Try to Remember

by Iris Gomez

  Olguita patted my hand. “It was a fun party, no?”

  I nodded gratefully. “Your cousins are nice,” I told her with sincerity. “I’m so sorry I ruined your party. So, so sorry.”

  “Oh no. Don’t worry,” she said, hugging me. “I had a good time.”

  I was ashamed of what I’d said about my father, but I didn’t know how to take it back. Being with him was killing me, though not in the way I’d described. The knife my father actually owned was only a blunt, rusty instrument for cutting cane or high grasses—one that he probably kept for protection in that beat-up sheath under his bed. I didn’t know why I’d brought that up out of the blue. Maybe it was just the weariness of trying to cover up so much. Every once in a while things squeezed out.

  I concentrated on getting myself to Camila’s car, but as we headed toward my house, I began to worry about what she would tell my mother. When we got there, I stumbled out toward the house and headed to my room without listening to whatever they were saying to each other. I let the voices slip away, my house becoming a separate thing, hard and fixed, to which I didn’t belong. I was a whiff of cologne that floated, motherless and fatherless, through the dark air....

  When I woke, Mami was plopping down a large cup of café con leche on my dresser. She sat on my bed and wagged a finger at me. “That vast quantity of alcohol is not to be repeated. ¿Sabes qué señorita?”

  I nodded with my eyes closed as everything from the night before collided in my brain.

  “Only a miracle prevented that drunken aroma from reaching your father,” she added with the usual exaggeration. “I can’t imagine what Camila was thinking. She said you didn’t eat anything! Why didn’t you, Gabriela? Un traguito, a social drink, is one thing—but multiple whiskey glasses! Since when did we bring you up to borrachear in public? Why didn’t you follow Olguita’s example? What’s wrong with you? What if your father…”

  Suddenly I remembered what I’d blurted out about the knife and my eyes popped open. But Mami merely appeared to be inspecting with the typical jaundiced eye my evening’s apparel, scattered on the floor. I closed my eyes. No, Camila must not have told her.

  Willing myself to sit up at last, I reached for the cup on the dresser. “Don’t worry about it, Mami,” I said, taking a sip of my café. “I don’t even like the taste of liquor.”

  She glared at me. “Taste?” She shook her head in disappointment. “And you think you have the maturity to work like your cousin Marisol?”

  There went my hope of a summer escape from my angry father. “But the money would help us,” I offered weakly.

  “You can help with Avon,” she retorted, standing to leave.

  At least her positive comment about Olguita had reassured me that I could go on visiting.

  Negativity returned, however, when Tío Victor called and I heard Mami advise him to cancel the doctor’s appointment. “I’ll resolve things somehow,” she claimed.

  I almost hoped then that my father would kill me with his sugar-cane cutter. Wouldn’t Mami be sorry.

  [ FIFTEEN ]

  IN THE WAKE OF MY DRUNKEN EPISODE, I occupied myself with collecting Avon orders to appease Mami while staying out of my father’s way as much as possible. I lied to him that Camila had asked me to teach Olguita English. Camila’s only reference to my embarrassing episode, fortunately, was a teasing remark that I should go for the aguardiente next time. Olguita just shook her head.

  In the days before her departure, Olguita hauled out Hernán’s old guitar to teach me some Colombian songs. Singing along to “El pescador barquero” helped put the sorry knife business out of my mind, though I knew the songs wouldn’t sound so great with just me singing. Lydia, my only other friend, seemed pretty busy with some boyfriend and was hardly home. My summer days would soon fill with the papers my father had been amassing since the doctor talk failed so miserably. On the good news front, there was no-news from our friendly community police officer, so I finally stopped worrying about her.

  The day before Olguita’s trip home, I went over to help her pack and found an unusually tall woman, who’d apparently moved onto that street, visiting Camila. “Mi amor,” Camila greeted me, apologizing that Olguita hadn’t returned from her expedition and then inviting me to sit and wait.

  “Bien,” I said, taking the empty rocker beside the neighbor.

