It Occurs to Me That I Am America

by Richard Russo

  So I held the button to get the top up and yelled “tête” to them, which I was 100 percent sure was the French word for it, and patted the top of my head. Because this had to be a total trauma for them and it would be awful if they also got a concussion. I actually didn’t have to give the demo because they all seemed to get it, and the pregnant woman in the front gave me a look that maybe said Like we don’t know?, which I hoped wasn’t the case because I didn’t want her thinking I was condescending to blacks. I turned on the AC, closed the windows and said to her “Je m’appelle Karen” and she said something with an M, maybe Miriam.

  But to tell you the truth by then I wasn’t concentrating on her because Winn-Dixie started moving, crept up just enough to give me room to squeeze into the left lane, which was going a little faster now. Within a minute I was far enough ahead of the people who had seen me giving a ride to five illegal immigrants that my license plate would be unreadable.

  Speaking of license plates, because Jeffrey gave me the total BMW luxury package, I personally drove to the DMV just west of Little Havana to get a Miami Heat plate. He was so touched by it because we had season tickets and sometimes I went with him. Anyway, my good deed paid off because as the left lane really started moving, I spotted two Miami cops waving Move it to get us all off the Causeway.

  At first I thought, What would happen if I fainted while I was driving? That passed but I was worried that some corrupt cop who wasn’t even being investigated would put handcuffs on me and pocket my Piaget watch as he shoved me into a police van. But then the two guys saw the Heat logo on the plate. One nodded and the other gave a big XL denture grin on seeing it, like he wanted to yell Go Heat! They were so thrilled by a stupid flaming basketball surrounded by a hoop that they missed five very black people in my car, though I admit the Haitians were thin and crouched down.

  I got past the two cops, onto Twenty-Sixth. That was when I started to hyperventilate. I so much wanted to pull over and cup my hands over my mouth so I could get carbon dioxide. But I couldn’t pull over because I had all these people whose lives were depending on me plus a baby who wasn’t yet born. So I went right, left, right just to get rid of anyone who was tailing me, like in all those movies and TV shows where the guy keeps looking in his rearview mirror to see if someone’s following him, and they usually are, so he keeps flooring it down weird streets. I prayed the boy in the back wasn’t getting carsick. I swear I wasn’t thinking about vomit on the floor mat, just that I remembered how my boys were at that age—such big shots, such babies.

  As I turned onto Brickell, I said in a very loud voice, “To Petite Haiti.” There’s a Haitian neighborhood in Miami called Little Haiti, not that I knew where it was exactly or if petite was the right word for it in French or Haitian.

  I wasn’t sure whether they’d understood, but Miriam reached up from being practically down on the floor and patted the side of my leg. She said, “Okay,” and then a bunch of other stuff that of course I didn’t understand. Her voice was soft and deep, like you could record it and play it as spa music.

  Once I announced where I was taking them, I realized I had to find it. I made another left and finally got to I-95 going north, because I knew that if you got to the Design District, you wouldn’t be far from Little Haiti. Back then, the Design District wasn’t as hot as it is now but it had lots of furniture stores and antique shops. I’d gone there with my designer, Susan, to pick out curtains and shades, and also had gone to a place that built gazebos, and someone there said that Little Haiti was up the road, but it was a bad neighborhood. Though Susan told me they had a great warehouse filled with incredible vintage deco furniture, I wasn’t that into deco because a little goes a long way and I already had a fabulous vanity.

  Going south on the other side of the interstate, it looked like every police car and National Guard van—or whoever the black uniformed guys were, maybe Immigration—was flooring it to get there and grab Haitians. I called out, “It’s okay,” so they wouldn’t think we were in a car chase since now we were going sixty-five. Miriam tried to get up onto the seat, but I said, “No. Police. Cops,” hoping they’d seen some American movie with subtitles and remembered the word. I wanted to raise my index finger and make a circle over my head like They’re all around and I think I heard a helicopter, but no one would ever nominate me for the Miami-Dade Best Driver award and I was afraid we’d crash.

