by Samuel Park
I didn’t have insurance and there hadn’t been an accident. Hadn’t he been the one to hit me? I glanced at the rearview mirror and saw cars piling up in my lane, then some of them abruptly turning to the lane next to mine, their tires screeching in annoyance as they passed me.
“I don’t have it with me,” I said, rolling the window down just an inch more, a concession to his upper hand. Flecks of rain beat against my warming cheeks.
The man stood there not seeming to mind the rain, his outrage a fuel that made him insensate to the elements. I almost felt like he was enjoying himself.
“You don’t have insurance, do you?” he asked in a manner somewhere between self-satisfaction and exasperation. “You’re all the fucking same.”
I felt a shiver of fear. The man looked at me like I didn’t deserve the benefit of the doubt. I did not budge, did not speak.
He pounded my windshield a couple of times to accentuate his points. “I almost hit you. I would’ve if I didn’t have excellent hand-eye coordination. And if I hit you, my insurance would’ve gone up and that is why people like you should not be on the roads. A woman, to boot.”
The cars behind us were now honking loudly, and the few pedestrians out in the rain glanced curiously in our direction. The sky darkened as if controlled by this man’s mood, our faces illuminated by the harsh beam of headlights from cars.
“Or you’re taking this a bit far. Your car is fine,” I heard myself saying. I wondered if I could get around his car and leave. Would he follow me? How much anger could one person contain?
“What’s your name?” he asked, pressing his finger against the window. I wondered which part of my face his finger floated over from his vantage point.
“My name?” I echoed.
“I want your name,” he demanded. His request dripped with ill will.
“Why?” I repeated.
He didn’t answer, as though the reasons were obvious. But then he said angrily, as though he might enjoy the redundancy, “So I can report you to Immigration. So I can have you deported.”
What did he consider a fair punishment for me cutting him off on the road?
I knew what he meant. An “illegal” couldn’t apply for a driver’s license, and technically, couldn’t drive. But we did. We all did.
“My name is Lucille,” I replied. “Lucille Ball.” I closed my window all the way, taking back the inch I’d given him. I thought he might hit the windshield again with his fist, but he didn’t. The rain started falling harder, and he no longer seemed immune to it. He shook his arms at motorists that honked at us.
“You will,” he finally bellowed. “Starting tomorrow, you will have to give me your fucking name.” I wasn’t planning on ever seeing him again, until I realized that to him I wasn’t an individual, wasn’t Mara. I was a class of people, a second-class type of person, and he was going to run into me over and over again. With this promise of future retaliation enough to satisfy his present anger, he got back in his car and mercifully drove away. I made a U-turn and drove in the opposite direction, taking the long way back to Hollywood just to avoid finding myself on the road with the man again.
Tomorrow. With everything going on with Kathryn I had forgotten the election. He was probably one of the crazies just salivating to vote yes on Prop. 187. He was just eager to do his civic duty, to screen any brown person he deemed unworthy of sharing his home.
I kept the radio off. I was too shaken to listen to music, my heartbeat in rapid sync with the rain falling down around me.
Prolonged rain in Los Angeles was an anomaly, a hiccup. It was still drizzling when I reached Nelson’s new condo in Westwood across from the federal cemetery. As I walked by, I wondered what it must be like to look out onto the perfectly spaced crosses every day.
Shortly after letting me in, Mr. Weatherly asked me to call him Nelson and handed me a tissue box. I dried my face. I suspected it looked like I’d been crying. As I walked in, I realized I had made a puddle with my things in his perfect home.
But to me the home was strange. The living room didn’t have much furniture, just a heavy leather club sofa facing a circular glass coffee table. The space in front of it was empty, as if the chairs had either left of their own accord, or never been invited in. In the dining room, a long wooden table sat in isolation, with no candelabras or tablecloths to spoil its barrenness. The wall behind it practically begged for a painting, empty and starkly white. Further in, I could peek at a den, where it was clear Nelson was spending most of his time.
“Are you still unpacking?” I asked.
