YOU WOULD NEVER KNOW BY looking at me that I used to be more than double my current weight. The loss isn’t enough to get me featured in a magazine or on a news program, but it was a lot for me, this small frame, pudge pockets I’d been carrying for decades, since I had no father and my mother thought the best compensation was food. I was one of those rotund babies who can barely move, who would topple over when placed atop a bed and need help sitting back up. I blamed my mother for overfeeding me, distorting my body practically from birth, but she was the first one to tell me I was predisposed by God for largeness and that I should not worry because what nature gives, art can fix. I was a teenager before I understood she meant surgery.
In the factory, everyone still calls me la gorda even though I’m now thin, my once-wide thighs narrowed to pegs. My ass went so flat with all the dieting and pills that I had to get it refilled with synthetic injections to recuperate lost volume. My breasts, which became nearly concave, were replaced with manufactured ones imported from France, and when I lie down, they hover above me as if saluting the sun. I haven’t touched my face yet, but it’s in next year’s budget. Everyone thinks I fly home to Colombia for two weeks every year to spend time with my mother, but it’s really for my surgeries. I’m still recovering from my fourth aggressive liposuction, which was more of a sculpting, to carve out my waist, the softness over my pelvis, so I can have a prettier vagina. Every summer, my friends from the factory go to Rockaway Beach but I always claim to be sick or busy. This summer they will see me in a bathing suit I bought on my last trip home. I tried it on the day after the operation over my compression garment, even though I was sore and swollen and blue everywhere that the needle had sucked and dug.
Edgar is the only one who never calls me gorda. He calls me guapa instead, just like he calls all the other ladies sweet names like hermosa, preciosa, linda, or bella. Lorena, who works on the packing line beside me, says guapa is the least desired of all the names Edgar gives to the women of the factory, but I don’t mind. I see how he looks at me when he delivers the pallet of boxes to the end of my line so I can pack them full of tiny ceramic penguins or ballerinas, bottoms proudly stamped with MADE IN USA. I see him look my way as he drives his forklift along the corridor toward the warehouse. At lunch, he always finds me outside by Don Pepe’s food truck and sometimes even pays for my croquetas. He doesn’t know this is the only time I allow myself such decadence. In the mornings, I eat only fruit. In the evenings, only vegetables. On weekends, I eat almost nothing at all. I am so hungry, but it’s the only way I can sustain this new body.
Sometimes he brings me mangoes he buys on the street near his home in Washington Heights. He takes the 172nd street guagua with the other Dominicans in the morning and back in the evening. I ride the guagua from Dover with some Colombians and a few Puerto Ricans. When I’m through paying for my surgeries I will buy a car, and this way I will be able to offer Edgar rides home.
He’s fourteen years younger than I am but he told me once, as we stood in the parking lot smoking a cigarette together, that he likes older women. His first affair was with a young friend of his mother’s who taught him to make love when he was fifteen. This was in Barahona, where his mother still lives in a house he paid for with his money from the factory. The first years in New York, he thought, just like we all do when we arrive, that he would eventually go back once he had something saved, but now he’s been here long enough to know there is no returning—once you cross that ocean and those borders, they cross over you.
I know he’s had relations with other women on our shift. There was Julissa, who works in Quality Control, young like him, and he might have loved her until one day they were no longer speaking and soon she was pregnant with Rolando from Dispatch’s baby. They both work at a cargo company in Newark now, and Edgar moved on to Leidy and Prisca who are both old like me. But those relationships didn’t last either. In those days, they were more attractive than I was, but I have made myself into something far superior now. My neck may still droop, but if I wear my hair down nobody can notice. I’m dotted with holes, I’ve got some indentations, and my breasts are lined with scars, but it’s nothing that would catch your eye in bedroom lighting.
We kissed once. It was fast but forceful, out in the parking lot during one of our breaks, which we always take together. He’d stopped smoking by then, but he would still join me outside, even in winter, and on that afternoon, the bruised and moldy sky ready to break with rain and all the others already back inside, he pushed his lips against mine, our teeth clanked, our tongues slipped into each other’s mouths, and then, like lightning, it was over, and he said something only young men say, something like I wanted this, or I was waiting for this, or maybe it was You wanted this, guapa. To tell you the truth, I can’t remember.
