Beyond the Ties of Blood

by Florencia Mallon

  Laura had never tried lemon poppyseed cake, and it sounded really good. But she could tell from the look Marcie was giving her that she needed to agree. She nodded. “I’m stuffed,” she said. “Everything was so good.”

  Mr. and Mrs. Bronfman laughed. “It’s all right, Laura dear,” Mrs. Bronfman said. “I’ll cut a piece for you to take home for you and your mother.” And with that, they were free to go.

  “Why did you do that?” Laura asked once they were upstairs in Marcie’s room.

  “I don’t know. I’ve just heard his story about Moldavanka a zillion times. And it always ends with a long lecture about the good old days, and how everyone looked out for each other then, and weren’t so individualistic, blah, blah, blah.”

  Laura sat down on the bed. “I wasn’t bored yet,” she said.

  Marcie sat down next to her. “That’s because you’d never heard it before,” she said. After a short pause, she continued. “Does your mom repeat herself over and over like that? I don’t know. My parents are getting more and more annoying all the time.”

  For a moment the two girls just looked at each other. Then, almost simultaneously, they burst out laughing. Two hours later, when Mrs. Bronfman came up to the room to offer Laura a ride home, they’d tried on every possible outfit in Marcie’s closet, and about half of its contents were spread across the bed. The new skirt that Marcie couldn’t quite close looked great on Laura, and she was now wearing it. The two girls had also decided to meet the next morning and go to the discount makeup store.

  When Laura woke up the next day, at first she couldn’t remember why she felt so different. She got up and went to sit in her window seat, tucking her bare feet under her to warm them in her nightgown. The leaves on the big oak tree outside her window had turned a sunburned shade of brown. And all of a sudden she knew. She had a friend.

  “Laurita! Laura! Are you up?” It was her mother calling from the kitchen. She could smell the fragrance of coffee and freshly toasting bread.

  “Yes, Mamita! Do I have time to take a shower before breakfast?”

  “No, m’hijita, just come to the table in your nightgown! You can shower later!”

  By the time Laura put on her slippers and padded into the kitchen, her mother was already pouring the hot milk into their coffee. The bread, toasted and buttered, was sitting on dishes in the dining area, and the orange juice was already poured.

  “You got up early today,” Laura said as she brought in the sugar and the salt and pepper for the fried eggs her mother was just removing from the stove.

  “I woke up early and decided to get going,” her mother said. “You know, Laurita, I was thinking. It’s such a beautiful day today, and I don’t have any emergency work to do. What if we call tía Irene and see if we can borrow her car? We could go out into the countryside, the leaves are so beautiful right now. And I was thinking about last year, when we went out and found that pumpkin and carved it and everything. Would you like to do that again?”

  Laura chewed her bread carefully, then took a slow sip of her coffee and milk. “I’m going out with Marcie. We’re meeting at the shopping center, you know, the one right on the bus line. We’re going to look at makeup.”

  “Oh.”

  “Are you upset?”

  “Oh, no, hijita, of course not. It’s wonderful that you’re getting to be friends.”

  “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you last night, it’s just that I was really tired and—”

  “No, don’t worry, mi amor. It’s great. This way I can catch up on some work, get ahead of my classes for the week. And I might even have time to go visit Irene. No, no, don’t worry.”

  But the more her mother protested, Laura noticed, the flatter her voice sounded.

  As Marcie and Laura became best friends, Laura began getting invited to parties. Since her mother didn’t have a car, she was always having to bum rides from Mrs. Bronfman.

  “At least I wish our moms could share more,” she said one day in school. “It’s not fair that your mom is always having to stay up late to go get us.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” Marcie said. “My mom really likes you. It’s been a while since I had a best friend, and I think she was getting a little worried.”

