Mamita’s last trip to Guatemala was seven years ago. I was there. I took her to San Sebastián, her girlhood parish church, where she’d been baptized and had planned to get married, where my sister and I were baptized, too, and where, on a Sunday night one year before our visit, the human rights bishop had been bludgeoned to death in the parish house garage. The still traumatized sacristan, Toño, and I gave my mother a little tour: Monseñor was found right here, Señora, in a pool of blood. They’d folded his hands over his chest like this and crossed his feet at the ankles. To which I added: Thirty-six fractures in his skull, Ma. He was hit so hard with, probably, a metal pipe, his jawbone was driven back into his trachea. Ay no, Frankie, que feo, murmured my mom.
Lexi’s last visit was one summer when she was a year or two out of high school. Over the years I’ve heard conflicting, partial versions of what happened during those months, mostly from my mother and Feli, some from our relatives, not much directly from Lexi. She did tell me how she used to like to walk to the Hotel Camino Real before nightfall, the cypresses lining the Avenida Reforma thick with chattering grackles at that hour, to buy the New York Times that always arrived at the hotel in the afternoon a day late. She’d sit alone with a glass of wine at the bar reading it, just like I’d regularly done when I’d lived in Tío Memo’s house a few years before, though I drank beer. Tía Meche was scandalized. She accused my sister of going to the hotel to try to pick up men. There were other such incidents, the inevitable results of a lonely gringa college student abroad asserting her own individual rights and clashing with my aunt’s rigidly old-fashioned sense of how a single young woman was supposed to behave. My aunt’s insinuations grew uglier; horrible words were exchanged. One night, after Tía Meche had sent our alcoholic cousin Fernando to fetch Lexi from a disco, where he found her sitting at a table conversing and having drinks with a Lebanese cardamom importer, he called Lexi a puta as soon as they were back home, in front of our aunt. My mother has never forgiven Meche for how my sister was treated that summer, it’s the one thing she’s never hidden her anger over. That’s probably part of the reason, at least, that Lexi seems to regard herself as only American and also, despite her closeness to my mother and her poisoned feelings toward my father, as a Jew, never blurring her identifications in the way I’ve done since childhood. I dash down to Guate every chance I get, never just to visit our family, but I do always at least stop in to the toy store downtown, family headquarters, to say hello.
Anger flashes in my mother’s eyes. What? I respond.
Memo, she says, why didn’t you come to my wedding?
Memo didn’t come to your wedding?
She gapes at me and after a moment she says, No, he didn’t, Frankie.
But he did, I think. I’ve seen photographs of the wedding and Mexico, and Memo was there. Or am I wrong, and I’m confusing those with photos of my mother at Memo and Meche’s wedding, that’s probably it. Jesus, both our memories suck.
Mamita closes her eyes again like she’s meditating.
So often when my mother asks me to try to get along better with my sister, she weighs her pleas by reminding me what a good brother Memo has always been to her. Yet here Mamita is now, convinced that Memo didn’t come to her wedding. If he didn’t, why didn’t he?
She’s awake, looking at me crossly. She says, Frankie, péinate.
Si, Mami, I say, and lift crooked fingers to my head and swipe at some curls. Not a visit passes without my mother scolding me to comb my hair.
Her eyes close. Soon I hear her soft snore.
I know Lexi has had some hard times in the past, but it does seem like she’s doing much better now, an important person in New Bedford, according to my mother, married to a policeman, a woman who can go to a Maya shaman to ask him to cast a spell to help her brother find a wife—
Lourdes López, at the moment, being the only possible known candidate for that. In Dunkin’ Donuts and during that morning after we made love for the first time, she told me stories from her childhood, like the one about the old man who used to arrive in her village to sell ice cream on weekends and holidays and how because her mother would let him stow his wooden cart behind their small house while he went off to get drunk and sleep somewhere, Lulú was allowed to scrape ice-cream scraps off the bottom of the cart with a spoon; happy memories, the only times in her childhood she tasted ice cream. But when she was an adolescent, she and her mother moved from Veracruz to gritty, polluted Ecatepec, in Mexico State, where Lulú’s uncle had a job working for the railroad. There, she said, they lived in a small concrete house like all the others on their street. Their next-door neighbor brought stray dogs home and kept them on his rooftop, feeding the dogs to fatten them up so that later he could mix their meat with lamb into the birria he sold from a sidewalk stand. He kept his sheep in a little pen in his backyard. At night Lulú could hear the dogs innocently barking, excited to be fed.
