Bulletproof Vest (19 page)

“Can I ask you something?” I say.

“Sure,” she says, lifting her brows.

“Is your life so lame that in order to make it a bit more exciting, you have to go sticking your nose in other people's business?” I ask.

“Um, well,” she scratches her neck, “Mathew is a friend of mine, and, and you shouldn't have cheated on him.”

“Who the fuck are you to tell me what I should or shouldn't do?” I say, clenching my fists and taking a step toward her. She turns away and I have to contain the urge to punch her, to crack her once, hard, and drop her, but her chin is trembling so much that I sort of feel sorry for her. She seems so helpless, so pathetic, and besides, I haven't been in a fistfight since I was in sixth grade. I may not even have it in me anymore.

I push past her, go back inside, and find my friends, and by the time we leave the party, she's long gone. But after that day, whenever I happen to cross paths with her, she clears out of my way. If we are both walking down the sidewalk toward each other, the minute she sees me, she crosses the street and walks on the other side. If we're walking toward the same building in the quad, she'll go around the building and in through a different door.

The semester is well under way and I'm sitting on my bed, books and papers sprawled everywhere, when there is a knock at the door.

“Come in,” I say, and Tracey, one of my thirteen roommates, pops her head in. I'm living in a four-story, fourteen-bedroom house with a full basement, ten parking spaces, and a large front deck with twelve other girls and Pablo, a foreign exchange student from Ecuador.

“Hey,” she says, “I just ran into Martin McCarthy on the quad and he asked me to give you a message.”

“Martin McCarthy?” I say. “Really?” Martin McCarthy had lived in the apartment below ours the year before, and though I had met him once or twice and would often run into him, we had never said much to each other beyond the initial hello. But there was something intriguing about him. He was tall, about six foot two, and even though his roommates were the T-shirt-and-baseball-cap-wearing types, he had shoulder-length blond hair that looked like he had chopped it himself. He wore vintage trousers, printed button-down shirts, black leather combat boots, and he was the lead singer of a band that was based out of Chicago. “What did he say?”

“He was all like, ‘You're living with Maria, right?' And I was like, ‘Yeah.' And he was like, ‘Will you give her a message for me?' and I was like, ‘Sure.' And he was like, ‘Will you tell her that I want to have her baby.'”

“He said that?” I say, a grin spreading across my face. “That
he
wants to have
my
baby?”

“Yup,” she says, “those were his words.”

A few days later, I have an extra ticket to see a band that's playing at a local venue. I get Martin's number from my roommate and give him a call.

“Hey,” I say when he answers. “I know you're into music and I have this extra ticket for a show, and I thought you might want to join me, but if you can't, it's no big deal, really.”

He says he'd love to join me, and later that night, while sharing a pitcher of beer, he tells me he was brought up Irish Catholic and is the youngest of six, four boys and two girls. Both his maternal and paternal grandparents were Irish immigrants, and though his father was born and raised in the United States, he worked blue-collar jobs his whole life, and put all of them through college.

“We knew we had to be home and sitting at the dinner table at five p.m. sharp, every day,” he says. “My job was to set out the chilled glasses of milk for everyone.”

“That's so sweet,” I say. Sitting down for dinner as a family was something I had always fantasized about when I was a kid. Eating dinner in our house had always been a free-for-all. Either one of my older sisters or I made dinner when we got home from school, and everyone ate as they came home from school or work, and if someone didn't like what was for dinner, they helped themselves to a bowl of cereal or a tall glass of milk and a stack of cookies. Once I had gone out of my way and had taken my mother's china from the cabinet and set the table, complete with silverware and napkins. I had made everyone wait until we could all sit down and eat together. Though they seemed confused, thrown off by the order of it all, they had waited, and when we were all sitting around the table, passing around the salad, mashed potatoes, and fried chicken, my siblings had started cracking jokes about how elegant it all was, and asked could someone please pass the butter, and why were we eating bread instead of tortillas, and why was there no salsa on the table, and why we were eating such a gringo dinner, and soon they were all roaring with laughter. Before I could finish my meal I had burst into tears, run into my bedroom, and shoved my head under my pillow.

