Come Together, Fall Apart Read online

  “I’m sorry, Marisol,” he says, but he’s not really and both of us know it. “It’s a bad time,” he tells me. When I don’t respond, he adds, “I had to let Yanina go, too.”

  I nod.

  “Buena suerte,” he says finally, and that’s it.

  12.

  Beto’s trying to tell me it’s no big deal.

  “You’ll get something else,” he says. He’s stoned and glassy, like a gigantic talking marble, and he warbles on and on about how I was better than that job and about how Senor Contreras is a fucking payaso and whatever. He has a joint rolled for me already and he pinches the tip again before lighting it and handing it to me. I take it between my fingers and put it to my lips and inhale, holding the smoke in my lungs while he blathers on.

  Finally I let the smoke go and feel a rush of warmth to my head. I tell him I don’t want to discuss it anymore.

  A bowl of stale gumdrops sits on the coffee table and from where he lies on the couch, Beto drops his hand in like a crane and starts rifling through them.

  We smoke a little more and after a while, I say, “Did I tell you I saw my papi the other night?”

  “You shouldn’t call him that,” he cautions. “You should call him by his first name, you know.”

  “He asked me for money.”

  “Jesus. And did you tell him to fuck off?”

  I don’t say anything at first. I look around the room at the plastic furniture and the white bars outside the windows and the gold refrigerator humming in the kitchen. Beto’s got a few plants on the sill but one of them is dying. He gets really pissed about it, too.

  “How’s your baby plant?” I ask. Beto pulls his hand out of the gumdrops and shakes the sugar from his fingertips. I watch the granules shower to the floor.

  “Whatever,” he says, and leans his head back against the couch, the plastic squeaking underneath him.

  13.

  When I get home, my mama is watching Sábado Gigante in her nightgown. The television is doing a light show on her face. As soon as she sees me she gets up and puts her hands on my shoulders.

  “What happened to you?” she asks. Her mascara is oily under her eyes and her hair is flat against the back of her head where she’s been resting it.

  “How do you know?” I say, although she always knows. She has crazy intuitions.

  She looks at me sadly. “Mari,” she says.

  “Señor Contreras said he was sorry, though,” I tell her. “I’ll find a new job soon.”

  She shakes her head. “There’s something else, hija.” I wonder for a second if she can tell I’m high and I concentrate to make sure it seems like I’m on earth while I’m talking to her but then she drops her hands to my stomach and holds them there. “It’s in here,” she whispers.

  She looks at me and shakes her head and sighs.

  14.

  There’s no way I’m going to tell Beto. I’m going to lose it as easily as it came. My mama thinks I’m wrong on both counts. She stopped talking to me as soon as I said it. I would come to the kitchen table in the morning to have some bread and some piña, and I tried: How did you sleep last night, Mama? What are you doing today? Do you want me to get you anything at the store? But she moved around, clearing the dishes from the table, rolling the top of the brown paper bag closed so that the bread would stay fresh, acting as though I didn’t exist.

  I broke a plate once. I had just pulled it from the cabinet and I saw her there, reading her astrology booklet at the table. I let the plate go and watched it shatter, a flower blooming in fast-forward, until all the pieces settled on the floor around my feet. My mama didn’t flinch.

  “Mamá!” I screamed. “You don’t even like Beto! What kind of father do you think he would be?”

  Beto didn’t want children, but still I thought he would be a good father. That wasn’t the point, though. I just wanted her to talk to me, to argue with me, something.

  She started rubbing small circles into her temples. She closed her eyes. I pulled four more dishes from the cabinet, all at once, and let them drop. One shard caught the side of my foot and sent a hairline of blood trickling down. She didn’t look up until I grabbed a blue teacup—how could she have known that’s the one I picked?—and was about to smash it, too. She opened her eyes, folded her hands in her lap, and said, “Your father gave me that cup.” I felt my fingers tighten around the porcelain. She looked straight at me without blinking.

