Try to Remember

by Iris Gomez

  Though Zoila laughed heartily, Mami derailed the joking. “A real marriage,” she said quietly, her chin held high, “should be more than that.”

  Surprised, I tried to size up the exact meaning of her remark while discreetly studying her. Was Mami actually acknowledging the existence of sex? Or, more precisely, its nonexistence, in her case? Cryptic comments she’d made in the past about no one recognizing her as a woman anymore started to make sense to me.

  “No relationship gives you everything,” Lara offered matter-of-factly, as she briskly folded up clothing, not bothering with any creases. “We all make compromises.”

  Mami glanced at her with curiosity.

  “Without a doubt,” Zoila admitted.

  But Lara has her man, I thought uneasily, unlike Mami. For a moment I wished I could throw my own zumo-squeezing difficulties into the mix and get somebody’s advice, at least Lara’s.

  Aloud, I only dared ask, “Like what, Lara?” while pretending not to see Mami frown at me for breaching the silence expected of me when crossing the borders of adult territory.

  “Oh,” Lara smiled vaguely as she tied up a finished bag. “Sometimes, in periods of difficulty, love presents us with challenges. ¿No Evi?” she inquired, trading understanding glances with my mother.

  Beside me, Zoila shook her own bag to test the knot and parked the bag back down. “Parece que we’ve finished, señoras,” she concluded, fists to her hips as she looked around. “No one would even guess that a man had lived here.”

  I surveyed the pink and gray room with its ruffled bedspread and shams and Camila’s matching robe that hung over a door. My gaze landed on her wedding photo. “Oh no,” I said, clapping a hand over my mouth. “That’s going to remind her.”

  “Ay Gabriela,” Mami said ruefully, shaking her head. “She’s not about to forget that he was her husband. Only that he’s gone, mi’ja.”

  Whatever that meant.

  Saturday, Mami went to the funeral with Lara. At first I was angry when Mami forbid me from going. “Funerals are no place for the young,” she proclaimed righteously. “Too much sadness.”

  As if I weren’t already familiar with sadness.

  But as the hour of the service approached, I felt relieved to escape my thoughts of Camila and her loss.

  I went to meet Fátima at the library until it was time for David to pick me up for our planned fishing expedition. I had finally gotten up the nerve to call him, and when he sounded completely normal and glad to hear from me I’d gratefully agreed to his suggestion.

  I still hadn’t found the courage to tell Fátima about him though, and the guilt was eating away at me. “Fátima,” I said hesitantly, opening my copy of Siddhartha, “do you think any guys in our grade are cute?”

  She twirled her ponytail with a pencil. “I guess if I were going to date anybody, I would pick Mark Pierce.” At my scrunched-up brow, she added, “He’s in Chemistry with me. Really smart.”

  “Oh yeah.” A high achieving male to meet Fátima’s standards. No doubt David would qualify in the loser category on that subject list. I nodded and observed neutrally, “He’s American.”

  She smiled. “I’m not about to get married, Gabi.”

  “Yeah, I guess your parents would let you leave home anyway,” I said with envy. “Mine are more old-fashioned.”

  “They’ll adapt,” she predicted confidently, bending to highlight something in her book.

  Unlikely, I decided, then promptly gave up the love talk to jot down sketchy thoughts about the Siddhartha cycles. A few minutes later, I glanced at my watch and abruptly told Fátima that I had to leave. “I forgot something I have to do for Lara,” I invented. “I’ll call you later and you can read me your paper, okay?”

  She gave me a funny look.

  “I’m sorry, Fátima,” I said as I stood up. “It was stupid that I forgot.” What a bad person I was, I felt then. Fátima was a friend of the soul—wasn’t that philos love? But did all the forms of love in Lara’s classification scheme count equally? I sighed to myself as I waited for the van.

  Soon, David was driving us toward the Miccosukee Village while chatting blithely about all he’d learned at the tackle shop. When we reached the spot near the canal where a guy was already fishing, David parked and set up our rods. Then we waited a long time until he got a bite and happily managed to reel in a fat black fish.

