Try to Remember

by Iris Gomez

  Tuesday I arrived gratefully at Royal Palm—an oasis in the desert of the past few months. I was overjoyed to see Octavio and Amy, even though Fátima was out sick.

  Sweetness greeted me on my return home too; when I opened the back door, wafts of sugary burnt oil floated out. Mami was frying plantains.

  “How did it go?” she asked, as I planted a perfunctory kiss on her cheek.

  “Good.”

  “Your aunt Rita’s here,” she said. “We’re doing our hair. Finish these when she comes out of the bathroom, will you?”

  “Okay.” I slumped into a chair, my book bag at my feet. “Where are the boys?” I inquired, eager to hear about Pablo’s adventures with the nuns.

  My father entered, wearing an undershirt with visible underarm stains.

  “Hola, Papi,” I said, glancing at my mother to see if she would criticize him for dressing that way in front of Tía Rita.

  Suddenly my father shouted. “¡¿Por qué?!”

  I gave Mami a quizzical look. She turned, greasy spatula in hand, and frowned. “What’s the problem, Roberto?”

  “¡¿Por qué?! ¡¿Por qué?!” he yelled.

  The “why” wasn’t really a question, punctuated as it was by the rising decibels. What was he so mad about? I eased toward the edge of my chair, preparing for flight, but I was wedged between my mother and the table and couldn’t exit.

  My aunt appeared, her wet hair tied up in plastic. “Vamos, Roberto, what’s all this about?”

  “¡¿Por qué?!” my father screamed, the vein in his forehead practically exploding now. As if he were about to exact the final revenge from mortal enemies, he screamed louder: “¡¿Por qué?! ¡¿Por qué?!” He was blinking rapidly and raised his arm.

  Suddenly something sharp landed on me. “¡¿Por qué?!” Sharpness pounded my head again. “¡¿Por qué?! ¡Por qué?!” Down came his knuckles, driving the crazy “¡¿por qué?!” furiously into my brain again and again.

  “¡Papi!” I cried, face in my arms. “I didn’t do anything!”

  “¡No, Roberto!” my mother shouted in panic as the knuckles ambushed me.

  “¡¿Por qué?! ¡¿Por qué?!”

  My scalp was on fire, a fire coursing through me down to my legs so that I feared I’d peed. “Please, Papi,” I whimpered.

  “Roberto, ¡por favor!” My aunt threw herself over me and pushed me roughly out of the chair and onto the floor.

  As I rushed to crawl out of there on my knees, I heard the por qués start up again behind me. My mother was crying, “Mi’jo, please, return to your senses!” I reached my bedroom, got to my feet, closed the door, and leaned my forehead into it like a best friend. But the pounding seemed to continue, only it was coming from my heart. Make it stop, I prayed dizzily, as my mother’s sobs and my aunt’s stern rebukes rose with my own heartbeat above the mad, fading chant of my father’s por qués.

  Then: wordlessness, signals, space.

  Later, someone knocked.

  “What?” my thick voice answered.

  “Let us in,” my mother said.

  “¿Por—” The syllable garbled in my throat. Why? Why?

  “Open the door, please,” she insisted.

  I opened it, stepped backward, and sank into my bed.

  “Mi’ja.” My mother entered with a bag of ice.

  “Let me feel it first,” said Tía Rita, coming in to sit beside me, her hair still wet and spiky from the Clairol.

  I recoiled. “No, it hurts.”

  “Sí, Gabi, you have to let me check.” My aunt explored my head lightly with her fingertips, and I winced as she touched the goose egg on my scalp. “Well, it’s not bleeding,” she said to my mother with a grimace.

  “Merciful God,” Mami said. “Here, put the ice on.”

  “I’ll do it myself.” I wrested the bag away from her, but the sudden movement brought on a wave of nausea. I took a deep breath, then carefully lowered the bag onto my scalp. The ice cubes were a sharp reminder of my father’s knuckles, and I let out a moan.

  “Mi’ja, let me slide you onto the pillow,” she offered.

  “No!”

  “At least she doesn’t seem to need a doctor,” Tía Rita concluded wryly.

  “Doctor?” Mami dropped to the bed too.