My mother named me Indiana after what she said was the most beautifully named state of North America. This was in Cali where all the girls of my generation were named María or Ximena. My name, my mother said, would be my destiny. She’s still alive, in the house that belonged to her mother and father. When I left I was twenty and my mother took me up to the church of San Antonio on the hill facing the three crosses shining over the valley, protecting the city from the demon Buziraco. She said some people were born to stay and others were born to leave. She was sure a better life waited for me on the other side of the Americas. When I arrived, a friend of a friend met me at the airport and took me to her house in Dover. It wasn’t really her house but one she shared with seventeen other people, mostly Colombians like me, who didn’t yet have social security numbers or enough cash to pay rent anywhere else. We lived five or six to a room, slept on floors or mattresses, if there was one available. I cried through my first winter from the lack of sun, the cloak of snow, and the wet chill that filled the house as we slept. But those people comforted me, fed me, dressed me.
The tears will pass, they said, and soon you won’t even remember how to cry. I don’t know if this was true for them, or words they told themselves to endure the distance building between them and their own countries and families, but I listened. And then it was as they said. In a year, maybe three or five, I stopped crying and decided this was home.
The same woman who brought me to that house brought me to the factory. She said the owner was a good man who hired Colombians without hesitation and who paid fair. They started me cleaning bathrooms. I didn’t mind. I cleaned offices and beauty salons back in Cali, and I knew how to do things fast. Then they moved me to the cafeteria. I was to keep it clean, especially after the lunch rush, when the men left their garbage all over the place. If I were better with computers, which is to say, if I had ever used one in my life, maybe they would have moved me into one of the more administrative positions. But I wasn’t good for that. So they promoted me to packing boxes. I like the rhythm of it, especially when the speakers overhead blast a song I like. Luckily Toño, the plant manager, is in charge of the radio station and likes salsa and merengue just like us. The classics. Grupo Niche and Joe Arroyo. Sometimes it feels like the whole factory is singing along with those songs we grew up dancing to with our cousins and our first loves. I had a first love, though you might never have guessed it since in those days I was at my absolute biggest and hardly left the house because everyone in the barrio called me la cerda. He was a neighbor. A boy who could be with almost any girl he wanted and still, he chose to come over to my house when my mother was out and be with me.
I told him I loved him and asked if he loved me, and he said yes, of course, otherwise he wouldn’t sleep with me just like that. There has to be some kind of love there, he said. He told me I was a good girl and said I could even be beautiful with some effort. Not quite a reina de belleza but maybe pretty like one of the lesser-known telenovela actresses or bikini models like Natalia París, who was short like me.
“I know you have it in you, Indi,” he said. “You just have to try.”
He died in a motorcycle accident. The most wonderful thing was that his family donated his organs to science, and then we heard there was another man his age walking around with one of his kidneys, and another man somewhere who got his heart. I had dreams for a while that I would be so sick that I’d need a transplant and they would operate and give me a part of him. Maybe a lung, his spleen, his liver, or even his eyes and that way I could see the world and even myself as he did. I knew from an early age that I would never be able to have children due to a malformed uterus and one lonely ovary. But I thought if I found myself close enough to death, one of his organs could save me, and it would be better than giving birth to his child because he would be the one living in me.
I share an apartment with my friend Soraya, who works at a bakery on Blackwell Street. She has been trying to convince me to come work full-time with her. She says I won’t have to do the hour-long commute to the factory every morning and night, but I wouldn’t give it up for anything. I spend each ride sitting in the front row of the van, planning things I will say to Edgar during our breaks, during lunch, practicing the way I will smile at him when he brings the pallet with the empty cartons or takes my packed boxes away on his forklift. And when the guagua driver pulls into the parking lot and I see Edgar standing along the brick wall by the back entrance with some of the others, waiting for me—la gorda!—to descend, I tell myself and my mother in my mind, and even the demon Buziraco if he will listen, there is no other place I would rather be.
From the way I talk about him, you probably imagine a guy with movie star looks, some kind of prince, moneyed and polished. Edgar is all those things, or maybe none of those things. It doesn’t really matter. I can tell you about his eyes and lashes and canela skin and broad shoulders that make clothes hang off him like drapery. I can tell you about the way he smiles, his front tooth angled outward, his sloped posture, the way he swallows half his syllables and makes fun of my singsong Spanish, and you would still not understand his beauty, his brilliance even though he can’t write more than a few words much less read. I know this because he confessed it and yes, that’s something that makes a man more appetizing to a woman, especially a woman like me: being made a man’s confidant, his secret keeper.
