The Book of Unknown Americans: List 4

by Cristina Henríquez
After Maribel Rivera sustains a debilitating injury, her family leaves a comfortable life in Mexico to seek treatment in the United States. Maribel develops a close relationship with her new neighbor Mayor, setting in motion a devastating chain of events.

This list covers pages 147–217 in the 2015 Vintage Contemporaries edition.

Here are links to our lists for the novel: List 1, List 2, List 3, List 4, List 5
35 words 130 learners

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Full list of words from this list:

words only definitions & notes
  1. solvent
    a liquid substance capable of dissolving other substances
    The police station was a brick and glass building with an American flag cemented in the ground out front. Inside, it smelled of cleaning solvents.
  2. cleft
    a split or indentation in something
    When she came back, a male officer with a chiseled face and a cleft in his chin accompanied her.
  3. righteousness
    the quality of adhering to moral principles
    I tightened my lips and straightened my purse strap on my shoulder with all the righteousness that I could muster.
  4. earnest
    characterized by a firm, sincere belief in one's opinions
    “De nada,” Officer Mora said in earnest, as if he believed he had done his job.
  5. roil
    be agitated
    But anger roiled in my belly, and after I boarded the bus back to the apartment that day I was seized by another idea.
  6. askew
    turned or twisted to one side
    And there, walking down the driveway of a brown clapboard ranch-style house with rusted gutters and a storm door askew on its hinges, I saw him—the boy—dragging a trash can down the cracked driveway.
  7. lacquer
    coat with varnish
    I lifted my eyes enough to watch him raise it to his mouth, to see his hands around the lacquered clay—those rough hands, the onion-thin peels of skin around his thumbnails where he'd bitten them, the scrapes on his knuckles where they rubbed against the top of the crate when he pulled mushrooms out from the soil inside.
  8. consuming
    very intense
    It was as if our sorrow was so consuming that there was no room for anything else.
  9. bereft
    lacking or deprived of something
    I was tired suddenly of feeling so bereft, so unmoored by sadness.
  10. liquidate
    convert into cash
    “It's from that summer house he had. The one his father gave him that we never went to. He has to liquidate it and I’m getting the money!”
  11. pinnacle
    the highest level or degree attainable
    It was no secret that since he was a boy, my dad had lusted after cars, and the pinnacle of his obsession would have been to own one.
  12. vagary
    an unexpected and inexplicable change in something
    In that big field, the old man, whose name we learned after we agreed to buy the car was Ralph Mason, gave my dad a quick lesson in the vagaries of manual transmission.
  13. careen
    move sideways or in an unsteady way
    The driver righted the car, put on his turn signal, and shot back into the traffic at the first opening. He careened around us...
  14. idle
    run disconnected
    And when we pulled off, two and a half miles later, my dad expertly brought the gears down to first, to idle at a red light.
  15. covet
    wish, long, or crave for
    Occasionally, I was greeted by the sight of Sra. Rivera, whose company my mom coveted, and anytime she was there, I would linger in the hallway outside the kitchen and eavesdrop, waiting for her to say something about Maribel.
  16. feign
    give a false appearance of
    “Tell me again, what university are they in?” my mom asked, feigning ignorance.
  17. blanch
    turn pale, as if in fear
    “I said maybe you don’t understand any of it because there’s something wrong with your brain.”
    Quisqueya blanched.
  18. rosary
    a series of prayers counted using a string of beads
    I saw that someone—my mom, I assumed—had hung a rosary over the stem of the rearview mirror.
  19. provocative
    serving or tending to excite or stimulate
    It was very racy, provocative, a lot of nudity, but the story was powerful, and even though for the first few weeks only a few people showed up to see it, word started to spread.
  20. lapse
    pass into a specified state or condition
    We were down to one week, a mere seven days, before we would lapse out of status.
  21. conspicuous
    obvious to the eye or mind
    But when I glanced at the people around us, no one was even looking in our direction, and I felt the way I often felt in this country—simultaneously conspicuous and invisible, like an oddity whom everyone noticed but chose to ignore.
  22. revelry
    unrestrained merrymaking
    And then, in the middle of the revelry, we heard a knock at the door.
  23. volatile
    liable to lead to sudden change or violence
    A few years ago Enrique and I had devised an alert system where we’d hold up a certain number of fingers to each other to indicate how far up the scale of volatility my dad was.
  24. capsize
    overturn accidentally
    It was the rotten economy that had landed him in the water and that had capsized the whole ship along with him.
  25. scour
    examine minutely
    My dad scoured the newspaper every day, searching the classifieds, calling any that sounded promising, and hanging up either in fury or in disappointment.
  26. snub
    refuse to acknowledge
    ...I’d shot him down so often that he started snubbing me, acting like he didn’t see me when I passed him in the hall at school, walking away if I approached him at his locker, sitting at a table as far from me as he could possibly get in the cafeteria.
  27. exonerate
    pronounce not guilty of criminal charges
    My dad glanced at my mom and for one delirious second I thought I was off the hook, that somehow I’d exonerated myself, and that we could all just go back to business as usual.
  28. esoteric
    understandable only by an enlightened inner circle
    I love the esoteric things in life.
  29. aesthete
    one who professes great sensitivity to the beauty of art
    My father used to call me an aesthete. He meant it not as a compliment, of course. He was disappointed by my interests and by the fact that they were not the same as his, which were farming and raising livestock.
  30. toil
    productive work, especially physical work done for wages
    He believed a man should work hard with his hands, that toil and sweat were evidence of a virtuous life.
  31. atrocity
    an act of shocking cruelty
    I had witnessed the sort of atrocities during the war that threaten to steal a man’s soul.
  32. import
    a significant effect or influence
    And I had come to understand my father’s perspective about the gratification of feeling useful, of being in the world under the most demanding circumstances, and learning that I could not only survive but thrive, and that my body, the physical presence of me, could have import.
  33. deployment
    the distribution of forces in preparation for battle or work
    Over the years, over the subsequent deployments, I sent her hundreds of letters.
  34. requisite
    necessary for relief or supply
    Ynez used to tell me I should write my own poetry, but just because you have the requisite admiration and even ambition to do something doesn’t mean you’re up to the task of performing it yourself, which was the case for me.
  35. afghan
    a blanket knitted or crocheted in strips or squares
    But Ynez borrows books from the library and we sit on the couch and she covers me with an afghan and draws her slender feet up onto the cushions and I close my eyes while she reads.
Created on Sat Sep 01 15:28:21 EDT 2018 (updated Thu Sep 06 11:23:04 EDT 2018)

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