The Book of Unknown Americans: A novel (20 page)

“Did something happen?” I asked, trying to conceal the anxiety in my voice.

Arturo pulled his head out from under the water, heavy droplets streaming down his face, dripping off the tips of his mustache. “You really want to know?” he said. “I was fired.”

“Fired?”

“Yes. Because I changed my shift. The morning when I stayed home for Maribel’s first day of school.”

“But that was months ago!”

Arturo turned off the water, twisting the handle so hard I thought he would break it. I watched as he picked up his towel from the floor and rubbed himself dry, the hair matted on his barrel chest, his limp penis hanging between his stocky legs.

“I don’t understand,” I said.

He snapped the towel against the floor. “¡Chingao!”

“It has to be a mistake. They went through all the trouble of getting you a visa. Why would they do that and then turn around and fire you?”

“Because they’re cowards.”

“What does that mean?”

“The only reason they sponsored our visas was because the government was pressuring them to hire workers with papers. But now everyone’s saying it was all talk.”

“But why does that mean they have to fire you? What are they going to do? Get rid of everyone they already have and hire people without papers now?”

“Probably. It saves them money that way.”

I thought, I could call his boss and explain the situation. Maybe if he knew about Maribel, he would have some sympathy. Maybe if he knew what it meant to us. This wasn’t how it was supposed to happen. We had followed the rules. We had said to ourselves, We won’t be like everyone else, those people who packed up and went north without waiting first for the proper authorization. We were no less desperate than them. We understood, just as they did, how badly a person could want a thing—money, or peace of mind, or a better education for their injured daughter, or just a chance, a chance! at this thing called life. But we would be different, we said. We would do it the right way. So we had filled
out the papers and waited for nearly a year before they let us come. We had waited even though it would have been so much easier not to wait. And for what?

Arturo finished drying himself in silence.

“I worked hard,” he said after a long time.

“I know.”

“I did what I thought—”

“I know,” I said.

We were both quiet for a moment. “Maybe I could look for a job?” I suggested.

“No. Our visas are only for me to work. I have thirty days. If I can find something within thirty days, then we’ll stay in status. It can be anything. Just a paycheck and our visas will be good.”

I reached toward him, but he stepped back, tense, locked in his thoughts.

“You’ll find something,” I said.

SO DURING THE DAY
, every day, Arturo looked for work. He dressed in his church clothes—black pants and a button-down shirt, a brown belt, his cowboy boots—and walked into store after store, asking for applications. People laughed in his face. They told him, “Haven’t you heard that the economy’s in the shitter? We can’t get
rid
of workers fast enough.” They told him, “Crawl back across the river, amigo.” And yet, what else could he do but try the next place, and the one after that?

We had to take money from our savings to pay the rent. There was no other choice. Arturo and I tried reasoning with Fito, but Fito was firm. “I feel bad for you,” he said. “I do. But I have a mortgage to pay and it depends on collecting the rent.” Arturo shook Fito’s hand and assured him we would bring him the
money soon, even though both Arturo and I feared that might not be true. Two months, we estimated, was as long as we could go without a paycheck coming in.

I made rice and beans and rice and beans and more rice and beans, but since we couldn’t afford chiles or ham or anything to spice it up, we soon grew tired of rice and beans. “Oatmeal,” I suggested. “We still have oatmeal left.” But neither Arturo nor Maribel wanted that either.

We walked around the apartment in the shadows, turning on the lights only after the sun had gone down. We kept the heat off at night. We showered every other day to save on water. I still washed our clothes at the Laundromat, but I carried them home sopping wet and laid them all over the kitchen counters and the floor to let them dry. I would have draped them over the balcony railing except that I was afraid they would freeze stiff. Instead of sitting at the kitchen table at night, drinking tea, now I simply boiled water for Arturo and myself instead, but the water was a poor substitute and trying to pretend otherwise only made me more depressed.