  My aunt touched my hand. “Look, Gabrielita. Victor’s here. He gave your father a pill a little while ago.”

  “Why didn’t the other one work?” However much I adjusted the ice, my head throbbed.

  Tía Rita raised an eyebrow at my mother, whose ojeras darkened with fear and regret.

  “¡Ay, mi’ja! He didn’t take it!”

  I looked out the window. “I wish I were dead,” I declared firmly into the dark.

  My mother drew a breath. “Eso nunca se dice.”

  Never Must It Be Said: always the passive voice with her.

  But I didn’t want to be passive or to help anyone.

  Tía Rita stood. “I’m going to tell Victor that Gabrielita’s all right.”

  My mother waited—for what I didn’t know—as the ice pressed my head like a freezing marble slab. Outside, the street lights weren’t yet illuminated. So dark. Even the ghosts of our three coconut trees, now amputated white stumps, had vanished like the Holy Family in flight from their persecutors. Who would I pray to now?

  Mami finally stood. “I’ll call you in a while to eat,” she offered quietly.

  I sat at the table between my brothers and began to swallow one forkful of rice, meat, and plantains at a time with great gulps of water. Nobody said a word. When I finished, I went and dumped my plate in the kitchen sink. Manolo followed, placing a hand on my shoulder. “I’ll wash the dishes, Gab.”

  “Thanks.” I returned to my room with my head still pounding and the rest of me completely bloated. Why had I swallowed all that rice? How disgusting. Resting on my bed, I closed my eyes. If only I could run away somewhere, emancipated from the entire world. I could glide magically in the clouds with a Coke in one hand and a book in the other. Maybe there was a place for me like the imaginary lands we’d read about in French. Le pays où l’on n’arrive jamais—a country never reached except through special kinds of remembering.

  Out of the blue, I remembered our long-ago family picnic in Queens, the rose brocade tablecloth spread out on the grass, my father catching me in his arms and laughing when I rolled down a mountain I’d imagined out of a simple slope of highway exit.

  My pays was a lost country in the distance, a figment of a country—a cuento.

  Pablo came in, closing my door behind him. “Hey, Gab.”

  “Hi.” I stared listlessly at his slimy sneakers.

  “I’m sorry the old man hit you,” he said. “Tía Rita told us.”

  “Yeah, it’s another reason for me to hate this place.”

  Pablo shook his head. “We don’t need any more reasons.”

  I got up abruptly. “I have to take some aspirin. Tell me about St. Stephen’s tomorrow, okay?”

  It wasn’t the same for Pablo. I was good. I hadn’t done anything to deserve getting beaten. I always did what our family needed. I was the one who’d completed meaningless puzzles, loyally typed encyclopedias, even tried to make my father’s craziness a little less crazy. I’d let myself become enslaved to him so that he wouldn’t hurt anyone else. I’d saved him from himself, hadn’t I? Did it all count for nothing?

  In the bathroom, I swallowed two aspirins.

  When I returned to my room, I took out my diary and a pen. Words rushed out in bad penmanship, cluttered like my father’s letters with exclamation points.

  PSYCHO!! I’ll shove your papers down your throat! Hold you by the neck and SQUEEZE OUT YOUR EYEBALLS, YOUR TONGUE! I’LL KILL YOU!!!!!!!!!

  As I stared at the words, icy dread crept up my writing hand toward my chest. The craziness had invaded me.

  Here was my punishment.

  Hadn’t I called the police on my own brother? Secretly hoped for my father’s arrest? Tried to
persuade my mother to let him be deported?

  Distraught, I folded the crazy pages over so that I wouldn’t have to see them again. Then, closing the diary, I buried it in my cigar box and slid the box under my bed. Like a zombie, I sat waiting. The beating inside me diminished as the aspirin kicked in, but I felt so uncertain about what to do.

  Suddenly I freaked: What if someone found my crazy writing? Quickly, I retrieved the diary and tore out the bad pages. But what to do with them?

  I stood up to inspect my closet, stuffed with junk: headless dolls Pablo used to take apart, boxes of shoes no one wore, the Important Papers box, our family pictures, my old pink bedspread and the matching vase with the dusty plastic roses, and wads of unattractive fabric Mami was saving to make something out of. She was afraid to give up on anything and throw it away.

