Rust (27 page)

He stepped into the shower, enjoying the beating of the hot water on his back, thinking how strange it was to come into his own house, to stand in the kitchen doorway where everything appeared to be quite normal, and know, clearly, that he and Rosalita were headed for a big scene and it would happen soon. Rico accepted and expected that, but he hoped, selfishly, that it could erupt in private. It was a wish that made him sad.

He hadn’t even settled at his place at the table for one minute before Lucy asked, “Papi, where were you last night? You’re always home for dinner.”

Rico wasn’t used to lying because he rarely had a reason to bother, but now he said, “I had to work,
mi hija
.”

“So late?” she responded. “I heard you come in after midnight.”

“Yeah, well, a good customer of mine, he needed his car this morning,” Rico said, feeling worse with every word.

“You shouldn’t have to stay so late,” Lucy said.

“It almost never happens, thank God,” Rosalita said as she placed a platter of
pollo
in the center of the table. As she leaned forward to do so, she temporarily blocked the visual line from Rico to Lucy, and he felt grateful. He tried to catch Rosalita’s eye, but she didn’t glance at him.

“So how was everybody’s day?” Rico asked, realizing when he was halfway through the question that he had spoken the line Rosalita always said in this moment.

Ana had just slid into her chair. “I made an A on my psych test,” she said, and everyone clapped. It was a little ritual that they always adhered to: good news from anybody got a round of applause.

“Tell us one of the questions, Ana,” Maribel prompted. “Make it a hard one.”

Ana thought for a moment and then said, “Okay. A serotonin reuptake inhibitor is most frequently prescribed in the treatment of a) color blindness, b) Alzheimer’s disease, c) chronic depression, d) alcohol withdrawal, or e) obsessive compulsive disorder.”

Everyone at the table was silent. Then Maribel said, in a matter of fact tone, “D. Alcohol withdrawal.”

“Wrong!” said Ana, and she launched into the particulars of the serotonin reuptake inhibitor. The actual words soon faded for Rico, became like the pleasant hum of honeybees in the trumpet vines outside the window. He was happy here at dinner with his whole family, his harem, as Rosalita called it, gathered around, eating the food that he was able to put on the table for them. He loved the way Ana, with her interest in science, was always willing to dumb down complicated science concepts for them. Sometimes he would raise his hand in the midst of it all and she would call on him and he’d ask a question. “Professor Garcia,” he would begin, “why does . . .” and she would look very serious and then continue on with more and more animation in her voice. She was the scholar in the group, and he had no idea where she got it. Lucy was the dreamer, and Maribel was the most like Rosalita—practical, down to earth, and calm.

Rico’s eyes shifted to Rosalita. She sat opposite him, but her face was turned toward Ana, and he only saw her left profile. She had been a beautiful young girl, so fresh-faced and innocent that Rico had fallen for her at first sight. That had happened at her
quinceañera
, to which Rico had been invited because Elena and Rosalita’s mother were church friends. He’d had nothing better to do so he tagged along, planning to feed his face, drink a few beers, and move into his evening. But when Rosalita had come out of the house, wearing high heels with a strap around the ankles and a low-cut flowered dress that left no doubt that she had achieved womanhood, he was smitten. He was almost twenty, a full-grown man, so he had respectfully asked her father for permission to dance with her. Once he took her in his arms, once she melted into him and gazed at him from underneath her eyelashes, thick with the mascara she was finally allowed to wear, his heart was already pounding under his shirt, and he had to fight the urge to lead her out of the backyard in front of everyone and disappear into the sunset in his truck.

He had been with several women by that time, but his heart had never acted up before, never felt inclined to open wide and welcome love. But he could barely refrain from whispering “
Te quiero mucho
, Rosalita” into her ear at the end of their first dance. It must have been clear that whatever had enveloped him had also descended on her because, even though it wasn’t the politest thing to do at her
quinceañera
, she refused all the others—boys and men—and from then on, she was Rico’s and that was that. After a month, Rosalita was riding her bicycle toward Garcia’s Automotive at the same time Rico’s father was leaving at the close of business. Within minutes of his exit, Rico would unlock the door to her, and they would climb into the backseat of whatever car was in the shop and not even come up for air until her curfew, which during the first year was eleven p.m. Rico wore condoms, colored ones that he bought in packages of fifty. Despite that precaution, Rosalita got pregnant before a year and a half had gone by. She gave birth to Lucy when she was just seventeen. Neither she nor Rico ever regretted it. Rico had already found his piece of land and, with his father’s help, had purchased it on a twenty-year real estate contract. He and Rosalita moved in there together when only one room of the house was constructed—wheel barrowful of adobe by wheel barrowful—when there was no running water, an electrical panel consisting of two fuses, and an outhouse. They were deeply, completely happy.

Yet they never married, which was shameful, at least according to their families. It was Rosalita who said no, who had witnessed too much behind the closed doors of her own parents’ marriage to believe in it. “I want to stay with you because of love,” she insisted, “not because of a piece of paper.” Here she would hold up her hand with her thumb and pointer finger touching as if there were a piece of paper between them. And sometimes she would add, “and if I have to leave, ever, I want to be free to go.” To Rico, it didn’t matter, though for many years every time they attended the wedding of a friend, he was filled with longing and proposed again, but Rosalita only smiled and said, “We don’t need the piece of paper, Rico. We don’t.” Now he knew, though he hadn’t until a few days ago, that a time had come when Rosalita had thought of leaving, but by then she did not feel free to go, paper or not.

Ana was wrapping up her psychology lecture when Rico finally tuned back in. The correct answer, he ascertained, to her multiple choice question was c) chronic depression. He nodded his head as if he finally understood, as if he had been listening intently with the others, but his eyes were on Rosalita. Had she been depressed for the past four years? Had she been living with regret, perhaps wishing she had run off with whatever man it was that arrived in her life and threw her off balance so completely that she had not been able to find her way back to Rico, whom she’d been with for close to two decades? Was he in the same predicament now? Heading for depression? Or had he just woken up from it?

