¡Yo!
Julia Alvarez
ALGONQUIN BOOKS OF CHAPEL HILL
for Papi
Many are those who deserve my heartfelt thanks—but most especially, to Shannon Ravenel and Bill Eichner for their faith and help with this book; to Susan Bergholz, my friend and literary guardian angel who watches over my work; to my colleagues at Middlebury College, especially those at the reference desk at the library, for their help with finding answers to my questions; to those students—you know who you are—whose editorial help on some of these stories was beyond the call of workshop commentary, may the muse be with you; to my friends and family, old and new, whose loving support inspires my life and work; and always y siempre to la Virgencita de Altagracia, mil gracias.
Contents
Prologue
The sisters . . . fiction
PART I
The mother . . . nonfiction
The cousin . . . poetry
The maid’s daughter . . . report
The teacher . . . romance
The stranger . . . epistle
PART II
The caretakers . . . revelation
The best friend . . . motivation
The landlady . . . confrontation
The student . . . variation
The suitor . . . resolution
PART III
The wedding guests . . . point of view
The night watchman . . . setting
The third husband . . . characterization
The stalker . . . tone
The father . . . conclusion
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¡Yo!
Prologue
The sisters
fiction
Suddenly her face is all over the place in a promo picture that makes her look prettier than she is. I’m driving downtown for groceries with the kids in the back seat and there she is on Fresh Air talking about our family like everyone is some made-up character she can do with as she wants. I’m mad as anything, so I U-turn the car and drive back home and call her up and I get her long-winded machine that says she can’t come to the phone right now, to please call her agent. Like hell I’m going to call her agent to give her a piece of my mind. Instead, I call up one of the other sisters.
“She’s now on to Papi in the Laurentians, imagine.”
“Jesus! Doesn’t she have any sense?”
“She has this whole spiel about art and life mirroring each other and how you’ve got to write about what you know. I couldn’t listen to it, it was making me sick.”
The kids are running around, screaming, knowing it’s a heyday because their mother’s mad at somebody else. And then little Carlos comes up and says, “Mamma, am I really in Auntie Yoyo’s book? Am I going to have my picture in the paper?” And then he’s begging to bring his auntie’s book to Easter show-and-tell so that the whole third grade of little Christians can get their ears burned to a crisp with the doctored-up family story.
“No! You cannot take that book to school!” I snap at him. And then more gently because those sweet chocolate-kisses eyes are blinking back tears, “It’s a grown-up book.”
“So can I take it in?” the eighth grader chimes in. She has started wearing her hair all fluffed out like her aunt’s.
“You kids are going to drive me crazy. When I end up at Bellevue—” And then I have to stop myself because that sounds more than vaguely familiar—it’s what the mami in the book always says. “Are you still there?” I say to my sister, who has gone strangely silent. Now I’m the one blinking back tears.
“I tell you, if she gets into my personal stuff, I’m going to . . .”
“But what can we do? Mami’s saying she’s going to sue her.”
“Ay, come on, Mami’s just pulling her usual. Remember when she used to pile us in the car as kids and drive over to the Carmelite nuns and say she was going to leave us in the convent unless we’d promise to behave? Remember? We’d be kneeling by the car and all these Carmelite nuns, who weren’t supposed to show their faces, were at the windows wondering what the hell was going on!”
We’re both laughing over that old story. I don’t know if we actually feel better about being fictional characters or if it’s just so nice to have a memory these days that we haven’t seen already worked over in print.
That night I talk to my husband—after the kids are off to their rooms. I fill him in on the radio show, the phone call with my sister, our mother’s temper tantrums out there for the whole world to know about. “What are we going to do about this?”
“About what?” he says.
I am not going to act like our mother and blow my temper. At least, not right away. “This . . . this exposure,” I say, because suddenly I don’t know what to call it myself. “I don’t think it’s good for the kids.”
My husband looks over his shoulder as if to assure himself there are no hidden cameras or reporters around. “We seem quite cozy here,” he says. He has a quaint way of saying things in his German accent that makes it hard to get angry at him. It’s as if you were to yell at someone in an ESL class who needs all the help he can get. I don’t know why he calls up this tender tolerance in me when I’m just as much a foreigner as he is. “There is no need to get upset. Soon she will write another book and this one will be forgotten.”
“Yeah, right. She was on the radio today talking away about Papi skiing topless in the Laurentians with all his French-Canadian girlfriends. Mami’s going to hit the roof!”
“Your mother will hit the roof anyway,” he says nonchalantly until he sees the look on my face. “But this is true,” he says lamely, scratching his balding head, something he does when he’s nervous that usually blunts the sharp edge of my anger. Tonight, it’s not really anger I’m feeling. I’m out and out flabbergasted that he would say such a thing even if it is true, which it is. I know for a fact that before he read the book and had lines like that plopped into his mouth, he would never have said so of his own accord. He used to be more polite. I feel like my whole life is losing ground to fiction.
