Yolandita was an angel, exclaims Mamita. She was like a little doll! I told her I’m seeing Feli tomorrow, and she started going on about Yolandita like she always does whenever I mention Feli. She holds her hands out imploringly and says, Did you know that two days after Yolandita passed away, her husband, Richard, went jogging and had a heart attack and died? Frankie, he died of a broken heart.
My mother’s feelings toward Feli are more complicated than her feelings toward Yolandita, deeper, harder for her to express. Feli’s second marriage has been happy and solid, and she has raised daughters who went to university and have their own careers, both married to successful husbands too. Feli studied the stock market and made smart investments with her husband’s earnings. She is also a straight talker whose directness at times must have offended my mother or punctured illusions.
I’m going to see María Xum, too, I tell my mother. Remember María Xum, Mamita? She barely spoke Spanish when she came to live with us. K’iche’ or Kaqchikel or one of those was her first language, remember? My mother seems to be trying to recall María Xum but not succeeding. Remember that time you caught María eating a stick of butter with a knife and fork in the middle of the night? I ask. You had to explain to her that it wasn’t that kind of food.
My mother is staring down at the Scrabble board, and with what seems a slightly effortful lifting of her hands, she plucks up two tiles and pushes them into place beneath the m in MUSA.
M
U
X
Mux, I say. Qué bueno, Ma. Xum backward. Or is that a Maya word?
My mother looks back at me. She even looks a little guilty, and I have to squeeze the muscles inside my cheeks not to laugh.
Soon after the coup, but before my mother met my father, Dolores Ojito’s parents sailed with friends on a yacht from Izabál and the Río Dulce to Miami, from where they were going to fly to Boston to visit her. But the yacht disappeared in a storm, no survivors. Lolita changed overnight, said Mamita that time when she first told me the story. She retreated into her relationship with a Boston College grad student in philosophy and within months they were married. He became a professor and later an administrator at the college. Though Dolores used to occasionally come to events at the Latin American Society of New England, it’s been years since my mother last saw or heard from her.
Maybe the Guatemalan consul in Boston was replaced by a new consul after the coup, and maybe Mamita was replaced, too, or else decided to leave on her own. But her next job was as a bilingual secretary at the Potashnik Tooth Company, and the way she always told the story of how she met my father is that she was habitually late for work, something the consul must have tolerated but that her new boss didn’t. The day she was fired, Bert Goldberg, head of Potashnik’s artificial teeth lab, found her weeping by a drinking fountain in a corridor and asked her to dinner. Despite his unglamorous-sounding job and his being almost twenty years older, he was an athletic bachelor about town with colorful friends: rakish sportswriters, crusty gamblers, wisecracking World War II veterans from his boyhood Dorchester neighborhood, including one who was now a Boston portrait painter, even a blind coin collector. In his forties, Bert Goldberg, playing for the University Club, had been state Class B squash champion, and he invited the young bilingual secretary to some of his matches. Sitting in the spectator seats elevated above that cramped, white box, Mamita watched my father and his rival scuttling around in short white pants, swatting at the speedy black pea ricocheting off the walls and corners. Bert had once played Cape Cod League baseball, not that that meant anything to my mother. He eventually let Mamita know about some of the immigrant hardships he’d endured as a boy, how his father had made him sell potatoes from a pushcart after school when he was only eight and how his mother, Rose, had died when he was in early adolescence.
When he met my mother, Bert was living with Uncle Lenny and Aunt Milly at their house in Waban. At my father’s funeral, Cousin Denise affectionately recalled that when she was a girl her uncle Bert used to sneak into her bedroom to hide presents inside her shoes. Lexi once told me that our father, during his courtship of Mamita, used to take her to the most fashionable restaurants and nightclubs in Boston. When those Zbiggy Brzezinski grad student types also invited her out, she delighted in knowingly name-dropping restaurants and clubs she knew those muchachos usually couldn’t afford to take her to. Lexi said that Mamita thought that was part of the fun of going out with an older man. Jewish, no less. What did that matter? Lucio Grassi, who claimed to be a devout Catholic, had stolen from her and lied. Maybe by taking Mamita to those expensive places, Bert gave her a misleading impression of wealth.
I’ve wheeled Mamita upstairs to her room again. She sits on her bed with her back to Susan Cornwall, who’s returned from her hospital outing. I’m in the chair in the corner facing my mother, the tin of French butter cookies on my lap. We’ve each just eaten a cookie. I offered one to Susan Cornwall, too, who now, on her back under her blanket, is eating her cookie in slow, savoring nibbles. Since we returned to her room, Mamita’s been answering my questions without even the usual hesitation. I offer her another cookie, take one for myself, and, sensing that there’s not going to be a better moment than this one, I ask, Mami, in all the years you were with Daddy, did you ever have an affair?
