The Gringa

by Andrew Altschul

  “Stephanie, I’m not going to do it,” I said. “Don’t worry. I don’t want to write the story.” She pursed her lips and considered this, long fingers clasped at her waist. I wanted her to look at me, to acknowledge that, whatever my deficits, at least I knew this story was beyond me. I had turned it down on principle. I wanted her to respect me for that.

  She turned back to the dance floor. “I always feel so disoriented here,” she said quietly. “There’s something so…enclosed. Do you feel that? It’s like a dream. The outside world could end in fire, but we’d all keep dancing in our little amusement park.”

  As if on cue, a burst of techno music crashed through the club. Colored spotlights gave way to pure, white strobe. “I think that’s why I like it here,” I said.

  “Because it’s not real?”

  “Because you feel like it will go on forever.”

  She nodded, gathered her hair and twisted it into a knot. We watched dancers with pale, pixilated faces, suddenly frozen when searchlights swept the crowd. Across the club, I saw Lucrecia stand up from the table in slow motion, holding Ronaldo’s arm with both hands. Rosa stood next to them, pointing at the dance floor, her movements insect-like and ominous, the whole scene caught and dismantled by the merciless strobe.

  “My brother is in Afghanistan,” Stephanie said. She turned to me, and I was taken aback by something in her eyes, something frightened. “That’s why I can’t write it.”

  “I don’t understand,” I said.

  “He’s twenty years old.”

  “He’s in the army?”

  “The Marines. He’s with a reconstruction team working in Kandahar.” A bead of sweat blinked green, red, blue at her temple. Behind her, a Peruvian I recognized came out of the men’s room and made his way toward us.

  “That must be hard,” I said. “But why—”

  “Because he could die,” she said. “He could get killed because of you.”

  “Me?”

  “All of you. George Bush, Rumsfeld, Leonora Gelb—”

  “Now hang on a second…”

  “You have no idea how to write that story. Not because you don’t know anything about Leonora—because you don’t know anything about yourself.”

  Her date came up behind her and nodded at me. He was tall and lean, with rimless glasses, mid-forties or older. He owned a small hotel not far from where I lived.

  “You’re a smart person, Andres,” Stephanie said. “Maybe you’re a good person. But you live in a fantasy world. You and the rest of America. You have no clue what’s been done to build that fantasy for you, how many people have been slaughtered and starved. And still you go around lecturing about freedom, barging in where you’re not wanted. You think the whole world is just waiting for you to save us.”

  She took her date’s arm and the strobe stopped, all of us blinking in a sudden, bright silence. Just before the pounding returned, I saw something strange: across the club, Ronaldo and his friends were hurrying up another stairway; down below, Jeroen was sitting on the filthy floor, a group of strangers trying to help him up.

  “Go ahead and write it, Andres. It doesn’t matter. I’m sure you’ll come up with something very entertaining that misses the point entirely. If there’s money to be made, someone’s going to do it, aren’t they?”

  “Stephanie, you’ve got me all wrong,” I tried to say.

  “I don’t think so,” she said. “You’re a fiction writer, aren’t you?”

  She turned away, her date shooting me a puzzled, sympathetic look. I stood a moment longer, silently arguing my case, as if the whole, exhausted crowd were waiting to hear my explanation.

  But then, at the far end of the balcony, Ronaldo and his friends emerged, stamping up the last step and squinting down the hall. Rosa was right behind them, shouting something that sounded like encouragement, and though the scene felt distantly humorous it occurred to me that I should find the nearest exit, that maybe I should get out of there before somebody got hurt.

  II

  A CONSPIRACY OF HOPE

  1

  Once upon a time and a very good time it was there were moppy little dogs chasing cars down the lane and a racket of sparrows out the kitchen window. The schoolbus stopped on the corner and when she rode in the mornings to the brick schoolhouse on a hill she leaned her cheek against the cold glass and watched the trees curve up into a milk-shot sky and the power lines drooped and rose and drooped and rose and disappeared into green glare spangle.

