The Book of Unknown Americans: A novel (18 page)

The cars were in a big cluster, parked at odd angles, some with their tires in a rut, some without tires at all. My dad walked through the maze of them, his hands in his pockets, and examined them silently.

After a few minutes, a small, gray-haired man in a plaid jacket came out to greet us.

“G’morning,” he said, shaking my dad’s hand. “How can I help you folks today?”

“We want to buy a car,” my dad said.

The man nodded. “We’ve got a few. D’jda have something in particular in mind? A sedan or a wagon? A truck maybe?”

“I like something fast,” my dad said.

“A sports car?” the man asked.

My mom tugged my dad’s sleeve like some kind of warning that he’d better not get too carried away. Predictably, my dad ignored her.

“Do you have anything Italian?” my dad asked, as if he hadn’t just seen everything on the lot.

“An Italian sports car?” The man’s eyes widened. “ ’Fraid not. What we’ve got here is mostly American or Japanese. There’s a
few Volkswagens in the bunch. But Volkswagen’s about as European as you’re gonna get. I have one, about fifteen years old, that still runs about as good as Secretariat when she was in her prime. Transmission’s manual, so you could probably crank it up, get her going pretty speedy. You wanna take a look?”

I doubted my dad understood everything the man said, but he followed as the man led us to the back corner of the field where a small car, brown like cocoa powder, sat in the sun.

“Here she is,” the man said. “Just got her last week from a fellow down in Bear. Not much wrong with her as far as I can tell. There’s a dent in the hood and the seat belts are a little slack, but the lights work, gearshift is smooth as silk, and it’s got power steering. Only thirty-two thousand miles. Little bit of rust around the wheel wells, as you can see, but the radio works. AC still gets cold. Not that you need it this time of year.” He chuckled. “She’ll probably last you another ten years. A real beauty if you ask me.”

I wouldn’t have gone that far. The car was small and unspectacular. But compared to the rest of the inventory, it might as well have been a Lamborghini, and I could tell by the way my dad was eyeing it that he was hooked.

“How much?” he asked.

“We run the Kelley Blue Book values on all these, so our prices are fair.”

“How much?” my dad asked again.

“Twenty-three hundred,” the man said.

My mom made a noise.

“You got that?” the man asked.

My dad, suddenly a master negotiator, shrugged. “We were just looking,” he said.

“You aren’t gonna find much better than this,” the man said, patting the car’s hood.

My dad peeked in the passenger-side window.

“Twenty-two hundred,” the man offered. “Times are tough. I’ll give you folks a break.”

My dad wandered around to the other side of the car and checked out the view through the driver’s-side window after smudging some frost away with the heel of his hand.

My mom shivered against the wind. “Rafa,” she said.

The old man glanced at her, apparently interpreting this as my mom’s way of telling my dad that it was time to go, because he said, “Okay. Two thousand even. That’s the best I can do. And you can drive her off the lot today.”

My dad took one more lap around the car, the sunlight bouncing off its rear windshield. Then he asked, “Do you take a check?”

WE DROVE HOME
, two thousand dollars poorer, in our new Volkswagen Rabbit. In that big field, the old man, whose name we learned after we agreed to buy the car was Ralph Mason, gave my dad a quick lesson in the vagaries of manual transmission. My mom and I sat in the backseat as Mr. Mason, from the passenger side, took my dad through the gears, telling him when to depress the clutch and when to let it go. “Take her up!” Mr. Mason would shout. “Give her gas!” And my dad would obey the best he could. He was a mess at first, and each time the car twitched my mom would exclaim, “Ay!” but he took to the basic coordination of it surprisingly easily. After ten minutes, Mr. Mason declared my dad a natural. “Best student I’ve ever had,” he said, clapping my dad on the shoulder, and my dad beamed. In the backseat, my mom rolled her eyes.

My dad didn’t stall once on the drive home. Of course, he never made it above thirty miles per hour, either, even when we got on the stretch of Route 141 between I-95 and Kirkwood Highway. He crept onto 141 cautiously, like a beetle onto the tip of a branch, and kept a steady pace even though all the other cars in existence were flying past us at warp speed, honking as they swerved by.

“What are you doing?” my mom asked, buckled into her seat belt in the front.

