In early November, Caridad and Esperanza’s friend Darlene married her longtime boyfriend Sergio. After the church service, Caridad trailed Esperanza and Reynaldo into the reception hall. They made their way past buffet tables laden with platters of cold cuts and cheeses bedded on lettuce, cut-glass dishes heaped with pickles and olives, baskets of rolls and breadsticks, and trays of fruit and julienned vegetables radiating like spokes from hubs of glistening dip. Recessed in a shrine-like alcove, the cake—a multi-tiered monument under a thick façade of buttercream frosting and corniced with sugary rosettes—glowed under soft lighting. Caridad’s stomach rumbled, and she coughed to disguise this. Esperanza turned to her. “Are you all right?”
“My throat’s a little dry.” But Caridad’s mouth went juicy at the sight of dark green champagne bottles arrayed on shelves near the buffet.
“Let’s find our table,” Esperanza said, “and get something to drink.” She took her sister’s arm as if Caridad were too weak from thirst to walk, but then Esperanza whispered in her ear, “Dah-Dah, I feel dizzy.”
Caridad clasped her sister about the waist, buttressing her back as she guided her through the hall, now echoing with voices and footsteps and chairs scraping the bare floor. She towed Esperanza close behind Reynaldo’s navy blazer as he plowed ahead, parting clusters of guests. Rey then stooped over various tables arranged in the hall, checking place cards for their seats. Esperanza’s satin dress, a burgundy maternity gown, slithered against Caridad’s silky shift with each step. She paused to reinforce her grip when Reynaldo at last beckoned them to a table in back.
Once they were seated, Reynaldo produced a handful of butterscotch disks. He opened one and popped it between Esperanza’s lips. “Gestational diabetes,” he said.
“Diabetes? Like Mama?”
Esperanza shook her head.
“It’s just that the hormone levels interfere with the insulin. Once the kid’s born, she’ll be okay.” His shining moment—at last, some shine!—of husbandly solicitude drawing to a close, Rey scanned the reception hall. “Hey, there’s Memo.” He stood and then leaned to kiss Esperanza. “Keep an eye on her,” he told Caridad before heading away from the table.
“I just need to eat something every few hours,” Esperanza said. “I haven’t had anything since lunch. What time is it now?”
Caridad glanced at her watch. “It’s after four.” Caridad hadn’t eaten anything more than a leathery slice of pizza for breakfast. The pizza had been left over from supper with Leland McWhorter, their last date before his stint as an Americorps VISTA volunteer in the Mississippi Delta. That morning, Leland had slipped away for an early flight so quietly that she had been surprised to awaken to an empty pillow beside hers.
Esperanza fixed her with a sharp look. “Have you seen Jorge lately?” Caridad shook her head.
“Do you think he’s here?” Esperanza surveyed the hall.
“Of course not.”
“Darlene and Sergio came to your wedding.”
“I invited them. Darlene is our friend, not his.” The past few weeks had shown Caridad that when newlyweds separate, husband and wife take with them what they brought into the marriage, from personal belongings to friendships. Her throat had clotted when Jorge crated his terrarium bonsai, but when she considered the absence of Noah and Geraldine from her life these days, it was with relief, not regret.
“Why won’t you two work things out? Marriage isn’t always easy, but it’s worth it.” In the background, Rey’s honking laughter rang out, followed by a feminine titter. Esperanza’s face tightened, but she said, “You have to compromise, make sacrifices even. Sometimes the hard thing is the right thing to do.”
“And sometimes the hard thing is just the hard thing to do.” Caridad was tired of hearing about marriage as work from Esperanza and Mama, as if it were an unpleasant chore, as if all she had to do was roll up her sleeves and go at it the way she’d scrub a floor and wah-la!—as she’d say when playing magician as a child—she would again desire Jorge, whose touch had repelled her in the end, like the unwanted advance of some creepy cousin. Caridad pushed back her chair. “Let’s get something to eat.”