I tried to be at the apartment during the day in case Arturo stopped back at home, either to eat or to drop off applications. I made him food and gave him pep talks, and then he was off again, ready to try somewhere new. I went only as far as the Dollar Tree or the Laundromat, both of which were close enough that I didn’t have to be gone for long. The Community House was too out of the way and even though I had gone back to the English class there only a few times, now I stopped going altogether. I still wanted to learn English, though, so I asked Celia if she would come over to teach me a few things. She brought a workbook that she and Rafael had used when they first came to
the United States. It had illustrations to show basic vocabulary—words for colors, foods, parts of the body, animals—like a child’s book of first words.

“Rafa and I both learned English in school in Panamá,” Celia said. “But when we got here, we had to refresh our memory.”

We sat at the kitchen table while she said, “Miércoles. Wednesday.”

I repeated the words.

“Jueves. Thursday,” she said.

I said, “Tursday.”

“Not ‘Tursday,’ ” she said. “Thursday. Push your tongue out against the back of your teeth.”

“Where is my tongue now?” I asked.

“At the top of your mouth, I think. Push it out.”

But I didn’t know what she meant and each time I repeated it—“Tursday”—Celia corrected me.

“Thursday.”

“Tursday.”

“Thursday.”

“Tursday.”

“No, Thursday. Th th th.”

“Thursday,” I said.

“You got it!” Celia cheered.

When I didn’t have a lesson with Celia, I made it a point to at least sit in front of the television with the dictionary Profesora Shields had given me and look up as many words as I could while they flashed across the closed captioning on the screen.

I learned the phrase “Are you hiring?” and taught Arturo the words. I thought maybe if he approached potential employers in English, he would have a better chance. But after trying it at
various places, he said, “I feel silly. I say it and then they answer me in English and there’s nowhere to go from there. They look at me like I’m stupid.”

“You’re not stupid,” I told him.

“To them I am,” he said.

And yet, despite the stress of the hunt and the anxiety over what it would yield, since that night in the kitchen, I felt closer to Arturo again, if only by inches, and I could tell that he felt closer to me, too. He took my hand sometimes under the blankets while we lay next to each other in bed, and once, while I stood in front of the sink washing the dinner dishes, watching bits of food float in the soapy water, he came up behind me and threaded his arms under mine, cupping my shoulders and resting his chin on the back of my neck, as if he simply wanted to be near me.

Our wedding anniversary was on February 19, and though usually in Pátzcuaro we went out to dinner, we didn’t have the money for that here. But Arturo wanted to honor the tradition, so we made a plan to go out for drinks instead. Waters, we decided, since even sodas were beyond our means by then.

We went to the pizza restaurant down the street because Arturo had submitted an application there and I knew he was hoping that if he showed his face again, maybe someone would recognize him and maybe somehow he would walk away with a job. We were down to one week, a mere seven days, before we would lapse out of status.

The restaurant was in the corner of a strip center, a striped vinyl banner above the door heralding its presence and its name. Luigi’s. Inside it was filled with square tables and metal-framed chairs, and the aroma in the air was sweet and sharp—tomatoes and cheese.

We had told Maribel on our way there that we were only ordering water.

“Can we order horchata?” she asked as soon as we sat down.

“They don’t have horchata here,” I said.

“Is this a restaurant?” she asked.

“Yes. But they don’t have horchata.”

“Do they have pescado blanco?” she asked.

“We’re not ordering anything,” I said.

“Why not?”

“We’re here to celebrate.”

“With water,” Arturo added.

We ordered three waters without ice and when they came we sat together, sipping out of pebbled red plastic glasses, celebrating in silence, while around us American couples and families ate slices of pizza and drank bottles of beer. I had the feeling that they disapproved of us being there, drinking only water, taking up space. But when I glanced at the people around us, no one was even looking in our direction, and I felt the way I often felt in this country—simultaneously conspicuous and invisible, like an oddity whom everyone noticed but chose to ignore.

And then, the front door opened, and I snapped my head up to see who it was. The boy, I thought. I don’t know why. On the walk over, I had been convinced that he was following us, and I had peered over my shoulder, thinking I’d heard the clatter of his skateboard behind us, but all I saw was Arturo giving me a quizzical look. Now though, it was only a young mother who walked in, pushing her child in a stroller. I held the glass to my lips and took a deep breath.

