The Town of Babylon Page 2

  But I’m not always wrong.

  The sound of tires inching over gravel perforates the silence. Another steel behemoth rolls into the lot and I realize that escaping will be more complicated from this moment onward.

  2

  SUBURBS

  They moved to this town by the thousands. From Ireland and from Italy, primarily. Then came the descendants of enslaved Africans from the South—Georgia, Mississippi, Alabama, Louisiana. It was this way for some time. Later, immigrants from Poland arrived. Not many. From Jamaica. Even fewer. From Puerto Rico. From the Dominican Republic. Much later, from Ecuador. From Peru. From Trinidad and Tobago. From India. From Ghana. From Senegal. All of them, by way of the city.

  They settled here, in this town, because it was all that remained. The town wasn’t along the water, near to the burgeoning industries of war or its fleets of whaling ships. Small businesses, few and brittle, replaced long-ago-abandoned farms. The houses were simple geometric stacks, a triangle atop a square, a square centered on a rectangle, sometimes a trapezoid. Single-family homes spaced apart enough to engender an illusion of independence. The trees had been largely disappeared. So, too, were most of the Pequot and Lenape.

  The Irish lived west of the church and the school. Italians lived to the east. Black people occupied six square blocks in the southeast quadrant of the town. The Germans and the English, who’d come to the region earlier, lived elsewhere, in the towns farther east and along the northern and southern coasts. They were the owners of land and commerce, unfriendly and often cruel employers, just as they had been in the city.

  Facing a common enemy forced an uneasy peace between the Irish and the Italians. They shared the pews and the classrooms, but rarely did they cross into each other’s faintly demarcated neighborhoods—unofficial subdivisions wherein people greeted one another and knew each other’s business: the what, the when, the how, and often the why. They helped raise each other’s children, fed one another, didn’t lock their doors. They attended baptisms and funerals together. Lived and died together. They died old.

  Until the next generation. They were the ones who wanted the shinier things that had eluded their parents. They longed for extravagance. They wanted more powerful cars and bigger homes spaced even farther apart than the ones they’d known all their lives. Or they wanted to live in the more cosmopolitan and less crowded versions of the apartment buildings their parents had left behind. They wanted to travel. They wanted to go back to the city—to any city. They believed that distance and anonymity would give them privacy and control over their destinies. A common desire, before and since, especially of those conditioned to want more.

  As the second generation scattered and disappeared, the town’s battlements were breached, and so, too, were its internal divisions. Those left behind began latching doors. Eyebrows, suspicions, tempers, the cost of living, and walls went up. As did blood pressure, cholesterol, and glucose levels. The town’s hitherto inexplicably pristine health worsened. Empty houses on Irish and Italian blocks were filled by newly arrived Poles, mixed Irish and Italian couples who were unconcerned with tradition or unbowed by expectations, a few Black families who wanted what had been dangled before them for generations—bigger homes on wider streets, nearer to everything—and occasionally, a mixed-race, ethnically ambiguous brood, maybe Puerto Rican or Filipino or deep Sicilian or a quarter Black or one-third Indigenous or all of it at once.

  * * *

  Álvaro and Rosario met in the city. They were on the rooftop of an apartment building that resembled all of the other apartment buildings in the neighborhood—a place where one might mistake one block for another if not for the distinct heads, arms, and legs jutting out of windows and dangling from fire escapes.

  On Rosario’s first night in her new country, there was a party: an assemblage of Colombians mostly, the dominant ethnic group in the neighborhood, but there were others as well. Except for Paraguay, Nicaragua, and Bolivia, every Spanish-speaking country in the Western Hemisphere was represented on that rooftop, along with a few blond white women who worked as the hosts, servers, and managers at the places where the others worked as cashiers, delivery men, and stock boys. Álvaro was one of the Colombians on the roof. He was small—height, weight, and chin—and he had soft, curious eyes and large hair full of loose curls. Rosario heard Álvaro’s laughter before she was able to identify him as the source. The sort of full-throated mirth that disarms and ensnares.