Before she rose from her seat, the bride and groom burst into the hall to an explosion of applause. Someone chinked a spoon against glass, and the guests grew silent. While servers scurried about pouring champagne, the best man muttered a lengthy but inaudible toast to the married couple. A waiter filled all six flutes at the table where only Caridad and her sister sat. When Esperanza pushed hers away, Caridad whisked it to her lips for one sly gulp, reserving her own flute to lift for the toast. As the best man droned on, the champagne’s tingling warmth blunted the sharp edge of her hunger. Even so, after glasses had been raised and Caridad drained a second flute, she and Esperanza bolted for the buffet. There, they filled their plates, constructing towers of crudités, cheeses, fruits, and bread that were barely architecturally sound in their defiance of gravity.
When they returned, an unfamiliar gray-haired man and woman were seated at their table, a pair that Caridad took to be siblings or a couple married so long that man and wife resembled one another. Both were spare and stringy with smallish heads of close-cropped ash-colored hair. She left it to Esperanza to sort out who they were, while Caridad sipped Rey’s champagne. She then cast a covetous glance at the full flute before the vacant seat near hers. Just as her hand traveled toward it, a bright blur scudded in the periphery. The scent of lilacs gusted near, and gloved fingers landed on her outstretched arm.
“Darlene!” Caridad stood to embrace the bride.
“You look beautiful!” Esperanza told Darlene.
But veil askew, flushed in the face, and wearing false eyelashes, Darlene looked blinkered and blundering. After exchanging greetings, the bride reached around to produce a slender dark-haired and moustachioed man who’d been lurking behind her vast tulle skirt. “This is Seth Dunbar,” Darlene told them. “He plays guitar in Sergio’s band.”
“Bass,” Seth said. His thinning black hair gathered into a ponytail, Seth had the expressive eyes of a silent film star. Caridad pictured a legionnaire’s cap obscuring his receding hairline and skimpy ponytail and more dramatically framing those limpid eyes.
“Bass, whatever.” Darlene shrugged. “He’s sitting at your table, so take care of him, hear?” And with another whir of tulle, she disappeared into the sea of suit jackets and pastel dresses in the direction of the buffet.
Leading Seth into the guesthouse that night, Caridad was glad that she’d tidied up for Leland’s visit the previous night. At least the bathroom wasn’t disgusting, and the kitchen, apart from the empty pizza box on the counter, wasn’t too bad either. But she regretted that the front door opened into the bedroom. Caridad had neglected to straighten the tumble bedding that morning. Since Jorge had taken the bed, she now slept on blankets heaped on a foam pad. If she smoothed the layers out and covered it all with her mother’s peach satin comforter, it didn’t look too bad, especially in the gentle glow of her oil lamp. But under the harsh glare of the overhead fixture, the room looked as if it had been ransacked, with clothing and books strewn among blankets.
“Sorry for the mess,” she told Seth. “I was in such a rush that I couldn’t get much done.” In truth, she’d been reading Flaubert’s Madame Bovary while gnawing on the tough wedge of pizza. By noon, she was engrossed in the story—Emma Bovary, after losing Léon, encounters the dashing Rodolfe, who notices poor Emma “gaping after love like a carp on the kitchen table after water.” Caridad then crawled under the comforter to devour several more pages, thinking Jorge should read the novel. Then maybe he would see it was not enough that Emma’s husband, like Anna Karenina’s, was not that bad—what a standard!—and hadn’t Charles Bovary himself sought an ideal in Emma after his plain and shrewish first wife? But an unsophisticated reader like Jorge would surely find Emma Bovary as selfish and unlikable as Anna Karenina.
She’d read on and on, openmouthed and gasping carp-like herself as Emma grew reckless in her passion, risking more and more while Rodolfe withdrew in alarm. When Caridad glanced at her watch, she’d been shocked by how late it was. Still, she took the book into the bath with her, and then she’d scrambled to dress before Esperanza and Reynaldo picked her up for the wedding. Now the novel was lying facedown, pages splayed like wings of a bird shot down midflight, atop the jumbled bedding.
