by Iris Gomez
“Yeah, right.” I threw a whole salt packet over my fries.
“Parents are a drag,” he admitted, folding his arms on the table. “You know, there’s something I didn’t tell you too.” He hesitated. “I got busted last year after a concert. I didn’t have that much, so they gave me a fine. But my parents said I’d better clean up my act.”
“Oh, I guess that’s lucky,” I said, digesting the unexpected disclosure. But along with sympathy, I started to feel some bitterness. David only had to “clean up his act” and pay a fine, while my father could be dragged off in disgrace and exiled permanently for doing the exact same thing, just because he was an immigrant. It wasn’t fair: Mami had been right on the money about that. As I sat stewing on the injustice, David added that he’d only started working to become independent of his parents. “I guess I should get serious about this kibbutz thing,” he concluded, studying the people eating at other tables.
“Yeah, maybe that’s a good idea,” I said faintly, my righteous anger suddenly abandoning me.
“It’s not even my idea,” he admitted. “A girlfriend of mine went to one.”
Girlfriend? My fantasy of being his one and only quickly disintegrated, and I started grabbing our trays to clear until he stopped me with a grin. “Hey, no big deal,” he said, playing with my hand. “Maybe I’ll stay here and transfer to U of M. I could take the Lita bus and ride in back so your girlfriends don’t discover your secret.” His eyes twinkled. “I could write a mystery, like ‘Bus Number 43 Romance’ or something.”
“Ha ha.” I faked a smile.
But what would be left of my story with David missing? My mother and her Commandments? Pablo and his sniffing hobbies, Manolo the Banker? My sewing uncles and Tía Rita, the Saint of Diverted Pharmaceuticals?
And my father, the greatest character of them all.
As David drove toward the Everglades afterward, he gave me his dimpled smile, inserted a Taj Mahal tape, and said, “Let’s get in the groove.” The gold streaks in his hair lit up his face, and I suddenly wanted to move to the pillows in the back. Eros love, defying any human fear.
Beyond the populated areas, he pulled off to the side of the road. Rummaging through his drug satchel, he removed two tiny squares of paper and handed me one. “Lick it.”
“Huh?”
“It’s glued on there. The Blue Heaven.”
I licked a few times, but I didn’t taste much. Puzzled, I looked up.
“It’s not a trick,” he said, grinning and licking his square. “You’ll see.”
Then we got back on the highway to the National Park. Parking in the lot, David took out a visitors’ guide to show me the board-walk trail he had in mind. He tucked the brochure in his pocket and we ambled over to the slough where the trail began.
Three alligators reposed in placid water. Our eyes riveted on their tails, we stopped and watched, waiting for one to move. Everything was utterly quiet, as if something ought to happen. But time here was indifferent: no fragmented hours, only a present that stretched out into perfect silence. As we kept watching, the biggest alligator finally glided across the slough into a clump of red man-groves until all we could see through the roots in the water was a dark, still mound of alligator head.
Eventually, we started down the boardwalk trail. Holding hands, we pointed out birds for each other. Anhingas. Blue herons, Little and Great. A beautiful pink bird the visitors’ guide said was a Roseate Spoonbill. Where the boardwalk ended, we continued on a path sculpted with limestone sinkholes. I peered into one of the holes, and a rainbow unfolded in the water. “It’s so beautiful, David.”
“Maybe it’s the acid,” he mumbled back.
Beyond the limestone holes, our path led through a tangled canopy of hardwood trees. Peacefully, we followed it along until both of us realized at once that our limbs and faces were stinging.
“Shit,” David complained as he swatted. “I should’ve brought bug juice.”
The stings multiplied and I began to scratch myself furiously. “Ugh! Let’s go back.”
Turning, we sprinted toward the trailhead. As the mosquitoes became completely unbearable, we tore maniacally down the path. I shook my arms in the air to simulate a breeze that might send the vicious insects away, but they were undeterred. It was one hot race to the van door. David panted as he fished for his keys and found them. Jumping in, we locked the doors behind us. “Fucking monsters,” he said, catching his breath. “Bloodsuckers. Pigs.”
