The Book of Unknown Americans: A novel (22 page)

“Maribel, come say hello,” Arturo instructed, turning off the music and summoning her from the living room.

Dutifully, Maribel walked over, tucking her hair behind her ears.

“Say hello,” Arturo urged.

Maribel stayed quiet.

“It’s fine,” Quisqueya said. “I understand.”

Arturo tightened his jaw. “She’s shy,” he said.

“Maribel, we need to talk to Quisqueya for a few minutes. Do you want to wait in the bedroom?” I asked.

After she left, Arturo settled himself across from Quisqueya at the kitchen table. I placed the glass of water in front of her. She took a sip and pushed it to the middle of the table. Then she sat, squeezing her fingers in her lap.

Arturo raised his eyebrows at me. I shook my head, as puzzled as him.

“Well,” Quisqueya began, “I hate to say anything.”

“Is everything all right?” I asked.

“With me? I’m fine. Thank you for asking.” She fidgeted while Arturo and I waited.

“Well,” she began again, “I was on my way out to the hospital
one afternoon. Did you know that I volunteer there? It’s nothing, really. I change bedpans and prop up pillows and deliver lunches. Sometimes the patients mistake me for a nurse, but I tell them, please! Nurses do important work. I simply come and do chores. It’s nothing. Of course, we are all doing God’s work. That’s what I think. Even if we contribute in only small ways.” She stopped and looked at us.

“What you do is important,” I offered, even though I didn’t know where this was headed.

“Yes,” Quisqueya agreed. She reached for the water glass again, but thought better of it and drew her hand back to her lap.

“I was on my way out a few weeks ago. And you know that the Toros bought a car? I haven’t had a chance yet to ride in it myself but … oh, of course you know. They took you for a drive, didn’t they? Last week? Did you see me? On the balcony? Rafael can be so rude sometimes. And do you know that Celia never called me after that? I hardly see her anymore. It seems she always has plans with other people”—and here, Quisqueya looked pointedly at me—“so there’s never really a good time to catch her anymore. It’s such a shame. She and I used to be very close.”

Arturo looked at me, confused.

“I saw them sitting in the car together,” Quisqueya said suddenly.

“Who?” Arturo asked.

“Mayor Toro. And your daughter. They were together in the car.”

Quisqueya cast a quick glance down the hallway, then leaned toward us. “They were kissing,” she said.

“When?” I asked.

“It was a few weeks ago.”

“Kissing?” Arturo said.

“Yes, they were kissing. Mayor Toro and your daughter, Maribel.”

“You’re sure it was them?” Arturo asked.

“I’m positive. In Rafael’s car.”

When had they been in Rafael’s car? They knew the rule. They had to be here or at the Toros’ apartment.

“They spend a lot of time together,” Quisqueya said.

“They’re friends,” Arturo said. I could tell he was upset, but he didn’t want to give Quisqueya the satisfaction of knowing it.

“I think they’re more than friends.”

“Okay,” Arturo said. “Is that what you came here to tell us?”

Quisqueya looked momentarily defeated. I could see it in her face. She had been eager to deliver this news. She had been looking forward to see what impact it would make, and now that she saw that it hardly left a dent, she was disappointed.

“No,” she said slowly. “There’s more.”

When she didn’t offer anything else, sitting there with her mouth pinched, Arturo said, “And? What is it?”

“It only
started
with a kiss,” Quisqueya said. “But then Mayor put his hand on her leg. I could see them through the windshield. They were kissing and then Mayor leaned toward her. And he put his hand on her leg, and … it was hard to see everything they were doing, but a few minutes later when Mayor stepped out of the car, his pants were … wet.”

Arturo pushed himself back from the table and stood.

Quisqueya stopped talking, her eyes wide, her face nearly as red as her hair.

I didn’t know what to think. It was too much.

“You’re making this up,” Arturo said.

“I’m sorry,” Quisqueya said, “but I thought you should know. Especially considering …”

“Arturo, sit down,” I said.

He was pacing in small circles.

“I know how boys can be,” Quisqueya said. “Boys Mayor’s age—you can’t be too careful. Of course Celia always tells me he’s so good, but I was over there recently and you should have heard how he talked to me. Very disrespectful. If that’s how he treats me, I started to think … Well, I was worried about Maribel.”