No matter that Edgar is twenty-eight and I am forty-two. In the factory, with summer heat blowing through the vents like fire, where we stand in front of the rusted metal fans unashamed of the sweat dripping down our collarbones, dampening the seats of our jeans. In winter, the icy humidity of the Hudson penetrating the concrete and cinder block, when we work in our warmest coats, the fingertips of our gloves sliced off so we can still easily pack our boxes and load our pallets. Here, we are the same: two working bodies, and I think only of another kiss waiting for me in the parking lot, hot and wet and hungry just like the last. In the apartment I share with Soraya, carved out of the basement of a house owned by an Iraqi family, I dream of a life with Edgar, not in his country or in mine, but in this one; a life new for both of us.
Everyone is talking about the Christmas party. The boss booked an entire restaurant on Bergenline, with a dance floor and everything. Normally our Christmas parties are here in the factory, with food served on foil trays and all our dancing happens between the cafeteria tables. But this year business was good, productivity above average, and there were no lawsuits or union disputes, so we deserve to be rewarded. All the Dominicanas are planning to wear gowns normally reserved for weddings and quinceañeras, with salon hairdos and their best joyas de fantasía. The men will wear their funeral suits. The Colombianas and Puertoriqueñas don’t want to look underdressed in comparison and many have bought new dresses or borrowed ones from friends. I have a dress I bought with some extra hours I worked at Soraya’s bakery packing holiday cakes. It’s royal blue with a cascade of beads along the chest and down the back. Satin that fits like skin. Secondhand but you would never know.
Soraya is twice divorced and thinks it’s odd that I haven’t been divorced even once as is normal for a woman my age. I didn’t have to marry for papers. My green card came clean and easy, and everyone said I was so lucky but I thought it was the least God could do for me. I don’t want you to think I’ve been celibate all these years in New Jersey. I’ve had plenty of lovers in my days as both a gorda and a flaca. I had a Syrian lover for a very long time, even in the first months that I knew Edgar. Perhaps I would still be with him, but he couldn’t take the homesickness and returned to his country. Not even a war could keep him away.
Edgar worked in other factories in the area before he came to ours. The worst, he said, was a brewery in Queens where the boss locked them in from dawn to dusk. There were monthly raids, in which someone usually got carted off due to false papers.
“It’s always sad when you see a compatriot taken away,” he told me.
I nodded.
He touched my hand. “We are the lucky ones.”
This was back when I used to clean the cafeteria and Edgar would find me there sweeping and float around the tables while I worked. Sometimes Gilmer, Pinto, or one of the other guys would stick his head in and make a whistling sound or start singing a love song and we’d both roll our eyes, as if the idea of the two of us as sweethearts was beyond the possibilities of this world.
The summer of the blackout, when the factory went dark as outer space, Edgar found me by my packing line, took my elbow, and led me to one of the emergency doors—not the one everyone else was rushing toward, but another one, on the far side of the building where we found ourselves completely alone in a patch of parking lot, warmed by peach afternoon light.
“Why did you come looking for me?” I asked.
“Because you’re my guapa,” he said, and embraced me in the way of two lovers who have been together a very long time, resting our arms around each other’s torsos with ease and familiarity. He held me close. I was still wearing the compression garment from one of my liposuctions and hoped the pressure of our bodies wouldn’t make my wounds ooze through the bandages.
I gave up smoking a few months ago. It was my last vice to go after ice cream and chocolate bars. I was used to stopping temporarily in preparation for each of my surgeries, but I always took cigarettes back up because I found them to be great company in the solitude of my life in this country. I can tell you how poisonous and deadly they are, information you can get anywhere else, without denying that smoking brought Edgar and me together those first days. But now that we are both healthier people, and have both tasted each other’s lips, we don’t need them as excuses to come together.
Now, in the mornings, Edgar waits for me outside the factory with a cup of coffee from Don Pepe’s truck. It’s bitter and oversugared, but I drink it even as it singes my insides because it came from Edgar. He always arrives to work first, since his guagua only has to make that short trip over the George Washington Bridge. The Dover route is eternal, along the Christopher Columbus Highway where there is always traffic, but on most days we manage to arrive just before it’s time to clock in.
