by Iris Gomez
They laughed as I tiptoed back to bed.
[ NINE ]
THE FEAR THAT MY FATHER would jeopardize our family’s precarious legal situation by causing a school fracas didn’t end with the Rickenbacker crisis. A few days later, I got into some good-for-nothing trouble of my own when I took Alina’s side in a foolish but heated fotonovela exchange with another girl at school. The teacher snapped and said she’d “had it with the Spanish violations” and sent all three of us, with the fotonovela, to the principal’s office. Although I wasn’t certain whether I was more in trouble for speaking in forbidden Spanish or for having a fotonovela, I intended to fervently apologize for both, whether or not I’d been at fault or agreed with the school’s stupid language prohibition. Imagine my horror when the interrogation session concluded with the principal, operating on what he termed “the honor system,” handing me a folded-over note to take home for my parents’ signatures. Dumbly, I took it from him and stood like Superman holding a rock of Kryptonite. My weak hand trembled as I imagined my father scrutinizing the note, the word “fotonovela” emblazoned upon it.
Somehow, I managed to walk upright to my next class. During recess, I stood under the aluminum awning outside the cafeteria and tried to get guidance from Alina. “What are you going to tell your mother?” I asked.
She shrugged her shoulders. “My mother can’t understand this stuff. To her, everything is persecution.” Alina’s father had been imprisoned in Cuba and her mother spent her spare time writing letters to the U.S. House of Representatives and raising money for the cause.
After we separated, I continued to brood over my angry, moralistic father and his ferocious scribbling. There was just no way I could let him see that principal’s note. Mami might have managed to derail the crazy Rickenbacker site visit, but I had zero confidence that she could perform that trick this time.
I quietly unfolded the note during my next class. It was actually a form with checkmarks placed inside the box for “Violated Classroom Rules” and in front of the lines for parental signatures. The form didn’t say a thing about fotonovelas or reveal what I’d actually done wrong. I recalled that Mami often turned Pablo’s letters of reprimand over to me. “Sign it!” she would say, annoyed that the school officials didn’t dish out their own punishments.
On the bus home, I mulled things over with Lydia. “Maybe I shouldn’t give it to her,” I considered aloud.
Lydia raised her eyebrows. “What about your favorite commandment?”
“It says honor, not obey.” I paused. “What does that mean, anyway?”
Lydia shook her head. “God helps those who help themselves?”
I had to crack a smile. I knew what Lydia would do.
“How ’bout ‘What they don’t know won’t hurt ’em?’ ” she volunteered.
“My Tía Rita has this other dicho,” I told her. “ ‘Why throw water into the sea?’ ”
“¿Qué?”
“You know, it’s like, ‘adding fuel to the fire’ or ‘pissing in the wind.’ ”
“Yeah, like a stick in time will save your butt.” Lydia held out her pen invitingly as I shook my head.
But as the bus got nearer to home, my feeling of imminent doom only began to grow. From the height of my window, I saw the empty bus benches gleaming in the Florida heat as if their orange paint were melting. People with overloaded bags trudged slowly down Flagler Street like prisoners on a chain gang. No wonder heat went hand in hand with evil. “I’m getting off here,” I announced abruptly. Heaving my books on my hip, I disembarked and hightailed it toward St. Stephen’s.
It was cool inside the vacant church. Up front at the roll-away table, I slid a dime into a slot and lit the only candle. Maybe that was a good sign: I had all the saints’ attention. I knelt down, but an Act of Contrition seemed improper since I didn’t feel sufficiently contrite. In despair, I closed my eyes and waited for the wisdom to know what to do with the note from the principal.
I tried to imagine Mami reading it. No doubt she would be confused, and maybe she would get angry with the school officials. How could they mistake her straight-A Catholic school daughter with some hooligan who’d “violated classroom rules”? And when I’d confessed that it was me—not a case of mistaken identity—she would fight to find the part of what I’d told her that she could throw back to me as wrong; she needed a place to put the blame.
Or—would there just be more disappointment?