“Yeah, a lot of my stuff is in those boxes,” said Nelson, pointing toward the stairway. Three large Public Storage boxes blocked the landing. “So how is Kathryn?”
“The surgery was a successful one. She’s wondering why you haven’t come to see her,” I said, suddenly feeling very agitated. As the rain worsened, I realized I was going to get really wet on the way back to my car. “Do you by any chance have an umbrella?”
“It’s in one of the boxes,” said Nelson. He was wearing sweatpants and a T-shirt with a hole on the shoulder instead of his usual white coat.
There was a crash of thunder and lightning.
“And of course I’m coming to visit her,” he added quickly, saying it as though it were all one word. “I just don’t want her to expect some kind of dramatic bedside reconciliation.”
I twisted my face. “I don’t think she expects that.” I didn’t mind lying for her. “She just wants you to cheer her up.”
There was a pause and then Nelson said, with a mirth that seemed forced, “You should come in. Please come in.” He led me into the living room. “At least until it stops raining. Do you want something to eat? I was just about to sit down for some pho.”
I was about to say no, but he was already back in the kitchen and tending to a large pot. I’d been sitting all morning in Kathryn’s room and hadn’t had breakfast or lunch. This somehow felt unprofessional, but I pulled a chair at his dining table. He poured the soup into two bowls and dropped in some shiny, fragrant basil leaves. It looked very appetizing, the broth rich and aromatic.
While we ate, Nelson turned the conversation to Brazil. I didn’t mind; it felt like comfortable ground, and at first, I liked talking about my country with him. As long as he didn’t assume everyone did capoeira and sunbathed topless at the beach. To those people, I felt like retorting, Oh, you Americans with your musical theater and Thanksgiving turkey and Ben Franklin’s Almanack! None of my friends or my mother’s friends or anyone I knew thought much about the martial art of capoeira. No one practiced it, unless they had an interest in Afro-Brazilian traditions, and back in Brazil, I had been considered white. I’d only become Latina upon arriving in California, a fact that initially mystified me, as I’d never felt any kinship to the citizens of other Latin American countries, certainly no more than a German person shared an identity with a French or Italian national. In Brazil, I’d listened not to samba, but mostly to Debbie Harry and the Rolling Stones, and read books not by Paulo Coelho, but by Sidney Sheldon and Harold Robbins.
Nelson asked me, Why did you move to the U.S.? What was your childhood and adolescence like? I piled up the evasions and kept repeating, The usual. I didn’t want to tell him about my experiences. What could I say to him? What would he like to hear? I kept my memories buried in the basement of my mind.
Nelson asked, “You weren’t happy there? Did something bad happen?”
I replied, “Do you know anything about Brazil in the seventies and eighties?”
“You mean beyond Carnaval and favelas and the very colorful plumage of blue macaws? I do remember a Costa-Gavras movie,” he said as he slurped some of his broth. “But I think it was set in Chile.”
Most people stuck to the exotic, glossed over the dark history.
“There was also hyperinflation, and a military dictatorship put into place by your Lyndon Johnson and a man named Robert McNamara,” I said matter-of-factly. “
There was a lot of violence.”
“Hopefully your family was protected from all that?”
I shook my head no, without saying anything more. Nelson looked at me sidelong, seemingly reluctant to pursue that line of questioning further. “Isn’t it incredible, how much you can fit into one life?” he mused.
“What I went through wasn’t really that extraordinary,” I said, finding his interest intrusive rather than flattering. “Considering where I come from.”
“How old did you say you were when you came to the U.S.?” he asked, oblivious to my reticence.
“I didn’t say. But I was sixteen.” I could see his brow furrow as he gathered the puzzle pieces.
“Are your parents in California, also?”
“No. What about you? Are your parents in California?”
Nelson shook his head and took a sip of his water. “They’re in Missouri. I went to a boys’ prep school there. Studied Latin. Played lacrosse. That’s what I was doing when I was sixteen, while you were fleeing heaven knows what atrocity.”
The pho, once steaming, had grown cold. I stirred the lone bean sprout left with my spoon just so I had something to do with my hand.
