—Coral Gables, the old woman said. She leaned forward, put her hand on the driver’s chair. Our stop is Coral Gables, near the – Gerald, just tell him how to get there.
—The man knows, Sharon. It’ll be fine.
He grunted this with a sturdiness that would’ve shut me up. It’ll be fine. I rested my forehead against the window—surprised, after so many cold weeks in New York, by the warm glass. Outside, the sun dipped behind buildings and palm trees, only the red welt of it still visible. I hadn’t decided yet if I should use this trip home to confess my issues at school to my mom; I’d bought my ticket weeks before things started to look so bad. I was straight-up failing my chemistry course, but by Thanksgiving this problem was only a footnote to a list of other issues, the most serious being that I had accidentally plagiarized part of a paper in my freshman writing class and would soon be meeting again with the Academic Integrity Committee about what this meant in terms of my status as a student at Rawlings. I’d testified at my hearing a week earlier: I’d attempted to correctly cite something, but I didn’t even know the extent to which that needed to be done to count as correct. The committee said it was taking into consideration the fact that I’d gone to Hialeah Lakes High. Several times during my hearing, they’d referred to it as “an underserved high school,” which I figured out was a nice way of saying a school so shitty that the people at Rawlings had read an article about it in The New Yorker. They’d expected me to know about this article—You mean to tell us you aren’t familiar with the national attention your former school is receiving?—as well as that magazine when the only one I ever read back then was Vanidades, which my mom sometimes mailed me after reading them herself during her shifts directing calls at the City of Miami Building Department. I’d swallowed and told the committee no, I was not aware. The committee was also, in general, worried about my ability to succeed at Rawlings given that I was considering a biology major. The truth was, I didn’t really know if I should major in biology, but I planned to major in biology anyway because I’d read it was one of the largest, most popular majors at Rawlings, and therefore (I reasoned) couldn’t possibly be that hard. The truth was, I had enough to worry about that Thanksgiving before my flight got canceled, before I’d ever heard the name Ariel Hernandez. And just like the fact of me even being in the city in a van headed her way, my mother knew about none of it.
3
IN PITTSBURGH, THE AIRLINE HAD sent me to a hotel that was only a short “courtesy” ride away from the airport, and like the hotels we now passed—scummy buildings on the fringes of Miami International, on the fringes of the definition of hotel—the rooms could be rented either for the night or by the hour. There was a time when hotels like this terrified me, but I’d spent enough hours in them with my boyfriend Omar during my senior year of high school that I was no longer shocked to see a prostitute hanging out by a vending machine or waiting in a car and sniffing her own armpits, thinking nobody’s looking. Still, I’d never spent the night in a place like that, and I was alone, and the room—which just as recently as that summer had seemed so fun and illicit and beautiful in this murky, hope-filled way—just felt gross, the sheets and towels, to the touch, all one step shy of dry.
We rolled through the city, our route apparently not needing the expressway. Around us, the noise of rumbling sound systems and way-too-much bass faded in and out depending on the stoplights. We eventually pulled up to a sprawling ranch house in a nice part of the Gables I’d never seen, and the old people left the van without saying goodbye to anyone, and I was relieved, now that I was back in Miami, that there was no need to be polite. Even this far inland, I could smell the salt in the air every time the door slid open. I hadn’t been this close to the ocean in months, and out of nowhere, the air made my mouth water. My eyes welled with tears—more water rushing to meet the ocean that I didn’t even know I’d missed.
My imaginary profesora and I were apparently the driver’s last two stops. She’d scooted in from the edge of her row after the old people left and was now directly in front of me. The mass of her hair was corralled into this thick bun, shiny and hard from the gel keeping it under control. The dark center of the thing, like an entrance to a tunnel, seemed to stare right at me. I had the urge to stick my finger in it, see how far it would go, but then she let out this big sigh and her shoulders drooped forward and shook. She brought her hands to her face, sucked in a wet breath through her fingers. The driver’s eyes swerved to the rearview mirror, and he lifted his eyebrows at whatever he saw there. He looked away to the road, but then his eyes met mine in the mirror and he shifted in his seat, cleared his throat when he looked away again like she was my problem. So I grabbed onto her bench and scooted forward, saying with mostly air so she wouldn’t really hear me, Uh, hey.