Arturo looked at me as if to ask, Do you believe her?

I don’t know, I told him with my eyes. Maybe. I wasn’t sure, but I wasn’t ready to take any chances, either. If there was even a possibility …

“I should go now,” Quisqueya said. “Thank you for the water.” She waited, as if she expected one of us to escort her to the door. When neither Arturo nor I moved, Quisqueya walked out herself, the click of her shoes echoing down the hall.

Late in February, my dad came home from work one night and said, “It’s over.”

I was on my way to the kitchen, but I knew enough to tell when I should stay out of his way. A few years ago Enrique and I had devised an alert system where we’d hold up a certain number of fingers to each other to indicate how far up the scale of volatility my dad was. If Enrique had been there that day, I would have rated this a level four, the second-highest possible, which meant “Radioactive. Steer clear.” The day he’d grounded me had probably been a level six, off the charts.

From the hallway, I listened as my mom scurried out to meet him. I heard muffled voices. And then, for a long minute, I heard nothing.

“Mayor, come to dinner!” my mom called. She sounded angry.

I walked down the hall slowly, unsure about what to expect, preparing myself to be yelled at again. Maybe I’d messed up something in the car when I snuck in there with Maribel and he’d just now noticed. But my dad had been in the car since then—all of us had gone to White Clay to skate on the marsh the week before—and he hadn’t said anything. Or maybe Sra. Rivera finally said something to my mom about how I’d been over there when I wasn’t supposed to be. Or maybe anything. You never knew with my dad.

But when I got to the table, he didn’t say a word. He was sitting
with his arms crossed, still wearing his coat and knit cap, while my mom dumped arroz con guandú onto plates, knocking the side of the spoon against the paila with each motion. I didn’t say anything either. I just concentrated on being invisible, lowering myself quietly into a chair, holding my breath.

When she had finished half the food on her plate, my mom looked at my dad and said, “Aren’t you going to tell him?”

“Leave it alone, Celia.”

“He deserves to know, doesn’t he?”

“Know what?” I asked.

“Go to your room,” my dad said.

“What did I do?”

“That’s how you answer me? When I say go to your room, you go.”

“Mayor, stay where you are,” my mom said. “He hasn’t eaten yet, Rafa. Let him eat.”

“Mayor, go to your room,” my dad said again.

“Mayor, stay where you are,” my mom said.

I waited for my dad to counter, and when he didn’t, I hesitantly picked up my fork and poked it into my rice.

I took a few bites while my parents watched me. My mom was curling and uncurling her lips like she wanted to say something. A geyser waiting to spew. After a minute and twenty-two seconds—I watched the time tick by on the clock on the wall—my mom said, “Well, what if you don’t find anything?”

“Jesus, Celia!”

“I think it’s a legitimate question.”

“I’ve already told you I’ll find something.”

“But what if it’s not for a while?”

“Then it’s not for a while.”

“Rafa!”

“This woman!” my dad said, looking up at the ceiling and pressing his hands together like he was praying. “Que Dios me ayude.”

“Don’t say that.”

“You don’t listen to me.”

“You’re not telling me anything.”

“I’m telling you I’ll find something. Do you want me to say it again? I’ll find something. I’ll find something. Do you hear me?”

After my dad left the table, snatching his pack of cigarettes from on top of the refrigerator and escaping to the balcony, my mom looked at me and said, “Well, I guess you might as well know. It finally happened. Your father lost his job.”

THE REST OF
the story emerged little by little: The diner was closing. Windows boarded up. Doors locked. Out of business after forty-five years. All that time my dad had spent worrying that he was going to get fired for dropping an omelet or for leaving the freezer door open, and now the reason he’d been axed wasn’t even his fault. It was the rotten economy that had landed him in the water and that had capsized the whole ship along with him.

