Vida

by Patricia Engel

  Cris was late to come home, so Paloma called Joe’s house. His mother answered and told Paloma that Cris had not been there that evening. She put Joe on the phone, and after some coaxing, he confessed that Cris was really hanging around with Tania, the local Girl With Problems. He finally showed up a few hours later, high on his experience, whatever it was. When he walked in through the back door of the house, Paloma rushed him, grabbed him from behind the neck, and forced him onto a chair at the kitchen table for an interrogation.

  He folded his arms across his chest, raised his chin in the air, and squinted his eyes so much he could probably only see his own arrogance through those lashes.

  “You’re only twelve and you already want to be some kind of perro puto?” she yelled, and it seemed to me she was taking this very personally. If my mother were here, she’d just tell him not to do it again and keep him moving up to his room. Cris was a perfect student—a free ride through all sorts of bad behavior as long as he kept delivering As.

  Cris grinned, his silver braces catching the light and making stars on the ceiling.

  “Don’t you laugh at me,” Paloma snarled.

  “You’re not one to judge,” Cris ripped. I could tell he’d been saving this one.

  “What does that mean?”

  “Don’t call me perro puto when you’re just a mistress. Got it?”

  I wasn’t sure what a mistress was but I knew it was bad, maybe as bad as a puta pagada, which is what my parents called the women my uncles sometimes hung around with instead of their wives. Paloma was stunned and Cris used the window of shock to make his escape and retreat to his room. All we heard was the door slam. Paloma was frozen, one hand on the kitchen table as if her body was laying down roots.

  “Are you okay?” I asked her. Nila had already gone to bed. I was glad she wasn’t there to see the show. I offered Paloma a glass of water. Told her maybe we could make some tea. But she just shook her head, and finally I told her good night.

  Paloma left her job keeping the books at Panasonic and went to work at the Museum of Modern Art, which made her happy because she could get all kinds of discounts on stationery and tote bags from the gift shop. My mom often went to meet her for lunch and a walk around the museum while my brother and I were at school and Papi was at work. My mother didn’t have many friends, but that never struck me as weird because my father didn’t have many either, just a ton of siblings who kept marrying, divorcing, and multiplying, so there were always a lot of people around anyway.

  Mami was on her own in the United States, if you didn’t count her husband or kids. She left her parents behind in Colombia and they both died before I had a chance to meet them. She had a few siblings left in Bogotá: one full sister, one full brother who was institutionalized for retardation, and another half sister that her father had with a secretary. Around here, Mami only had Paloma, and they clung together like schoolgirls, linking elbows as they walked, talking for hours about people I didn’t know, about the world they left behind in South America, in a way that made it sound like a miniseries.

  You could hardly tell they were related though. Paloma with her bare face next to Mami’s hour’s worth of cosmetics, perfectly layered creams and pigments, so that her eyes seemed lit from within. My mother always dressed as if she were on her way to a cocktail party, while Paloma had on her sensible uniform—black trousers and a blouse in one of the primary colors. My mother had the soft, forgiving nature of a mother, infinite patience unless you crossed her, and then she became a viper. Paloma seemed infinitely wounded, trusted no one, never accepted when you tried to give her a gift, and always wore her purse across her chest with a hand clutching the strap, prepared to be mugged.

  Paloma was happy working at the museum until a shiny Colombian compatriota named Oscar showed up, with oily hair that looked like it might drip on you if you got too close and a face that always looked wet. I saw this wonder myself one day when I went with my mother to meet Paloma at the museum. Oscar was always talking about the various women he was screwing, going into detail at the dirty parts so as to annoy Paloma, whose desk was next to his in accounting. And then his harassment became outright cruel. He’d call her fat, grotesque, mock her, told her he was going to have her fired with the false complaints he filed against her in personnel on a weekly basis. Paloma didn’t know what to do but she was tough, so she ignored the man, who was slowly poaching the few friends she’d made on the job. She had only one left. A recent college grad named Maggie, who had the kind of red hair you only see in movies. I think Maggie had a sad family story of her own and that’s why she gravitated toward Paloma.