“It’s usually not like this,” she told Seth.
“It’s fine,” Seth said. “You should see my place.”
They stepped into the kitchen, and Caridad flipped on the light. “Where’s that?”
“I’m kind of staying with my folks now. It’s not easy, you know, making it as a musician, so they’re helping me out.”
“Where do your parents live?”
“Brentwood.”
“That’s not too bad.” Caridad imagined Felicia’s voice braying in her ear: Brentwood! Well, la-dee-fucking-dah!
“Well, it’s Brentwood. It’s not a cool or happening place. Mostly old people live there.”
Mostly rich people live there. Caridad collapsed the pizza box to fit it into the garbage.
Seth shrugged. “It’s tough for musicians. You’ve got to make sacrifices.”
Caridad nodded. It was hard for her to get by as a student, especially living alone. She’d never anticipated how difficult it would be to afford rent, utilities, and groceries on her work-study paycheck. Caridad worried that she would have to drop out and find a full-time job. Before the pizza, provided by Leland, she’d eaten saltines swiped from the campus cafeteria for dinner two nights in a row. The phone had been disconnected earlier that week, and she’d unplugged the empty refrigerator to save on electricity.
“Nothing’s easy,” she said. Picturing Brentwood’s rolling lawns that led to columned edifices large enough to house entire neighborhoods in Calcutta or whole villages in the Congo, Caridad jammed the pizza box into the trash and offered Seth a glass of water.
In the morning Caridad woke to the dull clatter of crockery, the jangle of flatware. She turned on her side. The aroma of toasted bread wafted her way, and she sat upright. Leland! But an adenoidal falsetto—ah, ha, ha, ha, stayin’ alive, stayin’ alive—floated into the bedroom. She reached for her robe. Caridad shrugged it on and padded to the kitchen, where she found Seth fully dressed and peering into the oven.
“Good morning,” she said.
“Hey, gorgeous.” Seth slammed the oven shut and grinned at Caridad. His dark eyes were even more beguiling than they had been the day before, but his thick black moustache parted oddly in the middle when he smiled. Combined with his overbite, this made him look like an eager rabbit. He wagged a finger at Caridad. “You realize, young lady, that you have no food whatsoever in this house?”
At least she had her own place. “I’ve been kind of busy and—”
“Nah-uh-uh, no excuses—you have nothing to eat.” Seth smiled, those dazzling eyes shining. “So I went out and picked up a few things for breakfast. I hope you like bagels and orange juice and coffee. I also got the Sunday paper . . .” He nattered on and on as he set out the food and the newspaper on the dinette table.
As they ate, Seth hummed and read aloud passages in the newspaper to her. He called her Mother Hubbard a few times, teasing her about the empty refrigerator. By the time they piled plates in the sink for washing, Caridad’s temples pulsed in a warning way. She thought of Emma Bovary’s unclouded glimpse of Léon, the lover who supplanted her husband: “Each smile,” wrote Flaubert, “hid a yawn of boredom . . . each pleasure its own disgust . . .”
Seth stacked a last dish and turned to her. “So what do we want to do today?”
We? She knew what she wanted to do that day. Finish Madame Bovary, of course. If she were alone, she’d run a hot bath and soak in it while she read. Then she’d wash her hair and dry it in the sun, sipping tea brewed from the bag of chamomile she’d stashed in her purse at the reception. All the while, Caridad would savor the richness, the absolute luxury of solitude. No way to shut out the neighborhood noises—cars whooshing past, children’s voices, barking dogs—but such sounds demanded nothing of her. After turning the last page, she’d flip back to the first page to start the novel over. She glanced toward the bedroom, where she’d left the book on the floor.
Seth traced her gaze and took her hand to lead her to the disheveled bedding. And, okay, the lovemaking was fine. Until their last days together, Caridad had enjoyed sex with Jorge, and she’d liked it more with Leland, who couldn’t call her even if he wanted because her phone was disconnected. She pushed Leland from her thoughts while Seth was kissing her throat and making guttural sounds like an ardent pigeon. Caridad focused on Seth in a determined way. His urgency—like the morning’s patter of compliments—flattered her. Still, Seth was uncomfortably bony, his moustache now redolent of coffee and onion bagels. His ivory-hued skin, though, was smooth to the touch, and Caridad’s mind wandered to advertisement jargon: silken, soft, supple. Then she drew him into her with a low sigh.
