Try to Remember

by Iris Gomez

  Colleges? Recalling my morning’s foray with Mami into the unchartered waters of women’s independence, I could only mumble, “Um, Miami-Dade?”

  “Oh, you can do better,” he replied authoritatively. “What are you interested in?”

  “History, I guess. Maybe geography.” I positioned the poster to see if it was even.

  Mr. Lanham looked pleased. “Oh?”

  “Well, not so much the dates and stuff,” I said apologetically. “More like how people and places got to be what they are.”

  “Cultural anthropology,” he pronounced with conviction. “That’s a great field.” He handed me the pushpins. “You know, there are such good financial aid packages, your parents shouldn’t worry about cost.”

  I smiled agreeably, though sparkling colleges felt light-years away from life on my planet. Even if I got to attend college, it would be next to impossible to obtain an exemption from living at home. Blessed Virgin, will I really have to marry someone? I despaired silently. Who? How? I didn’t want to get married! The search for a passageway out confounded me even more than the unsolvable puzzle of my father’s mind.

  I resolved not to think about those intractable problems, though, as I quietly finished installing Mr. Lanham’s posters. The straightforward task brought me a simple pleasure. Being a girl in high school was going to have to be enough for the moment.

  Mr. Lanham led us into Egypt by way of a local museum that housed a sarcophagus; then he launched us on research expeditions of our own. My adventures with the spirit duplicator and my anti-adventures transcribing my father’s hieroglyphics inspired me to ask if I could investigate the invention of paper rather than the popular topic of pyramids.

  “That would be great, Gabi.” Mr. Lanham wrote down the Latin name of the plant, Cyperus Papyrus, for my research list.

  At home later, the assignment released me from my father’s grip to visit the library. His moods had become more agreeable with the sleeping pills, and sometimes he even took naps; I could almost swallow Mami’s diagnosis that all he needed to become well was a good rest.

  Quickly, however, I was disappointed to learn that the Egyptian invention was less like paper than a cardboard mat, and I complained about my pitiful findings to Lara and Walter when I babysat that weekend. Surprisingly, Walter returned later that day with a papermaking book he’d borrowed for me from the University of Miami library. He watched tolerantly as Lara and I pored over the beautiful illustrations of the ancient process.

  In ACs a few days later, even the normally reserved Claudio asked where I’d gotten that nice art book.

  “It’s for my geography project,” I replied.

  As he gently opened the book, I wondered if the black teardrop in his eye affected his vision.

  “You can still make this paper,” he told me in Spanish, admiring the illustrations. “But nobody uses it for routine writing anymore. It’s more of an art.”

  “How do you know?” I asked.

  “In Venezuela, I have an uncle who does this. The ancient indígenas made paper in a similar way.”

  “Really?” I glanced at the oversized black pad he always carried. “Do you know how to?”

  He extended a slow, sweet smile to me. “No, I have other traditions.”

  Without understanding what he truly meant, I grinned back. Claudio had such an oblique, professorial way of speaking. Maybe his formality came from spending so much time with his abuelo. Claudio had told me that he helped care for his sick grandfather, sometimes missing ACs on account of medical appointments. I couldn’t help but envy the fact that his grandfather was afflicted with a physical illness one could discuss in the open. The secrecy over my father’s condition, though, wasn’t the part that most distressed me. My main fear was that he would really hurt someone—and who knew what horrible crisis would follow?

  But months had passed without an eruption, and my fear began to fade—and with it, the whole saga of crimes and punishments and lost green cards. It was hard to believe that the end of my father’s probation was actually approaching.

  What never diminished were his delusions. One Saturday only a couple of weeks after I’d started on my school project, Mami waylaid me from a library trip to help clean the paper mausoleum that had become her bedroom. My father wouldn’t throw any of his stuff away—it was like his family, now that no one really conversed with him. “¡Estoy harta!” Mami muttered, swooshing across the buildup with her broom. How sick and tired indeed she must be, I sympathized silently while heading into her bathroom with a bucket of cleaning supplies.