“I just won’t have everyone criticizing the family,” I say in a teary voice that goes dry on me before I can wring any sympathy from him. So off I go to the kitchen to fix the kids’ lunches and settle my nerves. The last thing I want to do tonight is not be able to go to sleep and have to come out here and lie on the couch till all hours reading some stupid novel. I always was a reader, but now, whenever I open a book, even if it’s something by someone dead, all I can do is shake my head and think, oh my god, I wonder what their family thought of this story?
I’m in there cutting up the bread into little space-food squares the way my third-grader likes his sandwich and leaving out mayonnaise the way my eighth grader likes hers when the phone rings and it’s my other “fictionally victimized sister,” or so she introduces herself in a grim voice. I can’t say I go in for all this labeling but my two sisters are psychologists and that’s the way they get a handle on things. Me, I just get mad.
“People have been coming up to me at work asking, so which one are you. My therapist says this is a kind of abuse!” She goes quiet a moment. “What are you doing? It sounds like you’re hitting something.”
“Just making the kids’ lunches.”
My sisters, I love them all, but sometimes they get on my nerves. This one is always seeing trauma and sadness. Around her, I purposely go shallow, hoping I’ll get her to smile. “Oh, we’ll survive,” I say. Maybe talking to my husband has calmed me down.
“Speak for yourself,” she says gloomily. “But I’ll tell you one thing, I’m never going to talk to her again.”
“Oh, come on,” I say.
“I mean it. I’m glad this is all happening arou
nd my birthday. Because when she calls me, I’m just going to let her have it.”
“I know,” I say instead of pointing out that if she’s not talking to our sister, she can’t let her have it. “So how are things?” I say in a bright voice, hoping to get her talking about something happy. Why is it that with all my sisters I always feel like I’m the therapist?
“Well, actually, there is something else. But you’ve got to promise me that you’re not going to tell her—”
“Hey, I’m not talking to her either,” I lie. I’m not sure why. It’s as if I’m caught up in some family melodrama that I don’t necessarily like. “So what is it?”
A coy pause, and then a jubilant, “I’m pregnant.”
“Ay-ay!!!” I cry out, and here comes my husband, rushing into the room, the paper still in his hand. “Good? Bad?” he mouths. Recently, he observed—one of his new insights—how it’s hard to tell what’s really going on in my family with so much overreaction. Anyhow, I tell him my sister is pregnant and he gets on the phone and says he is delighted. Delighted?! I grab the phone back, and we gab for half an hour, the book forgotten, all those fictional doubles sent packing, my sister remarking on all the errors our mother made with us that she is not going to make with her child, and I kind of defending our mother because actually, though I don’t say so, I’ve repeated all those sins with my own kids—except the one with the nuns and that’s probably because there are no Carmelite convents that I know of in Rockford, Illinois. My sister concludes with the reminder that I am not to breathe a word of this to you-know-who.
“It seems kind of mean,” I even surprise myself by saying so. I guess I’m feeling expansive, like there are really only a few big things in this world, LOVE and DEATH and LITTLE BABIES. Forget fame and fortune and whether or not someone plagiarized you into a fictional character. “I think you should tell her.”
“You promised!” she says with such fury that even our mother could take lessons from her.
“Hey, I’m not going to say a word, it’s not that. But I think you should tell her. After all, she is going to be an aunt.”
“I can’t believe you’re saying this! I’m going to be a mother!”
“But why not tell her?”
“I just don’t want my baby to become fictional fodder.”
I get this crazy picture in my head—a cartoon really more than a picture—of this tiny baby being put through a big roller and coming out the other end as one of those small books that reviewers like to call a slim volume. But I also kind of see my sister’s point—it’s not just the baby, but the rest of the story will probably find its way into that slim novel: single motherhood, artificial insemination, sperm brought up from the D.R. from an area of the country where hopefully there aren’t many first cousins. Just thinking about it I get goosebumps up and down my arm.
“What are you doing? It sounds like you’re crying.”
“No, no, I’m so happy,” I reassure her, and then she makes me swear on my own children, which makes me very uneasy, that I won’t mention a word of this to our sister.
Well, I no sooner put the phone down and finish wrapping up the sandwiches and putting in an applesauce for the dieter and a jellybean cookie for the little Christian when the phone rings and it’s you-know-who.
“What’s going on?” she says all weepy like it just occurred to her that everyone isn’t ecstatic over her being famous.
“What do you mean?” I say, because if I’ve learned one thing in this family it’s you better not let on that anyone has gotten to you first with another version of the story.
And she tells me. Mami is going to sue her. Papi has to call her from a public phone. Our eldest sister has her husband say that she’s not available. “And I just called Sandi, and she hung up on me.” There is a wrenching sob, and though I myself was going to kill her six hours ago, all I want to do is ease that mournful sound. I keep remembering how when we first got to this country the only way she’d go to sleep was if I held her hand across the space between our beds and told her something I remembered from being back on the island.
“Hey,” I say, putting the best face on this messy situation, “I bet there were a lot of people mad at Shakespeare, too, but aren’t we all glad he wrote Hamlet?” I don’t know why I’m saying this since I dropped out of college in part because I just couldn’t pass the Renaissance. “But still,” I go on, getting everyone’s point of view in, “imagine how you’d feel if you were his mother.”