Edgar greets me every day with a kiss on the cheek. He’s not even shy about it. If you were to ask anyone on our shift who Edgar’s girl is these days, they would tell you, without hesitation, it’s la gorda. Maybe they would say they don’t really know or understand what our story is, being that we live far apart and only see each other on weekdays, but those moments are loaded with promise, and if there is a romance brewing in this ancient building, it’s not between one of the pregnant machine operators or one of the line mechanics with three or four novias. No, it’s between Edgar and Indiana. What we have, anyone would tell you, is true.
On this morning, my ride arrives at the factory first. The workers who came on the St. Nicholas Avenue guagua say that right after they crossed the bridge, a tractor trailer turned over on the upper level and there you go, traffic like it’s the end of the world. Edgar’s van got stuck behind it.
A streak of springlike days has hit New Jersey. It’s no longer frigid as a morgue. The grass in the lot next to the factory grounds has resurrected in a bright and fluffy green; even the birds and squirrels have emerged, hyper and shameless. A group of ladies gathered by the factory entrance brag to one another about their dresses for the party. I’ll show them. They’ll see la gorda dressed like Miss Universe, with hair extensions and fake lashes I’ve already bought at the beauty supply, all my surgery swelling down, my body starved and deflated and contoured to perfection. Mami was right. What nature gives, art can fix. On my next trip home, I’m going to bring my surgeon a gift to show my gratitude to him for my new life.
I ask Don Pepe for two coffees, one for me and one for Edgar. He lives with a cousin and his family on 167th Street. He’s told me he sleeps on a sofa in the living room. He has the money for something better, at least for his own room somewhere, but he sends most of what he earns back to his mother. One day I asked if he wants to have his own family someday, and he shrugged.
“I’m not like most men. I don’t care if I am never a father.”
He doesn’t spend weekends like some of the other factory guys, drinking, dancing, putiando all over the west side. Edgar prefers to stay in and watch television or play computer games with his cousin’s kids. If the weather is nice he might go play soccer with friends at one of the fields nearby. If he’s seeing a lady, maybe he will take her for walks in the park or to a party. From what I’ve told you about his other factory novias, you might think Edgar some kind of mujeriego, but it’s just the opposite. No woman has been good enough for him, his pure heart.
One of the women who lived in my first residence in Dover, the house that turned over tenants like the Port Authority, has her own botánica in Paterson now, and when I’m feeling desperate, usually before a surgery, I pay her a visit for a little spiritual cleansing and white magic trabajo for good luck. She’s a casual hechicera. Not like those brujas and magos who make you pay hundreds of dollars for all sorts of initiations and curse-breaking. This one is more about service. She just wants her community to be happy. I told her about Edgar, and she said she would take care of it for me, and I wouldn’t even have to do something pathetic like slip drops of period blood into his coffee to make him love me. All I had to do, she said, was light a white seven-day candle and burn the petals of a single rose each night until they became ash. And then I was to collect that ash in a sachet of silk and bury it in the backyard. I had to wait until the Iraqis upstairs were sleeping in order to do this, because the wife is very protective of her flower beds.
Don Pepe hands me the coffees, and I return to the brick wall by the factory entrance. Everyone is waiting until the last second before the morning bell rings to go inside. There are no windows where we work. The factory is a long charcoal tube, like a subway platform, and in the winter, with overtime, we can spend the whole day in there without seeing the sun rise or set. My mother, the one who wanted me to come here so badly, often asks me why I stay. It’s been twenty years, she says, and my life has not drastically improved since my arrival. Other immigrants do far better—start their own businesses, marry, have children who will be educated and able to provide for them in their old age. I have none of that.
“Maybe it’s time you return home,” she says. “You can take care of your mamita. We can be old ladies together.”
I understand her impulse. I am her only child. But I tell her, “No, Mamá. It’s not yet time.”
The morning bell rings, and most of the parking lot crowd drifts into the building for work. The last thing you want is for Toño to see you’re not yet at your station when the production lines kick in. You never know his mood. Sometimes he will let it go without writing you up, or, you might later hear your name called over the intercom system and find yourself sitting in Human Resources begging to keep your job. You might think this is just a factory, and why would anyone beg to keep working here, but the fact is there is a waiting list of people hoping to be employed. For every line worker, there is another handful of relatives or newly arrived friends who’ve heard about this place and are looking to get in. There are people who’ve worked here twenty, thirty years. Parents, children, even three generations of a family all on the same production line.
I want to wait for Edgar. I want to be the one to hand him his coffee when his guagua arrives, before he goes inside to work, so I hang around outside while the others disappear. My friend Rosa, who works the same line as me, sticks her head out the door. “You’d better get in soon, Indi. Toño’s making rounds.”