Those were the years when Lulú only wore rock band T-shirts, ripped jeans, and a steel bead in her tongue. Her best friend, Janeth, talked her into trying crack when they were fifteen. They rented a room in a cheap by-the-hour pension, Janeth showing Lulú how to cook the drug in a spoon. She and Janeth met to smoke crack four or five times, as if they were rehearsing to become crack addicts, but Lulú didn’t like it. Crack made her feel nauseous and paranoid, and since then, she says, she hasn’t even tried pot again.
So then what is this message that has just come from Lulú now resolute: “A gringo boy invite me to a party for ayahuasca. He move into house where my friend and her family live before. I am sad because now my friend they move to Yonker. Drugs scare me, so I think maybe no. But he seems like a good muchacho. Panchito, you ever take that drug?”
She’s asking me to give an opinion on whether she should accept this apparent housewarming party invitation from this good gringo muchacho or if she should go and take ayahuasca. She thinks no, maybe. When did she meet Ayahuasca Bro? I saw Lulú only the night before last.
I had better think about what I’m going to answer. I feel a little sick.
During one of our first conversations in Dunkin’ Donuts about her friend Brenda, the college student housekeeper with the boyfriend who pays her tuition, Lulú said that Brenda had decided to try to have a New York gringo-type relationship instead of a Mexican one. How are they different? I’d asked. Here in New York, she explained, the couples give each other freedom, but they have to be honest and talk about everything. In Mexico, she said—she slid her lips sideways, narrowed an eye—at least one part of the couple, the man, probably lies. It’s impossible, she said, to have an open relationship in Mexico because the man, almost always but probably the woman too, would become so jealous and angry. But the men, too many are violent too. You know how people say: He hit her, but it’s understandable because he was jealous. To be jealous is so stupid, said Lulú. I totally agree, I said. So, your friend is having an open relationship then. Yes, she said, Brenda’s boyfriend believes in open relationships. But that doesn’t mean he wants to sleep with other women, she said her friend had explained. He says he doesn’t want to because he loves Brenda. But if it happens that he has sex with another woman, or if Brenda does with another man, it is permitted, but only as long as they don’t hide it, they have to tell each other everything. My friend says that’s the way young people here have relationships.
Tell each other everything, sure, I repeated. Here in New York. Then I thought, Maybe that is how they have relationships now; what do I know about what the young couples are doing?
She said with a gentle firmness: Educated people, I think Brenda means.
During my freshman year of college, after I’d taken off into the city from that hotel out by LaGuardia instead of going home with my parents for the nearly monthlong Christmas vacation like I was supposed to, I stayed on in Manhattan, first at the family apartment of a friend from my dorm. When that college friend’s fli
ght from Rochester, the nearest airport to Wagosh, was canceled because of a snowstorm, his parents sent a limousine to bring him all the way from Broener to the city, and knowing I planned to take a bus there in a couple of days to meet my parents, he invited me to come along and stay at his place. I’d never ridden in a limo before. It steadily ploughed through the blizzard and blowing snow like a coast guard cutter down the endless thruway all the way to New York City. This is real money, I realized for maybe the first time in my life. Here is what real money does. My friend’s family apartment was on Park Avenue, but he had his own little apartment attached to theirs with a private entrance. I never got to go upstairs where his parents and sisters lived, though once I saw his mother, looking like Cleopatra in a shiny black-and-gold dress, a long fur coat draped over her shoulders, coming down the stairs from that main apartment to the lobby.