I burst out laughing. I’d never seen David so mad before. I climbed on top of him and kissed his bitten face with all four forms of love. Then I straddled the seat into the back and dropped myself into the mirrored pillows. With my hands resting quietly on my chest, I lay there and perused David’s posters as he drove us out of Paradise.
The posters were in 3D. In a blue concert hall, the Moody Blues were playing, but the sound traveled in rays of light that shone through the instruments. Synaesthesia—I remembered distantly, as snow fell across the Himalayas and each flake quivered like the long-held note of an electric guitar. The white doors of a church in Switzerland fluttered open. There was a swish of red leaves in the trees, a symphony of rain sticks. Everywhere I aimed my eyes the world came beautifully to life. I was so happy, so blessed. And for the first time in my life, I felt truly free.
I must have fallen into a trance, because David startled me when he opened the van door and the sun beamed in. “Wow,” I said, rubbing my eyes. “That was great.”
“Yeah. Except for the bugs.” He looked chagrined. “It’s kinda late. You hungry?”
“Full of joy.”
He tumbled into the back with me and we fooled around briefly until someone beeped who’d been waiting for gas behind us and forced David to move the van.
On the road, we stopped at an IHOP and I checked in with a call to Tío Lucho’s. My father was playing dominos with my uncle. That was a good sign.
“Everything cool?” asked David at the table.
“Yeah. We have time.”
He ordered pancakes with everything on them: strawberries, whipped cream, pecan bits, and golden syrup that I poured gloriously over the buttermilk medallions. David reached for the pancakes and cut into them. “Mmm, good,” he said through a mouthful as he slid the plate back over.
“David, I have to ask you something.”
“Uh-oh.” He wolfed down another big bite.
“Seriously. Say you could have only one kind of love. Like God’s love versus a person’s. For example, mine. What would you pick?”
He chewed on the pancake. “Sounds like a rabbi question.”
I waited.
“Okay, since I don’t believe God exists,” he said, licking his fork adorably, “I’d rather have yours.”
“Really?”
“Mmm.”
“You don’t believe in God?”
“Oh, I don’t know about that shit, Lita. Eat the pancakes already. I don’t want to get you in trouble with the authorities.”
“I’m sorry.” I chewed a little, glanced up, and smiled. “I’d rather have yours too.”
“Yeah, yeah.” But then he gave me the biggest smile of all. “Love is all there is.”
As I’d come to expect, the freedom and joy I’d felt that day didn’t last long. David began to zero in on his Israel trip, and as he did, a sad-eyed fatalism returned to claim me. I couldn’t laugh when David twirled my hair in his fingers and sang a croaky rendition of “So Long, Marianne,” which made Leonard Cohen sound even more depressing, if that was possible.
When his departure date neared, we made one more rendezvous to the park in the Grove, where I paid silent tribute to the banyan and mangrove trees that had always sheltered us. The low-hanging branches created a Hansel-and-Gretel darkness in the woods around me. Would I ever return?
David took off his silver pinky ring with the black and white yin yang stone. Flashing the dimpled smile he’d worn when he first asked me to party with him, he ha
nded me the ring. “Un regalo.”
I stared at the stone. “Thanks,” I said joylessly, taking the divided ring. What had I given him besides a few dull rules of Castilian grammar?
We drove to my drop-off spot, but this time he parked before coming around to let me out. I stood facing the battered blue door with my hand gripping the broken handle until David turned me toward him. “Hey, Lita.”
How solemnly I stared back.
He laughed and kissed me, then gave me a big hug. “Hey, it was really great to hang out with you. Even though you’re saving yourself for somebody better.”
I didn’t laugh.
My broken “ ’bye” got buried in his chest. Whatever kind of love it had been was lost in the woods of sorrow, along with every other kind I’d known.
At home afterward, I tied the yin yang ring on a ribbon around the cover of my diary and stuffed the diary back into the cigar box I kept under my bed. Then I lay down. When Mami called for me, I pretended I had cramps.