  After that, Laura felt better about Mrs. Bronfman. She began to see, too, that even though Marcie had a lot of friends to hang out with, she didn’t seem to have a lot of special ones to confide in. So it balanced out in the end. But she did occasionally worry about her mother. It was the first time she noticed that, unless tía Irene and Amanda came over to take her somewhere, her mother never went out. She began to wonder why her mom didn’t have any friends of her own. It would certainly make her own life easier if she didn’t find her mother waiting for her every time she got home, always eager to hear about how things had gone. For the first time in her life, Laura began to dread those middle-of-the-night conversations.

  It was worse when she began hanging out with Jacob at parties. Everyone was pairing off, it seemed, including Marcie. At first, Laura felt the same old pain in the stomach—the sense of being the odd one out—that she’d felt when they first moved to Boston. But one night Jacob came over and asked her to slow dance. He took her hand and led her out into the open area that served as a dance floor. A lot of couples were dancing already, and once they got a little further out into the middle of the room she could see that others had begun making out on the couches, just outside the reach of the lamplight. She felt a warm yearning that made it hard to breathe. Jacob took both her hands and brought them up around his neck, then placed both of his on her waist. He put his head down onto the top of her hair and she settled into his chest.

  That night when she got home, she was sure her mom would notice. What would she say in her own defense? Look, Mamita, I’m thirteen and a half. Don’t you trust me? Do you think I’d do anything wrong? Everyone’s doing it. Nothing sounded right. So she didn’t say anything, and had a hard time meeting her mama’s eyes.

  After a while, she and Jacob began making out. They’d dance for a while, and then he would take her hand and lead her to a couch outside the circle of light, pulling her down onto his lap. When his lips moved along her jaw she found that, at least for a moment, she could forget where and who she was, and no longer felt out of place. But she began to worry that Mama would see the warm, burning spots he left along the sides of her neck. A couple of times she had to wear her hair down and a scarf because he’d left a bruise. A hickey, Marcie called it. Everyone got them, she said. She made it sound like it was something to be proud of.

  When Laura turned fourteen, she and Marcie, Laura’s mom, and Mr. and Mrs. Bronfman all got together for Saturday lunch at a local restaurant. Later that day, Marcie and Laura went out to the movies and for pizza. Just the two of them. They’d decided to go it alone, because they had both broken up with their boyfriends and were still feeling a little strange.

  “I’m so glad we decided to do it this way,” Marcie said when they’d finished the pizza and she was drinking her third diet soda.

  “Me, too,” Laura answered. “And by the way, thanks for the perfume.”

  Smiling, the two girls got up and took their garbage over to the bin. Laura looked at her watch, a present from her mom.

  “We only have fifteen minutes until my aunt Irene picks us up,” she said.

  They began walking in the general direction, but the window of the electronics store caught their attention.

  “That is such a cool sound system,” Marcie said. “It has extra bass and you can—wait a minute!” She interrupted herself, then reached over to poke her friend in the side. “Look! Your mom’s on TV!”

  The two girls stared, open-mouthed. The television was tuned to the evening news on one of the local stations. With the sound turned down, they couldn’t hear what people were saying, but there was Laura’s mother, dressed up in a nice grey pinstripe suit, being interviewed by one of the anchors.

  “Wow,” Laura said. �
�She never told me she was gonna be on TV.”

  It was a long interview. Even with the sound turned down, Laura could tell that her mother was giving long answers to the questions, and at one point she even dabbed a tissue to the corners of her eyes. It seemed to be something really dramatic.

  “I bet Irene’ll know what’s going on,” she said, hurrying toward the front of the mall.

  Irene and Amanda were already waiting for them in their blue Saab. Amanda rolled down the front passenger window.

  “Hi, girls,” she called. “Go ahead and get in the back seat. Door’s open.”

  They climbed in. Laura scooted over, folding her legs behind her aunt’s seat. “We just saw Mom on television at the electronics store,” she said. “The sound was down but it looked serious. What’s up with that?”

