Try to Remember

by Iris Gomez

  “Office?” I asked, dumbstruck.

  “The post office,” she replied sarcastically.

  My father ignored her.

  While my father waited for his $5,000 ship of Good Hope to come in, Mami grew frantic that the factory tablecloths weren’t bringing in enough income. But then her friend Camila informed her about a part-time job a few evenings a week at El Palacio de Venezia, the discount department store where Camila’s husband had worked before his leukemia. Rightly apprehensive of my father’s reaction, Mami told only the uncles and me about her new job. I had to help lie to my father and big-mouth brothers.

  “Roberto, I’m going to stay with Camila a while,” my mother announced that first evening, since my father never seemed to mind her going over to help her friend whenever Hernán took a bad turn. “Gabrielita will manage dinner,” she assured my father. Then she gave me a bear hug.

  “It’ll be okay, Mami,” I said, swallowing my doubts.

  Around half past nine that night, he came to my room in his pajamas. “What time is your mother supposed to be home?”

  “Um, I called a few minutes ago,” I fibbed. “As soon as they finish turning over Hernán’s bed, I think. You want me to do something, Papi?” I asked faintly, hoping he didn’t. The prior days’ typing requirements on top of my Sunday puzzle trial had already made porridge of my brain.

  “No, no.” He blinked repeatedly, the new visual tic making me nervous too. I lowered my face guiltily into my summer reading book, Diary of Anne Frank, to avoid inadvertently exposing some clue as to my mother’s whereabouts. Eventually, he padded away.

  She arrived at 10:15 p.m. “How did things go, mi’ja?” she asked nervously in a low voice.

  “Okay. But Mami, Papi gets agitated after dark.”

  “Let’s see how it goes on Wednesday. Maybe I can request an early shift.”

  “All right,” I said, not that confidently.

  Every day that week, my father checked the newspaper for the puzzle contest results. On Sunday, the Sentinel published an announcement: no winner. I rejoiced! I felt triumphant at seeing my father foiled for forcing me to do something I hated so fiercely.

  Along with the announcement, though, they published a second puzzle. When my father told me I had to complete that too, I stared at his sharpened pencil and fantasized about stabbing myself in the heart. Would my mother save me?

  I went looking for her.

  “Humor him, mi’jita,” she said, squelching my only hope. Why did she never help me when I asked for it? She didn’t have the guts to stand up to him. All she did was hide things, like the Avon and the dresses and now her job, not to mention the mortgage payment we’d collected behind his back. No, she wasn’t about to help me escape the second puzzle trial.

  My fighting spirit dissolved, I dragged myself back to the dresser-desk and sat gazing into the newsprint until the letters blurred. The new puzzle turned out to be as difficult as the first. I got some answers right, but most words were too closely related, which made the coordinating Down and Across clues harder to figure out. My knees ached from the pressure of the dresser drawer handles digging into me. After struggling for an hour, I wanted to throw myself to the floor and weep. But it wouldn’t have made any difference. I had to go on, like a slave in a Hercules movie.

  After four impossible weeks my knowledge and patience, two of the qualities puzzles challenged, according to the dictionary, wore out completely. All I had left was the third—ingenuity—to guess my way to completion. My father couldn’t tell. That afternoon, as I silently put his puzzle into his envelope and handed it over, he actually praised me for finishing so quickly!

  Throughout that summer I deceived my father in numerous ways. On the weekdays Mami worked at the Palacio, I invented stories to keep him from catching on. I told him that Tía Elena was temporarily short of help at the factory; I whipped up spiritual retreats for parish mothers at St. Stephens. The rest of the family knew we needed the money and went along with our tall tales. But nobody knew exactly what Mami did at the Venice Palace until the Saturday morning that I found her uniform, all by its lonesome, in our washing machine.

  The uniform was white polyester with Mrs. De Paz—the la omitted—embroidered on it in red lettering. I stared in shock. My mother reduced to a cleaning lady? Cleaning was one of those jobs she believed gente decente shouldn’t do, probably because a cleaning lady in Latin America was like an indentured servant. Day and night, she cleaned, cooked, tended, and ran errands in her slipper sandals—even for visitors—before retreating to the crude cement room built for her in the interior patio of each middle-class home.