  When Paloma came to our house in New Jersey to spend the weekend, she would tell me about her. “Maggie is so sweet, she buys me a bagel and coffee every morning without my asking her to.” Or, “Maggie has to buy a dress for a party and she asked me to go shopping at Macy’s with her.”

  I got the feeling she was comparing me to Maggie. At that time I was fifteen and had an especially sucky attitude. When Paloma invaded the family room, sleeping on the couch so that I couldn’t watch television when I wanted, I took to ignoring her, isolating her with my indifference. My mother never pushed us to be close with each other. Our distance seemed to reinforce her own conflicted past with her sister and every now and then she’d fall into a memory and say, “Paloma used to be terrible to me,” before she stopped herself, shook out her hands as if they were full of crumbs, and added, “Well, never mind. That’s all in the past now.”

  At that time, our maid was a young Guatemalan lady with a mouth full of gold. Her name was Deisy and she’d buy turtle eggs from some store in North Bergen and eat them for lunch right there on our kitchen table. I told her they were endangered but she’d just say they were delicious, peeling away the soft shell to reveal the turtle fetus; tiny head with eyes closed and claws tucked inward. Deisy had only recently arrived but she was picking up English quickly from talk radio, and my father gave her a list of vocabulary words every morning that she’d memorize by the evening. It was Deisy who told me I needed to start treating Paloma better.

  I confessed that I didn’t feel any warmth toward Paloma, no matter if she was my aunt or my godmother.

  Deisy shook her head at me and said, “Ser amable no quita lo valiente.”

  We made a deal. She’d give up eating turtle eggs and I’d be nicer to Paloma.

  Holidays in our home consisted of my mother hosting all of my father’s family. Paloma came, too. She’d help my mother organize the food, set up the table, supervise the housekeeper so that every thing was perfect. But then, as the music and chatter filled the house and the relatives fell into their pods of conversation, Paloma was always left alone on the sofa. People avoided her, maybe because they didn’t quite know what to say. You couldn’t ask her about her boyfriend because by now everyone knew he was married to another woman in Parsippany and that he was probably never going to leave her despite his stringing Paloma along all these years. You couldn’t ask her about her job at the museum because then you’d have to hear about Oscar El Demonio for an hour, how he was trying to push her out of her job, force her to quit out of frustration, but she refused to give him the pleasure.

  Or she’d talk about all the things she was going to do in a few years when she retired. She had all these trips in mind: Southeast Asia, Russia, Brazil, and South Africa. She even wanted to go back to Jamaica to see the Kingston boarding school where the nuns tormented her, the place where she first understood what it meant to be alone and possibly forgotten. And of course, as soon as she retired, she would finally start reading all the books that formed a fortress around her apartment.

  But these conversations hardly ever happened because people didn’t give her the chance. Only my mother. When Mami was done feeding the people and taking compliments on the food and party, she’d go straight over to Paloma, and the two would fall into their song of history, exchange glances packed with gossip and innuendo about the other guests,
which only the two of them could understand.

  My mother’s mother died of cancer. Mami said it was because her husband’s infidelities had already demolished her that she handed herself over to the disease. She didn’t undergo any treatments and refused to go to the hospital. She stayed in her own bed, her body shrinking into the same sheets she’d embroidered for her wedding, while her absent husband returned home from the apartment he now shared with a mistress, to be with his wife during her last days.

  Mami says that during that last month, when she left my brother and father behind to go home to Colombia, is when she really got to know her mother. All the daughters spent hours in bed with their mother, told stories, rubbed lotion on their mother’s legs and skin until she said that the pain was too great, her flesh burning from the inside out. For her last days, my mother says that her father became the perfect husband. There was no mention of his mistress or the child he’d had with her. As he sat at his wife’s bedside, he told her she was the love of his life, asked her to forgive him, and said there was no other woman that compared to her in beauty and in spirit. Mami said the worst part was that she could see in her mother’s eyes that she didn’t believe him. And he wasn’t forgiven.

