The Book of Unknown Americans(25)

Alma


Arturo came home from work each day tired and hungry, the crevices of his skin caked with dirt. He went straight to the shower and stood under the spray of the warm water until I knocked on the door and told him that dinner was ready. When we started seeing each other, one of the traits that had attracted me to Arturo was how serious he could be, the way that he furrowed his eyebrows when I used to watch him on a job, the intensity of focus and the pride he took in doing the job well. I was stubborn, but I had never been as solemn as him, and I admired the strength that his solemnity seemed to represent. Of course, in time I learned his soft spots, like bruises on a piece of fruit. He was compassionate and kind, and hearing of others’ hardships affected him so much that usually he couldn’t stop himself from doing something to help. Once, when a young girl in our town lost her sight after a propane tank exploded in her face, Arturo built a birdhouse and put it on a stake in the girl’s backyard so that when she opened her bedroom window, she would hear the songs of warblers and mockingbirds. But he could also be uncompromising and hard on himself. And since the accident, those traits that I loved had given way to something darker—seriousness had become gravity, sensitivity had transformed into melancholy. I didn’t always see it. Arturo fought to preserve his better nature. But occasionally his despair came through.

I found him one Sunday morning in the kitchen on his hands and knees, his head inside a cabinet. I had just gotten dressed, and I went up behind him and kicked him lightly. “Hey!” he shouted, curling his head out.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

“I’m looking for a bowl.”

“Why?”

“Maribel wanted pineapple.”

“I would have gotten it for her.”

“I thought we had a glass bowl,” he said.

“We didn’t bring it with us.”

“Why not?”

“We have a metal bowl.” I started toward the cabinet where I’d stored it.

“I don’t want a metal bowl,” he said.

“It’s a perfectly good bowl.”

“When I eat something out of a metal bowl, it tastes different afterwards.”

“What are you talking about?”

“It tastes like I mixed in a handful of coins.”

I smiled.

“You know what I’m saying, don’t you?”

“Yes, I know what you’re saying.”

“I wish we had brought that glass bowl,” he said.

I looked at him and understood that we weren’t just talking about bowls anymore. I smoothed my hand over his thick hair, cupping the back of his neck. Arturo wrapped his arms around my legs like a child.

“We’ll see it again,” I said.

And I imagined it, that glass bowl with the flat bottom and the broad rim, nestled in the lower kitchen cabinet whose door creaked when it opened, nestled among the pots and pans, in the room nestled among other rooms—the bathroom where Maribel had hung a calendar to mark when to expect her next period, the bedroom where the nightgowns and socks and collared shirts that we had left behind were piled on top of the quilt my mother had sewn and given to us as a wedding gift, the sala with the bone-inlaid picture frames housing black-and-white photographs of our grandparents, who had passed, and of our great-grandparents, whom we had never known—all of which were nestled between the backyard with our old rope hammock and the stone half wall that was crumbling at one corner and the front yard, which was hardly a yard at all, just pebbles and aloe plants and a space where Arturo parked the pickup truck that he and I used to sit in together while we looked up at the stars. And all of that nestled in the town where the three of us had been born and had grown up, the town where my parents still lived and where Arturo’s parents had died, the town where we’d shared meals and drinks and late nights filled with laughter with our lifelong friends. All of it waiting so patiently. All of it so far away.


FOR A WHILE I made the meals we used to eat in Pátzcuaro—sopa tarasca and huachinango and corundas con churipo—but eating foods from home in a place that wasn’t our home only made things worse. Besides, the imported chiles and guajillo were expensive, and already we were living on so little. We had some money saved, but Arturo and I had both agreed not to touch it unless there was an emergency, which meant unless we had to take Maribel to a doctor or rush her to the hospital. For now we were getting by on Arturo’s paycheck week to week, which was just enough to cover rent and bus fare and food.

Eventually I stopped shopping at Gigante because it drove me crazy to see all the things we couldn’t afford to buy. All those crates of nopalitos and epazote and tender corn, all those shelves of pickled red onions and tequesquite and coriander taunting me. I started buying food at the Dollar Tree instead. Food in cans, food in boxes. Add water and heat.

One morning, I saw a Mexican woman there taking three drumlike containers off a shelf.

“What is that?” I asked her, pointing.

“Avena,” she said. “Oatmeal.”

“Like atole?”

My mother used to make me atole de grano when I was a girl, the dense corn kernels buried in the anicillo broth. But I hadn’t eaten it in a long time. The idea that this might be something similar piqued my interest.

“This is the American version,” the woman said. “It’s not the same. But it’s cheap. One can will feed you for a week. And it’s hot. Good for the winter.”