Marcelo in the Real World (30 page)

And now he is silent. I see his hands open and shut, the way mine do when I cannot find words for what I want to say. I wait and wait and then he says, “You know what? There’s only a few weeks left in the summer. Why don’t we end this summer job at the end of the week. Use the next two days to finish up what you’re
doing. Then you can use the rest of the summer to get ready for Oak Ridge. Get the books you’ll be using. Get some help to bring you up to speed.”

He sits back on his chair and bends his head to look at the document in front of him.

I turn around and take two steps toward the door. I stop. I feel Jasmine’s letter folded in my shirt pocket. I remember Rabbi Heschel’s words.
Trust in Him. He will know how to use whatever hurt results for His own ends.
And so I turn around, walk toward the edge of his desk, and extend my hand with Jasmine’s letter to him.

“What is it?” he asks before taking it.

“Wendell gave me this. He called it the ‘gift of truth.’ I think you should have it.”

He takes it from my hand. I wait for him to begin reading it before I leave.

W
e get off the interstate when we see the signs for Lawrence. As we wind our way through the streets, I begin to see more and more signs in Spanish—storefronts, restaurants. The beat of Latin music fills the air. The people’s skins are brown and black. We stop in front of a three-story green building. All the windows are open and from the top floor, I see a white curtain float out into the street like a flag.

“Here we are,” Jerry says. “That’s the place.”

We get out of the car and walk to the door. Now I have this sense of embarrassment. What will I say to Ixtel? Why am I here? Through the screen door I hear someone crying. Jerry García rings the bell and a few moments later, the door opens.

“Gerónimo!” a woman’s voice says. “Come in, come in.”

It is a large woman with wiry white hair who immediately reminds me of a darker and bulkier version of Rabbi Heschel.

“And this is Marcelo?”

“I brought some things,” Jerry tells her as he heads back to his car.

“I bring you lemonade.” The woman grabs my hand and pulls me inside. Before I know what is happening, she embraces me and holds me tight against her soft, large body. “Thank you for all you done,” I hear her say. “My name is Sister Juana. I speak in bad English to you, okay?”

“Yes,” I manage to say. I am out of breath from the embrace. She takes me down the hall in the direction of the crying.

“Let’s go in here,” Sister Juana says. We turn into a doorway opposite the room where the crying is coming from. The room we enter is half-full of metal folding chairs. At one end of the room, a television set has been moved to the side and there is a table covered with a white tablecloth embroidered with blue, orange, pink, and green flowers. A cross stands in the middle of the table and a candle in a red glass next to it. “On Sunday we say Mass here,” she says.

“You are a priest,” I say. Immediately I realize that there are no women priests.

“No, not priest.
Díos mío,
no!” She laughs. “Padre Antonio comes on Sundays to say Mass. Sit, please.”

Just as she sits down, we hear the sound of glass breaking. She stands up and says, “I be back. Here, I turn on the fan for you.” She goes over to a tall, rusty fan in the corner and clicks a button. She waits until she hears the blades begin to rattle and then she leaves the room. Her plastic sandals make a smacking sound as she walks.

Out in the hallway, I hear Jerry and Sister Juana speak. Then he leans in the doorway to speak to me.

“I’ll be back in twenty minutes. The sister just gave me a list of errands.” He waves a piece of paper and disappears.

I am alone for a few moments when a girl walks in, sees me, and freezes. She looks like a smaller version of Ixtel, only this girl’s face has not been hurt. Her hair is tied in a ponytail and it falls over the front of her shoulder. “Ay! You scared me!” she gasps.

“Hola,”
I say.

“I speak English,” she responds.

“Oh. My name is Marcelo,” I say.

“I’m María,” she says brightly. Now I see the full resemblance to Ixtel. “You’re looking for Ixtel?”

“Yes,” I answer.

“She’s upstairs. I’ll get her.” Then she asks, “Do you know how to fix the TV?” She is pointing at the television set with a coat hanger sticking from the top.

“No.”

“It is the stupid antenna,” she goes on, not paying attention to me.