  “Mudfish,” stated the Miccosukee guy, laughing when we asked if you could eat it. “Oh, sure. If you like mud,” he quipped, before he cleared out and left us alone there.

  We didn’t get any more bites after that.

  With disappointment, David folded up the rods. While he was packing them in the van, I mustered up the courage to tell him that I wasn’t really ready for a sexual relationship.

  He looked at me as if I’d said something funny. “What’s ‘a sexual relationship’?”

  “Don’t joke around. You know what I mean.”

  “No, tell me.” He shut the van door and leaned back, arms crossed.

  I studied the saw grass waving in the breeze on the opposite side of the canal. From this distance, you couldn’t see that it had many tiny razor teeth. “I mean, I can’t have sex with you, with anybody.” I looked up at him and my lip trembled. “I’m afraid,” I confessed.

  “Oh, Lita.” Reaching an arm out, he pulled me to him. “You’re making it into such a big deal. Can’t you trust me a little?”

  I tightened my arms around his waist, my face to his chest. We stayed that way, close and quiet, as the low-key sounds of Miccosukee life whispered across the Everglades. I didn’t want to let go. But the breeze was picking up, the sky threatening rain.

  On our way home, a quieter David put on a Cat Stevens tape while I gazed out the window and brooded, absentmindedly breaking apart split ends in my hair. Eventually, he lit up and smoked, but when he passed me the joint, I could only hold it out in front of me like some foul medicine I was supposed to swallow. “What’s your favorite drug, David?” I asked, before he finally took it back.

  He considered. “This guy I knew used to cook his own speed. That was good. Mushrooms are fun. I don’t know, probably pot. It’s easy to share.”

  Like Pablo, David craved the solidarity of fellow druggies.

  This time, when he passed me his joint I took it and inhaled for as long as I could. “David,” I asked, releasing all my breath at last, “do you still want me to try something else with you?”

  He looked curiously in my direction. “For real?”

  I nodded with fake confidence. I wanted to make things up to him, but I didn’t have anything else to give. “It won’t be bad for me, though, right?”

  He reached for my hand. “No,” he said, grinning happily. “No problema.”

  And all I could think was, we all make compromises.

  Twinges of anxiety stole over me during the weeks that followed, but I shook off my fears. Pot hadn’t proved to be dangerous, so how much worse could David’s other drugs be? If nothing else, trying to figure out prospects for sneaking away with him distracted me from my worries about my father.

  I quizzed Lara about her future plans, but with Walter in Argentina and Solita’s many pediatric visits, Lara hadn’t needed me much of late. “It’s so difficult to get things done,” she’d apologized the last time she returned early from the university, and I sensed it wasn’t me she was letting down but herself.

  When Tío Lucho rang with a family barbecue invitation, I sang a private hallelujah! Tío Lucho’s was so far that David and I could have the whole day to ourselves. Immediately, I fibbed up a babysitting excuse for Mami, which she acceded to since Manolo had begged off to work too. He’d practically disappeared into his hardware store job, the wages diligently stashed in the sleek, new Florida Savings & Loan: Manolo the banker, amassing the millions my father would never have.

  I was jolted out of my rendezvous plotting during a school assembly when a voice suddenly boomed out my name from the
stage.

  Startled, I looked up: Why was the principal calling for me?

  With a nervous glance at Fátima, who laughingly pushed me up, I climbed out of the row and hurried to the stage. There, I squinted into the high beams in confusion as the principal began shaking my hand and handing me an enormous plaque. I tried to read it quickly and almost couldn’t believe what I saw. I’d won the essay contest! Someone else pressed a thick envelope into my arms. It was Mr. Lanham, smiling at me as the principal began addressing the audience and explaining the award. In a daze, I smiled back while struggling to hold everything. The lights were so disorienting that I couldn’t quite catch what the principal said about some trip to New York.

  When the assembly ended, Mr. Lanham and the guidance counselor came up to me. “I’m sorry we sprung this on you, Gabi,” he said. “We thought it would be a great surprise.”

  Miss McWhorter smiled warmly, took both my hands, and asked, “Shall we back up a little, Gabi?”

  I nodded gratefully.

