Drowning Tucson (29 page)

Less than two years into her marriage, Rebecca took up crying as a hobby. Ever since her husband, Rogelio Nuñez, had withdrawn her from Pima County Community College, Rebecca often found herself weeping at her kitchen window, her forehead resting against the glass. She wanted to write a series of essays on crying. How sometimes scrunching your eyes really tight while the tears poured down your face would keep your eyes from getting red. That was the trick for not getting caught. So people wouldn’t stop and ask you what’s wrong all the time. But there was also something nice about crying. A deep pleasure in being able to release the emotions inside her in a tangible form, the salty liquid drops she could wipe onto her sleeve, leaving a darkness that would lighten after a few minutes. The taste was the dry salty feeling of hopeless disappointment, like the time Rogelio came home to find her studying at the dining room table. He ripped her books from her hands and threw them on the floor, saying you think you can just go around
behind my back reading when there’s things that need to be done around here? But she did not cry then. She couldn’t give him that luxury. Instead, she got up and took the meatloaf from the oven and set it in front of her husband with pursed lips, making sure to hold back her tears and act like it was nothing when it really felt like he’d thrown her to the ground and stomped on her throat, and he screamed MEATLOAF AGAIN? the fuck do you
do
with our money? and they ate their dinner in silence while her husband’s chewing, the squishy chomping and sucking, tested the strength of her resolve, mocking her even when she carried her dirty dish to the sink and thrust her hands beneath the water like she was searching for the washcloth but really she was clasping, smashing her hands and fingers together as hard as she could and wondering if there were a butcher knife beneath the water would she finally use it on her ungrateful and worthless husband, but then her rage and discontent waned and she felt guilty for questioning him, he was doing the best he could, they only pay Mexican mechanics so much, they’re too easy to come by, and she released her hands and found the washcloth, not watching her husband or letting him see her as she scrubbed food from her plate and it fell into the sink and mixed with the white soap bubbles until they turned orange. When he got up and left his dirty plate at the table, ignoring Rebecca, she knew he had gone to the bathroom to wash his face and sit on the toilet until he’d read the newspaper from cover to cover. This she used to love about him—the way he’d sit on the toilet every evening, relating the news stories to her that interested him while she brushed her hair or washed off the day’s mascara. But he hadn’t read to her for a while, and now it just annoyed her, his sitting in there, hiding behind the paper. And she knew there was no use in bringing up any of her worries now, because she had lost her window of opportunity. If he was in a better mood she could try to explain to him that she wasn’t being selfish. She simply didn’t want to be another broke mojado family. Didn’t want to give her neighbors a reason to laugh at them and say to each other, see, they’re all the same, living off our dollar and taking our goddam jobs. And while she waited to hear the toilet flush, Rebecca thought maybe if he would let me work too—a paper route, a cashier at Thrifty’s, anything—that would be enough.
Instead, I’m wearing a hole in our kitchen window where I lean my forehead every afternoon and watch the birds and the rain and the kids and try to name the cactus—ocotillo, saguaro, prickly pear, jumping, barrel, aloe—while I wait on you to come home mad because you hate your job. Have you seen the groove where my forehead rests? Or are you too busy going into the kitchen and searching for the grilled government-cheese sandwiches that we both hate so much? I’d like to buy tamales from the old woman who lives down the road, the one who knocks on our door on Tuesdays and Fridays carrying a steaming pan covered with a handwoven towel, but I have to turn her away like I’m not interested, like she’s a Jehovah’s Witness, when she knows, can see it in my eyes, that I want nothing more than to taste the warm, squishy masa and pork on my tongue. And what do we do when the ice cream man comes down the block and our baby comes running inside and I have to say no, we can’t afford it, when I want to say yes, buy a Bulletpop or some Lemonheads or a Flintstones push-up or one of those ice cream feet on a stick with a gumball for the big toe? Do I close the door so I can’t see him running down the street after the van, hoping for a handout he’ll never get?