  “He wasn’t a good father,” she said. “I always knew he wouldn’t be. But everything he’s given me, I’ve kept.”

  15.

  In the depth of the night the giant rocks along Avenida Balboa seem to stand guard over our city. My mama told me once there used to be a section of land that extended out over the bay where she and Papi would park. It’s hard to imagine them like that, based on the people I know now, but when she told me about it I could see her face glowing with the embers of nostalgia and joy.

  I climb over the rails and stand on a rock, the whole city behind me and the ocean and the rest of the world in front of me. I wonder what happened to that piece of land, and I think that even if the water swallowed it, there is still happiness that soaked into its dirt and even if my mama or I can’t stand on it now or touch it, it’s still somewhere. Sometimes I think that’s true: that every emotion gets caught in the fabric of the earth and even if it moves away from you and you can’t find it anymore, it will always exist.

  After another hour or so, I’m finally growing tired. On the way back to my house, I take a turn and walk to the church where I saw my papi nights before, expecting him to be on the bench again, gnawing at his seeds. I creep over the grass, looking for him. I don’t know why. It’s not like I’d have anything to say even if I found him. But he’s nowhere around. And I start wondering if I really saw him at all the last time or whether he was just something I wanted to see. I feel a little crazy thinking things like that but it’s just a night haze.

  And then again, maybe people and things are the same as emotions: Even when you can’t see them or feel them or be with them, and even when they have died and even before they are born, they still exist somewhere. Far away or close, they’re always somewhere. Maybe nothing in the world is ever truly lost, I think. And then I snort a soft laugh. If Beto knew I was thinking stuff like that he’d say, “No, Marisol, some things are lost. Like your brain, you know.”

  16.

  A few weeks later when I go to Beto’s, Yasmine and Josefina are totally nude and I want to knock them out for having such perfect plastic bodies. This is how I feel these days. For a week I haven’t been eating anything except soda crackers because pretty soon, I think, my empty stomach’s going to set it loose, the thing inside me.

  In his apartment, Beto says he might have found me a job.

  “Is it legal?” I ask.

  He looks wounded. I know the look—just a flash across his face. But he would never admit it.

  “Forget it,” he says.

  I know I should apologize and ask him what the job is. My mama and I are going to run out of money in a few more weeks and I don’t want her to have to find work. But I stay quiet. Beto says it seems like I’m in a bad mood. I go over and finger his baby plant, which is drooping over the side of its pot.

  “ Tu eres mi vida, Marisol,” he says, so sweetly. I love when he tells me that, that I’m his life, and I know he’s trying to soften the harshness of a few seconds ago. He’s always the one to come to me first. He wants me to smile but, instead, I start tearing up at the sound of it.

  “Do you want to tell me something?” he asks. He’s wearing a Pepsi T-shirt and cargo shorts and his old brown chancletas on his feet.

  “No.” I walk past him into the bathroom. I sit on the toilet for a while, waiting to see if anything happens but nothing does.

  When I come out I know he thinks I’ve been crying because he’s all, No reason to be depressed and whatever. He pulls a log of bills from his pocket. “This will make you
feel better,” he says, holding it up proudly.

  “You did all that today?”

  “School’s out, remember? No one’s watching around the playgrounds anymore. Plus, I had some suckers today. I jacked up the price a little on them.”

  “What are we going to do with it?” I ask.

  “I think,” he says, grabbing me around the waist, “we should go out and cheer you the fuck up.”

  17.

  At the club, Beto offers to buy me a drink.

  “Yeah,” I say, “the strongest you can think of.”

  “That’s my girl,” he says, grinning. “We’re going to have a good night, Marisol.”

  I watch him fight his way through about eight hundred people before he gets to the bar. He orders and while he’s waiting for our drinks, a long-legged woman wearing tons of jewelry comes and puts her hand on his back. He nods at her and they exchange a few words, but she leaves after a minute.

