The Book of Unknown Americans: A novel (13 page)

“I mean … I lost myself. In between.”

“Oh,” I said, and then I just sat there, because something about that idea—that you could be one person in one moment and then wake up and be completely different—punched me in the gut.

“You don’t ask me how I’m feeling,” Maribel said. “I hate it when people … ask me that.”

She’d told me that before, but I didn’t point it out. I just said, “It probably gets old, huh?”

“I want to be like everybody else.”

“Yeah,” I said, because I knew just what she meant. I’d spent my whole life feeling like that. Like everybody else was onto something that I couldn’t seem to find, that I didn’t even know
existed.
I wanted to figure it out, the secret to having the easy life that everyone else seemed to have, where they fit in and were good at everything they tried. Year after year, I waited for it all to fall into place—every September I told myself, This year will be different—but year after year, it was all just the same.

I didn’t say anything in response to Maribel that day. We moved on to another topic. But later that night, when I was lying in bed, I realized what I should have said, because for her at least it would have been the truth: “You shouldn’t want to be like everybody else. Then you wouldn’t be like you.”

ONE DAY
I walked back from her place to find my dad sitting on the couch, watching television. He had his sweat-socked feet up on the coffee table and a bottle of beer in his hand. Usually
he didn’t get home until later, so both of us were surprised to see each other.

“What are you doing here?” I asked.

He sat up, startled. “The diner closed early today. Not enough customers in the afternoons anymore. Aren’t you supposed to be at soccer?”

I tensed. “I was,” I said.

“You’re not wearing your soccer clothes.”

“Yeah.” I scrambled through excuses in my head. “My clothes were dirty, so I borrowed someone else’s stuff.”

“This is someone else’s? This? What you’re wearing?”

“Well, I had to give it back after practice, so I changed into my regular clothes again.”

“You gave dirty clothes back to someone?”

I nodded.

“Who?”

I said the first name I could think of. “Jamal Blair.”

My dad pushed out his lips. He was sitting on the couch, twisted to look at me. “I never heard that name.”

“He’s good. He’s a midfielder.”

My dad squinted like he was studying me with X-ray vision. I tried to stand as still as possible.

“When’s the next game?” he asked, like he was testing me.

“I need to check,” I said.

“You don’t know?”

I didn’t say anything.

“You don’t know?” my dad asked again, his voice booming this time.

This was how things went with him. One minute you were having a conversation and the next minute he was blowing up.

There had been one other time that my dad had mentioned wanting to go to a game, but the fact that his work schedule wouldn’t allow it had saved me. It was basically the only thing that had been saving me all along. By the time he came home each day, I just said I’d been at soccer and he didn’t know the difference.

But it was over now, I thought. He’d finally seen through me.

My dad raised his beer bottle and angled it toward the light. “Gone,” he muttered. He held the bottle over the back of the couch. “Get me another.” From where I stood, I could see four empties lined up next to the sink in the kitchen.

I took the bottle, and my dad slumped back down in the couch cushions.

Was that it? Were we done now?

Then from the couch my dad yelled, “Celia!”

I heard my mom’s footsteps move through their bedroom and down the hall. “Are you calling me?”

“You can’t keep up with the laundry?”

She walked into the living room, shaking her head. “What are you talking about?”

“Mayor’s soccer clothes. He says they’re in the laundry.”

My mom looked at me, confused. I just stared at her, trying to look as innocent as possible. But then her face changed, and for a split second I thought that maybe she had figured it out. But if she had, she didn’t give me away.

Instead she said, “Sorry. I’ll do laundry today.”

“¡Carajo!” my dad said, and that was the end of that.

Where should I begin? Venezuela is where I was born and where I lived until I was twelve years old. I was a very beautiful child, happy in every way. But when I was twelve, my mother fell in love with a man from California. He asked her to marry him, so we moved to his home in Long Beach. It was an enormous house with a pool in the courtyard. I believe a famous architect had designed it. Hollywood studios called us sometimes to see about using the house in a movie or for a commercial shoot. It was very glamorous.

