Sometimes Maria wanted to go back to college. Sometimes she wanted to know what it felt like to pull up into the parking lot of, say, some convenience store off an interstate with a man and two or three children and get out and extract the smallest of those children from the complicated car seat and hoist it on her hip and take it inside to the bathroom while the man whom she could not quite bring herself to call her husband would take the other two—they would be, like him, boys—inside and buy them something that she, with her strict ideas of proper snacks for developing bodies, would have preapproved.
That night—standing at the edge of the drive in her mother’s boots, staring up at the stars, her arms crossed, her hooded sweatshirt riding up her rib cage, the thrum of trucks far away up the valley and the slow clang of train, the day declining, giving itself up to night, a sweet and willful surrender, nothing left to declare, nothing to talk or even think about, just a confidence that all would be there, in order, in the morning—Maria wanted just that, and only, forever, that.
The next morning at breakfast Maria said, “I’m thinking I’ll stay awhile longer.”
Her mother registered neither surprise nor glee. She seemed overly concerned with Maria’s apartment back in Oregon, which Maria had already taken care of. The night before, after standing in the drive during the slow and lovely fade of day, she’d called her friend Beverly, owner of the restaurant where she cooked and mother to Matthias, who had been living at home since dropping out of college and was in Beverly’s hair. Maria offered to let Matthias sublet her place for a song if Beverly would hold her job for her and box up some things from her apartment—mostly clothes—and ship them to her. All this she explained to her mother, who said, “You’re going to let some boy live in your place? With your furnishings?”
“I don’t have much stuff.”
“What if he don’t pay the rent?” her mother was saying, still preoccupied with the apartment. “Is it not your name on the paperwork?”
“Well, his mother’s my best friend. We work together.”
“Myself, I try to keep that separate.”
“Keep what separate?”
“Business and friends.”
Ray wasn’t a friend, obviously. Her mother had no friends. Since Maria had been home, the phone had rung twice: once, it was Alberto asking if his cows were out, the other time it was someone at the motel. Her mother said she talked to Manny, Maria’s brother, every Sunday, but something about the way she said it, or the way she turned away to say it, made Maria doubt her.
“Well, I’m doing her a favor, really. It’s complicated. It’ll work out, though.”
“Don’t you want to go back out there and put your things in order? You got the other half of your plane yet, don’t you?”
She did not want to tell her mother what she feared: that if she got back to Oregon she would doubt her decision to stay in Texas, and she would have to call her mother and tell her she’d changed her mind. The silence that would fall between her statement and her mother’s inevitable, Well, you know best what you need, would have killed Maria; each second of the pause would bear the weight of all she’d missed in her many years away. She had savings—she’d done well with a catering business on the side, which kept her busy when she wasn’t cooking at Beverly’s Bistro—and now that she was back here, and despite the fact that she thought of it as “here” still, instead of “home,” it felt as if things she’d lost here could be, not found, but ordered. The night before, after squaring things away with Beverly, she’d shed her socks and stretched across the floor and rested her feet on the cool walls of the living room. Lying there until she heard her mother’s car in the drive, she felt as if what she’d lost and the reason for the losing—not so much the event itself that had caused her to leave, but all the things that had led up to it, all the small desires and decisions that she had not let herself think about for years—could be arranged, if she stayed long enough, in some sort of order. This was exactly the way she would have written it were she the type to keep a journal: I feel as if it can be put into order now instead of I feel I can put it into order, for the passive construction of the former implied the power of some other force that would lead her, rather than her it.
“Beverly can handle it,” she said.
“Well, you know best,” said her mother. She had not yet asked a single question about Maria’s life in Oregon or any of the other places she’d lived. How could Maria explain so many years of riding buses up and down hills in socked-in cities where seagulls circled vast parking lots? In some of those towns she could see her breath even in summer, which she took to be her heart, still smoking. To get by, she waited tables, developed photos at a drugstore, sold cigarettes to drunk students at a 7-Eleven across from a tony college; she lugged wing chairs abandoned curbside up flights to studio apartments. There were men, but they were chosen mostly for their indifference, and they treated her place like a motel room, bathroom floors puddled from showers taken with the curtain untucked from the tub. If pressed to name a staple of her diet in those first lean and consciously ascetic years of her exile, she would have to say toast. Scrape the burn away with a knife. The sound it made would echo against walls barren of cross-stitched homily and group portraits of rehearsal dinners and girls’ weekends to Cancún.
Food had not yet become important to her because she could not afford to eat well or more than once a day. She was often hungry and nearly broke, but as hard up as she was, she never stole or borrowed and she never cried. She took classes at this college and that, but never toward any outcome save the experience of being in college, which, despite a few gratifying classes with interesting professors, she judged frustrating, owing to the entitled and lazy attitudes of her fellow students. Sometimes, on weekends, she saw college girls walking down the streets hugging pillows to their chests, and the sight of their brightly colored pillowcases, which Maria imagined them picking out with their mothers to brighten dorm rooms Maria had never seen the inside of, elicited both envy and derision.
