She completed the forms and submitted them, along with a thick sheaf of notarized documentation. Long hours of doing what she had always done followed. Days of the same. Work: cleaning, cooking, marketing, washing, reading, teaching, correcting, preparing lessons. But really what Maritsa was doing was waiting, so even what was the same took longer now. One day she burned her maps in the oven, watched them ignite through the greasy little window. Still, she was waiting. Then the idea of hoping (because what is hoping if it isn’t waiting?) became so abruptly foreign it scared her. She didn’t need it anymore. The embassy of the United States had sent her a stamped paper.
Maritsa used to place her hands over America. Even with her fingers spread, she couldn’t cover it all. Michigan’s flat hat, Florida’s backward chicken leg. California always longer than her own thumb.
She took her seven-year-old, Damyan, and renamed him Danny, although she insisted that his name would always be Damyan. He didn’t mind. SWAT teams and Chicago Bears, the boy couldn’t get enough. Her husband, Lyubomir, stayed behind in Sophia. He was a doctor and he had to close his affairs as well as transfer their tiny, despised flat. Of course, he wasn’t going to be a doctor any more than she was going to be the schoolteacher she had spent the last twelve years of her life waking up and being. And what are they going to think of me there, my English being so atrocious? They’ll think I’m illiterate, a moron.
“And Damyan? You’ll steal his chance?”
“Don’t hide behind the boy. It’s you—”
So she left Lyubomir, and for months, the two of them sent letters back and forth across the ocean. In one letter, his pen ripped through the paper. He wrote that he had become a man with a wife who insisted the only way to leave a flat she hated was to move to America! Maritsa replied: It isn’t the flat, it’s everything. It’s the neighbors, it’s the Dancescus flushing, it’s the snoring, it’s Razvan and Sabina’s fucking we have to listen to. Can’t you understand that people shouldn’t have to live like this—especially now? And always, Damyan. The unimaginable opportunity. Damyan the American! What lies! And I’m a man who let it happen! They laugh at me, don’t you see, Maritsa? They’re all laughing.
And some nights he’d wake her up just before dawn, a call they couldn’t afford, and pant into the phone like an exhausted horse.
When she felt confident enough with her spoken English (she’d studied it for years, but talking to Americans was another matter altogether), she finally told the kind, stubby-fingered man at the gas station grocery who she was and what she was doing here. He spat laughter, not cruelly, only in shock: A refugee? To Waukegan? This armpit? Come on, love, sell me something else.
Well, not a refugee in a technical sense, but she didn’t want to explain her classification and the label made it easier. She’d won a lottery and the INS placement office in Washington, D.C., had found her an apartment in what was left of this city on Lake Michigan, too far from Chicago to say she lived in Chicago.
She got a job with a maid service. Every morning she and three other women were driven in a van to clean houses in Lake Forest. Lake Forest! Now here was America! Her first morning in the van, another girl, a Jamaican, had nudged her and said, “You won’t believe me.”
“What?”
“The women, they clean the houses before we get there.”
“What?”
“Not a joke. They clean like lunatics, these women. Oh, you’ll scrub their crap inside the toilet bowls, yes, and worse, but a lot of the work is already done before you walk in the house with the bucket.”
Cleaning for the cleaning ladies. Maritsa found this preposterous lie to be absolutely true. So it wasn’t the work that was difficult. It was only that these houses, houses as big as banks she roamed around with her tank-sized vacuum cleaner, sapped her energy in other, less definable ways. It was a kind of fatigue. She’d never imagined that proximity to wealth, unfathomable wealth, could make her so weary. She found herself not even wanting it anymore.
