Amanda's writing exercise

A lot of MFA students hate writing exercises, but I seriously love these things. They jump-start my imagination, which can grow stagnant sometimes. Here's the little diddy I came up with for next week's class--the assignment was to write two pages in the voice of a character that we drew from a hat. Mine was a Mexican roofer. Enjoy.

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Fidelia doesn’t understand. Comprender. Fidelia doesn’t comprehend. She doesn’t understand that it was enough for Tomas to practice his trade in his own country, among his own people. The tin walls and dirt floors were enough. The colonia. He did not want to come to this place. It used to be enough for Fidelia too, or so he had thought, but all that changed with Tohil. As soon as she found out she was pregnant, she began begging him to move the family to the States. It was as if the child triggered some sort of alarm in here, powerful and frantic. She fretted so much that Tomas began to worry that she would lose the baby. He gave in. They came to live with some of Fidelia’s cousins, and her uncle gave Tomas a job. They were currently remodeling the pool house of a white man who owned seventeen television sets. Tomas had counted them.

In the noonday heat, Tomas positionsthe last shingle on the east side of the pool house roof. He adjusts the t-shirt that he had tied around his head to protect his skin and uses the corner to wipe the sweat from around his mouth. Tomas sits on the edge of the roof and takes large gulps from his canteen of water. He looks across the yard to the main house. Through the large, paneled windows, the white man’s daughter is watching one of the seventeen televisions.

Tomas is uneasy. Inquieto. Something happened last night that sits dull and heavy in his stomach. He had been lying with Fidelia on the tiny cot they shared in the storage room of his uncle-in-law’s house. They had made love. Tomas had told Fidelia, “Te amo,” but in his head he said something different. In his head, he said, “I love you.” After months of struggling to learn this new language—trying to communicate with the store clerk, trying to communicate with the doctors, trying to communicate with his uncle’s clients—after so much slow, deliberate English spoken to him like he was a child, that he hated himself for requiring, there was this. I love you. The foreign words had rushed in unexpectedly. They had invaded. Tomas was horrified. He repeated the Spanish words to Fidelia, over and over: “Te amo, te amo, te amo…” And in his head, he repeated: te amo, te amo, te amo. He tried to remember the phrase in Achi, but he couldn’t wrestle the words from his childhood memory. Tomas had cried, and Fidelia did not understand.

Tomas closes his empty canteen and stands to his feet, taking care to keep his balance on the slanted roof. Once down the ladder, he looks again at the white man’s daughter sitting in front of the television. He knows he could walk into the kitchen and ask her to refill his canteen from the cold water jug in the refrigerator. He goes over the phrase in his head—he will say, “Excuse me, may I have some water?” The girl will smile obligingly at him, always smiling, and say something fast and clipped that he will have to ask her to repeat. He will thank her—“thank you”—and then he will get his water and she will go back to watching her television. He is sure that is how it will go.

Tomas shakes his head. He says a word that is the same in both languages—“no”—and walks to the side of the house where the garden hose is kept.