The People Who Report More Stress Page 4

  Truth is, I enjoy getting other people’s kids to leave my house. It’s easy, and I’m good at it. I aim for their fears. I take on a low whisper and a deep stare and tell them their parent is leaving without them. Even for a child who is hell-bent on staying, this is an alarming declaration. This works well with Bobby, who bolts for the front door.

  Alice and I exchange pleasantries while our kids squeeze in a few more seconds of imaginary play. Then, it’s all over.

  From one flight below, Alice calls out to me.

  “Yes?” I responded.

  “Are you going to the PTA meeting tomorrow?”

  I walk back into the hallway. Julio follows and squeezes into a space too small between the railing and me. He resumes waving at Bobby. “I hadn’t planned on it,” I say.

  “You should. We could use more dads.”

  “I’ll see if one of us can,” I respond.

  “Okay. Great.”

  “Bye, Bobby!” Julio screams, frantic and high-pitched, as if his life were in grave danger. It makes me want to squeeze his arm, but I restrain myself and tell him to keep his voice down because we share the building with our neighbors. He makes no sign that he’s heard me. Then he runs inside and hurls himself onto the couch, like an errant cannonball.

  MIDTOWN-WEST SIDE STORY

  VILMA AND HER THREE CHILDREN were in a station wagon, parked illegally on 56th between 7th and 8th Avenues—closer to 7th—waiting for Jorge to finish making the sale. It was June and dark. Eduardo was the only one of the kids still awake. Earlier in the week, he’d convinced Vilma to buy him the new Madonna album—another soundtrack. Vilma hadn’t needed much convincing. She was the type of mother who enjoyed pop music and pleasing her children. They were on their third consecutive listening when Vilma let out a yelp that caused Eduardo to jump. A short, dark silhouette was peering through her window: Dad.

  At times, it seemed that Vilma’s love was a Venn diagram of equally sized and nearly concentric circles: one, affection; the other, exasperation. She rolled her eyes and the window down. Jorge craned his head into the car as if he were something four-legged and gentle in search of nourishment.

  Jorge had already come by twice that night, the first of which was a couple of hours earlier, before the sun had disappeared behind the Art Deco horizon. Vilma had been cleaning out the coffee stains from the cup holder when the three children saw him approach. “¡Mami, ahí viene Papi!”

  “¿Dónde?”

  “There!”

  Vilma reached over to unlock the passenger-side door.

  “¿Se están portando bien?” Jorge asked the children as he stepped inside of the metallic gray trapezoid.

  “Yeah, except for Eduardo. He keeps cheating,” responded Inés, holding a worn white paper napkin that was graffitied in blue ink: an early evening’s worth of Tic-Tac-Toe games.

  “La niña tiene que ir al baño,” said Vilma.

  “Me too!” Marcelo called out from the back seat.

  “Me three!” Eduardo yelled before laughing, as if he’d just discovered the potential of language.

  Jorge encouraged Vilma to also go to the bathroom, knowing well that she wouldn’t. His wife detested public restrooms and drawing attention to herself. A clandestine trip through the lobby of a hotel where she wasn’t a guest would be dreadful.

  “Just get out of the car and stretch your legs, Mom,” Eduardo suggested.

  “¡Estoy bien!”

  Vilma didn’t like to be coddled, especially when she was hungry, and certainly not when she was pregnant. And she was pregnant, almost six months, even if, seated, there was no sign of it. The first three pregnancies had stretched her face, swelled her fingers and toes, and endowed her with the sort of large, albeit painful, breasts that she’d never dreamed for herself. She’d been miserable throughout. This time, the weight gain was primarily in her belly. Vilma’s face remained thin, her skin clear and glistening from the humidity, her hair a thick black thatch somewhere between pompadour and pixie. She was a young mother, and she looked like a young mother.

  Jorge’s face, too, retained the charm and softness it’d had before life had become about survival. The rest of his body, however, was undergoing a premature decay. After years of balancing trays well above his head and hauling fifteen- and twenty-pound bags of clothes between Park and 7th, he’d developed a radiating pain in his back and shoulders, an electricity that had become, rather perversely, one of the few reliable things in his life.