[ TWENTY-ONE ]
AN INTERNATIONAL CALL CAME the morning after I’d said good-bye to David. I could tell from my parents’ shouting on the phone. In bed with “cramps,” I put the transistor radio to my ear. Everybody had a broken heart. I tried to sing along on one of the peppier melodies, but I couldn’t bear to push my voice out to meet the notes. I couldn’t defy my nature, which was to be silent. Silent. Silent.
Getting up seemed pointless, like that part of The Bell Jar where the heroine wonders why we brush our teeth and hair day after day, over and over. Sameness was horrible. Why had God made us this way?
As the hours ticked, Mami became impatient and came to collect me. “Gabriela, please get out of that bed and help with dinner. Take some aspirin.”
I stumbled up. If only I did have cramps instead of this terrible ache in my stomach, chest, head, eyes.
In the kitchen, she was subdued, refraining from the usual complaints. I added capers and raisins to her picadillo and replaced our plastic tablecloth with the washed-out but merrier one with the orange flamboyán flowers. As the food simmered on the stove, Mami sat and stared out the window.
“¿Qué fue?” I asked, suddenly conscious that something was wrong.
In a soft voice, she answered, “Hubo una muerte.”
A death? My heart froze. “My grandfather?”
Mami looked startled, then shook her head. “No, mi’ja. Abuelita Matilde.”
My father’s mother. The one who, every year without fail, sent us—via Tía Consuelo or other visitors—treasured boxes of boca-dillos veleños. Inside each wood box came the treats, wrapped in a pale green wrap that Tía Consuelo had taught us wasn’t paper but plátano leaf enclosing each three-layer bocadillo. The thickest layer of rich guava paste was topped with a layer of dulce de leche, glazed with caramelized sugar. Nothing you ate in this world would be sweeter.
“What happened, Mami?”
“Ay, mi’jita,” she sighed. “Old age. A respiratory infection.”
I remembered how Abuelita Matilde’s tiny crystals had jiggled from her earrings when she laughed. I remembered her face with its slightly bent nose, a miniature version of my Tía Consuelo’s. I remembered, though more vaguely, my mother’s spinster sister, Tía Julia, and other relatives we’d lost. It was as if our family had started to die away from us after we left Colombia.
Mami was crying. It made me want to cry too, but I held the cry in my throat. I put my hand on her shoulder and let my gaze follow hers toward our intertwined lime/grapefruit trees, each bearing its own fruit.
When my father came out of his room for dinner, everybody quieted. He wore the determined look with which he assigned me projects, but when he sat down, he didn’t give Mami the usual goofy smile of anticipation or say everything smelled delicious. He simply looked at the plate in front of him, forgetting to eat. Even his ticking hand remained still on the faded flower tablecloth. I almost wished he would start raving about refineries again.
Across the table, Mami waited like a prisoner for a turn at the guillotine.
After exchanging uneasy glances, my brothers and I began our obligatory meal.
Tía Consuelo’s call lifted our penalty of silence. With relief, I listened to my father start the familiar shouting process on the hallway phone. Suddenly, he broke into sobs—great, ugly sounds that stumbled across the room and engulfed us. My brothers and I had never heard my father cry. Pablo trembled on the verge of tears himself, while my mother pushed her chair back as if to rise but then thought better of it and pulled herself grimly forward. Next to each other, Manolo and I hunched over our plates to shield ourselves from the avalanche of my father’s grief.
I felt terrible for Tía Consuelo, who had to listen to the sobs while trying to talk with my father. I felt the ache and sadness of each of the De la Paz brothers and sisters, of the family cloth that would not last. I felt saddest of all for my father and my tiny, lost abuelita. And me.
Abuela Matilde’s death left my father a different person, a broken one who frequently cried in his room. No one thought it a good idea to send him to Colombia in that state, even with his brothers, and Tío Victor was convinced El Chino would advise against it anyway because of the immigration complications. Luckily, my father didn’t bring it up himself.
I worried aloud to Mami about his constant crying, and she explained that he’d loved my abuelita very much, of course, and that a person always regrets not having done more to show his love. But to me it seemed that my father cried out of loneliness, a kind of loneliness that maybe no one but his mother could ever take away.
