The Book of Unknown Americans(51)

I made rice and beans and rice and beans and more rice and beans, but since we couldn’t afford chiles or ham or anything to spice it up, we soon grew tired of rice and beans. “Oatmeal,” I suggested. “We still have oatmeal left.” But neither Arturo nor Maribel wanted that either.

We walked around the apartment in the shadows, turning on the lights only after the sun had gone down. We kept the heat off at night. We showered every other day to save on water. I still washed our clothes at the Laundromat, but I carried them home sopping wet and laid them all over the kitchen counters and the floor to let them dry. I would have draped them over the balcony railing except that I was afraid they would freeze stiff. Instead of sitting at the kitchen table at night, drinking tea, now I simply boiled water for Arturo and myself instead, but the water was a poor substitute and trying to pretend otherwise only made me more depressed.

I tried to be at the apartment during the day in case Arturo stopped back at home, either to eat or to drop off applications. I made him food and gave him pep talks, and then he was off again, ready to try somewhere new. I went only as far as the Dollar Tree or the Laundromat, both of which were close enough that I didn’t have to be gone for long. The Community House was too out of the way and even though I had gone back to the English class there only a few times, now I stopped going altogether. I still wanted to learn English, though, so I asked Celia if she would come over to teach me a few things. She brought a workbook that she and Rafael had used when they first came to the United States. It had illustrations to show basic vocabulary—words for colors, foods, parts of the body, animals—like a child’s book of first words.

“Rafa and I both learned English in school in Panamá,” Celia said. “But when we got here, we had to refresh our memory.”

We sat at the kitchen table while she said, “Miércoles. Wednesday.”

I repeated the words.

“Jueves. Thursday,” she said.

I said, “Tursday.”

“Not ‘Tursday,’ ” she said. “Thursday. Push your tongue out against the back of your teeth.”

“Where is my tongue now?” I asked.

“At the top of your mouth, I think. Push it out.”

But I didn’t know what she meant and each time I repeated it—“Tursday”—Celia corrected me.

“Thursday.”

“Tursday.”

“Thursday.”

“Tursday.”

“No, Thursday. Th th th.”

“Thursday,” I said.

“You got it!” Celia cheered.

When I didn’t have a lesson with Celia, I made it a point to at least sit in front of the television with the dictionary Profesora Shields had given me and look up as many words as I could while they flashed across the closed captioning on the screen.

I learned the phrase “Are you hiring?” and taught Arturo the words. I thought maybe if he approached potential employers in English, he would have a better chance. But after trying it at various places, he said, “I feel silly. I say it and then they answer me in English and there’s nowhere to go from there. They look at me like I’m stupid.”

“You’re not stupid,” I told him.

“To them I am,” he said.

And yet, despite the stress of the hunt and the anxiety over what it would yield, since that night in the kitchen, I felt closer to Arturo again, if only by inches, and I could tell that he felt closer to me, too. He took my hand sometimes under the blankets while we lay next to each other in bed, and once, while I stood in front of the sink washing the dinner dishes, watching bits of food float in the soapy water, he came up behind me and threaded his arms under mine, cupping my shoulders and resting his chin on the back of my neck, as if he simply wanted to be near me.

Our wedding anniversary was on February 19, and though usually in Pátzcuaro we went out to dinner, we didn’t have the money for that here. But Arturo wanted to honor the tradition, so we made a plan to go out for drinks instead. Waters, we decided, since even sodas were beyond our means by then.

We went to the pizza restaurant down the street because Arturo had submitted an application there and I knew he was hoping that if he showed his face again, maybe someone would recognize him and maybe somehow he would walk away with a job. We were down to one week, a mere seven days, before we would lapse out of status.

The restaurant was in the corner of a strip center, a striped vinyl banner above the door heralding its presence and its name. Luigi’s. Inside it was filled with square tables and metal-framed chairs, and the aroma in the air was sweet and sharp—tomatoes and cheese.

We had told Maribel on our way there that we were only ordering water.

“Can we order horchata?” she asked as soon as we sat down.

“They don’t have horchata here,” I said.

“Is this a restaurant?” she asked.

“Yes. But they don’t have horchata.”

“Do they have pescado blanco?” she asked.

“We’re not ordering anything,” I said.

“Why not?”

“We’re here to celebrate.”

“With water,” Arturo added.

We ordered three waters without ice and when they came we sat together, sipping out of pebbled red plastic glasses, celebrating in silence, while around us American couples and families ate slices of pizza and drank bottles of beer. I had the feeling that they disapproved of us being there, drinking only water, taking up space. But when I glanced at the people around us, no one was even looking in our direction, and I felt the way I often felt in this country—simultaneously conspicuous and invisible, like an oddity whom everyone noticed but chose to ignore.