  They were briefly friends before they were lovers. Álvaro was twenty-one; Rosario was eighteen. She sought a tour guide and a break from civil unrest. Álvaro had been in the country a few years already and proved himself an attentive and tireless distraction. He took Rosario to the tops of the tallest buildings, to the nearest beaches, to the movies, to concerts in smoky cafés, cavernous arenas, and sprawling parks, to restaurants, bars, discotheques, pizza and ice-cream parlors, to church bingo on Friday nights and to mass on Sunday mornings. They were entranced by one another. Before long, they were inseparable. Rosario, who loved the serious glamour of high-heeled shoes, took to wearing flats as both a concession and a tribute to Álvaro, who, barefoot, was only a half inch taller than her. Four months after the rooftop, they were married.

  When Rosario became pregnant a few years later, she and Álvaro began taking trips out of the city, to sleepy historic towns and suburbs that proved alluring for their serenity—a life without blaring car horns, grime, drugs, graffiti, violence, sirens, footsteps above, cigarette smoke below, pollution, cockroaches, mice, rats. For a year of aspirational weekends, they visited places they couldn’t afford, which only whetted their appetites and made the city seem more unbearable, unsanitary, unsafe. The towns closest and farthest away were too expensive to consider, so they narrowed it down to the in-between places.

  Not long before Enrique was born, one of the cooks at the restaurant where Álvaro worked told him of a place. Perfect for new families. The cook had a brother who was married to a gringa whose parents lived there. A town not far away, with a reasonable commute back to the city. Un pueblo inventado, said the cook. Still building. Up and up, he explained. Houses were reasonably priced. Two floors, double garages, front lawns, backyards. Álvaro and Rosario visited the industrial town one Sunday and followed the uncreative, albeit effective, signs, New Homes for a New Life! They came upon a gated development where only a third of the houses had been erected. The artificial neighborhood wasn’t close to the school, the church, or the rows of houses with more space between them, but neither was it far. With their savings and a few loans from family and coworkers, Álvaro and Rosario were able to afford the down payment on a two-story condo with a patio. For five hundred dollars more, they could have added a garage, but Rosario had stopped working after Enrique was born, and a garage seemed like an unjustifiable indulgence with all of the available street parking.

  In the months that followed, they drove out to the town every Sunday. They brought Rosario’s cousin along one weekend, Álvaro’s sister another, and once, the cook and his wife. They picnicked on the hood of the car: egg salad sandwiches, tuna sandwiches, empanadas, toasted pumpernickels with cream cheese, pickles, potato chips, apple juice. They watched the second story appear, then the roof, the windows, one bathroom, a second, a skylight in the third. A few months later, Rosario was pregnant again. A few months after that, they left the city.

  * * *

  Rosario and Álvaro arrived in this country, like many other immigrants before them, hungry, apologetic, oblivious, and from somewhere in worse condition. They were unaware of and unconcerned with what was happening in their new world. A fruitful, protective ignorance. Rosario and Álvaro had come to make a life, as they saw it, on someone else’s land. It was incumbent upon them to proceed humbly, to work tirelessly, and to enjoy themselves quietly.

  Naturally, Rosario and Álvaro elided politics in all of its forms—no conversations, no groups, no voting, no petitions, no meetings, no causes, no effects. No good had ever
come of it. The oppression they encountered was the requisite price of being allowed to live here. Nothing, as far as they were concerned, was discriminatory. They were medium-complected Catholics from Latin America, who were largely untrained at receiving prejudice based on anything immutable. To them, hardship was class-based, and in this country, class was temporary and situational. When Álvaro was offered dishwasher jobs despite applying for server or host positions, he blamed his accent and the ignorance of the manager—never history or a systemic corrosion. When, on Fridays, Rosario was paid less for childcare or housecleaning than what had been advertised, she faulted, first, human error, then greed.

  A lack of context meant also that Álvaro and Rosario felt little empathy for anyone who didn’t, as far as they were concerned, try hard enough. “Lazy!” Álvaro said many times of many Americanos. “If I spoke the language, I would be a king here.” Neither he nor Rosario had considered the long-term effects of living in this country. How it might deplete one’s resolve. How for one person to succeed, many would have to fail. How this was a country that practiced a religion of lofty expectations and unattainable goals. How dreams were just that, dreams.

