Try to Remember

by Iris Gomez

  Lydia stuck out her tongue. “Don’t be jealous, chica.”

  I rolled my eyes and grinned, relieved that she didn’t return to the subject of angry fathers.

  When I showed Mami my Simplicity pattern package at home, she frowned. “What nonsense. What kind of sewing is that?”

  “It’s logical,” I assured her. “See? There’s directions. Step by step. I’ll explain it to you as we go along.”

  “I don’t think so. I was sewing long before you were born,” she countered.

  “So was the teacher,” I pointed out.

  But when school resumed a few days later, Mami’s skepticism began to trump my faith in the logic. The process—from reading instructions, to pinning sections of pattern correctly along the fabric’s grain, to drawing darts with a chalk wheel and finally cutting the dress sections out of cloth—proved unnecessarily complicated. Mami’s old-fashioned methods were admittedly superior. Not only did she rely solely on remnants instead of the precise lengths and widths mandated by instruction sheets, she didn’t use prefabricated patterns at all. Freehand sewing was second nature to her. She could easily have made the St. Stephen’s frocks blindfolded. In record time, she pinned, cut, and sewed, then emerged from the closet where she kept her Singer machine with the pretty ready-to-wear item on a hanger. By contrast, at the rate we were going in class, I might be able to wear my Simplicity dress to graduation.

  One night, while I was painstakingly basting over a bodice I’d done wrong, I listened to a radio program my parents had on, and Lydia’s remarks about Cuban immigration rules came back to me. The radio interview was about people who wanted to immigrate here to be with relatives but weren’t permitted to do so. I couldn’t get to the bottom of who was responsible for the poor families’ problems—the Cuban government for not letting the relatives out of their own country, or the U.S. government for keeping them out of this one? Whoever was to blame, it was all so mean!

  Little did I know that an innocuous immigration rule would soon throw another monkey wrench into our family life. The following Friday, as Mami hounded my father for the third time in a row about some alien reporting forms we had to turn in, he got very testy with her.

  I anticipated the worst, but she came out of their room looking merely exasperated, carrying our green cards and some blank white cards. She dumped it all on the table in front of me. “Fill those out, please,” she said crossly.

  “I’m typing for Papi.”

  “Do this first,” she said. “Tomorrow’s the deadline.”

  “All right,” I said, glancing at the immigration forms, then lowering my voice to ask, “Is this because of Papi’s problem?”

  “No,” she said, pushing aside his paperwork to give me room to write. “We just have to do it.” She went on to explain that despite our green card status, in the eyes of the U.S. government we were considered “aliens” and had to report our whereabouts every year.

  “We could get in trouble just for not turning these in?” I asked, holding up one of the plain white cards.

  “Por supuesto,” she agreed. “That’s why I keep telling your father. Tomorrow’s the last day to bring them to the post office.”

  “What kind of trouble, Mami?” I pressed, frowning at the card. “Is it one of those crimes El Chino talked about?”

  “I don’t know, Gabriela! Just write the information!”

  “Okay, okay,” I said, bending my head to the task. Neatly, I recorded our alien whereabouts on all five cards, along with our registration numbers, and gave everything back to her.

  It wasn’t until the next morning when I heard more quarreling that I appreciated the gravity of the little white card situation. My father was arguing vehemently that he’d already written to the government, and here was the proof of it, so the cards were unnecessary.

  “No, they’re not!” Mami insisted. “No, they’re not!”

  I glanced at the kitchen clock—almost noon. The post office closed at I P.M. on Saturdays. Time for reinforcements, I decided valiantly as I downed my glass of fortified fresh Florida orange juice.

  In one corner of their bedroom was my mother, angrily waving her handful of white cards.

  In the other corner, my bellicose father, fiercely gripping an envelope.

  “Papi,” I ventured, putting on my neutral Most Able Assistant voice, “Don’t you think the government might pay more attention to your letter if you go ahead and give them their little cards?”

  My father’s brows pulled together in thought.

  “You could try it,” I suggested, gaining confidence. “You always say trying is good, right?”

