The Lost Language

DUMPSTER

DUMPSTER

Edgar wanted me to help him get rid of a hand. When he showed it to me, I had a hard time believing it was real. It was stiff and bloodless. The

upraised palm had the tattoo of a pentagon in what must have once been dark blue ink. I thought the fingers might belong to a woman. When I closed my eyes, I could see her: dark hair framing her

face in a loose Afro; full red lips.

“I found it in the dumpster,” he said, shrugging and smiling, mocking me with those thin lips of his, those white teeth.

“Oh really,” I said. I didn’t want to show him how I truly felt. Disgust, I thought, would not help me in this situation. Better to play it cool, very cool.

Edgar was still watching me. I felt anger, then. He wasn’t my boyfriend. He wasn’t my brother He was a kid. A MALE kid, it was true, and there he had something over me.

I felt helpless and hopeless about everything that summer. It was as though my nerves were rubbed raw, I was always expecting something to happen. Maybe it was the constant yelling I woke to in

the morning, mom’s puffy face.

Now this. I couldn’t have smacked him, even if I’d wanted to. All I could do was stare down at the awful thing and watch Edgar prodding it with a pole he had picked up from

somewhere.

“Shouldn’t we call the police?” I asked.

Edgar shook his head, grinning now.

“Let’s keep it,” he said. “Here, with the rest of our stash.”

It wasn’t technically “our” stash -the empty liquor bottles he collected from the rich neighborhoods’ recycling bins. Why he collected them, I never knew. Every other

Monday night he would go prowling with a big plastic bag, always a different neighborhood. Every so often, he would line up the bottles in front of the Dumpster and read aloud from the labels:

Talisker, Macallan, Skyy (which he pronounced Ska-yee), Grand Marnier (Mariner, to Edgar).

Once a big black dog chased him and took a bite out of the seat of his pants. He had an ugly three-inch scar on his left buttock from that night. “Wanta see?” he asked me one day,

and before I could even answer he’d turned around and pulled down his pants. And I saw this: one partially exposed butt-cheek, white and deadlooking in the cold air, and a jagged s***h of

puffy pink flesh running diagonally across it.

I turned my head away.

Look, I felt like saying. It’s a woman’s hand, all right? She was probably murdered would anyone give up a hand just like that? And the rest of her is scattered in dumpsters

all over Baltimore…

Why am I here? I would think, for what seemed like the nth time that summer.

TWO YEARS ago was when we left. Mom’s cousin Nonong said things would be good here. They weren’t. He said he’d get Dad a good job: Dad worked as a night

watchman at a furniture factory. And the fights with Mom didn’t stop. If anything, they became even worse.

Once dad even hit my sister Mona. He said she’d been turning into a b***h. He actually used that word. It hung in the air, preserved in our silence, our shock. Somehow, in the last year,

my big sister had developed a mouth. Along with her new black clothes and black lipstick, it was scary. I didn’t know what to do, with a sister like that.

I didn’t know what to do, either, with a dad who used words like “bitch.” Or with a mom who cried all the time, who woke up with red eyes and a puffy face, whose hair was

turning grey, who didn’t bother to dress or put make-up the way she did in the Philippines.

I began wearing baggy shirts, to hide my growing breasts. I hid around street corners when the boys from the neighborhood came looking for me. They’d pinch and I’d try to slap their

hands away but they’d laugh until I gave in. Edgar was the only one who’d kept his hands clear. And now this. I didn’t know what to do. It was worse than being slapped.

“You don’t want to tell anyone?” I said. “What if what if someone’s looking for her…”

“No one’s looking for her, yo? It’s some ho who got offed by her john, get it? She was probably high all the time…”

His clear brown eyes had a cast. They’d gone dark, the pupils like large, still pools.

Edgar! I felt like calling out. Don’t leave me. Whatever you do, don’t leave me.

And, really, it was that important to me. To hang on to someone anyone—in any shape or form. If I had had a dog, I might have abandoned Edgar. If I had had a goldfish, even. But, at home,

there was only the cold kitchen smelling faintly of garlic, and the sad-looking bedrooms with our clothes scattered over the desks and chairs. Mom had lost any interest in fixing up. She was trying

to get a job. To do that, she had to improve her English. She spent her days poring over an English composition book that Rita, Uncle Nonong’s eldest child, had lent her. She listened to CNN

and knew more about the war in Iraq than anybody. I could see her sometimes, mouthing words silently to herself: jihad, terrorist, extremist. I wanted to tell her, it’s not just the words,

mom. It’s the look on your face when you go up to talk to someone in a*****e. The look on your face says: be kind. Almost no one is kind to someone who approaches them with that look. You

might as well be saying, kick me.