They spent the rest of the morning strolling about Caridad’s neighborhood. They walked as far as the park, more than a mile from the guesthouse. The day was dry and windy, and cool gusts whipped Caridad’s hair into her face. Gritty dust devils spun near gutter grates, and banners in used-car lots on Laurel Canyon Boulevard billowed and snapped. Store windows were already festooned with Christmas displays of wrapped gifts on cottony tufts, the glass decorated with chalky images of candy canes, snowy trees, and images of Santa Claus.
“Isn’t it strange how we fetishize snow?” she said. “It never snows here, so these displays invert the experience of snow. We on the outside have to look at representations of snow inside or on windows.” If she’d told Jorge this, he would likely roll his eyes and say, “There she goes again, my Daydream Believer.”
But Seth said, “I never thought about it before. That’s pretty deep.”
She smiled and took his hand. They passed a menswear shop, and Seth stopped to admire a blue dress shirt on a mannequin. Caridad found the print too loud for her taste, but she made a mental note of it, in case she’d ever have occasion to give him a gift.
After the park, no more than a swing set and slide in a wooded copse, they headed back to the guesthouse, and then Seth drove her to shop for more groceries. At the supermarket, Caridad filled a cart with fresh vegetables and fruits, bread, and cheeses. She tipped in rolls of paper towels and toilet paper, shampoo and dishwashing detergent. Not since living with Jorge had she tossed whatever she liked into a shopping basket. Her mind reeled with menu plans and recipes until she felt giddy, so preoccupied that she pretended not to notice when Seth dropped a toothbrush into the cart, along with a stick of deodorant.
When they returned to the guesthouse, Caridad pulled out her cookbooks to concoct vegetarian lasagna. She spent the late afternoon chopping vegetables and measuring ingredients, stirring sauce, and then layering noodles, cheese, and sauce in a casserole. Savoring the garlicky vapors, Caridad hardly registered Seth’s talky presence in the close kitchen. After they ate and he settled in to stay for the night, she meant to mention that he might want to go home. But the hard truth was that as long as Seth stayed, she would have food to eat. The entire day, she hadn’t had to endure the headachy listlessness, her nearly pornographic obsession with food, or that dull sense of panic caused by hunger, so Caridad didn’t suggest that Seth return home that night or the next.
By the time Seth began hauling over trunk-loads of his belongings, including his bass guitar and stereo system from his parents’ house, it was too late to protest without causing a tiresome conflict. Living with Seth meant Caridad wouldn’t have to leave school to work full time or find a roommate to share the one-bedroom guesthouse with her. Why, Seth could be that roommate, and they would help one another: Seth by contributing to rent and household expenses, and Caridad by providing him a place to live apart from his parents. All would be fair and balanced—a mutually beneficial arrangement between adults. She discussed this with him, and Seth praised the sensibility of this plan. When the rent was due, he counted out half the amount in twenty-dollar bills, though Caridad wished he would have written her a check for this, instead of snapping each crisp bill into her palm.
A month after moving in, Seth planned a Saturday outing for them. He wouldn’t tell Caridad where they were going, except to say that they’d be outdoors. They had to stop at his parents’ house first to pick up his acoustic guitar, and Caridad steeled herself to endure a beach or park serenade. The December morning was chilly, so she pulled a hooded gray sweatshirt over a thermal top that she tucked into Levi’s, and Seth dressed in a pair of blue-and-yellow plaid pants with a violet T-shirt bearing an antipollution slogan along with an applique of a craggy-faced Indian in a headdress, a solitary rhinestone-studded teardrop coursing down one weathered cheek.
