by Iris Gomez
The next day, my actual birthday, Lydia gave me a wallet, along with my own pack of cigarettes. I distributed that cheerfully after school, while saving a few singles for myself, before I terminated the festivities to walk home.
The sun poured down, soaking my sleeves in the simple effort of moving my arms and legs. When I arrived at the house, I shut my eyes for a moment to absorb the cooler kitchen air.
Mami came up and kissed my forehead. “Habla con tu papá,” she whispered.
My heart sank. Seeing my father was code for another assignment. “But my shirt is wet.”
“You can change afterward.”
My father heard us and came into the kitchen. As if planning to attend his court hearing totally ahead of schedule, he was strangely dressed up in a baggy suit and tie that made him look frail. Clenching and unclenching his hands excitedly, he confided that he had “algo importante” to discuss. Of course, with him there was always “something important.”
I glanced morosely at my mother, who merely nudged me toward their room with her chin.
There, my father had already set up the typewriter next to a pile of encyclopedias.
Some birthday this was turning out to be.
“Mi’jita,” my father began.
The endearment made me wary.
“You know how hard we have to work,” he continued.
Work? I tried to keep a straight face. Only my mother believed in that miracle.
I said nothing, though, since what I wanted never really mattered.
What he wanted was to take advantage of this “oportunidad.”
I hardened when I heard the same word he’d used to justify my consignment to the horrible summer of puzzles. “Opportunity for what?” I dared to ask.
“Dinero, mi’jita.” My father waved his arm like a wand across the typewriter. “Aquí,” he said, displaying his perpetual solution to all our woes. “And here.” He opened one of his expired magazines. The trembling of his knuckles as he held it open to an article about a Baton Rouge petrochemical plant distracted me, but I read enough to learn that the company had brought wealth to a poor town.
Next, he pulled out another faded article, “Fractional Distillation of Crude Oil.” That seemed to mean boiling, since a chart illustrated the boiling points of different components of oil. “Todo es refinería, mi’jita,” he concluded, pleased with himself.
This sounded like another of his oddball letters. I still didn’t see where the new money aspect came in, except that now he picked up a World Book Encyclopedia volume. We’d purchased the set a long time back from a persuasive visiting salesman with a pay-over-time offer. The S-U volume my father was holding up had slips of paper sticking out of it, but they fell out as he flipped pages. He started praising articles he’d “read” in his fragmented English, while I finally figured out the essentials:
1. The people in the magazines owed us millions of dollars.
2. We were going to get it all back.
3. I was going to help him.
4. By doing even more typing.
Suddenly I got why he’d put on the suit. He’d decided that this was his job. Here was his office. And I was his secretaria.
“But I have to go to school,” I protested.
“Claro que sí, mi’jita,” he reassured me. I would report for work after school. Handing me the encyclopedia volume in his hands, he thumbed to “The Solar System” entry and pointed to it. “Necesito tu colaboración con esto.”
Taking a deep breath, I ogled the entry and ventured a wild guess about how it related to our new million-dollar opportunity: Maybe my father thought he’d found a mistake, something to report to the World Book Encyclopedia so that he could collect a handsome reward? But my eyes widened when he informed me that he expected me to retype the entire article—nine single-spaced pages, charts and all. He was going to send it to the magazine as proof.
“Proof of what?” I inquired with dread.
He answered with one word. “Refinación.”
Refining! It was all I could do not to throw the book at him. Even if there were some remote connection between refining and the Solar System, my father could never put that into words other people would understand.
“Why don’t we make a photocopy, Papi?” I asked faintly, hoping against hope I could cajole him with the Xerox machine they’d installed at the post office.
“No,” my father said point-blank as he shook his stubborn head. He was going to write the article. “Yo,” he repeated, patting his chest.
In stunned silence, I tried to absorb his intention to write an article someone had already authored. Kids in school weren’t allowed to copy. That was plagiarism. The more distressing thought crossed my mind that my father was too far gone to believe in anything anymore but what he invented. Helplessly I stared at the halves of his white shirt split by his ugly tie. Where oh where was the father who used to work, chat with my mother, give us quarters, sign report cards, and take my picture on my birthday? The father before me now was like one of those figures in a Picasso painting from my art class slide show. You knew they were there—the title told you so—but the human features were broken up by objects you had to struggle to see beneath.