She’s just taken a bite of her cookie, and as if stimulated by baked French butter and sugar and a humming “afternoon tea” lucidity, Mamita answers, Yes, I did.
You did, Ma, really?
Yes, she says. She smiles wanly and says, Just one, Frankie.
Was his name Miguel? I ask.
But Frankie, how do you know that? Yes, Miguel, she says, slightly widening her eyes. He was from Mexico City. He worked for Honeywell. But Honeywell brought him to Boston for a year to learn about their new computers.
It’s so obvious that they must have met at the Latin American Society of New England that I don’t even ask. Mamita, I say, I’m really happy to hear this. I’m so happy for you that you had a love affair. She sits back, her expression girlishly complacent. My words are heartfelt, but I also feel a little bad. Still, I can’t stop myself and ask, Mamita, when you and Miguel wanted to be alone together, where did you go?
Sometimes we used to meet at the Hilltop Sheraton, she answers.
The Hilltop Sheraton, really? It’s as if the French butter cookies have drugged my mother like a truth serum. The Hilltop Sheraton is in our town, out by Route 128. On summer nights in high school we’d sometimes sneak into the swimming pool there. I ask, This was around when I was in high school, right?
She thinks this over and says, Yes, it was.
So what happened?
What happened? Well, he had to go back to Mexico, Frankie.
Ay, Mami, I say, I’m so sorry. Were you very sad?
Yes, I was sad, she says.
Did you love him, Ma?
And with that tone of voice and enunciation that reminds me of a polite contestant in a 1950s quiz show who masters her composure even as she knows she is providing the winning answer, Mamita says, Yes, I did love him, Frankie.
And this Miguel, he’s the one who gave you The Teachings of Don Juan and those other Carlos Castaneda books?
She laughs quietly. Oh, I don’t remember, she says. But he did like to read.
“I am a controlled warrior,” I say. Do you remember that one, Ma, your favorite Don Juan quote?
Recognition like two tiny fragile bubbles of light float up into her eyes, is that what that is? Do you remember, Ma? I repeat. “I am a controlled warrior.”
She giggles a little. Yes, she says. I do. Now she’s smiling to herself.
Was he kind of a hippie type?
He had long hair, she says and laughs again. But not as long as yours used to be! But, yes, Frankie, he enjoyed life.
He enjoyed life, I repeat. But, you mean, in a laid-back way.
>
In a what way? she asks.
He wasn’t a drinker or a big party guy, I say.
Oh no, she says. He had a tranquil personality.
A tranquil personality, not like Daddy.
Ay no, she says.
Do you still think about Miguel?
It was only a year, you know, she says. And only in Boston. But I have some good memories of Miguel, yes, and she smiles with closed lips.
After he left, did you ever see him again, Ma?
I was going to take a summer course on Mexican writers in Cuernavaca, on Juan Rulfo and some others, she says. She pauses, seems to be holding herself as still as she can as if that will help her remember, though suddenly her eyelashes rapidly blink. But, no, she says, I didn’t go, Frankie. We never saw each other again. She sits with her hands folded in her lap, staring off, but when she shifts her gaze to me, she lifts one hand over the end of her chair’s arm, raises her chin, a look like calm satisfaction in her eyes and an avid glint behind, like the very tip of a new memory rising. Something in her posture and poise reminds me of that oil portrait of her in her evening gown that hung in our living room. Now she looks down at the floor.
Well, I’m proud of you, Mami, I say. That you were brave enough to do that, to have your love affair.
Yes, Frankie, she says. She looks up again, slightly furrows her brow for a moment, then reaches her hand out for another cookie, and I hold the tin out to her.
I feel like a burglar who’s broken into her memory. But I also have this thought, which doesn’t exculpate me: Besides that warning, this is another reason that I came back from Mexico, to visit my mother at Green Meadows and ask all the questions that finally led to this one. It’s as if I’ve been slowly making my way through the dark narrow streets of her fading memories to finally discover this one room of light and calm where she keeps, instead of cardboard boxes filled with heels and soles, her most precious secret.
Where was my mother sitting within herself, what did she see around her, as she spoke to me? Maybe the past or a dream state or a fantasy had displaced the present. Was she really aware of what she was sharing with me? By tomorrow she might not even remember we had that conversation. But I also sense that she won’t have forgotten Miguel, that even if she sometimes loses her way trying to get back to the room, she goes there regularly.
