The Heart Is Not a Size (2 page)

“Do you know anything about Juárez?” she asked me. “Anything at all?” She was cleaning out the refrigerator, ditching what she called her science experiments. A startling blue-green mold had started to web across a tomato. “Well, that’s pretty,” she said, and tossed it. She crouched again and fished out a bag of half-used mozzarella and a block of white-pocked cheddar. “I’m not buying cheese for another year,” she said, and walked the two steps to the garbage can. “Why is it so hard to eat the food we buy? Why do I feel like congratulating people when we actually do?”

“Juárez is a border town,” I told her, shrugging at her questions because, really, are there answers? “Across the Rio Grande. Mixed up with the southern Rocky Mountains. It was the Mexican capital a long time ago, back during the Mexican Revolution.”

Mom had an old slice of blueberry pie in her hand—a crusty plate of solidified slime somehow forgotten by Kev. She carried it to the sink and set it down. She turned to look at me. She looked as if she might never eat again.

“I atlas’ed Juárez,” I said. “At Riley’s.” I knew she’d like that—me starting with a book as opposed to The Machine, which is what she called the internet. I figured that that small fact would help my cause.

“Well, that’s all terrific, Georgia. But I still don’t get why you’d want to go to Juárez. There’s a whole wide, explorable world out there. If you’re going anywhere, that is.”

“I got the idea from a flyer,” I said.

“You’re being sketchy here, Georgia. Frustratingly vague.” She smiled, but it was a tired smile. She had a bag of wilted lettuce in her hands. Above our heads, a rumble had started. We heard Geoff first: “Cut it out.”

“GoodWorks,” I said, rushing to explain before the next inevitable explosion. “It’s this—I don’t know—organization, I guess. It collects teens from here and takes them down there for community improvement projects.”

“I see.” She frowned, and the two dark valleys between her eyebrows deepened. Upstairs, Kev was yelling Geoff’s name. Now he was running down the hall so fast that the light fixture above us shook. “Frankly, it sounds a little impulsive, Georgia. Make sure, before you go any further, that this is what you want.” Mom might have said more, but the phone began ringing, and she cut across the room to get it.

I felt myself growing anxious—that hurt in my chest, that knot at my throat. I filled my lungs with air, closed my eyes, let the air go. Sometimes I could stop anxieties from getting nasty that way—sideline the attacks from their own game, breathe them right out of my mind. Mom on the phone was saying, “Oh, no. I’m so sorry.” She was walking out of the kitchen to take the news alone. Another Kev crisis, I figured. Kev, who was upstairs yelling from behind a closed door and who always managed to mess with the day.

A few minutes later I was back up in my room—door shut, computer on, in the middle of a Google. I was humming to block out the noise of my older brother and then my cell phone rang. It was Riley, talking before
I even said hello. That was one of Riley’s things—so much effervescing talk, when she wanted to talk, that Ms. Jean from school had dubbed her Bubbles. I called her that sometimes, when I was trying to get her attention.

“So, like, I swear this happened: She screwed up the self-tanner.” Riley chirped, she couldn’t help herself. She was a fast-talking, pitch-perfect soprano.

“Who? Your mom?”

“Of course my mom. Who else could screw up a self-tanner?”

Anyone, I thought. But no one else Riley’d notice.

“So I hear this noise, and I think the water pipes are broken; but it was her, the way she was crying. I’ve never heard my mother cry like that, and you know how she’s had some crying doozies—you’ve seen her.”

“Crying over a tan gone wrong?”

“She had little anklets of orange above her feet, you know? Like a henna tattoo or something.”

“She told you that?” The truth is, I rarely saw Riley’s mother sit down and tell her only child anything. They could be together without being together, the negatives in each other’s equations. Riley’s mom
was the most disappointed person I ever knew. Always someone somewhere had it better: A bigger house. A buffer husband. A bound-for-fortunes daughter.

“No. I saw it,” Riley was saying. “I’d gone into her room to find out what was wrong—I thought maybe she was hurt or something, maybe she needed some actual help, maybe I could be
useful
—right, yeah, what a concept—and the door to her dressing room was open. I found her in there trying on shoes with just her underwear on, all bawling over her self-tanner mistake.”

