The Book of Unknown Americans: A novel

by Cristina Henriquez

  “Mayor, come to dinner!” my mom called. She sounded angry.

  I walked down the hall slowly, unsure about what to expect, preparing myself to be yelled at again. Maybe I’d messed up something in the car when I snuck in there with Maribel and he’d just now noticed. But my dad had been in the car since then—all of us had gone to White Clay to skate on the marsh the week before—and he hadn’t said anything. Or maybe Sra. Rivera finally said something to my mom about how I’d been over there when I wasn’t supposed to be. Or maybe anything. You never knew with my dad.

  But when I got to the table, he didn’t say a word. He was sitting with his arms crossed, still wearing his coat and knit cap, while my mom dumped arroz con guandú onto plates, knocking the side of the spoon against the paila with each motion. I didn’t say anything either. I just concentrated on being invisible, lowering myself quietly into a chair, holding my breath.

  When she had finished half the food on her plate, my mom looked at my dad and said, “Aren’t you going to tell him?”

  “Leave it alone, Celia.”

  “He deserves to know, doesn’t he?”

  “Know what?” I asked.

  “Go to your room,” my dad said.

  “What did I do?”

  “That’s how you answer me? When I say go to your room, you go.”

  “Mayor, stay where you are,” my mom said. “He hasn’t eaten yet, Rafa. Let him eat.”

  “Mayor, go to your room,” my dad said again.

  “Mayor, stay where you are,” my mom said.

  I waited for my dad to counter, and when he didn’t, I hesitantly picked up my fork and poked it into my rice.

  I took a few bites while my parents watched me. My mom was curling and uncurling her lips like she wanted to say something. A geyser waiting to spew. After a minute and twenty-two seconds—I watched the time tick by on the clock on the wall—my mom said, “Well, what if you don’t find anything?”

  “Jesus, Celia!”

  “I think it’s a legitimate question.”

  “I’ve already told you I’ll find something.”

  “But what if it’s not for a while?”

  “Then it’s not for a while.”

  “Rafa!”

  “This woman!” my dad said, looking up at the ceiling and pressing his hands together like he was praying. “Que Dios me ayude.”

  “Don’t say that.”

  “You don’t listen to me.”

  “You’re not telling me anything.”

  “I’m telling you I’ll find something. Do you want me to say it again? I’ll find something. I’ll find something. Do you hear me?”

  After my dad left the table, snatching his pack of cigarettes from on top of the refrigerator and escaping to the balcony, my mom looked at me and said, “Well, I guess you might as well know. It finally happened. Your father lost his job.”

  THE REST OF the story emerged little by little: The diner was closing. Windows boarded up. Doors locked. Out of business after forty-five years. All that time my dad had spent worrying that he was going to get fired for dropping an omelet or for leaving the freezer door open, and now the reason he’d been axed wasn’t even his fault. It was the rotten economy that had landed him in the water and that had capsized the whole ship along with him.

  For fifteen years, my dad had been working at that diner. Fifteen years of taking the bus to the same place with leatherette booths and a coffee-stained linoleum counter and wood-paneled walls. He’d started as a busboy, clearing tables and wiping up bits of egg that had been left behind on the tables, and he’d never complained. “I wouldn’t have done much better in Panamá,” I’d heard him say before. “I didn’t have the brains to make much of myself.” My dad was smart, though. He’d never gone to college, which gave him the wrong idea about himself, but the only reason he hadn’t was because he’d been forced into getting a job after his parents died. He’d waited tables at a roadside restaurant in Panamá, which turned out to be the only experience he needed to find work in the United States.

  Eventually my dad worked his way up from busboy to dishwasher to line cook. He flipped thousands of omelets and fried mountains of hash browns. He strained the pulp from the orange juice by hand when they used to do that sort of thing and then dispensed pre-fab OJ from a machine when the management switched to that. He remembered the days when everyone who came in ordered coffee and remembered how the waitresses had complained when everyone started asking for lattes instead. Fifteen years. Six days a week. Early mornings. Up to his elbows in grease. And now it was over. Just like that.