  Camila introduced Lara, who smiled up at me out of curious gray eyes. She had a lanky build and thin shoulder bones that protruded. Her hair was a mass of evenly gray and black curls—surprisingly, she didn’t dye her hair.

  Lara was German, Camila explained, and had lived in Spain and Latin America.

  In native Spanish Lara added that her husband Walter was from Argentina.

  Her daughters, little wispy blondes, were running around with a boy from the neighboring yard. The girls spoke to their mother in a mix of Spanish and German that Camila said was enchanting. Lara laughed as if Camila had said something witty, and then Camila went inside to make us coffee.

  “What grade are you in?” Lara inquired with a warm smile.

  “I just finished ninth,” I replied. “I switch to high school in September.”

  “I see. And what subjects does one study in that grade?”

  I ran through my report card classifications, leaving out the questionable Physical Education curriculum.

  Lara nodded, as if she were actually taking in what I’d said. “And do you enjoy these subjects equally?”

  “I guess,” I said, considering her question. Most people—namely, my relatives—wanted to hear that I was a good student but weren’t too interested in the specifics. As long as their kids stayed out of trouble, parenting was on a need-to-know basis. “Mostly I like classes where we read.”

  Camila pushed through the screen door with a tray of demitasse cups and Lara switched back to Spanish. “Let me help you,” she offered, opening the wooden folding table.

  Camila’s cups had colorful miniature paintings of ladies who stood in 1800s-style bustle dresses and parasols under great leafy trees. Lara smiled when she caught me admiring the cups. “I think they’re pretty too,” she said.

  “At your service,” said Camila with a proud tilt of her head.

  Lara gulped her coffee. “Delicious,” she pronounced, then turned to me. “Do you care for children, Gabriela?”

  “You mean babysit?” I glanced at Camila, who was absentmindedly watching the older little blonde jump rope. “I think so.”

  “Wonderful. Would you like to take care of mine?”

  “Yes,” I replied. “I mean, if my mother says it’s okay.”

  “Vale. Ask your mother if you can come Saturday, around nine in the morning. I have to go to the university for a few hours.” She rose from the wicker chair, beckoned her daughters over, and asked me to phone her. “Camila can give you my number, yes?”

  “Claro,” Camila agreed.

  Lara shook our hands, thanked Camila for the coffee, and left.

  Camila mused aloud over the peculiarity of the handshake. “Muy raro,” she commented.

  I agreed that it was odd for women to shake hands. Out of the blue, like Lara herself with her wild salt-and-pepper hair. She seemed so foreign to tropical Miami.

  When Olguita returned later, I helped her pack. As a parting gift, she bequeathed me a taupe eyeliner pencil. “Don’t forget the twist,” she added, curling her wrist and smiling. Regretfully we hugged farewell, and I felt as if I’d known her for longer than the few weeks she’d been in Miami.

  The next day, with Olguita gone, I sat dejectedly in front of the typewriter and tried not to engage in direct conversations with my father. Things were resuming their uneasy, unreal state, though I remained on edge around him after the Manolo attack.

  When Saturday came, I was only too happy to flee to my new babysitting venture. Mami had assented to my helping out Camila’s neighbor with the children but had asked me not to tell anyone in the family, including my father of course
, but also the aunts and cousins, that I was to be paid.

  I showed up at Lara’s right at nine o’clock sharp.

  Her house turned out to be as unusual as she was. It had little furniture and absolutely no trace of the Pine-Sol scent so popular in my household. Lara apologized about the sparse furnishings and ran around gathering books while pushing a wayward curl behind her ear. “We’ve only been here a few weeks,” she explained. “Walter is teaching. He has to put in long hours at the university. I’m trying to do a little research too, for a book.” She giggled nervously. “It’s a bit difficult when one’s children are young,”

  The girls, Luna and Sol, were four and two. I found them playing with huge squashy red blocks in their room. The younger one cried when her mother left, but Luna and I distracted her by holding the blocks against our chests and throwing ourselves on the mattress that served as their bed. When I’d settled them with the game, I went to prepare their breakfasts.