“Why not just put on a pair of socks and forget about it?” I asked.

“She and Dad are going out. You know. To a
function
.”

“Oh.” I got a picture of Riley’s mother in my head—her skimpy little skirts and low-cut sleeveless sweaters. The ultragigantic diamond ring that she wore on the ring finger of her right hand that looked more like a weapon than like jewelry.

“I told her she should go with a pair of lace-up sandals, and I wasn’t even being sarcastic, I swear. I thought lace-up sandals could help, thought it was a genius
solution. But you know what she did right then, when I was talking? She slammed her dressing-room door in my face and told me to mind my own business.” Riley laughed, but I could tell she wasn’t feeling funny; she always laughed hardest when things were bad.

“She’s so hysterical, my mother,” Riley said. “She just is.” She kept laughing again, and I held on, listening. I didn’t press, because I never did. To be Riley’s best friend back then was to give Riley room. It meant being best-in-class at standing back. “Slammed the door in my face,” Riley repeated. “You gotta love my mom.”

“Sorry, Ri,” I said. “That sucks.”

“What about you?” she asked at last. “What’s up with the smart girl?”

“Googling Juárez,” I told her.

“What about that Lit thing you had due?”

“Got Lit under control,” I lied. “But Juárez I don’t. It’s a complicated place.”

“They call winter break a break for a reason,” Riley said. “You’re supposed to be taking it easy.”

The thing is, I’m truly terrible at taking it easy. I have a habit of piling things on and wanting things to
be perfect and going out of my way to make things harder than they are. It’s not that I’m running toward success so much as trying to keep my big wide feet off the heartbreak path of failure, and I don’t even know why I ended up this way—I can’t blame my parents or the example of my brothers.

I was the kind of kid who thought you had to color inside the lines—that if you missed and your crayon strayed, you had done bad; you were wrong. I’d practiced my handwriting until my fingers hurt, thinking that my letters had to match the ones in books. I’d put only the perfect shells from the Stone Harbor shore into my neon orange bucket, then stand with the hose on the gravel beside the beach house, scrubbing the sand from the shells. I’d perfected a technique on the monkey bars so that I’d always make it across without fail. I still picked up my room without being told, and that way my mom could apply all her reminding skills to my wreck-making brothers. Once, in second grade, when Mrs. Kalin asked the entire class to write the words
I will be quiet when the teacher is talking
twenty times in a row on blue-lined paper, she’d exempted me on account of my being so freakishly well-behaved,
attentive. I remember being jealous of the other kids that day. Jealous and aware of my grave difference.

So that when I found the flyer about Juárez, I had to know about Juárez—whatever I could find, whatever sources. The atlas, the library, and, at home, my good friend Google, which is like falling down an endless hole—you could spend every waking hour chasing question marks with Google. I typed in the word and all these portals came up; and the more I read, the more confusing Juárez got, the more impossible to squeeze within a box.

For example: There are a lot of people who have passed through Juárez—famous people, rich people, smugglers. People trying to get out and people trying to get in, the traffic going both ways across the river’s bridges. I liked the name of that river: Rio Grande. I liked how the river defined the edges not just of cities but of countries. There’s El Paso and there’s Juárez, and there’s the river in between them. The fish must be citizens of both.

Meanwhile, the last battle of the Mexican Revolution was fought in Juárez. Meanwhile, John Wayne and Elizabeth Taylor and Steve McQueen sat drinking
in Club Kennedy, a bar; and once Charles Lindbergh stopped by; and sometimes they’ll film a movie in Juárez, when they want that whole, authentic Wild West feel. Every time I Googled Juárez, I found out something new; but every single time, also, I found myself reading about the
muertas
. About those young women—hundreds of them—who’d gone missing. They weren’t much older than me, and some were younger than me; they’d go off to school or work and not come home. Later, in the desert, the women would be found: brutalized, dead, and abandoned. The country had been on a manhunt for a serial killer ever since 1993, but no such monster had been found. Tori Amos had written a song. Human rights groups protested. Still, young women from families without means up and disappeared.

