Tracy wears her vest open. It puffs out a bit as she walks, and her hair flutters around her face. She steps behind the counter. Alice probably won’t say anything to her, not now. Aside from the missed pay, there will be no punishment. Jeff feels his own misery pushing at him, about to burst. Tracy’s a selfish, immature, unreliable fuckup who doesn’t take her job—his job—seriously, and her behavior is unacceptable. It’s not right. Jeff hasn’t even finished with a customer when he spits her name out.
She jumps at his voice and turns. He’s never seen her without makeup, and he can tell from the redness of her eyes that she’s been crying. What happened? He doesn’t know her well enough to ask. Something about tragedy, about sadness, about her sadness—something drains from him. It’s as if the rest of the store has gone quiet. If she were a friend, he would know how to behave, but Tracy is not his friend. There is no scenario in which they’d be more to each other than what they are. He’d never imagined it bothering him.
“Are you okay?” he asks.
She nods in a way that says Thanks for asking and nothing else before turning back to her work.
He needs to go on break, but the line seems smaller now, more manageable, and he can wait until it is gone. They ring together in silence. He feels Tracy in the space beside him, and the weight of his own curiosity. As he rings, he keeps his attention not on his own customers, but on hers, listening to what they say, how they say it. He doesn’t know what he’ll do if one goes off on her, but then he does. He’ll step beside her, insinuate himself, and look the customer in the eye until they look away from her. “Can I help you?” he’ll say.
About the Author
KEVIN SKIENA received his MFA in creative writing from the University of Washington in 2006. He is a winner of the A. E. Hotchner Playwriting Competition and the Eugene Van Buren Prize for Fiction. His writing has appeared in Hayden’s Ferry Review, City Arts, and Gay City Anthology. He is a cofounder and instructor of the Seattle-based Smudgy Notebook writers’ workshop. He blogs at stilllifewithissues.wordpress.com.
JE NE SAIS QUOI
* * *
ELIZABETH LANGEMAK
I first saw you in a class
on theory where daily
I used words I understood
only in part. I stuttered
into the room like a girl
climbing a dark staircase
calling, Is anyone there?
In theory someone is
there but I’d been in school
so long I might not have
cared. Everyone’s knowledge
seemed part of my own,
a well I could drink from
if I became thirsty. In theory
I was thirsty but not always
in practice. Our teacher
gave me a list of others
who struggled so I could
ask them for help but
I thought this bad practice
so I started reading
through you, my eyes
on your fingers as they fanned
through the thin textbook
pages. I learned only what
I should not have and forgot
what I knew. When we
finally met we spoke about
theory and then in theory
for years, parsing each other’s
constructions of what
we thought might be love
and you would sometimes
yell Gah! and Fuck! like you
did when our teacher lectured
on Marx. I knew these
were the sounds of your
sounding. With practice
we decided which questions
were answers. Like so
many others, marriage
was a word I understood
only in theory. I thought
it meant something that happened
once and kept going but by then
I had some theories, too,
so I asked you
to practice and the practice
itself is a pleasure paid
to the debt of the theory,
to what it feels like to learn
something from nothing,
to the well we both drink from
that does nothing for thirst.
About the Author
ELIZABETH LANGEMAK’S poems have appeared or are forthcoming in publications such as Shenandoah, Colorado Review, Literary Imagination, the Beloit Poetry Journal, and Best New Poets: 50 Poems by Emerging Writers. She lives in Philadelphia, where she is an assistant professor of English at La Salle University. Find her online at elizabethlangemak.wordpress.com.
Maryanna Hoggatt © 2014
THE LAST KING OF OPEN ROADS
* * *
BRENDA PEYNADO
In 1979, our father took us on a ski trip. It was the last in a series of my father’s ideas over the years to put the family back together, to show my mother he wasn’t wrong to bring us to this new country. The trips were disasters, all of them.
Earlier that year, my father took us to the zoo on the day kids get in free, but it was also the day Gentle the Gorilla ate his trainer’s finger and escaped. We drove to the Everglades but couldn’t afford the tour, and the rickety boat my father borrowed from a Mexican peddling oranges sank into the swamp. Luckily, it was shallow enough to wade back. He took us to Satellite Beach, but a red tide had swept thousands of dead fish onto shore, and all of us had to plug our noses from the rot.
I forgave my father these disasters. I was nine years old, reading history books and radio manuals with squiggles I could barely decipher, and I worshipped him. He was a truck driver, and when he drove the big rig to the house, he would let me climb up into the cab, honk the horn, and make the air brake squeal. He looked like a master navigator behind the wheel, like he could find his way anywhere.
My brother, Alberto, who was twelve, was starting to sense that our father was not all I made him out to be. When I played in the truck, he’d taken to rolling his eyes and hiding from the neighbors.
Our mother knew my father for who he was: the master of nothing and no one. When he sent for her in the Dominican Republic, my brother was two and my mother was pregnant with me. My father had left Jarabacoa three months before to secure a job and a place en La Florida, so his daughter could be born a verdadera American. He’d found full-time employment as a truck driver because of a Dominican he knew; an uncle of a brother of a friend was in charge of the shipments.
