During that call from the florist shop, I’d given my mother the phone number of the apartment I was living in. The young couple who lived there, Gail and Blake, had rented me a tiny bedroom with one window that opened on a narrow airshaft. Gail had two mongrel dogs she’d found abandoned on the city streets that were always fighting each other. I hated walking those dogs that always wanted to attack every other dog and old person walking with a cane they passed. She also had a hyperactive orange cat she’d gotten from a shelter. Blake had a late-night jazz show on an obscure radio station and dealt pills. Once, when my father phoned, I managed to hang up after a few words and left the phone off the hook intentionally and then forgot, which infuriated Gail, who’d been trying to reach the apartment for hours from the restaurant where she worked. She was bad-tempered anyway, at least partly because of all the speed she took for her waitress double shifts and because she and Blake were always broke. He was always shouting: Well, if you weren’t spending so much on dog food!
Tío Memo phoned me there that same February. He’d come up to New York City like he did every year for the American International Toy Fair, and he took me to an Italian restaurant in Greenwich Village, where we had a long talk, by far the longest we’d ever had. When I’d come into the restaurant with straightened hair down to my shoulders, my uncle had watched me walk to our table with an expression of hawk-like stern astonishment. Two weeks had passed since the earthquake; the death toll was over twenty thousand. No one in our family had come to harm, and while the stores’ employees had all survived, some of their homes had collapsed; relatives had been killed or badly hurt. On the night after the quake, while the aftershocks continued, Abuelita and Tía Nano had slept in their car after their chauffeur, Chepe, had backed it out of the garage and into the empty lot across the street. Chepe, elderly himself and armed with a pistol, had stood guard. We didn’t know yet that Abuelita had cancer and was only going to live less than two more years. When the end was near, poor Mamita would cancel her last week of classes leading into the Christmas break to be able to spend more time with her in Guate; when she had to fly back home in late January to start the new semester, Abuelita was still alive. One evening a month later, after her separation from Bert, all alone in the house, Mamita got the telephone call from her brother that she’d been dreading.
In the Italian restaurant, I was still taking bites out of the bread sticks before anything else had been served when I told Tío Memo about having found my mother sobbing in the hotel room. I could see I’d instantly made him uncomfortable. My father makes her really miserable, I said heatedly, the way he makes everyone miserable, but my mother has gotten the worst of it by far, and because she never complains, nobody notices or does anything.
Ahh la gran, sighed my uncle, stretching out the sides of his lips and inhaling through his teeth the way he does. Qué pena, pobre la Yoli. I don’t like to hear this. He paused and said, Maybe it was just a bad day. All women are emotional, Frankie.
Rather than give a direct opinion on his sister’s marriage, Tío Memo started in on a story about my mother in her youth, as if hiding a clue inside of what initially seemed a tale of affectionate reminiscence. But to this day, I’m confused about the story Tío Memo told me that night. As a rule, we avoid discussing unpleasant topics in the Montejo Hernández family. My uncle especially is always looking for the next chance to say “ala, qué alegre” or “qué alegre, vos,” nice words to pronounce. I like saying them, too, in irony or sarcasm but also in goofy joy: Oh, what happiness! But what else is a lifetime of selling toys devoted to, if not getting people to exclaim, Qué alegre!
In their adolescence, said Tío Memo, he and Mamita used to share the same friends, a group of high-spirited ala, qué alegre youths. They’d go out to our family’s little chalet on the small lake near the city, Amatitlán, to waterski, or to their friends’ coffee fincas for horseback riding and picnics, and it was always so alegre. But my mother became especially close to one joven, said Tío Memo, who was a good student, an intellectual even—I sensed that my uncle calling him an intellectual was like that Chekhov rule about introducing a pistol in the first act—from a good family, a good family that employed the joven’s mother as a servant. Because the boy was so clever and had inherited his father’s light complexion, he’d always been allowed to live in that household and was eventually recognized by the father and given his surname. The joven’s mother went on working in the house and living in the maids’ quarters with her little son during his preschool years, then the father bought her a small home in the rough working-class barrio of La Limonada and gave her a monthly pension. The joven liked spending weekends and school vacations with his mother in La Limonada, where he was the only boy around with fair skin and hair. Tío Memo said that was probably the source of the joven’s societal resentments, feeling so torn between opposite worlds. The mother died when the joven was still in adolescence. My uncle and mother attended the funeral, where the coffin was carried to the grave atop a small wooden cart painted yellow, piled with flowers, and pulled by a donkey.