  My dad scoured the newspaper every day, searching the classifieds, calling any that sounded promising, and hanging up either in fury or in disappointment. He went all over town, filling out applications to work in the kitchens at the Christiana Hilton, Caffè Gelato, Valle Pizza, Grotto Pizza, Friendly’s, Charcoal Pit, Ali Baba, Klondike Kate’s, Iron Hill, Home Grown, the Deer Park, and even the restaurant at the Hotel duPont. My mom suggested he go to the Community House to see if someone there could help him, but he hated the idea of it so much, either of my mom interfering or of accepting help from a place that he called “the Handout House,” that he shouted at her to keep her big nose out of it, to which my mom said, “Big nose?” to which my dad replied by holding his arm in front of his face to mimic an elephant. My mom didn’t even have a big nose, but the two of them were down to cheap shots by then, and my mom ran to the bedroom, where she shut herself away all afternoon. Even when my parents were speaking civilly to one another, they spent the dinner hour complaining about how so far President Obama hadn’t done anything and how they saw absolutely zero improvements and about how people were getting desperate and thank God we had the money from Gloria but everyone else was in a tough spot and it had gotten so bad now that people were getting mugged outside of Western Unions for the money they were about to wire to relatives back home. “They’re targeting people who look like us,” my dad said. “It used to be the Orientals, but the style now is to pick on the Latinos. And the Arabs. At least them I can understand. They did September eleventh. What did we ever do to anyone?”

  My dad looked at my mom and me like he honestly expected someone to give him an answer. “ ‘Oriental’ is for rugs,” I said, repeating something that my social studies teacher, Mr. Perry, had told us once.

  “What?”

  “You’re supposed to say ‘Asians,’ not ‘Orientals.’ I don’t know if ‘Arab’ is right, either.”

  “This is what they teach you at school?” my dad said. “Forget about what to call people. What about the history?”

  “They teach us history.”

  “And has it ever been this bad before in the history of this country?”

  “Well, there was the Great Depression.”

  “I don’t know,” my dad said. “It seems to me like the world is going to hell.”

  “Don’t say that,” my mom said.

  “What would you prefer I say?”

  “How about something nice for a change?”

  “I say nice things.”

  “When?”

  My dad shrugged.

  “Exactly,” my mom said.

  I HADN’T HUNG OUT with William in months, lately because I’d been grounded, but even before that there had been times when he’d invited me to do something—go to Holy Angels to watch the girls in their uniforms or to Bing’s to get cinnamon rolls or to a movie at Newark Shopping Center—but I’d shot him down so often that he started snubbing me, acting like he didn’t see me when I passed him in the hall at school, walking away if I approached him at his locker, sitting at a table as far from me as he could possibly get in the cafeteria. I figured that with enough time he would get over it, but in the end, I was the one who caved.

  “Hey,” I said one day in chemistry. We were going through the motions of that day’s experiment, sitting side by side while neither of us acknowledged the other’s existence. “Is this seriously how it’s
going to be?”

  He pretended like he couldn’t hear me.

  “Hey,” I said louder.

  He looked at me.

  “You know this is dumb, right?” I said.

  “Did you just call me dumb?”

  I rolled my eyes. “So you’re gonna keep being like this?”

  “Like what?”

  “Like, not my friend.”

  “Me? You’re the one who keeps dissing.”

  “I’ve been grounded.”

  “So you’ve said.”

  “It’s true.”

  “What about before that?”

  “I had other plans.”

  “Yeah. With her.”

  “I told you that you could come hang out with us if you wanted.”

  “What do you do with her anyway?”

  “What do you mean? We talk.”

  “She can talk?”

  I gave him the finger.

  William pulled a beaker out of the clamp and held it up to the light, watching the soft fizz of the chemicals inside.

  “What do you want me to say?” I asked.