“What about you?” he asks, pouring me another beer. “How many brothers and sisters do you have?”

“Six,” I say, instantly feeling like a liar. But it's easier than saying I had seven, but now I only have six. “I have four sisters and two brothers.”

“Big family.” He fills his glass and holds it up. “To big families,” he says. We toast, we drink. “So, do your folks still live in Somerset?” he asks.

“They're separated,” I say. “My mother is still there, but my father is in Mexico.”

“Whereabouts?”

“I'm not sure,” I say, because I'm not about to tell him that my father is in prison. Though I had heard that his parents had sold a house they owned in order to try and bail him out. My godfather, the owner of the zapatería, had bought the house and demolished it almost immediately. Rumor had it that he had found several clay jugs filled with gold coins hidden within its thick adobe walls. There was so much money, in fact, that if he never wished to work another day in his life, he didn't have to. “We don't really keep in touch,” I say.

Martin walks me home that night, kisses me goodnight on my front porch, and leaves. A few days later we go out again, and he walks me home and stays. In the morning, he asks me about the Glastonbury poster on my closet door, and I tell him about Abigail and the three guys from Chico. How we had met while living in Granada, where Abigail was staying in a cave on the other side of the Moorish wall. On Fridays after class, I'd hike up to her cave along the dirt trails behind the wall and we would all camp out for the weekend. Then, on Monday morning, I'd hike back down, just in time to make my 9:00 a.m. economics class, the scent from the campfire and a few grass blades still lingering in my hair.

The next time Martin comes over, he brings his music collection, and soon we are spending countless hours locked in my bedroom, burning through candles and listening to music. We set my five-disk changer on shuffle and one minute we're doing the tango to “Paint It Black” by the Stones, and the next minute we're improvising a dance routine to “7” by Prince. When I'm in my room, I like to pretend I'm in a New York City flat. Though I've never been to New York, my room is what I imagine a studio in New York looks like: bed in one corner, couch in the other, next to the radiator, fire escape outside the window, and the bathroom across the hall. I tell Martin that someday I want to live in New York. Since he's a musician, he thinks he might want to live in New York as well.

Halloween rolls around and before heading out for the evening, he comes over to pick me up.

“What are you supposed to be?” he asks when I come down the wide wooden staircase in a white vintage wedding dress that fits as though it were custom made for my frame.

“The bride of Frankenstein,” I say. Earlier, after zipping up the dress, I had dabbed white powder on my face, frizzed my hair out, and painted a black lightning bolt from my hairline down and across my forehead with my eyeliner. I had then squirted fake blood on the side of my mouth, so that it ran over my chin and down my neck before disappearing into the low V-cut neckline of the dress.

“Doesn't she wear a black dress?” he says.

“Does she?” I say. “All right, then. I'm a bride. A dead bride. See?” I point at my forehead. “I was struck dead by lightning on my wedding day.”

“There you go, that works.” He offers me his arm and we head out. He's wearing a purple polyester tuxedo, a white shirt with green ruffles on the front, and a black top hat. Walking down the street, arm in arm, we must look like a bride and groom that crawled out of an abandoned trunk in a Salvation Army basement.

By the time Thanksgiving arrives, we're pretty much inseparable, and we're in my bedroom one night, listening to Pink Floyd and sending our shadows swaying along the candlelit walls. Though I've listened to
The Wall
before, I've never really paid close attention to the lyrics, which are now echoing as loud and ominous as a helicopter hovering above my bed. The song is saying something about how daddy's flown across the ocean, and I think it wasn't my daddy that flew across the ocean, but rather my brother who found the trapdoor on the river's floor and never returned. In my dreams, he has stayed forever the same age he was when he was killed—twenty-two—while I've grown up around him. We are now roughly the same age, and whenever he shows up anywhere, I'm no longer just trying to speak to him. I claw at his button-down, throw my arms around him, and hold him tight, knowing that the minute I wake up he'll be gone.

