Try to Remember

by Iris Gomez

  Eventually Tía Consuelo pulled her chair closer to her enormous brown suitcase, its leather worn down as if our family had been using it for centuries. Laughing, she eyed Pablo, whom she’d promised to let unbuckle the belts. “Bueno,” she said. “Open it.”

  Pablo unbuckled and unzipped and then lifted the top. Mixed scents of lavender, rosewater, and department store ambience rose from within. My brothers and I leaned forward, inhaling the possibilities amidst my aunt’s pressed nightgowns. There were packages meant for us, as well as others that had been wrapped with brown paper, tied with string, and addressed in cursive handwriting. Those were encomiendas—packages sent in my aunt’s care by people who had paid her to deliver them to relatives in this country. Jewelry, birth certificates, and other valuable possessions people feared the postal service wouldn’t deliver safely. Even cash was entrusted—encomendado—in her care.

  My aunt squinted at the writing on one package. “Ay, Lita, bring me my glasses, ¿ah?”

  Pablo and I traded smiles over my childhood nickname. As a toddler, he couldn’t pronounce my name in the diminutive form, so everyone had started calling me Lita instead of Gabrielita.

  I brought my aunt her reading glasses, and Tía Consuelo passed out packages: a doe-brown leather handbag and a letter to my mother from her parents; thin wood boxes packed with guava bocadillos from Abuela Matilde for my father; and sweets and dress up clothes for my brothers.

  “Bueno,” Tía Consuelo said, her eyes playing with me, “¿y para ti?” As she teased me, she smiled and began untying a package in her lap before finally holding out a dark green satin box.

  I took it with a shy smile. “Gracias, Tía.” Inside was a pretty velvet case the same color. And inside the case was a ring so beautiful that my mother and I gasped at the same time. A sleek gold band bore a tiny pyramid of golden steps leading to a sparkling emerald. “¡Qué lindo, Tía!” I exclaimed, so overwhelmed by wonder and joy that I could only stand and throw my arms around her.

  Tía Consuelo slipped the ring jubilantly onto my virgin finger.

  “Look at that!” said my mother.

  It fit perfectly, though it was almost too beautiful for that rough hand. The gold gleamed luminously beneath the emerald crown, and I felt like a great queen.

  Tía Consuelo took my hand with tenderness. “Do you remember where emeralds come from, Lita?”

  I shook my head “no” in kindergartner fashion.

  “Ah bueno,” she said, “let me tell you then.” Tía Consuelo began telling us all about the Andean foothills where indigenous people had first scraped crystal from the rock. “They polished the cloudy green stone until it had extraordinary clarity,” she gushed. “That’s why the Colombian emerald is the most beautiful in the world!” She clasped her hands. “And do you know, buried in those very mountains, many centuries later of course, the archaeologists found gold and emerald masks? The indígenas hammered them thousands of years ago, Lita. Imagine. Gold masks with the same emerald eyes as your ring! Chibcha eyes.”

  My father asked to see the ring, and I passed it to him. Holding it up to the light, he squinted, scrutinizing the gem closely. “Muy lindo, mi’jita,” he agreed, handing it back.

  I hugged my aunt in gratitude. For the ring, the story, and her scents of rose and lavender, and for making each of us feel so cared for. How much we trusted Tía Consuelo, as did the many people whose encomiendas she safely delivered. If there was one thing to be when I grew up, I vowed then, that was it. Trustworthy. The kind of person everyone could depend on.

  I gathered up the wrappings and said good night, then carried my treasure back to my room. After I’d changed, I climbed into bed and took out my ring to marvel at all over again. I held it up, just as my father had done, for the moonlight that shone in through my window. Back and forth, I tilted the crystal to catch the light traveling through it into the dark beyond. Long, beautiful rays bounced back, as if someone out there had finally said, “I’m sorry, Lita, I’m sorry.”