  When their mother died, Mami returned to Puerto Rico but Paloma stayed in Colombia for a while. My mother says they were not close then, but she heard from others that Paloma became addicted to sedatives, fell into an enormous depression, and that she spent months crying into the pillows of her mother’s bed.

  It was no surprise then when Paloma was diagnosed with cancer. Her mother’s had appeared in the pancreas, lethal, the kind of cancer that seems to take pleasure in the killing. Paloma’s cancer revealed itself in her uterus. More than one doctor told her it was because she’d never had children, as if she were to blame.

  I was twenty, at college in Manhattan, when my mother told me. I was impatient and asked her flat out if this meant Paloma was going to die.

  “It’s not like in the old days,” Mami told me. “They say they caught it early and she’ll go right into chemo. She should be fine.”

  Paloma lost her hair. At first she wore a scarf around her head or one of her old hats left over from the seventies. She lost a ton of weight with the treatment; her cheeks sank and her eyes bulged, while her lips became floppy. Her large breasts began to sag even farther and she held a constant expression of terror. Mami said we should be extra nice to Paloma, so I tried calling her every week to see how she was feeling. She was still working despite her fatigue and treatment schedule, never mind the nausea and depression that followed each session. She was still holding out for her retirement, her pension, saying once she kicked this cancer and got that cash in her pocket, she was going on a world tour.

  My mother went with her to the doctor sometimes. It was on one of those visits that a new doctor who was seeing her for the first time asked her if she’d ever had children. She said no, but the doctor went further and asked if she’d ever been pregnant.

  “Four times,” Paloma answered while my mother lost her breath.

  “And what happened?” asked the doctor.

  “I lost them.”

  Nobody knew Paloma had ever been pregnant. She never told my mother. My mother asked her why she’d kept it a secret all those years but Paloma didn’t have an answer.

  My parents convinced Paloma to take a vacation when her treatments were finally over. Paloma hardly ever took vacations, especially in the spring, because she said that they needed her at the museum during tax season. Papi always said Paloma did the work of a dozen people. But Oscar was still abusing her on the job, making fun of her bald head, telling her she looked like a hairless monster.

  We went to Israel. The Holy Land.

  At the time, I was dating a Lower East Side Costa Rican named Roly so I was too busy missing him and hoping he wouldn’t cheat while I was away to appreciate that we were walking in the footsteps of Jesus. Paloma’s hair was growing in, a dark fuzz much curlier than expected. Her face reclaimed some of its pink and she seemed invigorated by the dust and stone of Jerusalem. Paloma never went to church in New York, probably still mad at the nuns in Jamaica, but in Israel, I saw her fall into silent meditation at those holy sights packed with tourists, waiting in line behind dozens of people just for the chance to kneel before the Holy Sepulchre.

  We went to the Jordan River where there was a troop of born-agains baptizing themselves. The tour guide said the water was holy, so Paloma pulled out an empty Evian bottle and filled it up with the river water. I think she planned to anoint herself with it to keep away the cancer but I didn’t ask specifics. Some things are just personal.

  Mami later said to me, “I think this trip is a new beginning for her. She says she’s not going to work so much from now on. She might even retire early.”

  But when we got back to the States, it was business as usual. Paloma returned to her life at the museum, her nights with Gerald, and the occasional weekend at our house in New Jersey. Sometimes I called her to say hi even though it felt unnatural to me, just to make my mother happy. Paloma hardly seemed interested in talking to me, though, and gave the same monotone replies that I’d once offered as a snotty fifteen-year-old. I felt insulted. I wanted to ask her, “What did I ever do to you?” but I knew the answer. Nothing.

  They said if the cancer stayed away for five years, Paloma would be in the clear. It came back after two years. This time with full force, having deposited little nodules in her lungs, so firm in the tissue that there was no way to retrieve them. She went in for another round of radiation and chemo. She had to take time off from work and my mother brought her to stay at our house because the doctor said Paloma’s studio was too dusty for her lungs. Mami took her there to pack up some things and I think both of them knew it would be the last time.