My dad, focused on the road ahead, said nothing.

“Everyone’s passing us!”

“Let them,” he said, gripping the steering wheel with both hands now that we were in gear.

“No, this is not good, Rafa. You have to keep up.”

“The speed limit is fifty,” I said, trying to be helpful.

My mom peered at the speedometer. “You’re only going twenty-five!”

Again, my dad said nothing. He offered no explanation, no defense. He just focused on the road ahead and on steering the car.

A semi-truck roared by, sounding a long honk as it did. From on high, the driver gave us the finger.

“I can’t look,” my mom said, putting her hand over her eyes. “This is awful.”

“Give it gas!” I said, affecting the voice of Mr. Mason.

“Both of you,” my dad said. “I know what I’m doing.”

“I hope we don’t see anyone we know,” my mom said.

“We’re on the highway, Celia, not at a party.”

“This is so embarrassing!”

“No one we know even has a car,” my dad pointed out.

“We’re not going to have one for much longer either if you don’t go faster.”

“I know what I’m doing.”

“It’s dangerous, Rafa! Everyone has to go around us.”

I had been glancing out the back window every now and then, watching people switch lanes and flash their headlights at us. At that moment, I saw a car that had been coming up behind us in our lane swerve out to the side just before it reached us. The driver hadn’t realized until too late how slow we were going, or else he had miscalculated how fast he would catch up to us. He skidded onto the shoulder as my dad, totally unaware, kept moving us forward. The driver righted the car, put on his turn signal, and shot back into the traffic at the first opening. He careened around us and, as he passed by, yelled out his open window, “Learn how to fucking drive!”

My mom slumped in her seat. “Ay Dios,” she said.

“It’s a good thing Enrique’s not here,” I said.

“We would never hear the end of it,” my mom agreed.

“We’re almost there,” my dad said.

“Where?” my mom asked.

“The exit.”

And when we pulled off, two and a half miles later, my dad expertly brought the gears down to first, to idle at a red light. My mom sat up.

“You don’t understand,” my dad said. “They stop you.”

“Who? What are you talking about?” my mom asked.

“That’s why I was being cautious.”

“Who stops you?”

“The police. If you’re white, or maybe Oriental, they let you drive however you want. But if you’re not, they stop you.”

“Who told you that?”

“The guys at the diner. That’s what they say. If you’re black or if you’re brown, they automatically think you’ve done something wrong.”

“Rafa, that’s ridiculous. We’ve lived here for fifteen years. We’re citizens.”

“The police don’t know that by looking at us. They see a brown face through the windshield and boom! Sirens!”

My mom shook her head. “That’s what that was about?”

“I didn’t want to give them reason to stop me.”

“You were driving like a blind man, Rafa.
That
will give them reason to stop you.”

“Everybody else just has to obey the law. We have to obey it twice as well.”

“But that doesn’t mean you have to go twice as slow as everybody else!”

The light turned green and my dad brought the car out of first. We cruised under the overpass, a shadow draping over the car like a blanket.

“Next time, just try to blend in with everyone else and you’ll be fine,” my mom offered.

“The way of the world,” my dad said.

“What?” my mom asked as we emerged back into the sunlight.

“Just trying to blend in. That’s the way of the world.”

“Well, that’s the way of America, at least,” my mom said.

EVEN THOUGH
the general mood in our house had lifted, I was still grounded, which meant that I hadn’t seen Maribel since Christmas. I had told her back then that it was going to be a while before I could come over again. She’d been getting better
about remembering things—I didn’t have to repeat myself as often anymore and sometimes she even referenced things we’d talked about days before—but I wasn’t sure if she remembered this thing, and I hoped she didn’t think I was just ignoring her or that I’d lost interest. If anything, the grounding just gave me time to miss her, and I’d sit at home most afternoons depressed, staring out the window through the frost creeping in around the edges, hoping to catch a glimpse of her getting off her bus. And then I would walk away, because I knew if I saw her, it would be torture. And then I would go back, because not seeing her was torture. And then I would try to steer clear of the window for a while and make myself do something else like take a shower or read or play a game on my phone, but it was no use. I just paced around in anguish, not knowing where to look, not knowing where to go, and feeling like I was about to lose my mind.