Mamita didn’t go to Cuernavaca that summer. Someone, Mamita or Miguel or maybe both together, decided that she shouldn’t. But during several summers when we were small children, into at least our middle school years, she did sometimes go abroad to take courses of at least a few weeks’ duration. The courses qualified her to teach rudimentary literature classes rather than only give language instruction. She went to Mexico City, to the UNAM, more than once to Spain. In Madrid one summer, she studied golden age literature in a program also attended by students from the University of Havana and came home from it with an adamant dislike of Cuban men. Los Cubanos son muy groseros, no son caballeros, son tremendos, she was always saying things like that and also that they were loud. At first I thought it was that they were loyal Fidelistas and Communists who’d mocked her for being from Guatemala, a servile, humiliated American colony, the country that had let its territory be used to train the soldiers who went on to take part in the Bay of Pigs invasion, where they were soundly routed. Only a few years ago, it dawned on me that there was probably another reason Mamita always looked so perturbed whenever I brought up Cuba and Cubans, whether telling her about my own trips to the island or even asking her again to tell me about those Cubans she’d studied with years ago in Madrid. Son tan groseros, Frankie. No tienen respeto. In what ways, Mamita? I asked, and she twisted her face into a grimace, clucked her teeth, and said, You know, they’re so aggressive and rude. How, you mean about politics? Ay no, Frankie, ya. Mami, I said, laughing, I know what it is. They used to come on to you and openly flirt with you, right? I bet they teased you about what a prude you are. What did you expect, I said. A beautiful chapina all by herself in Madrid, and everyone knows what Cuban men are like. And she tightly pursed her lips and turned away, and I could tell she didn’t want me to see the amusement in her eyes or even that she was stifling a laugh. But that’s also how I knew that it wasn’t anything truly horrible that had happened to her with those Communist literature student Cubanos in Madrid.
I get it, Mamá. Geeky hippie-ish romantic intelligent Miguel, something of a free spirit, his enthusiasm for those peyote mysticism books, his gentle Mexican manners and awkwardly seductive, yet gently forthright ways, after two decades of dealing with Bert, it’s easy to imagine what you found so attractive about him. When you’re in Cuernavaca, Yolanda, we’ll escape to San Luis Potosí for a few days and with a shaman to guide us, we’ll take magic mushrooms or peyote. Yolanda, your life will never be the same. Mamita’s fantasies of what that will be like, God knows, make her eyes glow. She laughs with excitement. Yes, Miguel, we will, yes.
I’ve booked a room in a chain hotel out on the highway. Waiting out in the Green Meadows parking lot for a taxi, I think, How you answer Lulú’s message about Ayahuasca Bro and his hipster housewarming party could turn out to be really important, Frankie Gee, even decisive. But answer her later, at the hotel. Have a drink at the bar and think it over. You don’t want to mess this up.
But at the hotel, after I’ve checked in and gone into the lobby bar that I don’t want to spend another minute at, crowded with boisterous lower-level corporate types, “artistic” prints of iconic Boston athletes on the Irish green walls, I shout to the bartender through heads and shoulders for a double Maker’s on the rocks, then carry it up to my room with my luggage. From room service, I order a French onion soup and a Salisbury steak with mushroom gravy and another bourbon, this one straight. When I’m ready to drink it, I’ll get ice from the machine down the hall. I used to like Salisbury steak TV dinners when I was a child, this one will probably be no worse than those.
That first morning with Lulú in my apartment, fresh snow coating the tree branches outside the window, the scraping sound of snow shoveling coming from outside, the old steam radiator hissing and gurgling, when we woke in my bed, kissing and touching, that soft chain of delicious sensual shocks, didn’t we also begin to confide in each other? Lulú did in me. She lay on her belly, her arms crossed over the pillows, looked at me over her bare shoulder with her dolphin eye and said:
If I had a father, a father who cared about me, he would say you are too old, and he would not let us be together. Maybe he would do anything to stop it, even kidnap me and lock me in a room, you know? Her smile, I guess, was ambiguous. But I don’t have a father, she said. Or else, well, I don’t know where he is. I only have a mother I don’t really speak to anymore and whose advice I would ignore anyway. There’s nobody I have to listen to. My cousin doesn’t interfere in my life. The only one responsible for my life is me.
A few moments later, Lulú said, I’ve done things I’m not proud of, Panchito.
Yeah? I said and waited a moment. Well, there’s so much that I’m not proud of, too, Lulú, I said. I could write an encyclopedia of all those things.
So many? she asked.
I’ve been around a lot longer than you have. I’ve accumulated my share of mistakes, believe me.
I want to be finished making my mistakes, she said. But if you’re planning to make some more, don’t make them with me. She playfully punched my bicep, then lightly bit it.
Lulú has the most lovely bare feet. Her toes rows of nearly identical delicate peanuts inside smooth shells and her high perfect inner arches.
Alright now, be honest but not too honest; better yet, don’t be dishonest.
I answer Lulú’s text: “Ayahuasca gives you diarrhea and makes you throw up. I don’t enjoy either of those, that’s why I’ve never done it. But don’t let that stop you.
Monkey Boy Page 23