You can bet when Carlos came home, I threatened to leave him right then and there if he didn’t tell me what he was up to. I found out more than I wanted to know.
“No harm done,” Carlos kept saying. “I’ll just move it to another location tonight.” And he did, wrapping it inside my fur coat and laying the bundle on the back seat of the Buick like he was going off to sell that coat after all. He came back late that night, the coat over his arm, and it wasn’t until the next morning as I was hanging it up that I found the oil stains on the lining. They looked just like dried blood.
After that, I was a case all right. Nights, I was up to four sleeping pills to numb myself into a few hours of the skimpiest sleep. Days I took Valium to ease that jumpy feeling. It was hell on the wheels of our marriage having me down so much of the time. Worst were the migraines I got practically every afternoon. I’d have to lie down in that small, hot bedroom with the jalousies angled shut and a wet towel on my face. Far off, I could hear the kids yelling in their bedroom, and I’d wish I could squeeze that bear trick one more time to terrify them into silence.
Lots of worries went through my pounding head those afternoons. One of them that kept hammering away was that Yo had been snooping around in that closet. If she had seen that hidden gun, it was just a matter of time before she’d tell someone about it. Already I could see the SIM coming to the door to drag us away. One afternoon when I just couldn’t stand it anymore, I leapt out of my bed and called down the hall for her to come to my room this instant.
She must have thought she was going to get it about all the loud bickering coming from their bedroom. She hurried down the hall already defending herself that she had plucked off Fifi’s baby doll’s head only because Fifi had asked her to. “Hush now,” I said, “it’s not about that!” That stopped her short. She hung back at the door, looking around my bedroom like maybe she wasn’t so sure the bear was nothing but her mother in a fur coat after all.
I gave her a little pep talk in a soft voice—the way you talk to babies as you stroke them till their eyes drift shut. I told her Papá Dios in heaven could see into every one of our souls. He knew when we were good and when we were bad. When we lied and when we told the truth. That He could have asked us to do whatever He wanted, but out of all the hundred million things, He had only chosen ten holy commandments for us to obey. And one of those ten was honor thy father and mother which meant you shouldn’t lie to them.
“So always, always, you must tell your mami the truth.” I served her a big smile of which she only returned a little slice back. She knew something else was coming. She sat on the bed, watching me. Just as she had seen through the fur to her mother, now she was looking through her mother to the scared woman inside. I let out a long sigh, and said, “Now, cuca darling, Mami wants you to tell her what things you saw when you went looking in the closet the other day.”
“You mean the big closet?” she said, pointing down the passageway that led from the master bedroom to the walk-in closet and right through to her father’s study.
“That very one,” I said. The migraine was hammering away inside my head, building its big house of pain.
She looked at me like she knew that admitting she had been snooping would get her into a closet full of trouble. So, I promised her that telling the truth this time would make her my and God’s little darling.
“I saw your coat,” she said.
“That’s very good,” I said. “That’s what I mean. What else did you see in Mami’s closet?”
“Your funny shoes,” she remarked. She meant the heels with little holes pockmarked in the leather.
“Excellent!” I said. “Mami’s darling. What else?”
She went through that whole closet with the full inventory of practically every piece of clothing I owned. My God, I thought, give her another decade and she could work for the SIM. I lay there, listening because what else could I do? If she hadn’t really seen anything, I didn’t want to put any ideas in her head. That one had a mouth from here to China going the long way like Columbus’s ships.
“How about the floor?” I asked stupidly. “Did you see anything in the floor?”
She shook her head in a way that didn’t convince me. I went back over the ten commandments and not lying to thy mother, and still I couldn’t flush any more information from her except my monogrammed hankies and, oh yes, my nylons in a pleated plastic case. I finally made her promise that if she remembered anything else, she should come and tell Mami directly and no one else. “It will be our little secret,” I whispered to her.
Just as she was slipping out the door, she turned around and said a curious thing. “Mami, the bear won’t be coming anymore.” It was as if she were stating her part of our bargain. “Honey cuca,” I said. “Remember, Mami was the one playing the bear. It was just a silly joke. But no,” I promised her, “that bear’s gone for good. Okay?” She nodded her approval.
As soon as the door latched shut I cried into my pillow. My head was hurting so much. I missed not having nice things, money and freedom. I hated being at the mercy of my own child, but in that house we were all at the mercy of her silence from that day on.
Isn’t a story a charm? All you have to say is, And then we came to the United States, and with that and then, you skip over four more years of disappearing friends, sleepless nights, house arrest, narrow escape, and then, you’ve got two adults and four wired-up kids in a small, dark apartment near Columbia University. Yo must have kept her mouth shut or no charm would have worked to get us free of the torture chambers we kept telling the immigration people about so they wouldn’t send us back.
Not being one hundred percent sure we would get to stay—that was the hardest thing at the beginning. Even the problem with the English language seemed like a drop in a leaky bucket then. It was later that I got to thinking English was the hardest thing of all for me. But believe me, back then at the beginning, I had my hands too full to be making choices among our difficulties.
