The Book of Unknown Americans: A novel (7 page)

“To Evers.”

Celia nodded. She looked like she didn’t know what to say next, and I felt a mixture of embarrassment and indignation.

“It’s temporary,” I said. “She only has to go there for a year or two.”

“You don’t have to explain it to me.”

“She’s going to get better.”

“I’ve heard it’s a good school.”

“I hope so. It’s why we came.”

Celia gazed at me for a long time before she said, “When we left Panamá, it was falling apart. Rafa and I thought it would be better for the boys to grow up here. Even though Panamá was where we had spent our whole lives. It’s amazing, isn’t it, what parents will do for their children?”

She put her hand on mine. A benediction. From then, we were friends.

I WAS TIRED
of going to my usual places, so one rainy morning I went instead to the Community House, just to see what they offered.

I took the bus Celia told me to take and walked into a building filled with white tables and chairs. Beige computers sat on some of the tabletops and a row of beanbag chairs slouched along one wall like giant gumdrops. The receptionist asked me in Spanish, “Are you here for the English class?”

“English class?”

“I’m sorry. Our new session starts today, so I just assumed that’s why you were here.”

I was about to say no, but I stopped myself. Maybe it was luck that brought me here, or maybe it was providence. I envisioned myself in the school uniform I used to wear when I was a girl—the starched blue shirt and navy vest, the pleated skirt, the knee-high socks—and all of a sudden I liked the idea of being a student again. Maybe I would even learn enough to be able to help Maribel with her homework.

“Yes,” I said. “I am.”

The woman directed me to a room behind her.

A few people were already inside, seated at desks, and they glanced at me as I walked in. I smiled at them and sat with my purse on my lap, fiddling with the clasp until the teacher entered. She strode to the front and grinned at us with big horse teeth.

“Welcome, everybody,” she said in English. “I’m your teacher, Mrs. Shields.”

Of course, at the time I didn’t understand what she was saying. I only learned it later. That first day, the words were merely sounds in the air, broken like shards of glass, beautiful from a certain angle and jagged from another. They didn’t mean anything to me. Still, I liked the sound of them.

No one in the class said anything in return.

The teacher, in Spanish this time, said, “Hola a todos.”

“Hola,” a few people replied.

She put her hands on her hips. “We need to wake you people up,” she said in Spanish. “¡Hola!” She cupped one hand to her ear.

More people responded this time.

“¡Hola!” she yelled once more.

“¡Hola!” I said.

Profesora Shields threw her hands together. “Terrific. For today,” she explained, “I’m going to speak in Spanish, but as the class goes on, I’ll speak it less and less. That will be okay, because you’ll understand English more and more. You see? This is how it works.” She used her hands to mimic a scale. “Less and less,” she said, lowering her right hand. “More and more,” she said, raising her left. “Now some people will tell you that English is a difficult language. But don’t let them scare you. I congratulate you for being here at all and for having the courage to try. Bravo! Give yourself a round of applause.”

We all looked at one another.

“Go on,” she said.

We clapped lightly. Is this what Maribel was doing in her school? I wondered. Is this what school was like in the United States? It was like theater.

Profesora Shields called out greetings and had us repeat the words. Hello. Good-bye. My name is. What is your name? How are you? I’m fine, and you? Then she split us into groups of two and told us to practice. I was paired with a woman named Dulce, who was missing some of her teeth, so when she spoke she bowed her head self-consciously and directed the sounds at the floor. I asked her in Spanish, “Where are you from?”

“Chiapas,” she said.

“¿Eres mexicana?” I asked.

She nodded.

“Hello,” I said, in English, trying out the syllables on my tongue.

Profesora Shields had told us to pronounce the letter
h
, even at the beginning of words. “I know it won’t sound natural to you,” she said, “but you need to work to get it out. It’s important.”

I repeated the word. “Hello.”

In Spanish, Dulce said, “My son lives here with his wife. They brought me here.” She peeked at me. “Hello,” she tried.

“I came from Michoacán,” I said. “With my husband and our daughter.”

“My son’s wife just had a baby boy.”