By now, my mother had come into the room. “Let Gabriela change her clothes, Roberto,” she urged my father.
“Claro,” he agreed, sitting down to wait.
In my room, I sank glumly onto my bed and fixed my gaze on the black specks that marbled our terrazzo floors. I tried counting dots on my dotted Swiss curtains. With unhappy fingers, I traced the embroidery lines that curled back and forth across my bedspread—a labyrinth with no beginning or end. Fleetingly, I considered putting my foot down once and for all. Sure, I’d typed his convoluted, illogical job letters—they kept him happy, quiet, out of trouble. And there had always been that sliver of a chance that the letters might help. But this stuff?
I didn’t have the courage to defy my father, though. I was afraid. I’d been good at staying on his good side, but now he was prone to lash out at anything that angered him, no matter how innocent. Grimly, I tabulated the victims: the tailor shop customer, her daughter, the old Italian fisherman who’d only tried to cure Pablo’s earache, and all the inanimate objects of my father’s wrath like the Rickenbacker doors, the faraway shoe factory machine, and our poor TV.
My mother was observing me from my doorway. “Aren’t you going to change?”
I looked up bitterly. “Why don’t you help him?”
She walked toward my dresser and opened a drawer.
“Ay mi’jita.” She handed me a clean blouse. “I can’t see well. Anyway, your father wants you. You’re the smart one. Think of it as a chance to practice.”
“Practice what?” I blurted out. “Being crazy?”
Her slap shocked me. I stared back with utter contempt, willing myself not to touch my face, though it stung.
She rubbed her hand without looking at me. “Help your father,” she said, turning away.
Silently, I stood and went to retrieve the Royal, then carried it into the kitchen. At the table I sat with the typewriter in front of me and the World Book Encyclopedia propped between two cans of black beans.
Humidity made the keys sticky, so I gently wiped the letters with a napkin first. The typewriter was innocent. Its solidity and its order—the square box it came in, the rectangular opening where the legs of each key kicked up toward paper, and the square black keys, each with a proud white letter in the middle—braced me against the hopelessness in which I felt myself whirling as I began to type.
To calm down, I tried to make believe that I was watching instead of being the person at the table. Mutely, I watched the typing hands peck out the letters and pick up correction paper strips to fix mistakes, then furiously roll out a sheet to start over when there were too many to correct one by one.
Someone help me, cried a tiny voice inside me.
I had to stop, seized by fear that I too could b
e splitting apart like my father, some of me stuck inside and the rest gone who knows where?
The World Book Encyclopedia was a vast universe. What if, after I finished this, my father required me to type whole books—or the entire encyclopedia? Weeks would become months in the clutches of madness. What good would it do to save myself from deportation if I couldn’t keep my own mind from disintegrating?
As hours that felt like eternity passed, I managed to type over all the dense pages of text. But there were still charts and diagrams left—one of the planets, a rainbow of spheres moving toward the large flaming sun. Dejectedly, I inserted a final sheet into the Royal. All I could to do was type the captions, which I did in order like a list. But they read so oddly—disconnected from their pictures like my father from human reality. I stared at the diagram’s flaming sun and the tiny gray Earth near it while my father paced behind me, as if he couldn’t stop himself from dragging me into his doomed orbit.
In the wake of that depressing fifteenth birthday, my father whipped up many fresh batches of encyclopedia-related concoctions for me. Exhausted, I complained to Mami that my back ached from so much typing. She became silent for a moment, wiping her hands with a towel and thinking. Then she went to get Pablo, who seemed to have a lot of free time on his hands, and enlisted him in reading my father’s assignments aloud so that I could sit up straight. The typing did go faster, plus with Pablo cracking jokes I began to feel a little less alone in the world.