But maybe it was not what Maria had been doing all those years that her mother didn’t want to hear about, but any place she wasn’t familiar with, which was any place but her corner of far West Texas. Her mother’s lack of curiosity about anywhere else sometimes rankled Maria, but mostly she understood it as a kind of negotiation with all the things her mother had to take care of in her life. Ray was her Caribbean cruise, her trip to Vegas, her drive to the Grand Canyon. She could have chosen to travel but she would have had to give up something else. Ray was right there, three miles up the road. She chose Ray. It helped Maria to understand her mother if she summoned the ghost of Ray to explain both the things her mother would not talk about and the choices she’d made.
Even though she could tell her mother was antsy to get to work, she asked her to sit down at the table. Her mother had been unloading the dishwasher. As if she understood that Maria would never ask her to stop unless she had something to say, she took her apron off, hung it on the hook by the door, and sat. At least her mother understood when people had something to say.
“I’ve been thinking about that restaurant,” she said.
Her mother did not have to say, And? Yes? What about it? She never said things like that. When you were telling her a story, she never made noises of assent or comprehension. She just waited for you to say what you had to say.
“I would be willing—if you would be interested, that is—in getting something started in that space.”
“Getting something started?” her mother said.
“I mean I could try something out, see if it flies. I have a job back in Oregon and it’s there for me whenever I want it, but I can also take some time off and it won’t hurt me, Beverly will understand.”
“What sort of food are you thinking it would serve?” her mother said, but it wasn’t a question. What she meant was, I hope you’re thinking you’re going to serve something that people around here are going to want to eat.
> “Well, I’ve not gotten that far yet.”
“Might work best to serve the kind of food people around here like to eat,” said her mother. “That way you’ll make some money. And if people see it’s busy, it’s good for the motel.”
“Right, but what if I want to serve something they don’t yet know they like to eat but once they eat it they’ll realize they like it?”
“Like egg rolls?” said her mother. Maria swallowed her laughter until her mother cracked the slightest smile, visible in the corners of that terminally tight mouth of hers.
“Wontons?” said Maria, giggling.
“What do you call it? Moo goo gai pan? I could not order anything started with moo goo. I’ll feel the royal fool sitting up there saying, I’ll take the moo goo.”
“Sounds like someone’s been to China Garden a time or two.”
“Some of Ray’s mess. Put a cashew, a cube of warm pineapple, and a piece of chicken on the same plate and that man would hand over his wallet.”
“I was sort of thinking I’d find some way to incorporate fresh local ingredients from the area in the menu.”
“You hear people talk about organic a lot these days,” her mother said doubtfully. “Last time I was by the farmer’s market they had them lined up to buy a bag of lettuce somebody fertilized with manure. I don’t see how that’s a better thing to put in your body than the next thing, but then again you said yourself how I am no cook.”
This wasn’t exactly a concession, but it was as close as her mother would come to one. And if she felt Maria did not cook her vegetables long enough, would she change her mind and insist Maria open a taqueria or a barbecue joint, and would Maria use the other half of her plane, as her mother had referred to it? How much would either of them give? So much of the strength of whatever bond they’d been able to reestablish depended on things as yet unsaid: Her father. Manny, whom her mother only talked about when Maria brought him up. Ray. Randy, of course, and the life Maria had led all those years away. But Maria did not have to fight, because her mother, after having expressed such ambivalence about the value of an organic diet, said finally, and with her characteristic air of finality—more a sign that she did not have all day to sit around the kitchen talking, she needed to get to the motel—“Well, I guess you can just try it and see. Where’s the harm? There’s already plates and saucers and all left over from Johnny Garcia’s. I know for a fact that hood over the stove has hardly ever been used.”
MARCUS HAD ONCE READ in a magazine that by age forty, men get the face they deserve. On his long walk back to civilization (he had no idea how far from town he was, he had paid no mind to the odometer, so distracted was he by the scenery), he wondered whether he was about to get the death he deserved. A couple of hours earlier, standing in the slow, sudsy Rio Grande, he’d fantasized about disappearing into Mexico, succumbing to the elements, his picked-clean rib cage discovered by men attempting to cross over. Such an indulgent thought, now that he was truckless. These borderlands had seemed the perfect place to pause when he still had the means to move on if he chose, but what would it feel like now that he was marooned here?
His flashlight died after thirty minutes of walking, though there was just moon enough to make out the road. The night was so alive with the click and buzz of grasshopper that each step created a disturbance worthy of scrutiny. He felt, with his truck gone, the arrival of comeuppance.
