The Trog Girl

“They have a daughter,” shouted Sylvia Perez’s father, “about your age.” He, Sylvia, and her mother were touching up the little in-law apartment below their house and behind the garage before the new tenants arrived. Sylvia washed countertops. Her mother scrubbed the sink. Her father stretched a vacuum cleaner hose into high corners to inhale cobwebs and their cellar spider occupants. “And a son a few years younger, and another maybe five.”

Sylvia, too, shouted over the machine. “We were going to leave it empty, I thought. Didn’t go good last time.”

His bass laugh overpowered the noise. “Your Uncle Miguel says the father’s one of the best employees in his kitchens, a guy he wants to cultivate.” He switched off the machine to continue. “The family has to move because their landlord wants to give his grandmother their place, or so he claims. Miguel worries this might push them out of the City and he’ll lose the guy. He swears they’re quiet and sweet. The mother works, too, cleans houses days, offices nights. The daughter picks up her brothers from after-school care and takes them home on the bus to feed and get to bed.” He flicked the switch on. “Too busy for trouble,” he shouted.

Her mother did not attempt to argue this over the noise but shook her head.

The family arrived that Saturday in two loads of an old Ford pickup with scrapyard doors and hood in different colors from each other and from the cab and bed. In each load yellow polyethylene rope lashed furniture and the black plastic trash bags of their smaller belongings into a high intricate pile. In the first load’s cab the driver brought a woman and boy. Sylvia’s guess of the boy’s age did not make him old enough for the work she saw him perform helping the man unload furniture onto a carpet-topped moving dolly and steer it into the garage. The man drove away alone in the empty truck.

When she passed the door in the kitchen to the garage stair Sylvia heard the voices of the woman and boy below and distinguished no words, but an unfamiliar rhythm and melody of speech.

From the second truckload’s cab came a girl – the daughter her age, Sylvia surmised – and younger boy. Again the older boy helped unload. The girl joined in. The younger boy skipped in and out of the garage.

Sylvia’s father arrived in one of his company’s pickups during this second unloading. Watching with Sylvia from a window upstairs, he explained that he had to be back at a jobsite soon; concrete was booked for the next morning, and though he trusted his foreman he wanted to be there to authorize any overtime needed to meet City inspector demands. “But I wanted to see how it’s going here,” he told Sylvia as the family’s possessions paraded across the sidewalk below.

“Is that thing,” Sylvia growled, pointing to the emptying pickup in junkyard parti-color, “going to be parked out front every day?”

Through her eye’s corner she saw her father stare at her. “They’re borrowing it for the day,” he said, his bass quiet. “They don’t have a truck or car themselves.”

The moving dolly caught on something and its load pivoted. The man and older boy raised voices as they struggled with it. Sylvia heard again the unfamiliar rhythm and melody. “That’s not Spanish,” she said.

“Mixteco,” said her father.

“Where’s that from?”

His laugh, uncontested by a machine, vibrated the room. “Same country as your grandparents, but south, not the north.”

Her parents, her grandparents, and most of her family, close or distant, were tall and olive-skinned, and most of the men, her father included, honored a heritage of full black mustaches. From her distance Sylvia saw nothing that said the man below had ever needed to shave, and all his family was brown and small. “I see now how they might squeeze five into a one-bedroom place,” she said.

She saw again her father’s stare.

The pickup was gone when her younger brother Tony returned from playing baseball. “So how are these trogs?” he asked. Having read somewhere of the Troglodytes of Saumur in their cave homes and laughed and laughed, he called “trogs” any tenants of the back-of-garage apartment, on the uphill side of which the house’s concrete foundation was half the wall.

“I can say they’re different,” said Sylvia.