  The gardener came once a week. Out the bay window she watched the truck pull to the curb and the short, gray-faced man went back and forth on the lawn making noise and when he left she went outside and flung fistfuls of cut grass and sneezed. He had a funny mustache and was called Pablo. Sometimes he left a coffee can with newcut flowers on the doorstep. In summer it was hot and the air rang with insects; her mother made lemonade and brought Pablo a glass, which he drank at the bottom of the porch and handed back. She left an envelope in place of the flower can. Pablo never came inside.

  In kindergarten you pressed your hand into wet cement—blue for the boys, pink for the girls—and brought home the hard, heavy plate. You built buildings with plastic logs and drew your mother and father in sixty-four colors and each morning you stood proudly with hand on heart and pledged allegiance to the flag. Miss Daniels gave her a cup of chocolate ice cream with a tiny wooden paddle and sent a note to her parents: “Leonora has a sunny disposition and a love of learning, but she is quiet shy [sic].”

  There was a stream behind the house and neighbor children roamed the woods playing military games. Ash and maple and dogwood, tall ferns and the stink of skunk cabbage. When you rolled a stone the damp dirt wriggled with salamanders. In summer they picked strawberries at Bryce Farm and in winter they sledded down Sam’s Hill until Sam’s Hill was sold to developers and then there were big houses where rich people lived.

  “We’re not rich,” her mother said. “Just lucky.”

  Cannondale, New Jersey, sprung from farmland twenty-four miles from the Lincoln Tunnel. The garage door rumbled under the house each night and then her father was home. When they drove into the city she wore a dress and buckled shoes and looked like a real lady. Her brother combed his hair. The car went down through the long tunnel and her father pretended to hold his breath the whole time. Her mother stared straight ahead when the men with dirty faces rubbed newspapers on the windshield.

  “Just go.”

  “The light’s red, Maxi—”

  “Just drive.”

  When it snowed, Pablo shoveled the driveway. But then, in spring, a different man mowed the lawn and she asked her mother where Pablo was and her mother fixed her barrette and said Pablo had to go home. Matthew got sick and went to the hospital and she had to stay at Grandpa Carol’s for a week. In first grade they rode the bus to see Betsy Ross’s house and the Liberty Bell. Danny Goldstein threw up going home and it crept down the aisle and then two more kids threw up.

  “Leonora has excellent penmanship,” Mrs. Brill wrote. “She always says please.”

  David had a favorite chair and he sat in it each night. Ice made a sudden snapping in his glass. The swim club was down the road and in summer wet feet slapped on the deck and Matthew learned to jackknife; orange soda and Marathon bars gave you a stomachache. That winter they took a family vacation on a big ship. Her mother wore a floppy hat. When they came to an island everyone stood at the rail and waved. They threw coins in the water and black boys leapt from the pier, thrashing in the water and showing their teeth. She pleaded with her father for a coin and as she pulled back her arm a boy on the pier smiled at her. She wanted him to get the coin. Then there was shouting, many heads frothing in the water and men running down the pier with a cloth stretcher. She would never know if the boy they pulled from the water was the same boy. She would never know if he died.

 
Miss Gallo had to have her appendix out and the substitute played a guitar and sang a song about answers blowing in the wind. She lost the spelling bee when she misspelled tortoise and she cried in her room and her face was burning. When she came downstairs the tall man was on the television again, the same one every night, with the long, white beard and the black turban. There was a crowd of younger men with black beards kneeling in the street, or waving guns over their heads. Her father looked into his glass, his tie undone, and said, “Jesus, Jesus.”