English classes were held Tuesday and Thursday nights at the local grammar school. She sat squeezed, her knees jammed against the bottom of a tiny desk, and repeated after the teacher, whose name was Gilda Petrocelli. Not Mrs. Petrocelli or even Mrs. Gilda, only Gilda, and she had fat pink cheeks that made her look like a talking porcelain doll. She also had a husband who kept constant watch, prowling outside class, stalking the little halls like a giant in squeaky shoes. Often Gilda’s husband stuck his face in the narrow, crisscrossed wire window and breathed until it fogged. It was hard to tell if the husband’s problem was anger or sorrow or fear. Gilda had told the class that before she began teaching Advanced ESL, she’d been a librarian. But that’s all in the past now, she said. She said it like all that cataloging and shelving had been like fighting in some forgotten war. And maybe it had been. Teaching school had certainly been like that. Those terrible dangling feet, every morning those pairs of relentlessly staring eyes. Gilda was particularly concerned about pronunciation. She always spent the last five minutes simply saying whatever words came to her, in alphabetical order. Pronunciation holds the key, she’d say, grinning and holding up a cardboard cutout with a drawing of an old-fashioned skate key, to successful integration. These are words you know, but you must master how they sound. She spoke slowly, enunciating every syllable, directing them to watch her mouth.
Appetite. Butcher. Curriculum. Despondent. Evaporate.
At night she’d coo to her sleeping Damyan, but really more to herself, that where you are is in your mind, that it’s got nothing to do with maps. That if you aren’t in Waukegan in your mind, you aren’t there. Do you hear me, little man? This isn’t Waukegan, it’s the Horn of Plenty…
October and she’d walk the wet streets to the gas station grocery for sliced cheese and a magazine. She’d look at the potholes full of oily water and the broken windows of the abandoned paint factory that stretched three city blocks. The buildings of Sophia were beautiful in their corruption; headless, handless statues gazed down from countless ledges. Her city was streets of crumble and scaffolds. True, there were newer buildings in Sophia, cheap flimsy apartment blocks built in a day and a half, like the box she’d moved into after she got married, but she didn’t think of these when she thought of the architecture of home. In Waukegan, the buildings were not new and not old, and no one bothered to say anything about them one way or the other. They’d been built to endure and then were just left.
The man at the gas station told her that the big boats still call at Waukegan, but not as many as used to. Afternoons, after work, and before Damyan got home from school, she’d walk down to the beach by the harbor. She’d listen to the halyards clack against the masts of the sailboats not yet taken ashore for winter. But she didn’t come to look at the boats, small ones or big ones. She’d go down there to watch the waves, white as they crushed into shore, yellow as they withdrew. Plastic detergent bottles bobbed in with the current and bobbed out again.
Always, Maritsa would tell herself, the first betrayal, leaving, will always be the worst. She was confused by her own choices and her own desires, and she’d look out the windows of the houses she cleaned, at the enormous leafless trees, trees that took almost all the space of the sky, and curse herself for not knowing what to dream. Is this an answer? A husband panting into the phone? Days wandering rooms of other people’s piles of things?
Damyan looked so unlike his father that people in their building used to whisper that someone else must have been parking in her garage. She’d been called a whore behind her back so many times that for years she’d felt like one. Honorary whore of a building that apparently needed one. Damyan was a pale, oval-headed boy, with little hair and large, fearlessly unblinking eyes. He wasn’t afraid to look at anybody, and often adults were put in the uncomfortable position of having to turn away from a child’s stare. He had all his father’s curiosity and none of his mother’s restlessness. What’s the difference between snot and saliva? Why do people say you can drink one and not the other? They’re both only secretions. I’ve tried snot and it’s possible, you can drink as much as you want. His father’s boy, already exasperating teachers on a new continent. He was also a courageous kid and knew he had to buck up for his mother in a place that wasn’t so much unkind to her as ambivalent. His mother had always been a woman people talked about, and not only because she’d always been the prettiest. Now, here in Waukegan, no one much noticed her, and that shamed him. He tried not to let her know. He kept silent. And some nights she’d sit on the floor of his room and rest her head against his mattress and ask, Is it Daddy? No. Is it home? No. Why won’t you tell me? The boy would dig his face into his pillow and feign sleep.