  Irene didn’t say anything as she took several quick turns on her way out of the parking lot. Laura had to hold on in order not to be tossed around. Her tía had always been a bit dramatic behind the wheel. Whenever Mama mentioned it, Irene would only laugh. “You can thank General Pinochet for that,” was all she’d ever say. Now she didn’t answer until they were at a red light about a block away from the mall.

  “It started on Friday afternoon,” she began. “With your birthday celebration and all, your mother didn’t want to take attention away from you. She arranged to record the interview after your birthday lunch. They promised to give her a video copy so you could see it.”

  “But why did it happen in the first place? Why do the news programs want to talk to her all of a sudden?”

  “Well, Laurita, it’s understandable that you wouldn’t have been keeping track. Your mama and I, well … we’ve been following the story for several months now, but it didn’t seem necessary to call your attention to it until something had really happened.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “There’s big changes going on in Chile, mi amor. At the beginning of next month there’s going to be a special election, a plebiscite, to decide whether or not Chileans want Pinochet to continue as president. I think some of the debate finally ended up catching the attention of the media here in the United States. When the local news stations called around to find out who would be a good expert to interview, people recommended your mom. So she got a call.”

  “But why was she crying?”

  “You know it’s still a pretty sore subject for your mom. But I think she was also caught off guard. She called me after the recording session was over. The anchor started asking her about the Allende years, about her own experiences back then. They asked her some pretty personal questions, and at one point your mama starting talking about your papa.”

  “Oh, my God. Does she feel embarrassed now? Is she okay?”

  “She’s going to be fine, sweetie. But I think she’s a little worried about what you’re going to think since, being on the evening news and all, you’ll probably get a lot of comments from your friends.”

  Laura was glad she had a chance to see the interview on video before she went back to school on Monday. It had been decided that, as part of the special birthday celebrations, Marcie would stay overnight. So when they got back to the apartment Laura, Marcie, and Eugenia, still wearing her grey suit, watched the video together.

  After it was over, everyone was quiet for a while.

  “So, what do you think?” her mother finally asked.

  Laura looked at Marcie. Her friend was sitting on the couch, her knees up against her chest. There was a puzzled line between her eyebrows. Then Laura looked at her mom. “What was that question about torture?” she asked.

  Her mom played with her hands, pulling at a piece of skin on her left thumb, before she answered. “Well, there’s no reason you would know this, but the military hurt a lot of people after they arrested them.”

  “Like how? What did they do?”

  “M’hijita, there’s a good reason I didn’t talk about it in the interview. They did some pretty awful things.”

  “Like what? What did they do to you?”

  When her mother finally answered her voice was ragged but firm.

  “Look, mi amor, I don’t think there’s any point in going into detail. Let’s just say it was not pleasant, and that a lot of people suffered.”

  “This is why you have nightmares, isn’t it,” Laura said. It was more of a statement than a question.

  “And what do you think, Marcie?” Laura’s mother asked after a long silence.

  Marcie busied herself smoothing the legs of her jeans, then folding her feet under her. “Well, Mrs. A,” she began, “I thought it was kind of cool, about the two of you falling in love, and then how you ended up running from the police. I think the kids at school are gonna focus on you running from the cops.” They didn’t discuss the interview much more after that.

  “Are you okay?” Marcie asked Laura after they’d turned out the lights and settled in for the night.

  “I guess so,” Laura said. “It’s just a shock, you know? It never crossed my mind that my mom was tortured. I can’t even really wrap my mind around that. It doesn’t seem real. And then, it turns out that my parents were hippies and outlaws, and they never married. I don’t know, when I think about your parents, and how they’ve been together so long, and …”

  “You know what?” Marcie said. “My parents are boring. They say boring things. At least your mom is interesting.”

  “My mom’s always been unpredictable, you know?” Laura said after a short silence. “I never know if she’ll be sad, or happy. I haven’t been able to figure it out my whole life. And then, out of the blue, she moved us here.”