“¡Ah, felicitaciones!”

“That’s why they brought me. To help take care of the baby.”

“What’s his name?”

“Jonathan. I wanted Carlos, but they said no, he’s an American baby.”

“Maybe Jonathan Carlos,” I said.

Dulce smiled. “Hello,” she said.

“Hello.”

“How jou are?” she asked.

“Fine, and jou?”

English was such a dense, tight language. So many hard letters, like miniature walls. Not open with vowels the way Spanish was. Our throats open, our mouths open, our hearts open. In English, the sounds were closed. They thudded to the floor. And yet, there was something magnificent about it. Profesora Shields explained that in English there was no usted, no tu. There was only one word—you. It applied to all people. Everyone equal. No one higher or lower than anyone else. No one more distant or more familiar. You. They. Me. I. Us. We. There were no words that changed from feminine to masculine and back again depending on the speaker. A person was from New York. Not a woman from New York, not a man from New York. Simply a person.

I was still thinking about it as I got on the bus after class, mouthing the words while I sat, trying to accustom myself
to the feel of them on my tongue, the shape of them as they escaped into the air. Profesora Shields had given us all pocket-sized Spanish/English dictionaries to carry with us so that we could look things up with ease. “Practice, practice, practice!” she urged. I turned the tissue-thin pages, reading words at random. To trade, cambiar. Blanket, cobija. To grow, crecer. Outside, a light rain had begun to fall, and after a few minutes I closed the dictionary and watched the drops of water skid diagonally across the window as I listened for the driver to announce “Kirkwood,” which was my stop. But after a while—longer than it had taken on the way there—he still hadn’t said it. I sat up in the seat and looked around. Were we on a different route? I rubbed my hand over the foggy window and peered out. But of course I didn’t recognize anything. Relax, I told myself. The only reason you don’t recognize anything is because you don’t know anything here yet. I stayed put for a few more stops, fixing my gaze out the window while the bus rumbled along. I watched people get off, still more people get on. The driver shouted out other words, but never anything that sounded like “Kirkwood.”

The man sitting next to me was wearing a watch that read 1:57 in small, glowing numbers. Maribel would be home at 2:15. I was supposed to be there to meet her when her bus dropped her off. Panic fluttered in my chest. What was I going to do? I must have gotten on the wrong bus. I had a feeling I was only getting farther and farther from the apartment now. I had to turn around.

I stood and tugged the cord that ran above the seats. The bell dinged. I squeezed past the man next to me and walked to the front of the bus, trying to stay calm. The driver pulled over and opened the doors.

Now what? I thought once I got off. I was standing on a deserted road in the rain. There were no houses or buildings as far as I could see, only wheat-colored fields patchy with dirt and cracked wooden telephone poles with drooping black wires strung between them. Dios, I said to myself. Where was I? Why had I decided to get off the bus in the middle of the country? I could be killed out here and no one would know the difference. I shivered. Then I forced myself to laugh. Who was going to kill me? The telephone pole?

Before long, I heard a sound and looked up to see a car approaching. I watched as it neared and got louder, then sliced by and faded into the distance again. I told myself, It’s a good sign. If there was one car, there will be another. You just have to wait.

The rain was falling harder now—my hair and clothes were damp—and I crossed to the other side of the street and stood, clutching my purse. Maybe I could call the school and tell them not to let Maribel get off the bus if I wasn’t there in time. The translator, Phyllis, had told me that for students Maribel’s age the school didn’t require that anyone be there to meet them. She was allowed to get off the bus whether I was there or not. But maybe if I explained that this was a special circumstance? Maybe the bus driver would wait?

I dialed the school and when a voice answered, I said in English, “Hello?”

“Hello?” the woman on the other end said.

I didn’t know how to say, “I’m looking for my daughter,” so I just blurted out her name. “Maribel Rivera,” I said.

“Hello?” the woman said again.

“Is there someone there who can help me?” I asked in Spanish.

There was silence from the other end.

I reached in my purse and pulled out the dictionary, flipping through the pages to find the English word for “help.”

The woman on the other end said something I couldn’t understand.