  My aunt’s visit passed too quickly, though the special scent of her presence lingered through our house after she’d gone. My father remained agreeable for a while, but eventually he regressed into his Mr. Hyde character, scribbling with vengeance in his room only to emerge with rambling letters for me to distill sense out of on the typewriter. At least he didn’t blow up or provoke a crisis. I sent many prayers of thanks to Heaven that we still had our green cards, given Tía Consuelo’s alarming descriptions of the economic problems in Colombia and my mother’s heightened terror of being sent back.

  Mami valiantly cobbled together that month’s mortgage payment from her part-time wages and our spottier income sources. Flitting restlessly through the house, she recited litanies of economic woe and did no decorating at all as Christmas approached, though my brothers and I cut up and hung paper ornaments. In one of those moments where distress overcomes caution, she spilled the beans on the mysterious debt I’d caught her discussing uneasily with Tía Rita several times. We apparently owed the shoe factory for some expensive machine my father had damaged in Massachusetts. When Mami registered the aha! on my face, as my suspicion was confirmed that his sojourn hadn’t ended so benignly, she rushed to undercut what she’d revealed. “It wasn’t any kind of police thing,” she assured me defensively. “We just have to pay a lot.”

  A different and sadder revelation unfolded for me at Tía Rita’s holiday party. My aunt had completely covered the yard with white nylon filament to imitate snow, but it lifted up each time someone slammed the door and exposed our tropical reality. As was always the case, we split up by gender and age. When I passed Tía Rita’s room on my way to my cousin Raquel’s, I overheard Mami telling Tía Rita and Tía Elena about the difficulties of her job. The description of the store’s detailed accounting needs perplexed me, so I slowed down and stopped to listen—and what I heard was quite a surprise. Without directly lying, Mami made it sound as if her job were counting the inventory, not cleaning it. This deception, for some reason, disheartened me more than all our outright lies. I had to chide myself: even my mother was entitled to her pride.

  Still, the bad feeling stuck with me for a while, despite Raquel giving me an unexpected gift, a scented candle, and other gifts that followed. My cousin Marisol passed on her old transistor radio, and I got a box of cute hair clips from Fernandita, Mami’s niece de crianza—a term she’d long before explained simply meant that Fernandita was raised alongside her father’s true children. Marisol snidely reminded Raquel and me that it really implied Fernandita was illegitimate. I told Marisol that I didn’t care one whit how Fernandita had been born.

  Marisol scoffed at my response. Maybe she didn’t know what a “whit” was, or maybe she was just taken aback at my standing up to her. Sweet and trustworthy Raquel gave me a sympathetic look. She knew that I was really standing up for my mother.

  As if my father’s way of thinking were spreading, my brothers started inventing their own imaginary moneymaking schemes to supplement the portion of their earnings my mother let them retain. Pablo suggested entering a TV musical competition. He was kind of musical and cute but, as I pointed out, no prodigy. It would take a lot of bathroom cello practice before anyone would pay to listen to him. In the middle of that dumb discussion, Tío Lucho showed up with a huge bag of factory pieces.

  “Don’t worry,” Tío Lucho laughed as I groaned. “They’re remnants,” he said, dumping the bag on the couch to light his cigarette. “Maybe your mother can use them.”

  My brothers scavenged through the bag and unloaded cutout sleeves, bodices, collars—skeletons of clothing waiting to be whirred alive. When Manolo pulled out a whole bolt of fake tan fur, Pablo proposed making rabbit’s foot key chains like the one a girl had given him the year before on Sadie Hawkins Day. Manolo got excited too, and I saw dollar signs in his eyes. Here was something to be made and sold out of a worthless nothing we didn’t have to pay for.

  “They won’t look real,” I noted, holdi
ng up the synthetic fabric.

  “It feels real,” Manolo replied, rubbing the cloth.

  “We could call ourselves The Fuzz Shop,” Pablo added, pretending to smoke a joint as I rolled my eyes.

  Rabbit foot key chains, granted, were a big deal. But from the little I’d gotten out of that Junior Achievement meeting I attended, I doubted my brothers could make any money. They didn’t even know how to sew. Still, a couple of hours later, I found them madly cutting up fur rectangles by the hundreds.