  So we got to the Design District and I kept going, careful not to speed. If I knew it wasn’t that far from Little Haiti, so did the cops, and I kept thinking, We’re getting closer and closer so maybe their hopes are getting up, but what if there’s a roadblock?

  And dealing with cops? Because now I was a criminal, but except for this, with the Haitians, I’d always been very law-abiding. Maybe a little pot. Then I thought how these people had nothing, not even a change of underwear. Forget that, not even food. Except probably people in Little Haiti would help them. I had no idea how much cash I had in my handbag. Sometimes a few hundred, but it could be only twenty bucks because how often do I need cash, except when I’m on U.S. 1 and I see the guy under the overpass who sells the cheapest, best orchids?

  I always forget the names of the roads that go through the Design District, even though now they’ve become like Rodeo Drive or Madison Avenue, with Prada and Tod’s and Givenchy. But I kept driving on, through what looked like a wasteland of abandoned strip malls, so sun-bleached they’d turned near-death pale yellow. Hardly any people, but what there were didn’t look Haitian.

  Then I started to see more and more black people, not like American blacks who come in so many colors that it’s stupid to call them black, so I probably should start saying African American. Except these people were Haitian. Or Haitian Americans. So finally I saw a man and a woman walking together. They had an air about them like they were going somewhere but weren’t in a huge hurry, and they were talking to each other in the matter-of-fact, nice but not lovey-dovey way married people who really like each other talk. She was wearing navy cotton gauze pants and a lovely, crisp white shirt, cuffs turned up twice, which in my opinion is the only way to do it. So I pulled up the car right next to them and stopped. I rolled down my window. At the same time I was motioning Up to my passengers.

  The couple turned and stared and either they’d heard about what was going on from the news or they just knew that these things happen. And I knew I picked the right people because the man had a cell phone, which wasn’t a given in 2002, especially in poorer neighborhoods. I remember reading in the Miami Herald about how poor people need cell phones too, though I don’t always finish every article I start. The woman was beaming at the refugees and motioning that they should get out of the car.

  Anyway, in two seconds he was on the phone talking to someone and she had an arm around the boy, and amazingly the oldish man who’d been crouched down so long didn’t even seem stiff. People were suddenly pouring onto the street, surrounding the Haitians who’d been with me. I hadn’t even noticed them coming over. Just as I reached across the floor of the car to where Miriam had been sitting, to get my handbag, and I was opening it to get my wallet, I realized all five were already gone.

  Gone. The woman turned to me and said, “They wanted me to thank you.” I thought she’d have an accent, but she didn’t.

  “Oh, sure.” I smiled at her, but honestly I felt like crying because I never got a chance to say goodbye. Of course, I didn’t know them, and maybe the pregnant one’s name wasn’t even Miriam, but I felt like I knew them. Like I knew the father and the boy had a good relationship. I swear, I’m not making that up. “Can I give you some money for them?”

  She shook her head. “No. I don’t know where they went. People will take care of them. Don’t worry.”

  “Is there a group that helps . . . immigrants?” She nodded. I took all the cash out of my wallet and gave it to her. “Can I—?”

  She handed me back a ten, like a mother who wouldn’t want a kid to go out without any money
. She closed my fingers over it, then held my hand between both of hers. “Thank you,” she said. “I’ll never forget you.”

  Usually, that kind of stuff embarrasses me. If I have to say something back, it’s like the worst, because I hate mush. But the words rushed out. “I’ll never forget you either. You’re a good person, and so is the man—”

  “My husband.”

  “Yes. You both were so kind to stop and help like that,” I said back, sincerely, wanting to stay with her, even though I knew I’d completely missed my hairdresser appointment and Marco wasn’t great about clients being late, but that’s why God made me a generous tipper.

