by Iris Gomez
They’d run all the way home, she explained to me. A couple of sinvergüenzas had chased them.
“Why?” I asked Pablo.
“I don’t know,” he shrugged. “They don’t like us.” He reported that a kid had shoved him when he left cello practice and that the kid and three others had chased him and Manolo home with a pole. “They were sixth graders,” Pablo added.
That was Manolo’s grade, Pablo’s was fifth. Both had repeated a year—one among the many reasons my parents treated me as the “smart” one. Though Manolo and I were technically closer in age than he and Pablo, my parents preferred to lump Manolo in with our younger brother.
As they finished their story, I tallied my resentments over the number of times something had gone awry with my brothers and I was put in charge. Once, long ago in Queens, Mami had anxiously anchored the three of us on her bed while she went for medicine for my sick brothers and my father slept. “Don’t let the boys off this bed for an instant,” she’d warned me, and it had seemed like forever that I sat upright, my shaky nine-year-old hands planted on my brothers’ hot tummies until she returned. That was pretty much how the rest of our childhood had gone too.
In the middle of the mini-conference, my father shuffled in. “Hola, mi’jita,” he greeted me, as if I were the only one present.
“Not now, Roberto,” Mami said, frowning at the papers in his hand. “The muchachos are having a problem. It seems their school is a haven for delinquents.”
“¿Sí?” My father tilted his head. “¿Qué pasó?”
Manolo shifted on the plastic. “Nothing, Papi. Some kids bothered us.”
“Nothing? How can your mother be upset over nothing?” He yanked Manolo’s hair.
“It wasn’t Manolo,” Pablo said guiltily.
My father swerved. “Then who was it?”
“Nobody, Papi,” I said. “It’s over. We’re just discussing it.”
“Over?” Mami threw in. “What about those sinvergüenzas?”
I wanted to smack her as my father suddenly began surveying all of us for the right person to clobber. “¿Qué pasó?” he demanded again.
“Shameless delinquents chased them home!” she answered. “With a weapon!”
I stood and said with false brio, “I’ll call the school, Papi, okay?”
“¿Delincuentes?” my father responded in disbelief.
“Oh my God!” Mami exclaimed with an exasperated wave of her hand. “Let her call!”
My father blinked. He began to swallow repeatedly in a very awkward manner, as if he’d tasted something foul. Then, just as oddly, he went back to the repeated blinking. What was wrong with him? The four of us watched until the swallowing and blinking ran their course and he seemed to return to us.
“Sí.” He nodded at me. “Go ahead.”
Officiously, I went to the phone and dialed. Only the vice principal was at the school, and I explained the situation. Evidently not too worried about my brothers’ safety, he said he would “chat” with them the following day.
I hung up and summarized for my parents.
“Is that all?” Mami asked.
“I’m sure they’ll fix everything,” I assured her.
“No,” my father said abruptly. “I’ll resolve it. ¡Vamos!”
“But—but school’s closed, Papi,” Manolo stuttered.
My father turned toward Mami for confirmation.
“That’s true,” she decreed from her royal throne.
Examining the papers in his hand, he thought it over. “No lo creo,” he pronounced at last. “Manolo, Pablo. Get up. Let’s go see.”
My brothers stumbled to their feet, and I looked beseechingly at my mother. Aloud, I suggested nervously, “Maybe we should all go.” The only school visit my father had ever executed was on the day of my Confirmation, and that had been in a church with nuns and other parents around.
“Yes, you go, Gabriela,” Mami replied.
Just me? My eyes widened, but she looked away.
After my father had deposited his papers in his room and changed out of the ubiquitous slippers into his shoes, the four of us set out on our long, silent march of doom.
It was one of those odd Florida days when you actually needed a sweater, though we wore short sleeves. On the path in front of us, a brisk wind knocked a coconut down from one of the trees that had survived the pest eradication campaign. Maybe that’s a bad omen, I surmised darkly. God hadn’t dropped the coconut directly on my father’s head.
