Try to Remember

by Iris Gomez

  “I guess he’s better.”

  “You must miss your abuelita too.”

  “I don’t remember her that well.” The kindly way Lara spoke made my words catch in my throat. “I wasn’t—close with her, like I am to my grandfather Gabriel.”

  “Your mami’s father?”

  “Uh-huh. He and my Abuelita Julia took care of me when my mother was having my brothers. He writes poems.”

  “How beautiful, Gabi. To have a grandfather poet.”

  I almost started to cry, gripping my cup fiercely to stop.

  As Lara sipped her coffee, she asked in a casual tone, “How are your studies of love going, Gabi?”

  My head popped up. Had she seen me and David? “Oh, I was just…” I bumbled around for what to say. “Curious.”

  “It’s a good subject for a young woman to be curious about,” Lara said with a bemused expression.

  “Um, when is Walter coming back?” I responded nervously.

  Lara sighed. “A few months, perhaps. There’s been so much difficulty with the research,” she paused. “Sometimes—how can I say this? He doesn’t calculate everything into his planning.”

  I was unsure how to answer, so I simply asked, “Do you miss him, Lara?”

  “Oh yes.” She gave me a wry smile, then patted my hand as if I shouldn’t worry.

  But it did worry me. We all make compromises, I kept remembering her say.

  “You know,” she went on pensively, “you can try to change other people or change yourself. Either path is wretched! Walter struggles with it, too, even though he’s a man.”

  “Maybe it’s better to be alone,” I ventured.

  “Oh no, Gabrielita,” Lara protested laughingly. “You mustn’t lose your faith in love.”

  The girls woke, and I hung around to help everyone gaily prepare lunch instead of heading back to my house right away. Lara praised her daughters’ “cooking,” and I suddenly found myself blurting out that I’d won the Ambassador essay contest.

  Lara grabbed my face and kissed me. “That’s wonderful, Gabi! You’re a marvel!”

  I blinked furiously as the little girls clapped happily, and I tried to explain my prize.

  “What an opportunity,” Lara exclaimed, scooting the girls outside.

  “I don’t know about the trip, Lara,” I said dolefully. “I don’t think my mother will let me go.”

  “Oh, you’ll convince her.”

  I shook my head.

  “May I help?”

  Though I suspected Mami would simply discount the unconventional Lara’s advice, it was possible that she might trust Lara’s opinion as a professional. A seedling of hope took root. “Okay, maybe you could try talking to her.”

  “We’ll do it together. You tell me when.”

  “All right. I don’t have to turn in permission forms for a while.”

  When I got home, I found the back door open. A loud racket was coming from my parents’ room, and I rushed inside. They were both shouting, though I couldn’t see what was happening because Pablo stood in the doorway in front of me.

  “Give it to me!” my father screamed.

  “No!” Mami yelled, sobbing. “We’re not losing this house because of your cuentos!”

  “Leave her alone!” Pablo shouted, darting into the room with a fork that he clutched in his hand and brandished like a weapon while approaching my father.

  “Oh my God,” I heard myself utter desolately.

  I could see Mami bent over, grasping a small prayer book to her chest with both hands. My father tried to wrestle it away, his face becoming enflamed. As she secured the thing in her hands between her dress folds and locked her thighs tightly, forming an awkward vise, he began roughly shaking her to dislodge whatever she held. “It’s my money!” he screamed, his face sweating. “Give it to me!” Just as it hit me that what she held was the checkbook, he put his big hands around her neck.

  “No, Papi!” I cried out.

  Pablo lunged forward and decked my father hard in the face. The punch knocked him off-balance, and he stepped backward, wavering. Pablo rapidly retrieved the fork he’d dropped and held it up in the air again, but my father retreated, regarding Pablo in complete bewilderment. He glanced at my crying mother and seemed to notice me by the door, but suddenly it was like he was looking through us, or past us, as if we’d become his ghosts.

  Pablo lowered the fork, pointed it at my father, and said softly, “Just stay there.” With the other hand, my brother motioned for Mami to leave. She brushed by without looking at anyone. “I’ll be at Camila’s,” she barely croaked.

