The Chicano/Latino Literary Prize (48 page)

“When a woman starts to act up it means she's getting her own ideas,” Miguel told him after work the next day. Antonio hadn't wanted to go home and had convinced Miguel to have a beer with him. “Have you thought about hitting her? I don't believe in hitting women, of course. But wives … well, that's something different.”

“Did you ever hit your ex-wife?”

“Of course,” he said. “Why do you think she's my ex-wife?”

“So what kind of advice is that?”

“You didn't say you wanted advice.”

“Now I'm telling you.”

“What about cheating on her?”

“What good would that do?”

“It would get your mind off her.”

Antonio rotated his glass between his palms. Miguel gave a long sigh.

“There's only one option left, then. You're going to have to swallow your pride and make it up to her.”

“I can't seem weak,” Antonio said.

“You have a point.”

“Then what should I do?”

“Buy me another beer.”

“I already bought you two.”

“I think better after three.”

They kept drinking until the bar closed. Antonio found Pilar at home curled on her side of the bed, fast asleep. It felt good to slip into the warm sheets with her. He guided the hair away from her face so he could look at her, hoping not to wake her, and at the same time hoping she would wake, that she would turn to him and embrace him as if nothing had ever been bad between them. She stirred. Antonio mouthed a wordless prayer that she not tear away from him.

She stirred again, murmured—his name, or something else? “Don't be mad at me,” he whispered. She backed into the curve of him, and he slipped his arm around her. Into her ear he whispered one of the phrases that he knew excited her. This was one of the things they both loved—the exchange of hot, sweet, nasty words. He felt himself getting hard against her back, lifted himself to move on top of her. He eased her leg up over his shoulder, whispered more words. “Now talk to me,” he said, “talk to me.” She raised her head off the pillow, pressed her lips against his ear and whispered something he did not understand.

“Spanish,” he said. “Say it in Spanish.”

“I have to practice my English,” she breathed.

“Not now,” he said, going into her. “Later. Please. Make love to me in Spanish.”

But only English words kept coming. For all he knew she was reciting a lesson she remembered from class. He started to go soft, felt his own heart slowing out of rhythm with what he was trying to do. Pilar was smiling at him.

“I can't do it in that language,” he panted, collapsing on his back.

“What difference does it make?”

“I don't know. It just does. I never thought it would make a difference.”

She rolled away from him and went back to sleep. She was teaching him a lesson, and though he wanted to get angry about it, his heart was too weighted to muster the fight. More upsetting than the lack of sex was how easily Pilar seemed to go without it. Sex was the only way he had ever been sure he was telling her how much he felt. It was his language for giving her joy. Now he saw that perhaps it had never meant that much to her after all.

On payday Antonio came into the machine shop to find a half-dozen of his co-workers huddled around Miguel's workstation, talking about the upcoming lay-offs.

“That rumor's been going around for a while,” Antonio said.

“Today,” Miguel said. “We're talking about today. They tried to keep it from us until the end of the day, but I saw the pink slips on Martínez' desk.”

“Are you sure?” Gómez said.

“I'm pretty sure.”

“Pretty sure?” someone else said. “Either you're sure or you're not. Which is it?”

“Calm down,” Antonio said. “Tell me, Miguel, did you see any names?”

“No,” he said, “but there was a stack of them.”

One of the managers came to the door of the second floor office. Everyone looked up, then started to break apart.

Antonio put on his goggles and went back to his machine. He was losing his wife and now he was losing his job, and he had made no more progress on the business. Everything, everything was slipping away at a rate he couldn't seem to counter.

He turned his lathe back on, letting the hum of the machine calm him. He had always found something soothing about machines. Something about the predictability of them, he supposed.

At lunch he found Miguel out by the lunch truck. “I'm breaking away,” he said. “I'm quitting. No one's going to fire me from a job. I've been here the least time, so I'm sure to be the first to go.”

“Then we'll quit together,” Miguel said.

“Are you sure about this?” Antonio said.

“I told you, I'm behind you completely. Anyway, it might save one of these other poor bastards' jobs. Let's get it over with.”

On their way up the steps to the office, Antonio wanted more than anything else to call Pilar. He had never made a decision like this before without talking to her, and now he ached to hear her approving voice. Yes, she would approve, he was sure of it. … But just to hear her voice, just to hear her voice …

On his first day working for Antonio, Miguel worked all afternoon with him in the hot sun clearing space for scrap piles in the two-acre dirt yard that Antonio had rented for his business. They took Antonio's GMC roll-off unit out for a drive so Miguel could get the feel of it, then came back to the yard to weld the drop-off containers they would need for pick-ups. It felt good to Antonio to work with his whole body, even though the work was tiring. But he still only had two regular customers: small machine shops in the south part of Hayward.

“Stop moping,” Miguel said. “You have to have more faith. You're doing the right thing. I can feel it in my bones.”

When that failed to cheer him up, Miguel disappeared behind one of the drop-off units, then casually reappeared wearing two aluminum oil funnels taped together like a bra as he went back to work. Antonio stared for a moment, then dropped to his knees in a fit of laughter.

At the lumber yard a few days later Antonio saw Rivera, his old English teacher, loading pine beams into the bed of a Ford pick-up. Antonio spun around to avoid him and went into the building with his head down, pretending not to notice him. But standing in line at the register he felt a hand settle on his shoulder.

“Antonio?” the voice said. “How's everything?”

“Oh, fine, fine,” Antonio said. “Just picking up a few things for my new business.”

“I didn't know you had your own business.”

“I just started it a few months ago.”

“That's wonderful. I've always wanted to do something like that.”

He gave Antonio a friendly smile. Antonio laughed.

“What's so funny?”

“I thought you were going to test me on my English or something.”