The sprinklers were turned on when we reached Rickenbacker, which meant that somebody was there. Manolo bravely led us around toward the front.
The large blue metal doors were chained blessedly shut.
A joyful Pablo whispered, “Yes!”
Of course, my hardheaded father had to shake the chains and rap his knuckles insistently on the metal.
I timidly suggested, “Papi, the teachers must be gone.”
“It can’t be,” he retorted indignantly, then began to shout “Who’s there? Who’s there?” in Spanish while pounding more vigorously.
An elderly woman in a housecoat and cardigan came out of her lime green house across the street to see what was happening.
“Maybe we should come back another time, Papi,” I encouraged my father, who only continued to yell in Spanish and broken English while banging on the impenetrable door. To my horror, he started kicking it when his raw, reddened knuckles tired out.
“Help,” I mouthed to my brothers, who shook their heads in resounding defeat. As we passively watched our demented father kick and bang, I could only pray silently that he might exhaust himself before doing any physical damage to the door. In point of fact, the heavy metal looked too sturdy for anyone to harm. Is assaulting a door even a crime? I wondered wildly, biting on a finger-nail. What about making a spectacle of yourself? I peeked at the lady in the lime-colored house. What was a “moral turpitude” crime anyway? It dawned on me then, with amazing clarity, that no one in my family had bothered to ask El Chino what kind of trouble could jeopardize our right to remain in this country.
“Can I help you folks out?” A craggy man’s voice startled me, and I turned around.
He was a pudgy older black guy in a uniform-like shirt and pants.
“Um—” I stepped to the fore, but my father barked out a demand in Spanish that the door be opened.
“My father just wanted to talk to somebody,” I stammered.
The groundskeeper or janitor or whatever he was hobbled forward unevenly as if he had a bad ankle. “Uh-huh,” he said, nodding at my father, who looked completely disheveled from his door-kicking offensive.
My father’s ticking hand started going a little nutty right then, and he began shaking his arm aggressively as if to rid himself of the tic.
“It’s a problem with some bad kids and my brothers,” I offered, though Pablo and Manolo were gesticulating madly for me to leave them out of it.
“Well, the school’s closed,” the groundskeeper stated matter-offactly as he continued to regard my father, who was clearly stronger physically than the old hobbling groundskeeper.
My father swiped his brow in exasperation. “¡Qué carajo!” he erupted, turning toward me and demanding to know, “Is he going to open the damned door or not?”
“Oh sure, sure,” the groundskeeper-janitor answered him calmly in English. “I can open that for you, sir.” He fished a pair of metallic reading glasses out of his pocket and carefully put them on. Then, leaning on his good leg for balance, he slowly worked a key ring off the collection on his belt. “Okay now,” he said, facing the door. “Let’s get this chain off.”
Four locks and keys later, he opened the door and invited us in.
I glanced at my father. Now what?
“Vamos,” my father declared, walking in purposefully. He marched up a darkened central hallway and peered into one locked, empty classroom after another, while we stumbled along behind him like a band of escaped mental patients
. The click of his shoes on the floor and the rattling of the groundskeeper’s keys added a queer soundtrack. When we’d traveled up and down all three hallways, my father halted in his tracks, uttered a nondescript “Hah,” and stared into the dark with a foolish smile, as if he were dreaming of something.
Then the groundskeeper did an unusual thing. Limping up to stand close to my father, he placed a friendly hand on my father’s arm, looked up at him with a smile, and then just waited. After a moment, in an infinitely kind and gentle tone of voice, he murmured, “You see, my friend? They’re all gone.”
My father’s expression began to relax into that of a shy kid instead of the foolhardy madman he’d become. To my surprise, he let the groundskeeper turn him around and lead him peacefully in the direction we’d come. My brothers and I trailed along, equally subdued.