  I eyed my father anxiously, but he only stood staring at us in his disheveled and bewildered state, his cheek pink where Pablo had hit him.

  Pablo turned toward me. “I’m cutting out of here too.”

  “Okay,” I replied timidly, following him to the kitchen and watching him take off.

  Then, unsure of what to do next, I went to my room and sat on the bed. With Mami and Pablo gone, I felt as lost and bewildered as my father.

  A sudden burst of fear propelled me into my brothers’ room, and I locked the door. I stood facing it—and the treacherous possibility that perhaps we should let my father get arrested. Hadn’t he just tried to strangle Mami?

  But he loved her. Even if he was crazy, he loved her, right?

  An image of the cane-cutting knife I’d once told Camila and Olguita about flashed into my mind. What if my father, overcome with remorse over how he’d attacked Mami, turned the knife on himself?

  The house was so hot and horribly quiet.

  But quiet was good. No doubt it meant my father was all right…

  Or was he?

  Weak-kneed before the locked door, I felt physically incapable of going out there to check on him. Why didn’t someone else come home? Why didn’t someone else do something?

  After a while, I undid the lock, opened the door, and quietly exited. I crept slowly into the kitchen and paused there for a moment before inching my way toward my parents’ room. Some nerve-wracking minutes passed in which I strained to listen and eventually detected the sound of an eraser softly rubbing against the blessed, blessed paper.

  With enormous relief, I retraced my footsteps.

  Then I took a very, very long shower.

  When I got out, Pablo had returned, and I found him sitting on his bed, sweat streaking his back.

  “Hi,” I said from his doorway.

  He was staring at a mound of dirty jeans on his floor. “Hi,” he said, turning toward me, his eyes swollen from crying.

  “Where did you go?” I asked, walking in.

  “Johnny’s.”

  “Oh.” Rivulets of warm water wended their way into the towel I’d wrapped around me. Tightening it better, I sat beside him. “Pablo,” I asked quietly, “how come Papi blew up like that?”

  “The old man caught her writing a check.” Pablo shook his head. “Instead of making something up she just told him what she was doing, and he started with that crazy million dollar shit and exploded. His money! Man, he hasn’t worked in so long he doesn’t know what money looks like.”

  “Mami shouldn’t have stopped the pills,” I said with conviction. “I don’t know, maybe Papi’s getting worse?” Confused, I realized I’d always assumed my father would stay the way he was—that the only change would come in each of us taking our turn to leave. But if he hurt Mami…

  “I just wanna get outta this place,” Pablo blurted. “I hate him. I hate her. I hate everybody.” As his voice broke, I hugged him stickily, though he’d grown so big that he was hard to comfort.

  “It was crazy, man,” Pablo mumbled. “Hitting my own father.”

  “He could’ve hurt her, Pablo.”

  “Yeah, but my own fucking father.”

  The sweat, mixing with wetness from my shower, left me feeling like I would never get clean again, but I went and reshowered anyway. When I got out this time, Mami was slapping fish patties together in
the kitchen. I watched for a second while leaning into the counter. “What are you gonna do, Mami?” I asked softly.

  “It’s over, mi’ja. Ya pasó.” Her lip shook. “I gave your father the pill again. With his juice.” I located our vegetable oil bottle and placed it in front of her. Mami poured oil into the frying pan and let it get hot. As she threw in the first patty, she pushed me aside with the other hand, so that the sizzling oil drops wouldn’t burn me. Storge love. The kind you couldn’t help. I wished that my father had tried to choke Pablo or me instead of her.

  Tío Victor’s double-dosing scheme began to haunt me, but each time I planned to raise it with Mami, I couldn’t bear to remind her about my father’s attack. And so a few days later, with blackness in my heart, I rifled through the purse where she kept the sleeping pills and lifted one out. It would be easy enough to grind and dilute the calmante into my father’s juice as Mami used to do, I knew, and no one would be the wiser. My uncle, I comforted myself while guiltily pocketing the little pill, would surely absolve me later. But when I came across an envelope addressed to Tía Consuelo in Mami’s handwriting, I realized that she must have written for help. Mami was looking for a way out.