  “No,” he rudely disposed. “I’ll mail my own letter to those thieving burócratas!”

  Mami dropped dejectedly onto her bed and issued me a final pleading look, while he ransacked the closet for his good shoes.

  I studied the cards in her hand. “Papi,” I said casually, “I’ll go to the post office with you.”

  “Muy bien,” he answered, pleased as punch. While he bent down to tie his shoes Mami surreptitiously handed me the cards.

  Another deceit slipped into our family toolbox like the cards into my jeans pocket.

  The walk down Calle Ocho toward the post office felt interminable. It was so extremely hot I worried that the ink might run off the sweat-sogged cards in my pocket. To compound the unpleasantness, men called out lecherous invitations from their clankety cars, despite the presence of my father beside me, and then slowed to a crawl as if I would actually accept their lewd proposals. Worse than the lechery, the heat, the distance, or even the anxiety over how I would dispose of the soggy cards in my pocket without my father noticing, was having to listen to him boast, his ticking hand drumming onto my shoulder, about the latest moneymaking schemes. “La invención más importante, mi’jita,” he exclaimed, leaning closer to confide in me at one point. Now he was becoming an inventor too.

  I crouched lower to relieve myself of the added weight on my shoulder.

  “What we need,” he continued, “is a system that doesn’t require injection.” At the traffic light, he paused and smiled at the stopped cars. “And I can make it!”

  I squinted into the bright sunlight as he abruptly switched gears and added knowingly, “You need the right experience to manage that company, mi’jita.”

  “What company, Papi?” He jumped around so unpredictably that I couldn’t tell if this tidbit was connected to the invention or to some job referenced in one of the letters he now carried in his batch of envelopes.

  “The Louisiana company, mi’ja. I’ll be the engineer,” he explained, his free hand conducting the air with the envelopes.

  My father had always worked as a laborer. Wasn’t that a far cry from a professional job? I sighed deeply, tired of searching for the parts of what he told me that might amount to something in his junk yard of twisted logic.

  We finally arrived at our promised land: the air-conditioned post office. My father went to stand in line while I wandered around anxiously, canvassing the place. Finally I spotted a box labeled “Alien Registration” under the poster of those Wanted for kidnapping children. Keeping a steady eye on him, I sauntered over there and pretended to study the kidnapped children, all American. When his turn at the counter arrived, I swiftly dumped our cards into the box and strode back nervously toward where he stood.

  The clerk flipped through the envelopes my father had handed him and returned one with a question. My father looked back blankly. How I wished he would acknowledge people talking to him, even if he didn’t get what they were saying. Instead, he held his envelope out with both hands, as if he needed glasses, and turned to me. I popped up to the rescue.

  “It needs a more exact address,” said the clerk, with his finger on my father’s trademark block letters. The addressee was: “United States of America.”

  In Spanish, I asked my father who that letter was supposed to be for.

  “El gobierno,” he answered impatiently,
though that much was obvious. He tilted his head toward me and smiled at the clerk as if apologizing for my slowness. The clerk shifted his gaze from my father to me and back.

  As calmly and respectfully as I could, I told my father that it was necessary to include the name of the person in “The Government” as well as the street and city.

  “Give me that letter!” He plucked it out of my hands. “Tú no sabes nada,” he barked rudely, storming off.

  I didn’t know anything? Flabbergasted, I watched him leave. With an embarrassed shrug and without money for stamps, I turned to the clerk. “I’m sorry—could I please have our letters back?”

  Outside, my father sped down Eighth Street and I raced to catch up. The envelope agitated in his hand like a handkerchief in Tía Rita’s lumbering old washing machine. I certainly hadn’t typed any letters to the U.S. government. What on earth, I puzzled silently, could he have written to them about? Perhaps I should have encouraged the clerk to mail it anyway, even if it didn’t reach any destination; neither did letters to Santa Claus.

  When we got home, my father, red-faced from the intense heat, marched straight into the house.