  The first days after her mother’s interview aired on the news, a couple of Laura’s friends stopped her in the hall in school and said things like, that was your mother on television, wasn’t it? I didn’t realize you’d had such a hard time growing up, without a father and everything. So she began to relax. But on Friday that week, she ran into Jacob in the lunch room. Since they’d stopped hanging out at parties, he’d always just nodded his head but kept on going. This time he stopped right in front of her as she was putting her tray down on the conveyor belt.

  “Wow,” he said. “I didn’t know your parents were radicals running from the cops. It’s like a spy movie or something.”

  Laura kept her eyes focused on the tray, trying to look like she was being extra careful putting it down. What was she supposed to say? But he kept standing there.

  “Now I understand why your last name is different from your mom’s,” he continued. At that Laura turned to face him.

  “Actually, Jacob, I tried to explain that to you before,” she said. “In Latin America a woman doesn’t take her husband’s last name. At most she adds it to her own. But the kids get their dad’s.”

  “Yeah, I remember,” he said. “But maybe you should’ve kept hers anyway since your parents were never married. And besides, you never knew him, did you?”

  Laura found Marcie after school and they decided to take a walk. They talked a lot about what a bastard Jacob had been.

  “I think it’s because you called it off with him first,” Marcie said.

  At home, her mother was reading in the living room and got up to give her a hug. “What happened?” she asked as she pulled away. “I can feel your back and it’s all tight.”

  Laura headed toward the kitchen. “It’s not important,” she said. “Besides, I’m hungry.”

  Her mother followed her into the kitchen and watched her take out some bread and put it in the toaster. She waited until Laura had taken it out, buttered it and put some jam on it, taken out a glass of juice to go with it, and sat down at the table with her snack.

  “What happened?” her mother repeated.

  “Mamita, I already told you, it’s not important.”

  “Is it about my interview on TV?” Her mother put her hand on Laura’s arm, preventing her from getting the toast to her mouth. “That’s it, isn’t it?” she said.


  Laura gave up trying to eat the bread. She looked up. “It’s nothing, really, it’s just that—”

  “What?”

  “Well, there’s this boy in my class, and I think he has a crush on me. He asked me out once but I said no, and I think he got angry. Today he just said some mean things.”

  “What did he say?”

  “He’d seen you on TV. He talked about you running from the cops, and then he said that it would have been better for me to take your name instead of Papa’s, because I never knew him anyway.”

  “Ay, Laurita.” Her mother brought a chair over and sat next to her. “He doesn’t have any idea what he’s talking about. Some people are just ignorant, m’hijita.”

  Her mother offered to complain to the principal, but Laura said no. Finally her mother relented. But Laura couldn’t shake the feeling that, in the end, her mother’s anger was more about herself than about her daughter.

  After the new year, Marcie and Laura began going to parties again. Laura started talking with a new guy, Simon, who seemed to think that the stories circulating about Laura’s life only made her more interesting. Mysterious, was the word he used. At first Laura felt that same old pain in the pit of her stomach, that same old awareness of being different. But unlike Jacob, Simon was actually interested in getting to know her, and they spent hours talking. Although sometimes she wondered if he even found her attractive, Laura also found that with Simon, just talking made her feel like she belonged. And she really needed that, especially since she was getting more and more worried about her mother.

  Her mother was smoking more, and she was dreaming again. Mama’s room began to reek of tobacco and sometimes, when Laura got back late from a party, she could hear her moaning. She’d be tempted to go in and make sure Mama was okay. But then she would wonder what would happen if, in the middle of it all, Mama would really wake up and start trying to get involved in her life again. So she didn’t enter her mother’s bedroom, but simply lay in bed listening to her voice until she calmed down. Even on the rare occasion when she returned at one in the morning, it would take several hours before that happened. There were times, especially toward the end of the spring, when Laura saw the sun come up before her mother was finally quiet.