  My father chuckled.

  “I don’t find anything funny,” she said indignantly. “I live here too.”

  “Everything will be improved,” he replied, “when we receive the new house.”

  From the bathroom, I had to shake my head as I scrubbed.

  “Don’t start with those cuentos,” she warned him, while walking toward me with a sheet of newsprint that I took, dampened under the faucet, and tamped to the floor like a dust pan for the debris.

  My father leaned over his pencil and wrote so hard that his point broke. “You’ll see,” he pledged, sharpening the pencil point anew.

  “I’ll go blind first,” she answered with biting sarcasm.

  They’re both crazy, I thought, and eventually left them—my father, writing himself through a frenzy of imagined education into imagined riches, and my mother, sticking to her tried and true forms of ignorance.

  Afterward, I went to the library all the more determined to ground everything in my own life on objective, irrefutable fact. That became more complicated with my report, though, the more facts I read. In the book Walter had borrowed, I discovered that the true inventors of paper weren’t even Egyptian, but Chinese. One Chinese: Ts’ai Lun. He mashed up plant fibers in a vat, then filtered them through a screen. When the intertwined fiber dried up, presto!—a smooth sheet like the paper we used nowadays. They named his invention Distinguished Ts’ai’s Paper, and he became known as “The Saint of Paper.” But as those facts took me very far from Egypt, I made an appointment to see Mr. Lanham.

  He nodded thoughtfully over my draft as he read the story of the Islamic warriors who’d captured a caravan of Chinese papermakers and brought papermaking to the Muslim world—and eventually to Europe when the Moors invaded Spain. “Interesting material, Gabi,” he said approvingly. He said he wanted to enter my report in the state Ambassadors competition, but I would have to revise it into an essay. “You don’t need any more research,” he cautioned. “All you need to do is think about what it means to you.”

  Fátima, a smart girl I sat beside in class, suggested I write about what a society would be without paper. “They’ll like that. Trust me.” Fátima had very strong opinions and was the kind of person who would clearly go places—whipping out lists before each class; tucking away elaborated outlines afterward.

  “But I think it should cover the things I care about.”

  She shrugged as if she knew better.

  I decided to seek Lara’s advice.

  On Saturday, as we sipped our coffees, she admitted that she was struggling with the same questions I had about the implications of research. Her research was for a book she was trying to write on how women had evolved physically. “You see, Gabi, there is not so much neutrality. Histories depend on your point of view. You have to consider the prism through which you have decided that this particular history is important.”

  “You mean like me as a student?”

  “Or it could be as a Latina.”

  I nodded gratefully.

  Talking to Lara always gratified me. She led me to believe my thoughts mattered. Because of my father, I’d become fearful that the germs of craziness could spread through my brain from too much thinking, like a fatal tropical disease. But with Lara, thinking—even a lot of it—seemed normal.

  What was my prism?

  People had invented great things from their limited and humble environme
nts, I wrote finally. The story of paper was imagination in its purest form. In places as different from each other as the Egyptian river’s reedy banks were from the sacred forests of the Otomi people in Mexico, papermaking possibilities evolved and were passed along by each culture until the world knew them all and had more choices. My prism was Freedom.

  I finished and turned in my essay after the Columbus Day holiday.

  “Fantástico,” Mr. Lanham said, mispronouncing the a and o with his American accent. “Geography is the material everything derives from,” he quoted, putting my essay in his folder. “Once you understand the relationship of a people to their environment, you have real history. Not the history that can be cooked up. That’s Wolé Soyinka.” He gave me a ditto sheet with the quote on it, and I hurried to the AC office to mimeograph his copies. With disappointment, I learned that the school was going to be purchasing a much-desired Xerox machine. I had to admit, as I cranked out Mr. Lanham’s copies that afternoon, that the pages did all turn out slightly different on the duplicator because of the way the ink spread. But I liked that the copies the spirit duplicator made were unique, that each spirit was an original.

