Try to Remember

by Iris Gomez

  How much love could a person give?

  The pages of the baby book were embellished with watercolor drawings of storks and flowers. Each page had a gold script title, under which my parents had taken turns filling in information. “Nació” for the date and place of birth and doctor’s name. “El bautizo” for the church and time of baptism and the names of my godparents. There was a page with my baby footprint—so tiny and cute! A page for Visitors, one for my Family Tree—my father had laboriously recorded all the way back to my great- great-grandparents on his side and as far as my great-grandparents on my mother’s. There was a chart of my monthly growth the first year. My Favorite Toys. My First Word.

  I stared at the familiar block letters as my eyes filled with tears.

  Papá.

  [ TWENTY-FOUR ]

  THE SMELL OF MAMI’S ONION, GARLIC, and green pepper sofrito drifted into my room a little later, after I’d finished straightening out the closet and started in on homework. I squared my shoulders, put my pen down, and went to help her.

  She was preparing to fry meat, so I pulled the rice pot out of a cabinet, filled the pot with water and set that on the stove to boil. When my father heard me, he scurried in with one of his assignments. “Mi’jita,” he said, as if nothing had changed.

  I lugged the big rice bag to the sink so I wouldn’t have to look at him. Opening the bag, I dumped the grains into a strainer and turned on the faucet.

  “Roberto,” my mother broke in, while carefully spooning oil into the frying pan.

  “¿Sí?” he asked.

  “No más.” No more.

  I stopped washing the rice and let the water run.

  “She has too much schoolwork, Roberto. It’s too difficult. She needs to concentrate. You want her to do well, don’t you?”

  “Claro que sí,” he answered agreeably.

  “Well then, you can’t give her any more typing. She has to concentrate on her studies.” Mami lit a match and touched it to the burner.

  “Of course,” he said, smiling inanely. “I only ask her to help when she’s finished.”

  “No, Roberto,” Mami insisted. “You’re tiring her out. She can’t do all that homework and then work for you too. She’s still a child. You’ll have to complete your own letters. You have time. I can show you how to use the typewriter.”

  I was very still, my hands buried in the softened grains under the water.

  My father didn’t say anything. He gave my mother one of his weird laughs and waited. But when she bustled around without explanation, he simply shuffled back to his room.

  That was it. Over. Just like that.

  Mami threw the meat into the frying pan. As it sizzled, I slowly carried the bowl of washed rice over and placed it next to her, then grabbed a ripe avocado from the counter. “Should I cut this up?”

  She nodded. “Don’t throw away the seed,” she reminded me, and handed me a jar for the pit.

  After I’d cut up the avocado, I stuck the pit in the jar. “What else?” I asked.

  “Nothing. Go finish your homework.”

  In the doorway, I hesitated. The water in the rice pot had come to a boil, and my mother threw the grains in. Her hands were bony like mine, only longer. The wedding rings slipped around on her finger, but she never took them off.

  “Gracias, Mami,” I said quietly.

  “No hay por que agradecer,” she answered, waving me away. No reason to thank her.

  The porqué of reason, the cause. Only in Spanish could a word mean both why and because.

  • • •

  Fátima recovered from her flu and returned to school the next day. We couldn’t talk much in English class, since Mrs. Foster had assigned passages of Things Fall Apart to read aloud, nor at lunch either because too many people were around. Instead, I made plans to stop at her house later, after I was done with work.

  As soon as I arrived, she led me into her room by the hand and sat facing me on the bed. “You seem upset, Gabi. What’s wrong?”

  “I don’t know Fátima.” I looked away, feeling so alone with my truths. But how could I break down and reveal the very worst truth—the one about my father? “It’s just—I’m not sure what to believe in anymore.”

  “You mean like God? Because of that creepy priest?”

  “No…” My lip quivered. “It’s not that.”

  “What is it then, Gabi?”

  I twisted the handle of my book bag while she waited quietly beside me. She was such a good friend, always kind, always sharing her hope for the future with me. If I couldn’t trust her, who would I ever trust again?