  Rosario and Álvaro wouldn’t have this hindsight for decades yet. But it didn’t take long for them to intuit that there was indeed a pecking order. They might never be Americans, but neither were they held in the lowest regard. That place was occupied by Black people. A phenomenon that had been, through a combination of apathy, denial, and ignorance, easier to ignore in their countries. Here, however, the specter of an even worse life was an added (and unnecessary) incentive to succeed: they didn’t have it as bad as others, and they didn’t want to be lumped with those others.

  * * *

  The house that had been erected over the course of a year, reasonably priced in their estimation, was surrounded by surly older folk who wanted nothing to do with the new arrivals. Without realizing it, Álvaro and Rosario had moved into a gated complex originally intended, before a dip in the real estate market, as a retirement community.

  For a few years, almost none of their neighbors did much more than greet them begrudgingly, and sometimes only because of inertia, before realizing their error and turning away. The exceptions were John, the raspy-voiced septuagenarian widower who brought Rosario and Álvaro freshly killed venison every Saturday, and Patricia and Jason, an Italian-Mexican couple with one child and another on the way, who had also been lured by the housing prices.

  Álvaro and Rosario had found their way into a ghost town of sorts, where everyone was either hobbled or recently widowed and typically both. If the neighbors communicated at all, it was by way of notes. Notes tacked onto Álvaro and Rosario’s front door or stuck onto their windshield, sometimes with gum—brief, recriminatory missives about parking and garbage pick-up regulations. Álvaro, who was seldom home, was unaffected by the onslaught of ill manners and reproachful looks, the reports of which arrived by way of Rosario. “Así son los Americanos,” he reassured her. But Rosario wouldn’t excuse any of it. As far as she was concerned, even an unwanted guest was owed respect.

  Despite the disdain she felt for her neighbors, Rosario ceded the territory around her. She responded to the unwavering current of incivility by remaining at home, leaving only when it was absolutely necessary: the urgent care clinic, the supermarket, church. At least in the city, she thought, she might entertain herself by watching the stream of passersby from her window. Here, she counted more birds than humans. Without much else to do, it didn’t take long for Rosario to master the little that was expected of her, the womanly responsibilities that she’d fulfilled diligently in other people’s homes, but only casually in her own. Now, alone but for a baby who was easily entertained by a tower of wooden blocks, Rosario developed a dexterous touch and a keen eye for all matters of the house. A better-kept home would have been difficult to find in that gated community or anywhere else in the town.

  And never had there been a boy as quiet, obedient, and spotless as Enrique, who lived perpetually by his mother’s side, wound tightly and neat, like the collection of spools and bobbins kept in the small felt box in the middle shelf of her bedroom closet. The world had expectations, and now, she did too. A small smudge, a playful squeal, an unsanctioned foot out onto the patio, a momentary resistance: any of it could trigger Rosario’s New World wrath.

  In a few short years, Rosario had been rewired, her limbic system reprogrammed, her viscera by turns inflamed, contorted, and shrunken. Whomever she’d been when she’d landed and unpacked her two green leather suitcases, before traipsing through the city with the camera her father had given her at the airport—Para que yo también pueda ver todo lo que ves—she was no longer that person. And there was little proof—the camera had been stolen from her in a park—that she had ever existed as anything other than the self she had become. By her midtwenties, less than a decade after her arrival in this country, Rosario had a husband, a son, a house, an ulcer, two ovarian cysts, and two miscarriages. But her home was clean, and Enrique quiet.

  * * *

  Rosario and Álvaro had been trying for over a year to get pregnant when Andrés was conceived. He was born six weeks premature and at a low birth weight on the two-year anniversary of the house’s completion. “The early ones are smarter,” said an old man to Rosario as she peered through the glass partition and into the room full of pods and bright lights. Because she’d been raised to treat the advice of elders and complete strangers as an almost paranormal communiqué, the old man’s simple words remained with her.