But of course I say nothing of this to my mom, who is sad here and completely defeated, in a way that I could never have imagined she would be.

You know the real reason we left Manila? Because my dad had a girlfriend. He spent almost every night with her, and when his side of the family found out, they made his oldest brother sit down

with him and tell him: either leave the girlfriend, or don’t consider yourself one of the family anymore. Dad knew he didn’t have a choice, because we depended on family funds to get us

by he hadn’t had a steady job in years. And mom was working hard, but on a teacher’s salary she made almost nothing. So dad did try. We saw him at home most evenings, sitting on the

couch and looking unhappy. Then one day, I came home from school and there were shards of glass on the floor, mom was yelling. I had a terrible feeling in the pit of my stomach, I felt like I was

going to throw up.

I saw dad’s face, red and raw was it from tears? and mom’s face twisted and angry, and I heard her words, sharp and wounding.

The next week, she told Mona and me: “We have to leave. It’s no good here. We have to get a fresh start.”

Because dad was still in love with his girlfriend, and no matter how hard he tried not to see her, he kept wanting to be with her. And mom couldn’t stand it anymore. Her solution was to

bundle us all off to America, to the city where her cousin Nonong lived, to Baltimore.

And for a long time months that felt like years all anyone in my family could talk about was Baltimore, Baltimore, Baltimore. I looked it up in an atlas and saw that it was next to the sea. That

around it were clustered many other towns and cities. I felt a little hope.

Uncle Nonong wrote that yes, things were good here. You could earn hundreds of dollars a day, and in no time you’d be able to afford at least a second-hand car. And the food in the

supermarkets was cheap, and we could all live much more cheaply than in Manila, and best of all there would be no more meddling from relatives, it would be just the four of us, on our own. Sink

or swim, I thought to myself, but I didn’t say this aloud.

And of course we had to come in the winter, when the streets were dark and cold, and all I could see, with eyes bleary with homesickness, was the trash blowing around in the street. Bits

of paper, floating in the air like ghosts.

And we came to this ugly brick building with tall iron ladders on the side that could be raised and lowered from the street, and there was an old smelly man lying on the doorstep, and he looked

at us with red, angry eyes and yelled something, and even though my English wasn’t very good then I knew that it was something bad, unrepeatable, a curse. We were cursed, from the very first

moment we walked through the hallway into our new home.

So that’s our story. My story, that is. And I haven’t even touched on junior high yet. And sometimes I feel so hopeless, looking at the kids crowding the halls in their puffy

jackets and scruffy jeans, their closed-in faces, that I think I will never survive this. I will never survive this. And I need Edgar, I know he’s a jerk but I need him.

UNCLE NONONG comes by from time to time. I hear him talking to Mom: have you tried? Really tried? All she can say, over and over, is “I’m tired. So

tired.”

She hasn’t said it, but I know she wants to: I want to go home. I hold my breath. I want her to say it so badly that I squeeze the air in my lungs and try to keep it from going out and I

think: if she says it, I’ll never speak to Edgar again. I promise you, Ma, I’ll be good.

But she doesn’t say it. Always she ends with some kind of gesture, a hand waving in the air. Uncle Nonong stands to go. He gives me a hug. He always smells of cigarettes. He will sometimes

bring us food, packs of ground meat or chicken from Costco. He’ll leave the food on the kitchen table, and we all try not to look. But really, I am thinking: how sad is that? If it were not

for the food that Uncle Nonong brings us, we would not have meat, we would probably starve.

And the thought of starving, here, in America, seems so awful that I panic again and think I am going to faint or throw up— one of the two, it doesn’t matter which. Mom only touches

the food after a long, long while. We both can’t bear to look at each other.

Eventually, I’ll go to my room, and when I come back out, the meat’s disappeared. I know she’ll have stacked the packages in the freezer, and later, when I check, they’re

there, neatly piled on top of one another.

Edgar forces me to take a swig from his beer (filched from his older brother, Erik) and then he says, “I have an idea.”

The hand is sitting right there on the ground between us. In the last few days, it’s changed. The fingers seem stiffer and fatter, and it’s harder now to make out the pentagram on

the inner palm. But it doesn’t have a smell, which I thank God for, because if it did Edgar might think of something to make me put my face up close to it, and I wouldn’t like that at

all. My first response, in times of stress, is to throw up. So far I’ve managed to avoid doing that in front of Edgar, but one day I know it’ll happen.