We hear an angry scream from the room across the hall. María sticks her fingers in her ears and grimaces. “Is Ixtel your sister?” I ask when she unplugs her ears.

“Not real, real sister. She is everyone’s sister.”

“Do you live here?” I am nervous and am speaking out my thoughts as they first appear.

She looks at me. “You ask crazy questions. I’ll go tell Ixtel her boyfriend is here.” I think she’s kidding. She walks out of the room, lightly and quickly, like someone who is happy.

In a few minutes, I will see Ixtel,
I think. I can’t remember any of the things I practiced saying to her. I go up to the wooden crucifix and touch it. The Christ that hangs on it is made of bronze and his head does not slump on his chest the way it usually does.

“Come outside, is hot in here.” Sister Juana is in the doorway, wiping her hands on a white apron.

We walk through a hallway lit by a single lightbulb dangling from the ceiling and out a screen door in the back of the house. We are in a garden. I see small trees heavy with pears and taller trees with pink and lavender flowers. Almost every inch of the yard, except for the stone paths that cut vertically and horizontally, is filled with roses of different colors. Sister Juana holds my arm as she leads me to a small fountain in the middle of the garden where there is a stone bench. I see the leaves of trees move at the same time that I feel a breeze cool my face. The garden is surrounded on all sides by the walls of buildings, and I wonder how it is that a breeze has managed to enter and flow.

We sit side by side on the bench. Sister Juana is breathing deeply as if to make sure that the scent of roses reaches the bottom of her lungs. On the opposite side of the garden from where we entered it, there is another door. I do not fully understand the nature of this place that seems in part a jail and in part a church. Perhaps I should inquire about it, but there is something about asking questions just then that seems inappropriate.

After another deep breath, Sister Juana speaks. “This house once was from rich family. When last daughter die, she leave it to us. Is a big house. Now some nights we have forty girls. In rich family there only four live here. Father, mother, and two daughters. And maybe five servants.” She laughs. “Imagine.”

“Forty girls,” I say to myself out loud.

“Me, Ixtel, Sister Camila and Sister Guadalupe, and María you just met, we are, how you say, permanent. There are so many, many more girls out there and we have this only.” She glances at
the walls as if noticing for the first time how small the house is. She goes on, “We not force the girls to come, they must want to come here. Some come for a few days only and then go out for more drugs, more abuse. Some like Ixtel do not have homes.”

“Are the girls happy here?” I don’t know why this question pops up in my mind.

“Happy?” It’s like she never heard the word before. “This is safe place where they can be safe for a while. That is all we can do.”

I feel Ixtel’s presence a second before the screen door opens. “Ah, there is our Ixtel,” Sister Juana says. She struggles to stand up.

I see Ixtel walk quickly toward me like I am someone she hasn’t seen in a long time. She is wearing khaki slacks and a white button-down short-sleeve shirt. As she draws nearer, I recognize the delicate features on one side of her face: the eyebrows, the eyes, the forehead, all as in her picture, but also different. I try to determine what is different about her. Her face is calmer. The eyes that pierced through me in the picture are softer.

“I go now,” Sister Juana says when Ixtel stops in front of us.

We watch Juana hobble away, pausing once to lift up a drooping rose. When we see her disappear into the house, Ixtel sits on the bench and waits for me. I feel a sudden fear that I may have lost the ability to speak.

“You’re Marcelo,” she says, reminding me of who I am.

“Marcelo,” I repeat.

“It’s okay, you can look at me, I don’t mind.”

I don’t know why she says this at first and then I understand. “I always have trouble looking people in the eye. Not just Ixtel.”

“You’ve seen me before anyway. In the picture.”

“Yes.”

There is a pause. It seems like so much has happened since I first saw her picture.

“Did Jerry tell you that the surgery has been scheduled?”

“No.”

“No? He must have wanted me to tell you. First the reconstructive surgery, and then when that heals, the cosmetic part to make me look like a movie star.” She smiles with one side of her mouth. She is sitting on my left so that I see the good side of her face when I look at her.

“Ixtel is already beautiful,” I say. This time it is hard to keep my eyes on her.

