The Book of Unknown Americans: A novel (23 page)

“I had other plans.”

“Yeah. With her.”

“I told you that you could come hang out with us if you wanted.”

“What do you do with her anyway?”

“What do you mean? We talk.”

“She can talk?”

I gave him the finger.

William pulled a beaker out of the clamp and held it up to the light, watching the soft fizz of the chemicals inside.

“What do you want me to say?” I asked.

“Say you’re sorry.”

“For what?”

He gave me a sideways look. “Seriously, if you don’t know, then it’s not worth it.”

I ran my tongue along my teeth. Fine. If that’s what it took. “Sorry,” I said.

“Like you mean it.”

“You’re being a jackass,” I said.

William shrugged.

“Sorry,” I said again.

He grinned and put the beaker down. “So, amigo, you want to do something after school today?”

“I’m still grounded.”

“Fuck that. We just made up! You can’t leave me hanging now. We’ll go see a movie or something. I’ll drive you home after.”

I could see how much it meant to him and how crushed he would be if I turned him down. Besides, I’d snuck out that time to see Maribel and had gotten away with it, so maybe I could pull it off again.

“Sure,” I told William. “No problem.”

THE SECOND
I got home that day my mom stood up from the couch and said, “Señora Rivera called me.”

That was it. Nothing about where I had been or why I was so late getting home. Nothing about my grounding. I put my backpack on the floor.

My mom frowned. She was twisting a bracelet around her wrist.

“Why?” I asked. Was it Maribel? I wondered all of a sudden. Had something happened to her?

My mom looked like she was about to say something, but then she stopped herself. “We should probably wait for your father.”

“But why?”

“We should talk to you together.”

Now I was really worried. “Can’t you just tell me now? Is something wrong?”

My mom searched my face. Her eyes were heavy and tired and the makeup around them was smudged, like she’d been rubbing at them.

“I don’t know,” she said.

“Is Maribel okay?”

“Maybe you should go to your room, Mayor.”

“Is she okay?”

“Please, Mayor. Don’t make me say anything right now. I don’t even know what to say. Just wait until your father gets home. He and I need to talk first, and then we’ll come find you.”

“I’m just asking you if she’s okay.” That was all I wanted to know. As long as she was okay, I thought, nothing else my mom could say would matter.

“She’s fine,” my mom said. “Just—” she started, when, behind me, my dad walked in the front door.

He took one look at my mom and said, “What?”

“I need to talk to you,” she said.

“What happened?”

“Mayor, go to your room. We’ll come see you in a minute.”

“Papi’s home now. Why can’t I just stay here?”

“Mayor, please,” my mom said.

My dad cast his gaze at me. “You heard her,” he said. “Go.”

Angrily, I dragged my backpack across the carpet toward my room.

“Pick it up!” my mom screamed.

Without turning around, I snatched it off the floor and went to my room. I heard my dad say, “Celia, what the hell?” before I shut the door.

I sat on my unmade bed with my elbows on my knees. I got up and kicked my shoes off into the corner. I tried to listen through the door, but I couldn’t hear anything. From my pants pocket, my phone vibrated, and when I checked it William had sent me a text. “good movie. Ur mom mad?”

I wrote back: “dont know. sent me 2 my room.”

William: “haha. pussy.”

Me: “ttyl.”

I turned off my phone and threw it on my dresser.

After an eternity, my parents knocked on my door and came in. I could see right away that my mom had been crying. She was clutching a used tissue in one hand, and she stood with her body half hidden behind my dad, who had a dark look in his eyes. I
stood in my socks, facing them, waiting for the news, whatever it was.

“We received a call,” my dad said, his voice stony.

“I already told him that part,” my mom said.

My dad raised his hand to silence her.

“Señora Rivera said that you and Maribel were in my car the other day.”

I gulped. “We didn’t do anything to it.”

“So it’s true?”

I nodded.

“Is it my imagination,” my dad asked, “or are you still grounded?”

“Yes.”

“How did you get the keys?” my mom asked.

“I took them off the windowsill.”

My dad looked at me evenly. “Did you kiss Maribel?” he asked.

Flames shot through my cheeks. “What?”

“Did you kiss her in the car?”

“Why?”

“Answer the question, Mayor.”

“I don’t know. Maybe.”

“Maybe yes or maybe no?”

I just stared at them.

“What did you do with her?”

“Nothing.”

“Did you kiss her?” my mom asked from behind my dad.

“I mean, yeah, I guess. It wasn’t a big deal.”

My dad glanced at my mom and for one delirious second I thought I was off the hook, that somehow I’d exonerated myself,
and that we could all just go back to business as usual. But then my dad said to me, slowly, gravely, “You are not going to see her anymore.”

“What?”

“No more.”

“But what does that mean?”

“It means exactly what I said.”

I felt a dullness in my chest. “But why?”

“Her parents don’t want you to see her,” my dad said.

“Because I kissed her?”

“Was there more?”

“I mean, no …”

“No?” my mom asked hopefully.

“I swear, there wasn’t.”

But my dad shook his head. “It doesn’t matter. You broke the rules, Mayor. You’re only supposed to be with her in one of our apartments, aren’t you? I know you might think that’s unfair, but that’s what the Riveras want for her, so you have to respect it. And on top of that, you’re still grounded. Which means you shouldn’t have seen her no matter where you were.”

“This is because you don’t like her,” I said.

“No.”

“You never liked her!”

“Mayor, calm down,” my mom said.

“You don’t even know anything about her. I mean, did anyone even ask her what
she
wants?”

My dad shook his head. “You’re not going to see her again.”

“So that’s it?” I said. I felt the whole thing reeling away from me, like a rope slipping through my hands.