I stared sadly at my small, burning candle. Above it, the pale blue stone of Mary’s veil obscured her face, bent in perpetual sorrow. Our Lady of Sorrows—dolor. Singular or plural, in the end all sorrows became one.
That evening, after I helped Mami cook dinner and clean up, I typed a very long, moderately confusing letter my father had written to a laboratory in Pasadena; at least it had some tenuous connection with employment. After these and all my other tasks were done, I sat restacking textbooks on top of each other in my room until Mami startled me by coming in and sliding two pages in front of me.
“One of those notices came about the house,” she said with a grimace, rubbing her dry hands together. “Those people! They don’t give you a break!”
Glancing nervously at the letter, I reached for the Ponds jar and offered it to her. “Want some?” I asked.
She massaged the cream into her hands. “No sé,” she said. “I’m so tired. If they take the house, we lose everything, mi’ja. I don’t have any more rabbits to pull.” Her eyes began canvassing my room. There was plenty of disorder to pick on had she been game, but none of it seemed to inspire her right then. She simply shook her head wearily as a person might who has said “no” so many times she can’t utter the sound again.
Silently, we wallowed in our respective miseries. When she couldn’t take it anymore, she got up, declaring, “We have to find a way.” Off she went, searching for something to clean, fix, or put away.
My gaze drifted toward the empty hall behind her. Was it true? Were we really in danger of getting evicted or was it more excessive worrying?
I picked up the bank letter and frowned at the highlighted parts. It sounded serious. But I thought the uncles were helping us? Maybe we should call El Chino for guidance?
A sudden commotion on my parents’ side of the house got me up, and I made a beeline for the kitchen, where Manolo and Pablo were slurping bottles of malta. “What’s going on?” I asked.
“He’s mad about some magazine,” Manolo explained.
I tiptoed over to peek into their bedroom. My father’s angry face leaned toward Mami’s. “¡No te lo permito!” he shouted as he reached for a magazine in her hand.
“¡Déjamelo!” she yelled back righteously.
Back and forth, they tugged at the magazine. I darted back to where my brothers were sitting. “Is she trying to take away his Home Mechanics?” I whispered.
“Nope,” said Manolo. “Some Corín Tellado novela that Tía Rita gave her.”
“That’s not all. He called Mami dirty,” Pablo added.
“What?” Panicking, I recalled a Corín Tellado Alina had loaned me. Could I have left that one in the bathroom by mistake? How many fotonovela crises did one person deserve?
I darted back to spy on my parents. Mami held a fotonovela that I didn’t recognize out of my father’s reach. “¡No me vas a quitar la mirruñita de diversión que me queda en esta vida!”
Oh come on! Although I did sympathize, she was being dramatic. Was he really robbing her of her only crumb of pleasure? What a fotonovela she was!
His response was to loudly and roughly straighten his chair, then sit with his back to her.
I stepped back into the kitchen.
“She won,” Manolo observed without expression.
Both my brothers’ bottles stood empty. “Hey,” I asked, “does Mami know you guys are drinking those?”
As if she had a sixth sense my mother, eyes ablaze, burst into the kitchen. She clutched the fotonovela to her chest like a life pre
server from the capsized ship of her family. “Why are you drinking those?” she challenged my brothers. “You know they’re for company!”
“Sorry, Mami, we were thirsty,” Pablo explained, tossing his bottle into the garbage can. He pecked her on the cheek before she had a chance to react, while Manolo shrugged apologetically. Then they both scurried out.
I tried to take quick stock of the cover of the fotonovela, just to confirm that it wasn’t mine, but Mami tucked it closer to her person while grabbing a sponge and vigorously wiping water rings from the table. “He’s not going to convince me with that nonsense,” she muttered.
I didn’t know who she was talking to, but I decided to leave her alone with her tiny victory.
The next day, I turned in my forged note. One thing had been illuminated by the eviction threat: School difficulties weren’t worthy of such torment. I told the principal a white lie about the punishment I’d garnered—no television—just so he wouldn’t worry about an “honor system” student like me going astray.