I was content there for a while. My mother’s new husband had a son, Scott, from a previous marriage who was two years older than me. Scott paid no attention to me in the beginning, but soon enough, as my body began to change and I grew into womanhood, he took another look. He was always walking in on me in the shower, claiming he didn’t know I was there, or I would catch him watching me while I tanned by the pool. I tried to ignore him when I could. I kept the door to my room locked.

Scott and I were at the house one night. I was sixteen. It was a rainy evening. My mother and his father were out at dinner. I was in the kitchen getting a soda from the refrigerator when he came up from behind and kissed me. I remember very clearly he said, “It’s okay. We’re not really brother and sister, so it’s fine.” But it wasn’t fine with me. I tried to push him off, but he was stronger than me. I wasn’t a prude. I had kissed boys before. But
this was not what I wanted. He came at me again. He knocked me to the floor and climbed on top of me.

He did unspeakable things, all against my will. I don’t know why, but he thought he could do whatever he wanted. That’s how boys are.

Later, I told my mother what he had done to me, but she didn’t believe it. She accused me of trying to ruin things for her. She said, “Look at this life they’ve given us.” She warned me not to be ungrateful. Of course, I was only more upset after that. And I felt I couldn’t stay there, in such proximity to Scott. I knew it was only a matter of time before he came for me again. I told my mother I was moving out. She didn’t fight it. She didn’t offer to go with me. I don’t think she had ever even wanted a child. She had me as a result of a one-night stand. I was less important than the things she had now—a nice house and diamond jewelry, an expensive car and a big refrigerator. It was the life she had always dreamed of—we were even citizens now—and in the United States no less.

I went to a shelter and told them that I was on my own. I lied and said that my parents were both dead and that I had been fending for myself. I stayed with a girlfriend for a little while, too. I lived in her pool house for months, and her parents never even knew I was there. I missed my mother, but the truth was that I had missed her even when we were together, so it was nothing new.

As soon as I got my high school diploma, I left California. The girlfriend I had stayed with was going to college in New Jersey. Her parents had given her a car for graduation, so she was going to fill it with her belongings and drive across the country to her new school. She offered to take me with her. I stayed with her in her dorm for a while until I found a job waiting tables and saved enough money to live on my own.

I met a certain man while I had that job. He used to sit at the counter and order blueberry pie. He used to flirt with me sometimes. I tried to resist him. I was suspicious of men by then. I wanted nothing to do with them. But he was persistent and he was kind and he made me laugh. He started staying after the restaurant had closed, talking to me while I cleaned up. He used to walk me home when it was dark. He didn’t know what he was getting into with me, though. He never did anything wrong, but it was a struggle for me to be truly close to him. It was difficult, because of my past, to trust him. I pushed him away—every time he came back to me, I pushed again—until finally he left.

But he’s the father of my two boys, and I’ve gone out of my way to make sure that they turn out to be good and respectful. When they were in my house, they never laid a hand on a girl, never a kiss, nothing. I was very watchful. It’s possible they’re the only good boys in the world. With the help of scholarships and financial aid, they’re able to attend university. They’re studying hard there.

Now I receive money every month as part of my divorce settlement. So financially I’m secure, but I also choose to volunteer my time on Mondays and Wednesdays at the hospital because I feel I should do something positive with my time, something to help people. It’s the least I can do. I have enough money that maybe I could live somewhere else, but my friends are here. Besides my boys, my friends are all I have.

Almost no one in my life now knows what I’ve been through, nor do I want them to know. Some things should be private. That’s what I always say. Besides, I don’t need anyone’s pity. My life has been what it has been. It’s not a wonderful story, but it’s mine.

The days that December were long and cold. We had been keeping our thermostat at eighty degrees but then our first heating bill arrived in the amount of $304.52, which made me cry when I saw it and made Arturo shred the paper into bits the size of confetti. Neither of us needed to say out loud that we couldn’t pay it.