In Spanish I said, “My name is Alma Rivera. My daughter Maribel goes to your school. Is there someone who speaks Spanish?”

I waited for a response while I fumbled again with the dictionary, searching for any word that might make a difference.

“I need to speak to someone,” I said. “I need the bus driver to wait.”

The woman said something else that I couldn’t understand and I nearly wept in frustration. They were only words. I had the sense that I should have been able to unpack them, that there was only a thin veneer separating me from their meaning, and yet the veneer was impenetrable.

A second later, I heard the clap of plastic against a hard surface, as if the woman had put the phone down. I waited to see if someone else was coming, someone who could help me, but what I heard next was the beeping of a disconnected line.

In a fit of defeat, I threw both my phone and the dictionary to the ground, watching them skid and spin across the wet pavement. Why hadn’t I called Phyllis instead of the school? I was wasting time. But when I picked up the phone, the screen showed that there was no reception. I held it up like a torch and squinted. Still nothing. Even after walking a few steps in every direction, I couldn’t get it back. Chingada madre! I should have known better. It was a cheap piece of plastic, but it was all we had been able to afford since Arturo had insisted that we buy two—one for each of us—to be able to use while we were here.

Rain pattered against the ground like the sound of applause.
The pebbles along the shoulder of the road where I stood were slick and glistening. Weeds bent toward the earth. I crossed my arms over my chest to cover my blouse, which was wet enough now that anyone could have seen through it to my bra, then uncrossed them again when I remembered there was no one here to see me.

What time was it? How long had I been out here? I imagined Maribel getting off the bus, standing in the middle of the parking lot, her backpack hitched high on her thin shoulders, confused because I wasn’t there. Then I imagined the boy from the gas station skating up the way he had the other day, looking for her, and dread welled inside me.

Why hadn’t I stopped that car earlier? I should have run into the middle of the street, waving my arms. I shouldn’t have let it pass by.

Frantically, I scanned the road in both directions. I started walking, glancing over my shoulder every few seconds to see if perhaps another car was coming down the road behind me. I jogged for a while until I was out of breath. How late was it now? I checked the phone again, but there was still no reception. I punched all the buttons and held it to my ear, praying for a tone. But still nothing. I leaned my head back and screamed at the sky. A useless scream. No one could hear me out here. And then I started crying, my tears falling as dully as the rain.

I heard it before I saw it: the rumble and the whir. I stopped and turned around. A bus. It wasn’t just a mirage, was it? Was it the same bus that had dropped me off before? It didn’t matter. It was going the opposite direction now, the direction I needed to go, and it was coming toward me. I waved my arms and started crying harder. In Spanish I yelled, “Stop! Please stop for me!” I
didn’t care that the driver wouldn’t understand what I was saying. He would see me and stop, wouldn’t he? And when he did, I stood on the road and shouted up at him, “Kirkwood?” He nodded and I stepped up onto the bus.

TWENTY MINUTES LATER
, I arrived, soaking wet and shivering, at my stop. I ran so fast to the apartment that my lungs burned.

“Maribel!” I yelled as I flew into the parking lot. “Mari!”

It must have been 2:45 by then, maybe later. I dashed up to our front door, but it was still locked. Through the window, I could see that the lights were off. I turned and shouted again. “Maribel!” I thought someone would hear me and open their door—Nelia or Ynez or Fito if he was home—but to my dismay, no one did. I stood on the balcony and scanned the apartments, wondering if Maribel was inside one of them. Maybe someone had seen her and brought her inside. Celia, I decided. I should try her first.

I hurried so fast down the wet metal staircase that I nearly slipped, but as I started toward the Toros’ apartment, suddenly there she was. And right behind her, Mayor Toro.

I gasped and ran to her, lifting her sunglasses off, cupping her face in my hands, studying it for bruises, for anything that might seem amiss. She winced as I turned her head from side to side.

“She’s okay,” Mayor said.

“What were—?”

“I saw her when she got off the bus. I was just talking to her for a little while.”

“Are you okay?” I asked Maribel.

She nodded and stared at me with her wide owl eyes.