Night at the Fiestas: Stories (20 page)

Technically, Andrea had been invited to this party. Rather, her parents had been invited. Technically. But she was certain that the Lowells didn’t actually expect them to come. After all, they’d never been invited before. This invitation—letterpress-printed on thick, soft paper—had been a gesture of goodwill, and not even that, Andrea was sure, but something the Lowells had felt they had to do, given that her father would be there anyway, with his taco truck.

The truck was a highlight of this year’s party, according to the invitation: “Tacos provided by our own Salvador Romero and his El Primo taco truck!” And there, instead of blueberries on sage-colored sprigs, was the truck itself: a festive little line drawing debossed in red and yellow.

The taco truck was a recent acquisition. Andrea’s father had saved for four years, plotting, cobbling together loans (including a pretty substantial one from William Lowell), driving the family crazy with his exuberance. The truck would pay for itself, he said, would give him something to do. All week it was shuttered, parked in the driveway while her father worked as a supervisor in the Lowells’ orchards, and on the weekends he drove it to the park, where he served egg burritos and Cokes to young men famished after their soccer games, tacos and tortas to families out for a stroll. Her father never said so, but Andrea suspected from her mother’s strained silence on the subject that the taco truck wasn’t as lucrative as he’d hoped.

“Are they kidding?” Andrea said when she heard the Lowells were hiring her father for the party. “You’d think they’d want something fancy.”

“Oh, you know these wealthy people,” said her mother, shaking her head in bemusement. “They get their ideas.”

Her parents had been delighted to see the truck featured on the Lowells’ invitation and had gushed about how touched they were to have received it. Her mother turned the invitation in her hands and shook her head in wonder. “They didn’t have to think of us, but they did.”

Andrea was hijacked by the image of her mother in her teal dress with the gold chain belt, trailing the Lowells all over their party. “You’re not actually thinking about going, are you, Mom?”

Hurt flashed in her mother’s face, and Andrea bristled at the Lowells for causing this hurt. “I work on Saturdays,” her mother said stiffly and dropped the invitation in the trash. Later, in spite of herself, Andrea had plucked it out and squirreled it away in her room, saving even the envelope (yellow lined in red—why was she so impressed with the invitation?—she hated that she was so impressed).

Well, if the Lowells wanted Mexicans at their party, that’s what they’d get.

The day wasn’t ideal for an outdoor party, Andrea saw as she unstuck herself from the driver’s seat. The leaves of the peach trees were dusty silver in the hot afternoon light, and a breeze stirred the dry soil. “You won’t believe these people,” she told Matty, shutting the car door. She told him about the framed photograph she had once seen in their kitchen: the redheaded brother and sister as children in their green velvet coats, the Eiffel Tower lit and snowy behind them. “Can you believe that? Matching coats! And she was actually wearing white gloves. What a waste to bring little kids to France. They probably planned the whole trip just for that one stupid picture of their kids being adorable in Paris.”

“Annoying,” conceded Matty.

“Tell me about it. They probably read
Madeline
every five minutes. They probably couldn’t stop themselves.”

Andrea still remembered the children’s expressions: the boy flashing a showy television-child smile, little Parker scowling at her patent-leather toes. She’d seen the picture years ago; Andrea had come with her father when he’d stopped by to pick up paychecks. She remembered the kitchen, too, large and gleaming, the row of pale green porcelain bowls as thin as eggshells stacked in the open shelves. Mrs. Lowell had given Andrea three still-cooling ginger cookies wrapped in a napkin, which Andrea had made last for over a week, tasting in the increasingly stale nibbles the calm and security and beauty of this home.

“I’m pretty sure Parker Lowell isn’t even that smart. She’s too
sweet
to be smart.” Andrea fingered an aching pimple on her forehead.

“Do you think she’s easy? In my experience lots of rich girls are easy.”

Andrea ignored the pang in the center of her chest. “I’m pretty sure she only got into Stanford because she’s legacy,” she said, even though she didn’t believe it.

“Why are we here?” asked Matty. “If you hate them so much.”

Matty was here because Andrea had strong-armed him into coming; she intended for people to assume he was her boyfriend. It was the least he could do, after all the essays she’d written for his classes at Chico State.