  Soon, I began to feel similarly about Fátima, who chose me to partner with on an Antilles map project. Fátima had, in addition to her elaborate outlines, a grand unified theory of how everything led to a bright future. There was no room for fatalism with that girl—she’d broken free. As I headed eagerly toward her house for the first time, I hoped we could become good friends, especially now that Lydia had dumped me big-time for her boyfriend.

  When I arrived, a huge German shepherd barked at the gate, and a muscular man with a mustache, the strict father Fátima had warned me about, came out and restrained the dog by the collar.

  “I’m Gabriela,” I said meekly in Spanish.

  “Sí, I know. Pasa.” He gestured toward the house.

  Fátima, wearing her trademark ponytail with the tortoise-shell barrette that matched her glasses, led me to a room she shared with two sisters. “My oldest sister, Mirén, works at the mall with my mom,” Fátima explained. “At the Imperio Femenino Boutique.” As she tucked notebooks into her satchel, she pointed with her chin at the middle sister, who was talking on the phone. “That’s Rosalía. She basically communicates in orders.”

  Sure enough, as we left the room, Rosalía interrupted her call to tell Fátima, “Hey, use your own card. I don’t want fines on mine.”

  Fátima put out a what-did-I-tell-you hand.

  “It’s the opposite in my family,” I said, walking behind her. “I order my brothers around. But honestly, they need to be ordered.” As much as I hated to admit it to myself, though, Pablo hadn’t been heeding too many orders lately. He’d quit helping me with typing too, because he preferred to go off with friends to have fun.

  At Chekika Library, Fátima and I headed toward the wide table in the back. For a moment I missed the good old days of Gothic novels with Lydia. When Fátima unpacked a light blue test booklet from her bag, I gave her a quizzical look and she explained, “My Truth Notebook.” She flipped through it to show me a repository of handwritten quotations.

  “What’s it for?” I asked.

  “English papers. You stick Truths into your paper to illustrate your point. There’s all these books full of proverbs,” she said, motioning toward the library walls. “You want to start one?” She offered me a blank booklet.

  “Sure,” I replied agreeably.

  After we’d completed our archipelago maps, I went gamely truth-searching until I’d perused enough proverbs to last me a lifetime. Then I began to roam around in the Dewey Decimal System until I found a poetry book I liked and carried it back to our table. Reading through the book, I was delighted to find lines an English teacher had once written in my yearbook: Through the field wonderful, with eyes a little sorry, another comes, also picking flowers. Immediately, I copied the e.e. cummings lines into my booklet.

  “Huh,” said Fátima, tapping the desk with her pencil. “I hadn’t thought of putting in poems.”

  I was pleased that I’d managed to impress her.

  The next afternoon, as if I’d conjured her ghost while at the library, Lydia herself appeared at my house unexpectedly. “Want to go to Osco’s?” she asked brightly.

  “Okay,” I replied. Glad to see her, I put away my father’s latest typing gibberish.

  All the way to the store Lydia complained about her guy troubles. The tricks she’d tried to keep him from straying and the stupid ways he was always lying. “Like I call him when he’s not supposed to be home, right, and I catch him, but he just makes up more lies.”

  I said nothing while attempting to stare down the Calle Ocho oglers.

  Abruptly, Lydia turned and said, “Chica, you’re so serious lately. How come you hardly talk anymore?”

  “What’s wrong with being serious?” I countered.

  “I didn’t say anything was wrong with it. I was just asking.” She tossed her hair back awkwardly, reminding me that her old pixie cut had been way cuter.

  I shrugged as if I didn’t care about what she’d said. Maybe I didn’t. As much as I’d admired Lydia for her toughness, in reality she was the one who’d changed. She let that nasty boyfriend boss her around and then acted like it was no problem that he didn’t bother to honor his promises. She was doomed to live her mother’s life. That truth seemed written in the stars.

  A few afternoons after we’d embarked on our truth-collecting quest together, Fátima confided in me about her parents and their strong views of Cuba as a terrible place to live. “My dad’s finally working in an accounting office again,” she shared, “like he did before Fidel.”