Dinner progressed as it always did: with laughter and conversation and plenty of good food. Maribel, as always, had complaints about the manager at PetSmart, who, according to her, didn’t know his ass from a hole in the ground. Lucy had a date coming up on Saturday night with a
Mexicano
who played the trumpet in a mariachi band. Ana would babysit for Jessica, provided Lucy swore to be home before Jessica started screaming to get up at five in the morning. Speaking of morning, Elena pleaded with Rico to sneak over and strangle the rooster who lived on the other side of the fence from her
casita
, the one who started crowing at four and never shut up until ten in the morning. Rosalita was quiet, but that was not new. Mainly, she asked who was ready for more
arroz con pollo
or who needed another drink. As always, she added food to Rico’s plate without asking him. As always, she pretended to be surprised when the girls offered to do the clean up. “I wouldn’t mind putting my feet up,” she said, as she always did, and then she went into the living room and flicked on the television for the seven o’clock news.

Tonight, Rico followed her, leaving Maribel to walk Elena back to her
casita
.

“Rosalita, let’s take a little drive,” he said. “Or how about a walk by the river?”

She glanced up from the TV screen. “Why?” she said.

“So we can talk,” Rico said.

“I don’t feel like talking,” she said. “I don’t want to hear where you’ve been or what you’ve been doing.”

Rico sat down at the opposite end of the couch. “It’s not what you think,” he said. “At least, not yet.”

She looked at him now, and to Rico, she looked tired. “Were you with her last night?”

“For a while. We took a walk, that’s all.”

“It must have been a long walk.”

“Afterward I went to Fernando’s grave,” Rico said. “I climbed over the wall of the cemetery.”

Rosalita studied him. “Why?” she asked.

“I don’t know. I was talking about him to Margaret, and later I just ended up there.” Even saying the name Margaret out loud felt risky, and he realized with surprise that he was suddenly nervous about talking to Rosalita, the woman he had talked to every day for twenty-three years.

“What do you want from me, Rico?” she said.

He hesitated. “You could ask me if I’m okay,” he finally said.

“Are you?”

“I don’t know.”

She moved toward him then. He put his arm around her shoulder the way he had always done, before those four years when it became clear that she didn’t want him to touch her anymore.

“Well, look at this! Young love!” said Lucy as she came into the living room with Jessica on her hip. “Am I interrupting something?”

“No,” said Rosalita.

“Good,” replied Lucy, dropping her daughter into her mother’s lap. “Sit with Grandma,
mi amor
, until Mommy finishes the dishes.” Lucy turned around and vanished into the kitchen.

Rico had to laugh. Maybe that was family life in a nutshell. The walls could be collapsing, but until everyone was buried up to their necks in the rubble, life went on as usual. They had a granddaughter, a two-year-old who needed to be amused for a few minutes. Everything else was on the back burner. Jessica squirmed around and finally crawled onto Rico’s lap.

“Up, up,” she said, and Rico obliged, lifting her high above his head and pretending to drop her, which brought on great gales of laughter. Rosalita took the opportunity to move away from him, back to the other end of the sofa. She turned her attention to the evening news and seemed unreachable. Rico had expected fury from her, wrath, vicious words, and ultimatums, but her new silence felt full to the point of bursting, like a volcano or a pot of boiling water with its top on too tight.

Rico glanced at his wife again. Maybe she’d been waiting for this—a chance to get away without the guilt of having caused the breakup. But then he thought of the way she’d been in bed the last few nights, uninhibited and free in his arms, and a plot to escape seemed rather unlikely.

He did not know his own wife anymore, he thought to himself as he threw Jessica up in the air again and again. And to be truthful, he didn’t know himself either.

1990

V
INCENT
HAS
no idea there is enough left inside of him to feel so terrible. He thought he had bottomed out long ago, reached the point at which nothing really matters anymore. He is deeply shocked by this new wave of devastation. He has spent his whole life believing there is always something better, and now he knows that there is always something worse.

And this is it.

Regina dead.

Fourteen years.

Dead at twenty-six.

Vincent wanders the streets with no destination. He wishes he had money for alcohol or drugs, but there is nothing to dim the pain. No way to wipe it out except to feel it. Go through it.

He loses weight. More weight. One day he sees his reflection in a window and he thinks he looks like an old man. On that same day, he sees a beautiful young woman, a Hindu woman with long black hair that she has temporarily set free of its braid.

Her hair reminds him of Regina’s.

It reminds him of Margaret’s.

His daughter is twenty-two years old. Older than this Hindu woman whom he watches as she rebraids her hair and places a rubber band at the end.

It has not occurred to him that he could somehow get himself back to the United States, but now he decides to try. He still has a daughter.

He gets up from the steps of a statue in a local park that has become his home. He begins to walk.

He will walk all the way to Bombay if he has to. He will find the American embassy. He will manage it somehow.

He’s going home.

O
NCE
L
UCY
had collected her daughter, taken her into the bathroom for a nice warm bath, Rico let himself out into the evening air, which had cooled considerably. The night was very dark, with just a tiny crescent of moon in the sky and his own outdoor lights turned off for the moment. He could vaguely hear the sound of the television set. He didn’t want to compare Margaret and Rosalita. It did not seem productive or fair, and yet he could not help but recall Margaret’s words when he told her about visiting his brother’s grave. “That’s big,” she had said. Rosalita, on the other hand, had just asked a technical question: “Why?” Between the two, he found his comfort in Margaret’s reaction, though he wasn’t even sure why he needed a reaction or why he wanted to tell the story.