Carlos was morose. All he could think about was the compañeros he had left behind. I kept asking him what else he could have done but stay to die with them. He was studying like cats and dogs for his license exam. We were living on the low end of the hog off what little savings we had left, and there was no money coming in. I was worried how I was going to pay for the warm clothes my kids would be needing once the cold weather set in.
The last thing I needed was their whining and fighting. Every day it was the same question, “When are we going to go back?” Now that we were far away and I wasn’t afraid of their blurting things out, I tried to explain. But it was as if they thought I was lying to them with a story to make them behave. They’d listen, but as soon as I was done, they’d start in again. They wanted to go back to their cousins and uncles and aunts and the maids. I thought they would feel more at home once school began. But September, October, November, December passed by, and they were still having nightmares and nagging me all the long days that they wanted to go back. Go back. Go back. Go back.
I resorted to locking them in closets. That old-fashioned apartment was full of them, deep closets with glass knobs and those keyholes like in cartoons for detectives to look through and big iron keys with the handle part shaped like a fleur-de-lis. I always used the same four closets, a small one in the girls’ bedroom and the big one in mine, the broom closet in the hall, and finally the coat closet in the living room. Which child went into which depended on who I grabbed first where.
I wouldn’t leave them in there for long. Believe me. I’d go from door to door, like a priest taking confession, promising to let them out the minute they calmed down and agreed to live in peace. I don’t know how it happened that Yo never got the coat closet until that one time that I lived to regret.
I had shut them all up and gone round, letting out the baby first, then the oldest, who was always so outraged. Then the two middle kids, first Sandi. When I got to Yo’s door, I didn’t get an answer. That scared me, and I
opened that door quick. There she stood, pale with fright. And, ay, I felt so terrible!—she had gone in her pants.
That damn mink coat was in that closet, way to one side, but of course, being Yo, she’d gone poking around in the dark. She must have touched the fur and lost her bananas. I don’t understand because it had seemed she knew the fur was just a coat. Maybe she associated me being under that coat, and here I was on one side of the door, and there she was alone on the other side with a monster she was sure we had left behind in the Dominican Republic.
I pulled her out and into the bathroom. She didn’t cry. No—just that low moan kids do when they go deep inside themselves looking for the mother you haven’t turned out to be for them. All she said that whole time I was trying to clean her up was, “You promised that bear was gone for good.”
I got weepy myself. “You girls are the bears! And here I thought all our troubles would end when we got here.” I laid down my head on my arms on the side of the bathtub, and I started bawling. “Ay, Mami, ay,” the other three joined in. They had come to the door of the bathroom to see what was going on. “We promise we’ll be good.”
Not Yo. She stood up in the water and grabbed a towel, then stomped out of the tub. When she was out of my reach, she cried, “I don’t want to be in this crazy family!”
Even back then, she always had to have the last word.
Not a week later a social worker at the school, Sally O’Brien, calls up and asks to make a house visit. The minute I get off the phone, I interrogate my girls about what they might have said to this lady. But they all swear that they have nothing to confess. I warn them if this lady gives us a bad report we’ll be sent back, and if we are sent back, cucos and bears are going to be stuffed animals compared to the SIM fieras that will tear us apart there. I send them off to put on their matching polka dot dresses I made them for coming to the United States. And then I do what I haven’t done in our six months here. I take a Valium to give this lady a good impression.
In she comes, a tall lady in flat black shoes with straps and a blond braid down her back like a schoolgirl dressed in an old lady’s suit. She has a pleasant, un-made-up face and eyes so blue and sincere you know they’ve yet to see the worst things in the world. She carries a satchel with little hearts painted on it. Out of it she pulls a long yellow tablet with our name already written on it. “Is it all right if I take some notes?”
“Of course, Mrs. O’Brien.” I don’t know if she is a married woman but I’ve decided to compliment her with a husband even if she doesn’t have one.
“Will your husband be joining us?” she asks, looking around the room. I follow her glance since I am sure she is checking out whether the place looks clean and adequate for raising four girls. The coat closet I forgot to shut looms like a torture chamber.
“My husband just received his medical license. So he has been working like a god every day, even Sunday,” I add, which she writes down in her notepad. “We have been through hard times.” I’ve already decided that I won’t try to pretend that we’re having a ball in America, though believe it or not, that was my original plan on how to handle this visit. I thought it would sound more patriotic.
“That must be a relief!” she says, nodding her head and looking at me. Everything she says it’s like she just put the rattle in the baby’s hand and is waiting to see what the baby is going to do with it.
I shake it, good and hard. “We are free at last,” I tell her. “Thanks to this great country which has offered us the green cards. We cannot go back,” I add. “It would be certain death.”