  Vilma swatted the crumbs from her children’s shirts, grooming that transformed into a ritual of aggression when her children were about to be seen by the world. All of it accompanied by grumbling: How disheveled they looked. How embarrassing. What will people think? Vilma took a brush to Inés’s hair, tying back every loose strand, glossy and perfectly black, as if a brand-new vinyl record had been stretched from a racetrack into a straightaway. Tears budded in the child’s eyes, but they remained as still as the rest of her.

  “Don’t be wild. No running or screaming! Quiet all the way to the bathroom,” were Vilma’s parting words.

  “Quiet,” repeated Inés.

  “How quiet?” Eduardo responded cheekily.

  “Like you don’t exist,” Vilma said. “Three little ghosts.”

  “Dale la mano a tu hermana,” Jorge demanded of Marcelo, the protector—pudgy, reticent, and the eldest by only a few years. Eduardo, thin, excitable, and with an eye for mischief, was already hopping up and down, lapping up the freedom of open air. Inés, only seven, was the most confident and obedient of the trio. She held her hand up for Marcelo to grasp.

  The three walked quickly and unevenly toward the hotel, managing, in their way, to exude fearlessness and trepidation at once. Vilma couldn’t bear to look, conflicted by the clash of instincts: to protect them and to protect herself.

  Jorge’s thoughts were elsewhere and traveling at a different speed. He scanned the car doors to make sure they were locked. Then he pulled a long receipt from his wallet. On one side, he’d written a list of names and prices.

  “No, the Bill Blass suits are 175,” Vilma said, as she slipped her hand between Jorge’s back and the cracked upholstery. It was a forceful yet comforting touch.

  “What about the Hickey-Freemans?”

  “Ask for 225, but you can go as low as 200. Those pieces are from last season. The new ones come on Sunday.”

  Jorge scribbled furiously onto the thin, crinkly paper, while simultaneously mouthing Vilma’s instructions to himself. “¿Y los Oscar de la Renta?”

  “Más. 300.”

  “Do you want to go up to the room instead?” he asked. “Ramiro and Cristina don’t trust my advice when it comes to clothes. They prefer you.”

  Vilma shook her head. Ramiro and Cristina, two flight attendants on a layover, were notoriously indecisive, and she had little patience for it that night. “I feel disgusting. I don’t want to be around anyone.”

  “Okay. But before I go up, eat something. A gyro from the deli across the street? El Griego.”

  “Without tomatoes,” she said, her face now changed by the smallest of smiles. “Please.”

  * * *

  The second time that Jorge came down to the car was more than an hour later and only briefly to drop off munitions. He’d brought with him two Styrofoam containers filled with well-appointed burgers—pickles, tomatoes, lettuce, red onions, thick french fries. He’d also handed off the night’s entertainment: a brand-new deck of Spanish cards—oros, espadas, copas, bastos. “Here. ¡Rápido!” He emptied the ketchup packets from his pockets, as if he were bailing water from a sinking ship. “The bellman wasn’t there just now; I want to get back before he does,” he explained. At this hour, the hotel’s lobby was sparse, leaving Jorge without the cover of a crowd. An intrepid employee was capable of anything. Jorge and Vilma were well acquainted with the American array of How can I help you? glares.

  “Ramiro and Cristina are making their final decisions. Should be done soon.
Tonight’s going to be big. Adios,” Jorge whispered before cutting through a small line of sidewalk traffic and into the newly settled darkness.

  For the remainder of the evening, the children did their best to play in the cramped space. Inés held her cards with one hand and used the other to prevent the pick-up pile from sliding behind the belt buckles—the place where crumbs, G.I. Joe limbs, and My Little Pony heads vanished. Over the course of a few hours, Vilma had only to ask them to stop fighting three times. Mami, Eduardo’s cheating! had been the catalyst on each occasion. There was little to separate this evening from any of the others.

  After Marcelo and Inés dozed off, Eduardo climbed the two hard-vinyl hills into the front. Madonna had been singing for well over an hour, in part because Vilma repeatedly interrupted.

  Stop > Rewind > Stop > Play > Stop > Rewind a bit more > Stop > Play > top > Fast forward a smidge > Stop > Play.

