a joke between me and Corina. Corina was such a laugh. It makes me smile just to think of her.” She held the photo a little closer to her face, rubbing the corners gently with her thumbs. “I wonder what Corina is doing now. We never spoke again after I left.”

  Maria watched as her mother carefully slid the photos back into the folder. On the back of one of them, Maria caught sight of a note. When she tried to hurriedly scan over the words, she realized she couldn’t, at least not quickly, because it was written in Spanish. Even though Maria had grown up with the knowledge that her mother was fluent in two languages, she had never thought about what that really meant. Lots of people in Queens spoke more than one language, but that wasn’t the case at Bell Seminary. Her mother had something that set her apart, that made her unique, that granted her entry to worlds that nobody at her school would ever come close to knowing—Corina, Ecuador, the purple organza. The father across seas, the way she adapted, the words of the old world and the new taking turns punctuating her life. Her mother had a talent that set her apart. A vocabulary Maria had no access to. More than that—a way of speaking and experiencing. Her mother had a skill.

  “Okay, mija,” she said, putting her hands on her knees. She looked like she was ready to stand up. “Anything else? Or can I put this stuff away?”

  Maria shook her head no. Later, Maria saw her mother and father eating from the same bowl of ice cream with mashed Chips Ahoy! cookies scattered like sprinkles on top. They were giggling, and Maria hurried past the television, but neither of them called after her.

  In her room, she tapped her nails on her keyboard. She had spent lots of time trying, in vain, to look up the places her parents came from, but now she had a different idea. The thought of it expanded rapidly, filling her like a cup, and she almost spilled out of her chair with excitement. She had never before looked up her name.

  A sea of Marias flooded the screen. Hundreds, then hundreds of thousands of them. The results narrowed a bit when she typed in her last name, but not by much. There were 70,000 Maria Rosarios.

  From all of those links and listings, she was able to see that there was a history to her name that extended past her little life, which at seventeen years old, still felt so brand-new that she sometimes couldn’t believe that she was really alive at all, and not just a face that appeared in her great-grandparents’ dreams, blinked away and forgotten upon waking.

  Take Maria itself—the most powerful patron saint, whose name is derived from the Hebrew word for rebellion.

  Take Rosario—not just a rosary, but a beautiful garden of roses. Maria felt herself burst into petals.

  And then together—María del Rosario—a name that was centuries old, given to girls during a Spanish festival celebrated in early October. Maria’s birthday was coming up now in March, but it didn’t matter, the day or the month. All of the Marias were different, born through all seasons of the year. They were artists, doctors, runners, designers. They were journalists, pianists, gardeners, bodybuilders. And yet here they all were, iterations of Maria Rosario, each of them tucked into various pockets of the globe, each filled with their own purpose and magic and light. Tears came to her eyes. They were legion. At last, Maria saw, she wasn’t alone.

  Ever since that grueling drive to the Southampton hospital, Rocky nodding off in the passenger seat, Ricky wheezy in the back, Maria weepy behind his seat, Charlie desperately wanted to apologize. He imagined telling the three of them in the car that sometimes a man makes a terrible mistake, that he hadn’t been thinking straight, but he knew it would sound like he was citing a movie. And even in their youth, they would see right through him. Charlie had felt achingly lucid when he first put his hands on Maria.

  What was worse was that Rocky didn’t seem interested in confronting him. If she had, it might have forced him into some kind of speech. But she hadn’t yet, and with each day that she didn’t, Charlie lived in a heightening state of panic at the possibility that Rocky might do something rash. If not with him, she would need to talk about it with someone, and would a seventeen-year-old know better than to tell her friends? What about her mother? He had actually started to wonder when Veronica would bring it up, and so he would end his phone calls with her on an anticipatory note, like how someone only just learning a language hangs on to a syllable for a moment too long. But she always hung up abruptly, and each time, Charlie was more astonished. He once had tepid fantasies about revenge, about Veronica knowing how terribly he could behave. Now, as the days went by, and it seemed like Veronica was still oblivious, Charlie realized he didn’t actually care what she knew or didn’t know about him. Every day, her opinion became less important.

  Still, he would need to talk to his daughter. Since the day at the hospital, they had said little more to each other than hello and good night. It was months later, on a day in early October, when Veronica, who had officially moved into the country house, called him and told him that Rocky was planning her campus visits and asked if he would arrange some sort of meeting, that he knew he could no longer put it off. The apartment, filled with sunlight, was quiet and empty as usual when he left on a Sunday afternoon to meet Rocky on Riverside Drive. He had been planning to take her out for breakfast, but she’d left early, she’d told him, to have brunch with a friend, so he was waiting at the corner of Eighty-Ninth Street and Broadway when a yellow taxi pulled up across from him, and he caught the first nacreous glimpses of Rocky’s arms. He wanted to rush across and help her step out, but at the intersection, the light was set to “Don’t Walk.” In an asymmetric black dress with a subtle buckle at the side, Rocky looked perfectly modern, if not ready for work, and he watched as she glanced at the sign, ignored it, and crossed. Charlie wanted to tell her the dress was a great choice, but just as she entered hearing distance, she spoke.