But it was hopeless. Rogelio had already gone to bed. She couldn’t talk to him for the rest of the night. The only thing remaining then was for her to lean against her kitchen windowsill in their apartment, her elbows on the ledge and her forehead pressed against the pane of glass, and teach imaginary math lessons to the birds or the cactus or the paloverde trees—wishing they were real children—so they could better themselves, so that not a single one of them would ever have to lean against the windowsill crying, or stand in line at the mission for government cheese and peanut butter and powdered milk, wondering what could have been in their lives, because tomorrow Rebecca would be here again, resting her forehead against the window, crying and wishing.

But what she could not understand, what had eluded her since the first date she had ever gone on with Rogelio, was how he could slap her sometimes and other times weep in front of her. How sometimes he needed her and she meant everything to him. Like the night at Mama Inez’s Cocinera when he had cried while telling her how he’d witnessed
the beating of his brother behind a liquor store in his old neighborhood and how his mother, hearing of her son’s death, never left her rocking chair again, not even to eat or sleep or bathe, and he and his two remaining brothers brought her badly cooked food and blankets and washed her off with sponges, turning their heads out of respect, and clothed her in freshly cleaned robes of mourning. Sometimes when it rained, Rebecca gazed out her kitchen window and wondered where did the man go who used to write me poems, even though they were often stolen or, at best, badly written? Do you remember going to the Tanque Verde Swap Meet, even though we knew we couldn’t buy anything, and looking at all the booths and pointing and laughing, wondering who would buy Chinese stars or get a tattoo in front of all those people? Or the time we went out to Gate’s Pass up in the Tucson Mountains and were amazed at how far we could see, and you held me tight because I didn’t want to go up there where the cops found dead bodies all the time tossed over the side of the cliff like dirty diapers or empty coffee cups. Rogelio could change so quickly it wouldn’t have even surprised Rebecca if he came to her one night to make love and, in the middle of that beautiful act, pointed out each flaw in her body and personality, yelling YOU DISGUSTING WOMAN, LOOK AT THIS FAT BOILING OUT FROM YOUR STOMACH AND YOUR TITS SAGGING LIKE A PAIR OF LEAKY BALLOONS AND YOU’RE ONLY TWENTY-TWO while he still made love to her, his face buried in her neck, his hands pulling her hair so hard that she wondered if her scalp would tear. Rebecca wished she could return to the moment when he’d asked her to marry him, right after he’d praised her attempts at getting an education and promised her with every part of his body that
he
was the one who would be blessed if she accepted his offer. If she could only go back, she would turn him down. She would tell him please leave me alone to go about my business. She would give him back the ring he’d saved an entire year to buy, fling it at his feet in a dramatic fashion, like something they did in the movies, so it would be all symbolic.

She longed for the times when Rogelio came home after work with a smile on his face and scooped her into his arms, twirling her around, and thanked her for being his wife. How he used to sing her to sleep
with boleros and tell her of his plan to save up enough money for them to drive down to Zacatecas on their anniversary and make love under the magical Mexican stars. Even though they’d always been poor, there had been a time when he would do side jobs at restaurants in exchange for free meals for the two of them. He even helped with some minor plumbing at Breakers, the new water park, and got free passes, and they pumped five dollars of gas into their car and drove to the water park one Saturday and slid down the slides together and flirted in the wave pool like a couple of teenagers and made plans to bring their child when he was big enough so they could teach him how to swim.

But that was the past. Pregnant with their first child, she spent every afternoon, while a pot of pinto beans boiled on the stove, sewing little unisex baby outfits and poring over magazines and ripping out decorations they could never afford for a nursery they had no extra room for. She thought maybe she could make more baby outfits from her old dresses and clothes she picked up from the free store and sell them at a consignment shop. After she cleaned the house and hung the laundry on the line to dry, she spent her afternoons sewing bloomers and jumpers and onesies and capri pants and sailor outfits and Easter dresses and first communion dresses. She even found a little shop called Guadalupe’s Second-Go-Round that agreed to place a few of her items on the shelf for two weeks, and for the first time in years she was excited to wake up each day because there was always the chance that when she called Lupe at the shop she would give her news of her items flying off the shelf. It made Rebecca happy to think that a child somewhere would be wearing an outfit with a tag in the collar that said Lovingly crafted by: Rebecca Nuñez. Her name handstitched in cursive with her finest pink silk thread. Would they wonder who she was? Would they ask their mothers when they were old enough to read, who is Rebecca Nuñez? is she my aunt, or my grandma? and their mothers would say oh she’s a lady who got her start making baby outfits down the road, but we never imagined she’d get so famous that now she has a factory down in Agua Prieta, where the best seamstresses sew each item by hand, under Rebecca’s watchful eye, before shipping them around the globe.