Her eyes blink at this, and she makes a note. “I read things in the paper,” she says, bringing her braid from behind to fall down the front of her suit. She doesn’t seem the nervous type, but the way she keeps minding that braid it’s like she is getting paid to keep it occupied. “But are things really that bad?”
And right then and there in my broken English that usually cuts my ideas down to the wrong size, I fill her two ears full with what is happening back on the island—homes raided, people hauled off, torture chambers, electric prods, attacks by dogs, fingernails pulled out. I get a little carried away and invent a few tortures of my own—nothing the SIM hadn’t thought up, I’m sure. As I talk, she keeps wincing until her hands go up to her forehead like she has caught one of my migraines. In a whisper she says, “This is truly awful. You must be so worried about the rest of your family.”
I can’t trust my voice to say so. I give her a little nod.
“But what I don’t get is how the girls keep saying they want to go back. That things were better there.”
“They are sick of home —” I explain, but that doesn’t sound right.
“Homesick, yes,” she says.
I nod. “They are children. They do not see the forest or the trees.”
“I understand.” She says it so nicely that I am convinced that even with those untried blue eyes, she does understand. “They can’t know the horror you and your husband have lived through.”
I try to keep the tears back, but of course they come. What this lady can’t know is that I’m not just crying about leaving home or about everything we’ve lost, but about what’s to come. It’s not really until now with the whole clan pulled away like the foundation under a house that I wonder if the six of us will stand together.
“I understand, I understand,” she keeps saying until I get control of myself. “We’re just concerned because the girls seem so anxious. Especially Yolanda.”
I knew it! “Has she been telling stories?”
The lady nods slowly. “Her teacher says she loves stories. But some of the ones she tells, well—” She lets out a sigh. She tosses her braid behind her back like she doesn’t want it to hear this. “Frankly, they are a little disturbing.”
“Disturbing?” I ask. Even though I know what the word means, it sounds worse coming out of this woman’s mouth.
“Oh, she’s been mentioning things . . .” The lady waves her hand vaguely. “Things like what you were describing. Kids locked in closets and their mouths burned with lye. Bears mauling little children.” She stops a moment, maybe because of the shocked look on my face.
“It doesn’t surprise me,” the woman explains. “In fact, I’m glad she’s getting it all out.”
“Yes,” I say. And suddenly, I am feeling such envy for my daughter, who is able to speak of what terrifies her. I myself can’t find the words in English—or Spanish. Only the howling of the bear I used to impersonate captures some of what I feel.
“Yo has always been full of stories.” I say it like an accusation.
“Oh, but you should be proud of her,” the lady says, bringing her braid forward like she is going to defend Yo with it.
“Proud?” I say in disbelief, ready to give her all the puzzle pieces of my mind so she gets the full picture. But then, I realize it is no use. How can this lady with her child’s eyes and her sweet smile understand who I am and what I have been through? And maybe this is a blessing after all. That people only know the parts we want to tell about ourselves. Look at her. Inside that middle-aged woman is a nervous girl playing with her braid. But how that girl got stuck in there, and where the key is to let her out, maybe not even she can tell?
“Who knows where Yo got that need to invent,” I finally say because I don’t know what else to say.
“This has been very helpful, Laura,” she says, standing up to go. “And I want you to know if there’s anything we can do to help you all in settling in, please don’t hesitate to call.” She hands me a little card, not like our calling cards back home with all your important family names in fancy gold lettering. This one shows her name and title and the name of the school and her phone number in black print.
“Let me call the girls to say goodbye.”
She smiles when they come out in their pretty, ironed dresses, curtsying like I taught them. And as she bends to shake each one’s hand, I glance down at her pad on the coffee t
able and read the notes she has jotted: Trauma/dictatorship/family bonds strong/mother devoted.
For a moment I feel redeemed as if everything we are suffering and everything we will suffer is the fault of the dictatorship. I know this will be the story I tell in the future about those hard years—how we lived in terror, how the girls were traumatized by the experience, how many nights I got up to check on their blankets and they screamed if I touched them.
But never mind. Within a year of all this, the dictator will be shot dead by some of the very men who were in the underground with my husband. The girls will be jabbering away in English like they were born to it. As for the mink, I will exchange it at the secondhand shop on Fifth Avenue for four little-girl coats. If nothing else, my children will be warm that first winter everyone warned would be the hardest thing about coming to this country.
The cousin
poetry
Don’t think I don’t know what the García girls used to say about us island cousins. That we were Latin American Barbie dolls, that all we cared about was our hair and nails, that we had size-three souls. I don’t deny I looked around me once I was trapped here for the rest of my life. I saw the women in their designer pantsuits loaded with gold, the little rounds of teas and parties. I saw the older tías with their daily masses and novenas, praying to ensure the family a good place in the next life while their husbands went off on business trips with pretty mistresses they pretended were wives. I saw the maids in their color-coded uniforms working way past overtime. And still, I spread my arms wide and gave myself to this island, which is more than the García girls ever did for their so-called homeland.
Yo! Page 3