  Outside the town library, there was a black cannon on a pedestal overlooking Charlie’s general store and the police station. Miss Gallo said not to climb on it. The cannon had been there since before there was a town, since before anyone could remember, glimpsed each morning by fathers on their way to work, saluted at the Fourth of July picnic as they reflected on the blessings of liberty, on the country that had given them circular driveways and summer crickets, Little League and revolving credit, blessings secured by hard work and sacrifice and defended, when necessary, by heavy artillery, by satellite surveillance and incursions on foreign soil and when all else failed by the threat of Armageddon—like the fourth-grade boy who said You have to play my way! and then punched Maria Salierno in the stomach and got sent home. It was hard to understand, Miss Gallo said, but sometimes when people are lucky it makes other people mad. It makes them want to take what those people have.

  “Sometimes we have to protect what belongs to us,” she said. “We have to stand up for what’s right.”

  Here is your portrait, your well-rounded character. I’ve been asked to tell Leo’s story, a story of terror and bloodshed, of a country convulsed by war. But readers will only “invest” in that story if they care about her, my editor says, if they get to know her as a person: where she came from, what forces shaped her. She liked chocolate and strawberry, but never vanilla. She had a habit of plucking the eyes from rag dolls and for a brief period was fascinated by frogs. My job is to locate the offending pea under the plush mattresses—the one that so tormented her she chose to take up arms against a foreign government, to stockpile explosives, liquidate legislators. She was the first in her class to master long division. She was inexplicably terrified by her grandfather’s show poodle, Audrey. The better I can dramatize those early provocations, explain her later actions as reactions, the more integrity the story will have. Or so the theory goes. The better average readers can relate to her, see themselves in her, the higher the return on their investment.

  Or so the theory goes.

  So let us not leave out Miss Moore, the third-grade teacher whose obsession with American Indians caused concern at the PTA. Let’s not forget Leonora’s love of Choose Your Adventure books, or her early struggles with ballet. Can we fail to mention her fourth-grade presentation on Martin Luther King, or overlook the implications of the undated report, “Madame Defarge: A Role Model for Women”? My editor wants me to find trauma, some primordial harm against her person—but there’s only the child’s clear eyes, doubled in the windows of the schoolbus, following the power lines as they droop and rise, droop and rise, carrying light into peaceable American homes.

  O, the wild rose blossoms

  On the little green place.

  I’m hardly the first to go looking for trouble. “Nothing,” is what Maxine told Oprah Winfrey in 1999, in the first flush of Leo’s martyrdom, when asked what in her daughter’s upbringing might have led to “this.”

  “She was a normal kid. Smart, fun-loving. She would never hurt a fly.”

  “But there must be something, some memory. Was she ever in trouble, did she complain about—”

  “She abhorred violence. She was not interested in politics. I don’t think the word ‘revolution’ ever crossed her lips.” Maxine was unswerving in her exculpations, not offended so much as practiced. “She was a model student, a model sister. David and I used to say how lucky we were.”

  “Perfect,” Oprah offered.

  “Yes. As much as any parent can say it—”

  “A good girl.”

  “Everyone wants to find something. Everyone wants to explain it.” She smoothed her skirt and looked straight into the camera. “There’s nothing to explain.”

  * * *

  —

  She remembers piles of leaves, orange and brown and wet underneath. She remembers the thick, soily smell. Snow days when the lane disappeared and a sea of white becalmed every house. She remembers soccer practice and the Statue of Liberty, chicken pox and sore throats and “Casey at the Bat.” She remembers voting for Jimmy Carter, her mother holding her up in the voting booth to pull the lever that made all the buttons pop back out with a heavy ka-chunk. She remembers times tables and the pyramids of Egypt, dodgeball and monkey bars, a special room full of puzzles and microscopes that gifted students could visit once a week. She remembers Lisa Kim, the Korean girl, her straight, oil-black hair in the front row of the class. Every other student at Clarence E. Singer Elementary School was white—she remembers that now, sees their faces in class photos. But it didn’t occur to her, or to anyone else, at the time.

  She remembers the hostages. Every night on TV they told you how many days it had been. Carter tried to save them but it didn’t work. The old man with the beard always frightened her, the sound of the word “ayatollah.” She remembers asking her father why the old man wanted hostages and her father stirring his drink with his index finger. “It’s hard to explain,” he said. Her mother turned off the TV and said, “No, it’s not.”

