by Iris Gomez
Then we walked back to the table. Flustered, I nibbled on my pizza crust. What had happened to my resolve about avoiding the opposite sex? But I felt dizzy with the consciousness of David’s body across from me, as if I’d been knocked off kilter on a sudden elevator ascent.
• • •
Lara seemed especially flustered when I arrived on Saturday morning before my secret liaison with David. Apparently, Solita had contracted an earache, and Luna was fussy too. Running her hands through her hair, Lara complained about Walter in an unusually frank manner while she struggled to open a tight kitchen drawer. “I’ve had to take her to the pediatrician three times this week!” she exclaimed, shaking the drawer open at last. “And to the pharmacy every time they changed the antibiotic because, after all, where is Walter in all of this?” She threw up one hand in frustration while the other located the pharmacy card she’d been hunting. “Very busy preparing his research for Argentina,” she answered herself mockingly as she shut the drawer.
“You’re going to Argentina?” I asked, alarmed.
“Oh no.” She smiled apologetically. “Just Walter. His team is going to do field studies in the pampas. ‘Objects of permanence in the lives of migratory peoples,’ ” she explained, drawing imaginary quotation marks in the air. Her good humor returned as she talked and rummaged for cereal that she poured into a plastic Baggie. “In other words, what is ‘home’?” she posited. “You could say it’s practically a mimetic fallacy for Walter,” she added with a wry grin, “since he’s gone so much.”
“Lara,” I said, watching her dump the cereal lunch into her bag, “could I fix you a sandwich?”
“Oh, no thank you, Gabrielita, this is fine.” She smiled away my concern. “I’ll pick up Soli’s medication first and drop it off before I leave, ah?”
I nodded, only slightly worried that Lara’s delayed start might make me late for my secret rendezvous. But she returned as planned in the afternoon, and I regretted that she had to find both girls crying. Still, I had to make my excuses to leave instead of staying to help, since I was anxious to get to the park to meet David.
He was already there when I arrived. He’d brought along a cooler of Budweisers and chocolate Yoo-hoos, a rolled up sheet, and a large order of McDonald’s fries.
Toward the back of the park, we found a shady place under the jasmines and away from teenagers. I helped David shake sand out of the sheet before we placed it on the ground. After we sat down, he fished through the cooler with his tanned arm, extracting a Yoo-hoo that he handed to me and a beer he kept for himself. He arched his eyebrows provocatively. “My uncle has a vast supply.” He popped the beer open, took a long drawn-out swig, and propped himself up on both elbows beside me. “So what’s your last name? Are you really seventeen?”
“No.” I smiled timidly. “Almost sixteen. My birthday’s this month.”
“Great!” His dimples deepened. “Something to celebrate.” Sitting up, he took a joint out of his pocket.
Why did illegality seem to follow me everywhere? I wondered forlornly.
David lit the joint, smoked, and passed it to me. I hesitated for a second but then took it and just puffed, all my reason abandoned.
Then, with genuine interest, he asked me about my family. How long we’d been in this country, what kind of customs my parents had.
In between trying to smoke correctly, I awkwardly answered his questions and started to feel warm and fuzzy. Maybe it was the buzz Pablo had described. I found myself talking about my family’s unconventional chaperone code. How the chaperones could be stupider than the chaperoned. “Like when my idiot younger brother got assigned to watch me at the Laundromat,” I said, taking another toke.
David grinned. “What did he watch you for?”
I sidetracked into an explanation of my parents’ perplexing “decent” family exception. “Like, I can go out with Fátima and her sisters but not on rides alone with Octavio, who’s older than her and me but I guess not as ‘decent.’ As a girl, I mean.” I paused. David seemed to be enjoying these lessons, but suddenly I began to feel guilty about ratting on my family. Maybe the Octavio confession had started to let my cat out of its bag. “What’s your family like?” I inquired abruptly.
“My dad’s a TV producer. My mom teaches dance at a private school in Manhattan. Isadora Duncan style.”
“Oh.” His parents sounded rich.
David added that he’d graduated early. “Big mistake,” he said, shaking his head. “Now I have to figure out whether to go back to college or do the Israel thing.”