  I sat on the back steps and listened to Mami criticize him for failing to mail the mortgage check. Listlessly, I lay back. The journey had worn me out. Clouds drifted behind the dark leaves of our mango tree.

  My father yelled tersely at Mami about that scoundrel government owing him for work in the Colombian oil fields, eons ago. “We’re not paying them a single centavo more,” he warned her angrily. “Not until I receive my money.”

  “But it’s not true, Roberto,” she protested. “You were always paid by that company, very punctually. What are you talking about? You know we have to make our mortgage payment.”

  “I repeat, Evangelina, we’re not giving them another penny. That money is ours!”

  As I listened to him stampede away, the voices falling silent, I studied our crossed lime/grapefruit tree. The tree reminded me of my cousin Raquel’s younger brothers, Ricardito and Robertico, whom everyone addressed indiscriminately as “Mello” or “Twin”—as if their identity lay solely in being related to each other. I remembered how when we’d first moved in, my father had caught me inspecting the tree curiously. “Which one grows?” I’d asked, and he’d pinched a lime and yanked it off to chew on the twig at the end. With a smile he’d offered me a try, but I declined, shaking my head. “The lime is good,” he’d insisted, laughing. Despite the unusual form of his fruit testing, my father’s words had proved true. The limes were always good.

  My mother suddenly came outside and dangled a mortgage payment envelope over my face.

  I sat up. “Mami! I already snuck those cards over there for you!”

  She ran her fingers through her hair and looked skyward. “¡Ay Dios mío! ¡Ayúdame con esta casa!”

  Should Heaven help her with the house, I speculated critically, or with the people in it? Silently, I amended her prayer, though she hadn’t even thanked me for solving our alien registration crisis.

  “Mi’jita,” she begged.

  I shook my head. “Make your little beaver Manolo go.”

  “He’s not here. I’ll keep your father occupied.”

  I glanced toward the closed blinds of my father’s window, sighed, and surrendered my weary hand.

  As I retraced my steps down Eighth Street, I couldn’t help but worry about all that time my father was spending alone with his magazines. Even though it kept him away from people he could cause trouble with, it couldn’t be good for his mind. In fact, the more he stayed in there, the more he seemed to be completely fading out. Granted, he’d never been totally present in our family, but the other absences had felt normal. Like back in Colombia when he’d worked long hours doing measurements around the refinery near our town. His longest absence, when I turned eight, was for the faraway United States. There, he had told us, a person could work for overtime pay, hold multiple jobs, and earn dollars instead of meager pesos. He’d sent for us as soon as he’d secured a steady factory job at night. After that, there was the daily absence of working, but we saw him on Sundays and holidays. Periodically, my mother would show him my report card and he would pat my back and praise my intelligence, and then remind me that A Good Education Is the Most Important Thing in the World. My mother finally revealed to me once that he’d never had the luxury of finishing high school himself.

  That evening, with the post office debacle behind him, my father babbled on and on about how delicious the dinner was. “¡Arroz con pollo!” he exclaimed in delight, oblivious of my mother’s stony silence.

  No government treats for us that day.

  In the kitchen afterward, as Mami passed me plates to wash while she proceeded to scrape the hardened cuquillo from the bottom of our rice pot, I thought more seriously about my father’s actions. Because we hadn’t socialized much with anyone but relatives, I’d gotten used to seeing him as the aunts and uncles did—taking for granted that in addition to his temperamental outbursts and moral extremisms he sometimes acted a little odd. But now it was obvious that his occasional mild eccentricity had turned into persistently illogical, disturbing behavior that was difficult to brush off. “Something’s wrong, Mami,” I blurted out.

  My mother ignored me and kept on scrubbing.

  “In the first place,” I continued, “even if some Colombian oil company owes us money, what does that have to do with our mortgage? And in the second place, why should the U.S. government care if we get ripped off or pay our bills? Something’s wrong with Papi.”

  She swung around with the pot. “Never repeat such a thing,” she hissed.

  “But what’s happening?” I felt like a giant child beside her—grown tall on the outside but still small inside.