  My mom asked me to come home to Jersey to spend some time. My brother even made an appearance. Paloma was camped out in the family room, had an oxygen tank beside her, just in case, and she banished the elderly Manchas from sight because she said his fur got into her throat. She would have been more comfortable in one of the upstairs bedrooms but she was too weak to climb the steps without turning purple from exertion.

  Our maid at the time was a former nurse who came to the States after her husband was murdered in Medellín. Her name was Luz and I loved her. She had two daughters, who went to work as nannies in Barcelona, and she missed them so much that she sort of used me as a stand-in, making a fresh batch of arepas and lentejas every time I came home, always leaving a steaming cup of cinammon tea on the nightstand before I went to bed. Because she’d been a nurse, Luz was extra good with Paloma. That is, until Paloma started barking at her, telling her she wasn’t cleaning well enough because the dust was causing her to cough uncontrollably. Luz almost quit a few times, told Mami she was not used to this kind of treatment, but Mami begged her to stay, finally admitting that the doctors had told her Paloma wouldn’t last much longer.

  Several times a week, Mami drove Paloma to the city to see her doctors. Every weekend that I came home, I found Paloma more dependent on the oxygen tank, with plastic tubes up her nose and eyes wide as if in the midst of a duel. We kept the house quiet. Paloma couldn’t take any kind of noise, which meant that Luz couldn’t play her salsa music while she worked in the kitchen, and Mami had to whisper when she spoke on the phone to her other sister in Colombia. Paloma wouldn’t even come to the table for dinner. She was losing her appetite. It took all her will to swallow a few crackers and some soup.

  All her life, Paloma loved to read the New York Post. Never the Times. When she was at the house, Papi went out every morning to get her a copy. One day, Paloma stopped reading. Each day thereafter the editions piled up on the coffee table in the family room untouched. My father tried to entice her with the latest news about the mayor or whatever political scandal was in the headlines—all to inspire a little passion in Paloma, but she wasn’t interested anymore, and soon she lost track of the
days.

  Gerald came to see her sometimes. My mother tried to be polite, even asked Luz to make him lunch, coffee, whatever the guy wanted as he sat in the armchair next to Paloma, who didn’t even change out of her nightgown anymore. She spent her afternoons on the sofa with her crossword puzzles, and when Gerald came to visit, they sat in silence across from each other in the family room. Sometimes Luz and I hung around the doorway trying to hear the way they spoke to each other but they didn’t give anything away. Luz said she could see in Gerald’s eyes that for him, Paloma wasn’t dying fast enough.

  When Paloma was hospitalized, my mother asked me to call her sister in Colombia to tell her to come because there wasn’t much time left. Carmen arrived the next day. Papi picked her up at the airport and brought her straight to the hospital. Carmen was two years younger than my mother and they could pass for twins, though Carmen had abandoned the Andean vanity that sustained my mother, in favor of a more European look, wore mostly black and only foundation, which Mami always told her was the wrong shade. Mami warned Carmen not to cry at the sight of Paloma but when she stood at the foot of the hospital bed, the room dimly lit because too much light bothered Paloma’s eyes, Carmen folded. Paloma peeled the oxygen mask from her face when she saw her little sister for the first time in over ten years.

  “I must really be dying if you’re here.”

  My mother and Carmen slept at the hospital with Paloma, who was increasingly anxious that she would suffocate, her lungs locked with disease. She sucked air from the plastic nasal tubes, ravenous, and called the nurses often, telling them the oxygen tank was broken, not enough air was coming out.

  After three weeks, the insurance wouldn’t pay for her hospital stay any longer and the doctor told my mother that bringing Paloma back home with her would be a mistake. Mami argued that she could take care of her, with Luz’s help, and she would hire a full-time nurse, but the doctor kept shaking his head, and finally took Mami’s wrist in his hand and said, “Trust me, you don’t want to do this.”