  “As Mr. Lanham must have told you,” she began, “this program promotes intercultural understanding, dialogue. That’s why the kids who win are called Ambassadors. They get to travel abroad and learn about other people.”

  “This year’s country is Egypt,” Mr. Lanham interjected eagerly.

  “I won a trip to Egypt?” I asked in disbelief. A strange warmth began to fill me. I had won my freedom!

  Mr. Lanham smiled. “Yeah. But it’s not all shopping and bistros. You’ll be there for a whole semester.”

  “A whole semester?” I echoed faintly as the winds of the Levante and the Khamsin swept me across the sand dunes of some other wondrous world.

  “Sure. You’ll go with all the reps from participating schools around the country,” he explained.

  “It’s all in there,” Miss McWhorter added, tapping the envelope in my arms. “You’ll go to New York first, to the United Nations, and you’ll get to attend their sessions. That should be fun.” She threw an inquiring glance at Mr. Lanham.

  “It will all be fun,” he stated confidently.

  “Oh, great,” I said. But the lightness that had carried me along was dissipating. Who was I kidding? There could be no bistros, trips, or understanding dialogue for me. There was only the prison of home. “Mr. Lanham,” I said bravely, trying to squelch the feeling of letdown, “I know this is an honor and all, but I don’t think that the trip part will go over with my family. Couldn’t I get the prize money without it?”

  He looked disappointed. “There isn’t any money, Gabriela. The purpose of the award is to give you an opportunity that you might not have otherwise.”

  “It’s okay, Gabi,” Miss McWhorter said, her brow furrowed. “This isn’t something you have to decide now. You talk it over at home. The trip isn’t for a year. You have to be a junior. Tell your folks to call me about it or to come see me, okay?”

  “Okay,” I said, though I knew only too well that parental visits to school weren’t on the De la Paz itinerary either.

  Slowly I walked back to my locker, placed my plaque and the envelope inside, and headed depressingly toward my next class. As I took my seat next to Claudio at the crowded communal table, our bare arms touched. Both of us immediately retracted them, and an intense shyness came between us, causing us to sit perfectly still. Thankfully, the teacher, Mr. Rubenstein, broke the silence to explain our next writing assignment. When class finally ended, Claudio stood by hesitantly as everyone else filed out. Then, offering me a generous smile, he congratulated me. “It will be a journey of greatness, Gabriela,” he added, looking at me so profoundly that I wanted to give him something back too.

  “I wish you could go,” I blurted.

  For a second, we stared at each other without speaking, and my heart began to flutter like a baby parakeet begging to fly.

  “Would you like a ride home?” he asked me quietly.

  “I’m supposed to meet Fátima.”

  “Ah.” He picked up my bag and handed it over.

  “Thanks,” I said, falling silent while feeling like an idiot as we walked out. I finally found my tongue. “Is your grandfather any better?”

  Claudio shook his head. “The cancer is making him even smaller.” With both hands, he measured vertically, as if his abuelo were an infant.

  “¡Ay Claudio! How sad!”

  “The story is sadder,” he said ruefully, admitting that his family had convinced the grandfather that he had osteoporosis, not bone cancer, so that he wouldn’t know he was dying. “To save him the tragedy,” Claudio explained as we headed downstairs.

  But that meant more tragedy for Claudio, I realized sorrowfully. How could you share a room with your grandfather and watch him die while pretending not to know or feel anything? A great city of lies was crumbling into dust around us.

  We reached the cafeteria where Fátima was waiting, and I paused at the door. A part of me wanted to go with Claudio, wherever that might be, but I said good-bye and went to meet her. Then I put Claudio’s tragedy out of my thoughts as I returned to brooding aloud to Fátima about what to tell Mami about my award. I could only imagine her appalled reaction to the notion of a trip across the world.

  “Give her a chance,” Fátima urged as we rode the bus together homeward.

  “Your father went to college,” I said glumly, staring out the window. “He knows leaving home is part of modern life. My mother doesn’t agree with that stuff. I’d have to get married, or else I’d turn into a persona non grata.”