The second betrayal was named Ted. He was from Pakistan. His name wasn’t Ted any more than Damyan’s was Danny. I’m Ted, he’d said, Ted tired of correcting people. She almost laughed. “That’s not funny,” she said. How long since she’d laughed? A ten-minute break during class, the two of them leaning against a set of little lockers. He’d looked at her then from an odd angle, his head too far to the left. He looked at her as if he already knew her weaknesses and was mocking her for bothering to try to hide them. He spoke English; he only pretended he didn’t. “It’s my second language,” he said, “but don’t tell anybody that we speak English in Pakistan, I’m here for dates. Night school ESL is the United Nations of Women. Filipinos, Mexicans, Koreans, Somalis, where did you say you were from again?” All this she laughed at, quietly, the way she remembered laughing as a child at things she knew she wasn’t supposed to, pressing her fingers into her lips. She thought it wouldn’t be right to ask his real name, that it would somehow break the grip he was already beginning to have on her. He would always be Ted, even after he was gone, and he had smooth lips that she knew would soon kiss her places Lyubomir couldn’t have imagined.
Which is what happened, for three months, but mostly they watched television and ate bag after bag of sour-cream-and-onion Doritos. They’d talk about how fat real Americans were compared to TV Americans, except for Roseanne and her husband. (Why aren’t their kids fat, though?) They’d sit and wonder whether they’d bloom out like sandbags after they got their citizenship. Ted was a small man, half the size of Lyubomir. She could have picked him up and tossed him. They’d talk about how stupid the shows were, and how this stupidity, which was genuine stupidity, was something to laugh at, but also to be wary of. All the dollars in the universe, Ted would murmur, and this is what they do with it.
One night, after two in the morning, the two of them on the living-room floor, naked beneath a thin blanket, the TV light casting a gray pallor over the furniture, the volume down so low all they could hear was faint laughter, and suddenly the child in the bedroom begins to shout. Amid all the unrecognizable words, it was possible to make out: Dyado! Dyado! Ted’s first thought was that it meant father, that the crafty boy knew the only way to rid his mother’s house of this interloper was to cry out at the worst possible moment. After she’d buttoned her shirt and gone to the boy’s room, he’d remained on the floor, motionless, a couch cushion beneath his head. Maritsa. She told him she’d been named after a river. He tries to picture a river quietly gurgling through a snow-hushed forest in a country that he will never see. Yet he’s never had any talent for conjuring trees or woods or rivers, and the image gives way to her face.
Now she is back from the boy’s room, settled under the throw, her head next to his on the cushion. She rubs his wrist.
“Hey.”
“What was that about?”
“It’s all right.”
“His father?”
“No.”
“No?”
“Only a nightmare.”
Maritsa told him a strange thing then. She spoke in his ear. In the dream, Damyan had been shouting, not for Lyubomir, but for his grandfather, her father, a man who died before Damyan was even born. He was warning him about a truck. A famous family story. The kid must have heard it a thousand times.
“My father was hit by a truck, but he lived. The story is always told this way. After the war, Dyado got hit by a truck on Ravoski Street. He was flattened—he never walked again—but he didn’t die. The Slavs couldn’t kill him, the Germans couldn’t kill him, the Russians couldn’t kill him. Not even a truck.”
They lay in the silence, the TV light crawling, then retreating, across the walls.
Later, years later, Ted will think of that night. A woman named Maritsa. The two of them on the floor. Her boy shouting in the night, warning a man already long dead. Dyado, the truck! Are warnings ever timely?
Damyan stares at his mother. They’re at the post office mailing letters. Her mascara makes her eyes look too wide open.
“What is it?”
“Ted doesn’t come anymore.”
“No.”
“Why not?”
She looks past the top of her son’s head, through the slits in the blinds, at the pieces of cars flinging by. You chased him away. Anyway, it wasn’t love. I’ve ruined your father. She says nothing.
The boy waits, looks at his mother, and knows she will keep taking walks, alone, even after his father comes, if his father comes, and that the walks will have nothing to do with her friend from English class, or any other man, including his father. Still, he tries to be kind.
“Maybe he’ll come back,” he says.