  “It’s everything, Fátima,” I blurted out finally, facing her and taking a deep breath. “The thing is,” I continued bravely, “my father’s gotten to be a big problem. A big problem. And my mother isn’t too good at handling things either. So everything’s—I don’t know—out of control. I don’t know what to do anymore.”

  Fátima’s face looked more troubled. “Do you want me to ask my parents for help?”

  “No! I mean, thanks, but—see, my father doesn’t realize it, when he’s being that way.”

  “What way, Gabi?”

  “Like,” I swallowed, “hitting people.”

  “Bad kind of hitting?”

  I nodded.

  “Like, did he hit you?”

  “Yeah.” Remembering made my head throb. “He hits everybody.”

  “¡Ay Gabi!” Fátima’s brows furrowed. “Isn’t there someone who could talk to him?”

  “It’s not a talking thing, Fátima. He’s—crazy.” Once I’d uttered the word, the whole gruesome por qué story spilled out. “It was awful, Fátima, like he was possessed or something. See, he has these delusions, on top of the temper. He thinks we’re gonna get millions of dollars from the government, and that everyone’s trying to keep him from collecting the money. And I’m all alborotada all the time fearing that he’s going to get arrested and lose his green card and we’ll end up in some sad life in Colombia with no way back!”

  I leaned against her pillow. What a relief it was to finally let the truth out. “We give him these sleeping pills to calm him down and stuff, but sometimes he doesn’t take them. I don’t trust those pills anyway. He’s still crazy underneath. And he could do something horrible too. But all the time, we’re like pretending that everything’s normal. Only it’s not. Nothing in my house is normal. Nothing.”

  “ You’re normal, Gabi. I swear.” Fátima reached over and hugged me.

  I broke down and cried. Philos—the only kind of love that didn’t hurt.

  I kept my distance from my father at home in the aftermath of his attack. I didn’t kiss him hello or good night. I didn’t want to feel anything toward him.

  Mami offered him lessons on the typewriter, but he resisted. I figured he might force Pablo to do his dirty work, but my brother shrewdly avoided that by claiming homework the way I used to—although he actually did have a lot to do now. The nuns even gave him free guitar lessons that seemed to be replacing the glue-sniffing hobby.

  My father followed Mami around while she cooked or cleaned.

  “¡Ay, Roberto!” she complained. “Leave me in peace!”

  After a few days of wandering in uncertainty, he decided to write his incomprehensible articles in longhand.

  “It’s better that way,” she confided to me. “He fills more hours in his day.” She was meticulous with his pill now and wouldn’t leave for work until she saw him swallow it down. Tía Rita and Tío Victor had tried to press upon her the importance of some kind of medical intervention, but my mother clung to her own blind faith in, and loyalty to, my father, come what may.

  Although the pill subdued him and writing longhand was laborious, my father acquired new energy for his increasingly strange compositions. Alone, he dismantled whatever feeble dykes we’d once mounted against the vast sea of hypothesis and correlation.

  After a few days, it got so he wouldn’t come out for dinner.

>   My mother sent my brothers in there one night to get him.

  “I have to work,” he said, bent over his scrolls.

  I glanced into the room. When he looked up, he didn’t really see me. His eyes were filmy, as if with conjunctivitis, and I had the fleeting impression that a person could literally drown in hallucinations, if they were strong enough.

  It was only a matter of time, I feared, before that storm finally drowned everybody.

  After my confession, Fátima insisted I hang out at her house all that week on the pretext of planning her birthday festivities. I tried to reassure her that my father was absorbed by his elaborate transcriptions, though I was glad she was so concerned. I was also grateful that she didn’t try to drag me to church anymore, though she worried aloud about me “losing my way.” One morning in English class, she passed me a folded slip of paper, and when I unfolded it cautiously under my textbook I found a holy picture inside. It was the gold-trimmed kind that had been a prize trade back in Catholic school: A beautiful angel with an illuminated face and enormous wings lifted a bouquet of lilies into lazurite blue skies. The caption on the reverse read: St. Gabriel the Archangel, Messenger. Fátima had scribbled, “Do you still believe in angels? XOX, me.”