I plunged back into despair, though, when one of my textbooks went missing. “It has to be Papi,” I told Mami darkly, after I’d searched just about everywhere except his chambers. I went in there and carefully scanned his cluttered pseudo-desk, but it was hard to tell what was under the large plastic lime planter in which he kept his treasure trove of sharpened pencils and cartridge pens and the slide rule he’d confiscated for his diseños—as if he were the one taking Manolo’s drafting class. Sure enough, the corner of my science book peeked out from where he’d buried it under the planter.
I turned on my heel.
“Mami, he has my book!” I hissed. “He’s taking over my life! First he takes my money, then my supplies, and now all my stuff. When is this going to end?”
She sniffed disdainfully. “Don’t exaggerate, Gabriela. He borrowed a book. It’s not going to kill you to be without it for a few minutes.” Then she went into the lion’s den as I listened from a safe distance.
“That book, Roberto,” she asked innocently, “isn’t that Gabriela’s?”
“This? Sí, but I have to examine it.”
“Roberto, your daughter needs it. Give it to me, please.”
“It’s important for my research.”
“I’ll get you another one.”
“You don’t know, Evangelina. We need 1.9 million barrels.”
“What I know is that your daughter needs that book to study,” she replied. “Gabriela!” she yelled. “Bring me the book Pablo didn’t return last year! From his closet!”
I ran into my brothers’ room, which Pablo had decorated with posters of rock bands whose names had “Black” or “Dark” in them. On the closet shelf I found a social studies book, The World We Live In, with a Rickenbacker sticker inside. I ran back, extending the book to my father in both hands like a peace pipe. “Here, Papi.”
As he took it, Mami nabbed the science text and passed it to me.
My father began blinking at the wall in front of him, as if he were thinking very hard. Blink. Blink. Blink.
I frowned at Mami in puzzlement and left.
Things got worse as my father recognized, despite the looseness of his thinking, that Pablo’s reading aloud enabled me to type faster. He assigned more of the World Book Encyclopedia, The World We Live In, and his dog-eared magazines, and combined it all with his illogical handwritten notes. Having to retype entire encyclopedia entries from scratch was bad enough, but connecting my father’s incomprehensible sentences to those disparate sources just about taxed my remaining mental capabilities. When Pablo suggested skipping parts to see if my father noticed, I refused—only because I didn’t want to use up the brain cells that survived figuring out what to omit. Clinging desperately to reason, I resorted to adding a concluding sentence here and there so that his documents wouldn’t end so abruptly—vague summaries like “Thus, Seismic Stratigraphy is very important.”
When at last my father assigned us an article about global seismic activity that appeared to have some miraculous connection to oil drilling, Pablo and I got our hopes up. Maybe, just maybe, our father understood more than we appreciated. It might all come together in some mysterious way, like our purpose here on Earth when God was through with us.
The letter to Miami-Dade Junior College wiped out my illusions once and for all.
Happy and energized, my father emerged from his room one bright April morning, his special letter drafted and ready. Pablo had gone to some thirteen-year-old’s pool party, leaving the unfortunate task to me.
I followed my father into his room. Sunny as it was that day, he’d turned on the lamp to show me his letter in all its glory. His own private solar system.
On top of a pile of the usual volumes and periodicals was the introduction in his unmistakable block print:
DEAR SIR:
PLEASE YOU BE SURE THAT I AM WRITING WITH RESPECT AND HOPES OF SPEAK AS SOON AS POSSIBLE. WITH THE PROPOSICIÓN OF DISCUSS MY TÉSIS.
My father had failed to translate “proposal” and “thesis” of course. As usual, he’d also forgotten that English didn’t have tildes, accent marks.
HERE YOU WILL HAVE MY EXPERIENCE IN REFINERY. SECONDARY RECOVERY TECHNIQUES IN THE OLDER FIELDS, SOME OF WHICH DATE BACK TO 1918, EXTEND THE PRODUCTIVE LIFE OF THE FIELDS. OFTEN, THEY INCREASE ULTIMATE RECOVERY TO MORE THAN 20 PERCENT. THESE TECHNIQUES GENERALLY INVOLVE INJECTION OF WATER TO DISPLACE OIL, DRIVING IT INTO THE WELLBORE (NATURAL GAS IS OFTEN PRODUCED SIMULTANEOUSLY WITH THE OIL FROM A RESERVOIR).