  She remembers Carter losing, after a long day when her mother called every name on a sheet of paper and reminded them to vote. Her father smiled reassuringly and said nothing would change, and it didn’t. She remembers the Miracle on Ice, her father and Matt whooping for joy in the family room. She remembers the morning she found her mother crying in her bathrobe, listening to the kitchen radio. She remembers the name Mark David Chapman. She remembers when the hostages went free.

  She remembers these things during her first year in El Arca, during the solitary confinement mandated for terrorists. She walks a butterfly pattern in her cell, two blankets around her shoulders, draped shawl-like over her thinning hair: six steps lengthwise, seven diagonal. She’s decided a hundred circuits equals one mile; she walks ten miles a day. She’s let outside for thirty minutes each morning. Stale bread and cloudy soup comes on a tin tray, if the guards don’t steal it first. She eats slowly, despite the foul taste. She’s allowed no visitors, no phone calls, no contact with her lawyer or the embassy, no books. She spends hours at her cell’s small window, assembling home movies in her mind, shoring up sepiatone fragments, looking for patterns. She’s trying to make sense of it—like my editor, like me, she’s trying to understand.

  She remembers Morning in America. She remembers the Son of Sam. The Love Boat and What’s Happenin’?, The Electric Company and The Captain & Tennille. She remembers John Hinckley, Jr., the scuffle by the limousine. She remembers Live Aid and Abscam. Have It Your Way. Be All That You Can Be.

  And she remembers the Burned Man: his too-white eyes staring from a blackened face. How the shadows scurried all around him but no one came to help. She remembers how she recoiled in the backseat, pressing up to her brother until he shoved her away. She must have been six or seven—the hot, scratchy feel of tights, her scalp still stinging from her mother’s vigorous brushing. They’d gone to see A Chorus Line, and on the way back to the tunnel they took a wrong turn and found themselves on a dark, empty street, girders and overpasses criss-crossing overhead. Her mother’s agitation: “David, David,” she breathed. They saw a bright light at the corner, flames flickering out of a trash can, shadows running away. Her father made a high, choked gasp and took off his seatbelt but her mother gripped his arm and said, “Do not get out of this car.”

  The man was slumped against the building. His hands were black. His clothes and his shoes were black
. Tiny tongues of flame still skittered along his pants. The hood of a heavy parka framed his blackened face, but his shocking white eyes stared at Leo as the car slid past.

  “Drive away,” she remembers her mother said.

  “Maxine, someone has to help—”

  “Get out of here, David. Just drive.”

  She remembers this as clearly as she remembers waxy little boxes of chocolate milk and the home phone number her mother drilled into her, as clearly as she remembers who shot J.R. For years at a time she would not think of the Burned Man, but then for no reason he’d come back. Once, in college, she’d told the story to a lover, someone she met in Gabriel’s class. She described his eyes, glassy and surprised, his swollen black hands. Maybe there was a smell. Yes, if she tries hard enough she can remember a terrible smell.

  But it never happened—or not the way she remembers it.

  “There was something,” her mother says when she asks about the Burned Man. “Something in the newspaper, some kids from Long Island did it, I think. It was right after we moved to Cannondale—Matt was a baby.” She shuts her eyes and shakes her head to dislodge the memory. “I think it happened in the Bronx. They poured gasoline on him while he was sleeping. Mayor Koch went on TV. I’m surprised you remember that.”

  But they were there, Leo insists. She remembers the pained sound her father made, the look on her brother’s face, the long glow of the tunnel when they finally found their way home.

  “What do you think, Leo? That I wouldn’t remember?” Maxine tilts her head as if she can’t recognize her daughter. David slumps against the wall of El Arca, his face sallow with altitude sickness. Leo closes her eyes and the man is still there: propped against the wall as if to be carted off, his shocked and accusing gaze.

  “What kind of people do you think we are?” Maxine says. “You think we’d just drive right by something like that?”