I tell her I’ll be right in. Besides, Toño can’t go hard when there’s an entire guagua of workers late for their shift for reasons beyond their control. Toño thinks he’s better than us because he has some kind of degree in who knows what.
“You could have Toño’s job someday,” I once told Edgar. “You’re smarter than him. All he does is babysit us like we’re in a daycare.”
“You think so?”
“You’re the smartest guy in this whole place,” I said. I could tell it was what he needed to hear. Everyone needs positive affirmations. I heard a woman on TV say that once.
I hear the van’s old engine before I see it tear into the lot. Rusty is driving. His only job in life is to deliver people over the bridge and back at the start and end of the factory’s three shifts, and he’s usually as careful as a surgeon. But today, no doubt with his passengers complaining they might have time deducted from their checks for being late, he rips across the pavement toward the back of the building, where I lean against the brick factory wall holding Edgar’s coffee.
I search past the tinted windows for Edgar’s face. I know he sees me. The van comes closer and closer, and I approach to meet it, but it doesn’t stop; it keeps rolling and rushing as if delivering its passengers straight through to the other side of the wall, and I am pinned, the bumper pressing my thighs, the grill and hood, cracking my ribs against the brick. I feel nothing, only hear the crash, the skidding, and then screams.
My legs were severed. Well, they were still attached by something. Tendons or ligaments or fibers, I don’t know for sure. Only that they were unusable. My pelvis, shattered. A few ribs too. My organs appear to be intact. They keep saying I am very lucky.
Many years ago, when Colombia played in the World Cup here in the United States, before the famous autogol that eliminated them and cost poor Andrés Escobar his life, the country was celebrating the national team’s defeat of Romania. I’d watched the match at a cousin’s house, and in the hours after, walked home alone wearing my yellow jersey, the streets packed with cars waving national flags from the windows, horns honking, joyful victory chants and already fireworks overhead. I was crossing a jammed intersection, inching between two cars stopped one behind the other at a red light, when I felt one car roll forward and push me against the one ahead. It was less than a second, this awareness that I would be stuck there, my legs cut as if by a blade, but I felt something lift me, carry me out of danger and place me on the sidewalk. I was shaken and told my mother the story when I got home. She had no doubt angels had saved me. Nobody else would have been able to lift a gorda like me like a bird carrying thread. It was a miracle if you believe in miracles. Or just an unexplained mystery if you don’t. But it happened. I’m still here. All of this is to tell you that I’m not surprised I wasn’t so lucky the second time. This time Buziraco got his way when he said, “Gorda, your legs now belong to me.”
My friends from the factory brought me a card that everybody signed wishing me a quick recovery. Recovery. Such a funny word. As if my legs have only been misplaced and might still be found. I picture them walking around the factory, waiting for my return. This is what you get for being late to work, they will tell me when we are reunited. But no, they took those scraps of flesh and bone wherever they take detached body parts. I wonder, now that I have time to think about such things, whose job it is to pick up those human pieces, to discard them in the hospital trash.
Edgar signed the card near the bottom. He only wrote his first name, in letters of uneven sizing. I remember little about the crash. They tell me I was on the ground for a long time, before the ambulance and police came, before they assessed the mess of my body and decided what to do with me. I bled so much they thought I would die. But my system has always been good at clotting. I know this from all my surgeries.
I remember Edgar kneeling on the concrete beside me. His face close to mine. I don’t think I was crying, just dazed from the shock, heat shooting through my bones.
I remember asking what happened, and Edgar said, “Hold on, Indi. You’re going to be okay. Just keep talking to me.”
I felt very sleepy then very cold, and I sensed the wall of people standing nearby watching and crying. I heard the big boss’s voice. I heard the medical workers. Then I was no longer there.
They determined it was an accident. The break on Rusty’s van malfunctioned. It wasn’t his fault, and there will be no criminal charges. He may be able to sue the car manufacturer or the garage where he had his last tune-up. I don’t feel the need to blame. I know these things happen. Bad fortune is as certain yet unpredictable as the weather.
I lie in bed and feel my phantom limbs, kick them into the air, practice the steps I was planning to try when Edgar asked me to dance at the Christmas party. These were moves I’d rehearsed with Soraya in our basement on many nights, the music turned low so the family above wouldn’t complain.