I also confessed to Lydia about the forgery. Then I returned all her fotonovelas. “I can’t take this stuff anymore,” I informed her. “From now on, don’t even show them to me.”
Lydia packed her magazines away and stayed quiet for a few minutes. Finally, she spit out what was on her mind. “Gabi, what does your father really have?”
“I don’t know,” I mumbled, rebuckling my bag in humiliation. Despite Mami’s dire warnings against divulging family secrets, it had gotten harder and harder to avoid Lydia’s direct questions.
“What do they think it is?”
“I have no idea, Lydia,” I repeated. “Some kind of nerve disease. I’m not sure if there’s a name for it.”
“Oh.” Shrewd Lydia said no more.
The crisis over our mortgage intensified. For three days, Mami was constantly on the phone with family, wringing her hands unhappily after each call and then escaping to her friend Camila’s house. Months had passed since my father had worked, and Mami’s secret Avon and dressmaking sales hadn’t brought in the income to cover our payments. Manolo had taken a part-time hardware store job, but his wages were measly. At least he got free stuff like wood glue with which he repaired the holes Pablo had gouged into the back of the house. Tío Victor and Tío Lucho, along with Tío Paco—who’d finally returned and landed a job with a fancy builder in Opa-Locka—took up a collection to cover our April mortgage balance. They slipped the money to Mami that Thursday evening when they came by the house after work. The opportunity presented itself after my father excused himself to go retrieve one of his peculiar letters. The uncles exchanged troubled glances, apparently recognizing my father’s increasingly flimsy connection to the material world.
“Evi, you have to find a job,” Tío Victor said at last, putting down his coffee cup. “There’s an ad up at the 7-Eleven.”
“But Roberto should find something,” she replied, with a light tremble in her voice. “It just takes time to find the right one.”
“That’s the problem,” Tío Victor said gently. “You don’t have any more time.”
Tío Lucho stood up and jiggled the loose change in his baggy pants pockets. “Mira, Evi,” he said. “You can’t keep depending on us. We don’t have much more to spare. You know that. What good will it do you to stay in the country if you lose the house?”
“But how can I work?” she despaired. “You know how he is.”
Tío Victor sighed. It was true that my father had acceded to Manolo’s job, but he was morally opposed to jobs for women.
“¡Jamás!” was precisely how he responded when Mami broached the topic at dinner that night. It was definitely a not-in-your-wildest-dreams answer.
“Yo soy el que mantiene a mi mujer,” he huffed loudly, thumping his chest like a boxing champion. But we all knew he wasn’t supporting anyone, let alone “his woman.”
“As if anyone could tell I was a woman in these rags I have to wear,” Mami retorted, storming out.
Luckily, Tío Lucho soon solved our family’s income shortage, at least temporarily, by arranging for Mami to do piecework at home for the factory where his wife, my Tía Elena, was employed. My father didn’t object to that, since Mami was always sewing anyway.
Despite Mami’s disdain for the paltry sewing skills I’d acquired in Home Economics, I was enlisted to help. The piecework would keep me occupied during the upcoming summer recess, she told me. Never mind that I already had plenty of chores to occupy me for a lifetime.
Mami and I took turns at the Singer, an old-fashioned pitch black sewing machine with faded gold letters. To make the machine go you leaned your knee against a side pedal; but unlike the quiet, beige, state-of-the-art models at school, this one zoomed loudly and threateningly across the fabric. I released my grip in panic the very first time I sewed my pieces together.
“But you control it, mi’ja,” Mami explained, putting two firm hands over mine as she showed me how. Cautiously, I pressed my knee to the pedal, and as we guided the cloth together, I learned to trust the machine.
Piecework was hard. We’d sew identical fabric pairs together as fast as possible in a continuous chain that we clipped apart at the end. Collars, cuffs, sleeves—you name it, we made it. Speed was key, of course, otherwise we got ripped off. But sewing at that accelerated pace lost its novelty for me in the poorly lit closet after a couple hours of hunching over the Singer with the sleeves of my father’s clothing swaying creepily across my neck.
