hat. Carlos often made life convenient for his wife, dropping her off in front of their apartment, after which he drove three subway-stops away to dump the Highlander in their garage just west of Lincoln Center. She texted him they needed whole milk for tomorrow’s coffee. Carlos walked home, not really wanting to get there quickly, unless he was more exhausted than he was. Tomorrow he would prepare for his classes and finish that research paper on Zapata in the stacks of Butler. At home Sarah would be talking to Jonathan or Ethan, if they were around, and getting dinner ready. He would be just like an invisible father-butler, in the way, trying to find a Yankees game on TV, feeling that distant look in Sarah’s eyes every time she walked into their bedroom. Why are we even together anymore? Why isn’t she more affectionate? Why does she torture me like that? She got everything she wanted. And now she hates me? It’s never enough. But why am I blaming her? Maybe there’s a problem with me.
Carlos hated himself for wasting time with these thoughts as he walked north on Broadway to stretch his legs. It was a gorgeous October day in Manhattan. He had forced her to work, when young Sarah would have been quite happy as a stay-at-home mom. That’s what love did: it warped them into different selves. His schedule was much more flexible than hers, which she had never stopped resenting. For her, weekends became sacrosanct time to be with Jonathan and Ethan. Carlos thought they should already have learned to be on their own and not be depending on their mother to remind them constantly about college applications, term papers, driving lessons. The Mondscheins were like that: always on top of their children, a family trait they had passed from generation to generation. Can anyone ever escape these cycles of history within a family? Carlos never forgot when he asked Sarah a question at the Newburyport kitchen table years ago, and her mother Nancy, without skipping a beat, answered for her daughter, as if Sarah had not been a New York lawyer but still a teenager in Massachusetts. That’s how it often was in that family. His parents from Juárez loved him, but that meant they pushed him out of the house and encouraged him to take fifteen-mile bike-rides on weekends by himself—as a grade-schooler, through traffic, with only a “God be with you!” at his back. After Carlos had announced to his parents (who didn’t speak much English) that he wanted to apply to colleges in Boston, and after he was accepted to a school he had never visited and in a state he knew nothing about, his father handed him three hundred dollars. “The rest is up to you, Carlos.” The first and only time his parents visited him in college was when he graduated. It was brutal, but also clarifying.
“Excuse me,” Carlos said to Sarah as he worked his way around her in the kitchen to put the milk in the refrigerator. He had waved at eighteen-year-old Ethan on the couch, engrossed in his computer. To interrupt him, Carlos walked over and kissed his son on the forehead. Sarah was chopping a tomato and mozzarella in slices. His younger son Jonathan was nowhere in sight. Carlos had overheard their conversation about Ethan’s “personal essay” for college. This past summer Carlos had driven Ethan and Sarah to a dozen colleges, from Maine to Pennsylvania and back.
“Dinner will be ready in about fifteen minutes.”
“Okay, thank you. Ethan. Ethan—” Carlos said, as soon as his son looked up from the screen. “I’m happy to look at the essay too, when you’re ready. I wrote about my abuelita and how much she had meant to me in El Paso. She had shot and—”
“—killed a man who attempted to rape her during the Revolution. I know. Great story. Thanks, Dad. I’m gonna have Mom look at my essay first, if that’s okay.”
“Of course.” Carlos stared at Sarah for a moment. She hadn’t looked up from her cutting board.
“I’ll show it to you by the end of the week, okay?”
“Yes, of course. Whenever you want. I’ll be ready.”
Later that night, in the semi-darkness still made possible by the micro-blinds in their bedroom, when Sarah reached over perfunctorily to kiss him goodnight, Carlos noted the chill on her lips, noticed they only remained on his cheek a second (never an instant longer), noticed she never pressed her body insistently into his anymore to say, “You’re not tired, are you? What if I…you know…get ready? I miss you.” For months, and then a year, he had initiated their lovemaking until it occurred to him that she didn’t want to make love anymore, that she did it because she had slept with him for decades, but not because she wanted to be with him. There was no great argument. No smashing doors closed. No walking out. No drama at all. Just a cold, friendly kiss that burned on his lips for many minutes after he could hear her softly snoring asleep. Wiping that kiss away in the darkness was always what allowed him to get some rest. Does everybody reach a point in life when you’re dying more than you’re living?
The fall was his favorite time in New York, breezy and cool, with that anticipation of the holidays at the end of the year, that excitement at the beginning of every academic year lingering in the air. At Columbia University, the young women still sunbathed next to the statue of Alma Mater on the steps. In front of Butler Library, a young man in a red t-shirt, with a goatee, leaped miraculously through the air and grabbed a Frisbee and slid on the grass, like an outfielder snagging a fly ball in shallow centerfield in a spectacular play for the Yankees. Carlos had never been that carefree as an undergraduate, never that fit or confident, but he liked seeing those young people. He loved teaching them Mexican history. He imagined them as selves of what he could have been, perhaps how his sons would be in college, without the abject poverty of the border like a boulder strapped to the back of their heads, without the fear of the self that does not belong, without that weakness that distrusts and dismisses its own voice. Sarah had helped him through all of that. He would always be loyal to Sarah in his heart because of her patience with him. If they could just break down these walls between them—after the kids left for college?—then maybe they could thrive again together, maybe they could recapture a new version of their relationship. Was it too late for another metamorphosis?
A student in his seminar on “Major Battles of the Mexican Revolution,” had asked him a series of questions, which preoccupied his mind like fireflies flittering around a porch light.
Carlos flashed his ID to the guard at the library entrance. The guard grinned at him, he knew Carlos well, he recognized him, but Carlos could not help but be formal, a mask he donned to keep anyone from bothering him. Intimidation. It worked.
That inquisitive young woman in his seminar reminded him of Christina Sierra, a girl he had a crush on at Ysleta High School in El Paso. Chocolate brown hair. Black coal eyes. Her skin so clear and pallid that it seemed to shimmer.
Like his seminar student, Christina had also owned a slim and pretty figure. But that’s not why Carlos had “loved” Christina, as much as a chubby, geeky high-school senior can pine for a friend without actually doing anything about it. Plenty of girls from Ysleta High were gorgeous, even voluptuous. Christina wasn’t like that necessarily. Yet she was smart, she was eloquent. She gleefully argued with young Carlos, and he never intimidated her. That was her attraction: Christina Sierra was an aggressive, intelligent, pretty Chicana who was his equal. She wasn’t like his mother, who obeyed his father out of instinct and fear. She wasn’t like many of the other girls at Ysleta High who obsessed about hair and makeup and the stupidities of fashion, or flirted with the jocks, or ass-kissed the popular teachers, or pretended to be rich when no one in Ysleta was really rich. Christina was “modern,” that’s how teenage Carlos had phrased it to himself.
That’s why he went away to college, to find more modern women and men, to become one. That’s why he fell in love with Sarah, a confident college student, and why he still loved her. The young woman in his history seminar possessed that same magical mixture Sarah had: nerve, beauty, intelligence, and youth. Always a remarkable whole.
Carlos thought about the exchange in class earlier that day, the past often the present in his mind.
“Professor Garcia, I understand how Villa’s
