The Book of Unknown Americans: A novel




Quisqueya Solís


Where should I begin? Venezuela is where I was born and where I lived until I was twelve years old. I was a very beautiful child, happy in every way. But when I was twelve, my mother fell in love with a man from California. He asked her to marry him, so we moved to his home in Long Beach. It was an enormous house with a pool in the courtyard. I believe a famous architect had designed it. Hollywood studios called us sometimes to see about using the house in a movie or for a commercial shoot. It was very glamorous.

I was content there for a while. My mother’s new husband had a son, Scott, from a previous marriage who was two years older than me. Scott paid no attention to me in the beginning, but soon enough, as my body began to change and I grew into womanhood, he took another look. He was always walking in on me in the shower, claiming he didn’t know I was there, or I would catch him watching me while I tanned by the pool. I tried to ignore him when I could. I kept the door to my room locked.

Scott and I were at the house one night. I was sixteen. It was a rainy evening. My mother and his father were out at dinner. I was in the kitchen getting a soda from the refrigerator when he came up from behind and kissed me. I remember very clearly he said, “It’s okay. We’re not really brother and sister, so it’s fine.” But it wasn’t fine with me. I tried to push him off, but he was stronger than me. I wasn’t a prude. I had kissed boys before. But this was not what I wanted. He came at me again. He knocked me to the floor and climbed on top of me.

He did unspeakable things, all against my will. I don’t know why, but he thought he could do whatever he wanted. That’s how boys are.

Later, I told my mother what he had done to me, but she didn’t believe it. She accused me of trying to ruin things for her. She said, “Look at this life they’ve given us.” She warned me not to be ungrateful. Of course, I was only more upset after that. And I felt I couldn’t stay there, in such proximity to Scott. I knew it was only a matter of time before he came for me again. I told my mother I was moving out. She didn’t fight it. She didn’t offer to go with me. I don’t think she had ever even wanted a child. She had me as a result of a one-night stand. I was less important than the things she had now—a nice house and diamond jewelry, an expensive car and a big refrigerator. It was the life she had always dreamed of—we were even citizens now—and in the United States no less.

I went to a shelter and told them that I was on my own. I lied and said that my parents were both dead and that I had been fending for myself. I stayed with a girlfriend for a little while, too. I lived in her pool house for months, and her parents never even knew I was there. I missed my mother, but the truth was that I had missed her even when we were together, so it was nothing new.

As soon as I got my high school diploma, I left California. The girlfriend I had stayed with was going to college in New Jersey. Her parents had given her a car for graduation, so she was going to fill it with her belongings and drive across the country to her new school. She offered to take me with her. I stayed with her in her dorm for a while until I found a job waiting tables and saved enough money to live on my own.

I met a certain man while I had that job. He used to sit at the counter and order blueberry pie. He used to flirt with me sometimes. I tried to resist him. I was suspicious of men by then. I wanted nothing to do with them. But he was persistent and he was kind and he made me laugh. He started staying after the restaurant had closed, talking to me while I cleaned up. He used to walk me home when it was dark. He didn’t know what he was getting into with me, though. He never did anything wrong, but it was a struggle for me to be truly close to him. It was difficult, because of my past, to trust him. I pushed him away—every time he came back to me, I pushed again—until finally he left.

But he’s the father of my two boys, and I’ve gone out of my way to make sure that they turn out to be good and respectful. When they were in my house, they never laid a hand on a girl, never a kiss, nothing. I was very watchful. It’s possible they’re the only good boys in the world. With the help of scholarships and financial aid, they’re able to attend university. They’re studying hard there.

Now I receive money every month as part of my divorce settlement. So financially I’m secure, but I also choose to volunteer my time on Mondays and Wednesdays at the hospital because I feel I should do something positive with my time, something to help people. It’s the least I can do. I have enough money that maybe I could live somewhere else, but my friends are here. Besides my boys, my friends are all I have.

Almost no one in my life now knows what I’ve been through, nor do I want them to know. Some things should be private. That’s what I always say. Besides, I don’t need anyone’s pity. My life has been what it has been. It’s not a wonderful story, but it’s mine.





Alma


The days that December were long and cold. We had been keeping our thermostat at eighty degrees but then our first heating bill arrived in the amount of $304.52, which made me cry when I saw it and made Arturo shred the paper into bits the size of confetti. Neither of us needed to say out loud that we couldn’t pay it.

We turned the heat down to sixty after that and huddled by the radiators for warmth. We wrapped blankets around our shoulders, pinching them closed in our fists, and wore extra pairs of socks. I tied a scarf over my head, even though Arturo said it made me look like a terrorist. The wind sliced through the edges of the old, loose windows and shuttled cold air into our bedroom. Arturo tried to smooth caulk into the crevices, but the caulk cracked when it dried. He taped rags around the window casings, but it was little help.

“My body isn’t made for this weather!” I told Arturo, who laughed the first time I said it and frowned when I repeated myself again a few days later.

“We shouldn’t complain,” he said.

So I did my best to focus on the positive. Maribel had laughed twice since that first time, and it seemed to me that she was able to remember more on her own now, too. She still relied on her notebook, but during Mass, for example, she knew when to kneel and when to stand, when to go up for communion and how to find her way back to our seat afterwards. The reports from school were encouraging, too. The most recent one had said: “Maribel speaks with increasing frequency, both to the teacher and to the aide, although only in Spanish. She has begun to respond to questions, although at times her response is inconsistent with the question asked. Both in voluntary speech and in reply, she has begun to modulate her voice to be more expressive.”