All those choices must be nice, I thought.
“It’s either that or Vietnam,” he added on a somber note.
“Vietnam?” I asked with dismay.
He gave me a bemused look. “Don’t look so freaked. I got a 203.”
“What’s that?”
“My lottery number. You know how it works?”
I shook my head no.
“It’s a roll of the dice. They use these Ping-Pong balls, according to birthdays. None of the numbers they picked were in the hundreds, so I should be okay. But if they did call my number, I wouldn’t go. I’m no My Lai murderer.”
The mental picture of him gunning down Vietnamese kids, like that horrible Lieutenant Calley in the newspaper, made me shudder. “Maybe you could do something good instead, like medical work,” I suggested.
“They don’t exempt you for being into Peace,” he replied soberly.
“But if you run away from the Draft, don’t they hunt you down—like a criminal?”
“I’m already a criminal,” he said with a sly smile as he put out his joint. “I’m conspiring with a minor.”
He could joke, I thought with chagrin, because he wasn’t an immigrant. But the way he was looking at me was making my heart start to flutter again. “Why are you in Miami?” I asked nervously, to buy some control.
“My parents went to Europe. They didn’t want me hanging around their apartment, so my aunt and uncle let me stay here while I get my shit together.” He grinned affably. “Miami’s as good a place as any.”
“What do you mean, get your shit together?”
“Oh, the usual. My future.” He gave me a wry smile. “Girls.” Suddenly feeling self-conscious again, I tore the aluminum ring off his beer can and slipped it onto my pinkie. He reached across and lightly spun the ring, then looked at me as he spun it again and again. Each time his finger touched mine, it gave me a thrill. He turned my arm over, ran his hand slowly up my pinkie and along the lines of my palm to the soft skin at my wrist. I wanted him to keep going up my arm. I was so paralyzed with wanting it that I had to close my eyes to keep him from seeing. I felt him pull me onto the sheet and start to kiss me, deep, with his tongue. Suddenly, the sky was darker and his fingers were grazing the skin below my ribs and climbing. “Me vuelvo loca,” from one of Olguita’s records, played wildly in my head, or maybe it was my body. But then a freakish echo, like an aural memory of my screaming father, shook me out of the kissing spell and forced me to stop. Gravely, I stared into David’s eyes. I feared that if I opened my mouth, strange sounds might come out. Forked tongue language. Voodoo.
He gave me a crooked smile. “Hmm, let’s see. I’m guessing you’re a fifteen-year-old Latina virgin?”
I shook my head hard.
“No?”
“Yes,” I gulped out. How could he think otherwise? “I—couldn’t talk for a minute.”
“What?” He laughed and rolled over on his side to check me out. “So I guess sex isn’t in the cards right this minute, huh?”
I sat right up. “No.” The very thought of sex stirred up every kind of fear, confusion, and shame I’d stored up through all my father’s fits of violent moralism.
David only laughed, leaning across me for the fries. “ Quieres french fries?” he asked engagingly.
“Sí, quiero.” I smiled gratefully and took a couple from him. They were cold and salty.
Then I lay back
, and we watched the jasmine blossoms fall on our sneakers. “I love fries,” I said and reached my hand out for more.
Later, as I walked home, I couldn’t help but smile stupidly to myself while reliving the unusual afternoon. His eyes roaming over me as he twirled the beer can tab around my finger. The cheeky way he’d brought up sex—disconcerting but still sort of seductive.
Some nun I’d make, I mocked myself.
When he’d said we should get together again, I’d felt ecstatic, though I cautioned him that it had to be on the sly. Saucily, he quipped back, “Sounds like fun.”
He would make it fun, I knew.
It was near dark when I reached my house, and Pablo came out to report on the lies he’d told Mami about my being at some high school thing while she was out.
“On Saturday?” I asked, frowning at his idiocy. “You were supposed to say I was at the library.”
“She doesn’t know, Gab.”
Luckily, Mami seemed tired, already yawning and rubbing her eyes as I greeted her in the kitchen. “Gabriela,” she said sharply, “I can’t have you in the streets in the middle of the night.” She took foil off a plate of fried fish she put in front of me.