  “Say you’re sorry.”

  “For what?”

  He gave me a sideways look. “Seriously, if you don’t know, then it’s not worth it.”

  I ran my tongue along my teeth. Fine. If that’s what it took. “Sorry,” I said.

  “Like you mean it.”

  “You’re being a jackass,” I said.

  William shrugged.

  “Sorry,” I said again.

  He grinned and put the beaker down. “So, amigo, you want to do something after school today?”

  “I’m still grounded.”

  “Fuck that. We just made up! You can’t leave me hanging now. We’ll go see a movie or something. I’ll drive you home after.”

  I could see how much it meant to him and how crushed he would be if I turned him down. Besides, I’d snuck out that time to see Maribel and had gotten away with it, so maybe I could pull it off again.

  “Sure,” I told William. “No problem.”

  THE SECOND I got home that day my mom stood up from the couch and said, “Señora Rivera called me.”

  That was it. Nothing about where I had been or why I was so late getting home. Nothing about my grounding. I put my backpack on the floor.

  My mom frowned. She was twisting a bracelet around her wrist.

  “Why?” I asked. Was it Maribel? I wondered all of a sudden. Had something happened to her?

  My mom looked like she was about to say something, but then she stopped herself. “We should probably wait for your father.”

  “But why?”

  “We should talk to you together.”

  Now I was really worried. “Can’t you just tell me now? Is something wrong?”

  My mom searched my face. Her eyes were heavy and tired and the makeup around them was smudged, like she’d been rubbing at them.

  “I don’t know,” she said.

  “Is Maribel okay?”

  “Maybe you should go to your room, Mayor.”

  “Is she okay?”

  “Please, Mayor. Don’t make me say anything right now. I don’t even know what to say. Just wait until your father gets home. He and I need to talk first, and then we’ll come find you.”

  “I’m just asking you if she’s okay.” That was all I wanted to know. As long as she was okay, I thought, nothing else my mom could say would matter.

  “She’s fine,” my mom said. “Just—” she started, when, behind me, my dad walked in the front door.

  He took one look at my mom and said, “What?”

  “I need to talk to you,” she said.

  “What happened?”

  “Mayor, go to your room. We’ll come see you in a minute.”

  “Papi’s home now. Why can’t I just stay here?”

  “Mayor, please,” my mom said.

  My dad cast his gaze at me. “You heard her,” he said. “Go.”

  Angrily, I dragged my backpack across the carpet toward my room.

  “Pick it up!” my mom screamed.

  Without turning around, I snatched it off the floor and went to my room. I heard my dad say, “Celia, what the hell?” before I shut the door.

  I sat on my unmade bed with my elbows on my knees. I got up and kicked my shoes off into the corner. I tried to listen through the door, but I couldn’t hear anything. From my pants pocket, my phone vibrated, and when I checked it William had sent me a text. “good movie. Ur mom mad?”

  I wrote back: “dont know. sent me 2 my room.”

  William: “haha. pussy.”

  Me: “ttyl.”

  I turned off my phone and threw it on my dresser.

  After an eternity, my parents knocked on my door and came in. I could see right away that my mom had been crying. She was clutching a used tissue in one hand, and she stood with her body half hidden behind my dad, who had a dark look in his eyes. I stood in my socks, facing them, waiting for the news, whatever it was.

  “We received a call,” my dad said, his voice stony.

  “I already told him that part,” my mom said.

  My dad raised his hand to silence her.

  “Señora Rivera said that you and Maribel were in my car the other day.”

  I gulped. “We didn’t do anything to it.”

  “So it’s true?”

  I nodded.

  “Is it my imagination,” my dad asked, “or are you still grounded?”

  “Yes.”

  “How did you get the keys?” my mom asked.

  “I took them off the windowsill.”

  My dad looked at me evenly. “Did you kiss Maribel?” he asked.

  Flames shot through my cheeks. “What?”

  “Did you kiss her in the car?”

  “Why?”