Lately Caridad had tried to influence Seth’s sense of style. Not out of possessiveness, but just as one roommate advising another. So far, she’d concentrated her efforts on persuading him to shed the ponytail, a look that emphasized his bulging forehead. But he claimed it identified him as a musician, a ponytail-wearing member of rock-band culture. That morning, she’d been so dumbstruck by Seth’s loud pants and corny shirt that she’d blurted, “What the—”
“Eye-catching, isn’t it?” he said. “Wait until you see where we’re going, and you’ll see why I need to stand out.”
During the drive to Brentwood, Seth talked about his parents, weaving together strands of memory, longing, and family legend. While he spoke, Caridad considered Madame Bovary and how that narrative was put together—tragedy and absurdity, the stories within the novel inscribing the lives of Emma’s father, Charles’s mother, the ambitious pharmacist Monsieur Homais, and even the merchant Monsieur Lheureux, who extended credit to Emma, entangling her in debt. Caridad considered what these stories revealed about the characters and even about Flaubert. What did Seth’s family stories say about him? Clearly, he admired his father, but his mother emerged less distinctly as he spoke.
Over the past weeks, Caridad learned that Seth was a twenty-five-year-old UCLA graduate who worked for his father selling wholesale gems to jewelers. At first he had been secretive about this, as if worried that Caridad, who wore no more adornment than a wristwatch, might expect him to lavish her with trinkets. Seth claimed to work well with his father, though sometimes he was disappointed about his commissions. Even so, he seemed to have plenty of money. He’d bragged to her that his new car was paid for outright—a gift from his father.
Before he’d begun selling precious stones, his father, Cyril Dunbar, had been a musician, too, a trumpet player in a jazz band. Cyril—who liked his sons to call him Cy—supported Seth and his older brother in their creative and spiritual pursuits. He’d even traveled to Southeast Asia with them for a Buddhist pilgrimage. They were all chanting Buddhists, the Nam-myoho-renge-kyo kind. The previous day, Seth had talked about assembling a shrine in the guesthouse, but Caridad, a lapsed Catholic, was uneasy about this. Now, speaking of his father and his spiritual support, Seth again mentioned installing a shrine. “It wouldn’t have to be a big deal,” he said. “Just a few brass cups, some incense holders.”
“There’s no room for that.” Wasn’t it enough that she was handing over a Saturday to him? She wasn’t about to relinquish space for him to chant in the house on top of this.
“I’d put it in the towel closet and build shelves for towels in the bathroom.”
“The bathroom’s already too cramped.”
“You’re just being stubborn. It’d be such a small shrine you wouldn’t even notice it.”
“I like the towels where they are.”
“My parents have a shrine,” Seth said. “It doesn’t hurt anything.”
“That’s their house. Not mine.” Caridad gazed out the window at the other cars on the freeway, imagining that the many faces blurring past belonged to people on their way to places they really wanted to go.
When they arrived at Seth’s family home, his mother Nancy, a slender white-haired woman with Seth’s smoldering eyes, greeted them at the door. “So nice to meet you,” Nancy said. “I always enjoy meeting Seth’s girlfriends.” She welcomed Caridad with a cool handshake and apologized for not offering refreshments. “It’s Marta’s day off,” she explained as she led them into the house.
The living room struck Caridad as spacious beyond sense. The hardwood floor covered twice the area of Caridad’s entire guesthouse. The walls were beige hued with a creamy trim at the wainscoting, and the blocky furniture was constructed of dark wood and upholstered with black leather. Despite the vastness of the room, the place felt close and overheated, emanating musty odors that Caridad associated with the elderly: Ben-Gay, mildew, and the acrid scent of dust burning in furnace vents. Seth led Caridad to the shrine at the end of a long hallway. There, Caridad beheld the shelves of brass bowls and handleless cups, the photograph of an emaciated man in a sagging dhoti atop one of these, and incense sticks sprouting like follicles from a bisque vessel.
“Nice,” she said. The setup was not nearly as vibrant as her mother’s altar for Our Lady of Guadalupe, with its turquoise and coral brightness, smoky copal, and votive flames guttering in beveled glass.