At school, things were no better. I sat at my desk, drawing hats and mustaches on the people in my textbooks while I thought about Maribel. I wondered what she was doing, if she was as miserable as I was, what her hair looked like that day, what she was wearing. Anytime a teacher called on me, I had no idea where we were in the lesson. I’d just say “Huh?” and usually, after getting a disappointed look or even more often, a surprised one, I’d slump down in my seat and feel like crap. I went to the nurse’s office and complained that I had a stomachache or that I had a headache or that I was pretty sure I had the swine flu so I needed to go home. The nurse would take my temperature and send me back to class every time.

Sometimes when I got home from school, one of my mom’s friends would be in our living room, sipping freshly brewed coffee out of the Café Duran mugs my mom liberated from the
cabinet only for guests. Occasionally, I was greeted by the sight of Sra. Rivera, whose company my mom coveted, and anytime she was there, I would linger in the hallway outside the kitchen and eavesdrop, waiting for her to say something about Maribel. Once, my mom mentioned my name and after a pause Sra. Rivera said, “He seems to like Maribel, no?”

“Mayor?”

“He’s been good for her, I think. She’s different when he’s around. More like herself.”

“Really?” My mom sounded genuinely surprised.

“Did something happen, though?” Sra. Rivera asked. “He hasn’t come over in a while.”

“Didn’t I tell you? Rafa grounded him. Mayor got into a scuffle at school, and Rafa flew off the handle as usual. Él es tan rabioso.”

“It was serious?” Sra. Rivera asked. “What he did at school?”

“No, no. It was nothing. Trust me, Mayor is a good boy.”

Sra. Rivera didn’t say anything to that, and I wondered whether she believed my mom or whether knowing that I’d been grounded had somehow ruined her image of me.

One day I came home from school to find Quisqueya sitting next to my mom on our couch with her legs crossed. She used to be a regular fixture in our house, but lately I hadn’t seen her as much. Her furry snow boots were by the door and her white fur hat was in the center of the coffee table like a cake.

“How was your day?” my mom asked, after I walked in and dropped my backpack on the floor.

“Okay.”

“Anything interesting?”

“Nope.”

My mom said to Quisqueya, “He’s a man of few words these days.”

“Like all men,” Quisqueya said. “Except for my sons, of course. They call every night from the university to talk to me.”

“Tell me again, what university are they in?” my mom asked, feigning ignorance.

“Your memory is so short, Celia. They’re at Notre Dame.”

“Oh, right! Notre Dame. I don’t know why that never seems to stick with me.”

Quisqueya twisted herself to look at me. “I notice you’ve been spending a lot of time with the Rivera girl,” she said.

My mom tsked. “Not lately. Mayor is grounded.”

Quisqueya gasped. “Grounded!”

My mom shook her head like she was sorry she’d mentioned it. “It was nothing,” she said.

“Well, before. He used to spend a lot of time with her before.”

Quisqueya twisted herself to me again. “It’s a shame about her, isn’t it? But when I see you with her, the two of you seem to be having actual conversations. Like real people.”

“You don’t know anything about her,” I said, my cheeks burning, my voice flat as a wall.

“Not as much as you, certainly,” Quisqueya said.

“They’re just friends,” my mom said.

Quisqueya replied, “Of course. That’s how it starts.”

“Mayor, go to your room and start your homework,” my mom ordered.

“I don’t have any homework.”

“It’s a good idea to do your homework,” Quisqueya said. “Hard work is what got my boys where they are.” She faced my mom again. “Did I tell you they’re both majoring in computer
science? You should hear them talk about their assignments. All these technical terms! They love it. But I have to tell them, Please! I’m just your little mom!” She smiled. “I don’t understand any of it.”

“Maybe that’s because there’s something wrong with
your
brain,” I said.

“Mayor!” my mom snapped.

“What did he say?” Quisqueya asked my mom.

“I’m sorry,” my mom said. “I don’t know what’s gotten into him lately.”

“I said maybe you don’t understand any of it because there’s something wrong with your brain.”

Quisqueya blanched.

“Ya, Mayor! To your room!” my mom said, leaping up from the couch and pointing. When I didn’t move, she growled, “Now.”