“I told you,” I said, retrieving a fork from the drawer. “I needed to go to the library for a school project. It’s not my fault.” I prayed she wouldn’t pick at the discrepancies between my story and Pablo’s.
“Well, tell your teachers to assign less.” She plopped down a glass of water. “Do they think we have a chauffeur to escort you around at all hours?”
I was tempted to poke her hand with my fork. “It’s only 7:47 p.m. What are you talking about?”
“I’m talking about young girls wandering around in a dangerous city. Don’t you know what happens out there? What terrible people there are?” She folded her arms over her chest as if she were cold and perched herself on the edge of a chair. Almost immediately she pulled herself to her feet again, unwilling to let fatigue come between her and the struggle against evil.
“Nothing’s gonna happen, Mami. I take care of myself.”
When the phone rang, she went to answer. Carefully I picked out the baby bones from my fish. A long-ago memory of my grandfather, tenderly removing a fish bone from his panicked terrier’s throat, came flooding back. Poor Mami, I sighed. If only she would give the world a chance to be good.
[ NINETEEN ]
THE WHOLE-PILL REGIMEN SEEMED to be working well, because the production of missives slowed and my father became more “mellow,” to quote David. Sometimes Papi would even bumble around like a dreamy old person, letting me float away from everything I’d obsessed over—his volatile temper, The Law, who would be exiled, who would remain, and where to find the hidden door out of my family prison.
Big chunks of my free time suddenly and fortuitously became available for secret larks with David. In his blue van, he would pick me up at a park with a lonesome eucalyptus tree. Then, slouching in his seat, he’d grin through dark granny glasses and ask things like, “Anybody spot me?” before getting out to let me in the van from the outside, since the passenger door was dented. He took me to banyan-filled parks he loved in Coral Gables and Coconut Grove; to the funky Grove shopping area with its beautiful but dilapidated Playhouse that evoked the Grand Old South; and sometimes just for a drive around quaint historical Grove neighborhoods that my one black teacher had told us were built by his Bahamian ancestors out of nothing but trees and breeze. The houses were called “shotgun houses,” he’d explained, “not because you could shoot through them, but for the Yoruba word, shogun—God’s house.” David turned me on to a record shop hangout, where the employees burned incense and let him play me albums, like one by an unusually deep-voiced Canadian named Leonard Cohen, who must have been Jewish but seemed obsessed with Christian imagery—and women. Even the Sisters of Mercy—nuns!—had slept with him.
A couple of times, David just parked and left the van running, slipped in a sitar music tape, and coaxed me into the back to smoke with him. I’d decided to quit worrying about that, despite my initial qualms, since David, like hippies at school, only got high in places police didn’t frequent. I followed his lead, climbing onto the colorful Indian pillows, sewn with tiny mirrors, that covered the van floor. Pretty soon, we’d be into the mirrored pillows, the original Gabriela de la Paz dissipating into the ether with all the brain cells lost by smoking illegal drugs. I could drift along pleasantly enough until the sobering reminder of my Jehovah father, furious and apocalyptic, always brought my kissing to a halt.
Whenever I returned from these airy adventures, it was hard to focus on whatever I was supposed to be doing. If I read En glish assignments, Odysseus would morph into David and I’d have to shut my eyes, conjuring up images of him rescuing me from mythical storms, wandering sea rocks, and a mad Scylla who looked suspiciously like my father. Movies I’d seen or read about in TV Guide would play out behind my closed eyes with David in the lead role, brandishing a sword, musket, bow and arrow. Fighting movies inevitably changed into romantic ones, and suddenly I’d want to fly around the room and sing with my arms out, like Lesley Ann Warren in Cinderella or Audrey Hepburn after her ball with the professor.
On my birthday, I woke to such daydreams, but my reverie was interrupted by a long forgotten snippet of the “Las mañanitas” song—Mami’s pretty voice was singing it as she entered, carrying a gift wrapped in rainbow tissue paper. My brothers poked their heads in behind her. “Happy Birthday, Gab,” they chimed.