“Let’s feed it to Martina,” he says.

Martina is the Cuevas’ guard dog. She’s big and black and mean. She almost could be a German Shepherd, but her head’s too square. Her eyes aren’t like those of any German

Shepherd I’ve ever seen they’re opaque, like little black marbles. And so still. When I pass the Cuevas’ house on my way to school, Martina is sitting on the front step, watching

me alertly. I imagine her bounding forward, catching the hood of my parka in her sharp teeth.

Most dogs would turn up their noses at this dead, pathetic hand. But not Martina. I have seen her worrying dead squirrels for days, in the front yard of the Cuevas house. When she catches me

looking, she raises her bloody snout and growls a deep, low rumble, from somewhere cavernous inside her. I know she will tear the hand apart.

We wrap the hand in some kind of plastic. Edgar dangles it gingerly and we set off, taking shortcuts through back streets. It’s getting dark now and I can see through the lighted windows

of the neighbors’ houses. We pass a building where one of my classmates, Carla, lives. I know her mother’s apartment is up on the 10th floor. Carla has the most gorgeous red fingernails

and toenails, and the boys like her because she “developed early” and you can clearly see her n*****s through her one-size-too-small T-shirts.

She’s sweet, though. She never cusses at me when I trip against her in the cafeteria or in gym. I imagine her in her bedroom, one foot propped up on the edge of her bed, lips pressed

together in concentration as she applies Lover Heart Red to her toenails.

Then we’re past her building and in a few minutes we’re at our street. The streetlights are on but there are shadows everywhere. I shiver.

Martina’s in the backyard, lying on her side. Perhaps she’s been sleeping, but as we move closer she lifts her head and begins to sniff the air expectantly. We stand on our tiptoes

and look over the fence at her for a few moments. She sees us soon enough and comes trotting over. I can see the hair standing stiff at the back of her neck. She utters a few warning growls.

Edgar makes a clucking noise in his throat and throws a stick over the fence. Martina catches it effortlessly in her powerful jaws.

Without warning, Edgar heaves the plastic bag and the hand falls out. It lands with a thud on the ground almost directly in front of Martina. She sniffs at it and pushes it around with her nose.

Then she takes an exploratory bite.

My hands clutch my chest.

Martina is furiously chomping now. Her paws are planted in the dirt and her teeth rip and tear. I see long strings of saliva oozing from the sides of her mouth. I think I see fingers coming off

but I can’t be sure in the gathering darkness. The dog’s panting is like a howling in my head.

Mr. Cuevas appears on the back porch. He is wearing furry slippers, pajamas, and a dark parka. I almost giggle. He looks around the yard, scowling.

“Whatcha got there, girl?” he croons, spying Martina. She growls at him and plants her paws protectively on either side of the hand.

“Whatcha got there?” he repeats, coming closer.

My heart is pounding so loud now that I’m sure Edgar or even Mr. Cuevas can hear it. I bite my fingers hard to stop from shaking.

Mr. Cuevas is bending down. He frowns. Suddenly, he yells, “Scat!” Martina doesn’t move and he plants a hard kick on her side. She rises and for one minute I think she will

jump at him. But she doesn’t. Like a cowed bully, she plants her tail between her legs and slinks to the side.

Mr. Cuevas is on all four nows, oblivious to the dirt and the mud on his pajamas. Suddenly, he starts, falls backwards.

“Oh my God,” he says. “Oh my God.”

He starts yelling for his wife. “Kelly!” he shouts. “Kelly! Call 9-1-1!”

Mr. Cuevas is running back and forth in the yard, flapping his arms up and down and bellowing. “Damn neighborhood kids!” he yells. “Damn fuckin’ kids!”

Mrs. Cuevas yells from inside the house. “What do you want?” she says. “Stop making such noise!”

Edgar is holding his sides, laughing, but I start to sob. I’m not sure whether it’s from fear or sadness. Edgar hits me hard on the side of the face. I bite my lip so hard it starts

to bleed.

“Stop!” he hisses fiercely at me.

But it’s no use. I’m too far gone. There’s a wetness down my legs and I know with awful certainty that I’ve peed.

I look up at Edgar, but his face is a mask. I read nothing in his eyes, only hatred.

“Stop!” he hits me again. This time it really hurts. My teeth jar in my head. “Stop, or I’ll friggin’ make you stop−” •