Rivera laughed too. “Listen,” he said. “You left in such a hurry that last day, I never got a chance to tell you how much I enjoyed having you in my class.”

Antonio stared at him. “Really?” he said.

“Yes, of course. I've seen very few students put so much effort into my class. And that wife of yours. What a talent. You're a very lucky man.”

He shook Antonio's hand, then left him there, speechless. How wrong he had been to misjudge this man, to have made such an issue out of nothing. Certainly he had looked at Pilar with desire, but what man could have helped doing so? Antonio wished he were a stronger man, more deserving of Pilar. But she was the strong one, he knew, strong for being able to put up with his foolishness. Pilar, the pillar. Pilar, his support.

The dark period between them had gone on long enough. He saw what he had to do, while he had the courage to do it: shake off his jealousy and pride, and cast them away and never let them near him again. He would find a way to make things up to her.

So that night, awkwardly, wordlessly, he held out his hand to her in the manner of a gallant requesting a dance. She was scrubbing the bathroom tub at the time, yellow rubber gloves rising above her elbows.

“Please don't fool with me, Antonio.”

“I want to take you out tonight.”

“I have work to do.”

“I'll do it for you later.”

“And leave me with more work than if I'd done it myself? Dinner is almost ready. Go and change out of those overalls.”

“Save it for tomorrow.”

“It won't be as good tomorrow.”

He kept his hand out. She kept scrubbing. Finally, she tossed the sponge down, peeled off the gloves. “There's that movie at the Bal. I guess we could go to that together. After we eat.”

It was an opening of a new movie with Olivia Rodríguez that had been playing in Mexico for several months, one that the papers were calling her comeback film after a two-year battle with alcohol. As they waited in line, a woman stopped to ask them something in English. Antonio wasn't sure if she was asking directions or what time the movie started, but Pilar answered her right away, in English. The woman asked something else, and again Pilar answered without hesitating. Soon they were deep in the thread of a conversation of which Antonio understood little.

There should have been nothing surprising about this. Pilar had always been fast to understand and had been practicing English daily with one of the neighbors. Only now did Antonio start to see what his wife's talent might mean for him.

Throughout the movie he could not stop thinking about it. He had always thought of the business as his. He had never thought of including Pilar in it, in part because she had never shown an interest, but really because, well, he had never thought of it. But now he saw that she was the one with the talent to help him make it take off. She was the one who could get him the Englishspeaking clients.

He didn't bring it up right away. He could only imagine Pilar's reaction. Is that what you were buttering me up for, Antonio? Yet another favor, another sacrifice of my time, to be your secretary?

He said nothing about it on the way home, nothing that night. Not until the next morning, after hours in bed crafting his words to sound as unconcerned as possible did he work his way around to the subject.

“Do you have a lot planned today?” he said.

“Housework. Errands. The usual. Why?”

“I was thinking, I'd like to bring you to see the yard sometime. It looks different since the last time you were there.”

“Maybe some weekend,” she said. “I have a lot to do.”

“It must get tiring for you, the same thing every day.”

She shrugged. “What's one to do? I can't complain.”

“You could always come work for me.” He laughed to make it sound like a joke.

“I can see it: me breaking my back at the scrap piles.”

“I meant in the office. The phone, paperwork.”

She started folding towels on the bed.

“I just thought it would be better than sitting around here all day.”

“Is that what you think I do? Sit around the house all day?”

“No, no, no, that's not what I meant. Never mind, I don't know where that idea came from.”

Pilar stacked the towels and carried them out to the bathroom. A couple minutes later she came back. “Who would take care of the housework?”

“We both could, on the weekends.”

“And if you're working on the weekend?”

“Then it will have to go undone.”

“And the neighbor's kids?”

“You've been doing that long enough.”

She left the room again. The house was quiet. When Antonio had finished dressing, he came into the kitchen. Pilar was packing two lunch bags. “Let's get going,” she said.

“Are you sure?”

She shrugged. “Anything to get out of scrubbing the floors for a day.”

At the yard he showed her into the trailer office at the back. With arms folded she looked over the wood plank desk, the rusted file cabinets. She picked through a tangle of receipts on the desk.

“All you'd have to do is answer the phones and do the scheduling,” he said.

She ran her finger along the aluminum window sill. Finally she sat down and spread her hands flat on the desktop. “Well, what are we going to call it?” she said.

He stared at her.

“The business. It has to have a name, doesn't it? Otherwise what am I going to say when I answer the phone? ‘Hi, this is Pilar, what the hell do you want?'”

He left her emptying the filing cabinets. “This is no way to organize anything,” she said. “Give me an hour and I'll have a system set up for you.”

Two hours later, she was on the phone with the yellow pages spread open in front of her. She held out two slips of paper to him. “Two new accounts,” she said. “I've been on the phone all day calling all the machine shops. Ace through Zúñiga. I'm almost done. Tomorrow I'll start on welding and steel forming. Then I thought we could do our first mailing at the end of the month as a reminder.”

“
Oye, hombre,
” Miguel said, after Antonio had introduced him to Pilar. “I had no idea you had such a good-looking wife. I can't believe how she's pulling things together around here. Forget what I said about cheating on her. This one is too good to risk.”

That night Antonio awoke at two to find Pilar gone from bed. He found her sitting on the living room floor with green-and-white receipt pages spread out all around her.

“I couldn't sleep,” she said, pushing up her reading glasses. “There's a fifty-dollar error on the books and it's been driving me crazy. I have to find it.”

“Please, come to bed,” he said. “You're working too hard.”

“You want this business to be a success, don't you?”

“I don't want you to start hating it.”

“Please, Antonio. This is the first interesting thing I've had to do in years. Can't you see how much I'm enjoying it?” She took off her glasses, entwined an arm around his leg and kissed his kneecap.