But weeks later, after Lupe told her quit calling, I’ll call you, she still had not sold a single article of clothing. And even after she convinced Lupe to reduce the price by half and keep the items in the shop another week, she still had not managed to sell any clothes. More than anything she wanted to tell her husband about her disappointment, share with him the sting she felt each time she hung up the phone with Lupe’s words repeating over and over, no we have not sold anything yet,
we’ll call you.
She wished she were wrong, but experience told her otherwise. If she told Rogelio how she had failed at her small-time business, he would only tell her she should have been spending that time cleaning or shopping or learning to cook better food or getting the apartment ready for the baby.

He’d say what makes you think you can do better than me? I’ve worked my hands down to nubs, slaved away for Ruth down at the shop, and how far has it gotten me? And I’m a
man.
And what could she say to that? She couldn’t sneak behind his back and make things better. She’d already tried, and Lupe wanted no part of it. He was right. She had failed. So she had given up on that endeavor and returned to tearing photos and advertisements out of
Good Housekeeping
and
Parenting
and
Better Homes & Gardens
and wishing some fortune would befall her. But she refused to fail as a parent. Sometimes she was so desperate about succeeding she wanted to grab her husband by the collar and scream DO YOU WANT OUR CHILD TO GO TO SCHOOL AND STAND IN THE FREE LUNCH LINE THAT TELLS OTHER KIDS, LOOK AT ME, I’M POOR AND MY PARENTS ARE WORTHLESS AND I HAVE TO WEAR THE SAME SHOES EVERY DAY AND PROBABLY THE SAME DIRTY UNDERWEAR BECAUSE MY DAD CAN’T PAY THE BILLS AND MY MOM DOES NOTHING BUT CRY AT THE WINDOWSILL EACH AFTERNOON WHILE I’M AT SCHOOL AND DAD’S AT WORK? Rogelio, will we have succeeded as parents then?

Should I tell our baby, let’s call him Junior—cause if he’s a boy, don’t we have to name him after you?—that he will spend the majority of his years fighting and playing tough because that’s what all the boys do, the ones I sometimes see walking home from school. They find the smallest one and push him and steal his lunch and call him a pussy and his father a cocksucker and his mother a puta until he runs home crying to her.

Sometimes she considered playing the lottery, which kept her mind occupied for a while when she drove to the grocery store or to visit her old friends from high school. She found herself stopping behind cars and gazing at their license plates and adding the numbers together and dividing them by the number of digits on the plate or trying to break them down into prime numbers or multiples of three or five with the intention of playing them in the state lottery. She tried to store these numbers away in her mind, but they melted together in the heat of the desert, and she inevitably forgot them and realized it was fruitless to play anyway because the only ones who ever win the lottery are the old retirees who were already rich or else they wouldn’t be able to afford living in Green Valley or the foothills. Yes, they win the lottery and forget to cash in the ticket because they’re too busy celebrating their good fortune at the clubhouse of their golf resort or in the smoky dim rooms of the Elk’s Lodge over sushi or filet mignon. Or maybe they would lose the slip of paper beneath all the stock certificates wedged under a Jamaica magnet on their refrigerator. Every so often some young person might win too. Someone who could actually use the money. Of course even they didn’t appreciate it. Didn’t need it the same way she did, to pay bills and send her kids to the U of A. They’d get to use the money to party and get girls or travel the world. But she’d never win. Not Rebecca Nuñez, who was a month away from bearing her first child, feeling like Mary of the Immaculate Conception because she sometimes forgot she even had a husband, pushed him out of her mind. Though sometimes she wished he’d massage her head and brush her hair and listen to her. Rogelio, she’d whisper, I’m drowning, like I’m trapped in a fishbowl with no food and I’m a goldfish and there’s a piranha chasing me, laughing and biting, and I can’t get away from it cause my fins are torn and my tail won’t move and my gills are cemented shut with tears and I suffocate with the effort and I’m helpless and for what?