  “What is a provost?” she said.

  He laughed. “Ask him. I’m sure he’ll be happy to tell you.”

  “Are you joking? Is that funny to you? The college counselor says we need to be prepared.” Rocky frowned. “Being stupid is uncute.”

  Since when were high school students expected to know things like that? As Charlie regarded Rocky’s dress again, he wondered if Rocky thought that being stupid was just another thing you could wear or take off. Where had she gotten that word from—uncute?

  “Basically, he’s second in command,” Charl
ie said.

  Rocky nodded, seeming satisfied with this answer. Her hair looked darker than it did earlier in the summer, and Charlie saw that the highlights that once streaked her hair were gone. She wasn’t wearing sunglasses like she usually was. All of it together made her seem more serious, somber, but her eyes were still bright, and behind them, a million thoughts seemed to be churning, whirring in her mind, giving her face a youthful vibrancy. Next year at this time, Rocky would be enrolled in college. Charlie felt suddenly proud of her.

  “Rocky,” he said, clumsily, not fully knowing what he was about to do. “I never told you that I’m sorry.”

  They didn’t stop walking as they passed alternating white and brownstone town houses. Rocky cut in front of him to step past a fenced-off tree, and he found himself trailing behind her.

  “I wasn’t thinking straight. I was selfish. I wanted what I wanted.” His throat felt thick with mucus. He swallowed. “But I’ll never do anything like it again. I hope you can forgive me.”

  Abruptly, Rocky stopped. She looked at Charlie, her eyes aflame.

  “She isn’t innocent!” A tiny prickle of spit fell on his cheek. “She’s a greedy whore!”

  Charlie stopped in front of one of the town houses and leaned over its grainy banister. Whatever streak of maturity he thought he’d seen in Rocky’s eyes had been an illusion, a trick sculpted out of heat and sunlight. It hadn’t been the first illusion he’d seen. He thought of Maria on that first night in Vegas, a strand of hair catching on her protruding lip, accentuating her slight underbite. She asked him to go slower, and he’d twisted her meaning to suggest something tantric, an effort to stall a cosmological wish. He’d been wrong to pursue her, to manipulate her, but after a certain point, Rocky was right—it no longer felt like he was manipulating her at all. Her body reciprocated. She leaned in to his kiss. She told him she wanted to see him again. In retrospect, he should’ve stuck with the poetry, he should’ve never promised gifts, but he wouldn’t have guessed that she’d actually believe, from the low lights of that pool in Las Vegas, that he would pay for her college tuition. Gifts were normal for women, even big gifts—it was the only reason Veronica had ever been reluctant to leave him—but he never planned to offer anyone hush money beside a hospital bed.

  “So you won’t tell your mother?” Charlie asked.

  “Ha,” Rocky said. They passed a row of trees whose fallen leaves made a scraggly rug beneath them. Under Rocky’s heel was a leaf so red it looked like a blood smattering on the sidewalk.

  “Do you know why I’ll never tell her?”

  She stopped and looked into his face.

  “Because I don’t give a fuck about you. I don’t give a fuck about either of you, or about how shitty you are to each other. You’re both awful. You both disgust me to the core. Both of you can do whatever you want to each other. I’m sick of pretending to care.”

  “I’m going to make believe I didn’t hear that, Rocky.”

  “Which part?” Rocky said. “That I don’t care about you? Or that you’re disgusting? Here, let me say it louder. You’re disgusting, Dad. Complete, utter trash. You’re the most vile man I’ve ever met.”

  With her dark hair and thin lips like a ribbon held taut, Rocky looked so much like Veronica. It was amazing that he hadn’t noticed their resemblance before. Both she and Rocky were so reticent and stoic, like women from old portraits, from a different era. They were nothing like the women in his family, who could be most aptly described as larger-than-life, and Veronica liked to credit her composure to her Russian ancestry, but Charlie had always scoffed at this suggestion, accusing Veronica of putting imagined cultural barriers between them that didn’t at all exist. The latest barrier that Veronica insisted on, however, was all too real and material: he agreed that after the divorce, which would be finalized in a month, the country house was all hers. She’d get to have the kind of Martha Stewart Living life she always romanticized having left behind when they moved out of Westchester. Now, they were only half a block away from where the provost owned his Manhattan property, and Charlie blinked hard as he reached into his pocket and pulled out a pack of cigarettes. As he regarded his daughter’s face, he couldn’t help but think of his wife.

  “Well, I love you,” he said, gripping his lighter so tightly the tips of his fingers turned white.

  “Stop that,” Rocky said. “It’ll leave a bad impression.”