Through the rest of summer they fulfilled Uncle Miguel’s prediction of quiet so thoroughly that away from the stairway door Sylvia was reminded of their presence only when in kitchen or bathroom she heard through the pipes that they ran water. She saw them outside on weekends. Her mother refused them use of the washer and dryer in the garage. Saturday mornings they trooped to a laundromat on Mission Street, mother and daughter pulling folding wire two-wheeled shopping carts overtopped by cloth bags of laundry, father with shoulder into a large rectangular zippered bag woven from red, white, and blue polypropylene straps, oldest boy carrying by handles the bottles of detergent, bleach, and fabric softener, and youngest again skipping freely. Sunday mornings they walked in the same direction. Father and sons wore black trousers carefully creased, black shoes, and white cotton long-sleeved shirts, mother and daughter polyester long-sleeved blouses and dark skirts nearly to their ankles and on their shoulders rebozos against the summer chill of San Francisco fogs. Each but the youngest carried a thick black book trailing ribbons.

Sylvia asked her father at Sunday breakfast, “How are they Mexican and Protestant?”

His laughter rang from cabinets and walls. “It’s just as well,” he said. “Catholics like a party.”

“I’m impressed, myself,” said Tony as he accepted a plate from their mother. “They’re not what we’ve had down there.”

Their mother shook her head. “Trouble wears different costumes. I’m holding my tongue to wait and see.”

When on the August day of return to classes Sylvia descended the terrazzo stairs from front door to sidewalk she encountered the daughter coming out the side door to the garage.

Sylvia did not recall having seen her at Balboa High School the year before, but “Balboa?” the girl asked her.

At Sylvia’s nod the girl walked beside her.

Sylvia had not intended the nod as invitation. “I should know your name at least,” she said. “I’m Sylvia.”

“Núria,” said the girl, so quietly that Sylvia asked her to repeat it.

She did. Their conversation went no further. Sylvia did not attempt her little Spanish. She was uninterested in how much English or Spanish the girl had. Knowing her name was more than enough. The oddness of their pairing reflected in the windows of parked cars and then more fully in Mission Street shop windows irked her. The girl, much shorter than her, wore again the long dark skirt and long-sleeved blouse, and her long black hair was unstyled but for a center part, while Sylvia wore makeup and jeans, short jacket and croptop, and the reflections were sometimes clear enough to show her navel and short brown mass of curls. As reflections accumulated her irritation grew, but she could not bring herself to send the girl from her side.

From just outside the school’s gate Sylvia saw friends at the foot of the stair to the buildings. “Gabi, Sofi,” she called. They waved. She hurried through the gate to them and did not introduce the girl beside her.

Núria walked on wordlessly.

Sylvia to her surprise found no relief in this. She felt instead her failure to introduce Núria taint the chatter to which she’d looked forward much of summer, no matter that Sofi had French-tipped nails to show and Gabi a navel ring, or that it may have been as rude for Núria to walk unasked with her.

Núria was in none of Sylvia’s morning classes. Coming into the courtyard at lunch, Sylvia saw that she had found two girls small and brown like her and likewise in long skirts and long-sleeved blouses. Sylvia recalled neither girl from the two years she’d been already at Balboa, but she decided she could easily have ignored them. Sofi appeared across the courtyard, then Gabi with her. Crossing to them, Sylvia passed close enough to the three girls bending toward each other at a picnic table that she caught despite the courtyard’s noise fragments of their unfamiliar language. To her ear shush-shushes filled it, and oo-oo’s and o-o’s, and nasal sounds like French she had heard. Núria glanced up and raised a hand in greeting.

Sylvia surprised herself with a smile; Núria seemed unwounded.

She was glad, though, not to see her outside the school at class day’s end. By varying morning departures she succeeded in avoiding her all the rest of the week..

At dinner Friday Tony said, “Friend of mine saw you and the trog girl walking to school together.”

Tony had already irritated her by turning his black hair a strange blond and spiking it for his own return to school. “She has a name, you know,” she said. “It’s Núria. And stop calling her ‘trog.’ She’s Mexican like us.”

Her mother huffed.

Her father’s laugh was muted by his mouth’s closing to chew. He swallowed. “You,” he said, his fork pointing left then right at Tony and Sylvia, “might say ‘abuelo’ and eat machaca, but I don’t know if your mother and I’ve failed or succeeded in this: You’re apple pie and Fourth of July American.”