We turned the heat down to sixty after that and huddled by the radiators for warmth. We wrapped blankets around our shoulders, pinching them closed in our fists, and wore extra pairs of socks. I tied a scarf over my head, even though Arturo said it made me look like a terrorist. The wind sliced through the edges of the old, loose windows and shuttled cold air into our bedroom. Arturo tried to smooth caulk into the crevices, but the caulk cracked when it dried. He taped rags around the window casings, but it was little help.

“My body isn’t made for this weather!” I told Arturo, who laughed the first time I said it and frowned when I repeated myself again a few days later.

“We shouldn’t complain,” he said.

So I did my best to focus on the positive. Maribel had laughed twice since that first time, and it seemed to me that she was able to remember more on her own now, too. She still relied on her notebook, but during Mass, for example, she knew when to kneel and when to stand, when to go up for communion and how to
find her way back to our seat afterwards. The reports from school were encouraging, too. The most recent one had said: “Maribel speaks with increasing frequency, both to the teacher and to the aide, although only in Spanish. She has begun to respond to questions, although at times her response is inconsistent with the question asked. Both in voluntary speech and in reply, she has begun to modulate her voice to be more expressive.”

Even so, I was a worrier by nature and I couldn’t escape the feeling that anything could happen to her at any time. As if because something terrible had happened to her once, there was more of a possibility that something terrible would happen to her again. Or maybe it was merely that I understood how vulnerable she was in a way I hadn’t before. I understood how easily and how quickly things could be snatched away.

Every school morning, I stood outside and waited for the bus with her. Every afternoon, I met her again in the same spot. Maribel had developed a sort of friendship with Mayor Toro, which seemed like one more way that she was making progress—he was her first friend since the accident—but I told her that she and Mayor were only allowed to spend time together under supervision, either at our apartment or at the Toros’. About that I was firm. The Toros’ front door was no more than ten meters from ours, down on the first floor, but I stood outside and watched Maribel walk the distance, waiting for her to go inside before I did. When it was time for her to come home, I watched for her again.

I was making enchiladas de carne one day with some near-expired brisket I had found on clearance at the meat market. I was humming to myself, a song my mother used to sing me when I was a girl. I washed the black pasilla chiles off my hands, patting
them dry against my pants, and glimpsed the clock, which read just past five. My heart leapt. How had it gotten so late? Maribel should have been home by then. Quickly, I walked to the door and opened it, expecting to see her mounting the stairs, walking toward me, but all I saw was the cracked asphalt and the faded white paint lines in the empty parking lot. Where was she? Was she still at the Toros’?

I closed the door behind me, stepped outside, and started toward the Toros’ apartment. When I got to the bottom of the staircase, I heard laughter. Not Maribel’s, but someone’s. Coming from around the side of the building. And then I heard a boy’s voice.

I crept toward it. “Maribel?” I called. No one answered. “Maribel?” I said louder, inching my way forward.

I kicked something and looked down to see Maribel’s sunglasses on the ground. Unease rose beneath my breastbone. I picked up the sunglasses and kept walking, listening for her, but everything was quiet now.

And then, as I turned the corner, I saw her. Her back was against the cinder-block wall, and her hands were up over her head. A boy—the boy from the gas station, I recognized him instantly—was holding her wrists in place, staring at her. Her shirt was bunched under her armpits, exposing her white cotton bra, and her head was turned to the side, her eyes squeezed shut.

I screamed. The boy startled and spun his head around.

“Get away from her!” I yelled.

I raced to wedge myself between them, yanking Maribel’s shirt down, shielding her with my body. The boy said something in English, something unintelligible to me, but I could hear the
indignation in his tone, and without thinking, I turned and spat in his face. He grabbed my arm, digging his nails into my skin.

“Go, Maribel,” I shrieked. “Go to the apartment!”

But she didn’t move. She was mute and immobile, a tree rooted in place.

“Go!” I said again, tearing myself away from the boy. And then I ran, dragging Maribel with me to the front of the building, back up the staircase and into the apartment, where I locked the door behind us, gasping and trying to blink away the blinding white light of panic.