  “Before Fidel” was the line, I knew, that forever divided Cuban time in the world.

  I told Fátima about a newsreel we’d been shown in junior high of the “Freedom Flights”—how the TV people pointed out that although thousands of refugees came here after the Revolution, they were only a small fraction of Cuba’s population. “How horrible could it really be, Fátima?”

  She got up and closed her bedroom door. “Well, my family lost a lot of stuff, Gabi,” she said soberly, sitting back next to me. “The Castro government took our house and my grandfather’s jewelry store. We pretended to be going on vacation and put on tons of jewelry. That’s all we had to live on when we got here. My father thought the Americans would kick Fidel out, but then that didn’t happen so we had to stay. Thank God the Church helped us.” She gave me a grave look. “Whatever you do,” she warned, “never say the word ‘Revolution’ in front of my parents. Say ‘Dictatorship.’ ”

  “Okay,” I promised, then admitted, “It wouldn’t be too much fun for me to go back to Colombia either.” As the old dark cloud passed over me, I realized that in different ways, Fátima and I were both stranded.

  “My father says we can’t believe what relatives write in letters,” she added. “About how great everything is, how all the black people live in nice houses in Velado and Miramar, and how everyone gets free medicine.” She shrugged her shoulders. “It’s hard to know for sure.”

  Whatever the truth was about her country, I could only imagine tiny Cuba afloat on the vast Caribbean, with survivors hanging on to their beloved island, whatever its faults.

  When I got home, my mother complained about how long I’d tarried at Fátima’s.

  “Mami, we study,” I said, rummaging through the cabinet for a Coke can I’d hidden from Pablo but not finding it.

  A minute later the phone rang. Fátima again.

  “You saw her less than twenty minutes ago,” Mami said with annoyance. “How much more is there to say to each other?”

  “¡Ay Mami, por favor!” I replied, hanging up. “She just wants to invite me to church tomorrow with her family.”

  “Hmm,” my mother answered, stymied about how to object to that.

  I headed outside for a replacement Coke from the 7-Eleven. The afternoon was so bright, the light looked
artificial. As I walked, I mused over the notebook truths I’d been collecting with Fátima and the truths my own family collected. Crazy things my father said and wrote were often composed of truthful information, like facts from the The World Book Encyclopedia, but they were twisted into an incoherent and shapeless form that was the opposite of truth. No, facts alone would not net my father the millions he dreamed of; they hadn’t even gotten him a job.

  I caught up with Manolo en route from his home-away-from-home job. “Hey,” I called out. “Did you remember Mami’s light-bulbs?”

  Manolo stopped and frowned at the traffic signal. “Somebody should light a bulb in her head.”

  “What?” I responded, taken aback.

  He glanced up as the signal changed to Walk. “You know she’s giving the old man pills?”

  “She told you?”

  “I saw her. She doesn’t tell me shit.”

  I reached out a sympathetic hand, but something like guilt pulled it back. I wished I could explain that Mami telling me “shit” didn’t count for much, that she didn’t like me any better. But Manolo was another island broken off from the mainland to which we’d both belonged. He’d drifted from Pablo too since the broken leg episode.

  “How does she know that stuff doesn’t make the old man worse?” Manolo blurted out to me. “He keeps making up new shit, like the house thing.”

  “Tía Rita takes those pills. She says they’re okay.”

  “Yeah, but she’s not crazy.”

  “That’s true. It makes him quieter, though.”

  “I guess,” Manolo concurred.

  That time when the light turned green, we went our separate ways.

  As I continued toward the store, I pictured the disturbing image of my father, blindfolded and tied to his chair while our family surrounded him. The ground-up sleeping pills were an antitruth serum. Instead of confessing the truth, my father was forced to sleepwalk in our land of make-believe.

  Make-believe number one: the “vitamins.”

  Make-believe number two: the lies we fabricated around things that might upset him, like Mami’s job.