Tony twisted in his chair.

Sylvia sat still but silent. She resolved to stop avoiding the girl.

Over the next few weeks they did sometimes walk together weekday mornings. Núria made this easier by exchanging the skirt and blouse for jeans and a plain T-shirt. Their conversations were sporadic, but Núria had enough English to tell Sylbvia that it was the subject she liked least and mathematics most, and that just now she was finding analytic geometry “beautiful.” And did Sylvia like mathematics?

“Like seeing the dentist,” Sylvia growled.

Nothing more was said in that morning’s walk.

Sylvia still did not encounter Núria after school. One afternoon, though, then another, then another, she looked down from her desk at the window of her third-floor bedroom and saw Núria arrive at the side door of the garage with her younger brothers. Sometimes in kitchen or bathroom the pipes told her that Núria was cooking for them or helping them to bed.

“You cook for them, yes?” she asked Núria one late-October morning.

The girl nodded.

Sylvia was prepared to admire a skill she hadn’t acquired. “What do you cook?”

“I…,” said Núria. For a few steps she added nothing. She said, “You know.”

Sylvia didn’t know, but now guessed that whatever constrictions pinched a family of five into a one-bedroom garage apartment might make plain and repetitive the products of its stove.

Over that night’s last sweet corn of the season and roast chicken and arroz rojo, she related her guess to her family and added, “We should do something for them.”

“We already are,” said her mother. Sylvia noted the sharp glance at her father.

“The rent is reasonable,” said her father.

“You mean cheap,” said her mother.

“Maybe for San Francisco,” said her father.

“Maybe you want us to ask the trogs up for Thanksgiving, or Christmas,” Tony said. “Or your birthday.”

“We have so much,” Sylvia said. “We could give a little.”

“They have their pride. Let’s not offend it,” her mother said.

“On this,” her father said, “your mother and I agree.”

One afternoon the next week the wind turned and blew out of the Sierra and cold. Sylvia had not dressed for the turn and almost ran home after school to escape it. Tony had come home even faster.

“I should tell you,” he said, “I used the last of your shampoo this morning.”

“You have your own.”

“Yeah but I needed yours. Mint and citrus. For someone.”

“If you want me to ask who ‘someone’ is, fuck you.” Now she had to return into the east wind. She discovered that her winter jacket no longer fit. She found in her mother’s closet one that did. She grimaced at its red and black plaid wool but wore it anyway. The walk to and from the drugstore was only a few blocks each way. With luck she’d meet no one she knew.

On the sidewalk she buttoned the jacket to her throat and turned up the collar. Then she discovered the pockets. The two low on the front plackets were large enough for more than her hands. She was imagining comb in them and lipstick and packet of tissues and phone and finding room for more still when she turned the corner and her luck failed.

The pockets of a pink puffer jacket swallowed Gabi’s French nails. Her navel ring hidden by a puffer in gold, Sofi fingered a button in the plaid wool and tittered. “Nice,” she said.

“My mom’s,” said Sylvia.

“Wouldn’t have guessed,” said Gabi.

“Mine didn’t fit any more, because, you know.” Sylvia drew a hand across her bust. “And it’s cold.”

“As fuck,” said Sofi.

They laughed and continued in their opposite directions, Sylvia now angry at Tony, at her mother, at Tony’s someone, at herself; at the wind.

In the drugstore the shampoo was locked behind a plexiglass flap. Sylvia pressed a button nearby to call store staff to open it and waited. Commuters stopping on their way home from jobs had filled the store. She waited more. Her anger grew to include the wait.

A woman in the drugstore’s pale blue vest at last hurried up the aisle with key in hand. Sylvia indicated her shampoo. The woman unlocked the flap and extracted a bottle from beneath it. Sylvia accepted it. The woman hurried on. All this passed wordlessly, without apology or thanks.