  Suddenly I heard Mami’s footsteps outside the shed and quickly shoved the uniform back into the washer.

  “Didn’t you hear me, Gabriela?” she asked as she approached, a dirty plastic shower curtain hung over one arm.

  “I’m sorry, Mami, you want me to wash that?”

  “No, I’ll do it. Get the other one, please.”

  I went inside to the bathroom, unhooked the moldy curtain, and shook it out. Holding it out at a distance in front of me so as not to soil myself, I carried the curtain outside.

  “Gracias, mi’ja,” Mami said, scooping the slimy plastic to her chest without hesitation. As she turned toward the washing machine, her silhouette widened on the ground behind her like the shadow of a much bigger person. I thought of the beliefs she was forced to defy for the sake of her family, and my complaints about the brain-wasting puzzles and the aches and pains of typing and sewing suddenly felt selfish. Like Mami, I should swallow my pride and become a bigger person. We had to each do our part for our family, connecting our individual pieces to make it whole.

  Pablo began to do his part too, delivering Seminole Sentinels on the rusty bike my father used to force him to ride. Normally, Pablo did the route alone, but one quiet and eerily humid afternoon when I wasn’t puzzle-bound and my mother wasn’t working, she stood in the Florida room with the front door open, stared at the moving clouds, and suggested we start bagging before the tempestad came. Pablo had gone to fill a flat tire, and Manolo was on duty at the hardware store again—my brothers’ former twosomeness had begun to crack.

  As Mami and I bagged Sentinels, the room became unusually dark. A breeze picked up, banging our door and shaking its old bent screen. When Pablo biked up on the rusty two-wheeler, he was surprised to see the bagged newspaper stack. “Hey thanks,” he said, with a grateful smile, and sat down with us to finish.

  Thunder rolled in and the wind got stronger, sweeping away garbage can lids and madly spinning the wheels of the bike. You could see how Frank Baum had imagined a house blowing off its foundations and sailing through the sky over to Oz. Though our glass-paned Florida door was shaky, I had faith in the house’s thick walls and the furious energy of the three of us working together to get the job done.

  The rain came in long, elegant strides that paused and yielded to a greater wind. Mami instructed Pablo to put on his slicker, though he complained that it would blow around, delaying his progress. Finally, he packed the Sentinels into his canvas shoulder bag. With his thick black hair falling into his eyes and the enormous bag on his back, he looked like an orphan about to peddle his wares in the Olde London of English novels. Pablo was the only one of us who’d gotten happy eyes; Manolo and I inherited the sad, deep-set family eyes. As little kids, when jealousy got the best of us, we’d teased Pablo that he was adopted, but he only grinned. Everyone loved him best and he knew it.

  I offered to help distribute newspapers on foot in the immediate vicinity, la vuelta a la manzana, as we called it. It was hard to know why we used that phrase, once around the apple, when neighborhoods—at least in Miami—were strictly square, as if a giant had drafted the blueprints with an enormous slide rule. Maybe in the ancient villages of Latin America, houses had been round like the huts of the Miccosukee and streets unpeeled around the huts, giving the poor hungry people the apple idea.

  As I set off
with my bundle of Sentinels, I was handicapped by Mami’s long raincoat that the wind kept lifting up over my head. I slapped determinedly at the coat’s tails with one of the bagged newspapers, but it fell and scuttled up the street. Quickly I ran to catch it while clutching my bigger bundle to my chest. By then, Pablo had zipped through his first round and spotted me chasing the Sentinel. He started laughing, and I had to laugh too. Warm rain came down then and washed us both. I felt the weight of my T-shirt and shorts as the wind whipped them close, but the water itself was light, dissolving as it touched me.

  The rain stopped by the time our deliveries were done. Pablo and I turned around and skipped backward with the wind, our scarecrow arms dangling the leftover bags of Sentinels. Pablo took a sheet of newsprint out of one bag and threw the other papers into a dumpster. We ran forward into the wind, the sheet held high between us like a kite gliding home.