My father’s sadness made my own feel small and futile. With David gone, and now school ended, I sank into gloom and doom. Fátima had secured a job at her mother’s store, but mine at the mall bookstore wouldn’t start for a couple more weeks. While I waited for that and Pablo for his summer school course to start, we stayed home together and listened to my father cry. After a week of that, Mami quit giving him sleeping pills for fear they might be depressing him further—despite Tía Rita’s admonition to wean him off gradually, so that he wouldn’t panic. As his crying ceased, my father promptly resumed his manic scribbling.
That wasn’t a big deal, but a couple of evenings later when we were sitting over dinner, something alarmed me about his overly excited predictions regarding the millions of dollars the government would return as soon as we stopped writing checks.
Pablo chirped up. “You said the government’s gonna give us a house, Papi.”
“No!” My father shook his head angrily, declaring that we would get the millions outright after he wrote to the bank. He raised his dinner knife and warned, “No more mortgage checks.”
Mami stood and began loudly clearing the plates.
Though she’d already hidden the family’s important documents in my closet, she took the checkbook to work with her on Monday. It was a lucky thing, too, since that day my father went hunting. Off the sleeping pills, he had surprising energy. Pablo and I hung around in our beds while anxiously listening to my father fight with the drawers. Pablo kept verbal track of progress. “He’s in the silverware drawer again, Gab.” Then, a while later, “Hall closet.”
As much as Pablo poked fun at my father initially, all humor disappeared when his searches became frenetic. The house rattled with doors and drawers banging over the angry pitch of my father’s muttering. A couple of nights later, when Mami got home from work, I alerted her that his bizarre behavior had intensified.
Her immediate response was to disregard all that and pick on me instead for hanging around all day without doing anything productive. “What’s wrong with you, Gabriela?” she demanded, shaking her head.
Too deflated to mount any comeback, I only shrugged. Something was wrong with me, I knew. Fate had been stalking my fledgling future like my father on his relentless quest for the checkbook—and I was losing ground. I still hadn’t told Mami about my contest victory, despite Miss McWhorter’s cajoling for me to
do so before classes let out. The counselor had taken pains to emphasize how great the field trip would look on my college applications, and she’d even plied me with pamphlets about college choices. But I already knew my college choices, if any: Miami-Dade or the University of Miami. Home with the family was my husbandless destino.
I tried to redeem myself by preparing dinner. When Mami saw the chicken stewing later, she planted a kiss on my forehead. “Gracias, mi’ja. You’re a good girl.” She took the wooden spoon. “I’ll finish.”
I sat at the table, momentarily at a loss. To make myself useful, I grabbed a napkin and began wiping the hard-to-clean crevices on our salt and pepper shakers. They were ceramic flamingos, the tiny salt bird’s wings extended in flight and the pepper bird with both feet planted. A terrible longing seized me as the fragrance of spices filled the air and the evening light fell across my mother’s shoulders like a shawl—the two flamingos stood mute, separated between the earth and sky.
In the morning, I walked to the library instead of vegging out with Pablo. Carrying a few college catalog trays over to a table, I read about the University of Chicago, Notre Dame, McGill in Canada, and even the University of Barcelona, where Claudio hoped to study some day.
Cold, damp places, thousands of miles away, where my family and its problems could never reach me.
If only I could get there myself.
I put the catalogs back in their trays.
The next day, Friday, was every bit as steamy and depressing as the day before. No hint of air broke through, and I lugged myself through the hours like a slug across the eternity of a tree trunk. I couldn’t wait for my job at the book store to begin.
Gratitude struck in the form of an unexpected babysitting date the next morning, which provided an air-conditioned reprieve from the general meaninglessness of my life. That day, when Lara returned from her research and errands, she ran her fingers through her hair with an apologetic smile. “I haven’t had a free moment for a cut.” Carrying our coffees into the living room, she kicked off her shoes and said, “Oof, what weather! How is everything at home, Gabi? Your Papi?”