For fifteen years, my dad had been working at that diner. Fifteen years of taking the bus to the same place with leatherette booths and a coffee-stained linoleum counter and wood-paneled walls. He’d started as a busboy, clearing tables and wiping up bits of egg that had been left behind on the tables, and he’d never complained. “I wouldn’t have done much better in Panamá,” I’d heard him say before. “I didn’t have the brains to make much of myself.” My dad was smart, though. He’d never gone to college,
which gave him the wrong idea about himself, but the only reason he hadn’t was because he’d been forced into getting a job after his parents died. He’d waited tables at a roadside restaurant in Panamá, which turned out to be the only experience he needed to find work in the United States.

Eventually my dad worked his way up from busboy to dishwasher to line cook. He flipped thousands of omelets and fried mountains of hash browns. He strained the pulp from the orange juice by hand when they used to do that sort of thing and then dispensed pre-fab OJ from a machine when the management switched to that. He remembered the days when everyone who came in ordered coffee and remembered how the waitresses had complained when everyone started asking for lattes instead. Fifteen years. Six days a week. Early mornings. Up to his elbows in grease. And now it was over. Just like that.

My dad scoured the newspaper every day, searching the classifieds, calling any that sounded promising, and hanging up either in fury or in disappointment. He went all over town, filling out applications to work in the kitchens at the Christiana Hilton, Caffè Gelato, Valle Pizza, Grotto Pizza, Friendly’s, Charcoal Pit, Ali Baba, Klondike Kate’s, Iron Hill, Home Grown, the Deer Park, and even the restaurant at the Hotel duPont. My mom suggested he go to the Community House to see if someone there could help him, but he hated the idea of it so much, either of my mom interfering or of accepting help from a place that he called “the Handout House,” that he shouted at her to keep her big nose out of it, to which my mom said, “Big nose?” to which my dad replied by holding his arm in front of his face to mimic an elephant. My mom didn’t even have a big nose, but the two of them were down to cheap shots by then, and my mom ran to the
bedroom, where she shut herself away all afternoon. Even when my parents were speaking civilly to one another, they spent the dinner hour complaining about how so far President Obama hadn’t done anything and how they saw absolutely zero improvements and about how people were getting desperate and thank God we had the money from Gloria but everyone else was in a tough spot and it had gotten so bad now that people were getting mugged outside of Western Unions for the money they were about to wire to relatives back home. “They’re targeting people who look like us,” my dad said. “It used to be the Orientals, but the style now is to pick on the Latinos. And the Arabs. At least them I can understand. They did September eleventh. What did we ever do to anyone?”

My dad looked at my mom and me like he honestly expected someone to give him an answer. “ ‘Oriental’ is for rugs,” I said, repeating something that my social studies teacher, Mr. Perry, had told us once.

“What?”

“You’re supposed to say ‘Asians,’ not ‘Orientals.’ I don’t know if ‘Arab’ is right, either.”

“This is what they teach you at school?” my dad said. “Forget about what to call people. What about the history?”

“They teach us history.”

“And has it ever been this bad before in the history of this country?”

“Well, there was the Great Depression.”

“I don’t know,” my dad said. “It seems to me like the world is going to hell.”

“Don’t say that,” my mom said.

“What would you prefer I say?”

“How about something nice for a change?”

“I say nice things.”

“When?”

My dad shrugged.

“Exactly,” my mom said.

I HADN
’
T HUNG OUT
with William in months, lately because I’d been grounded, but even before that there had been times when he’d invited me to do something—go to Holy Angels to watch the girls in their uniforms or to Bing’s to get cinnamon rolls or to a movie at Newark Shopping Center—but I’d shot him down so often that he started snubbing me, acting like he didn’t see me when I passed him in the hall at school, walking away if I approached him at his locker, sitting at a table as far from me as he could possibly get in the cafeteria. I figured that with enough time he would get over it, but in the end, I was the one who caved.

“Hey,” I said one day in chemistry. We were going through the motions of that day’s experiment, sitting side by side while neither of us acknowledged the other’s existence. “Is this seriously how it’s going to be?”

He pretended like he couldn’t hear me.

“Hey,” I said louder.

He looked at me.

“You know this is dumb, right?” I said.

“Did you just call me dumb?”

I rolled my eyes. “So you’re gonna keep being like this?”

“Like what?”

“Like, not my friend.”

“Me? You’re the one who keeps dissing.”

“I’ve been grounded.”

“So you’ve said.”

“It’s true.”

“What about before that?”