  I spent the rest of the summer bent over the weekly puzzles while my father buzzed around, constantly sharpening pencils before releasing me to the piecework I helped Mami complete so that she could sneak off to the Palacio. The Sentinel finally suspended the crossword puzzle contest after seven weeks without a single winner. Despite my intention to rise above selfish feelings, the Sunday puzzles came to infuriate me more than anything else in the exhausting crusade against our family’s threatened exile into poverty and disgrace. Unable to express my fury directly—afraid to—I began to fantasize about my father dying in any number of gory ways, thus liberating me from his oppression: a heart attack, a burglar’s blow to the head, a bus careening into him on Eighth Street as he walked to the post office clasping his precious puzzle envelope.

  Little by little, I began to hate everything about him. Not just his Assault on a Minor; not just the assaults of his wild temper all put together; but also his laugh, his idiosyncrasies, his tics, his inadequate English. Most of all, I hated his inability to recognize that he would never win the money—that the stupid puzzle victory was, like so many things we had and would encounter wherever we lived, totally beyond reach.

  [ ELEVEN ]

  THE SUMMER ENDED and I gratefully returned to school. Hoping to evade my father upon my return home that first day, I gathered money saved from helping with Avon, piecework, and Pablo’s paper route to go buy supplies at Osco’s for the big-deal Dade County Youth Fair project.

  My father stopped me before I got out the door. He wanted to acompañarme.

  I hustled into the kitchen. “Mami, he’s so difficult,” I whispered. “Can’t you please keep him home?”

  She rolled her eyes at me but called out, “Roberto, Gabriela doesn’t have time for errands. She has school things to do.”

  “¡Claro que sí!” he said, joining us. “She’s a good student.” Then he added. “Como yo.”

  Like him? I raised an eyebrow for my mother’s benefit, but she dismissed the remark with a tight-lipped shrug, abandoning her halfhearted effort to deter him.

  “Vamos,” my father urged.

  Sweating my way there with my father’s hand jerking against my shoulder, I tried to ignore his unintelligible babbling so that I could conceive a topic for my exhibit. But an evil voice inside me whispered, “Oil drilling.”

  Jealously I recalled that Lydia and Alina were collaborating on some Santería project.

  “What does that have to do with science?” I’d challenged.

  “Chickens,” Lydia replied matter-of-factly. “People sacrifice them to Changó, like if somebody is dying.”

  “They won’t let you bring dead chickens,” I’d said knowingly.

  “Tch! It’s gonna have pictures, chica,” she’d replied.

  Now, while my father drifted off in search of pens, I carried around my hurt that Lydia and Alina had excluded me to plan an exhibit about their own culture. Nothing about my own Chibcha ancestors seemed comparable, but as I stood before the poster boards, it occurred to me that maybe I could turn to the indigenous people who had survived right here in Miami—the Miccosukee. History was science, no? With a surge of enthusiasm, I gathered rainbow markers, laminate, and posters for an exhibit that might show why the lost Everglades mattered.

  I went to find my father examining pens despite the many writing implements we had at home. It seemed he would be a while so I took off, paid for my supplies, and waited for him. Finally, balancing boxes of pens and envelopes, he emerged triumphantly and headed toward the cashier. She rang up his items and waited for him to pay, but my father smiled inanely, and she caught my eye. “Doesn’t your dad speak English, honey?”

  I shook my head, leaning close to him to whisper in Spanish, “Papi, did Mami give you money?”

  “Ha!” he answered, looking at the cashier as if I’d done something cute.

  Oh God, how humiliating. Furiously, I pulled out a crumpled ten-dollar bill.

  “Here you go, hon,” she said, handing me the change.

  I stomped out and rushed up the street, pausing only for my father to appear, moving along at a turtle’s pace with his two bags a-dangle, so that he could see me before I finished my mad hare’s race home.

  “He doesn’t need that stuff!” I cried to my mother. “It’s a big waste of my money!”

  My mother poked diffidently through my wares. “Those Osco prices are ridiculous,” she concluded.

  That night, my mother came into my room and fiddled around gathering empty glasses off my dresser. The dillydallying bugged me, and I frowned in mock concentration at a book on my lap. As she was about to make her exit, she hesitated in my doorway. “You know,” she started to say, “Your quince will be here before we know it. Maybe we should go to that new jewelry store on the corner and put something on layaway.”

