How We Are Hungry Read Free Page A

story.
    Pilar: she is not Latin in any way she knows, but ever since she was very young she’s heard from friends and strangers that her name is a Latin or Latin-sounding one. She is always embarrassed to admit, though she’s admitted it a hundred times, that she’s never looked up the provenance of her name, its meaning, or anything else about it. Her skin is the color of blond wood, easily tanning, and her hair is black, which reinforces the assumption of her Latinness, even though she’s been told by her parents, always, that she’s Irish and only Irish—maybe some Scottish, perhaps a jab of German. Though with her hair in a ponytail and with her long legs, very long for a woman not even five and a half feet tall, she resembles, more than anything, popular images of Pocahontas. She always wanted to have some Native American blood in her, just as everyone does, because with that blood, she thought, stupidly, would come nobility, as would excuses to do things the wrong way, or not do them at all, to do anything she wanted. But instead she is Irish or possibly even Welsh but not in any tangible sense, and thus born without any sorrow in the lives of her recent ancestors, and so she had to smile gratefully and create good things from scratch or perhaps just save people from skin disease. Pilar was a doctor, a young one, a dermatologist. Her profession does not figure into this story.
    PILAR WALKED: with her toes pointing northwest and northeast, like a dancer.
    PILAR LAUGHED: in a throaty way, and loudly, while her eyes devoured.
    PILAR KNEW: when something would happen, and when something would not.
    Hand was in Granada, Nicaragua, for six months and was encouraging all visitors. He was working for Intel, doing something Pilar could never really grasp, even if she wanted to, which she didn’t, because her brain, she believed, was meant to be filled with more colorful things. Intel had asserted itself in Central America and was rotating in young Spanish-speaking consultants like Hand for a year or two at a time. Pilar couldn’t imagine what Hand would know that Nicaraguan Intel could need, but then again, this was the sort of arrangement he always landed—well-paying, low-commitment, impossible to explain. Pilar accepted Hand’s invitation, but they couldn’t agree on what the week would entail. Hand, sick of Nicaragua for the time being, wanted a week in Costa Rica, surfing and looking at women jogging across the flat wet sand. Pilar wanted to see Nicaragua, because everyone, it seemed, had seen Costa Rica, but no one she knew had set foot in Nicaragua. Nicaragua sounded dangerous; she liked the word. Nicaragua! It sounded like some kind of spider. There it goes, under the table—Nicaragua!
    Hand got his way. They’d be surfing in Costa Rica, on the Pacific coast. But Pilar didn’t mind. She would tell everyone she went to Nicaragua anyway.
    In San Jose the humidity covered her with many gloved hands. She rented a car and immediately went the wrong direction, headed straight into the city’s center when she wanted to do the opposite. It was easily ninety degrees and she was in the merchants’ district, filled with cheap electronics and men selling things from white aluminum carts. Rental car agencies and banks and students. Clumps of pedestrians jogging through traffic. Office buildings of the sixties steel-and-glass Erector-set sort, flimsy and forgettable. The road was five lanes wide and was jammed but moving. San Jose looked like L.A. circa 1973, and she puttered through the city weirdly horny. The heat maybe. The volume of the sidewalks maybe. She watched women through her windshield and they watched her. She found an English-language station and on it Michael Jackson’s “Rock with You” and she thought she would burst. She was happy, and she’d been for a few years able to recognize it, just dumb happiness, when it came, whatever its cause. When people asked how she was, she said Happy, and this made