Tuesday, June 27: 55 days until I go home
Is that my abuela in front of the jewelry store? ¡Carajo! Even if she and my grandfather refused to come to Mamá and Evan’s wedding, I should have visited them already. But I haven’t even called. And what would she say if she saw me with a guy in a motorcycle jacket?
I back into a corner of the brand-new mall, near the fancy neighborhood where my mother’s parents live, and pull Frankie toward me. Maybe I can hide behind him. Mamá and Evan are getting back to Wisconsin tomorrow, and when Frankie picked me up at the house I told him I still hadn’t gotten them anything for their wedding. So he brought me here. I should have asked him to bring me somewhere else. So far, everything’s way too expensive anyway.
The wrinkled lady in high-heeled shoes struts in our direction. She carries three different shopping bags—navy, brown, and pink-and-white. But she’s not my grandmother.
I exhale. After she’s safely past, I ask Frankie if he got the cuete.
“No, sorry, couldn’t find any.” Frankie puts his arm around my back and gives me a tug. “Don’t you know drugs are bad for you?”
I shake my head and force a laugh. I guess that he forgot. Or he couldn’t find anybody who had it. Or he didn’t want to risk going to jail for ten years because of me. “You’re too late anyway,” I tell him. “I needed it last weekend.”
“The trip was that boring?”
“Worse. I had to carry Papá’s stuff. It was so heavy.”
“What was he doing?” Frankie twirls a strand of my hair.
“Interviewing people. Getting treated like a celebrity. Acting like one.” I pretend to take Frankie’s picture, the way the photographers from the newspapers Papá writes for took his. If Papá hadn’t treated me like a pack mule while he played Princess Diana, I might have been happier to see him so happy at work. Instead, all I could think about was kissing a certain hot guy with a motorcycle while sitting on a cliff overlooking the ocean at night.
“Did you see the city? Or take the lift to the top of the hill?” Frankie asks.
“I saw the inside of a building. I heard about the lift.” I sweep the hair from my face. “My aunt drove me to the top of one of the hills to see the city at night. That was kind of cool.”
“You probably won’t believe this, but I’ve never been to Valpo. I’ve never been outside Santiago.”
“Really?”
He nods. “My uncle says he’ll take me before I go into the army.”
“Why wait?” I clasp my hands behind Frankie’s neck. “Let’s sneak off together. Do what we want to do.” I don’t think my father would notice, but my aunt might.
“You mean it? You’d run away with me?”
“Like Romeo and Juliet.” My favorite Shakespeare play, though so far I only have Julius Caesar to compare it to. I wonder if Frankie studied it in school. “Except things didn’t go so well for them.”
Frankie frowns. “What happened? Did they get killed?”
I guess he didn’t study it. “I can’t tell you. But I promise I’ll get you a copy of the play if you work hard on your English.”
“Deal.” He holds out his hand for me to shake. So old-fashioned, given that we’re already tongue-kissing. “And then we’ll run away.”
I can’t tell if he’s joking or not, so I watch his face. The beginning of a smile. A little nod. After we kiss and let go of each other, he pulls a folded piece of paper from an inside pocket of his jacket.
“Look what I found.”
I take the paper and unfold it. It’s some sort of flyer with the headline, OUR DUTY TO PROTEST. Underneath is the date and time of a demonstration two weeks from now. And a list of speakers that includes, right at the top, Marcelo Aguilar. “That’s Papá’s! Where did you get it?”
Frankie answers in robot-like English. “The office. The desk.”
“And you swiped it when you picked me up?”
“There were a bunch of them. He’ll never miss it.”
I lean toward him. “Are you going?”
He winks. “Maybe. My uncle . . . someone told me it’s an illegal demonstration.”
“Your uncle told you?” His uncle must be a momio—a supporter of the dictator. Especially if he’s the same one who likes fancy restaurants.
“It wasn’t my uncle. It was someone else, from work. Besides, no one cares about illegal demonstrations unless a speaker incites a riot.” Frankie slides the flyer from my fingers. “Your father would never do that, right?”
My insides sparkle like the flecks of light on the floor tiles. I haven’t given him any reason to believe I’m so into politics, but he must really care about me to go to Papá’s demonstration because of me. Ever since my aunt told me about his father’s affiliation, I’ve figured Frankie’s father must have been imprisoned and tortured for his views just as mine was.
Frankie leads me to a record store. The albums and cassettes are brand-new and in their original wrapping, not like the used and bootleg tapes at the store near Papá’s place. I also see a few compact discs that are really expensive. Frankie buys re-releases of Kill ’Em All, Master of Puppets, and Ride the Lightning on CD, and I wonder where he got the money for them and the equipment to play them on. Maybe delivery boys make more than I think. I pick up a cassette of dance music from Brazil for Mamá and Evan but put it back. My old papá liked to dance. Evan jogs. And Evan doesn’t listen to music when he jogs.
While we eat at the local version of McDonald’s in the food court, Frankie asks me to translate his favorite songs. He likes “The Call of Ktulu,” which doesn’t have any words, so I don’t have to translate that one, and “For Whom the Bell Tolls,” which is one of my favorites, too. It was inspired by a scene in Ernest Hemingway’s novel about the Spanish Civil War.
“I didn’t know that,” he says. “I mean the novel. We learned about the war in school. How Franco stopped the Communists.”