  Even as a young girl in San Salvador, Vilma had been a devoted fan of American and British music—the Beatles, Stones, Doors—even if she hadn’t always sung the correct lyrics or known what she was singing. Minor errors here and there. And who cared? No one else knew what she was singing anyway. But now she was preoccupied with speaking the language perfectly. She utilized her children and Top 40 radio. Who better to assist her than those very creatures who ridiculed—sometimes in front of other adults—her grammar and pronunciation? They were unwitting ESL instructors at the peak of their training, steeped in the esoteric rules of this most arbitrary of Western languages—Who or whom? Had or had had? Use to or used to?

  “ ‘Soon-er or la-ter you are go-ing to be mine.’ ” Vilma repeated the syllables while jotting the Sondheim lyrics onto a receipt for the antiacid she’d bought that morning.

  “No, Mom. It’s ‘you’re,’ a contraction.”

  “But that is informal for writing.”

  “Everyone learns contractions in school, but we’re never supposed to use them in our homework. Later, it’s okay to use them when you’re older.”

  “Who told you that?”

  “Sister Donna.”

  Vilma erased with care as she flatened the crinkly paper across the dashboard. “Okay. ‘You’re.’ ”

  “And it’s not ‘going to be mine.’ It’s ‘gonna be mine.’ ”

  “That is just bad English.”

  “It’s a song.”

  “It does not matter. If she sings ‘going to,’ it would not change the song.”

  “Yeah, but if she sang ‘you are’ and ‘going to,’ it would be harder to sing that line.”

  “Okay. How about the next one? ‘Ba-by it’s time that you face it. I al-ways get my man.’ ”

  “Almost. It’s past tense: ‘faced.’ ”

  “Why? She is telling him to do something now, not in the past. It should be face.”

  “That’s true. I don’t know why.”

  “I wonder, could it be a mistake?” Vilma asked.

  “Maybe.”

  “¡Ayyyy!” she screamed. The dark silhouette appeared behind the glass. It took a moment for Vilma to recognize Jorge. “Don’t do that! You scared me!” she said, as he leaned into the car to kiss her.

  “Dad!”

  “Shhh!”

  “But Mom yelled too!”

  “Don’t be fresh.”

  “¿Cómo te fue?” Vilma asked.

  Jorge tipped his head a few degrees to one side before exhaling with force. Then he dug his hand inside the car to pop the trunk.

  Eduardo regarded the narrow eyes, accordion brow, and vanishing lips of his father’s face. It hadn’t gone well. He hadn’t sold enough.

  “Dos blusas,” Jorge said. “¡Miércoles!”

  Two blouses after nearly three hours. An evening of finagling and hoping, only for it to end with a mercurial coda. Their clients’ sudden change of mind would alter the mood of the family for an entire week, possibly two.

  The children would be wise to remain quiet. Better not to be the source of any problems on the way home. Definitely not the night to suggest a slice of pizza. Or to request a bathroom stop. Their father, although typically a tired sort of affable, could ignite after a night like this one—a werewolf for whom financial precarity was a full moon. Two cans of Löwenbräu while zoning out on short skirts and fútbol highlights was what Jorge needed, but only after one of Vilma’s pep talks. The one that began with “Don’t worry.” The one that was sprinkled with quick and hopeful math. The one that ended with “¡Sí puedes! We can do this, mi amor!” and kissing his face all over, which then typically led to one of the children saying something like “Eww. Get a room!” which, in turn, elicited a chuckle from Jorge.

  But first they had to survive the trip home.

  Eduardo woke the others. They would take turns eyeing the road and squeezing their father’s arm if the car drifted toward the highway median or if another car swerved too close: their contribution to the family business.

  * * *

  From a map, Vilma and Jorge had chosen the all-white suburban town where they lived—a quaint, three-bedroom house in a gated retirement community that had been advertised in the back of a newspaper. They’d wanted to escape the bustle and crime of the city, but not so far they couldn’t commute back to serve food and sell clothes. Evening trips to Manhattan happened four or five times per week. The kids would be home from school by three-thirty. Dinner was on the table by four. In the car by five, and in the city by six. Sometimes Jorge couldn’t get out of his dinner shift in time to join the traveling bazaar, leaving Vilma with no choice but to entrust the children to Jorge’s cousin in Queens, something she preferred not to do. Úrsula smoked cigarettes—¡Todo el santo día! Then she’d empty a bottle of air freshener, somehow creating an odor more intolerable than the cigarettes. There was also Tía Beti, a family friend who the kids loved because of her lax dietary restrictions—Twinkies, marshmallows, colorful cereal, chocolate milk—which Vilma suspected were the roots of Marcelo’s tinted molar and Eduardo’s stomachaches. But Beti had a thing for bourbon, which always left Vilma uneasy. When neither Úrsula nor Beti were available, Vilma sold the clothes by herself and left the kids in the car alone.