“Dios,” my mom said. “Qué lío magnífico.”

My wife, Ynez, and I were both brought into the world by way of Puerto Rico, me in 1950, and she five years later. Not long after we were married, I enlisted in the navy. I always wanted to do something heroic. With the navy, I traveled to Vietnam, Grenada, the Persian Gulf, and Bosnia. I was injured in Bosnia, which requires me to use a walker now. But I came home. I came home. And that is all any soldier cares about.

I love the esoteric things in life. My father used to call me an aesthete. He meant it not as a compliment, of course. He was disappointed by my interests and by the fact that they were not the same as his, which were farming and raising livestock. He believed a man should work hard with his hands, that toil and sweat were evidence of a virtuous life. He did not appreciate that I wanted to read books and that I saved money to buy an easel when I turned fifteen and that I would spend the afternoons painting pictures of trees. The only time he was proud of me, in fact, was when I joined the navy. He was an old man by then, nearing death, but I still remember his face when I told him, the way he had smiled with those teeth of his that were brown around the edges, the way the wrinkles rippled up to the surface of his cheeks.

Ynez was not as happy about it. She supported me, but she was worried. We never had children. We knew from the outset and in a terribly selfish way that our interest lay only in each other.
So when she was home during my deployments, she was there alone, and the weight of the solitude depressed her, I think, and gave her wide-open plains upon which her mind would wander, allowing her too much time and space to think about what might be happening to me as well as whether and when I would return.

When I came back from Vietnam, she wept at my feet. I saw clearly the toll it had taken on her. But I wasn’t ready to leave the navy. I had witnessed the sort of atrocities during the war that threaten to steal a man’s soul. I saw that humans are no better than any animal or brute, and in many cases might be infinitely worse. But often in the span of the same day, I would be restored, too, by the courage of men. And I had come to understand my father’s perspective about the gratification of feeling useful, of being in the world under the most demanding circumstances, and learning that I could not only survive but thrive, and that my body, the physical presence of me, could have import.

So eight years later, I left again, but this time while I was away, I wrote Ynez letters. If she heard from me with enough regularity, I thought, it would ease her worry. Over the years, over the subsequent deployments, I sent her hundreds of letters. I wrote two or three a day sometimes. They began as a way to save her, but they saved me also. They helped me to make sense of the things I saw, and from that, I began to make sense of the world and my place within it.

I read a lot of poetry in those days. I took small chapbooks overseas with me, chapbooks bound by staples with covers that were little more than construction paper. I copied the poems down sometimes and included them in my letters. Ynez used to tell me I should write my own poetry, but just because you have the requisite admiration and even ambition to do something
doesn’t mean you’re up to the task of performing it yourself, which was the case for me. I am good at being a reader of poetry, but not at much beyond that.

My eyes have turned against me now, so I am resigned to listening to books on CD. Sometimes Ynez reads poetry aloud to me. I no longer have any of those chapbooks that used to keep me company in so many far-flung places. I usually burned them after I finished them, just to lighten my load. But Ynez borrows books from the library and we sit on the couch and she covers me with an afghan and draws her slender feet up onto the cushions and I close my eyes while she reads.

There’s an American poet named Marvin Bell who emerged in the late sixties, during the height of the Vietnam War. He has a beautiful poem called “Poem After Carlos Drummond de Andrade,” which is a reference to the great Brazilian poet. I love the part that goes:

And then this portion at the end, which means everything to me:

After we told her that she couldn’t see Mayor anymore, Maribel grew moody and sullen. I had witnessed a hint of the same thing ever since Mayor had been grounded, but now it was worse. She hardly spoke. She nodded or shook her head. She held out her hand to indicate that she wanted something. She sat on the ledge at the front window and stared across the parking lot with her chin planted on her knees.

Once, nearly two years ago, Maribel had insisted on painting her fingernails black. She and her friend Abelina hid away in her room and painted each other’s nails, and when Maribel came to the dinner table that night, we saw it.

“What did you do to your hands?” Arturo asked.

“I painted my nails,” Maribel said, grinning and holding her fingers out like a fan.

“Is it permanent?” Arturo asked.

“It’s just nail polish, Papi.”

Arturo looked at me as if to ask, Is this something we should be worried about?

I had learned by then that Maribel liked to think of herself as a rebel. And yet she managed only small insurrections. She stayed out too late with her friends. She walked through the middle of the boys’ soccer games in the street, impervious to their shouts for her to get out of the way. She painted her fingernails black. And she did it all playfully, good-naturedly, in a way that made it impossible to be angry at her.

At the dinner table, she wiggled her fingers in the air and said, “I think it looks cool.”

Arturo glanced at me again. This time, Maribel saw him.

“What?” she said. “It’s okay to be different.”

“Of course it is,” I said.

With a depth of feeling that was lost on her, Arturo said, “We would love you no matter what. Because you’re ours.”

Maribel tucked a bite of her cuernillo relleno inside her cheek until it bulged. She chewed loudly, smacking her tongue against the roof of her mouth. “Would you love me if I ate like this all the time?” she asked.

I watched Arturo fight a smile. “Yes,” he said.

Maribel swallowed and curled her lips back with her fingers. “What if I looked like this?”

Arturo grinned. “Yes.”

She tensed the muscles in her neck until every tendon rose to the surface beneath her skin, like strings under a drooping tent. “What if I walked around looking like this all the time?”

“Maribel, stop it,” I said.

Arturo looked right at her, struggling to keep a straight face. “No matter what,” he said.

It was still the truth, but the way she was acting now had me worried. She had been showing so much improvement—the latest report from the school had said that Maribel could easily answer questions and follow prompts, and that her attention span had increased—and I hoped we hadn’t just undermined all of her progress.