  I grinned at her, and she smiled angelically back.

  That next weekend was her party. I went over there early, and her father was already roasting a pig in the yard.

  In the sisters’ bedroom I sat on the floor and helped Fátima blow up balloons. Her sister Rosalía came in, holding a curling iron in her hair, and walked up to the closet. She gestured toward the pink-and-white polka-dot dress on a hanger on the door. “This is it, Gabi,” she told me.

  “Slinky,” I said with an appreciative smile and thanked her for loaning me the dress. It was pretty—so what if it might reveal some curves? I turned to Fátima. “So is your Chemistry friend coming?”

  She nodded enthusiastically as she blew up the last balloon and tied it with a white ribbon. Then we grabbed the blown-up balloons and took them outside. After we’d tied them to the fence and festively lined up folding chairs next to each other, we went back inside, stealing a few spoonfuls of black beans from her mother’s huge pot. By the time we got ourselves dressed, boisterous relatives had arrived. They were followed by Amy and Octavio, who went to the yard with me to admire the pig (Amy and Octavio) and feel sorry for it (me).

  Fátima’s heartthrob, Mark, a husky guy with hair shaved short as a soldier’s, showed up while we jóvenes were snacking on the patio and adults danced in the living room. When the doorbell rang again, I was surprised and glad to see Claudio. His grandfather wasn’t doing well, so I hadn’t been sure Claudio would come. In his crisp white shirt, he circled the living room and greeted every one of Fátima’s relatives.

  “What a guy,” said Octavio.

  Claudio joined us outside. There wasn’t enough breeze to keep the balloons in the air, so he helped me tie the floaters closer to the fence. Some balloons popped, prompting Fátima’s cousins to bring out firecrackers and roman candles. Claudio and I stopped to watch the spray of comets as they dissolved, leaving in their wake the golden Arabic moon and its radiant twin star in the darkness. Adults wandered out, urging us jóvenes inside to take their places, so we headed indoors and Claudio asked me quietly in Spanish, “Do you know how to dance to this?”

  “More or less,” I said with a smile.

  He held out his hand. “More or less, I accept.”

  As he led me out, I looked to Fátima for some moral support, though I knew Mark didn’t dance Latin.

  “Come on, Octavio,” Fátima said, pulling him by the arm. “We can’t let the old folks defeat us.”

  Fátima’s father lifted a rum drink in the air and cheered us on. “¡Vamos!”

  It was a moderately paced merengue. Claudio held me lightly, letting me warm up before trying any turns. The cotton fabric of his shirt was thin, the hard slope of his muscle surprising under my hand, and suddenly I was happy to be wearing that flirty pink dress. He pressed my back in for a turn, grinned as we came together in time, and twirled me again. We picked up the pace and traded smiles as we slipped through each other’s hands. More young couples joined in, the last of the older folks ceding the room. As Claudio and I turned one last time, the merengue yielded to a sentimental bachata, and someone lowered the lights. With his eyes, he asked my permission, then drew my fingers to his chest and pressed me closer. A scent of freshly ironed cotton, rainwater, or something sweeter that I couldn’t define filled my face. Into my hair, Claudio breathed the lyrics: Lloraré—I will cry for you.

  From the yard, men announced the pig-carving, and the dancers released each other. Claudio grazed my cheek with the barest of kisses and said my name once, his voice low. Gabriela. We moved to the patio, the air warm between us, my name ringing joyfully inside me.

  The next morning, I got an early call—Lara needed babysitting help.

  She was unusually energized when I arrived, and I found both girls pink-cheeked and healthy for once.

  Luna and Solita played happily while Lara was gone, and I relived my heady feelings of dancing with Claudio. If love could be exhilarating, I fantasized wistfully, wouldn’t that be a marriage of agapé?

  When Lara returned, sooner than expected, she’d brought almond cakes from the Spanish bakery. “We’re celebrating your father’s return!” she told the girls. Gaily, she escorted Luna and Solita outside to eat, and then came back to prepare our customary coffee.