“He’s going to fall in love if he hasn’t already,” Soraya told me. This Soraya was full of hope for my future. Soraya today only looks at me with mournful eyes.
“I knew you should have come to work with me at the bakery.”
It’s too late for such thoughts but I forgive her. I forgive everyone.
A guagua full of my friends from the factory comes to see me at the hospital. Edgar is among them, but he hangs back. They’ve reduced my pain medications, sewn my stumps with thick black socklike seams at what used to be my thighs. I keep them covered when guests come because I realize most people can’t handle the sight of my nubs, and still, their eyes drift to the flatness under the white hospital sheet.
They take turns coming to my bedside and holding my hand.
“We love you, gorda,” they say. “We miss you so much on the packing line.”
The Christmas party has already passed but they have the kindness not to mention it to me. Their faces are sad, and I feel I must be the one to make them feel better.
“I’m not dead. They’ll give me new legs, and I’ll be back on the line soon. I know it.”
When Edgar comes to my side, the others clear the room so we can be alone.
“Indiana. I don’t know what to say.”
He holds my hand, or rather, I hold his. He is the one more in need of comforting. I hear the others whispering in the hall. It’s not their fault they can’t gauge their own volume.
“It’s such a tragedy,” someone says. “All that work she did to her body, and now this.”
My mother has already suggested this was some sort of punishment or retribution for the ways I’ve gone against nature to change my appearance. I was cheating God’s design for me, she said, becoming vain, and I needed to be humbled.
My mind flashes with images of Edgar pushing me in my wheelchair, helping me stand on my new legs that actually make me taller, like a model or a beauty queen. I see us dancing together, me in my blue dress, Edgar shaved and glowing in a dark suit.
I tell Edgar a few lawyers have come to see me. They heard about my case and say I might be entitled to compensation. The factory’s insurance company will surely want to settle because there should have been a safety rail or something protecting the entrance from incoming cars. One lawyer says I could get millions.
“We can take my new robot legs and travel the world,” I tell Edgar.
He smiles. I would call it a smile, not counting the tears in his eyes.
“I have to go, Indi. They’re all waiting for me. We have to get back over the bridge before rush hour. I’ll come see you again on my own. I’ll figure out which bus to take and come soon.”
He kisses my forehead, and I’m embarrassed because I know I’ve got the hospital stink even though the nurses bathed me in bed this morning and helped me brush my hair nice so it covers my shoulders. I would hug him, but my pelvis is casted and I can’t shift my weight.
Arrangements have already been made for my mother to take me back to Cali with her once the doctors decide my body can handle the journey. The only thing we know so far is that there is nobody to care for me here, to help me with all the necessary things, the ugly things, going to the bathroom, learning to walk. I would have to go live in a special residential facility. Years of therapy await. A psychiatrist told me nightmares will come when it settles in that half of me is missing. But I will adapt, the doctors say. All humans do.
They warn me not to get fat again because it will make it harder to walk on my new legs. Little did I know that by losing all that weight, I was getting myself into optimal condition for life as an amputee.
My mother tells me I should consider myself blessed. Not because I didn’t die under the guagua but because I might get some money out of the whole endeavor. “Just think how all those people back home who’ve had their limbs blown to bits by land mines have no such luck. Maybe you’ll make friends with some of them,” she says. “There are support groups for people like that. I saw it on the news.”
This is her first time in this country. She has seen only the airport, the hospital, and the basement where Soraya takes her to sleep each night in my bed pushed along the window near the good radiator. When she comes to the hospital to see me each morning, she proclaims, without fail, that she’s almost grateful this accident happened because it’s going to bring me home to Colombia with her.
She sits on a chair thumbing the pages of a magazine she bought in the gift shop downstairs. She says she doesn’t understand how I endured so many grim winters or what kept me here year after year. It’s not the future she hoped for me. So many people come to this country with much less and accomplish so much more than I have with my little factory job. Why, for such a life, she wonders, did I try so hard to be beautiful?
I don’t argue or try to explain. I want to save my words for Edgar. Maybe he will come see me tomorrow or the day after. I want to think of a funny joke or story to tell him so that when he looks at me his first thought is not pity. But my mind is tired. The doctors warned I would feel this way for a while due to the trauma on my body, the loss of blood. My mother asks if I can hear her. Indiana, Indiana, over and over. But I only roll my head toward the window. Through the glass, there is only brick in place of sky.