I didn’t want to go back to Broener after the Christmas break. I couldn’t face being in my dorm, living on the same floor as the Adonis, where Abbie Schneider had practically moved into his room. The Adonis must have known that all I’d done with Abbie during our more than a month as a couple was make out until our lips were like chewed-on balloons, feel her up outside her bra, and JesusHChristdryfuckinghump. They must have shared some sweet laughs over that, mixing ridicule, bafflement, and hilarity as they cuddled in intimate bliss, she even faking pity and affectionately scolding him for having too much fun with his cruel mockery. Who else had they told? I was sure that if I had to go back to Broener again I could die from the humiliation of it. The city represented the chance for a new start, and though I really didn’t know how I was going to survive, I felt different to myself just walking out onto the city sidewalks. By the end of that initial week in New York, I’d found a job at a florist shop on Broadway on the Upper West Side, where during those first several days, I must have tied thousands of pine cones onto Christmas wreaths with bits of wire. Soon I was renting a tiny bedroom in a nearby apartment too. After Christmas, six days a week, I was up at dawn to drive the florist’s van down to the wholesale flower market on Twenty-Eighth Street in Chelsea to pick up the flower orders. Most of these came packed inside long cartons, wrapped in wet newspapers from all over the world: Colombia, South Africa, the Netherlands, Ecuador, South Korea, Costa Rica, Haiti. Occasionally the tropical flowers, birds-of-paradise, heart-shaped red anthuriums with long yellow stamens, heliconia, voluptuously fragrant tuberoses, came wrapped in Guatemalan newspapers, and some of the orchids, packed inside crates with moist mossy jungle earth, were from Guatemala too. Down in the basement workroom, I’d spend the rest of the morning sorting flowers and snapping thorns off rose stems, while constantly enduring raunchy homosexual teasing from the owner, Steve, a diminutive, hirsute Jewish Buddhist horticulturalist with pointy elf ears, and Howie, the Cheerful Fat Slob Master Flower Arranger, as I’d privately nicknamed him. They weren’t a couple, but they gave the impression that in the past they’d had a thing. Sweetie Pie, Howie used to call me. Upstairs, the ferny, earthy, nutrient-enriched smells of deep forest rot, sweet blossoms, and photosynthetic saturation of the flower shop’s misty air made it like being inside a cloud forest. Everyone kept their jackets or sweaters on except for Howie, who always worked in an old flannel shirt, usually wildly unbuttoned, sliding off and baring his blotchy ham-hock shoulder or exposing hairless belly blubber, the maw of his navel hanging out over his belt like a screaming Edvard Munch face. Downstairs in the workroom he’d lewdly tease me: Is Sweetie Pie a cherry pie or a blue-ball pie? and Steve would cackle. Shut the fuck up, I was always shouting at them. Leave me alone! Shut the fuck up! I’m not a fag! I’d pretend to menace them with flower-cutting shears. They’d run into corners as if to hide, laughing. They made me laugh, but I made them laugh more. I regarded their harassing antics as part of the “New York experience.”
Around noon, I’d go back out in the van again until nearly evening, delivering flowers and plants. Often, after apartment building doormen put down their intercom phones and waved me in, I brought flowers up in elevators that opened directly into vestibules that provided peeks into some of the most opulent homes in Manhattan. One elevator man gruffly advised me to show some respect and remove the Red Sox baseball cap I was wearing because the apartment I was bringing flowers to had once belonged to Babe Ruth. Usually I handed the deliveries over to servants but sometimes to women, mostly older, who came out to receive them and who looked so mesmerizingly stylish, artificial, glamorous, women who went outside in winter wearing Russian novel fur hats, long mink coats, hands plunged into muffs, uncanny faces glowing like glasses of neon milk, intense red lips. One afternoon, Yoko Ono, arm in arm with John Lennon, came walking toward me up Broadway, she looking so magnificently leonine with her streaming black hair and darkly lustrous midthigh fur coat, her powerful tread pulling John nearly weightlessly along, pale and waifish in his skimpy black leather jacket and little black cap, my face went red hot, as if I’d been caught spying on their intimacy. I delivered bouquets to young women barely older than myself who lived in apartment buildings without doormen and buzzed me in or came down to the grimy, small lobby in sweatpants to open the door, usually delighted to be getting flowers, lifting the paper cones to their noses and happily exclaiming, some even blushing. Those were the girls who’d earnestly apologize for not being able to give a bigger tip or sometimes any tip at all. But some received their flowers with a smirk or a fed-up roll of the eyes, carrying their bouquet back to the elevator like a dead rabbit by the hind feet.
I was out making deliveries, stuck in clogged traffic near Lincoln Center that February afternoon, when I heard on the van’s radio that a massive earthquake had struck Guatemala. Tears blurred my eyes; I had to find somewhere to pull over. Abuelita, the rest of my family, my cousins, had they survived? I hadn’t seen Abuelita since the summer after seventh grade, when we’d gone down for the last time with my mother. That was the summer of Abuelita’s eightieth birthday party, held in her house and to which all the shopgirls were invited, and there was a marimba band and some traditional Guatemalan dancing. Watching Mamita dance like the village Maya girls, hands clasped behind her back, doing those hopping steps, one heel lifted back at a time, was always a little embarrassing. Whenever I go back to Guatemala and stop into Juguetelandia, I say hello to Amalia, who has worked in the store for at least half a century, so withered and stooped in her blue store smock, her smile like a twist of lipsticked yarn; she always first asks about my mother and then enthuses over that party of thirty years ago like it was the single most festive night of her long life: Ay, Frankie, it was so alegre. Do you remember how even Abuelita danced? It was at that party, in front of everybody, that Abuelita reached up to pinch my cheek and pronounced me the most Montejo of the Montejos, and that made me so happy.