  I had to open the living room shades for more light. In that room, between two armchairs, a coffee table was scattered with magazines, newspapers, and index cards with neatly printed quotations. Books were stacked in piles that came up to my knees, and the stacks extended from that room into what was supposed to be a dining room. There was no dining table, though. Lara had downed her morning yogurt while standing in the kitchen. I guessed they ate dinner at the plastic table in the backyard.

  While the girls’ oatmeal cooked, I counted twenty-five stacks. The books were written in English, German, Spanish, and French. I moved carefully among the piles, in case they’d been arranged in a particular order, and proceeded to open books and scan contents, comparing the French with my Spanish here and there. Most of the books were hardcovers with heavy-duty titles like Symbolic Logic, La poétique de l’espace, Modernism and Rubén Darío, and The Origins of Consciousness. Lara’s books distinguished her home from any other I’d seen before. My parents and relatives owned some books, mainly paperbacks that reminded me of fotonovelas, but I rarely saw anyone read anything except for my father. Of course, it was hard to say how much of what he did could be called reading. To me it seemed that when he lifted paragraphs into letters, he wanted to understand, but the understanding was another fantasy.

  By the time Lara returned, breathless and loaded with more books, I’d decided that either she or Walter was a history buff. She smiled, thanked me for putting the girls down for naps on time, and gave me five dollars for the four hours she’d been gone. “Next week?” she asked.

  “Sure.”

  I waltzed home and found Mami popping overgrown eyes out of old potatoes.

  “Lara wants me again next week,” I informed her.

  Mami nodded without looking up. “But don’t forget what I told you,” she said.

  “I won’t,” I agreed.

  “No sé cómo vamos a hacer,” Mami continued, moving on to the daily mantra. “How am I going to put together the total?” Aloud, she subtracted phone and gas balances from what was left of last month’s income, then deducted water, electricity, etc. It was such a wearisome arithmetic.

  “Here.” I put the bill Lara gave me on the counter.

  “No, mi’ja,” Mami said with embarrassment. “You keep it for your things.” She dried her hand on a towel, shoved the money into my pocket, and picked up her peeler.

  I grabbed a knife to help with the potatoes.

  Confident about my new employment, I decided to broach a matter I’d been brooding over. I’d finally pinpointed the root of my father’s evil anger at the world: those people who’d ripped off his money. Why had that one incident meant so much?

  Mami raised her eyebrows. “Those are your father’s cuentos, mi’ja. Don’t pay attention to them.”

  Cuentos? So she believed the things Papi said were just stories?

  Lowering her voice, she explained that he’d always been paid for his work. The trouble was that it didn’t pay enough. “But nobody owes us, mi’ja. On the contrary, we owe. The bank, Southern Bell, that Massachusetts factory….”

  Off she went, trying to fix the pieces instead of what was broken. I put my knife down in frustration and turned to leave.

  “Wait,” she said, motioning toward the cabinet where she stashed important mail for me to read. “A letter came.”

  I retrieved an opened envelope from behind the jar of naranja agria. The letter, written in Spanish, was from Miss Lucy Prado, Family Unit Officer at the Dade County Office of Protective Services. “You can read this,” I said, puzzled but becoming alarmed as I skimmed the letter.

  “I need you to make the appointment,” she explained, peeling away.

  “It doesn’t say you and Papi have to go.”

  “Of course we do. Why would they send a letter?”

  “This is the government, Mami,” I said, shaking the letter in front of her. “It’s like… going to the police. You know Papi can’t do that. He’s still in his probation. You want them to find out he has… dementia or something and can’t take care of his own kids?” Unattended minors, I remembered El Chino calling it. “ You might get in trouble, Mami,” I warned anxiously. “Isn’t there enough trouble with him?”

  My mother stared. “First of all, your father is forty years old! No one who is forty gets dementia.” She aimed the potato peeler at me. “Además, you kids are lucky you have a house and don’t live in some miserable place where people are killing each other back and forth through eternity!”

  “Who’s that shouting?” my father called from his room. “I’m working!”