“You ever have anyone do something so good for you that you feel bad because there is no way to thank them? You say the words ‘thank you,’ but they don’t seem enough. That’s how I feel. But anyway, I’ll say it. Thank you.”

I don’t know what to say. If “thank you” is not enough, then neither is “you’re welcome,” but I say it anyway. “You’re welcome.”

I inhale deeply. The fragrance of the roses reminds me of Abba. She grew roses in our backyard. I bend down to look closely at a rose that is a color I have never seen before. It is not one color but various shades of white and pink and even violet on the rim of the petals. The drops of dew remind me of Aurora.

“The roses are full of dew.” It is the only thing I can think of saying.

“Sister Juana is the rose expert. She mixes and matches roses trying to invent a new color. She tries to get us to help her but no
one wants to. Even with gloves on, we get all scratched up with thorns.”

“My grandmother liked roses. She planted them all over our yard. Once, when I was a small child, she asked if I wanted to see something special. She got this thing from the kitchen that looked like a giant eyedropper. I forget the name of the utensil.”

“A baster. The big eyedropper thing is called a baster.”

“A baster? I did not know.”

“Trust me, I know about basters. Cooking is something we do a lot here.”

“Abba, that’s what we called my grandmother, filled the baster with water and sugar and made me sit in the middle of the roses. She told me that if I held the baster very still in front me, squeezing it just enough for a drop to form at its end, a hummingbird would come and feed from it.”

“And did one?”

“Yes. After a while a hummingbird came. It was amazing to see one so close. Its wings were moving so fast they seemed to be still.”

“That’s neat. You were like St. Francis over there.” She points to a cement statue of St. Francis hidden in the rosebushes. The stone bird that sits on his shoulder does not have a head.

There must be a proper response I can make to that statement, but instead I ask: “Are you happy here?”

She looks at the roses and then at the walls enclosing the garden. “This is a good place. I didn’t think so when I first came. After the car accident I was very bad. I was fourteen and I was on the street on my own. Even with this face I could sell myself easy. Maybe they thought it was good to make it with a freak. And there
were drugs. There’s so many ways to hurt yourself if you want to. Finally, Social Services brought me here. I hated it.”

“How long have you lived here?”

“Almost a year. When I turned sixteen, I could have left. But I stayed. Look at this.” She points to the walls that surround the garden. “It’s kinda like being sent to rehab and then staying for good. Now I feel like this is where I belong. I must be crazy. And the people who come here are no angels—that’s for sure. They’re all like me when I first got here. ‘Get me the hell out of here. I need my fix.’”

“But how did you change? What happened? What made you different?”

We both turn to look at each other at the same time. I can feel her wondering why I want to know. Maybe she can see that I’m not asking just out of curiosity or to make small talk. I’m asking because I want to find what she found.

“Little by little, I don’t know, what was eating me up went away.”

“But how did it go away? What did you do?”

“Like, at the beginning, I felt sorry for myself, I guess. Not like, you know, pity or anything. But then one day I stopped being so angry. ‘You’re just a little girl,’ I said to myself. ‘It’s not your fault your parents died. It’s okay you messed up. It’s okay to be angry about your face and hate everyone. You’re just a little girl. I forgive you, little girl, for all the bad things you did.’ Like that. It’s crazy, isn’t it? To have one part of your self be nice to another part. Like the nice part of my face saying nice things to the ugly part. After a while, the nice part and the ugly part stopped hating each other. There was peace inside of me, like the
different parts disappeared and there was only one me. After that, I saw how the other girls were like me, and I started doing the same thing with them. I saw their ugly parts—and around here that’s not too hard, believe me—and I tried to be nice to their ugly parts.”

Then it comes to me. It cannot be that this is the first time I realized this, but it is.
We all have ugly parts.
I think of the time in the cafeteria when Jasmine asked me what the girl in the picture was asking me. How do we live with all the suffering? We see our ugly parts, and then we are able to forgive, love kindness, walk humbly.

“We all have ugly parts,” I say to myself, forgetting for a moment that Ixtel is sitting next to me.

She gives a short laugh that sounds like a cough because of the shape of her mouth. “You say that as if you never knew it.”