She leaned back on the bench—I moved my hand out of the way just in time—and, still through her fingers, said, God. Then she wiped her cheeks with her whole palm, pushing with the same fierceness that Leidy’s son, my baby nephew Dante, used when smashing his own hands into his face as he cried. She bent down and snatched something from off the floor—her huge purse. It hit her lap with a sound like steps creaking, the leather stretching as she rooted around in it. She pulled out a compact and flipped it open. In the mirror she used to inspect her face, I could only see a tiny circle of her at a time: her weak, ruddy chin; her bare, wide lips, the almost-straight teeth they revealed then hid; her flared nostrils as she used her pinkie nail to swipe something from the right one. Then, a flash of her full, dark eyebrow—and below it, her right eye, still ringed in perfect black eyeliner, the lashes still well-shellacked with mascara. None of it smudged by tears at all. I sat back against my bench, confused as to whether or not what she’d just been doing, not five seconds before, was crying. She tugged at the corner of her eye, lifting it, and I’d been staring for exactly too long when I realized what she watched in her mirror was me.
She snapped the compact shut, slid her purse off her lap and onto the bench, and turned to face me. She smiled—a square, forced grin that even showed the crooked bottom teeth I’d missed before—then dropped her head back to her purse. She said, Sorry, I’m being weird.
Her voice didn’t sound like I thought it would, and I was surprised I’d expected something specific. It was deeper and quieter than I thought it should be, and there was no Miami accent in it, no sharpness to her I. And what she said made her sound like my roommate Jillian, who was constantly describing the things she did as weird or random, even when they were neither weird nor random. Her face still turned to her purse, she asked, Are you headed to Hialeah, too?
—Yeah, I lied.
—Wait though, she said. Where did you go to high school?
She hopped in her seat and twisted her whole body my way, her hand now on the seatback between us. In seeing her get so excited about such a stupid, irrelevant question, I wanted to take away all the distinction I’d given her by thinking of her as a professor. But I didn’t know yet that this question—when you’re from Miami and talking to someone else from Miami after you’ve both left it—was the shortcut to finding out which version of the city had raised me. Out the window, the sun disappeared along with the clean, empty streets of Coral Gables, and that neighborhood started to melt away into the run-down strip malls—with their bakeries and liquor stores and Navarro Pharmacies and neon-signed cash-only restaurants—that looked more familiar.
When I didn’t answer right away, she said, I went to Hialeah Gardens.
She said the school’s name like a punch line, pointed to her chest with four of her fingers, her thumb back at me, as if saying, Can you believe that? But I didn’t get the joke: Gardens was our big rival in football, a sport we tended to dominate, but they killed us almost every year in soccer. A handful of kids from both teams at both schools went to college on athletic scholarships each year; that was how most of the few students headed to college at all from either school managed to make it there.
—Oh c
ool, I said. I went to Hialeah Lakes.
—Wow, she said, nodding. Yikes, she said. That’s rough.
She lowered her head and nodded harder, waiting for me to nod along with her. A rectangle of light came in through the van’s window and scrolled over her face, turning her skin greenish, and I thought maybe she was lying about going to Gardens, or that maybe I was wrong and she wasn’t some kind of Latina like me.
—Were you crying just now? I said, crossing my arms over my chest. Because it looked like you were crying.
The woman let her hand drop from the seatback, and I added, I’m just saying.
—I’m, she said, I was being weird is all. She laughed a little and said, I just flew in from Michigan. I’m in my last year of a postdoc there.
Then she rolled her eyes, as if the definition of postdoc were written in the air above us. I lifted my chin and squinted, but she didn’t say more, and I tried not to think about how much I still didn’t know, even after almost a whole semester away at a real school. The rectangle of light slinked over the seat and found my arms, passing over them and turning them the same green.