  “Nobody! Calm yourself!” Mami answered, before resuming her furious potato attack. “Help, please, Gabriela, instead of giving me things to worry about.”

  “I always help,” I said, staring into the pile of peels in front of us until they became the muddy fields of the Andes. Quietly I shoved her letter into its envelope and put the envelope back in the cabinet. My mother wasn’t going to save anyone, not even herself. “Fine,” I said. “I’ll call those people for you.”

  Bitterly, I tramped into my room and tossed my babysitting money on top of the nightstand. Money wasn’t my problem. What undid me was the living balance sheet my mother shoved my way: plus this, plus that, always more of her demanding mathematics.

  The only math I believed in was the kind that distanced me from our problems. Like skewed lines in space or the infinitesimal points between any two others, no matter how close. That kind of math, the geometry of imagination, was the only kind that had ever helped me.

  As I’d been instructed, I scheduled her Protective Services interview for a date in late July when she didn’t work. Later, I called Tío Victor, who very rationally agreed that my father had no business paying visits to inquisitive public officials. It eased my mind to turn my mother over to my uncle, who indicated he would contact El Chino, or maybe Tío Paco’s old divorce lawyer, about the peculiar interview business.

  • • •

  Saturday, I eagerly tapped at Lara’s door again.

  “Come in!” she called out. From the living room, I could hear her bickering with Walter about some private school where she wanted to send their daughters. He declared the school too expensive. Apparently they had math problems as well.

  When Walter came out, I saw that he was taller than Lara. He had a young face, like a kid whose body had grown up before he did, and he wore wire-rimmed glasses. Nodding briefly, he downed his coffee and went out to the car to wait for her.

  Lara emerged with her bedraggled hairdo and gave me an apologetic laugh. “Walter doesn’t think ahead about the children’s needs,” she offered. “It’s the woman’s job, no?”

  I returned a half-smile, wondering if Lara had any friends. “Is your family in Germany?” I thought to ask.

  “My father is there. My mother died long ago.” She gulped some coffee. “You know, when I was a girl, he was a diplomat and took me all over the world. That’s how we ended up in your beautiful birthplace.” As she talked, Lara quic
kly made herself and Walter lunches while taking her unstocked groceries out of bags. We heard Walter beep his horn.

  “I can put those away,” I offered politely.

  “Oh thank you!” Lara swallowed the rest of her coffee. “Let the girls sleep as long as possible, please. They’re not feeling well.”

  “Okay.”

  After I’d stocked the groceries, I heated milk in a saucepan and prepared instant Nescafe. As I waited for the girls to wake, I looked through the book piles for something interesting to read. No novel was in sight, and I was reluctant to upset the piles by digging down too far. The closest reader-friendly material I found was the Modernism and Rubén Darío book, which at least concerned literature, so I sat down to read that.

  Three chapters were devoted to one of Darío’s poems, “Divagación,” through which I wandered, in homage to the title, until compelled to read the whole thing. Unicorns, horns of gold, incense burners, roses! What a strangely beautiful world that was! It was like my grandfather’s. The book’s text, however, was harder to understand with its maze of undefined references I’d never heard of: dithyramb, aboulia, gauchesque. I skimmed the Prologue to determine what “modernism” meant, which turned out to be a literary movement in Latin America and not modernism as in “now.” According to the book, people had had difficulty seeing themselves as Latin American instead of Spanish—with breaking away from their past.

  Lara is modern, I concluded, as in “now” and as in breaking away from the past too. I’d gathered from her comments that she was in favor of Women’s Liberation, a popular discussion topic at my school. Was my family liberated, I wondered, since the females—my mother and I—planned and organized around the males? On the other hand, we had to do everything around my father’s temper, so maybe he had the power. Still, didn’t we kind of control him with our lies? I put the book down, confused. My parents were nothing like Lara and Walter, with their equal jobs and the independent bank accounts I’d heard about from the morning quarrel. But Lara had to care for the girls and deal with groceries on top of her equal research. Modernity apparently required more than the old-fashioned ways.