A few minutes later, Arturo broke the silence that had settled over us like fog. “Well,” he said. “Nineteen years.”

“Nineteen years what?” Maribel asked.

“Nineteen years that your mother and I have been married. She was eighteen when I married her.”

“Don’t say that,” I said. “It makes me feel so old.”

“You are old,” Maribel said.

Arturo laughed.

“What’s funny?” Maribel asked.

“Yes, what’s so funny, Arturo?”

“Do you have … a joke?” Maribel asked.

“Your father doesn’t know any jokes,” I said.

“Oh, I know jokes.”

“Like what?”

“Here’s one I heard on one of the American late-night shows. Why did the bicycle fall down?” He scanned our blank faces, waiting for a response. When he got none, he said, “Because it had two tires.”

“That doesn’t make sense,” I said.

“Well, the audience laughed. Maybe the subtitles were wrong?”

“It was tired?” I said. “That’s why it fell down?”

“You think you can do better?” Arturo asked. “Let’s see you tell a joke.”

“A joke about what?”

“Anything.”

“Yes,” Maribel said.

I looked around the restaurant for inspiration.

“We’re waiting,” Arturo said.

“Hold on.”

“Maybe you can order one from the menu,” Arturo offered. “Waitress, waters for us and one joke for my wife. Skip the straw.”

Maribel smiled.

“I’m getting funnier by the minute, Alma. You’d better think of something quick if you want to keep up with me.”

I stared at the table and tried to concentrate. Finally, to satisfy them, I told the only joke I knew, one that had made me laugh out loud when I heard it, even though I’d never repeated it myself. I said, “Why didn’t Jesus use shampoo?”

“I don’t know. Why?” Arturo asked.

“Because of the holes in his hands.”

Arturo looked at me in shock. At the sight of his face, I crossed myself. God in heaven, forgive me.

Then Arturo started laughing. Even Maribel, who months earlier never would have been able to process a joke like that, put her hand over her mouth to hold in her laughter.

Arturo raised his glass and toasted. “To the funniest woman I know,” he said.

“Thank you,” I said.

Arturo frowned. “Nothing about me?”

“Sorry. To the best man I know.”

“That’s more like it.”

“And the best daughter,” I added.

“The best!” Arturo said.

I looked at them both—the way Arturo’s mustache turned up when he smiled, the way Maribel’s face glowed.

“The best,” I repeated.

SEVEN MORE DAYS
passed. Seven days of knocking on doors and making calls and begging with store owners and anyone who would listen. But at the end of it, Arturo came up empty-handed.

I found him in the morning, the day after the deadline, sitting
in the thin blue light, his head bowed, his fingers entwined behind his neck. I went to him and put my hand on his shoulder with all the tenderness I possessed. I wanted to heal him somehow with my touch, to save him from feeling that he had let us down.

He said, “I’m sorry.”

“You did everything you could have done,” I said.

“If anyone finds out—”

“Who’s going to find out?”

“She would have to leave her school, Alma.”

“No one’s going to find out.”

He ruffled his hands up through his hair.

“We haven’t done anything wrong, Arturo.”

He didn’t respond.

“We’re not like the rest of them,” I went on. “The ones they talk about.”

He unclasped his hands and looked at me, his expression sad and weary. “We are now,” he said.

AT THE TAIL END
of February there was an ice storm. That’s what Celia called it. I phoned her not long after it began, when the rapping against our windows got so bad I thought for certain those hundreds of tiny collisions would break the glass. I was home alone—Arturo was still searching for a job, not for our visas now, but because we needed money—and when I heard the light taps followed by great thwacks like horse hooves against the panes, the thought crossed my mind that it was kids in the neighborhood, tossing rocks against the window. But when I looked I saw a glinting silvery spectacle against a white sky. Splinters of rain.

When Celia answered the phone, she said, “It’s an ice storm. They’ll be sending the children home from school soon, I’m sure. Don’t go outside unless you want to fall and break something. The last time this happened, José’s walker slipped. He broke his wrist and had to wear a cast for six weeks.”