Bulletproof Vest (9 page)

I know there is no point in arguing with her. She just doesn't get it. She was raised in Mexico, had only attended school until she was about twelve years old, had married my father when she was seventeen, and expected I would do the same. Get married, have kids, and be a housewife.

“I don't plan on getting married,” I say. This is pretty much my constant refrain, whenever she says things like this, or whenever she tells me to iron Jorge's shirts, or make him breakfast, because what kind of a housewife am I going to be if I don't even know how to cook and iron?

“Your brother is the one who should be going to college. He's the man, the one that should get an education, have a career, not you,” she says.

“Jorge doesn't even like school, amá. Why would he want to go to college?” I say, even though after my conversation with Ms. Flint, I had told Jorge and Yesenia that they should start paying attention in class, and whenever they didn't understand something, they should ask questions, stay after school, and get help if they had to. It wasn't too late for us.

None of our older siblings had gone to college. Rose had gotten pregnant her sophomore year and had dropped out and got married, and Sonia had eloped with her boyfriend the minute she graduated. Salvador had started working as a carpenter right out of high school, practically, and had married a nineteen-year-old girl from my mother's church and moved to Pennsylvania. Mary had dropped out of high school when she was a sophomore and had been hired at a factory, where she worked full-time to help pay the bills, while attending cosmetology school in the evenings. Chemel had been the only one who had talked about going to college and maybe becoming a lawyer. Even though he had graduated from high school at the top of his class, he too had gone straight to working in a factory to help make ends meet. He always smelled like turpentine when he came home from work. Sometimes he'd pick me up and throw me on the couch and kiss me all over my face and neck. “Gross,” I yelled, laughing and trying to break free of his embrace, as his stubble scraped against my cheek and I inhaled the factory fumes coming off his hair.

“Have you heard about the rumors your father has been spreading?” my mother asks, staring out the window, looking beyond the moths that are still searching on the other side of the glass.

“What?” I ask.

“He's been making the rounds in the cantinas of Valparaíso, saying that I've been taking road trips with the ministers, that I must be sleeping with them, and that the next time he sees me, he's going to kill me.” She nods her head and frowns as if she's already accepted her fate.

“That's crazy,” I say, looking up from my homework. “Why would he want to kill you?”

“That's why, because he's crazy.”

“It's probably not true,” I say, and there's a part of me that doesn't believe her, that doesn't want to believe her. “Who told you that?”

“What do you mean, who told me?” she says, raising her voice, as if I just called her a liar. “Everyone has been calling—my mother, my sisters, my brother, everyone has been calling and telling me not to go back down to Mexico because your father has been saying that me and the hallelujahs have brainwashed his kids, turned them against him, and that the next time he sees me, he's going to put his .45 to my forehead and send me to my God.”

“That doesn't make any sense,” I say, thinking that even if she was sleeping with the ministers, that even if none of us wanted anything to do with him, what should he care? He's the one that left us, went off and started a new family. By then we had heard that the woman he was living with had had a baby girl.

“It's amazing how far the devil will go,” she says, staring out beyond the moths that are still clinging to the glass, perhaps afraid to fly back into the darkness where they will be rendered temporarily blind.

A few days later, I'm sitting in the same spot and reading
The Grapes of Wrath
for my English class, and I stumble upon a word or an image that conjures a desolate scene. I can practically see my father rising from the dust and aiming his gun at my mother's forehead, the same way he used to aim it at my forehead when I was nine years old when, after the local bars had closed, he and his buddies came stumbling into the dark house. On the other side of my bedroom door, I lay in bed, fully dressed for school the next day because I hated having to change out of my warm pajamas in the brisk morning. I stared at the line of light under the door, listening to the noise coming from the living room.

