Mayor
Not long after New Year’s, my tía Gloria called my mom to say that her divorce had gone through.
“Esteban is no longer part of my life,” she said.
My mom burst into tears.
“Why are you crying?” my aunt asked. “It’s good news. And listen to this—he has to pay me!”
“What do you mean?” my mom asked, sniffling.
“I’m getting eighty thousand dollars from the settlement!”
My mom’s tears dried up immediately. Her voice turned serious. “How much?”
“It’s from that summer house he had. The one his father gave him that we never went to. He has to liquidate it and I’m getting the money!”
“And,” my mom told us over dinner that night, “she’s giving some of it to us.” She was pink in the face, barely able to contain herself.
My dad wiped his mouth with a napkin. “How much is she giving us? Fifty dollars?” He smirked.
“Well, that was nasty,” my mom said. “You’re going to feel bad when I tell you the real number.”
I peeked at my dad, who was waiting with the napkin clutched in his hand. My mom started eating again, delicately picking the capers off the rice with the tines of her fork.
She took at least four bites before my dad finally said, “Well? Don’t keep it a secret.”
A grin played on my mom’s lips.
“Never mind, then,” my dad said.
“You don’t want to know?”
“Why would she be giving us money anyway?”
“Because we need it.”
“Who needs it? Not us. We’re fine.”
“We’re fine? Now we’re fine? For months you’ve been talking about how you might lose your job, but now you’re telling me we’re fine?”
“Yes.”
“Unbelievable.”
My dad shoveled rice into his mouth, probably to stop himself from saying anything else.
But my mom couldn’t let it go. “I’m only saying we could use the money.”
My dad dropped his fork onto his plate with a clatter. “Jesus, Celia! I told you we don’t need it! What’s she giving us? A hundred dollars? Two hundred dollars? We don’t need it!”
“If you don’t want to take it, you don’t have to! I’ll just keep it for myself, then.”
“What is that supposed to mean?”
“What I said.”
“You want to leave?”
“Who said anything about leaving?”
“You take this, I take that. Is that what you’re doing? Just like Gloria?”
My mom rolled her eyes.
But my dad was in a groove. He lifted his plate from the table and slammed it down, scattering rice and capers and peppers and chicken across the floor. “Goddamn it, Celia! How many times do I have to tell you that I will take care of this family? What do you think I’m doing out there every day? You think I’m working my ass off for fun?” He stood, toppling his chair.
My mom pursed her lips and stared at her plate.
He reached across the table and seized both of her wrists. “Look at me when I’m talking to you!”
But as soon as she did, my dad threw her wrists back at her in disgust.
“I don’t know how many times …,” he muttered, shaking his head. Then he turned, using his leg to sweep aside the chair, which was on its back on the floor, stepped over the food, and walked out of the kitchen.
The clock on the wall ticked faintly. The glass bottles of vinegar and hot sauce that my mom kept on the shelves inside the refrigerator door rattled. I felt embarrassed for my mom, who sat across from me screwing up her face like she was determined not to cry, but I stayed absolutely silent, waiting to see what would happen next.
Finally my mom said quietly, “Mayor, finish your chicken.”
TWO DAYS LATER, my dad and I learned the news: Tía Gloria was giving us ten thousand dollars. After the heat between my parents died down, my mom blurted out the number during dinner. My dad nearly choked on his food.
“I can’t believe it,” my mom kept saying.
“Well, we’ve probably given her almost as much money over the years,” my dad said once he’d recovered from the shock.
“Ten thousand dollars, Rafa? Come on.”
“We did what we could,” my dad said.
“Of course we did. And now she’s doing the same. It’s just that she can afford to do more. Ten thousand dollars! I can’t believe it.”
It didn’t take my dad quite as long to wrap his head around the idea. The morning the money landed in my parents’ bank account, my dad said, “I think we should buy a car.”
“A what?” my mom sputtered as she snapped a piece of bacon and popped it in her mouth.
“Nothing fancy,” my dad said. “I’m not talking about an Alfa Romeo here. But a car. Something that runs.”
He was happy, I could tell, at the mere thought.
“A car?” my mom asked, dumbfounded.
“Yes. You’ve heard of it? Four wheels. Takes gasoline.”
It was no secret that since he was a boy, my dad had lusted after cars, and the pinnacle of his obsession would have been to own one. Once, he bought an issue of Autoweek at the Newark Newsstand, and for the past few years he’d consoled himself by flipping through it while he lay on the couch, licking his thumb before he turned each thin, glossy page, staring for what seemed like hours at a sleek black Maserati or a balloonish blue Bugatti. Enrique and I used to make fun of him about it, but even when the pages eventually started falling out, my dad just taped them together and flipped through it again.
“But what will we do with a car?” my mom asked. She looked at my dad now with mild amusement, as if he had just suggested they buy an elephant.
“What do you think?” my dad said. “We’ll drive it.”
“Where?”
“Anywhere. You could drive to the Pathmark.”
“I don’t know how to drive.”
“You’ll learn.”
“Can I drive it?” I asked.
“You don’t have a license yet,” my dad said.
“But when I get one, I mean.”