I drop my french fry. That’s probably what they learned in school under their own dictatorship like the one in Spain, but wouldn’t his father know the real history? Maybe his father never went to school. And I’m sure Frankie couldn’t read the novel For Whom the Bell Tolls because it takes the side against Franco and would have been banned.
Picking up my half-eaten burger, I change the subject back to Metallica. “What other songs do you like?”
He doesn’t hesitate. “‘Master of Puppets.’ I got a concert version from the bootleg place where they played it in a medley with ‘Welcome Home (Sanitarium).’”
“Oh, yeah! I heard it live. They call it the ‘Mastertarium.’ But I like ‘Sanitarium’ better.”
Frankie sings the opening verses of “Sanitarium” in English. He sings in tune and hardly has any accent at all. I translate the words into Spanish, verse by verse, and then I translate the words of “Master of Puppets,” after he sings those.
Everyone at the tables around us is staring at us by now. I’m sure they weren’t expecting musical entertainment, even from someone with as fine a voice as Frankie has, but we don’t care. He reaches for my hand under the table. His hand is warm and a little greasy from the french fries. Or maybe it’s my fingers that are greasy. Heat spreads through my body.
“So what do you like about ‘Sanitarium’?” he asks me.
“The opening. The melody. And it’s the story of a lot of my friends.” I tell him about Leslie, my first real friend in the United States, whose mother had her committed to a psychiatric hospital after she tried to run away near the end of our eighth grade year. “I see why you like ‘Master of Puppets,’” I add.
Frankie folds his arms and leans across the table. “A lot of people around here think it’s a political song. But it’s really about drugs and booze. How they make you their slave.”
My smile evaporates. Maybe this is Frankie’s way of telling me he doesn’t want to bring the weed. “Is Metallica popular here?”
“Guys like them. I’ve never met a girl who did. Except you.” He touches the ends of my hair. “Girls here are different.”
“More girlie-girl?” I think of my aunt Cecilia, running up the hills as a kid and then wearing high heels at fourteen.
He takes a sip of his soda. “They know their place. There are things that boys do, and things that girls do.”
I’m not shocked. Daniel has said the same thing. Problem is, the boys get to do all the good stuff.
“But I’m not like that, you know,” I say. And he better be okay with it, because that’s the way it is where he wants to live.
He shakes his head slowly. “Me, I want to see the world. This country is just an itty-bitty corner.” He holds his thumb and index finger a centimeter apart. “But whenever I’m with you”—he extends his arms—“it’s like the whole world opening up for me. Like when you told me about how boys and girls aren’t so different in your country.”
I give him a huge smile. “Maybe you can visit me in Wisconsin. I’ll talk to my mother as soon as I get back.” I say before popping the last bite of hamburger into my mouth.
“You promise?” His eyes meet mine. “Really?”
“Promise.” I rest my arm on the table. Frankie strokes my pinkie, then each of my other fingers in turn. His touch is electric; the sensation moves up my arm and through my body.
“How will I get there?”
“She got a new job and my stepfather’s an architect. We’ll send you a plane ticket.”
He gives me a doubtful look.
“They can afford it. Honest.”
“You say you have a stepfather?”
I nod. “His name’s Evan.”
“Do you like him?”
“Yeah, he’s really nice. You’d like him, too.” I tell Frankie about the mitzvah house, as coherently as I can with his fingers caressing my hand and wrist.
“He sounds cool,” Frankie says. “I wouldn’t have thought to fix a busted-up house if I had the money. I would have torn it down and built something new.”
“My aunt said the same thing. But she works for a company that builds high-rises.”
For a few seconds Frankie stares at me without saying a word. Then he asks, “So who would you rather have for your father? This Evan guy or . . . you know?”
What kind of question is that? “I have both.”
But he presses me. “Who? If you were forced to choose one.”
“Evan’s easier to live with. He lets me get away with more, because I guess that’s the way the gringos are. And because he’s not my real father.”
“Does he drink?”
“No. Maybe a glass of wine at dinner.” I’ve never had to choose between Evan and Papá before—not even Papá has asked me to do it. “But there are things I like about my father, too.”
“No way.” Frankie blinks rapidly.
“I’m proud of the things he does. And that with all his problems, he still gets up and goes to work every day.”
“Yeah, that’s a concept.” Frankie slurps down his soda and lifts his hand from mine. “Ready to go? Maybe tonight we can see the stars.”
My eyes don’t sting when I step outside. Yesterday’s rain and wind have cleared most of the smog. Fifteen minutes until closing time on a weeknight, the mall’s parking lot is nearly empty. And the stars are out, the brilliant southern constellations I had forgotten in my years away. To the east, I can see the snow on the mountains and the lights of the Farellones ski resort. I imagine the skiers from all over the world coming to this itty-bitty corner that Frankie has never left.
Frankie lays his arm across my shoulders and turns his head toward me. His mouth closes on mine. I taste french fries and secret sauce. I explore the gap between his two front teeth. He pulls me tight against his body. I was standing on tiptoes, but it seems as though my feet have left the ground completely. I can no longer tell where I end and Frankie begins. Is this what love is like?
When the long kiss is over and I feel my feet on the pavement again, I bury my face in his leather jacket. It’s smooth against my cheek and makes a soft crackle when I move. I inhale a thick, slightly oily smell.
Mastertarium. The word, the thoughts, echo in my head like the opening bars of “Sanitarium” and the glistening lights of Farellones. You like “Master of Puppets.” I like “Sanitarium.” The two fit together.