Once outside the entrance, the groundskeeper shook my father’s hand and told him his name. “Abi for short,” the groundskeeper added with a grin, before addressing me. “Young lady, you tell my friend here that the building’s always open by 7:30. Most folks stick around until about 2:30 or so.” He gave my father a nod of encouragement. “You come back any of those times, and you should be okay, my friend.” I obediently translated the schedule for my father, without mentioning anything about coming back, which prompted Pablo to poke Manolo conspiratorially in the side.
Abiasaph studied my brothers over his glasses as he commenced the elaborate door-locking process. “You kids watch out for your father,” he said quietly.
Then we left. It was only after we were walking back that I felt the true meaning of his words rise up out of the “watching out” I’d heard him say into the watching over he must have intended.
At home, my father’s perfunctory summary for Mami left me unsettled about what to tell her privately about the peculiar visit, but I put it all behind me because the immediate crisis was resolved—or so I thought.
That evening my brothers came and told me they’d overheard my father planning another visit to Rickenbacker on Monday.
“Oh great,” I groaned, wishing there were a chain like the groundskeeper’s to lock up my father until the era of his criminal probation had ended.
“We won’t be so lucky next time,” Manolo warned.
“Lucky?” I felt like it was my turn to Assault a Minor, say the culprit behind this school fiasco, for instance. “What’s the story with those kids you fought?” I demanded to know.
“I didn’t do anything to that kid,” Pablo swore, not very convincingly.
I looked at Manolo for an explanation.
“I wasn’t there,” he reported honestly, though I could tell he shared my doubts about Pablo’s innocence. In the past, my brothers had tended to stick together in misdeeds, Pablo with big-eyed charm and Manolo with plain old silence, but maybe there was hope that Manolo would outgrow all his training in dumbness. “At least it’s not tomorrow,” Manolo noted. “Maybe Papi will change his mind over the weekend.”
“What are we gonna do if he does come?” Pablo whined.
“I don’t know!” I burst out. “Go to the park or something.”
“I’ll miss cello practice,” Pablo protested.
“That practice isn’t doing much for your playing,” I said nastily, before I could stop myself.
“You got that right,” Manolo added with a snicker that exposed his crooked front tooth.
Pablo pulled out his borrowed school cello just to spite us, although Manolo had hidden Pablo’s sheet music somewhere. While Manolo and I debated the chances of our father actually getting a paint job call from the neighborhood contractor, horrible cello sounds screeched out of the bathroom, where Pablo practiced to avoid pissing off Papi. Pablo actually longed to play guitar, and even claimed not to mind the fruit bowl haircuts Mami gave him because he believed they made him look like a Beatle, but his school didn’t offer guitar. Cello or violin, those had been his options. “Only girls take violin,” Pablo had informed us the day he showed up at home with his large instrument of harmonic torture. Now, as he tried to practice from memory without the sheet music, he played that Ode to Joy so slowly and painfully that Manolo eventually felt bad and slipped him the music under the bathroom door.
I mentally prepared myself to convince my mother of the folly of letting my father loose on Rickenbacker. But when Manolo and Pablo returned home from school the following day, Friday, she only stirred herself up over the incident again. “Were those sinvergüenzas punished?”
“Nothing happened, Mami,” Manolo assured her as he peeled a mango and bit into it.
Fists on her hips, she looked back and forth between Manolo and Pablo. “Why are you so late?”
“We stopped at the playground,” Pablo explained.
“Playground?” she replied, aghast. “All these problems and you go to the playground instead of coming home?”
“I’m sorry, Mami,” he said, with his black eyes rounded and seemingly contrite.
After she’d gone inside, they confessed that everyone involved was getting detentions.
“But why are you getting punished?” I asked Manolo, suddenly anxious that the friendly groundskeeper might have reported something after all about my father’s rowdy encounter with the door.
“I don’t know,” he answered. “I don’t care anymore.”