Seth turned to his mother. “Caridad doesn’t want a shrine at our place.”
Nancy issued a thin smile. “You should have a shrine if you want one.”
“There’s no space for it,” Caridad said.
A door opened on one side of the hallway, and a red-faced man with crinkly gray hair partially encircling his bald head appeared at the threshold. “Seth,” he said in a coarse, phlegm-thickened voice. “How’s my boy?” He limped forward with a rolling gait.
After embracing his son, Cy glanced at Caridad. “How are you?” He spoke to her in a slow and amplified voice.
“I am fine,” she said, also in a loud voice, in case he didn’t hear well.
“Good, good!” Cy clasped Seth’s elbow and led him into the room from which he’d emerged. “Excuse us, ladies. I want a private word with my son,” he said before shutting the door behind them.
“Seth tells me you like to cook,” Nancy said. “He’s bragged about your lasagna.”
Wary that Nancy would next ask about her aptitude for housecleaning, Caridad shrugged. “I just follow recipes.” She gazed again at the shrine. The fine sifting of dust that coated the brass bowls suggested that Marta shared her indifference for the bland display. Muffled voices were audible from behind the closed door, but Caridad couldn’t make out much until the old man uttered a distinct phrase: jail bait. This was followed by protestation from Seth. Her face hot and salty, Caridad stroked the cushion on a stool near the shrine.
“Of course, it’s a lot of trouble for Seth to set up a shrine if he isn’t going to be staying long,” Nancy said.
Caridad looked into the woman’s large glimmering eyes. “That’s right.”
“It’s a shame Marta isn’t here,” Nancy told her. “You’d like her.”
Seth and his father emerged from the side room, talking about plans for the next week: appointments to schedule and calls to make. Seth took Caridad upstairs to collect the guitar from his room. Before long, they tramped downstairs, ready to leave for their outing. Seth’s mother invited them to return for dinner, saying she was sure she could fix something, though it wouldn’t be much. Before Caridad could come up with an excuse, Seth accepted.
He and Caridad stepped out through the kitchen into the garage instead of using the front door because he needed a guitar case stored there. In the dimly lit space, they first had to squeeze past an enormous boat—a canvas-covered monstrosity that barely fit in the enclosed space—to reach the shelf that held the guitar case. Seth wiped this off and opened it to fit his guitar inside. Then he pushed a button in the wall to raise the garage door, and they stepped out into thin sunlight toward Seth’s car in the driveway.
Once in the car, Seth said, “My parents seem to like you.”
Caridad turned to gape at him.
“They do,” he insisted. “Didn’t they ask us to dinner?”
“What did your father say to you in that room?”
“It was just business stuff.”
“Nothing about me?”
Seth gave a small shrug. “He thinks you look young. That’s all.”
“Right.” Caridad clicked on the car radio.
“How come you get to do that?” Seth’s raised voice startled her. “Why do you get to sit in my car and turn on the radio without asking? What gives you the right when I can’t even have a shrine in the place where I pay rent to live?”
Caridad switched the radio off, and they rode in silence until Seth parked the car in a lot near Barney’s Beanery in West Hollywood. She hoped Seth’s mood would shift with a warm meal. It was past one, and she looked forward to a bowl of chili on a frigid afternoon like this. But when they climbed out of the car, Seth opened the trunk to pull out his guitar case. “I’m going to sing for our soup,” he said with a smile.
She trailed those clownish pants down the boulevard to a breezeway between two office buildings. The offices were closed now on the weekend, but the breezeway was filled with pedestrians on their way to shops and restaurants. When he was satisfied by a spot, Seth settled the guitar case on the pavement, flipped it open, and pulled out his guitar. Sing for our soup? Heat suffused Caridad’s face, and her eyes stung. Shock and shame collided in her with such force that the ocean seemed to roar in her ears. Seth left the case open and placed a few dollars in it. Then he tightened and tested the strings before launching into “Blackbird.”