That night in the Greenwich Village Italian restaurant, when Tío Memo was telling me about the intellectual joven and my mother, he must have told me his name. Later I vaguely recalled it being either René, Ramón, or Raul, though I always mix up those names, often to my own embarrassment; whenever I’m introduced to a René, I’m bound to call him Ramón or Raul the next time we meet. That’s why I always think of him as el joven. As adolescents, Tío Memo and this youth, el joven, had participated in the student movement—Chiquilines de la Revolución the young people were called—that sparked the peaceful 1944 October Revolution. Everyone was so excited and proud that Guatemala was going to be a democracy. Even my mother, at twelve or thirteen, stood in front of the store handing out campaign leaflets for Arévalo. A couple of years later, Tío Memo went off to college in California and two years after that, my mother followed; the youth went to San Carlos, the public university in Guatemala City. After we came back from California, said my uncle, we didn’t see him again. My uncle said that el joven was the type who likes to stay in school forever. A few years later I would learn that people like my uncle liked to describe leftist militants as perpetual students, meaning that the universities were where they could sit around plotting the coming of the workers’ and peasants’ revolution instead of having to work.
Now I know, though I didn’t then, that it was after California and before she went to Boston that Lucio Grassi came into my mother’s life, but Tío Memo didn’t even mention the Italian. The restaurant was an old-fashioned Venetian trattoria, with white tablecloths and older male waiters in bow ties, most with mustaches. It was a favorite of my uncle’s. Over the next twenty years, when Tío Memo came up for the toy fair as he did every February, if I was in the city, too, we’d go back to that restaurant. I always ordered the Venetian-style spaghetti Bolognese.
Yoli always had so many friends, said Tío Memo cheerfully. She was the soul of any party. He let out a blast of laughter and said, But the family never thought her friendship with that joven was good for her. Do you understand what I mean, Frankie, when I say that he was not even good for himself? After a pause, I said, You mean he was self-destructive? Yes, Frankie, self-destructive and destructive, said my uncle. That patojo always did what he wanted and never considered how his actions could affect other people. Now I get it, I thought. Tío Memo was pushing the conversation in a direction meant to be instructive for me, who was also behaving, he must have thought, in a self-destructive way, doing whatever I wanted, not taking into consideration how my actions affected my parents.
Suddenly Tío Memo jumped ahead in his story. My mother had already been in Boston for a year or two, the coup happened, and the joven destructivo was one of the hundreds of Guatemalans who fled to the Mexican embassy. Three months would pass before the new government would allow those refugees to go into exile, most to Mexico.
You mean
he was in the Árbenz government, I said.
Not that I know of, said my uncle. He was more what they call a fellow traveler. Do you know that term?
I’ve heard it, I said. People were always being smeared with it back in the fifties, right? Okay, so this self-destructive lefty guy was friends with my mother. But what do you mean, Tío? How friendly were they? Was my mother a fellow traveler too?
My uncle seemed to find that genuinely funny; he sat back and enjoyed a hearty laugh. No, Frankie. Yoli wasn’t interested in things like that, he finally said. They were just good friends, you know, the way young people are, joking and laughing about any silly thing.
What kinds of silly things, I asked. Do you remember an example, Tío?
My uncle did seem to think that over for a while, which I assumed was for show. But then he said, One time three of us went to the movies together, and maybe because the joven was hungry or had indigestion, his stomach kept growling, loudly enough so that if you were sitting nearby you heard it. And Yoli leaned her head close to his stomach and said, Shhhh, naughty stomach, we’re trying to watch the movie! Well, that joven’s stomach answered her with its loudest growl yet! I don’t know how he did it, like a ventriloquist. Now they did have to leave the theater, because they couldn’t stop laughing. Ala, qué alegre, Frankie.
My uncle’s story made me laugh, too, even though it didn’t seem to have anything to do with the subject of my mother’s unhappiness. But Mamita wasn’t all we talked about in the restaurant that night. Tío Memo had his mission, to find out what was really going on with me and convince me to go back to college. Wasn’t it true, he asked, that I’d gotten all A’s for grades? That was true, I admitted. Then why didn’t I want to go back? Was college too easy? There’s a jovencita behind this, verdad, Frankie? My uncle leaned forward, like now we were getting down to the truth. No, really, there isn’t, Tío, I said. I wish, but no, no girl. I saw alarm in my uncle’s eyes. Maybe he was thinking, Frankie ran away from college because he was upset about Yoli? And now here he is, with his girlish straightened hair. What a strange boy my nephew is.