The quake had hit the capital hard, but in the provinces the situation was catastrophic: avalanches, roads and villages buried. In Guatemala City, homes and buildings had collapsed, including a hotel blocks from our family stores … thousands feared dead … still too early to know. I had to phone home, but I made more in tips than in salary and had to finish my deliveries first. I twisted the radio dial, searching for more news. Over the next few hours, assessments of the disaster were becoming graver and there were urgent pleas for rescue teams and international donations. As soon as I returned to the store, I stood in the middle of the floor telling everyone about the earthquake in Guatemala and my family, repeating the news I’d heard on the radio, my voice rising with emotion and even panic. Why this public display? I suppose I wanted Steve and Howie and also Megan, who worked the cash register and the shop floor, to realize that I was also from this other place, the same country that some of our exotic flowers came from, where now an earthquake had snuffed out thousands of human lives in seconds, maybe including some from my family. But I also wanted to prove to myself that this forceful emotional connection I’d felt to Guatemala and my family in the van hadn’t been spurious, that it w
as real, and so I didn’t try to hold back the tears spurting from my eyes and rolling down my cheeks.
Of course Steve said I could phone home, even though it was long distance. My mother answered and said that she’d gotten a telegram from Tío Memo that our family was safe and that she was more worried about me than about Guatemala. I’m doing great, I told her. I have a job, maybe I’ll go back to school, I don’t know yet. But, Frankie, you got A’s on your report card, she pleaded. Yeah, they’re not called report cards in college, Ma, just trimester grades. She said, Frankie, we’re so proud of you. Daddy wanted to take you out to a good restaurant in New York City and celebrate your wonderful grades. Listening to her go on, I felt angry. I wished she’d accuse me of being an ungrateful brat for having left school after my father had paid for it, then I could speak the words I had ready: I’m not going to cost him another cent ever again. I have to go, I said curtly, I’m at work. I remember the expressions of apprehension on Steve and Howie and Megan as they waited for me to finish my call and their smiles of relief when I told them my family was okay. What good, kind people they were. Years later, during one of my returns from Central America, I would drop in to the store and learn that Steve had died of AIDS and that Howie had gone to live in Hawaii.
Down in the basement in the mornings, while I sat on a tall bucket turned upside down, snapping thorns off rose stems, Howie would often tell stories about his extreme nighttime fun in the gay bars, such as offering himself through a hole in the wall to the room full of anonymous men on the other side. If Steve was there, he’d smile sadly with what seemed a Buddhist resignation meant to suggest, I think, that he’d done that, too, and mostly hoped he wouldn’t again. Gross, you guys are so fucking disgusting, I’d exclaim, which, of course, made them laugh uproariously. It struck me as a mystery of human temperament how Howie could seem almost always so robustly cheerful, until I decided it was his bravery that fueled the joy he took in his dementedly horny, brazen sexuality, however inconceivable it seemed to someone like me, who until just a few months before had still been sleeping every night in his boyhood bed. Who was more admirable? Howie or Ian Brown, the most brashly sexually individuated person I’d known until Howie? Howie, by a long shot. Steve and Howie may once have been lovers, but now they were good friends. Girls who went out with Ian ended up despising him. I’d decided that Howie the Cheerful Fat Slob Master Flower Arranger, even among the heaped blossoms and plants of his basement worktable, sat atop a kind of Sex Mount Olympus; like a novice monk setting out on a long apostolic journey, all I had to do in order to experience the lowest lowlands was walk around Times Square and stop into any of those peep show or live-sex places. I’d take my place in the daytime parade filing briskly in and out, mostly men in business suits and ties—“fake rich,” I’d heard black teenagers taunting some of those business guys out on the sidewalk, mocking their cheap suits and overcoats, even their shoes—but all sorts of other types, too, once inside rarely acknowledging each other’s existence for even a split second while at the same time casting hungry eyes all around. Put a quarter in a slot, a window or shutter would open, and you could watch a man and a woman doing sixty-nine or a woman eating out another woman; after about ten seconds the window would close, then you could put in another quarter and the window would open and now the woman’s midriff would be quaking in orgasm. Some of the window portals let you poke your hands through, and I got to touch the pale breasts and pebble-like nipples of a girl about my own age, such a nice smile; she told me she was from Honduras and that she liked the way I touched her. I bet you make your girlfriend happy, she said. Even if she’d said that only to get me to drop more quarters in the slot, I left walking on air and also trying to remember exactly how I’d touched her so that I’d be able to do that again. I wondered what would happen if I dared to ask the Honduran girl out on a date. It’s not like I went to those places every day, every couple of weeks seems more like it, and while I probably did try to find her, all I remember for sure is that I never saw her again.
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