“Rafa, be serious,” my mom went on. “We don’t need a car. We could go to Panamá ten times with that money.”
My dad rubbed his chin. He looked at the two of us, sitting there, eating breakfast. I could tell, and I’m sure my mom could, too, that he had made up his mind.
“We’re getting a car,” he said.
THE AUTO DEALERSHIPS in our town were on Cleveland Avenue. Cars waxed and gleaming, plastic pennant flags crisscrossed over the lots. But of course, because my dad was always looking for a bargain, Cleveland Avenue wasn’t where we went.
We took a bus instead to a used-car lot that my dad had found through an ad in the newspaper. It was in the middle of nowhere, and the winter sun shone over the acres and acres of land that surrounded it. The hard grass crunched under our feet as we walked and the wind squealed, tearing holes through the air.
My mom grimaced and pulled the collar of her coat up around her face. “Is it supposed to snow today?” she asked.
My dad was already way ahead of us.
“It’s supposed to snow?” I said, excited by the prospect.
“I don’t know. I’m just asking. I can’t believe it’s January and we haven’t even had flurries yet.”
I looked up at the sky. Even though the air was frigid, it seemed to me like the sun was too bright for snow, but maybe I was wrong. I hoped I was wrong.
The only reason I’d come was because my dad thought he might need a translator. I told him, “You use English every day.” But my dad had argued that he didn’t know the language of cars. To him, everything had its own language—the language of breakfast, the language of business, the language of politics, and on and on. In Spanish he knew all the languages, but for as long as he’d been speaking English, he believed he knew it only in certain realms. He never talked about cars with
anyone in English, he said. Therefore, he didn’t know the language. It was no use explaining to him that I didn’t exactly spend my days talking about cars with people, either. To him, I knew all the languages of English the way he did those of Spanish. And as proud as he was that I was so good at one, I think he was also ashamed that I wasn’t better at the other.
The cars were in a big cluster, parked at odd angles, some with their tires in a rut, some without tires at all. My dad walked through the maze of them, his hands in his pockets, and examined them silently.
After a few minutes, a small, gray-haired man in a plaid jacket came out to greet us.
“G’morning,” he said, shaking my dad’s hand. “How can I help you folks today?”
“We want to buy a car,” my dad said.
The man nodded. “We’ve got a few. D’jda have something in particular in mind? A sedan or a wagon? A truck maybe?”
“I like something fast,” my dad said.
“A sports car?” the man asked.
My mom tugged my dad’s sleeve like some kind of warning that he’d better not get too carried away. Predictably, my dad ignored her.
“Do you have anything Italian?” my dad asked, as if he hadn’t just seen everything on the lot.
“An Italian sports car?” The man’s eyes widened. “ ’Fraid not. What we’ve got here is mostly American or Japanese. There’s a few Volkswagens in the bunch. But Volkswagen’s about as European as you’re gonna get. I have one, about fifteen years old, that still runs about as good as Secretariat when she was in her prime. Transmission’s manual, so you could probably crank it up, get her going pretty speedy. You wanna take a look?”
I doubted my dad understood everything the man said, but he followed as the man led us to the back corner of the field where a small car, brown like cocoa powder, sat in the sun.
“Here she is,” the man said. “Just got her last week from a fellow down in Bear. Not much wrong with her as far as I can tell. There’s a dent in the hood and the seat belts are a little slack, but the lights work, gearshift is smooth as silk, and it’s got power steering. Only thirty-two thousand miles. Little bit of rust around the wheel wells, as you can see, but the radio works. AC still gets cold. Not that you need it this time of year.” He chuckled. “She’ll probably last you another ten years. A real beauty if you ask me.”
I wouldn’t have gone that far. The car was small and unspectacular. But compared to the rest of the inventory, it might as well have been a Lamborghini, and I could tell by the way my dad was eyeing it that he was hooked.
“How much?” he asked.
“We run the Kelley Blue Book values on all these, so our prices are fair.”
“How much?” my dad asked again.
“Twenty-three hundred,” the man said.
My mom made a noise.
“You got that?” the man asked.
My dad, suddenly a master negotiator, shrugged. “We were just looking,” he said.
“You aren’t gonna find much better than this,” the man said, patting the car’s hood.
My dad peeked in the passenger-side window.
“Twenty-two hundred,” the man offered. “Times are tough. I’ll give you folks a break.”
My dad wandered around to the other side of the car and checked out the view through the driver’s-side window after smudging some frost away with the heel of his hand.
My mom shivered against the wind. “Rafa,” she said.
The old man glanced at her, apparently interpreting this as my mom’s way of telling my dad that it was time to go, because he said, “Okay. Two thousand even. That’s the best I can do. And you can drive her off the lot today.”
My dad took one more lap around the car, the sunlight bouncing off its rear windshield. Then he asked, “Do you take a check?”