  “Who was that?” I ask when he returns, handing me a drink.

  “I got you whisky with ice,” he shouts into my ear.

  “Who was that girl?” I shout back.

  He shrugs. “She wanted to know if I had any weed.”

  We go out onto the dance floor for a while and it feels good, moving with him like that, our bodies bouncing off and around each other like electrons in our own charged field. I have on a short skirt, an electric-blue halter top, and sandals that make me taller. Beto rests his hand on the top curve of my ass and he keeps nuzzling his face in my neck. I send him for as many drinks as I can get down, trying to flood myself with poison, trying to drown it. Little by little, my legs start feeling lighter, my whole body lighter. My head is rolling around like it’s loose on my neck and whenever I try to focus my eyes on something, I just see it pulsing and bright in front of me. There’s one point when I slump down on Beto, who is the only reason I don’t fall over altogether, and he props me up and asks if I’m okay. I just give him a drunken smile and he nods like, okay, now we’re having a good time.

  We go on like this until about two in the morning, when I feel a wetness on my thighs. I push off Beto and look down at his khaki pants. There’s a brown-red bloom above the knee.

  “Que pasó?” he yells.

  I turn and run to the bathroom. It seems like hours before I finally get there and push my way into a stall. Ribbons of toilet paper are strewn over the floor and some putrid stench has found its home in there. I lower myself onto the toilet and sit for a long time, long enough until I’m sure it’s washed away, like a whole weeklong period all at once and when it stops I wipe my fingers along the inside of my thigh and hold them up under the fluorescent lights. I don’t know what I think I’ll see. It just looks like blood. That it looks so normal in a small way makes me relieved, but at the same moment something else knocks into my lungs and something balls up like dough in my stomach and I start to feel nausea stalking through my body. I sit still and concentrate on breathing long enough to let it pass.

  After I clean myself up, I find Beto and tell him we have to go.

  “What the fuck’s wrong with you? You see what you did to me? You got your period or something?” He’s pointing to his pants.

  “We have to go,” I say again and turn from him quick, focusing my eyes on the door on the other side of the club to keep myself from crying.

  18.

  In the car, we pay at the tollbooth and roll the windows down. The air smells sweet, like mangoes and garbage. We’re on the highway, going forty or so, and I watch out the window as the trees slip past. We have the road to ourselves and after a while I tell Beto to go faster.

  I can feel him look at me through the dark. “Are you going to tell me what happened back there?”

  “Just go faster,” I say.

  “Would that make you happy?” he asks. He takes one hand off the steering wheel and brushes his fingers against my wrist. “I only want to make you happy”

  “Go as fast as you can,” I say.

  I want it to be like my dream. I want us to just take off from this world, to be careening silently over everything, to be carried by the veins of the wind. The car roars a little and Beto jerks it into fifth gear. My hair whips like a fire around my head and somewhere in all this the trees I’ve been staring at stop looking like trees—it’s just a wash of black-green velvet—and instead I see it all: my papi buying me a popsicle dipped in milk when I am young; my mama, weeping as she hangs the laundry out to dry, using the sheets to dab her eyes; the first time I meet Beto, while I am leaving a shoe store on Avenida Central; the banana leaves brushing the wall behind our house in a storm; my pale blue dress years ago for my quince años; the tiniest round shape of the baby that died in me. But then the same thought comes to me again: maybe nothing is ever really lost. Even if you can’t find it, even if you can’t hold it in your thin, tired arms, it’s always somewhere. The wind rushes against me like the sound of waves and I think, When we stop, I will tell Beto. Until then, we just drive.

  MERCURY

  For the third time since she has been here, Maria presses her ear to her grandparents’ bedroom door, struggling to hear anything she can, something that might signal it’s okay to go in. She flattens her ear so hard against the plywood door that she swears she can hear termites gnawing through the stringy wood, if there is even such a thing as termites here.