  Obediently, Charlie returned the cigarette to his pack. She was right; it was better that he didn’t smoke, anyway. He was terribly exhausted, and he didn’t know if his calloused thumb could make the lighter strike without breaking the skin. He imagined shaking the provost’s hand, blood seeping out from the tip of his fingers, creasing into his lifeline. They hobbled up the small hill along Riverside Drive, and Rocky flashed everyone—the doorman, the elevator handler, the provost, and even, after a moment, Charlie—what could only be termed a most winning smile. They were ostensibly there because of the important connections Charlie had made, but as he regarded Rocky, she seemed to resemble Veronica less and less, until he finally had the feeling that everything this strange and beautiful young woman had in her life, from her fortitude to her interviewing prowess to her impressive style, was something she had nurtured into mastery for years—and had very little to do with either of them, not her mother and not with him.

  CHAPTER 24

  It was early March, and because the envelope was printed in gold lettering, Miguel mistook it for a college acceptance letter. It came in a big manila folder, like they were told the college acceptances would. He had been anxious about the financial aid package, but he hadn’t admitted that to the dean of students, whom they’d been asked to meet with in September, at the start of Maria’s senior year, and whose bubbly demeanor and curly doll hair made him think of a Cabbage Patch baby, the kind that Maria had swaddled for years. The letter hadn’t fit under the door, so the mailman had thrown it inside the empty planter where they usually kept their spare key.

  When Maria brought it to him at the table, he was already dreading looking inside. He didn’t want to see the double-digit numbers next to “Due Now.” She was smiling, something rare to see. It wasn’t often that he felt like he pleased her, and earlier that week, he had gone to the bank to prepare for this moment exactly. After all her years at that elite private school, he had come to the conclusion that he couldn’t justify not allowing Maria to go to the best college she got into—not only because he had seen how hard she had worked, but because he himself could recall how hard he had fought to secure her admission. So what if nobody else appreciated the craftsmanship in the chapel—he did. They had spent summers together hunched over the dining room table, hunched over math workshop problems for her standardized tests just so that Maria could go to Bell Seminary, so that she could later attend an amazing college. They couldn’t give up now. Since August, Analise had started working every day. In September, he’d been given a raise. He knew that with enough crunching and budgeting and adjusting, they would be able to figure it out. At the bank, he had learned about parent PLUS loans. They discussed a second mortgage, and the banker noticed when he and Analise exchanged a terse look. The banker tried to reassure them, promising that they could always plunge deeper and deeper into debt. Okay, Miguel thought, as Maria wielded what he thought was the financial aid letter, let’s see how much damage will be done.

  “Hi,” she said. She kissed him on the cheek. “We got a letter.”

  Still sweating from his long day at work, he plunged his fork into his rice. His new position didn’t pay as much as his last, but it was getting better, and his boss had suggested he acquire another license that could help him earn a higher role in his department. He’d been surprised at how the prospect of studying excited him. You seem happier, Analise said with suspicion one day, and he took her hand because money was one thing, but he was sorry that he’d made his happiness so volatile as to make her think it could go away for good.

 
“Oh yeah?” he said now to Maria. “Read it.”

  “Dear Mr. Miguel Rosario,” she said, her eyes barreling into the paper. “We are writing to confirm the settlement offer made to you on behalf of Jenison Consulting LLC. We and Jenison Consulting LLC agree to settle your account noted above for an amount of $42,000. Additionally, if you so wish, the union will reinstate you as a contractor in our partner building at 450 Broadway, effective immediately.”

  Maria put the letter down, her eyes glistening.

  “It’s great news, Pa.” Maria smoothed the edges of the letter. “I know you like your new job, but at least this is good, because now it’s like, you have options. And either way, you don’t need to use that money for my college. You heard the dean say that financial aid will cover some of my tuition, anyway. And I’ll take out loans. I’ve been applying to some essay contests, too. There’s actually one sponsored by Taco Bell. As long as they don’t look too hard into my employment history, I might get a small scholarship from them. But they probably won’t do that, right? That stupid Taco Bell on Queens Boulevard closed down, so good luck trying to get ahold of them. I don’t think they’ll look that hard, anyway, right? I think they’ll probably give it to me.” She was pacing the table as she spoke, and now she steadied her hands on the back of an empty chair. “It’s not impossible, I don’t think.”

  He watched as she folded the letter back into the envelope and placed it to the left of his plate. Maria was shaking, bouncing from one foot to the other, waiting for him to respond. Of course, he had already known what the letter would say because the lawyer had called days ago to tell him first, but it was in earnestness that Maria thought the future of the family hinged on this moment. In reality, there’d been several defining moments, and he and Analise had been experiencing them, parsing them, contending with them all throughout Maria’s young life. He was reticent with his children for a reason, and he wanted to toughen them, but he didn’t want to break them, and here his daughter was, shivering with anticipation. It was so endearing. It made him think of the summers he’d blow up a two-foot-tall kiddie pool by mouth. She’d humorlessly wear a pair of flippers into the water, and when she ran into the house with them still on, she’d leave enormous wet triangles trailing behind her as Analise screamed in rage. The letter had mentioned another position, but he wasn’t even sure that he wanted his old job back—once he’d begun to swim forward in his new workplace, he was noticed and promoted. He soon found that his cage wasn’t as small as he’d thought. That little pool he used to blow up for a little Maria, well, it was only pathetic if you saw it that way. Back then, she had made it her world.