I WAS FROZEN IN the Conroe’s BBQ restroom. I could hear the thumping beat of an unfamiliar song, and the shrieks of teenage girls. I counted the rolls of toilet paper again: twenty-seven. I checked the liquid soap dispenser: full. From the cabinet underneath the sink I brought out the Windex and sprayed, then carefully polished the mirror.
The police had been circling the block all night. As the Chávez students danced and preened, made out and bumped hips and dirty-danced in full view of the hapless chaperones, the rest of us waited for some nut job to pull out a gun. Even Jake, in his Goodwill tuxedo with the ruffled shirt and neon cummerbund, even he looked jumpy, but maybe he was just worn out from assembling three hundred Sweet Stacy sandwiches.
The punch could be spiked, some kid could OD, Sam might dump Evian and ruin what was quite possibly the best night of her life. I stood in the john, trying to think of something else I could sanitize.
I reapplied my creamy lipstick. I gazed at the wrist bouquet that matched Jake’s. I brushed my hair and sprayed it with the can of Aqua Net. I thought I should sweep, but the broom was all the way in the kitchen. Someone knocked on the door.
There I was, Alice Conroe. In a strapless dress, wiping. There was my hand, the skin loose around my knuckles. There was my mastectomy scar, barely visible when I reached to clean the upper corners of the frame.
I looked like an adult who knew things. This is it, I told myself, not sure what I was getting at. I understood I needed to return to the restaurant, where Beau was indulging his fantasies of being a DJ, if just for the night.
It occurred to me that so much of what I did—the cleaning, the futzing, the worrying about everyone I loved—was born of my childhood belief that if I kept in motion, I would not have to miss my mother. So much of what we all did, to be fair, was a valiant attempt to distract ourselves from the fact that we were going to die, and none of us knew when or how or what the fuck we should do with ourselves in the meantime.
I took a breath. I had to just show up and feel everything—to risk the possibility that despite Marion’s heroic efforts Chávez Memorial would shut down in the spring (it would), to endure the painful hope that Jake might let us keep our adoption file open a few months longer (he would), to swallow the reality that Jane might get cancer and there was nothing I could do about it (she would not). I had to stand by and watch as Evian ruined her own damn evening by spurning Sam and going home with a small-time drug dealer. I had to hold my husband, let myself burn for him, even though he could die or leave me or we could just lose our love as time went by.
I had to go out there into the Chávez Memorial High School Homecoming dance simply because I could: I was alive on this earth and my mother was not.
I had to leave the bathroom.
Another knock came. I put my hand on the knob and turned.
49
Carla
THIS ESSAY HAS gone on for a long time, I am aware. We have a guidance counselor at our school, Mrs. Halpern. She means well, but when she tells us we must follow the instructions to the letter, I do not believe her. I want you to know me, Admissions Officer. I want you to understand what I have done so that I can attend the University of Texas, so that I can walk along the paths I see in your shiny catalog and join the group of students sitting in a circle of sunlight outside your library. If you admit me to your university and I find a way to make it from the desk where I am sitting to that circle of sunlight outside your library, the American dream will lie before me.
I can only imagine what sort of essays you will be reading. I have been told that American students will travel to my country to gain life experience and empathy. Maybe they will write about the little girls they see picking through trash at the dump in Tegucigalpa, handling discarded food to see if it is just a bit rotten, still edible. It is possible that an American in a tour bus saw me give putrid fruit to my brother, trying to save him from a hunger so unrelenting that he was forced to escape it with yellow glue. I don’t know. I can’t go back, in any case. I cannot board an airplane without documents.
In my years here in the Ace Motel, I have barely spoken to American kids. There is a new grocery across the street, which advertises “real local food.” I went inside once, ogled things like couscous, almonds, and Texas peaches (picked by Ernesto, perhaps?). The cashier told me I was supposed to bring my own containers to fill and that this would help eliminate waste from the planet. I said, “Like a bread bag?” and he laughed as if I had told a joke.
In the parking lot outside the room we share with two other families, we cook beans. Even the druggies (who never share a motel room with more than three others) look askance at us. They would be surprised to know I can use the word “askance.”
I have worked hard to learn your language. Most of my relatives speak little English. I go to places where Americans congregate and speak loudly—shopping malls, Starbucks coffee bars, Subway sandwich shops. For the price of a drink, I listen to the way Americans speak, and there is even a clean, free bathroom. I can record the voices around me to play for myself later, the way as a child I played the songs of Stevie Wonder even after my batteries died.
I know how privilege sounds: haughty, a bit loud, incensed by imagined slights. Americans don’t seem to laugh as much as we do, in my family. Maybe they haven’t been forced to see the worst of human nature, to know the true value of joy.
On The Beast and in the shelters along its rails, people traded stories about their experiences. We talked about bandits, robbers, rape. We agreed that people were kindest in Veracruz and Oaxaca. Once, as I rode the train, a very old woman threw a blue plastic bag that landed in my lap. I opened the bag to find six rolls, a bottle of lemonade, and a sweater.
“Thank you!” I called, waving.
I heard her voice ring out in the distance: “May God watch over you!” And so He has.
Now that we are here, we do not talk about The Beast.
I will finally answer the essay question you have posed: What was the worst day of your life? You might be surprised to hear that the worst day of my life did not take place along the journey from Tegucigalpa to Austin, Texas. The worst day was not losing my brother Junior, though that was a very bad day. Being raped more than once was … I have no words. But it was not the worst.