  I started rabidly pulling things out but she walked in unexpectedly, and I managed to quickly stuff the evil diary pages into my jeans pocket. Les pages où l’on n’arrive jamais—the pages no one would ever get to.

  “What’s this?” As her eyes critiqued the floor, she stooped to lift her Chase Manhattan papers box.

  “I’m looking for something,” I improvised. “I’ll put it all back.”

  “Why did you take everything out in the first place, mi’ja?” she asked.

  “I told you. I need something.”

  “What are you looking for that you have to make this mess?”

  “A box for my old school work. To make room for this year’s.” “A box.” She left the room but returned moments later with a used UPS box. “Here.”

  I made a show of transferring notebooks into it, while she stood by with her arms folded like a security guard’s and didn’t budge. Climbing on the chair, I tried to reload the closet with everything I’d thrown down, but blankets and clothes kept rolling out. Instead of helping, my mother compulsively criticized the way I put everything back. My father’s attack on me had barely dislodged her batteries: Here she was again, recharged, with a running commentary on each thing I did wrong. The only faith she had was in her own complaining. I wanted to slam the shoe box right over her mouth. “Mami. Just get out of my room and leave me alone!”

  “¿Cómo? ¿Quién te crees?”

  Who did I think I was? “I’m somebody,” I answered evenly in English, “who wouldn’t stand around watching my kids get beaten!” I shoved a doll back on the shelf. In English, I could be powerful. In English, I didn’t belong to her.

  “What did you say? Who did you say stands around doing nothing?”

  From the height of my chair, I stared her down. I didn’t care what she thought anymore. My chin up, I hopped off, grabbed some pajamas, and headed for the bathroom. Pablo gave me a thumbs-up as I passed him. In the bathroom I locked the door and changed, then crouched under the vanity for my hidden paperback before putting the toilet seat down to read. But all I could do was sit and rub my temples.

  Eventually, a tap came. “Coast is clear,” Pablo whispered.

  In the room, my mother had finished putting everything back pretty close to how it was supposed to be, except that she’d left the UPS box on the floor for me to squeeze up there somehow. I kicked it.

  On my bed, the old pink bedspread was folded over the white coverlet. My mother had turned off the harsh overhead light and left my bedside lamp on, a rosy glow in the corner.

  My room seemed to have recovered its original identity from when we’d first moved to Miami. After Mami had taken me to Sears for the pink bedspread, she’d sewn the dotted-Swiss curtains and we hung them up and wrapped wire daisies around the panels to let in more light. Together, we’d shaken out the bedspread and made the bed, and then she walked around stretching and smoothing the folds of the cloth. When she’d gotten everything perfect, she stepped back by the door, put her arm around me, and pressed me close. In the curve of her arm, her little girl had rested.

  I woke early the next morning and left my house without preparing the café con leche.

  Royal Palm was quiet and deserted when I arrived except for a few teachers. I plopped myself on the ground near the dumpsters. The grass was damp, but that was normal. School was normal. No one was trying to kill me or drive me crazy or squish me into the ground like a bug. I took out my excised diary pages and fished around in my pencil case for matches. When I found a broken Newport Menthol, I lit the cigarette and burned holes in the pages. Then I finished smoking the crumb of cigarette and went to throw the burnt sheets into the dumpster.

  By first period English, the aspirins had worn off and my headache returned in full force. I told Mrs. Foster I was sick to stop her from hounding me with questions. Fátima really was sick, and I felt lonely without her. I got through the morning thinking that I would find Octavio later and tell him my new cuento, but by lunch, I was too nauseous to talk and asked the cafeteria proctor for a pass instead.

  The yard behind our school was a huge field surrounded by a track, the trees leaning over the fence like spectators. As I headed out there, sunlight pummeled my sore head. “¡¿Por qué?! ¡¿Por qué?!” I pressed my fingers into my temples to stop the pounding, but that didn’t work. Frustrated and mad, I began to run—first, stomping the ground hard as if to kill my shadow, then crossing the track arbitrarily back and forth. But nothing killed the headache. In desperation, I ran faster, fleeing toward the streets beyond the school grounds.