—I’m in college, I said. I’m a freshman. I came home for the break but my flight got screwed up yesterday.
She showed me all her teeth again, but her lips slipped over them in a more natural way. She asked where I went to school, but I flapped my hand in front of my face, like the question smelled foul. I didn’t expect her to know the school. My boyfriend Omar had never even heard of it before I’d applied, and my own sister had trouble remembering the name, though she blamed me for that, since I’d applied to Rawlings without my family knowing about it and—as a necessary result of that—without their permission.
—It’s this school in the middle of nowhere called Rawlings.
—Rawlings College? she said more loudly than anything she’d said so far. That’s where you go? As in, one of the top liberal arts schools in the country? That Rawlings?
I couldn’t believe she’d heard of it. I couldn’t believe she knew to say liberal arts. My surprise at this almost matched hers. She shook off her open mouth and said, Hold up, so you must be a super-genius.
—Not really, I said. But yeah, it’s – it’s like a really good school.
We both nodded, and I felt ready to brag a little, to tell her how a few weeks earlier the school had thrown an all-day party for everyone on campus—even us new students—under this huge tent on the quad to celebrate this one professor winning the Nobel Prize in economics. The school had sprung for hundreds of these goofy caps with part of the prize-winning theorem (which meant nothing to most of us, as several of the speakers that day joked) printed on the front and the words ’99 NOBEL BASH on the back. After eating my weight in free fancy cheese, I got up the courage to ask the now-super-famous professor to sign my cap’s bill, and that request made him chuckle. (I feel like a movie star! I didn’t even bring a suitable pen! he said.) Then, after we located a suitable pen, his hand shook as he signed and he accidentally smudged the signature. To the smudge he said, Oh drat!, which apparently meant he felt badly enough about it to find me another free cap, and he signed that one, too. I wanted to say how later, I caught him offering to sign other people’s caps, and I couldn’t believe I’d given a Nobel Prize winner an idea. Maybe I’d even tell her—since she was from home, since she’d gone to Gardens—that eating all that cheese had backed me up like nothing I’d ever felt, and so I didn’t shit for two days, but neither did my roommate (she’d dragged me to the celebration in the first place but had disappeared by an ice-cream bar I didn’t find until I was already too packed with cheese), and how just as my roommate confessed her no-shitting to me, she ripped this huge fart—the first of hers I ever heard despite us living in the same rectangle for almost two months—and I laughed so hard I fell out of my desk chair and onto the floor with a fart of my own.
But this woman, before I could think of how to best tell the story, put her hand over my hand and set her face in this serious way, her eyeliner thick under her bottom lashes, and said, It’s not a really good school. It’s a fantastic school. Congratulations.
I shrugged, said thanks, and tried to slide my hand out from under hers, but she grabbed it and said, No, really. Getting in there is a huge freaking deal. You should be proud as hell. And from a school like Lakes? Holy shit, girl.
Outside, the houses whizzing by had bars over their windows, which meant we were closing in on my old neighborhood, but those bars—it’s like I’d never noticed them before. I shrugged again and looked down at the floor; it was covered in clear candy wrappers. I imagined someone here before me, on this same route, eating a thousand mints, readying her breath for whomever she’d come to Miami to see.
The woman lifted my hand off the seat and said, You know that, right? That you should be proud?
Her mouth was shut, the muscles on the sides of her jaw flaring in and out. I finally pulled my hand away, balled it into a fist. I said, Yeah, I know.
She said, Good, and slid her palms along the sides of her head to check the gelled-back precision of her hair. I shifted my feet and the wrappers crunched beneath them. Water stains climbed the canvas of my sneakers, where winter slush had soaked in and dried and soaked in again. They were ruined, and that officially made them my winter shoes.
—How are you doing in your classes so far? she asked.