My mother spent those early months of pregnancy learning English from a USAID nurse whom my mother sewed clothes for. On the plane ride over, Mami chatted with the flight attendants in her new English. Her full belly stretched her starched white dress, and she squeezed my brother’s hand in excitement. The USAID nurse was from Denver, and told her how everything was better there, cleaner. When my mother arrived in Florida, she was expecting something glamorous, mountains even grander than in Jarabacoa, with pines instead of plantains, cities in the cleft of valleys whose skyscrapers reached into the heavens. But the town my father drove her home to was ugly and dry: Kissimmee, Florida. It wasn’t even near the ocean, and there were no mountains to speak of. My mother said when she first saw Kissimmee and our squat, flimsy house, it’s like Dios sat on the earth, and this is the mark of his culo.
The yearly disastrous vacations usually came a few weeks after my mother threatened to go back to the island. We knew if she went home, she’d never come back. Even I sensed, every time my father left on his long hauls, that I was to babysit her and make sure she didn’t leave us. When I couldn’t find her in the house, I’d start to cry until she emerged from the yard or the garage, asking me what was the matter.
Her childhood friends she hadn’t seen in ten years had become more and more unavailable, and when she did manage to speak to them, she found they had almost nothing to say. She was terrified no one remembered her back on the island. I caught her in one of my searches, telep
hone cord leading into her closet, my mother pressed up against the dress forms she used to sew clothes, trying to hide the fact that she was racking up phone bills.
So when my father proposed a New Year’s vacation, he was, as always, trying to fix things with her.
The plan was simple enough. He would take her to see Colorado and the American mountains she had fantasized about. He had to haul snowblower parts manufactured in Florida to a Denver warehouse, and he could bring us with him in the cab of his truck. We’d leave the day after Christmas and make it to the mountains in time for New Year’s Eve. He would teach us how to ski, and he’d prove to her once and for all why he’d brought her to this country. Although we could afford less here than on the island, and even though we’d left our family behind, he could share with her the view of America from the road that he had grown to love. And he could show her fresh white snow—something she’d never seen before.
What a ridiculous proposal, my mother said. It’s too expensive. You think the solution to our problems is loading us all up in your asqueroso, smelly truck and throwing us down a mountain?
That night, after I heard their raised voices in the kitchen, my mother acquiesced. They came out to the living room and announced we were driving to Denver.
I’d rather go somewhere warm and read comic books, Alberto said before locking himself in his room.
Then Papi turned on the news, like he did every night, the leather of the secondhand chair crumbling around his outline. Washes of light flooded the living room from bright pictures of politicians arguing over President Carter’s policies. My father watched the news with such gravity, you would have thought he understood the English, understood what was happening to the country he had chosen. I had checked out all the American history books from the school library, determined to understand it for him, thinking that if only we could see the road clear before us, my father the navigator could steer us. If we could just find the way forward, my mother would stay, my father would be redeemed, and the country we lived in could finally be ours.
I translated the night’s top headline for my father: Students in Tehran climb like ants over the walls of the US embassy and take hostages.
I had translated other events for him over the course of the year: The Soviet Union invades Afghanistan. The great Hurricane David kills over twelve hundred in the US and the Dominican Republic. One of the Unabomber’s wooden contraptions failed to go off in the belly of a plane headed for Washington, DC. Saddam Hussein is inaugurated president of Iraq.
Maybe it was the state of the world, but my father looked miserable. Flashes of light from the TV colored his frown gray, and I took on the role I’d always taken, which was also my father’s, trying to put things back together like a giant jigsaw puzzle. It was what I tried to do even after I married one of those “real” Americans whose Irish family had been here for generations and my parents were both in the ground.
Papi, I said, I can’t wait until I see snow!
He turned from the TV and measured me with his eyes. He said, You need to promise me something. Keep your eye on your brother. You know how he is, always making trouble. We need to make sure everything goes smoothly this time.
It was true about my brother. At Satellite Beach, my brother threw dead fish at me, a smell I could not get out of my hair for weeks. At the zoo, he taunted the animals behind the cages.
I crossed myself. I promise I’ll help, I said.
I don’t know why you even bother, Mami said as she walked in. Just watch the Spanish channel. Turn that ple-pla off.
On Christmas Day, I woke up first and pulled Alberto out of his room. There were smaller boxes with each of our names on them, but there were huge boxes too, wrapped in brown packing paper. We were save-the-best-for-last kind of children, so we opened the small ones first. They were the troll doll and the Secret Identity Mego that we’d wanted, but much smaller versions than we’d asked for. My troll was three inches tall with his lime-green hair sticking straight up and the signature naked, fat belly. Alberto’s was a knockoff Mego, smaller and uglier, with “Made in Hong Kong” stamped on the back of the packaging card. It wasn’t even Clark Kent exactly. His glasses were wrong.
Mami and Papi came in once we finished inspecting the toys. We chimed our quiet gracias, and they opened their presents next. Mami gave Papi fuzzy slippers for driving in the cold. He said he loved them, picked her up, and gave her a kiss to say thank you.
Papi got Mami an eight-track: Pablo Neruda’s The Captain’s Verses.