  “You were more than kind,” she said back, and she did sound a little bit French or Haitian when she said that. Anyway, we wound up kissing each other, the two-cheek Euro kiss.

  As I got back into my car, she vanished. Then I did too.

  I think of them, the Causeway people and the good couple, a lot. More than you’d believe. Sometimes I smile. Sometimes my eyes fill up. Can you believe it’s been fifteen years?

  Maybe we’re all Americans now. I hope so.

  SUSAN ISAACS was dubbed “Jane Austen with a schmear” by NPR’s book critic. Among her thirteen bestselling novels are Lily White, Shining Through, and After All These Years. She has written screenplays for two films, Compromising Positions, an adaptation of her novel, and Hello Again. She also has one nonfiction work to her credit, Brave Dames and Wimpettes: What Women Are Really Doing on Page and Screen. Before she took to books, she was an editor at Seventeen magazine and a freelance political speechwriter. An alum of Queens College, Susan currently chairs the board of the literary organization Poets & Writers. She is a past president of Mystery Writers of America and belongs to the National Book Critics Circle, Creative Coalition, PEN, and the International Association of Crime Writers. Among her honors are the John Steinbeck Award, the Writers for Writers Award, and the Marymount Manhattan Writing Center prize. Her most recent work is the novella A Hint of Strangeness. She is finishing her fourteenth novel (and first of a series), Takes One to Know One. She lives with her husband, a criminal defense lawyer, on Long Island.

  GISH JEN

  * * *

  Mr. Crime and Punishment and War and Peace

  Roger Rabid, we called him. Jabbertalky. Evermore. But mostly we called him Gunner—Gunner Summers. And it wasn’t just the Asian Americans. It was pretty much all his fellow 1Ls—the immigrants from Azerbaijan and Poland and Brazil. The students who were born here, but who had been brought up to be respectful of others—kids of cops, of farmers, of teachers. We analyzed Gunner en masse: It was his upbringing. His genes. His ego. It was his insecurity—related, perhaps, to the fact that this was not exactly Harvard Law School we were attending. I was not of the persuasion that it was Gunner’s looks, too, that gave him the idea that he was entitled to more airtime than other human beings, but others maintained there was a chart somewhere showing correlation if not causation: rugby build plus blond locks put you at risk, especially if you played tennis, sailed, and had really wanted to take Swahili but in the end had been forced to admit it wasn’t as useful as French. In truth, there weren’t a lot of people like Gunner in our ranks—people born with silver spoons in their mouths and their hands in the air. This was a fourth-tier school. But he inspired an expansion of our vocabularies, anyway. By the end of the first month, everyone in our section could not only define but spell logorrheic Pleonastic Periphrastic. Indeed, you might have been forgiven for thinking we were strangely supersized contestants, preparing for the Scripps Spelling Bee.

  As for the sesquipedalian adjectives, those were courtesy of Arabella Lee, of course—Arabella who was born in China but who had grown up here and who everyone knew was smarter than Gunner, and more prepared, too. For example, in Property Law, when Professor Meister asked for examples of disabilities protected by the Americans with Disabilities Act, Gunner immediately supplied that significant myopia constituted “a physical or mental impairment that substantially limits one or more major life activities.” And such was the spell of his utter self-confidence that even normally perspicacious Professor Meister agreed until Arabella lifted her elegant hand.

  “What about Sutton v. United Airlines, 1999?” she asked.

  “Yes?” said Meister.

  “This was an employment discrimination case involving two myopic individuals who had applied to be airplane pilots, were rejected for failing the eyesight requirement, and then sued United Airlines, alleging discrimination on the basis of disability.”

  “And?” said Meister.

  “And they were found by the Supreme Court not to be disabled for purposes of the law,” said Arabella.

  “Ah. Well. That is indeed relevant.” Meister flushed with embarrassment even as he grinned with delight. “What a great example of how critical it can be to look up the leading interpretations of the statute,” he went on. “Especially those by the Supreme Court. Thank you.”