WE DROVE HOME, two thousand dollars poorer, in our new Volkswagen Rabbit. In that big field, the old man, whose name we learned after we agreed to buy the car was Ralph Mason, gave my dad a quick lesson in the vagaries of manual transmission. My mom and I sat in the backseat as Mr. Mason, from the passenger side, took my dad through the gears, telling him when to depress the clutch and when to let it go. “Take her up!” Mr. Mason would shout. “Give her gas!” And my dad would obey the best he could. He was a mess at first, and each time the car twitched my mom would exclaim, “Ay!” but he took to the basic coordination of it surprisingly easily. After ten minutes, Mr. Mason declared my dad a natural. “Best student I’ve ever had,” he said, clapping my dad on the shoulder, and my dad beamed. In the backseat, my mom rolled her eyes.
My dad didn’t stall once on the drive home. Of course, he never made it above thirty miles per hour, either, even when we got on the stretch of Route 141 between I-95 and Kirkwood Highway. He crept onto 141 cautiously, like a beetle onto the tip of a branch, and kept a steady pace even though all the other cars in existence were flying past us at warp speed, honking as they swerved by.
“What are you doing?” my mom asked, buckled into her seat belt in the front.
My dad, focused on the road ahead, said nothing.
“Everyone’s passing us!”
“Let them,” he said, gripping the steering wheel with both hands now that we were in gear.
“No, this is not good, Rafa. You have to keep up.”
“The speed limit is fifty,” I said, trying to be helpful.
My mom peered at the speedometer. “You’re only going twenty-five!”
Again, my dad said nothing. He offered no explanation, no defense. He just focused on the road ahead and on steering the car.
A semi-truck roared by, sounding a long honk as it did. From on high, the driver gave us the finger.
“I can’t look,” my mom said, putting her hand over her eyes. “This is awful.”
“Give it gas!” I said, affecting the voice of Mr. Mason.
“Both of you,” my dad said. “I know what I’m doing.”
“I hope we don’t see anyone we know,” my mom said.
“We’re on the highway, Celia, not at a party.”
“This is so embarrassing!”
“No one we know even has a car,” my dad pointed out.
“We’re not going to have one for much longer either if you don’t go faster.”
“I know what I’m doing.”
“It’s dangerous, Rafa! Everyone has to go around us.”
I had been glancing out the back window every now and then, watching people switch lanes and flash their headlights at us. At that moment, I saw a car that had been coming up behind us in our lane swerve out to the side just before it reached us. The driver hadn’t realized until too late how slow we were going, or else he had miscalculated how fast he would catch up to us. He skidded onto the shoulder as my dad, totally unaware, kept moving us forward. The driver righted the car, put on his turn signal, and shot back into the traffic at the first opening. He careened around us and, as he passed by, yelled out his open window, “Learn how to fucking drive!”
My mom slumped in her seat. “Ay Dios,” she said.
“It’s a good thing Enrique’s not here,” I said.
“We would never hear the end of it,” my mom agreed.
“We’re almost there,” my dad said.
“Where?” my mom asked.
“The exit.”
And when we pulled off, two and a half miles later, my dad expertly brought the gears down to first, to idle at a red light. My mom sat up.
“You don’t understand,” my dad said. “They stop you.”
“Who? What are you talking about?” my mom asked.
“That’s why I was being cautious.”
“Who stops you?”
“The police. If you’re white, or maybe Oriental, they let you drive however you want. But if you’re not, they stop you.”
“Who told you that?”
“The guys at the diner. That’s what they say. If you’re black or if you’re brown, they automatically think
you’ve done something wrong.”
“Rafa, that’s ridiculous. We’ve lived here for fifteen years. We’re citizens.”
“The police don’t know that by looking at us. They see a brown face through the windshield and boom! Sirens!”
My mom shook her head. “That’s what that was about?”
“I didn’t want to give them reason to stop me.”
“You were driving like a blind man, Rafa. That will give them reason to stop you.”
“Everybody else just has to obey the law. We have to obey it twice as well.”
“But that doesn’t mean you have to go twice as slow as everybody else!”
The light turned green and my dad brought the car out of first. We cruised under the overpass, a shadow draping over the car like a blanket.
“Next time, just try to blend in with everyone else and you’ll be fine,” my mom offered.
“The way of the world,” my dad said.
“What?” my mom asked as we emerged back into the sunlight.
“Just trying to blend in. That’s the way of the world.”
“Well, that’s the way of America, at least,” my mom said.
EVEN THOUGH the general mood in our house had lifted, I was still grounded, which meant that I hadn’t seen Maribel since Christmas. I had told her back then that it was going to be a while before I could come over again. She’d been getting better about remembering things—I didn’t have to repeat myself as often anymore and sometimes she even referenced things we’d talked about days before—but I wasn’t sure if she remembered this thing, and I hoped she didn’t think I was just ignoring her or that I’d lost interest. If anything, the grounding just gave me time to miss her, and I’d sit at home most afternoons depressed, staring out the window through the frost creeping in around the edges, hoping to catch a glimpse of her getting off her bus. And then I would walk away, because I knew if I saw her, it would be torture. And then I would go back, because not seeing her was torture. And then I would try to steer clear of the window for a while and make myself do something else like take a shower or read or play a game on my phone, but it was no use. I just paced around in anguish, not knowing where to look, not knowing where to go, and feeling like I was about to lose my mind.
The Book of Unknown Americans Page 14