“Are you worried about what kind of person is taking care of your ex-wife?”
“No, not at all,” said Nelson, taken aback. “I think she’s in great hands. But sometimes I think of all the things that can happen to a person and you multiply that by the number of people in the planet and it amazes me. How can the world fit so much?”
I broke eye contact. I put my spoon down on the table and noticed that the rain had stopped.
“Thank you for the soup. It was really good,” I said.
“I’m glad you enjoyed it,” Nelson said, smiling kindly. “This was a nice change from eating alone.”
His smile lingered in me while I headed to my car, and I thought to myself that I should avoid seeing Nelson again.
When I got back home later that day, I again helped Bruno circumvent the laws of the land.
Since moving in together, I’d grown close to my roommates, and I even started enjoying Bruno’s company. Some nights, Renata brought home leftover appetizers and side dishes from the restaurant, and we’d have an impromptu pig-out party, eating off the aluminum trays she’d packed the food in. We’d pass them back and forth as we sat on the sofa, watching Renata’s soap operas. She had a cousin in São Paulo who recorded them and sent them to her assiduously, although her cousin had trouble remembering to set her VCR to NTSC, and the recordings trembled and shifted.
“Renata, you have to make sure to vote tomorrow,” I said when the tape went to commercial.
“I don’t know if I’ll have time to vote,” said Renata. “And it’s not like my vote is gonna make a difference.”
“What if the racist proposition passes?” I asked her, ready to deploy guilt as a tool. “What if one vote makes a difference?”
“Maybe it wouldn’t be such a bad thing if Prop. 187 passes,” said Bruno, toying with a video recorder. “We have too many illegals in California. You’re gonna bankrupt the whole state.”
I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. “But Bruno, you’re illegal, too.”
“Hold your horses,” said Bruno, joking around. “Illegal no, undocumented yes. I didn’t come here riding through the desert on a coyote. I landed in LAX on a plane, and I was wearing Ray-Bans. Yes, I overstayed my guest visa, but when I came, I came legally.”
“Makes no difference to the folks in Orange County,” I said, shaking my head.
“Look, I don’t go to the county hospital, I don’t have kids at public schools. I’m not a drain,” said Bruno, leaning forward on the sofa so he could speak directly to me. “I came here to find success. I didn’t come here for the free stuff.”
I thought of the Brazilian couple who had come to buy my old mattress a month ago when I was moving to Renata’s apartment. After they hauled away the queen-sized mattress, they came back and started pointing at random objects, asking if they could have them as a sort of free gift with purchase. They pointed at an extension cord, a trash can, a set of dishes I’d just acquired from Goodwill, all with rapaciousness or fear.
I wanted to find a sharp pointed retort to Bruno’s flawed thinking, but I was shocked to realize I had none. I was an immigrant. But how can a person be illegal?
“Your vote counts for sure, Renata,” I said, but more quietly and less self-assuredly.
Bruno shrugged. “If Californians pass Prop. 187, I’ll just move to New York.”
“That’s not how deportation works, Bruno.”
Renata turned to me. “Worse comes to worst, you can always marry for a Green Card.”
I wouldn’t marry someone for a Green Card like she had, but I did spend much of my time thinking about ways of getting one. I applied to the diversity lottery every year, and I prayed that Brazil remained on a list of countries underrepresented in the U.S. During my first seven years in America, I’d paid a lawyer to apply for the lottery, until I found out that all I had to do was type up a form and send it to the right address, double-checking the zip code since each region went to a different one. The biggest disappointment in my life each year was receiving a Green Card diversity program denial notification.
“You all can feel however you want, but this proposition scares me,” I said. “What happens if it passes? It would be horrible. Are they going to start by plucking Mexican kids out of the schools?” I thought about the earlier incident in the parking lot, of that driver’s thick, crossed arms, of his rage. “Civilians will just start policing everyone.”