“¡Otra!” I heard my father yell over the blaring music. I knew how he sat, holding his cards close and scanning the others' faces, looking for clues to the cards they held in their hands, though he never played for money. He also didn't smoke, but the scent of cigarettes soon filled my room as I watched my goldfish swimming circles in his bowl. On those nights, even if I had to go pee, I held it. I scanned my bedroom, looking for anything that might hold eight ounces. I contemplated jumping out the window and peeing outside, even, just so that I wouldn't have to step out into the living room. The record started skipping, and I knew that was my chance. One giant step and I was at the door, cracking it open. He was leaning over the consola, his back to me. I darted up the hall toward the bathroom. “Chuyita!” he yelled, and by the time I turned around, he was already stumbling toward me, his heavy hand landing on my back. “This one should have been a man,” he yelled as he walked me over to his two friends. They sat on the couch, red-eyed and grinning. “She's got nerves of steel,” he said, flexing his arm. His friends chuckled as they watched him reach into the back of his pants, pull out his .45, and aim it at my forehead. Then there was silence. His friends weren't laughing anymore.

“Jose, put the gun away,” they said. “You've had too much to drink.” I stared down the barrel of the gun without flinching. I knew he wouldn't pull the trigger. Not that night, or any of the other nights that he had tested my nerves. I knew that no matter how much he had had to drink, he must remember that I was his daughter. I shot him a smile and he exploded with pride.

“Nerves of steel,” he yelled, punching his fist into the air, his two buddies laughing as if they'd been holding their breath for years. He grabbed the bottle of 1800 off the table, handed it to me, and gave me a nod. I took the heavy bottle with both hands and brought it to my lips. The sharp smell stung my nose. I held my breath, took a sip, and handed it back to him. He took a long pull, set down the bottle, and then shoved a twenty-dollar bill into the front pocket of my Jordache jeans, his eyes still gleaming.

He had bought those jeans for me, and even back then, I knew that he had bought them to spite my mother. If she could have had it her way, my sisters and I would have worn nothing but long skirts and dresses like all the girls and women at her church. What if it was she staring into the barrel of his gun—would he pull the trigger then? The book is on the table in front of me and I realize that I'm eight pages into a new chapter and have no idea what I've just read. I push it aside, open one of my notebooks, and write him a letter.

Hi Dad,

We've heard about the rumors you've been spreading around town. How you have been saying that you're going to kill our mother. What the hell is wrong with you? You were the one who created a mess for us, and what did you do? You ran away. You bought yourself a bulletproof vest and left, and what did you care if they had come and killed us in the middle of the night? You left us to fend for ourselves when we needed you most and now you're threatening to kill the one parent that did stick around? I wish it had been you instead of Chemel. He was more of a father than you will ever be—you fucking coward.

I sign my name, close the notebook, and go to bed, end up forgetting about the letter, as I never meant to send it. I was merely venting, putting on paper what I would have never said to his face. But that letter may have expressed something unspoken in my family, some deep sense of betrayal that we all felt, because a few weeks later, Sonia found the letter and sent it to him.

He must have been shocked when he received it, must have ripped the envelope open the minute it was in his hands. It was written in English—a language he had never bothered to learn, and so he wouldn't have understood a single word, though he must have recognized the signature: Maria Venegas. It was from one of his daughters, one of the two Marias, and perhaps a wave of joy rushed over him at the realization that one of his kids had thought of him. They may have refused to talk to him on the phone, but one of his daughters had taken the time to write him a letter. He found someone to translate it for him, and I imagine him sitting across from the translator, smiling with anticipation, watching as the person read the letter to themselves before relaying it to him, line for line, word for word—each syllable wiping the grin clear off his face.

Not long after Sonia sent the letter, one of his sisters calls us, demanding to know who wrote the letter. He had called her sobbing, saying that his own kids wished him dead.

“How dare you speak to your father like that? You have to respect him. He's your father, for Christ's sake,” she says. “Whoever wrote that letter better call him and apologize.”

No one ever calls him, and years later, I find out that two of my sisters had written and sent him similar letters around the same time, though Mary had added that he ought to be ashamed of himself—carrying on as if he were a bachelor while she was the one footing the bills and making sure his kids had a roof over their heads and food on the table.