  Shoving her pot into the cabinet, she faced me. “Listen now,” she whispered. “There’s no such thing as a perfect family. God gave you this life, now you concentrate on helping us resolve our problems. Not on complaining to anybody about our misfortunes. ¿Me entiendes?”

  I nodded.

  She grabbed the laundry basket and went out for the clothes. Her reaction frightened me. This went way beyond ordinary immigrant confusion over the everyday things done in this country, such as parents letting kids sleep over at each others’ houses or girls leaving home before getting married. It felt scarier, even, than losing our green cards. As I watched through the window and waited for my mother’s return, dusk filled the sky. Something spread through our house without my being able to see exactly what it was.

  [ EIGHT ]

  THE LONGER MY FATHER STAYED in his room writing letters instead of looking for real work, the angrier he became at the magazine people who refused to answer his inquiries. “When are they sending my money?” he cried out to my mother one morning at the start of our cleaning hour. But time didn’t mean anything to my father anymore. When he realized that Mami was determined to ignore his endless interrogation, he came to bug me. “You know how much they owe me?” He waved his Home Mechanics magazine in front of my face. I stopped sweeping and shook my head.

  “¡Son millones!”

  I didn’t bother to ask who owed him the millions. Now I knew it was the big, bad American government.

  Rarely did my father bother to go talk to my brothers about that stuff; they’d also lucked out of the mandatory bike riding my father had entirely forgotten about in his preoccupation with paperwork.

  When my birthday came around in February, I tried to buoy my spirits by helping to bake the family cake. It weighed a ton by the time we removed it from our cast-iron rice pot, because the recipe called for a pound of butter, flour, and sugar and a dozen eggs. Mami fluffed it up with dulce de leche frosting and inserted candles around the edge. After dinner, she put the cake on the table and lit the candles. Then my father belted out an out-of-tune rendition of Cumpleaños feliz which my brothers sang in English under their breaths. Pablo had made me an origami butterfly, my only gift, and as I blew out
the candles and cut my father a slice of cake, I wished we could celebrate without him. His presence left a hollow feeling like a hole in the middle of my birthday.

  The next morning, the mailman delivered a pale blue envelope with the birthday letter my grandfather always sent me. It wasn’t really a letter but a poem, handwritten on a thin sheet of paper. Bible paper. Other years, I’d given his poems back to my mother to save because the dense Spanish vocabulary words were too challenging. She would always get sentimental, reminiscing about the poems he used to write to her.

  This time, I kept my grandfather’s letter to myself. I went outside, stretched out on the grass under our acacia, and held the poem up to the sun. You could almost see through the paper. The poem was called Norabuena, basically Congratulations.

  It was about a girl of Eden with blue gondolas in her soul and winds of love breathing her into a faraway port. I lifted the sheet with two fingers so that the feeble Miami breeze could turn the ends up a bit. I wondered how my old grandfather, who hadn’t seen me in so many years, had guessed that my soul was full of boats searching, like the thin waters of the Everglades, for the place where they could be released. I went inside for a pen, thinking I might write back. But what came out instead was a waterfall of sadness—wingless angels, unrequited love, and waves of sea beating their helpless hands against the shore. I titled it Las Magdalenas, after the saying in Spanish “to cry a magdalena,” which is what a person does when he or she is inconsolable.

  • • •

  My birthday sadness soon gave way to more manageable worry over the much touted eighth grade concert. Girls were supposed to wear a yellow dress, which I didn’t possess, and I dreaded the humiliation of standing out like an odd duck. Who knew what antiquated thing my mother would come up with if I told her, and Lydia was too busty for me to fit into anything of hers. So when a few weeks past my birthday, another pesky notice was sent home about proper attire, I thought to phone my cousin Raquel to see if she had a dress I could borrow. Mami summoned me into the dining room before I could make the call, however. She seemed to be holding court at the mahogany table while my brothers were sweating it out before her on the padded burgundy chairs she’d protected with plastic covering. It crunched under their butts as they shifted position.