Sylvia felt she deserved something now, some balm for this rash of irritations. She thought of the candy aisle, turned into it, and encountered another: Núria and her two brothers, precisely when Sylvia had no patience for them. The boys tugged Núria’s sleeve toward the shelves, which here no plexiglass shielded. Without understanding a word, Sylvia knew what the boys pleaded. Núria shook her head, but the candy seemed to pin her in place. She stopped the headshaking long enough to nod to Sylvia’s nod. Sylvia thought it unlikely that this girl, too, would find her jacket ridiculous, but that this was possible at all heightened her pique.

The commuters crowded more practical aisles. On the candy aisle Sylvia saw beyond Núria and brothers only an elderly Asian woman perusing a label through the bottoms of eyeglasses. The shampoo was in Sylvia’s left hand. A pack of three chocolate bars was by her right.

Almost as quickly as she could imagine the packet in a jacket pocket, it was there.

She looked up and down the aisle to see who might have observed this. The older woman interrogated another label. The small dark inverted dome of a ceiling camera watched, but at its angle the bulky jacket should have blocked any view of the theft.

Núria did watch, while the boys still chanted pleas and tugged.

“I give them plenty,” said Sylvia, holding up the shampoo for which she intended to pay. “They get plenty from us all. Little something won’t kill them.”

Núria stared.

Sylvia lingered an instant in the stare, then shrugged and started toward checkout.

Exiting the aisle, she almost collided with a man turning into it. She feared he might be coming for her, but he was dressed in jeans and Giants hoodie and seemed too slight and young to represent authority. With no apology for near-collision he passed into the aisle, and with him her fear.

In the long wait at the checkout counter she thought she heard Núria’s voice and a man’s rise briefly back in the aisle from which she’d come, but the aggregate noise of the small movements and work-roughened breathing of the crowd around her made this uncertain.

On the sidewalk outside she found the store’s uniformed security guard with radio to his ear beside another woman in the blue employee vest. A police car pulled up against the white-painted curb. The guard approached it.

“What’s this about?” Sylvia said to the woman.

“All the shoplifting,” the woman said. “Police Department gave us a plainclothesman. He has someone.”

“Just awful,” Sylvia said and hurried away.

She was at desk, homework, and window when a police car turned into the curbcut before the garage and parked across the sidewalk. Núria’s father came along it. It was a time when ordinarily he would have been at Uncle Miguel’s restaurant. Two uniformed policemen emerged from the car. Even in the foreshortened view from her window Sylvia could see the policemen tower over the father. The father responded with small bows of the head to whatever they said.

One opened a rear door of the car. Núria and her brothers exited it.

More bows and words, and the father twisted an upper sleeve of Núria’s jacket in his fist and pulled her harshly through the side door to the garage. Eyes to the sidewalk, the boys followed.

“I saw trog girl and little trog bros got a ride home from the cops,” Tony said at dinner.

Sylvia watched her mother’s eyes go fierce and her father stop chewing and stiffen.

Her mother turned to him. “This is what I was telling you. Kids left on their own every night, that’s begging them to get into trouble. Parents lose control.”

“Maybe they got a ride just because they needed help getting home,” Sylvia said.

“Yeah no,” said Tony. “Daddy trog got called home, looked like. He seemed pissed.”

“It can’t have been real serious,” said Sylvia, “if they just brought her home.”

“Like you would know,” said Tony. “Like you would ever get a ride home from the cops.”

“This is how it starts,” Sylvia’s mother said to her father. “I said you should just find some retired woman, quiet, no kids. You still could. Send this family along.”

“I’m thinking, I’m thinking,” said her father. “My brother really likes the guy.”

“I can work on your brother,” said her mother. “And no way they’ll fight it. Their situation, they want nothing to do with government.”

“I’m thinking,” said Sylvia’s father.

Sylvia, too, was thinking. This was all her fault. This was none of her fault. The trog girl had made her own choice. Sylvia had dragged Núria by example into trouble. Sylvia should tell her parents what she had done. She could not possibly tell her parents what she had done. The pipes close by sang meanwhile in their downstairs work that their lives were joined now, hers and Núria’s. What this demanded, what Sylvia owed the fact, she couldn’t think, except that it might not be small or quickly paid.