And why was Andrea here? Driving, she’d felt full of the brazen courage she would need to crash this party. She would show up full of breezy, sparkling confidence that would startle these people. Andrea was an equal now, a Stanford student, poised and intelligent, no longer just the daughter of one of their laborers, no longer an awestruck kid worshiping their cookies, and if the Lowells wanted to trot out her father and his taco truck to provide a little kitsch, then they’d have to do it in front of her. By her very presence today, she would prove to them their snobbery and make them ashamed of their entitlement and their halfhearted acts of charity toward her family. Admittedly, her plan was vague, but it involved making Parker eat a taco in front of her. And she would have Matty at her side, handsome bad-boy Matty Macias, whom she’d loved since eighth grade. Matty, with his gelled hair and warm, thick-lashed eyes and the cords of his scapular showing at the neck of his t-shirt. Matty would not fail to disconcert.

“We’re here because I was invited. I can’t just snub them. Parker and I are classmates.”

Andrea smoothed the wrinkled back of her new sundress (J. Crew—the most expensive dress she’d ever bought, and she did not intend to keep it; the tag still hung, scratchy and damp now, down her back, and she hoped, should Matty touch her, that he wouldn’t notice it).

“Just, you know, be polite,” Andrea told him.

“—the fuck?” Matty said, shooting her an irritated grimace. “You think I’m an idiot?”

“I think you’re not used to being around people like this.”

Andrea strode past him, clutching the invitation. Only now did it occur to her that maybe she ought to have brought something: Flowers? Wine? Already she could hear laughter through the trees.

A
NDREA HATED IT
, the constant alert hunger for every possible chance to move up in the world. “He’s lazy,” her father would tell Andrea’s mom in the evenings, referencing one or another of the farmworkers. “He might as well go back to Mexico. Work hard, get ahead. Look at me.”

Over and over, the same conversation. “You should talk to Bill about law,” her father would urge, pronouncing his name
Beel
. “Maybe he could help you.”

“He doesn’t practice,” said Andrea.

“Still,” said her mother, “it’s nice to show interest.”

“We’ll have to get the girls together,” William Lowell had said after Salvador told his boss with tears in his eyes (Salvador’s eyes had filled even relating the exchange) that Andrea had been accepted at Stanford. “Maybe lunch at the house, and they can swap notes.” But though Mr. Lowell asked after Andrea (Salvador always told her when he did), and remarked over and over how wonderful it was that she’d gotten in, and on full scholarship, too, they never did get the girls together. And thank goodness. It would have been strange and awkward. As children they’d played together on a few sporadic summer afternoons—Andrea remembered running after Parker through the orchards, bashful and grinning—but the girls hadn’t seen each other in years.

Stanford, Stanford, Stanford. There were weeks last summer when Andrea couldn’t sleep, so thrilled was she by the sense that her life was blooming into something marvelous. She’d tremble in bed, eyes darting around the dark familiar shapes of her room, which was really just an alcove off the kitchen, amazed that she would actually be leaving this home she’d known her whole life: goodbye to the rippled linoleum, goodbye to the Aladdin-print curtain that was her bedroom wall, and beyond it, goodbye to the refrigerator’s intestinal gurgles. Oh, the success and wealth and greatness the future held for her! It actually made her breathless to think of it. Parker Lowell was the single blight on her joy. During freshman orientation, as Andrea was herded through White Plaza with others from the Chicano student association, she found herself looking with dread for Parker among the clumps of happy milling students. It was only a matter of time, Andrea knew, before they ran into each other at a party or on the Quad, and when they did, Parker would smile and make small talk and, through her very graciousness, expose Andrea as she truly was: cheap, striving, unworthy. Maybe, Andrea thought, Parker would get mono.

But the campus was sprawling and Andrea’s freshman dorm mercifully distant from Parker’s. The first quarter passed, and nearly the second, before Andrea saw her, in the winter production of
Once Upon a Mattress
. She’d sat tense in the audience, searching the actors’ faces, and felt oddly thrilled when she finally spotted Parker. As Parker, lady-in-waiting to Queen Aggravaine, curtsied and twirled and warbled on stage, Andrea considered pointing her out to her roommate, but didn’t.