  I took pity on them and volunteered to sew their rectangles together on the rickety Singer in my mother’s closet. The thick fur kept getting stuck under the needle, which aggravated me. Mami must have heard me cursing, because she suddenly came over and put a human foot down on the project. “You think I have money to buy another machine when you break this one?”

  “I’m sorry, Mami,” I said before going to report the disappointing news to my brothers.

  Scissors in hand and surrounded by mounds of rabbit fur, they stared at me in disbelief.

  “That means sewing by hand,” I pointed out.

  “But my hands are tired from cutting,” Pablo complained.

  “Yeah,” Manolo agreed. “It’s not worth it.” He tossed the shears into Mami’s basket and got up to raise the TV volume on some game show.

  All moneymaking enthusiasm dissolved in a matter of seconds. Gabriela the Helper, of course, gathered the cut-up scraps into the bag, then hoisted the bag up to carry away. Defeat weighed me down too. All I’d hoped for was a little extra money to buy a Christmas present for each person who’d given us one, so that we wouldn’t feel like moochers. The problem with Junior Achievement business plans, I concluded depressingly as I lugged the bag toward my room, was that they assumed everyone had more control in the world than was actually possessed. Like the power my father lacked to find and keep a job, despite succeeding in Colombia and New York. At least he was still trying with his pathetic, disjointed letters. As I passed the kitchen, I overheard him speaking loudly in his room about the La Cira Infantes oil field. He paused briefly, as if someone might ask him a question, but there was no one in there with him. It was so weird.

  Back in my room, I tried to shove the unwieldy bag into the closet, but it burst, spilling the lifeless animal tails. Morosely, I threw myself onto my bed and stared at them. How stupid to have thought the scheme would work. At least my brothers and I had recognized that the project was doomed without necessary tools. Not so with my father; he repeated things that failed and failed. It was his great mental tic.

  Yet I preferred to blame him for his nervios, or whatever malady he had, and for everything that followed from it—the criminal case, the immigration problems, the lack of money, my mother’s awful negativity, and both my parents’ total ignorance of the bad things sickos like the Laundromat jerk did to children. Because to consider my father a hapless victim of some flawed Junior Achievement business plan only filled me with doubts. What was the use of trying to help everyone around you stay calm, do the right thing, obey the law, or generally make life better if your own efforts could never be certain to produce good results? And how were we supposed to know if any of our betterment efforts were crazy without trying them out?

  Some things you just knew ahead of time. For instance, no one in their right mind would dive into the ocean if they didn’t know how to swim, because other people had already drowned that way.

  But what of things no one had tried yet?

  You would have to trust your instincts, your own thoughts.

  But what if your thoughts turned out to be defective?

  I started to cry. What else did I have but my own thoughts?

  Melancholy stayed with me until Mami dragged me along with her to the bank on some mysterious errand.

  The bank was in another strip mall that had replaced The Palms, a pale pink motel whose two neon palm trees used to illuminate the intersection before the traffic light was installed. The elderly year-round residents must have moved on, I eulogized silently, nearer to the quiet palms of God’s Gulf Coast.

  Between the bank and the jewelry store was a sandwich shop with another lean-in window for people to sip coladas, cortaditos, and other Cuban coffee variations. Mami suggested we share a café con leche there. After we downed the coffee, she smiled conspiratorially and said, “All right, let’s go into the jewelry store.”

  Oh, so the bank excuse had been subterfuge. “I don’t need a birthday present, Mami,” I reiterated hollowly. “I already have Tía Consuelo’s ring.” I held up and wiggled my finger, the pyramid emerald glittering. “Don’t waste money on me.”

  “You’re too generosa, mi’jita.” A small furrow appeared between Mami’s brows. “Sometimes I worry about you,” she said quietly.

  “Me?” I asked in surprise.

  “Of course.” Her eyes softened as she gazed into mine. “A mother never stops worrying,” she said with a smile. “Ya verás, when you grow up.” Then she turned and led us toward the Joyería Marbella, and it struck me that predictable as Mami was, I didn’t completely understand her.