Surely these parts were frequented by the narcotraficantes he’d heard about, and the armed coyotes that ferried groups of the hopeful across in the night. At least if he died out here it would not be by his own hand, and he would have expired en route to some new stage of his life rather than been stricken in the farmhouse, rattling the ice in his tumbler of bourbon to quiet the mice in the walls. He imagined himself in twenty years, still hanging on to the center, a madman in the swampland, eccentric proprietor of a ragtag museum visited only by folklore graduate students more interested in vernacular oddities than botany. His last-leg enterprise would be written up in blogs devoted to roadside kitsch, and the T-shirts Marcus reluctantly decided to sell in the gift shop would provide a substantial portion of his income. Someone he used to know would send him a photograph clipped from the pages of Vanity Fair of a faded rock star infamous for her stints in rehab sporting one of his shirts at some sort of urban gathering. Her shirt would be far too tight and the crude drawing of the flytrap and the ridiculous logo—“I Got Trapped at the Flytrap Educational Center, Silt, North Carolina”—would cause him to ignore the spike in requests from Japan for three dozen shirts, postage paid. He would ignore also the derelict state of the dome, stained by pine sap and crusted with leaves, though he would hold forth on the marvelous engineering principles of geodesic domes in general, held together by continuous tension and discontinuous compression, a metaphor he would apply to everything from consciousness itself to—blatantly, in the manner of a man too old to worry about offending anyone—copulation. Of far less focus in his monologues would be the flytrap itself, for which he would long ago have lost his passion. Or perhaps the flytrap would have thrown him over, weary of being exploited like some freak-show giant.
Pudgy, bald, breath so odiferous no amount of mouthwash or toothpaste could disguise it. Annie would long since have sold off all but the two acres housing the center and his equally run-down farmhouse to developers and loggers.
Better to be snakebit or shot for the laces in his shoes than wither like that. He stoked his wretched fantasy to distract himself from dangers present if not exactly clear until, after a mile or two of blacktop, he was swept up by the Border Patrol. A Mexican officer and a white one. They had him down on the pavement, spread-eagled, his pockets turned out, the useless flashlight confiscated.
“A late-model F-150?” said the Mexican officer when at last they allowed him to stand. “Two miles from the border? Keys under the seat?”
Both officers laughed. “You leave a plate of tamales steaming on the hood, too?” said the Mexican. “String a green card from the rearview?”
Marcus had no idea what they were talking about and it must have shown.
“Mexicans love a F-150,” said the Mexican.
“Aren’t you Mexican?” said Marcus, before he could stop himself.
“You think all brown people are Mexican?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “I just thought, us being right here on the border and all . . .”
“Let’s say I am Mexican. That’d mean I’d be able to say shit like I just said.”
Marcus nodded agreeably, even as he wondered how a Mexican, even one born in this country, even one hard up for a job where jobs seemed scarce, could sign up to catch people fleeing from unimaginable poverty and the threat of daily violence in order to live ten to a one-bedroom apartment in some shitty part of, say, Topeka or Charlotte, taking jobs so low paying even the American underclass would not stoop to take them. But this did not seem the right time or place to raise this question.
“What was in the truck?” asked the white officer.
After Marcus listed the contents, the Mexican officer said, “You might get some of that back. Might turn up in some draw, since it sounds like a load of junk. So what the fuck were you thinking?”
Unthinking was the only word Marcus could come up with for what led him to the backseat of the patrol car. Keys were easy to lose and hard to find if you had to tote them everywhere you went. He’d always left his keys in his truck at the farm. He’d not locked the doors to his truck or his house in years. He could not recall locking up even when he stopped for food and lodging on the way down. Since he could not remember consciously choosing one way or the other, maybe his unthinkingness was part of his dramatic surrender to the elements.
“I guess I wasn’t,” he said to the officers, who ignored him, having already made up their minds about him. Ferrying him back to town, they decided between them that the park ranger was to blame.
“Motherfucker set him up,” said the white
officer. “Sending him down there this time of day? Knowing what’s kicking around out there just waiting on a chance?”
“Either that or Ranger Rick’s still thinking like an Eagle Scout. ‘Why, this is a delightful stroll through the natural habitat,’ ” the Mexican officer said in a girly falsetto.
For the rest of the trip, the agents ragged on the Park Service with a hatred Marcus suspected was common to government agencies with slightly overlapping jurisdictions. Hours later, after paperwork had been filed desultorily by a sleepy clerk, he walked the two miles from Border Patrol headquarters back to his hotel, stood in the rusty shower stall until all the hot water was gone, and fell into bed. He woke early to the music of a waking town indifferent to his straits. Beep of backing-up delivery trucks and Tejano music blaring from passing traffic. Just after nine he called the Border Patrol to check on his truck.
“No word,” said the man on the other end of the line.
“What do you think the chances are it will turn up?”
“If it were me?” said the man, who had a lilting Hispanic accent, which made Marcus trust what he was about to say, even had he not started his sentence with “If it were me,” which Marcus chose to believe implied sincerity rather than egotism. “If it were me I’d go ahead and file with the insurance.”
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