  “Come on, Gabi,” Fátima said, with a smile. “Think about it. You show up with a scholarship to Harvard, and she’s going to say no?”

  “You don’t know the half of it,” I said, frowning.

  “Well, at least talk to her about what it means to you,” Fátima encouraged, as the bus neared her stop.

  As I rode on toward my house after she got off, the difficulties of negotiating the Egypt trip grew nearly insurmountable in my mind. And if leaving for one semester was difficult, I thought morosely, how would I ever leave my family prison for good? To be sure, the Holy Family wouldn’t look favorably on my entering any convent under false pretenses. And false they would be, since I’d obviously exhibited physical impulses toward the opposite sex. That left me with only one legitimate escape route: marriage. And who was there for me to marry?

  Claudio?

  Whatever was going on between us, he had plenty of his own problems and wasn’t going anywhere either, not for a while.

  Octavio knew about my crazy father, I mused. I pictured marrying him—he was a good person. Would he do it as a favor?

  Oh, this was ridiculous. No liberated woman would hang her life on a husband. That wasn’t the kind of compromise Lara had in mind, I was sure. Sighing, I let myself off the bus and plodded home. Maybe I would wait and seek her advice, when she had some more free time, before saying anything to Mami about the Egypt trip.

  That night I tried not dwell on the loneliness of not being able to tell my own parents about my contest win. Instead, I searched distractedly through my diary for something I could deliver in the guise of a writing assignment. The only possibility that seemed to fit the theme—personal portraits—was the unpleasant episode in which my father, screaming and cursing in furious Spanish, had whacked a burning newspaper funnel out of our elderly fisherman neighbor’s hand while the poor guy mumbled back in confused Italian. Call it a story of men speaking in tongues under our lime/ grapefruit tree. Call it: The Tree of the Split Persona.

  No, that wouldn’t do. Even if I changed the names to make my father American, the whole school would speculate about me. With frustration, I continued to flip through pages until I came to a diatribe about how Mami never let me express my true feelings. I stopped, then grabbed a sheet of paper and started listing her favorite admonishments—from the innocuous “eso nunca se dice ” (“that must never be said”) to the more direct “ya” (“enough”)—into a kind of poem, a mean one. I squeezed my eyes shut
for a moment and tried to divine which clichés would follow an announcement from me that I was going off to Egypt. “¡Ni siquiera!” (“In your dreams!”)

  Adages from past fights quickly landed on my page, along with the timeless questions: “Who Do You Think You Are?”; “How Could You Ever Suggest Such a Thing?”; and the ever-popular “Who Gave You Your Life?” As I wrote, I alternated between English and Spanish—indenting the translated lines separately on the page, as though the two languages were yelling their Ten Commandments at each other. I suspected my darkly poetic teacher would love it. It was so harsh.

  Fátima called, and I put aside the commandments poem to briefly report on my lack of gumption to bring up the contest win at home just yet. When I returned to my bedroom, I found Mami staring at my writing. My heart leapt.

  “¿Qué es esto?” she asked.

  “Homework.” With my eyes, I willed the pages intact, afraid she might rip them.

  “What kind of homework is that, criticizing your family?” she asked, frowning.

  “It’s an assignment,” I told her quickly, reaching for the papers and tucking them safely inside a book. “It’s supposed to be ironic.”

  “To be what?”

  “Ironic. Mami, didn’t you see Pablo messing around with the typewriter in his room? Papi will have a fit.”

  The anger dissolved in her face, leaving deeper crevices of anxiety. When she left, I felt relieved that she hadn’t cried, though I resented bitterly her complete indifference to any of my feelings. The only persona she seemed to love was one who would march resolutely into martyrdom to save everyone else.

  My piece, Mr. Rubenstein opined when I turned it in the next day, was “a cultural map of subtle dimensions.”

  David just laughed when I read it aloud for him on Saturday at the start of our special outing, which began with our ever-romantic McDonald’s stop. I shared my contest victory news as well as my travel difficulty—that great big hole at the center of my cultural map.

  “Well, if you figure out how to sneak off from your mother,” he joked over his burger, “I’ll meet you. Israel’s not far from there.”