*   *   *

It's Friday night and across the continent, high school football stadiums are lit up. The bleachers are packed with parents, teachers, and students all watching helmets collide on the open field, while stashed inside purses and coat pockets are bottles swiped from grocery store counters and parents' liquor cabinets. It's nearly halftime and across the field the stadium lights are merging into one continuous streak against the black sky. I definitely feel it now. I didn't feel it earlier, when my friend Lisa and I were sitting in her car just up the street from here, in the church's parking lot.

“Do you feel anything?” Lisa asked.

“No,” I said, and she reached under her seat for the bottle of rum, which had been nearly half full when she snuck it out of her house. She emptied the rest into our 7-Eleven Big Gulp cups. The heater blew on our bare legs while we sang along to “Pictures of You” by The Cure and sucked our drinks down. Once we finished them, she had driven to the stadium, parked across the street, and now here we were, sitting in the bleachers, my blood coursing sedately in my veins.

“Do I look green?” I ask Lisa. “I feel green,” I say. “Do I look green?” She glances at me and we both burst. She's laughing so hard that her mascara is running in black streams down her cheeks.

“What did you two drink?” Jeff, who's in my history class, is sitting on the bleacher in front of us. We look at him, then at each other, and again we are doubling over. I'm laughing so hard that I'm afraid I might start crying.

“Maybe we should leave,” Lisa says, gasping, even though she knows I can't leave. She can leave if she wants to, but not me—I'm on probation for having missed a game. Two Fridays ago, my mother had dragged me into the city with her, to the wholesalers where she buys stock for the weekend. Afterward, I had gone to the store and helped her unpack and price everything, and I had not made it back in time for the game.

If I miss another game now, I'll be kicked off the drill team. I did the cheerleading thing for one season, and quickly realized that standing on the sidelines cheering for boys who could barely dribble across the court without being fouled was not for me. I knew that if my old “gang” could have seen me bouncing around and chanting “Be aggressive, b, e, aggressive,” they would have lost all respect for me. My sophomore year, I had tried out for the drill team instead. There was no cheering involved. We needed only to show up at the home games, perform a dance routine at half time, and then we were free to leave.

Jeff is staring at us, and it feels like suddenly everyone is turning and looking in our direction, as if the entertainment is no longer out there on the field but right here in the stands. A horn blows in the distance, the players run off the field, and everyone jumps to their feet as the marching band begins to play. I stand up and sway slightly forward, manage to catch myself on Jeff's shoulder, and follow Lisa as she makes her way out of the bleachers.

“I can't go out there,” she yells over the music when we make it to the grass. “I'll wait for you in the car.” She turns and makes her way toward the opening in the chain-link fence. I watch her chestnut ponytail bouncing away, and I want to yell wait, please don't go, I thought we were in this together, but she's gone, and my legs are already carrying me toward the music. I join the rest of the drill team and we make our way around the track, the marching band booming behind us. The drums and horns sound like the tamborazo, like my father's music, and the sound waves are echoing in my bones and making me want to cry out like a wild cock.

The band takes their place in front of the bleachers, the drill team goes running out into the middle of the field, and I also run, not so much with them, as after them. I find my spot, stand behind the row of girls that are down on one knee. I hold my head down, and my pom-poms brush against my bare thighs while I wait for the cue. The music comes thundering across the field like a stampede of wild horses that instantly sends pom-poms punching into the air: and one and two and three and kick, and five and six and seven and punch, and one and two and turn and turn, and five and six and I'm behind. I can't remember if I should be in the front or back row, so I stay where I am and focus on the girl standing in front of me, follow her lead. I notice how the other girls are flashing a smile for the crowd, while keeping one eye narrowed on me. Their arms go up and come down in unison as they move into the kick formation, and then I'm locked in, the two girls on either side of me are practically holding me up. A row of legs fans out, opening and closing like scissors, all those eyes watching the black miniskirts parting at the pleats, revealing the white inlay underneath.