The song goes on with something about the family album, and I know that if it hadn't been for my brother, we wouldn't have any snapshots in our family albums. When we first arrived from Mexico, he found a part-time job, bought a Polaroid camera, and with it he captured so many moments in flight: my sisters and me in pigtails, standing in front of the Christmas tree, holding up a present; us sitting on my father's truck in polyester shorts and squinting in the sunlight; us standing in front of the house, my father's hands resting on my shoulders; me wearing a cone-shaped hat and standing behind a birthday cake, the candles burning and everyone waiting for the birthday girl to make a wish—if only it were that simple—make a wish and blow out the candles.

The lyrics continue, explaining how what the father left behind was nothing more than a brick in the wall, but instead of brick, I hear break, and I think that really is it, that's what that bastard left us—nothing but breaks, and I'm aware that my shadow is no longer moving, I'm standing still and am not so much hearing the music as I am feeling it. It's like a liquid that is seeping into all the deeply buried crevices where nothing else can reach. There's a familiar sentiment, a longing that I can't explain, though years from now I will find out that Roger Waters's father had been killed in a plane crash during the Second World War, when Waters was still an infant. I assume the brick in the wall must be the one that has his father's name on it—in memoriam, a substitute for what will never be replaced. It's the curse of the missing father—absent, yet ever present in his absence.

Martin seems to be tiptoeing as he comes around and stops in front of me, and it's too late because I can already feel the tickle at the bottom of my chin where the two hot streams are merging.

“Maria,” he whispers, “why are you crying?”

*   *   *

After the holidays, I return to school with my brother's guitar. I took it down from the wall where it hung next to my mother's china cabinet for years. All but two of the strings had snapped. Martin restrings it for me, teaches me a few basic chords—the same chords my brother was teaching me when he left for Mexico. I put a nail in the wall next to my window and hang the guitar.

It's my final semester, and since I've already fulfilled most of the requirements for my major, I have a few electives. I sign up for an oil painting class and an acting class. The acting class is an introductory-level course for non–theater majors, and we spend the first week doing breathing exercises and playing icebreaker games. When the second week rolls around and we are still playing games, I pull out the course catalog and find an intermediate-level acting class taught by a Professor Stuart. The course is open to theater majors only, unless permission is granted by the instructor. I track down Professor Stuart. He's a tall, slim man with a full white beard and floppy white hair to match.

“Why don't you finish the intro class and join my class next semester?” he says.

“This is my last semester,” I say.

“Well, I guess it's now or never, kid,” he says. “I'll see you on Monday.”

On Monday, I show up for class and am prepared to do whatever is asked of me because I don't want to let Professor Stuart down. My first assignment is a scene from Paul Zindel's
The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds
. I'm assigned the role of Ruth and one of the other girls is assigned the role of the mother. He gives each of us a character road map that we must fill out and hand in on the day that we perform. The road map asks everything from what is your character's favorite ice-cream flavor to what is her motivation—why does she say and do the things that she does? What is it that she needs or wants from the other characters?

I pick up the play at the library and read through the whole thing once. Even though I'm not an avid reader, I love it so much that I read through it again. I complete the road map and then fill up half a notebook with my character's nuances, her likes and dislikes, right down to whether she's a cat person or a dog person and why. I decide that she's neither, since at the end of the play she kills her sister's rabbit. Why did she kill the rabbit? I come up with a handful of reasons, as a way of getting into Ruth's head, into her emotional state. I memorize my lines and meet with my scene partner twice a week to rehearse.

After three weeks, it's our turn to perform, and I'm not really nervous until I take my place in front of the class. I stumble through the first few lines, but soon I'm breathing a bit easier, taking my time to describe how I came down the stairs and saw the dying man foaming at the mouth. “Stop it, Ruth, please, stop it,” the mother is yelling, and hearing how upset she's becoming only makes me want to dig even deeper, and with every step I take, the adrenaline is unleashing in my veins, making me feel like, if I wanted to, I could fly.