Even before I’d started working in the flower shop, with some of the money my college friend had lent me I’d had my hair straightened again by a super cute, chatty boricua lesbian with hair dyed glossy pink at a unisex hair salon up on Amsterdam, who when I was leaving said, If you were a girl, I’d go out with you, and she kissed me, leaving a pink cloudlet of lipstick on my cheek. My hair was now longer than ever, tangled and viny like I’d dreamed it could be, something like how Jim Morrison’s hair must have looked at the end of his life or even like Chantal Goya’s hair after wild sex. Everywhere I went in the city girls smiled at me, though nothing had happened with any of them. I’d developed a crush on Gail, who seemed to want to break up with her boyfriend who was never home anyway. Every evening I faithfully walked her horrible dogs in Riverside Park. Gail was an inch or two over five feet, with a fey prettiness and slanted sleepy eyes and wavy black hair that snaked to her bony hips, and like most New York waitresses, she wanted to be an actress. The other night I’d gone to meet her in the Dublin House after her waitressing shift. We were both a little drunk when she gestured toward another young woman in a red leather jacket and a so-called little black dress leaning against the back wall and said, I want to fuck her. I said, I want to be a lesbian. Gail laughed, put her small hands in my hair, and said, Too bad you’re not one, then. I’m ridiculous and pathetic, I thought, sitting opposite my uncle. My face felt hot and prickly. I lifted a cloth napkin over my face and pretended to sneeze. Frankie, estás bien? my uncle asked. I excused myself and went to the men’s room, where in the mirror I saw that my skin had slightly broken out in hives. I leaned over the sink splashing cold water over my face.
Over dessert, a sticky dark chocolate-and-cherry roll called Vampire Cake, I asked my uncle if I could come to Guatemala and stay in his house. What I was telling myself was that New York City is fucking me up, I should go to Guatemala to help the earthquake victims. He said, You know you are always welcome, Frankie, but I think it would be better if you went back to college first.
My uncle did know how to tell a story in a way that made you sense, in the nonsense cake he was baking, darker layers of frosting, which as soon as you tried to taste them with your finger turned to air. All I wanted my uncle to say was that I’ve always known Bert was an hijo de la gran puta, and my sister ruined her life by marrying him.
Ay Yoli, Tío Memo suddenly blurted. Pobrecita, la Yoli.
Sí, Tío, pobrecita, I practically cried out. Allowing myself that exclamation was like squeezing a sponge, and my eyes filled with tears that probably weren’t only for my mother.
A few weeks later I’d go to a barber, cut my hair short, and head back to Broener for the spring trimester. But by the next January I’d be back in New York, transferring into a special program at the New School.
As we were finishing our coffees, Tío Memo said something that took me by surprise. He said, That joven, not so joven anymore, turned up in Boston and found Yoli there.
Maybe because I’d been silently dwelling on my own problems, it didn’t occur to me to ask if this muchacho’s coming to Boston had happened before or after I was born.
When my uncle said a moment later that my mother had sent el joven away and told him not to bother her anymore, I sensed he was improvising. Who knows where he is now, said Tío Memo. Cuba, probably, and he guffawed at the idea of el joven ending up in Communist Cuba instead of Guatemala, the Little Land of the Free.
On some of those previous visits to Green Meadows, I’d asked my mother if she remembered her old friend who came to look for her in Boston. Every time I asked, she really did seem to think it over before shaking her head no or saying, Frankie, I don’t remember. Well, I’d said across the Scrabble board during our last visit, I don’t know if his name was René, Ramón, or Raul. Maybe his name was Rodrigo or Roberto. Maybe it was Juan, Tomás, Diego, Gonzalo, Miguel—
Miguel? she pronounced softly. What do you mean, Miguel? There was a quiet note of defiance in my mother’s voice.
Before I leave today, I’m going to ask my mother who Miguel was.
Mami, that tooth Daddy made for you? I ask. You still have it, right?
She doesn’t respond. She looks back at me as if she didn’t hear me and is waiting for me to resume our conversation.
One evening, when I was about eleven, when Bert had taken the family out to dinner, he presented Mamita with a velvet ring box. When she opened it, instead of a ring with a radiant gem, she found a radiant artificial tooth. But my mother seemed happy with her gift and laughed gaily with her napkin held over her mouth. She’d been going around with an Alfred E. Neuman smile for months, a gummy gap where a central incisor had been pulled. My father must have put all of his expertise into that tooth, trying to achieve perfection as his craft defined it.
You do remember that Daddy made a tooth for you, I ask, don’t you?
Yes, I do, Frankie, she says.
Smile, I say, and she smiles. Her front teeth all look pretty much the same, healthy considering her age. I can’t tell which one is the implant, though.
My father hated the words “false teeth.” What’s false about them? he’d growl at anyone who called them that. When you don’t get it right, that’s when it looks fake, I remember him shouting. A false tooth is a badly made tooth. I can spot one of those in somebody’s mouth from ten feet away!
Artificial tooth, prosthetic tooth, those were the correct terms. “A mix of science and art,” once you start doing some research into the field you repeatedly come across that description. Bert was a chemical engineer but also a color scientist or a color chemist. I’ve also learned from the scientific histories that modern ceramic artificial tooth production has its origins in the methods and discoveries of the European alchemists and Kabbalists. So does the story behind Mary Shelley’s Fran
kenstein. (How did Frankenstein get his “pearly white teeth”?) Bert the alchemist, a contemporary practitioner of that ancient sacred craft of the Kabbalists. I only need to slide my laptop out of my backpack like this, set it on my lap, and open the desktop file titled (sorry Dad) FalseTeeth to find these notes copied from a journal:
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