  My head hurt so much, I didn’t know what to do, so I kept running through the neighborhood of dogtrot houses until I arrived at a park I’d frequented with David. In the roots of the lone eucalyptus tree, I sat down, protected from the eyes of garbage collectors or retirees who might be wondering why I wasn’t in school. Gazing up into the tree’s leaves, I felt their darkness swimming toward me and closed my eyes. I imagined my mother in the kitchen, home from the early shift. The washing machine going off. Eventually, she would pick up her dark burden of clothes.

  The image of my father, I had to squeeze out. He was a traitor I would never love.

  I focused on trying to breathe in the cool air of the tree, and its great shadow contained me. When the beats in my head had finally slowed, I rose cautiously and began the arduous journey back to Royal Palm, with only a brief stop at an air-conditioned convenience store before I headed into the heat again. Florida weighed me down and wore out the last of my energy.

  I reported to the school nurse, who looked at my sweaty face and decided to take my temperature. “You’re okay,” she concluded. “But why don’t you lie on the cot until next period?” She gave me an aspirin, but I held up two fingers and she handed me another.

  By the end of the day, the headache had finally passed.

  At the bus stop, I sat and let 77s and 43s go by. I felt so tired, like I really did want to die.

  It was better to be mad. Mad at my mother, mad at my father. Who was worse?

  She’d let things get out of hand. It was her fault he was so crazy. She was weak, inept. She’d drugged him. Lied to him. Now, she wouldn’t stand up for me when it mattered.

  And him—I’d squashed myself into the ground for him, but he’d crushed me out anyway, as if I were nothing more than a water bug.

  A small, hard voice in my brain told me that my father was too crazy to have meant what he did. But in my own crazy heart I believed that he’d hurt me on purpose.

  Eventually, because there was nowhere else to go, I forced myself to board a bus and return home. I couldn’t bear to use the back door, so I walked around to the front. When I knocked, Manolo gave me a puzzled look before heading off to work.

  I went into my room without greeting my parents, then wearily spread my voluminous homework out on the bed. Eleventh grade was going to be no piece of cake. Odd number grades were always the hardest. How I wished I were in an even number. Twelve would be the perfect number to break out of this prison at last.

  When Mami came in, I didn’t glance up. She kissed my forehead. “Too much homework?” she asked, in a voice fake wit
h sympathy.

  I didn’t answer.

  “Well, come help soon. Don’t forget to put that away,” she reminded me, indicating the UPS box. After she closed the door, I stared at the box and got up to inspect my mess of a closet again. How would I squeeze in something extra? I eyed the smaller, water-stained box with our family pictures—maybe I should stick that inside the UPS box?

  Climbing on my chair, I pulled down the photo box and couldn’t help but grin, despite my dour spirits, at the stiff, colored-over studio portrait on top: Pablo, Manolo, and me, smiling with our fat little hands under our chins. I flipped through a few out-of-focus black-and-white photos under the portrait—my parents on the old Roman bridge in Cartagena; my grandfather and me, holding hands in front of a palm tree with the Caribbean sparkling behind us; blurry people I didn’t recognize. Someone—my mother, I guessed—had run out of steam and stopped marking the dates on the back. In one undated photo, she wore dark glasses and a sleeveless dress with big buttons down the front. She was smiling vaguely at some place beyond the camera as if trying to hide her doubts. My father smiled too, his arm around her. He had all his hair then. You got the feeling that the family picture was his idea and that my mother had gone along—as she had with bringing us to the United States, moving us to Florida, treating my father’s ideas as if they were normal, and everything else. At different heights in front of them, my brothers and I posed obediently while the sun shot pokers into our eyes.

  Under the pictures, I found a pink leather book with “Nuestro Bebé” calligraphied in gold script on the cover. As I opened the baby book, I recognized it as mine. I barely remembered it, though in elementary school, my brothers and I used to go through our childhood mementos constantly while hounding my mother about what we were like when we were small. Had we cried coming out of her? Who was the biggest baby? Whom did she love best?

  I love you best, mi’ja, because you’re my oldest, she’d said. You, Manolo, because you’re my middle child. And you, Pablito, because you’re my baby.