I looked up from the floor and caught the driver staring at us in his mirror. He yelled, Hialeah! And since I knew that wasn’t really my neighborhood anymore, and since this woman’s question proved she didn’t want my Nobel Bash story, I figured I’d try out how it felt to stop the game of me being this credit to where I was from, this beginning of a success story, and instead, finally admit the truth to someone who maybe would understand.
—I’m doing bad, I said.
Her thick eyebrows slid together and they somehow looked more perfect like that. She leaned her face forward, closing her eyes and crinkling the skin around them in a pained way that I thought said, Go on, tell me, I’m listening.
I said, I’m doing really bad, actually. I don’t know why it’s so hard. Everyone else seems to just know stuff and I – I don’t. It’s like I’m the only one. I don’t even know how I got in sometimes, that’s how hard it is, how much I’m messing up. So yeah. It’s going really, really bad for me.
—Oh god, the woman said. It’s – what’s your name?
—Lizet, I told her.
—Lizet, she said. It’s bad-lee.
—What?
—You’re doing badly. Not bad. Bad-lee.
I sat there with my mouth open, possibly making a dumb sound with the air seeping out from it. I could taste it then: my bad breath, the breath of someone who’d kept her mouth shut all day.
I blamed the new sting in my eyes on this breath and said, Right, okay.
Out the van’s window, we passed my old high school, which hadn’t changed since the summer: the eight-foot-tall, barbed-wire-topped fence surrounding the city block on which it stood, the windowless two-story facade with the words HIALEAH LAKES painted on it in all capital letters, the whole building the same gray as the concrete surrounding it. It was the gray of the winter I’d just left, and I had to touch the window again to make sure it wasn’t freezing. When my hand felt the warm glass, I let it rest there, my fingers a barricade sparing me from the next block we sped past, then the next block, with the mini-mall that housed the My Dreams II Banquet Hall, where, if we could’ve afforded the formal party, my Quinces would’ve probably happened. I tried to remember who I’d been friends with at fourteen, before Omar came along and replaced them: which girls or boys I would’ve asked to make up the fourteen couples of my quinceañera court. I chanted their names, first and last, in my head and over the word badly as each couple added themselves to the list; I invented last names where I no longer remembered them, all to distract myself from the salty water brimming at the edges of my vision.
—Oh no, the woman fin
ally whispered. No, don’t – I didn’t mean it like –
—¿Señora? the driver said.
The van stopped.
—Shit, she said. This is me.
She dug around in her purse and said, Here, take this. I want you to e-mail me.
She held out a little card—a business card. I took it from her, making sure my thumb covered her name. The seal for the Michigan school took up the whole left side, the side my thumb couldn’t cover.
—I know you don’t know me, she said. But I’m – I’m a resource. We’re two girls from Hialeah who left for, you know, better things, right? More opportunities? And I want to help you any way I can. We have to stick together, right?
That same square smile, wrecking her face. The driver unbuckled his seatbelt. He turned on the blinkers—the tinny, rhythmic tick of them flashing on and off behind me—and got out of the van. I nodded.
—Awesome, she said. Cool. OK, well.
She scooted her purse along the bench, pushing it ahead of her like a boulder. As she slid open the door, the humidity outside flooded the van again, and it hit me from behind too, as the driver opened the back doors to get her suitcase. I felt my bangs curl, but her hair stayed perfect, the gel doing its job. She hopped down, hauled her purse to her hip, then straightened out her pants and blazer, tugging at the wrinkles as she stood just outside the van. She leaned a little away from the purse, struggling to keep it balanced on her shoulder and looking crooked as a result. The wheels of her suitcase dragged against the asphalt outside. The grating sound they made moved away from me, ended when the driver placed the bag by her side.
—Gracias, she said to the driver, who’d already left her there and was on his way back to the van. She watched me for a little too long, her eyes zipping around my face like she was trying to memorize me sitting on that vinyl bench before sliding the door between us closed. She inhaled then, so hard that her shoulders rose, the purse slipping.
Make Your Home Among Strangers Page 2