For Memorial Day weekend, Tío Lucho suggested that Mami and I try a stint at the factory with Tía Elena. Sewing went faster on industrial machines, he pointed out, and we would make more money. Mami told my father that my aunt was overwhelmed with an unexpectedly large order and needed temporary help.
At the factory, a warehouse with lightbulbs dangling from the ceiling, middle-aged Cuban ladies with the same shade of Clairol Medium Auburn hair sat before large metal sewing machines listening to Latin music as their flying needles dissolved the fabric into a dust that thickened the air. The ladies complained frequently about how stuffy the place was, despite the air-conditioning, and everyone ordered me around. “Tráeme una colada, Gabrielita” or “Súbele el volumen al radio, mi amor,” they would say, reducing my so-called workday to coffee errands, the switching around of radio dials, and other helper duties.
When the weekend stint was over, Mami and I returned to piecework at home. She admitted to me that she wished she could stay at the factory and earn more money. “But your father’s awfully proud,” she rationalized. “It would bring him shame, his wife working when he isn’t.”
“That’s stupid,” I blurted out, “when we obviously need the money.”
She snapped at me. “Insolent girl! How can you sit there criticizing your father?”
I didn’t reply. She was allowed to criticize. But her rules never applied to me. In silence, I kept clipping sets while she sewed. Only the whirring and clipping kept us together, my mother, huffy and righteous, and me, just plain mad.
[ TEN ]
THE WEATHER BEGAN to suffocate me. By the second week of summer vacation, the air had practically stopped circulating over Miami, and I stood on our front terrace contemplating my Sunday pilgrimage to St. Stephen’s. My mother had begged off with a handful of coins. “Light a candle for us, mi’jita.”
Upon my return, I found my father in an especially cheerful mood. Apparently, he had new “plans” for me. Putting his arm around my shoulder, he escorted me to the makeshift desk he’d set up in his room. A solitary chair faced the Seminole Sentinel and two sharpened pencils lay atop the dresser.
“Siéntate, mi’jita,” my father said, gesturing to the chair.
Hesitantly, I sat.
He stood behind me, placed a hand on my left shoulder, and pointed to the newspaper, curiously opened to a crossword puzzle. “Léelo,” he instructed me.
I looked at him dubiously. Didn’t he know that you didn’t read a crossword puzzle?
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br /> “Papi,” I asked at last with trepidation, “did you want me to translate these questions for you?” I indicated the clues.
“No, mi’jita,” he answered, containing his excitement. “Es para ti.” At my quizzical look, he added, “We have an opportunity! Read this.” Even his good hand quivered as he showed me a paragraph that described a $5,000 prize.
Now it all made horrible sense. He wanted me to do the puzzle.
I gulped down my distress. It was bad enough that I’d become his personal typing robot, but I thoroughly detested puzzles! They only defeated the purpose of words, which was to form sentences, to communicate. They wasted meaning.
Eagerly, my father handed me a pencil. I studied the first clue and worked through the answer with growing uncertainty. Eventually I had to move on to the next equally difficult clue. This puzzle was so much harder than most. Some answers varied by a single letter or they depended on difficult distinctions, such as contusion and confusion, refrain and reframe. The dictionary helped somewhat, but looking up so many words slowed the process to an excruciating degree. My knees started to hurt from pressing the dresser handles. While I struggled to finish, my father paced back and forth like a great animal in his cage—periodically pausing to roar out the window at Pablo and his friends, then returning to paw my shoulder as I crouched lower into the uncomfortable dresser-desk.
“Muy bien,” he approved mildly at one point, after my mother had entered the room with an armful of factory linens. She gave him an intense look before inquiring loudly whether anyone needed a break.
“No!” I retorted, wanting only to get the horrible puzzle over with.
I didn’t finish until dinnertime. Though I wasn’t feeling terribly sure of my answers, I turned the puzzle over to my father, who slid it into an envelope he’d addressed to the P.O. Box provided in the Sentinel.
My mother watched him with her lips pursed. “Good,” she said to me. “Your father can take it to his office tomorrow.”