  Gunner scowled.

  But would Arabella ever wield the oomph she really should in society? Or, out in the real world, would the Gunners always somehow triumph? She was, to begin with, most impressively unimposing. When the Red Cross came through asking for blood donations, she couldn’t give; she didn’t weigh enough. Rumor had it she was a size 0. Worse, she not only thought before she talked, she never seemed to forget that there were forty of us in the section, so that if everyone talked for five minutes straight, as Gunner was wont to do, classes would be two hundred minutes. Did this not spell defeat?

  Of course, it bugged a lot of us, not just that Gunner was the ideal and knew it, but that he was the ideal to begin with. It bugged a lot of us that the professors wanted us to talk like him even if we were bound to get off topic and end up having to finish covering what we were supposed to cover on our own. And it bugged a lot of us that Arabella’s being judged “too quiet” was potentially disastrous.

  But this last injustice bugged me especially. Not that I was her boyfriend—she was practically engaged, of course. I was just your garden-variety five-foot-nine friend who was also born on the Mainland and also named Lee, and who was also raised in the States by brave, illegal parents, as a result of which I could appreciate as others perhaps could not just how special she was. A lot of us immigrants had the test scores and the work ethic, after all. She had something else. This clarity. This poise. This touch. Things I no doubt noticed because I was what my parents called “the good-for-nothing-artist type.” She knew how to argue without hammering—something our Constitutional Law professor was always trying to teach us. Professor Radin would never have singled out anyone in public, but when she talked about how it really was possible, even at our level, to be deft, we knew she was inspired by the example of Arabella—that Arabella had sparked a flicker of hope in her for us all. Arabella was, what’ s more, the only member of our class who could ever admit she didn’t know something. And she was kind. When people were at one another’s throats, she sang funny songs like “So sue him, sue him, what can you do him?” Once she drove three hours to get a depressed classmate’s cat from her house and smuggled the animal into her friend’s apartment; the friend found her cat under her covers, purring.

  I don’t mean that Arabella was an angel. For one thing, she disliked Gunner as much as anyone; whenever his name came up she would move her mouth fast and wink. For another, she sometimes signed up for two slots on the treadmill at the gym when you were only allowed to sign up for one. Like she’d use her initials in the right order for one slot and reverse them for the other. AL then LA. It was such a pathetic ruse you had to think she was going to get caught, especially as she did it all the time. But this was Arabella: though everyone at the gym knew, no one wanted to bust her.

  One more imperfection. She was, it must be said, a little unliterary. I once told her that Crime and Punishment was my favorite book, to which she answered that today someone would no doubt help poor Dostoyevsky, and that if talking weren’t en
ough he would probably be put on something nice. Also, she said she didn’t like the word punishment, as she strongly believed rehabilitation to be the appropriate point of all sentences, especially incarceration. It’s true that, when I pointed out that Crime and Rehabilitation lacked a certain je ne sais quoi, she conceded that I was probably right. But she maintained that she didn’t like the title anyway and thought Dostoyevsky should have gone back to the drawing board and come up with something completely different.

  “Like War and Peace?” I said.

  To which she replied that I could make fun of her but honestly? That was a great title and while the historical record could not, of course, prove this conclusively, it did lend support to her contention.

  If you were looking for help for a title for something, in short, she might not be your go-to.

  To return to her cardinal flaw, though—her failure, according to the professors, to be more Gunner-like—she said it was a species of Western hegemony that people like her and me were always being pushed to do something fundamentally at odds with our culture. It stressed her out, she said. It stressed us all out. She said that as a rule she just listened to her body and talked as much as felt comfortable, and that if her breath shortened up, suggesting a certain pulmonary preset, then she stopped. And if that kept her from getting a good grade, while people like Gunner were physiologically equipped with some manner of embarrassment override, well, so be it. She didn’t need to finish first in our class. She was only in law school, she said, to learn to help ordinary people with their ordinary problems anyway.