  I looked up. “My birthday is months away, Mami,” I advised, returning to my book. “Anyway, you don’t have to get me a present.” The quince reference had briefly reminded me that wealthier girls at school would soon be planning lavish quinceañeras, each celebrant choosing her corte of fifteen girls in matching ball gowns and choice male escorts. Quinceañeras were not for the likes of me, though.

  “Why not?” my mother challenged, lifting her chin high as she turned to leave. “I’m not going to let your quince go by without at least getting you a gift.”

  But my real gift was the happy news that Tía Consuelo, my father’s eldest sister, was coming from Colombia in October: her first visit since we’d come to Miami.

  The day she was due, Mami and I cleaned prodigiously. I liked the smell of Pine-Sol cleaner, but that morning’s scrambled eggs in my belly combined with my menstrual cramps to make me feel ill. I sat down on the toilet to wait for the floor around me to dry. When my mother’s exasperated yells reached me from across the house, I threw open the bathroom door and did some shouting of my own. “I have cramps!”

  “Go lay down,” she called back. “And pick up your feet!”

  I got up and mopped my way backwards toward my room, kicked off my flip-flops, and jumped into bed. Mami had this crazy notion that when you were sick, your feet shouldn’t touch a cold floor. I didn’t know if there was any scientific basis to this line of thinking or whether the cold floor theory was a superstition, like sprinkling holy water over our doorstep. As Catholic as my mother might be, I knew her heart belonged to voodoo.

  It was quiet in the house. My eager father had gone with my uncles to the airport. Outside my window, a breeze scattered blossom bits through the sky, like rice from someone’s wedding. The smell of jasmine and Pine-Sol blended with whiffs of the celebra-tory sancocho my mother was stewing. Sleepily, I rubbed the pain from my belly and daydreamed about Tía Consuelo and her presents. On prior visits, she’d brought dresses, fine ones sewn by hand like my white Confirmation dress with the voile skirt and shiny pearl buttons down the back, and others I remembered backward from my pink tulle party dress with its satin sash, to my very first tiny pinafore, yellow taffeta peeking through white eyelet....

  When I woke up, Tía Consuelo was sitting
at my bedside. A gold filigree medallion beamed like her heart from the center of her torso. She hugged me, put a cool hand in mine, and, with a confidential smile, asked “Así que ya eres señorita, ¿ah?”

  Although I’d become a young lady some time back, I nodded affirmatively. “I’m almost fifteen now, Tía.”

  “So I’m told,” she said with a twinkle in her eye. “Qué bueno, ¿no?”

  She had a way of slowing down her enunciation, like kindergarten teachers do, and then letting an “¿ah?” or “¿no?” linger at the end of a sentence, so that you had to give a reply. I willingly became her kindergartner when she spoke to me. Her face, with its small crooked nose and wide-set eyes, was so kind. She was the first person in my family to tell me that my own face, my carita, was pretty. I loved her, deeply.

  Leaning over now, she whispered. “I have something special for you, ¿ah?”

  I grinned with joy as if I’d just remembered how.

  After phone calls from the rest of our family, we convened in the living room. My father was still wearing the ironed shirt, dark pants, and buffed shoes he’d worn to the airport. Without his slippers or scribbled sheets, he looked like a normal person.

  My brothers and I plopped ourselves at Tía Consuelo’s feet as my parents and aunt discussed who had married, who had died, who had lost his job; the country’s economic crisis that had gotten so serious; whether the Hotel Caribe was renovated; and the economic problems all over again. Gradually, my father’s hand jerking slowed down. His legs, lightly crossed at the ankles, seemed to relax too. Every so often as he chatted with Tía Consuelo, he chuckled, shook his head, or shared a smile with her, and she patted his knee affectionately. For the first time in eons, he was actually participating in a conversation. My own exchanges with him had been reduced to monologues he conducted while I listened for the part where I was supposed to chime in with the obedient servant’s “Sí, señor.” In a burst of conscience, I recalled Abiasaph the groundskeeper’s lesson of kindness and wondered, could my father’s being with his sister return him to himself? Maybe Tía Consuelo had the kindergartner effect on him too. A wisp of longing passed through me.