Prize Pages

doused Annie’s home, and although I didn’t see the fi re, I never did see Annie again.

Kids didn’t stay in the trailer park long; they were always moving to another state, like Minnesota, to live with their grandma or dad. Sometimes they’d come back, say it didn’t work out. My home stayed the same—two parents and two little girls, dinners around the table, long summer evenings on the swing set while Mom and Dad watched from deck chairs. At night, alone in bed, I’d think about fi re, how it could snatch my happy world with one lick, and I’d pray feverish prayers until the panic burned away and I fell asleep.

There’s a cardboard box in my basement containing some old photographs. This morning, I went down to check a mousetrap and after, with a similar uneasiness, I opened the box. In one photo, I smile broadly as the man I was married to for over twenty years holds our daughter. They smile, too; she bites her lower lip. There’s a part of me that wants to throw out the photo, but how do you forge fully ahead when a residual heaviness pulls you back, even if it’s to a life you no longer want?

I’m in my mid-fi fties, of a generation of women who started to believe we could be anything we wanted. But messages were mixed. Speak up but not too often. Be confi dent but not too sure of yourself. I don’t remember ever being taught it was okay to have my own needs. My mother grew up in poverty, the child of immigrants. She lived in a tenement on the Lower East Side of New York City, and her own mother died at a young age.

“Quit your bellyaching,” she often told me. “Make it work.”

So that’s what I did. Until I didn’t want to anymore.

I’m still not sure what to do with that old photograph of my ex-husband and me. My grown daughters have their own family photos and memories. My marriage helped shape me into the person I am today, so maybe that’s why I hold on to it. Or maybe I know even if I throw out the photo, the shadow of that other life will follow me anyway.

By our senior year in high school, my friend Adele and I had pretty much had it with the rank cafeteria food. We were looking for something a little more outof-the-ordinary. There was a Chinese restaurant, the Ni Hao, located in a strip mall beyond the school parking lot and a busy street. Although ours was a closed campus, Adele and I decided that a decent meal was worth the risk, and went there for lunch at least one a week.

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I had a blank permission slip, signed by my English teacher, Mr. Corey, that I’d found on his classroom floor. I hoped it would serve as a pass to present to the authorities in case we were caught.

One day as we were coming back, the campus “police”—basically moms in cop uniforms, but fierce nonetheless—asked us where we’d been. I showed them my pass from Mr. Corey, which they didn’t believe was real for one minute. They led us back into school where a bemused Mr. Corey told them he hadn’t authorized anything. The housemaster suspended us for leaving campus without a legitimate permission slip and called our mothers to come pick us up.

I don’t know about Adele’s mom, but my own was furious that the school would suspend me for such a stupid infraction, although I think she really just objected to having her day interrupted. Mr. Corey took my forged slip in stride in that kind, absent way he had, as he did the afternoon when our humanities class read aloud The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock and made the argument that it was really about him.

“Best chile relleno I ever had,” my friend said yesterday. She couldn’t resist a warm packet of temptation o ered by a woman in a striped rebozo and huaraches at one of the pueblos along the tracks. I’d been living on oranges and Dos Equis since we pulled out of Tijuana two days ago.

This morning, her eyes glassy, I take her clammy hand and guide her to a pair of seats under the only cold-air vent in our second-class train car. I lean my sweaty forehead on the grimy window, watch the rocky, creosote-gnarled hills of the Sonoran Desert flow by, and picture the fir trees on my university campus. What am I doing in this furnace on wheels?

For three years I have hammered away at vocabulary lists, chanted verb conjugations with every stroke of my bike pedals, and forced my dictionaries flat until their backs broke, dreaming of the day I’d coax, complain, chastise and comfort in the language of Lorca. Verde que te quiero verde. But when I opened my mouth my face would redden, my stomach twist, and I would stare at my shoes, silent, afraid I’d warp my beloved Spanish with my blunt gringa breath.

She’s in the bathroom, again, and a man is about to sit next to me. I bring my hand down on the seat, look up, and say, way too loudly, “Está ocupado.” It’s taken. Struck like a new coin, in a single blow. He smiles and steps back.

That evening, on the platform between cars, I take a long drag on a short, dry Mexican cigarette. Scattered maguey cactus point tall, blue-green spikes to the sky. The sun burns like a low gas flame behind the hills.

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