Oh, she said softly, how wonderful.
I didn’t understand the gift. We didn’t have an eight-track player in the house, and I knew from a conversation I once overheard that The Captain’s Verses was the only Neruda book she didn’t like. Although I didn’t know why at that point.
The only one that wasn’t on your shelf, Papi said. And we can listen to it on the way to Colorado.
Oh, she said again, how wonderful.
Inside the big brown boxes were ski jackets, mittens, hats—cold-weather hand-me-downs from some related Dominicanos in Boston. The vacation was our present. Mami packed our bags. I found the Neruda eight-track hidden behind the bookshelf; she had intended on leaving it. I stole my father’s keys and set the Neruda on his truck seat. Two days after Christmas, in the dark morning, we climbed the ladder steps and entered the purple cab of Papi’s eighteen-wheeler.
I felt like we were aboard a spaceship, except filled with faux leather and wood panels. There was even a bed behind the front seats, where my father slept on long hauls. The dashboard array of lights glowed like planets, and the needles on the dials swiveled like broken compasses. The brakes groaned and hissed, and the CB radio, which my father couldn’t understand, droned steadily. Papi had hung up pine-tree air fresheners like ornaments to cover the stench of cigar smoke that he kept puffing out the window. Alberto and I rolled around on the small bunk behind our parents. The Captain’s Verses intoned on repeat.
Once we crossed out of Florida, the air got cold even with the heat blowing, so we suited up in our ill-fitting jackets. I could tell my brother was proud that his was his favorite color, neon orange. He kept rubbing the worn sleeves. I’d brought my troll with me, and I clung to it, played with it, and imagined it could tell me the future if I rubbed its hideous belly.
But it didn’t tell me that thirty years later I would be driving this same interstate, leaving my own husband behind, with my children not yet understanding what was happening. And if they’d known, would they have treasured their last moments with their father together as a family? Or like me, would they have looked out the window, the country flying by them like a map with borders so invisible that they wouldn’t know they had crossed over until the betrayal was done.
Mami had brought dominoes for us, but the ivory rectangles wouldn’t stay in lines on the bed and ended up scattered all over the cab like an infestation, along with Alberto’s M&M’s. Mami would sometimes squeeze my hand from the front seat, but for the most part, she just looked out the passenger window for the three-day ride. Alabama, Louisiana, and Texas passed before our eyes with little acknowledgment from her, except for occasional deeps sighs of stale regret. On the fifth time The Captain’s Verses started over, a deep voice intoning Today, it was all the earth, in a lightning flash, dawn. In that territory, walking, walking, walking, I shall spend my life. Mami asked Papi to turn it off. He thought she was insisting out of politeness and left it on.
Alberto was finally excited. He whispered to me, Maybe out here Papi’s a superhero, the last of his alien kind. The King of Open Roads. He saves hitchhikers and stray dogs. Maybe they yell, King! on the CB, and that’s the signal for him to save someone. Maybe we’re his supersecret identity, this terrible cover. I never want to go back to Kissimmee.
Kiss-ih-me, I said, and I puckered my lips, and my brother squirmed and shrieked until my father bellowed, Ténse quietos! And we were.
When we reached Denver, we could see the Ro
ckies, jagged and marbled with white. Mami said the white starkness was terrible, that everything was dead except the evergreens. But I caught her smiling as she looked out the window to the mountains. Alberto grabbed the CB radio and whooped into it, yelling King! and warning all the truckers of grizzlies. I just stared; the white landscape was like nothing I’d seen. Papi raised his eyebrows at my mother. Look at the glorious gift I’ve given you, all these grand mountains carved by glaciers, he seemed to say.
By the time we reached the ski trails, it was already late into the afternoon. Mami jammed hats on each of our heads and deposited us on the icy pavement. Papi blared the truck’s horn, as if people hadn’t already noticed we’d arrived.
The truck took up five parking spaces. People in soft scarves and Vuarnet sunglasses stared as we unloaded the giant purple cab. Other families had their skis mounted to the roofs of their cars. Papi couldn’t conceal his excitement as he stretched and put on his ski pants over his jeans, making a big show of it. I tried to put the hood up on my jacket, but the string had long since broken, and the hood kept falling down, exposing my embarrassment.
A little boy asked his father if that family was actually going to ski. My mother understood him and clenched her jaw. My father gave an Epa! as we headed toward the ski shop. I stuck my tongue out at the boy. My brother waved, his jacket too short and coming up almost to his elbow as he lifted his arm.
Inside the ski shop, a man who reeked like skunk and gasoline ratcheted my feet into boots, which smelled like the worst sicote and mashed my feet stiff. The man ignored my complaints and tried to speak to my father instead.
No Inglish, Papi said.
The ski-shop man shrugged and told him, It’s really cold today, frostbite cold. You need to cover up. He mimicked someone shivering with their arms crossed. He asked if my father wanted a harness to put on me so that I couldn’t get too far away or out of control. He held the leash out and dangled it, as if I were a dog. Rental, he made sure to say. Only two dollars.
Day One, Year One: Best New Stories and Poems, 2014 Page 26