This whole paragraph I recognized from an article I’d typed before.
I WORK TOO MANY YEARS IN COLOMBIA REFINERY.
This was clear enough, but underneath he’d clipped a letter that the Sentinel rejected when he’d looked for work in a more or less normal manner. The work experience paragraphs of the old letter were circled for me to insert, but they included jobs that had not been with Colombian refineries—like picking tomatoes, sweeping the shop, and making shoes.
The page ended there. I looked at my father. He put a hand on his pile of Home Mechanics magazines and World Book Encyclopedia volumes. They contained excerpts for his letter, he explained, petting the pile like a pet.
Wordlessly, I counted twenty-six lengthy entries he’d clipped, including the beloved Solar System article that I’d already retyped once. He handed me another handwritten page that he’d signed, despite its draft status, which read:
AND I WANT TO BRING TO YOU THESE PAPERS OF PETROLEUM INDUSTRY AND STUDY MORE WITH YOUR UNIVERSITY THE PROBLEM, WITH YOUR ASSISTANCE. AND RECEIVE THE PAYMENTS.
SINCERELY YOURS,
This was followed by my father’s signature and beneath that, a title,
“EXPERTO EN REFINERÍA.”
Expert in refining? I wearily asked myself. To be paid for his petroleum studies?
All my father’s obsessions and delusions were now coalesced in a single document.
Okay, I quietly but sternly told myself. No more fixing. No more trying to make this garbage rational. Pablo was right—trying to fix things was hopeless. My father was nuts. My mother was nuts for going along with him instead of me. There was only one sane response to life in this insane asylum: escape. Whenever and however I could manage it. With that conviction, I picked up my father’s materials and marched into the kitchen. I inserted the first clean sheet into the typewriter.
The letter to the first of the thirty Miami-Dade addressees was a pain to cobble together out of my father’s multiple inserts. But I drew some satisfaction in leaving the bottle o
f Wite-Out untouched. As I moved on to the second letter, my mother prepared a café con leche for me with lots of sugar. The coffee jolt gave me the sense to go buy carbon paper, after which I typed three letters at once, adding the individual addressees later. The addresses corresponded to phone-book listings in the community course catalog that had arrived a few days earlier—for me of course, although my father had appropriated that like Manolo’s slide rule, my money, and whatever he could squeeze out of my mind.
For the envelopes, I resourcefully converted Mami’s leftover return address stickers from St. Stephen’s with the red and green Christmas crosses on them by scratching off her name and substituting my father’s. He insisted that I go drop off the letters, though at least he didn’t tag along.
Pablo found me dumping envelopes into the post office mailbox. He had a towel around his neck and offered me his goody bag. “Want some candy?”
“Thanks,” I said, grabbing a pack of Red Hots. “Was the party fun?”
“Yeah, it was really fun. Hey, Gabi, let’s detour over to Tuttle and see who’s there. I don’t wanna go home with the crazies yet,” he said with a grin.
“I don’t know,” I replied tepidly, but I wasn’t too eager to return home either so I let him talk me into it.
Tuttle was the typical clean neighborhood park, complete with swings, sandbox, and a slide. In the back, however, the chain-link fence had been pushed down, yielding an overgrown swath of land adjacent to rusty railroad tracks. The park was named for Julia Tuttle, the one woman studied in our Florida history unit because she’d given money for the railroad that “civilized” south Florida. Now, the abandoned tracks were littered with beer bottles, Coke cans, tampons, and empty Frito bags. Pablo and I walked past the litter and situated ourselves on the grassy part between the jasmines and a lone orange tree that sometimes dropped dried-up fruit. No one Pablo knew was around. Tossing me his goody stash, he pulled a small paper bag from his pocket and removed a tube that he uncapped and squirted into the bag. Then he lifted the bag to his face and sniffed.