  “Is Walter’s work done?” I asked in surprise as I removed two cups from the cabinet.

  “Oh no, there’s a great deal more.” Lara put the cakes on an ivory china plate I’d never seen before that had tiny purple nose-gays and a silver edge. “But he can finish here,” she added with a smile as she poured the coffee into our cups. “We need him,” she said simply, lifting the tray and carrying it to the yard.

  As I trailed behind her, I worried vaguely about whether any of the “compromises” Lara had spoken of in the past could be avoided before it was too late. “But, Lara, it doesn’t seem like—” I hesitated, struggling to find the right words between honesty and respect, “like when Walter’s around, he helps you that much.”

  “True,” she acknowledged, as we claimed the plastic table. “But he does even less thousands of miles away! ¿Sabes qué, Gabi? The problem is that Walter never anticipated a domestic life. He’s still—exploring. That makes things difficult for the girls and me.” She cast an approving look at Luna and Solita, who’d gotten out the hula hoop. When Lara clapped for them, their round sweaty faces beamed.

  “But it doesn’t seem fair, Lara,” I said dubiously.

  “Oh, you’re right, my Gabrielita.” She offered me the pretty plate with the cakes on it. “But you see, I’m getting a little more time this way.”

  I tried to return a positive smile. Lara loved Walter, I knew, but the marriage route didn’t seem to have provided her with too much freedom even if she did have a lot more independence than Mami. The conversation was disheartening.

  After we’d finished our coffees, I went to get Miss McWhorter’s brochures and permission forms from my bag. My mother had softened a bit since my father’s attack on me, and what did I have to lose by letting Lara try to persuade her about the trip? Lara perused the material curiously, then promised to come by when the girls were napping and Camila could look in on them.

  The talk with Mami didn’t start out too well.

  “A hotel?” my mother exclaimed. “A young girl in a foreign hotel? With strangers?”

  “I am sure the program teachers will provide excellent supervision,” Lara said. “If you like, I can speak to the counselor for you and investigate the lodgings too. Everything will surely be of the highest quality. It’s a school. They’re not going to take children anywhere inappropriate.”

  “Thank you, Lara. It’s not necessary. That’s too long for Gabriela to be away from her family.”

  “
Not at all, Evi. It’s only a semester. I’m sure you’ve had to be away from your family temporarily.”

  “Never.”

  “What about when Tía Julia died, Mami?” I burst in. “You left us for almost two weeks.”

  My mother shook her head. “It’s not the days!” she cried, wringing her hands. “It’s just not right!”

  I looked at Lara. This was the kind of point that defeated me. I mean, who decided what was right? How could you prove or disprove it?

  “Evangelina,” Lara said gently. “I know how hard it is. I’m a mother too. But this is a wonderful opportunity for Gabriela. I know you love your daughter. I’m sure you want her to have the best opportunities, the ones you didn’t have.”

  Mami started to cry. “Tú no sabes lo difícil que es…” How difficult it was. “Taking care of a home without help.” She cried about how she couldn’t manage without me, about struggling to make ends meet, about my father’s work problems—and his perplexing illness.

  I tried to harden myself, to keep my soul from drowning in hers, but Lara was patient, patting my mother’s shoulder and sympathizing with her difficulties. Then Lara gave me a look that meant “go,” and I pretended to—turning the corner and leaning against the wall so I could keep listening.

  “Roberto was so honorable,” Mami said, sobbing. “If you knew, Lara, how hard he worked. After his father died, he was the one who stayed. Even his sisters were gone before him. He wouldn’t leave that woman alone. Imagine, Lara. What kind of man does that? Only Roberto. He was the one who worked the hardest. And had the most hope. When we married and after, when we moved to the refinery, and he was so proud too. Dios mío, I can’t explain to myself how this could’ve happened to him. ”

  I pictured the young, dark-eyed man standing beside my mother in solemn promise in their wedding picture. The confident father, radiant with hope on our sunny Roman bridge in Cartagena. The stubborn father who’d pressed my wriggling footprint into a pink baby book to immortalize my childhood.