  A sense of right and wrong returned and flooded me with shame. What could I have been thinking? What if I overdosed my father instead of fixing anything? Mortified, I put the pill back and hoped against hope that Tía Consuelo would come quickly. If anyone could help us right him, or at least get him to a real doctor, it was her.

  That week, summer classes started for Pablo, and he all but stopped coming home. When not in school, he hung out with druggie girlfriends at Tuttle Park. The little time he was home, he just slid Manolo’s lock across their door and stopped popping into my room to get laughs out of me. I began to believe that he really did hate my father.

  Whatever hate I had was impossibly entangled in storge. The episode with Mami had really scared me. I wanted to believe that my father hadn’t understood what he was doing, that he’d only choked her because he became overwrought over the missing checkbook and confused her with the people who’d stolen his money. The people he thought had stolen his money, I corrected myself for the umpteenth time.

  It was a welcome relief when my job began. My father in his timeless universe assumed that I was still going to school. That day before I left, I gave him the obligatory good-bye kiss and noticed how the hair on his scalp had thinned. Despite everything, I felt sorry for him, like when he’d cried continuously after Abuela Matilde died. But with Mami plying him with daily “vitamins” again, there would be no crying. Only our house’s silence, as each of us left him for work, school, or other peoples’ lives. And for a while things appeared to go back to normal—or at least as normal as they could be in that house.

  [ TWENTY-TWO ]

  WEEKS PASSED DURING which I felt that time was changing for all of us—time in the Latin sense of tiempo, meaning temperature or weather as well as the time of stories. You could sense it like the thickened air before a storm or the way you smell rain before it falls.

  In real time, fortunately, there were no further eruptions from my father. Mami didn’t mention Tía Consuelo, though I closely monitored the mail. In the relative peace, my mother decided that it was okay to leave my three cousins home with us for a day while Tío Lucho drove her to Jackson Memorial’s free eye clinic, since the glaucoma drops made her eyes blur.

  “Cuidado con tu papá,” she cautioned before she left, though I was always careful with my father.

  “Don’t worry, Mami,” I reassured her. “We’ll take everybody to the park.” Manolo and Pablo were on orders to help me entertain our cousins.

  Mami had predictably decked herself out in a nice outfit and the dangling emerald earrings from her wedding. The quantity of hair spray and perfume forced me to hold my breath as I kissed her good-bye.

  “We’ll be back in a few hours,” Tío Lucho told my cousin Luchito. “No funny business. Marisol and Gabrielita will report to me.”

  My thirteen-year-old cousin grinned.

  After my uncle drove away, I announced, “Okay, guys. Just stay in the yard or go to Tuttle. Don’t anybody come in the house unless you have to use the bathroom.”

  “I have to go,” Luchito piped up.

  “Well, hurry up, stupid,” Marisol said, shoving him.

  “Just kidding.”

  “You’re hilarious,” she said.

  “Come on, Manolo,” I urged. “You guys take Luchito to the park.”

  Manolo scowled, but the three of them headed off after Marisol gave her brother a dollar.

  When they’d gone, I opened lawn chairs outside and volunteered to braid Cari’s hair. As Marisol lay back in the chaise longue with her eyes closed, I went into the house for a comb and rubber bands.

  My father, wearing Mami’s pink reading glasses, intercepted me. “I need envelopes, mi’jita,” he said.

  “I don’t have any, Papi.”

  “It’s necessary to buy them.”

  “Papi, my cousins are here.”

  “What cousins?”

  “Marisol and Cari. Don’t you remember? Tío Lucho took Mami to the clinic.” I regarded him warily. I trusted that Mami had given him his pill before leaving, what with everything that had happened, but you could never be too sure of anything around here.

  “O sí.” My father nodded docilely as he remembered. “But I have to send these letters, mi’jita.”

  Keeping quiet, I opened a drawer and rummaged for rubber bands. Maybe he would drop it.

  “It’s urgent,” he said a little louder.

  “I have to stay here, Papi,” I explained. “Tío Lucho wouldn’t like my leaving my cousins. That’s not nice.”

