Pupusa
A couple little stories, plus a NYC reading this week
An announcement for New Yorkers: I’m reading this Wednesday at the Brooklyn Center for Theater Research, in Greenpoint, to support the launch of the third issue of Serpent Club Press, the magazine publishing my latest short story, “Greyhound.” The excerpt I’ll be reading is fun, plus you’ll get to hear from a gaggle of talented and interesting writers doing their thing. If you’re around Wednesday, come hang out! 7:30pm in Greenpoint. Tickets and additional info here.
In the meantime, I came across a few snippets I wrote a couple years ago, in El Salvador, which I’ve revived from the dead for your pleasure. Enjoy, and have a great week.
“Do you know what she was talking about? The acidity of the beans?”
I stop dead in my tracks. It’s twenty minutes after I last saw the man, and I had forgotten about him, in the way you forget about marginal characters like Johnny, the ones who abruptly disappear for hours at a time and then inexplicably return with four small styrofoam containers after long, wordless, gesticulating conversations with local maids over cans of pinto beans.
“No, man. Sorry about that.”
He inspects me, up and down, then grins. “No worries, bro.”
It’s three o’clock in El Tunco, and I am still stuffed from breakfast.
* * * * *
I’m watching Johnny swaying in the kitchen and trying not to let Esteban get away with another bogus Sorry turn—he’s “counting in his head,” he tells me, which is, apparently, meant to explain why he’s skipped the first two spots every time he moves his piece—when I suddenly wonder about Johnny and me. About the paths each of us took which ended with us in the same room, me playing Sorry with a six year old and him in the kitchen chopping jalapeños for himself and the girl he had moaning in his room half an hour earlier. What would Esteban and Johnny talk about if they played Sorry together? I don’t know anything about Esteban or Johnny, except, I guess, for the former’s Sorry prowess, but I sense innately that it would be impossible for either of the two to initiate a conversation with the other. They have shared a tight physical space for over an hour, and Johnny has stayed here for many days, yet I cannot imagine them interacting.
This thought doesn’t make me feel superior or selfless or like a good samaritan, pretending to be into a board game on a waveless afternoon to appease the child whose mom owns the youth hostel. It makes me jealous. Of their total autonomy; Johnny is chopping peppers and humming Marley like he’s on Pluto, and Esteban is immersed in his counting, and that’s what they’re doing, and though they’re a few feet apart they don’t care about, or even feel the need to acknowledge, the presence of the other.
I’m in the middle of convincing Esteban to adjust the way we’ve been using the Sorry card for the last half hour—he plays that whenever you pull a Sorry card, you just move the opponent’s piece back to their home base, and I’ve realized that playing this way makes it mathematically impossible for the game to end—when I see Johnny turn around from kitchen, where he’s consolidated all his ingredients into a pot, and squint in my direction. He looks back down at his food, gives it a stir, then moves his hand up to his mouth to lick off its contents before stopping, giving his fingers a sniff, and wiping his hand onto the side of his striped swim trunks instead. He tiptoes towards me, rerouting himself a foot or two further than he needs to to evade Esteban’s chair, and makes an announcement.
Through bleary eyes, he tells me he’s leaving his food on the stove. Just to keep it warm. And that he’ll be right back. But if I need to cook anything, for any reason, while he’s gone, to clear his stuff and go for it. He doesn’t wait for me to respond before strutting off, gingerly opening the front gate, and forgetting—perhaps too generous a term—to close it behind him.
* * * * *
I have no intention of cooking. At ten that morning, I had ordered a three dollar breakfast from a shack down the street, with eggs and toast and rice and beans, and, assuming based on the price that it wouldn’t be enough food, ordered three pupusas—one cheese, one spinach, and one garlic—to come with it. The cook, ten minutes after the waitress took my order, waddled over to my folding table, dipped her chin and raised her eyebrows in a way which, I registered a few crucial moments later, expressed great concern.
“Las pupusas para llevar?” she asked, her pitch soaring on the last syllable past that unmistakable point where curiosity ends and judgement begins.
No, no, I told her confidently, the pressure cooker of the interaction suddenly cranked all the way up, forcing me to respond before I’d had time to consider the significance of the unusual tone in her voice. No. I wanted to eat the pupusas with my food, not take them to go.
“Hm,” she muttered, rolling her eyes up in their sockets a notch, as if considering how to proceed. She walked back to the kitchen.
It wasn’t until she had taken a step or two away from me that I processed all of this, and realized that the body language the cook had displayed towards me is never the sort of body language you want to see from somebody in charge of making your pupusas. But it was too late to do anything, so I spent the next ten minutes replaying the conversation in my head, finding ways to subtly improve my Spanish responses to her questions with each playback, muttering to myself, sitting alone at a folding table in El Tunco, terrified of the possibilities soon to emerge from the kitchen.
Finally, the kitchen door swung open, my eggs on the way, but I was more interested in what I glimpsed in the background: the pupusa station, where, very briefly but very clearly, I could see three rows of three pupusas bubbling on the grill.
At the precise moment the waitress slid my eggs and rice and beans down on the blue checkered tablecloth in front of me, the significance of this image, combined with the cook’s tone, thundered down on me. Nothing was confirmed—the dough was still on the grill—but I was positive nonetheless: the pupusas came in orders of three. I had ordered nine pupusas, and I’d already rejected the option to take them to go.