To get Mami off their backs, I revised the facts, telling her that the principal had given detentions to the shameless good-for-nothings, as she’d called them, and that, as a safety measure, my brothers were supposed to come home on variant schedules. She believed every word. She wouldn’t have wanted to hear the truth anyway, if it meant accepting that the problem had no solution.
My anxiety over my father’s Rickenbacker activities had overtaken my own minor worries, such as the dreaded concert problem. Instead of turning to my family to bail me out, I’d resorted to more lies. In the morning, just before the concert, I’d taken the metro bus to the stop near school, waited there for a couple of hours until I was sure the performance had ended, and eventually shown up at the main office with the story that I’d been sick and my mother didn’t think to write me a note. Lying was getting easier.
Unfortunately, my father remained determined to go to their school, despite my brothers’ swearing up and down that there was no problem left to solve. My father even told Mami that he was looking forward to stopping in afterward on his “friend” Abiasaph the groundskeeper!
Mami paid scant attention to any of that, concentrating instead on keeping everyone off the phone throughout the weekend so we wouldn’t miss a call from the contractor. With no sign of it by Sunday morning’s Mass, I devoted all my prayers to that one miracle. To my faithless brothers, I merely suggested, “Cross your fingers.”
Sunday night, we waited in our rooms, each of us silently willing the phone to ring. A little before eleven o’clock, Manolo came to talk to me. “What are we gonna do?” His pajamas were way too short for his legs and the fruit bowl haircut that looked so cute on Pablo made Manolo look like a mentally challenged adult instead of a normal teenager. Since he was funny-looking anyway thanks to his bad tooth, Mami wasn’t doing him any favors cutting his hair that way.
I racked my brain for solutions. “I don’t know.” What could we do? With a vague sense of duty, I swung my legs off the bed. “I’ll try talking to Mami again.” Making my way to the kitchen, I began to putter around and prepare lunches before eventually calling out, “Mami! I can’t find anything for sandwiches!”
She charged in with her head partially covered in rollers. “What are you talking about?”
“You can’t let Papi go to their school tomorrow,” I said in a low voice.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” she retorted.
“What if he yells at the principal? What if he does something worse?”
“Yeah,” added Manolo, who’d snuck in behind me. “We might get in trouble.”
“Your trouble is not paying attention to homework,” s
he reprimanded my brother.
“Mami, that’s not the point,” I said.
“The point is your father has to protect your brothers from bad people.”
“Oh yeah,” Manolo muttered in English. “Protect us.”
“Go to bed!” she ordered him.
“The bad kids already got detention, Mami,” I argued. “What’s the use?”
She raised her chin and refused to answer me.
She’d called the bad kids sinvergüenzas, but if she was such a big fan of shame, where was hers? “At least go with him, Mami. We were lucky the school didn’t arrest him before!” I tried to control my voice as I pleaded with her, “Do you really want to take a chance?”
“You know everything, don’t you?” she said tiredly, bending down to retrieve a roller that had fallen out of her hair. “Everybody just go to sleep,” she said, waving us away.
Manolo and I found Pablo with his face buried into a pillow. “I hate my life,” he mumbled. “I wish I could die.”
“Oh, shut up,” Manolo snapped.
Instead of fighting back, Pablo began to cry. I had an impulse to lean over and hug him, but I was too frustrated by the whole family to make anyone feel better. I went into my room, shut the door, and turned off the light. Then I closed my eyes, trying to dream myself into a blue gondola sailing away somewhere with my grandfather.
The sound of my mother’s footsteps, followed by mumbling voices next door, jarred me awake. A few minutes after she’d left, I crept to my brothers’ room.
Pablo sat up, his eyes gleaming in the dark. “Papi’s not coming!”
“You musta convinced Mami,” Manolo whispered. “Thanks.”
“Yeah, thanks, Gabi,” Pablo echoed.
“It’s okay,” I said. “Just stay away from sinvergüenzas.”