  “Answer the question, Mayor.”

  “I don’t know. Maybe.”

  “Maybe yes or maybe no?”

  I just stared at them.

  “What did you do with her?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Did you kiss her?” my mom asked from behind my dad.

  “I mean, yeah, I guess. It wasn’t a big deal.”

  My dad glanced at my mom and for one delirious second I thought I was off the hook, that somehow I’d exonerated myself, and that we could all just go back to business as usual. But then my dad said to me, slowly, gravely, “You are not going to see her anymore.”

  “What?”

  “No more.”

  “But what does that mean?”

  “It means exactly what I said.”

  I felt a dullness in my chest. “But why?”

  “Her parents don’t want you to see her,” my dad said.

  “Because I kissed her?”

  “Was there more?”

  “I mean, no …”

  “No?” my mom asked hopefully.

  “I swear, there wasn’t.”

  But my dad shook his head. “It doesn’t matter. You broke the rules, Mayor. You’re only supposed to be with her in one of our apartments, aren’t you? I know you might think that’s unfair, but that’s what the Riveras want for her, so you have to respect it. And on top of that, you’re still grounded. Which means you shouldn’t have seen her no matter where you were.”

  “This is because you don’t like her,” I said.

  “No.”

  “You never liked her!”

  “Mayor, calm down,” my mom said.

  “You don’t even know anything about her. I mean, did anyone even ask her what she wants?”

  My dad shook his head. “You’re not going to see her again.”

  “So that’s it?” I said. I felt the whole thing reeling away from me, like a rope slipping through my hands.

  “Dios,” my mom said. “Qué lío magnífico.”

  José Mercado

  My wife, Ynez, and I were both brought into the world by way of Puerto Rico, me in 1950, and she five years later. Not long after we wer
e married, I enlisted in the navy. I always wanted to do something heroic. With the navy, I traveled to Vietnam, Grenada, the Persian Gulf, and Bosnia. I was injured in Bosnia, which requires me to use a walker now. But I came home. I came home. And that is all any soldier cares about.

  I love the esoteric things in life. My father used to call me an aesthete. He meant it not as a compliment, of course. He was disappointed by my interests and by the fact that they were not the same as his, which were farming and raising livestock. He believed a man should work hard with his hands, that toil and sweat were evidence of a virtuous life. He did not appreciate that I wanted to read books and that I saved money to buy an easel when I turned fifteen and that I would spend the afternoons painting pictures of trees. The only time he was proud of me, in fact, was when I joined the navy. He was an old man by then, nearing death, but I still remember his face when I told him, the way he had smiled with those teeth of his that were brown around the edges, the way the wrinkles rippled up to the surface of his cheeks.

  Ynez was not as happy about it. She supported me, but she was worried. We never had children. We knew from the outset and in a terribly selfish way that our interest lay only in each other. So when she was home during my deployments, she was there alone, and the weight of the solitude depressed her, I think, and gave her wide-open plains upon which her mind would wander, allowing her too much time and space to think about what might be happening to me as well as whether and when I would return.

  When I came back from Vietnam, she wept at my feet. I saw clearly the toll it had taken on her. But I wasn’t ready to leave the navy. I had witnessed the sort of atrocities during the war that threaten to steal a man’s soul. I saw that humans are no better than any animal or brute, and in many cases might be infinitely worse. But often in the span of the same day, I would be restored, too, by the courage of men. And I had come to understand my father’s perspective about the gratification of feeling useful, of being in the world under the most demanding circumstances, and learning that I could not only survive but thrive, and that my body, the physical presence of me, could have import.

  So eight years later, I left again, but this time while I was away, I wrote Ynez letters. If she heard from me with enough regularity, I thought, it would ease her worry. Over the years, over the subsequent deployments, I sent her hundreds of letters. I wrote two or three a day sometimes. They began as a way to save her, but they saved me also. They helped me to make sense of the things I saw, and from that, I began to make sense of the world and my place within it.