“What do you mean? What’s art going to mirror if it isn’t life? Everybody, I mean everybody, writes out of his or her own experience!” And she’s off into all the stuff I already heard her say on Fresh Air. But I let her say it. For one thing, my head is going a mile a minute, all that clunky, outdated emotional machinery from childhood that should have been replaced years ago with the trim, cutting-edge technology of feeling is chugging away, and nothing short of a handful of sleeping pills is going to shut it off. I might as well stay up on the phone instead of sitting in the living room shaking my head at some dead novelist.
“It really hurts, you know, that my family can’t share this with me. I mean I haven’t done anything wrong. I could have been an axe murderer. I could have gotten up on some roof in a shopping mall and mowed down a bunch of people.”
I sure am glad it’s me she’s talking to and not one of the psychologist sisters.
“All I did was write a book,” she wails.
“Everyone’s feeling a little exposed, that’s all.”
“But it’s fiction!” she starts in.
Oh yeah? I want to say. I don’t care what it says on that page up front about any resemblance is entirely coincidental, you know when you spot yourself in some paragraph of description. “But it’s fiction based on your own experience! Like all fiction,” I add, quoting her from the radio. “I know, I know, what else are you going to write about?” But to myself, I’m thinking, why can’t she write about axe murderers or law-firm scams or extraterrestrials and make a million and divide it four ways, which by the way is what the other sisters suggest she should do with this book since we provided the raw material.
“So you do understand, ay, it means so much you understand.”
Oh dear, I’m thinking, if this gets out to the rest of the family! And before I know it I’ve opened one of the lunchboxes and I’m nibbling away on the space rations.
“Mamma, why are you eating my lunch?” It’s my boy coming in to say good night. He has stopped in the doorway, hands on his hips, striking a righteous pose. He fancies himself part of The Force policing the galaxy. Catching me snacking is right up his alley.
“I’m talking to your auntie Yoyo,” I say as if that’s a reason to eat his lunch. Oh boy! Those little galactic-fighter eyes light up.
“I want to talk to Auntie Yoyo!” he cries out. I hand him the phone, but suddenly, the Milky Way’s motor-mouth is totally stagestruck. All he can manage are little earthling grunts and murmurs. “Uh huh. Nah. Um um, yeah.” His face is pink with terror and delight.
“Love ya, too,” he whispers at the end and hands me the phone with such a radiant look on his face you’d think he’d gotten the baby Jesus Himself in his Easter basket.
“You got one fan here,” I tell my sister.
“Only one?” she asks, straining for a light tone, but I can hear those tears just ready to rain down if I say the wrong thing.
It strikes me that what my sister wants is that look of adoration on every one of our faces. The best I can do is, “Well, you are a big hit with all the nieces and nephews.” And then, I can’t help myself, even if my own two precious babes are hanging in the bargain of my silence, I tell her that she’s going to be a new aunt, that our sister is pregnant, and that she better not write about it or all my little sticks are going to fall, too.
“I have to pretend I don’t know a thing?” She sounds so sad like she’s just been kicked out of our gene pool or something. But I know what hurts her mo
st is to be left out of a family story.
So, I tell her that I’m going to talk to the others because no matter what, we’re sisters, and we’re always going to be sisters, even though I was pissed as hell to hear her talking our stuff on Fresh Air, but I love her and that’s the bottom line, and she’s all subdued and listening and saying, well thanks, thanks, and it’s like we’re ten and nine again, our arms swinging in the dark as we hold on tight to each other’s hands.
Have you talked to your sister?” my mother wants to know, as if my sister is only related to me, not her. She’s already gone off the phone twice to see who’s on the other line. Mami, the gadget lover—that part the book got right. She’s got every conceivable option on that phone of hers. I’ve teased her that if the extra terrestrials finally get through to planet Earth, it’s going to be on her phone number.
“What sister?” I hedge, and then because I don’t want to wimp out on my promise, I say, “She sends everyone her love.” I don’t know why I’m making up this stuff except I’m figuring that with a few touches here and there, surely we can get back together as a family.
“Humpf!” Mami scoffs. “Her love?! What does her love mean? She didn’t even send me a Mother’s Day card.”
And I’m thinking, but you were going to sue her. What’s she going to say? Dear Mami, happy Mother’s Day from your plaintiff daughter. Or wait a minute, is the plaintiff the accused or the other way around? I should know with all that O.J. stuff on TV all the time. “It probably just slipped her mind,” I explain. “She’s on the road a lot these days.”
“Oh?” she says, curiosity peeking out from her voice like the toe of a lover’s shoe under a bedskirt. “Where’s she been? Your Tía Mirta saw her on live TV. Mirta says she looked terrible like maybe her conscience was bothering her. It was one of those programs where you can call in with a question, but your aunt couldn’t get through. I tell you, I want my equal time. I want my chance to tell the world how she’s always lied like the truth is just something you make up. Remember the time she ran away to the Carmelite convent and told them she was an orphan?”
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