The Book of Unknown Americans(26)

“Thank you,” I told her, and started loading containers of oatmeal into my basket until I cleared the shelf of it.

I made it that afternoon. The instructions on the back were in English, but there were drawings, too—a faucet pouring water into a measuring cup, a hand holding a spoon and stirring—and there were numbers that I could read. I followed it all, heated it on the stove, and before I knew it, I had made a pot of pale gray mush. I dipped a finger in. It tasted like paper. Maybe the slightest hint of nuttiness somewhere at the edges. The woman had been right. It wasn’t good. Not at all like the atole I remembered. But I had barely made a dent in the oats and I had cooked a whole pot of them. It was enough to feed all three of us. Maybe, I thought, I could sprinkle some cocoa powder on it, or stir in some honey, just to liven the flavor.

Maribel and Arturo looked skeptical when I set out the bowls that night.

“What is it?” Maribel asked, poking at it with her spoon.

I had made it too early. I didn’t know that the longer it sat, the more it hardened. By the time I put it out for dinner that night, it was like rubber.

“Oatmeal,” I said, pronouncing the word in English. “The Americans love it.” I pointed to one of the cardboard cans on the counter. “You see that man? He makes it on his farm.”

Maribel touched the surface with her finger. “It feels … weird.”

“You’re not supposed to use your fingers to eat it. Use your spoon and put some in your mouth. Come on. Which one of you is going to try it first? Arturo?”

But I could tell Arturo had his own reservations. He just stared at the bowl with his spoon poised in his hand.

“Maribel?” I asked.

“What’s it called again?” Arturo said.

“Oatmeal.”

Arturo tried to stifle a laugh in his nose that escaped anyway.

The sound of it—the tinkle of joy in the midst of our bleak American winter—was startling. “What are you laughing at?” I asked.

“Say it again,” Arturo said.

“What? ‘Oatmeal’?”

His face cracked into a smile beneath his mustache. I loved seeing that smile. So rare these days. I would have said the word for the next hundred years if it made him smile like that.

“Oatmeal,” I repeated.

Arturo started laughing. “Oatmeal!” he said, and I laughed, too.

In English, it sounded funny to us, as mushy and formless as the cereal itself. And then, the sound of angels: Maribel laughed, too. Light and crystalline. Thin glass bubbles of laughter.

Arturo looked at me in astonishment. She was laughing. Laughing! She had smiled once in Pátzcuaro when the three of us were eating ice cream in the square and Arturo’s had fallen and splattered on the sidewalk, and she had cried at no longer being able to do simple things like hold a fork or write her name or wash her own hair, although of course in time she had relearned all of that. But laughter? It was the first time in over a year that we had heard it. Just like her old laugh. Just like our old Maribel.

“Oatmeal!” I bellowed.

“Oatmeal,” Arturo said with tears in his eyes. He jammed his spoon into the bowl and dug out a mouthful. “Delicious!” he declared, rubbing his belly after he had swallowed, making a show of it, and the three of us broke out in helpless, gorgeous laughter once again.


I LAY IN BED most nights, long after Arturo and Maribel had fallen asleep, and stared at the ceiling. Sleep was like wealth, elusive and for other people. I lay rigid on the mattress, remembering what it used to be like, before all of this. Maribel running at the hammock, flipping it over her head, laughing wildly. Maribel darting across the street ahead of us, looking back and tapping her toes in mock impatience. Maribel swimming in the lake with her friends, coming home with her hair dripping wet, her clothes clinging to her thin frame. Arturo and I looked at her sometimes in awe. It had been difficult for us to conceive a child. We had tried for nearly three years, visiting doctors and curanderas. My mother had said prayers and begged for an audience with the priest. Every month, we waited to see if perhaps it had happened at last. Every month, suffering the disappointment that it hadn’t. And then, after we had said enough with the doctors and with the discussion, just as we started to believe that having a child simply wasn’t going to be part of our lives, that being parents was a distinction we weren’t meant to have, when we had hardened ourselves to the pain of seeing everyone around us carrying and feeding their babies, those downy heads and wet lips, I missed my period. We had a hiccup of hope. Could it be? we thought. Nine months later we were holding her in our arms. Tiny starfish hands, ribs pushing up against her skin like piano keys. She wriggled and croaked. Our Maribel. “You won’t ever have another one,” the doctor told us. But that didn’t matter. We had her.

Maribel was fourteen when the accident happened. Arturo was leading the construction of an outbuilding for a rancher who had bought more livestock than he had room to house, and Maribel had circled around me that morning like a gnat, begging me to let her go to the job site with her father. Ever since she was young she had clung to Arturo, interested in everything he did, every move he made. That day I told her, “I don’t know. Your father’s going to be busy.” She said, “But I won’t get in his way!” And I had glanced at Arturo, who was across the room pulling his boots on, asking him with my eyes what he wanted me to tell her.