  “They can accompany you.”

  I jerked the drawer shut. “Okay. I’ll ask Marisol.”

  Outside, she was still reclining in her glamorous position. “Look,” I told her, “I have to go to the store. You want to wait with Cari?”

  “I’m not staying with your crazy father,” she said, promptly putting on her sandals.

  “What about my braids?” Cari protested.

  “We’ll do them after,” I promised. “Maybe Mari will buy you some pretty bands.”

  “I’ll buy her a lice comb,” Marisol said.

  “Marisol, you’re mean,” Cari said.

  “She’s grouchy from her period,” I told Cari.

  “No. My love life,” Marisol argued glumly, as the three of us walked down the street. “He won’t tell me if he’ll be my escort for his sister’s quinceañera.”

  “Bummer.” I tried to remember—was she talking about that guy with the 1920s mustache? “Can’t you go with somebody else?”

  “Tch! Don’t you know anything? No one’s gonna ask me if they think I’m Guillermo’s novia!”

  We arrived at the light. “Maybe you should ask someone then,” I suggested.

  “Oh my God. You’re so American. You think I would ask a boy out?” Marisol stressed the “out” as if it were a horrible disease.

  I looked down at Cari, who returned a sympathetic smile. Though she was only nine, she was wise to her sister’s superiority complex. “I don’t know,” I answered neutrally.

  When we finally reached Osco’s, Cari and I gave Marisol the slip and went to find my father’s envelopes. The store was out of white ones, so I had to buy the thin, blue-tinted kind with “Air Mail” printed on a red and blue border. They were envelopes for international mail, but my father wouldn’t mind; his oil empire spanned the globe.

  After we got home, I tossed the box on my father’s bed and scurried back outside before he could demand any more of me. Then I stationed myself behind Cari in a lawn chair and busied myself with her dense black hair. Sure enough, my father popped into the yard and stood watching us. I combed Cari’s hair as slowly and laboriously as possible until he finally withdrew.

  When the afternoon got hotter, I moved my chair under the mango tree next to Marisol to nap a
nd closed my eyes as she began to complain about virtually everyone she knew.

  Eventually my father reappeared at the kitchen door, tinted envelopes in hand. He’d handwritten the addresses, I figured, if he’d addressed them at all. As he came closer, I tried squint-reading the writing. Of course. They were letters to banks.

  “I’m going to the post office,” he announced.

  No one answered, but I nervously gave the pale blue envelopes another peek. Already stamped. Good.

  “Your father must be looking for a job, huh?” Marisol asked with her eyes closed after he’d started down the street.

  I knew she was probably being sarcastic but I merely said, “I don’t know what he’s looking for,” and sighed. I watched my father’s shadow slide along the ground behind him as if his spirit were folding into the sidewalk.

  “Poor Tío,” said Cari.

  I asked Cari to help me knock some limes off the tree. A little later, as we squeezed lime juice into a jar, I heard a commotion.

  Manolo burst in, Pablo in pursuit.

  “Hey!” I yelled, as Pablo banged into me. “Stop fighting! You guys are too old for this stuff.”

  Manolo pushed forward, arms outstretched to escape Pablo’s grasp, but Pablo caught him by the hair and punched his face. Manolo couldn’t see to punch back, but he kept swinging blindly behind himself to hit Pablo’s chest.

  “Cut it out!” I yelled as I tried to pull Pablo off Manolo. “Now!”

  But my brothers were too big for me to handle alone.

  Luchito came into the kitchen with Marisol. “Help me!” I ordered them.

  Instead, Marisol grabbed Cari and backed away while Luchito and I grabbed Pablo’s arms. That gave Manolo the upper hand, which he used to hit Pablo in the eye. Infuriated, Pablo freed himself and dove for Manolo’s neck. I wedged myself between them while pushing Pablo away with my butt, but Manolo picked up a knife and backed up like he was going to charge us with it. I stumbled back, scared, and Pablo snuck around me and lunged. At that point, Manolo dropped the knife and ran for his room. Pablo followed but Manolo slammed the door in his face and locked it.