Passersby hurried along without glancing at him. Caridad pulled her hoodie over her hair and inched toward a bus stop, hoping to be taken for a waiting passenger, connected only by mild curiosity to this street musician. Despite the chill, her cheeks continued burning and her armpits prickled. Caridad’s gaze swept eateries and stores across the street. She examined her bare hands, reddening with the cold, and stared at the cars rushing past. When Seth looked her way, she smiled, but like a house in flames, she was engulfed in mortifying emotion.
He called it busking, but Seth was begging, and she was by his side. Face it—she was with him; together they petitioned strangers for money. She thought of her mother and sisters, envisioning the confusion and disbelief on their faces if they saw her like this. At last, the song ended, and no one had dropped as much as a coin into the case. Please, she silently implored him, please stop. But Seth strummed another chord, and his nasal voice rang out: “Teach . . . your children well. Their father’s hell . . . did slowly go by. And feed . . . them on your dreams . . .”
“All of that sounds seriously fucked up,” Felicia told her the next week at their mother’s house. The three sisters had gathered to celebrate their mother’s December 12 birthday by preparing enchiladas for her and presenting her with small gifts. Caridad had scraped together enough money to buy her a sugar-free cake. And now, after supper, Esperanza was giving their mother her “gift” of dyeing her gray hair black in the bathroom while Felicia and Caridad cleaned up the steamy, cumin-scented kitchen. The two sisters had shared a bottle of wine, which Esperanza and their mother could not drink. After two glasses, Caridad grew flushed and chatty. She told Felicia about Seth’s singing for soup after describing his parents.
“Did you wind up going to eat at his folks’ house that night?” Felicia asked while washing the dishes.
“I said I had a migraine.”
“Who is this dipshit anyway?”
“He’s this guy I met at Darlene’s wedding.”
“And yet you’re living with him?”
“Once Jorge left, I couldn’t afford the rent or pay the bills and—”
Felicia spun to face Caridad, soapy water dripping onto the floor. “Listen to yourself.” She plunged her hands back into the dishwater and scraped at a saucepan. “We don’t do this. We just don’t.”
“Do what?”
“Granted, Jorge is dumber than dirt, plus he’s puro panzón, and what is up with that hillbilly beard? But you don’t swap him out for someone just as shit-silly. If you don’t have money, you do what I did when I wanted to go back to school and couldn’t afford it. I moved back home. Problem solved, and Mama likes having me around to help her out . . .”
Caridad tuned out her sister as she enumerated the benefits of returning home, since Felicia was the main reason moving home would be impossible for her.
“But you let them talk smack on you,” Felicia said now. “I don’t get why you can’t speak up and tell people to fuck off, with their boat and their beggar son—”
The phone rang, and Caridad dashed for the wall-mounted receiver. “Hello?”
“It’s me, Seth. Listen, I’m with my folks, and there’s something I should tell you.”
Felicia shot her a curious look, and Caridad mouthed, It’s him. She gripped the phone, convinced his parents had urged him to move back home. Relief and dread clashed in Caridad at this thought. While Seth the boyfriend was growing unendurable, she depended on Seth the roommate. If he returned home, how would she manage to pay next month’s rent? How would she stay in school? Was he really that unendurable?
“It’s that we’re having steaks,” Seth said.
“O-kay.”
Felicia crowded in to listen. Caridad tipped out the earpiece to let her hear.
“I thought I should be up-front about it since you’re a vegetarian.”
“What you eat doesn’t matter to me.”
Seth’s father’s phlegmy sputter and the low murmur of his mother’s voice sounded in the background. “Hey, there’s something else,” Seth said. “I was telling my folks about your family and how they don’t like me and—”
“It’s not that.” Caridad had insisted on coming by herself to her mother’s, telling Seth it was too soon for her family to meet him. “I just wanted to give them more time.”
“Anyway, my folks came up with a great idea to get them to accept me.” Seth laughed. “I swear it’s foolproof.”
Felicia’s eyes narrowed.
“What you should do, see, is tell them I’m black.”