  When we paused in front of the display window, I couldn’t help but admire the pretty gold bangles and rings. Delicate clusters of seven tiny medals twinkled on each ring. The bangles glowed in sets of seven too. Cuban girls, even Lydia, who disdained copycats, wore semanarios, as they were called—one bangle for each day of the week. The only bracelets nearly as ubiquitous were the metal POW-MIA cuffs engraved with a soldier’s name and the date he went missing in Vietnam that some American girls wore. The gold bangle sets didn’t bear that kind of weight, but they shone as brightly as my memories of the jewels the ancients would throw into their sacred lagoon for the First Mother, Bachué. Mami used to read me those stories from her own treasured schoolbook.

  “So pretty,” she murmured now.

  In a moment of weakness, I admitted how much I liked the bangles myself.

  She grabbed me by the wrist and ushered me inside, where she asked the Cuban saleslady about the price. Mami’s eyes widened when she heard the quote. “Oh. Do you have a layaway plan?” Of course, that was how my family had purchased everything nice we owned, like our dining room chairs that had come two by two—like candidates for Noah’s Ark—only to be encased like mummies in the plastic of eternal life.

  “Sí, of course,” the lady answered, her glasses bouncing on their chain against her bosom as she bent down for the forms. “¿Son para la niña?” she inquired.

  “Sí,” Mami nodded, turning in my direction. “Tell the lady which ones you like, mi’jita.”

  Without hesitation, I chose the plain rims that had no engravings to dim the glow of their gold. The saleslady took one bangle out, lifted its miniature price tag up to her nose to read and held it out for my mother.

  Mami bit her lower lip, then looked up. “May we have three?”

  Three? I tried hard not to show dismay—but three?

  Nodding politely, the lady gave us one of the cards to fill out and placed her chubby arms on top of the counter to watch my mother write. When Mami handed it back with our cash down payment, the lady recorded the amount due on our card and slipped the money, card, and my three bangles into a plastic Baggie. She locked everything behind the glass counter with the gleaming, golden bangles I couldn’t have.

  On the way home, I didn’t say much. As soon as we arrived, though, I went to retrieve my personal savings stash and counted out fourteen dollars that I brought into the kitchen. “Here, Mami.”

  She stared at the bills in dismay. “But it’s your birthday present.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” I replied, leaving the money there.

  It did matter. Contributing to my present didn’t bother me. What did was that I had to get it in such a peculiar way. I mean, if we were buying the bangles on layaway anyway, why didn’t we buy a normal set? Who ever heard of half a semanario set? Bitterly, I tried to imagine a store letting you put one shoe on layaway. I wished I could
feel grateful to be getting any bangles at all, but like our chairs in their hard plastic, I was trapped in my negativity without a way out.

  I resolved to buy my own semanario instead of depending on my mother for her fractured gift. Later that day, I called Tío Lucho and asked him to bring over more dreaded piecework, and he laughed at my sudden “reformation.”

  All the money I earned after that I applied toward the full bangle set. My mother, ashamed that I was paying for my own gift, didn’t try to talk me out of it. But she looked at me sadly every time I returned from the Joyería Marbella as if every one of my payments took a little more life out of hers.

  Finally the day arrived for me to give the saleslady the final payment. She removed my semanario from the bag and crossed out the balance due on our layaway card forever. My golden bangles lay on the glass, the morning sun shining upon them. How they gleamed, prettier than the first time I’d seen them. Dear, I thought to myself, a two-sided word from English novels. The dear of costliness, the dear of loved.

  [ TWELVE ]

  MY BIRTHDAY REALLY BEGAN when I received my grandfather’s poem, “Tempestad,” a day early. Although I took my time reading it, the bleak stanzas, the last one particularly, utterly confused me:

  Don’t say no to me, Light—constant,

  panoramic, faithful in distance;

  illuminate this solitary shore.

  I put the page down. What had happened to Abuelo’s sentimental odes? My rueful gaze drifted out the window toward the three stumps the city’s eradication crew had painted with white lime. Once, our cheery coconuts had stood there. Could my grandfather’s poem be about death?

  Mami only wrinkled her brow when I showed it to her. “I don’t know, mi’ja,” she said, returning it in frustration. “We’ll study it some other time.”