  Two days earlier, when Maria landed at Tocumen International Airport, her grandmother, alone, was there to pick her up. Beyond the tinted automatic doors that opened every so often like a gaping mouth to reveal the crowd of people on the other side, craning their necks, anxious to catch a glimpse of those they were waiting for, Maria saw her grandmother watching. She saw her grandmother’s coppery hair, pulled back, a few pieces poking out like wires and, after the customs agents had fished through everything in her suitcase and she went through the automatic doors herself, Maria saw that her grandmother looked older than the last time: her skin paler, her posture poorer, the sacks under her eyes heavier. But mostly Maria noticed that her grandfather wasn’t there. Before she had a chance to ask, Maria’s grandmother said, “Your abuelo isn’t feeling right. He’s at home resting.” But then she laughed and drew Maria to her, brushing her powdered cheek against Maria’s own, making it seem like everything was fine. On the way home in the taxi, her grandmother flitted her hands and spoke in Spanish so fast Maria had trouble keeping up. But she heard her grandmother clearly—because she said it twice—when she warned Maria not to bother her grandfather right away. “He is a proud man,” she explained. “Orgulloso. He doesn’t want you to see him until he’s feeling better. He’ll call you when he’s ready. You understand?” Maria nodded her head, wondering when that would be.

  Is he ready yet? Maria wonders now, her whole self pressed against the door. She wants to hear him breathing or coughing at least, but since she arrived, there’s been no sound. She considers knocking but feels scared, though she’s not sure why, of what might happen if she does. Her grandmother calls her from the kitchen to come for lunch. Maria sighs and pulls away from the door.

  She walks with bare feet down the hallway to the kitchen. The air, like a constant hot breath from someone’s open mouth onto her skin, spreads and folds around her. It carries the smell of garlic from the soup her grandmother is preparing for lunch. When Maria gets to the kitchen, she sits at the table on a chair with a rusted metal frame and a padded plastic seat, the backs of her legs sticking to it. She can feel the thick morning sunlight plodding in through the window and can smell the scent of dirt and the rooster dung coming from the backyard.

  Her grandmother, in a threadbare pink nightgown, stands with her back to Maria, stirring sancocho—the same kind of soup she makes every day. When she serves it, the table is already set with big spoons on napkins and water glasses turned upside down to keep out flies. In the soup she puts half a cob of brown corn, a chunk of ñame, and strands of chicken meat. Sometimes, just for flavor, she drops in a chicken foot, somethi
ng Maria has always regarded with fascination and disgust. Her grandmother presses white rice into a cup and delicately turns it onto a plate, like a sand castle, and serves it alongside.

  “Hola,” Maria says.

  Her grandmother turns. “You’re here!” she exclaims, and claps. Maria notices again how her grandmother’s body bends slightly when she stands. Her grandmother pulls a brown paper bag from the top of the refrigerator. Inside, Maria knows, are the fresh and doughy bread sticks her grandmother buys every morning from a neighbor—Señora Carmen—down the street, who makes them herself When Maria was younger and came here with her parents, they took her along in the mornings. She learned from her mother, who used to do it herself as a girl, to take a clean sock from the clothesline because the bread was always too hot to hold with her bare hands. Once, because he wanted to impress her, Maria’s father tried to hold the bread without the sock. But he started bouncing the roll back and forth between his hands, small squeaks escaping him, and dropped it. Maria’s mother had laughed in front of Señora Carmen, who had looked woefully at the roll on the floor, but Maria thought her mother had also seemed angry.

  Maria eats the bread stick slowly, thinking of her grandfather in his bed. She rehearses in her head what she will say when she finally sees him—Hola, Abuelo. Como te sientes? Me excitan para verte—and quickly recognizes her error, reminding herself to use only the second-person formal when she talks to him, not the second-person familiar. How are you feeling? I’m excited to see you. She checks herself again to make sure the verb tenses are correct.

  “You want oransh joose?” her grandmother asks, holding up a glass pitcher, laughing at her English.