“Thanks.” I smiled, sitting up to reach for the gift. Inside I found a lavender and white skirt and top. “So cute, Mami!” Grateful for something at last that we both liked, I hugged her hard.
Fátima called later to congratulate me, and she invited me on a beach outing to escape the latest heat wave. I accepted gladly, relieved not to have to invent another lie in order to sneak off with David, who’d gone to a family wedding. Embarrassed about my liaisons with him for some reason, I’d been unable to confide in Fátima at all.
Lara was driving Walter to the airport that morning, so I already knew the girls wouldn’t need watching. I felt badly for Lara, since I’d learned from our last conversation about his research trip that she wasn’t too happy he was going off to the Argentine pampas while leaving her alone with the girls.
After I’d finished dressing and stuffed a beach bag, Mami called out that Lara had dropped by on her return from the airport. Surprised, I went out to the Florida room, where the two of them sat, a bakery box between them. The front door was open as Luna and Solita played outside.
“Lara brought you a cake, mi’jita,” Mami announced, handing me the box. “She saved us the trouble of baking on this atrocious day! Muy atenta,” she added appreciatively.
“Wow,” I said, peering in at the meringue roses. “It looks like a wedding cake!”
“But dark chocolate inside,” Lara pointed out, smiling.
“Mmm. Thanks so much, Lara!” I ran up and hugged her. “Should I call the girls in?”
“No, Gabi. You save that to enjoy with your family.”
“Mi’ja, why don’t you make us both a tintico before you leave?” Mami pleaded, then told Lara, “Gabriela has an excursion. But the girls seem happy out there. Stay a while.”
“Vale,” Lara agreed.
As I prepared coffee, I heard Lara begin to explain the modern day mysteries of Walter’s trip.
“Argentina…” Slowly, Mami sounded out the syllables, as if she were measuring the distance. “So far…,” she murmured. I was sure she wouldn’t understand why Walter couldn’t do his research here instead of abandoning his family.
“Yes,” Lara admitted with a forced laugh. “I imagine we’ll get a little lonely.”
“You’ll get accustomed,” Mami said kindly. “Roberto had to leave us for a short time too. And those boys were difficult! But you have girls,” she added reassuringly. “Girls are much better. Se portan bien. And your two are sweet.”
&nb
sp; “Thank you, Evi.”
On that note, I waltzed in with the coffees.
It felt odd to leave them together afterward with their distinct forms of loneliness. But my mother, I realized, was more practiced at hers—and Lara seemed to want to stay.
When I arrived at Fátima’s, she welcomed me with the gift of a blue leather diary with gold-edged pages. “It’s from all of us,” she declared warmly, hugging me.
Mirén and Rosalía hugged me too.
As we drove to Crandon Park afterward, it seemed that all Miami was on vacation, but we managed to find a shaded grill at the beach, and Mirén and Rosalía parked themselves in chairs while Fátima and I lay on our towels on the sand nearby. When Fátima’s parents arrived separately, I turned over on my stomach to wave, then rolled back over. After a couple of hours, though, my skin started to sting. I threw on my big yellow T-shirt to cool off under a palm tree and drink a Coke. The light had changed and the water deepened its blue hues. In the distance, I recognized Claudio from my AC crew. He’d recently been conscripted to the school arts magazine, after the adviser saw his drawings on display. Waving, Claudio walked over.
“Hola,” I said, saluting him with my Coke. In Spanish, I introduced Rosalía and Mirén.
“That was a good sketch you did of Gabi,” Fátima commented, leaning up on her arms to squint without her glasses on.
Claudio returned a small smile. “Thank you for your kindness.” I almost expected him to give her a bow.
I’d blocked the sketch from my mind out of embarrassment. Along with his bodega drawings, Claudio had exhibited a crayon drawing of me with a sad expression on my face and my hair draped around me like some Florentine Madonna. I couldn’t imagine what had made him draw me instead of the slouchy older girl who sometimes hung around waiting for him.
“Would you like to take a walk?” he asked now.
No one responded until I realized it was me he was inviting. “Oh!” I glanced toward Fátima’s parents.
“You don’t have to ask them, Gabi,” she said, smiling.