Her whole life Andrea had been subjected to her parents’ slavish interest in the Lowells’ affairs, so she shouldn’t have been surprised that all through freshman year they kept her apprised of the Lowell family news. “I really don’t care,” Andrea said, but she listened anyway, thinking as she did that there were lots of interesting things she could tell them about power structures. They reported on leaf curl and how the Elbertas and Elegant Ladies were faring, and on the Lowell boy’s job in the governor’s office, and then in the spring they called with the news that brought Parker lower than any bout of mono ever could: Mrs. Lowell had left her husband for their landscaper—their twenty-eight-year-old
female
landscaper—and William Lowell, apparently unable to live for twenty seconds without a wife, had started up with the widow of his roommate from Exeter.

Andrea had been shocked. In the face of her mother’s shock, though, she’d feigned total equanimity. “No one’s really straight,” Andrea explained, “not one hundred percent.”

So it was that the Lowells, poised and affectionate and photogenic, now found themselves cut down by a crisis that had all the elements of a joke, and it seemed to Andrea that the balance between them had shifted. In Andrea’s mind Parker underwent a faint oxidation, taking on a patina, for the first time, of vulnerability. Again Andrea found herself seeking Parker on campus, this time so she might extend her hand in friendship.

W
HEN THEY STEPPED
into the clearing between the orchards and the rows of highbush Jubilee blueberries, Andrea saw that her father’s taco truck had inspired a whole Mexican theme. Gone were the sun-faded Porta-Pottys and the water truck; in their place, the Lowells had erected a tent festooned with fluttering papel picado flags. Elderly people in pastels sat in the shade and the younger people stood around drinking margaritas. White tablecloths rippled in the hot breeze. In the center of each table sat a little piñata on bright woven fabric.

And there, at the edge of the party, was the taco truck itself. From where she stood, Andrea could see her father’s arms handing full plates out the sliding window. She remained out of his line of vision. He’d be surprised and proud and pleased to see her here as a guest, would probably think Parker had invited her personally, but she didn’t feel like getting into explanations, and she didn’t want to establish herself as the daughter of the cook, at least not yet.

The truck
did
look festive here, Andrea saw with disappointment, against the backdrop of trees. A colorful hand-painted sign announced a pared-down, classed-up menu: Kobe beef, wild-caught salmon, free-range chicken, and vegetarian, all on blue corn tortillas.

“A vegetarian on a tortilla,” said Andrea. “Ha.”

“Funny,” said Matty. He scanned the crowd. “They know how to do it up.”

Tacos were not the only option: caterers in white shirts presided over a vast spread of fresh, colorful food. Tin buckets were lined up on another table, a grosgrain ribbon tied around each handle. Already several beautifully dressed children were in the blueberry rows, picking.

And now, turning toward Andrea, in a floral shift and Converse sneakers without socks, was Parker. In one hand she swung a bucket, and in the other she held a massive sloshing glass of wine. “Andrea?” She tilted her head, her red hair shining in the sun and slipping over her shoulder. “Your dad didn’t say you were coming. It’s so great you could make it!”

Was Parker going to hug her? Yes, she was. Andrea put her arms around Parker, and there was nothing casual about it, nothing breezy. She pulled away too soon, terrified Parker would feel the price tags.

“So,” Andrea said, tongue-tied. She brandished her invitation. “Do I need to give this to you?”

Parker looked at the invitation, but made no move, and it remained there, large and clumsy in Andrea’s hand. Stupid, to think she might be required to present it like a ticket. She waved it at the party and the field and the orchards. “It all looks great. I haven’t been out here in years.”

Parker stuck her hand out at Matty. “Parker. Great to meet you.”

“Oh, sorry. This is Matty.” Andrea smiled at him in a way that she hoped looked affectionate and familiar and somehow also conveyed the sense that they were having lots of spectacular sex.

“Matthew,” said Matty.

Andrea smiled woodenly; Matty jingled the coins in his pocket with one hand and, with the other, thumbed the edge of his repellent little mustache.

Andrea had imagined cornering Parker near the truck, plying her with tacos, which Parker, too polite to refuse, would choke down in class-conscious misery until she was sick. Absurd and far-fetched, yes, but Andrea had gotten a grim pleasure from the image. Now, though, she felt pathetic for even thinking it.