  Two brothers couldn’t have been more dissimilar. While Enrique was portly, Andrés was scrawny. Where Enrique was aimless and taciturn, Andrés was an arrow shortly after its release. Enrique was disinterested in both school and socializing; Andrés longed for Monday mornings, so that he might, once again, be out in the world, surrounded by his peers. The brothers’ differences extended past temperament. They were undeniably cut from the same cloth, but a cloth that was asymmetrical in its design. Enrique was a rich, vibrant brown; Andrés was a duller beige. Andrés had loose, dark curls; Enrique’s hair was tighter, almost kinky, reminiscent of a great-uncle that Rosario recalled only in fragments and of Álvaro’s paternal grandfather, both of whom the boys had only ever met in the top drawer of Rosario’s bedside table—a place of refuge for all of the uncategorizable things: old rubber bands, baby teeth, insurance policies, Social Security cards, dried-up pens, useless pencils, hospital bracelets, bank statements, and bundles of sepia-toned and black-and-white photographs. At times, it seemed that the only common thread between Enrique and Andrés was the cotton-polyester blend in their school uniforms.

  In Rosario’s and Álvaro’s countries, private school was the shortest path to a life worth living, and around here, just as they had been back home, private schools were Catholic schools. Divine intervention, however, came at a nearly insurmountable cost. Each month, the nuns pinned payment slips stamped OVERDUE to Enrique’s and Andrés’s blazers. Each month, Álvaro tucked a post-dated check into Andrés’s backpack and asked him not to bring it to the school office until the final period of the day, guaranteeing that no intrepid nun would have the time to make a deposit before the banks closed.

  No matter how many checks bounced, how often utilities were shut off, how many debtors called, how many coins Rosario pulled from couch cushions and Álvaro picked up from the street, how many cold showers they took in the winter because the boiler had stopped working, how much they sweated in the summer because the thermostat couldn’t go below seventy-seven degrees, how many half lunches they ate, how many consecutive rice-and-bean dinners Rosario prepared, how many times they had to give the car a push in order to get it to run, how many weighty hands or worn belts landed on soft cheeks or tensed backsides, Rosario insisted her boys continue at the school.

  * * *

  When Andrés and Enrique were old enough to walk to the bus stop alone, Rosario bought a navy-blue skirt suit, sheer nylons, and beige-c
olored high heels, and she asked Andrés to help her create a résumé.

  One of Álvaro’s regular customers at the restaurant, a Venezuelans day trader, worked at a large Spanish-based bank in the city, and he offered to put in a good word with human resources.

  Rosario agreed to go to the interview, but she feared what her absence at home might engender. Children left to their own devices would end up lazy or in the hands of the devil. She also felt guilt about her desire to leave, something that she had never uttered aloud. An escape from a domesticated life without trajectory, characterized disproportionately by endless waiting: waiting for her children to wake up, waiting for the washer to complete its cycle, waiting for the water to boil, waiting for her children to come home, waiting for the oven timer to ding, waiting for her children to fall asleep, waiting for her husband to come home. All of it, alone. Rosario wanted her life to have a slope and a pinnacle—nothing overtly lofty, but certainly an ascent. She wanted a career, a desk, a week’s worth of skirt suits, pantsuits, and appropriate but severe heels, a commute, colleagues, and a plaza with a fountain where she might eat her lunch. But at some point, she’d concluded that her life would be lived strictly as a wife and mother. Until suddenly it wasn’t. After her fourth miscarriage, two of which were in the second trimester, Rosario’s doctor told her that her womb was inhospitable.

  Everything, it seemed, was inhospitable.

  Álvaro worked six days a week at the restaurant, and often all three shifts. Even so, it was never enough. There was always another expense. Mortgage, maintenance, tuitions, car insurance, life insurance, homeowner’s insurance, credit cards, remittances for both families, hospital bills from the births and miscarriages, backdoor penicillin, uniforms and school supplies, milk, eggs, beans, rice, meat, cereal, fruit, vegetables, fuel, telephone, electricity, water, cable. Rosario’s salary as a receptionist at the bank proved to be a life-sustaining infusion, until the car broke down or taxes were due or someone had unbearable tooth pain. Whenever they’d scaled the mountain, it seemed that the fog would lift, revealing another summit.