The
muertas
stories were always right there in my research on Juárez, near as a mouse click. They always made me sadder than I can say—not afraid of Juárez, but sad for Juárez, full of some big desire to do something that would make things better for the ones the murders left behind. I’d read the stories until I couldn’t anymore, then stand up and walk away. Go down the
hall and outside and through the front door and either north, toward the horse show grounds, or south, where the older houses with their trembling gardens cast dark, moist shadows late at night. I needed stars and moon and night air, so I walked—worrying about women I’d never know; thinking about all that can’t be changed or controlled; trying to envision Juárez, this place of complications and contradictions, where perfect, I pretty quickly figured out, wasn’t the issue: Survival was. Survival under a hot sun, along a tired river, among factory jobs that paid hardly enough to sustain a family, and also among unsolved murders and loss.

In Juárez all my little self-imposed rules would be tested, the things I tried to control, my minuscule attempts at doing most things right. I’d be a rising senior that summer, on the verge of college. I needed a release from the narrow outlines of my life.

But it’s not as if I understood this at first, in the days just after finding the flyer. All I knew then was that I had grown desperate for some kind of change in view. Desperate for a way to heal myself from the panic attacks that I had not told a soul about, the panic attacks that also seemed like failure. Even Riley, my
only longtime best friend, didn’t know what I went through. But then again, she was keeping secrets, too. We were each hiding demons from the other.

That night we waited until Dad got home to call GoodWorks and ask questions. Mom dialed the kitchen phone first, then Dad and I picked up—me in the upstairs hall, Dad in the living room, Mom taking the lead. She interrogated. Dad clarified. Mack, the leader of this GoodWorks trip, answered every question calmly. They were looking for a dozen local teens who wanted to make a different kind of difference, Mack said. Teens who could recognize the value of small steps in vast places. This trip would focus on a
colonia
called Anapra, where the people by and large were good—working at jobs that paid some fifty dollars a week, struggling for food, struggling for water, struggling for survival in their sixty-square-foot houses. GoodWorks was liaising with a local outfit, Mack said, an organization whose sole business and purpose was to give American teens the chance to get to know the real people of Anapra and to leave something lasting in their wake. “These trips change lives,” Mack said, and my mom
was quiet. “They change perceptions on both sides of the border.”

“Safety,” Dad said, “is a concern.”

“We take every precaution,” Mack said.

“It’s a complicated world,” Mom said.

“There are no guarantees,” Mack agreed. “None in Juárez, none in any city in the world. But we have history on our side at GoodWorks. A long-running program with an impeccable safety profile. As for the health of those who go: We require up-to-date inoculations, including hepatitis A. We’re zealous about water supplies and dehydration.”

“What about housing?” I asked. I wanted to be able to picture the whole thing, to visualize two weeks away.

“We’re still working some of that out,” Mack said. “We’ll have all our plans in place by our first kickoff meeting, which we’ll hold in February.”

That night I could hear my parents talking late. The next morning I found a note slipped beneath my door:
Honey, if you want to go, you can.
It was written in my father’s hand. My mom had drawn a heart for love.

It was early. The skies were gray. There was a crack
of sun low on the horizon, but there’d soon be a lashing of cold winter rain. I took a good look around my room—at the wallpaper I’d chosen when I was seven, at the mobile of butterflies that I had never bothered taking down, at all the English springer spaniel porcelains my dad had given me once as gifts because we could never get a real dog of our own—Geoff was allergic. It looked, in my room, as if nothing ever happened. But something had to happen, that was the thing, if I was to rise above all the mounds of worry that were threatening to do me in.

I picked up my cell and turned it on. I called Riley, who never turned her own phone off. “Hey,” I said after she’d said hello.

“Georgia,” she moaned, “what are you doing? It’s not even—like, what time is it, Georgia?” She yawned. I could hear her rustling around in her bed.

“Listen,” I said.

“I’m listening.”

“Ri, you’re going to Juárez, right? You’re going to come?” I was sitting on my bed, wearing a T-shirt and a pair of Old Navy shorts. I was sitting there, and then I stood and walked over to the window and looked out at
the little-kid swing set in the yard—still there as if my parents thought we kids would stay little forever.