“What?” The phone nearly slipped from Caridad’s grasp.
“If you tell them I’m black, then when they meet me and see that I’m not black, they’ll be so relieved, they’ll have to like me.”
Felicia snatched the phone from Caridad. “Listen, asshole, what makes you think our family is as racist as you are?” Squawks emanated from the earpiece, but Felicia had pulled the phone away. “I’m her sister, not that it’s any of your goddamn business.” And she banged the receiver on the switch hook, hanging up. “Un-fucking-believable!”
At work on Monday, Caridad still winced when she recalled that phone call, and her face burned when she replayed her return to the guesthouse later that night to assure Seth that of course she had known he was joking. “I’m no racist,” he’d said. “Think about it—if I was a racist, how could I be with you?” She shook off the memory and handed a library card to a faculty member’s son, reciting the rules for using it by rote, but inflecting every other syllable to amuse him and to distract herself.
“The library card comes with certain conditions of use,” she told the teenager, who grinned at her robotic-sounding speech. Something about being behind the front desk, issuing library cards and checking out books, transformed Caridad’s normal reserve into something more outgoing, even performative. It was like being on stage, and the patrons were the audience. The library itself—its vast parquet floors, wooden desks, and modular furniture upholstered in bold primary colors—was like a secular place of worship to her, and Caridad, succumbing to this influence, cast herself in the role of jocular high priestess. Over winter break, most students abandoned the library, but Caridad asked to work as many hours as possible to earn much-needed money and to be free of Seth, at least for part of the day. He tended to make sales calls only while she was at work, and he’d stopped playing music at night, claiming he’d rather spend time with her.
Several minutes passed before the next patron, a boyish man with curly light brown hair, set a stack of well-worn hardcovers on the desk. As she slid book spines along the demagnetizer, Caridad noted the titles: Candide, The Decameron, The Nibelungenlied, Don Quixote, and Sister Carrie. She recognized all of his books but the last one from a course list. Caridad held a book’s pocket card to her forehead like a talk-show fortune-teller. “I predict you will be taking Foreign Literature in Translation with Selcke next semester.”
He nodded. His eyes were paler than his hair, nearly amber hued.
“How did I know?” Caridad glanced at the first name on the library card he’d handed her. Gray. Gray Kessler. Light brown hair, honey-colored eyes, suntanned face—he was really more golden than gray. “Now, how did I know that, Gray?”
“You must be in the class, too,” he said, his voice high and hushed.
“Correct.” Caridad ran the punch cards through the card reader, establishing a quick rhythm. “But this isn’t on the reading list.” She held up the last book, Sister Carrie by Theodore Dreiser.
“It’s for Naturalism, Realism, and Capitalism in American Lit.”
Caridad flipped through its pages. “This is me, you know.”
Gray raised his sparse blond eyebrows. “You?”
“The title, it has my name in it—Carrie. Only my name’s really Caridad.”
“Caridad,” Gray said, pronouncing it as she had.
She pushed the stack of books toward Gray. “They’ll be due back in two weeks, but you can renew them unless there’s a recall. Just renew and renew as often as you need to.” She grimaced at the unintended rhyme.
Gray tapped his card on the counter, and Caridad thought he might ask her out for coffee, but he said, “I bet no one calls you Carrie.”
“How do you know that?”
“Carrie is too easy to say.” Gray swept up the armful of books and turned for the exit. As the turnstile clicked, Caridad noticed he’d left a book behind.
“Wait!” she’d called out to him. “You forgot something!” But he had vanished into the bright portico, and Caridad couldn’t leave the desk to chase after him. She climbed on a nearby stool and pulled the volume into her lap. Now he would have to come back for Sister Carrie. She opened the novel to the first chapter, the brittle pages nearly translucent with age. She lifted it to her face for a sniff: dust and glue, traces of vanilla, and something earthy and sweet—the scent of mown grass? She stroked the print, raised like tight stitches embroidered in linen. “When Caroline Meeber boarded the afternoon train for Chicago . . .”