  The very business of fencing designer clothes had begun a decade earlier, at the restaurant where Jorge worked—an upmarket French place, tucked obscurely at the base of a skyscraper—where it wasn’t uncommon for a few weathered paparazzi to be parked outside, drinking coffee and smoking, doing their best to fade into the drab grandeur of Midtown, east of 5th Avenue. The restaurant’s profile brought out the moneyed set, the glamorous ones, and the pretenders. And because airline employees in the 1980s and 1990s retained the sheen of celebrity they’d had in the 1950s and 1960s, when air travel was for the well off, uniformed pilots and flight attendants dined there as well. It became a usual haunt for the flight crews of British Airways, KLM, EgyptAir, Alitalia, and Aeroméxico.

  Despite being the only short server with a thick accent at the restaurant, Jorge maintained the air of someone who might have done more if he’d had more opportunities. He was gregarious and confident beyond what his colleagues and customers expected. His charm, along with the Park Avenue menu prices, made the restaurant work lucrative enough for down payments (home, car, vacuum cleaner, stove), but somehow insufficient to keep up with the month-to-month that followed. So when Aníbal, a thirty-five-year-old busboy from Colombia, introduced him to a fellow compatriot, who worked as a distributor of high-end clothing, Jorge seized the opportunity.

  “I’ll get you the best designers. Wholesale prices. You mark it up a little, but still less than what they pay in the stores. Even the rich ones won’t pass up a discount,” explained the twenty-something purveyor, who everyone called El Flaco. Although thin, his presence, too, was outsized. He had a frenetic energy, accompanied by a perpetual shrug and the artful gesticulations of a haggler. He wore a coiffed, handlebar mustache and a drop-silver earring in the shape of a padlock in his right ear.

  “Why not
sell it yourself?” Jorge asked.

  “The guy who gave me a start sensed that I’d be good at this. I sense that in you. Plus, the volume is too much—You in or out?” El Flaco extended his hand toward the endless rows of clothing racks and circular stands that filled the green-carpet basement in Hoboken.

  “Where does it all comes from?” Jorge had promised Vilma he wouldn’t get involved if the clothes were stolen.

  “Some I buy from another distributor. And some, well, just shows up on my doorstep, leftovers—In or out?”

  Jorge bought a dozen to start—six dresses, three skirt suits, three pantsuits—which he sold easily to coworkers, friends, and their one friendly neighbor—a retired postal worker who needed a suit for his granddaughter’s college graduation. The next dozen he sold to some of the restaurant’s regulars, whom Jorge would size up surreptitiously during their meals, while taking orders, dropping off appetizers and main courses, carefully interjecting the names of designers into their small talk, always attentive to the clothes his customers were wearing. The coup de grace typically came during the pie a la mode or the crème brulee, when he would let the table or the most fashion-conscious member of the group know that he could help them find alternatives to the city’s prices.

  A stopover in New York for a flight crew might only be twenty-four hours, sometimes twelve, seldom long enough to sightsee and shop. Jorge provided an effortless solution to a problem they didn’t even know they had. The pilots and flight attendants could gallivant about the city and have the latest fashions brought to their hotel rooms on their own schedules.

  The 1980s were an orgy of deregulation for the Gordon Gekkos, but Ronald Reagan wasn’t entirely wrong: some of the spoils made it to the bottom. It was less a trickle than the thump, scrape, and cacophonous clanks of clothing racks falling off of trucks.

  In the first ten years of trafficking designer clothes, Vilma and Jorge came to know several distributors and owed each of them a substantial sum of money, which they paid off just in time to put the next season’s fashion lines on credit. The scheme proved exhausting, whether business was brisk or stale. When the clothes sold quickly, the previous twenty years of their lives were somehow validated; when they didn’t, the tension and regret took over. Every night ended with the same lament: “Dios mío, what are we doing?”