Even so, I was a worrier by nature and I couldn’t escape the feeling that anything could happen to her at any time. As if because something terrible had happened to her once, there was more of a possibility that something terrible would happen to her again. Or maybe it was merely that I understood how vulnerable she was in a way I hadn’t before. I understood how easily and how quickly things could be snatched away.

Every school morning, I stood outside and waited for the bus with her. Every afternoon, I met her again in the same spot. Maribel had developed a sort of friendship with Mayor Toro, which seemed like one more way that she was making progress—he was her first friend since the accident—but I told her that she and Mayor were only allowed to spend time together under supervision, either at our apartment or at the Toros’. About that I was firm. The Toros’ front door was no more than ten meters from ours, down on the first floor, but I stood outside and watched Maribel walk the distance, waiting for her to go inside before I did. When it was time for her to come home, I watched for her again.

I was making enchiladas de carne one day with some near-expired brisket I had found on clearance at the meat market. I was humming to myself, a song my mother used to sing me when I was a girl. I washed the black pasilla chiles off my hands, patting them dry against my pants, and glimpsed the clock, which read just past five. My heart leapt. How had it gotten so late? Maribel should have been home by then. Quickly, I walked to the door and opened it, expecting to see her mounting the stairs, walking toward me, but all I saw was the cracked asphalt and the faded white paint lines in the empty parking lot. Where was she? Was she still at the Toros’?

I closed the door behind me, stepped outside, and started toward the Toros’ apartment. When I got to the bottom of the staircase, I heard laughter. Not Maribel’s, but someone’s. Coming from around the side of the building. And then I heard a boy’s voice.

I crept toward it. “Maribel?” I called. No one answered. “Maribel?” I said louder, inching my way forward.

I kicked something and looked down to see Maribel’s sunglasses on the ground. Unease rose beneath my breastbone. I picked up the sunglasses and kept walking, listening for her, but everything was quiet now.

And then, as I turned the corner, I saw her. Her back was against the cinder-block wall, and her hands were up over her head. A boy—the boy from the gas station, I recognized him instantly—was holding her wrists in place, staring at her. Her shirt was bunched under her armpits, exposing her white cotton bra, and her head was turned to the side, her eyes squeezed shut.

I screamed. The boy startled and spun his head around.

“Get away from her!” I yelled.

I raced to wedge myself between them, yanking Maribel’s shirt down, shielding her with my body. The boy said something in English, something unintelligible to me, but I could hear the indignation in his tone, and without thinking, I turned and spat in his face. He grabbed my arm, digging his nails into my skin.

“Go, Maribel,” I shrieked. “Go to the apartment!”

But she didn’t move. She was mute and immobile, a tree rooted in place.

“Go!” I said again, tearing myself away from the boy. And then I ran, dragging Maribel with me to the front of the building, back up the staircase and into the apartment, where I locked the door behind us, gasping and trying to blink away the blinding white light of panic.


“WHAT’S WRONG?” Arturo asked that night while we sat at the kitchen table—that ridiculous stolen kitchen table—drinking manzanilla tea, as we did most nights after Maribel went to bed.

I looked at him, startled, as if he had woken me from a dream. “What do you mean?”

“You’re so quiet,” he said.

“I was thinking.”

“About what?”

I hadn’t told him what had happened. I wasn’t going to tell him. I didn’t want him to know that I had failed Maribel again. Besides, she was okay. I had asked her what the boy had done—if he had kissed her, if he had touched her, if he had hurt her—and she shook her head no. He had pushed her against the wall. He was going to do something. That was clear. But I had gotten there in time. And when I inspected her, examining every visible part of her body, there were no scratches, no marks of any kind. She’s okay, I told myself, with a certain, strange relief. I tried to focus on that instead of on the other part of me that chimed, “This time.”

“Alma?” Arturo prodded.

“I was thinking about Maribel,” I said. It felt like a way of telling the truth.

At the sound of her name, he softened. “She’s doing better, no? The reports from school—”

“Yes.”

“But you’re worried?” Arturo asked.

I attempted a smile. “No.”

“You’re worried about something.”

I stared at him and shook my head lightly.

“Yes, you are. You worry about everything. You’re a true mexicana. A fatalist.”

“As if you don’t worry about things.”

“Of course. But I’ve been thinking. What if God wants us to be happy? What if there’s nothing else around the bend? What if all our unhappiness is in the past and from here on out we get an uncomplicated life? Some people get that, you know. Why shouldn’t it be us?”

I flattened my hand against the table, spreading my fingers out. It was a lovely thought, but hearing Arturo’s optimism bubble to the surface, hearing the rawness of it, was excruciating.

“You have to think like a gringa now,” Arturo said. “You have to believe that you’re entitled to happiness.”

I took a small sip of tea, feeling the warmth of it bloom in my mouth. Outside, the wind howled and sent the tops of the leafless trees casting back and forth in the night. Soon it would be Christmas, and all at once I wished that we were back in Pátzcuaro, where Christmases were warm and thick with the scent of cinnamon, where pi?atas filled with oranges and sugar canes hung from the rafters, and where children paraded through the streets carrying paper farolitos in their small hands. I wished we were anywhere but here—geographically, emotionally. I wished our life was different, that it was what it used to be.

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