Bruno grew more contemplative, and said, with doubt in his voice, “I should’ve gone to Portugal instead. At least I speak the language.” This was one of Bruno’s pet peeves, the fact that people often mistook his poor language ability for low intelligence. Of all three of us, his English was the weakest.
“I have an idea,” said Renata, turning to me. “If the proposition passes you can go to Bel Air and seek asylum with your employer.”
I smiled at Renata. “She’s got bigger things to worry about than the legal status of her caregiver.”
Renata reached into her purse. She produced an envelope from Pacific Bell with the plastic window prominently torn up. “Look at this phone bill.” Renata turned to me accusingly. “I get that you love your mother, but do you really have to call that often? Can’t she read? Can you send her letters instead once in a while?”
“I’ll pay for my part,” I said, grabbing the bill from her.
“Okay, Miss Rockefeller,” Bruno said. “If you’re so rich, maybe you should pay a higher share of the rent.”
“I hate figuring out shares,” said Renata. “Reminds me that I’m terrible at math.”
“I’ll figure it out for you,” I said, glancing at the amount. It was indeed very high.
Renata had dated a string of Brazilian men who invariably went back and I wondered if she’d thought of going back with one of them. I found a telltale sign in her desire to give a Brazilian name to her future child.
I didn’t regret immigrating to America. The last ten years had been lonely, but I’d gotten used to it. When I first arrived, I was so intoxicated by the promise of a new life that I didn’t notice how unhappy I was. There were too many new things to take in, new people, new places. A visit to the beach felt like a trip to the moon.
“Everything is so expensive,” I said. “I don’t regret moving here. Although I don’t know where I’d go if they start deporting us.”
“Back home, to Brazil, of course,” said Renata, switching her tray of caramelized plantains for my tray of French fries made of yucca. Bruno double-dipped so much into his tray of bean stew that we simply let him have it.
“No, not Brazil,” I said quietly. I didn’t add anymore. With everything that had happened to us in the years after Lima, I couldn’t. Wouldn’t.
“No I couldn’t, either,” Bruno said, uncharacteristically contemplative. “I
like driving at night knowing I won’t get held up by guys at the red light.”
Renata ignored Bruno and glanced at me suspiciously. “Go back to Brazil. You make it sound like it’s not an option. You still have family there.”
“You know going back isn’t as easy as clicking your red slippers together, right?” I said. “Nothing would ever be the same after so much time away.”
Renata handed Bruno her tray of yucca.
“Okay, Mara. I’m going to compromise,” said Renata. “I won’t vote for sure, but I’ll try to.”
I smiled at her, happy for a partial victory.
“I’ve never voted before. I don’t think it’s for me,” she added. “I think it’s for old white people. The right to vote.”
“You might like it. You might like it so much you do it twice,” I said jokingly.
During the days after the surgery, Kathryn liked to sleep in. I forgot she lived there as I cleaned her lonely house in the mornings. The house became the body whose well-being I was responsible for; the body I wiped, bathed, and rearranged; the body I had to return to a Platonic ideal, the version unspoiled by human touch. The house, I remembered even as I tried daily to push the thought from memory, that Kathryn had said would be mine.
I also began to notice little things that had escaped my attention before. Like all the lemon and avocado trees in the backyard. Or the fact that there were hornets’ nests outside many of the windows. Once, a raccoon crossed my path and made me jumpy. There were wildflowers growing next to camellias and a single red rose I’d nicknamed Bloody Mary. Bees, beetles, spiders, fireflies, and ladybugs were abundant. All of them—they could all be mine.
Hear this silence, Kathryn liked to say, whenever I brought her breakfast or helped her walk to the backyard. No sounds of lawnmowers, voices, music. Even the knives clopped in a muted manner. The water boiled while holding its breath.
I didn’t like silence. Back home, I’d cook and hear Janete cackling on the phone, turning her conversations into performance art. There were mothers calling out to their children on the street; warnings needed to be given, heeded, ignored. When music came on, I could never tell where it came from. Even at night the symphony continued—sirens, couples arguing, the elaborate jingle announcing the start of the news shows. The noisy stretches and yawns my mother performed before going to bed.