When Tito Loved Clara

by Jon Michaud

  “Where do you live?” she asked her mother.

  “Far Rockaway,” she said.

  “Near the beach,” said Yunis. “You're going to love it.”

  After the initial glee of the escape, after the initial round of hugs and shoulder rubs, after the laughter and the whoops of excitement, after the exchange of the most urgent family news—that her abuelita was dead, but her abuelito lived on, that her Tío Modesto was married and her Tía Augustina divorced—there had been a period of silence in the car, as if they were all waiting for something to go wrong, for Clara's father to appear behind them in his pickup, for a flat tire to strand them on the side of the road, or for them all to realize that there had been a terrible mistake and that they weren't really related to one another. Clara, sitting in the backseat and still holding her mother's hand, looked at the people around her in the car: the members of her new family. There was Javy, a short, very dark man with bug eyes and a thin, debonair mustache. He was so dark that Clara suspected he was at least part Haitian. He wore a crimson linen shirt and a crisp Panama hat. There was an unlit cigar in his mouth, which he removed now and then to spit a fleck of tobacco out the window. (This was her mother's second husband. He would die six years later in a high-speed accident on the Belt Parkway.) Once they were in Queens, Javy turned up the radio. The mellow country lilt of a bachata filled the car.

  Up front, next to him, was Yunis, who did not resemble her father in any way. Clara guessed that she was fifteen, maybe sixteen, which meant that her mother and Javy had met very soon after Clara's mother and father had come to New York. Her parents must have broken up quickly after arriving in America. Her mother had been with Javy much, much longer than she had been with Clara's father. Yunis began to dance, moving her shoulders to the music and singing along. Yunis and her father shared a private joke and she punched him on the arm. She was then still just a goofy teen-ager, not yet the schemer and scammer that single-motherhood and her Virginia boyfriend would make her. Javy turned up the music again.

  In the back next to her was her mother. She was recognizably the same woman from the wedding photos Clara had studied in her grandparents' house when she was a child, a beautiful and some-what daunting woman. In those photographs—there were three of them—her mother had shown the beginnings of the double crease between her brows, a mark of perpetual suspicion and fret. To the attentive observer those lines would have foretold the quick end to her first marriage, which Clara had long suspected was precipi-tated by her conception. That double crease had now deepened to a double crevice. Only when her mother laughed uproariously (a rare event) did the creases disappear completely. Yes, she was recognizably the woman from those photographs, and yet Clara did not feel at ease with her, did not feel connected to, related to her mother. Not yet.

  Her mother wore gold bracelets on her wrists and big hoops on her ears. Clara would learn in the coming months that she spent a great deal of time working on her appearance—her eyebrows were always plucked, her hair was always straight, her clothes were always pressed, and her makeup was always in place. Looking at her now, Clara saw that there was a scar on her lip—a pale incision emerging from her lipstick and running perpendicular to her mouth, as if she had bitten down on a razor blade. Clara would come to believe that her mother's attention to her appearance was a way of spitting in the face of her limited circumstances. Looking good made her feel wealthier than she would ever be.

  All of these redolent things—Javy's Panama hat, her sister's pregnancy, the lines on her mother's face—had stories behind them, stories Clara wanted to hear. But for now, not knowing those stories pointed to the scary truth that she had placed herself in the hands of strangers. For all she knew, they were taking her away to be sold into the sex trade. In this scheme, Javy was the pimp, her mother the madam, and Yunis one of the unfortunate girls whose precautions had failed. The idea made her smile. Wasn't that exactly what her father and Dolores had always said? That her mother was a whore? She'd never believed it, but there it was, in her subconscious, feeding her fears. Brainwashed.

  THE APARTMENT WAS in a privately developed housing complex near Rockaway Boulevard, a block from the beach. At a first glance, Clara would have written them off as city projects. But they were in better shape—there was no graffiti and no litter around the entrance. The only indication that the ocean was close were the squawking, foraging seagulls standing on the rims of garbage cans. “This is your home,” said her mother, as she unlocked the door. It was a tidy, cramped place. “We got two bedrooms here,” she said. “One for me and Javy and the small one for Yunis. You're going to have to sleep on the couch.”

  “Does it fold out?” Clara asked.

  “No,” said her mother. “But you're not too tall. You'll fit. You can put your clothes in Yunis's closet. Make her throw out some of that garbage she got in there.” In Yunis's room, a bassinet occupied the available space between the bed and the closet door. “We're going to set the crib up in the living room when the baby gets a little older,” Yunis said. “Maybe then you can sleep in my bed and I'll sleep out there.” Clara nodded. It hit her for the first time how much of a difference Dolores's accident settlement had made to their life in Inwood. Without it, her father would have been pumping gas. Without it, she and Efran would have shared a room.

  Clara was given the spare key. She was shown how to turn the shower on and off with the pliers that must not be removed from the bathroom. She was told never to touch the radiator valves, no matter how hot or cold it got. She was shown where the iron and the ironing board were kept. The schedule was laid out for her. Javy and her mother worked six days a week. Javy was a gypsy cab driver. Her mother was a chamber maid at the JFK Ramada. Javy worked nights, her mother days. They overlapped for one meal every twenty-four hours: dinner, which was Javy's breakfast. In the mornings and evenings, bathroom times were assigned. Obedience to the schedule was essential to the functioning of the household. Sunday was a day of rest. A day of sleep. When the tour was complete and the schedule explained, her mother said, “Tengo sueno,” and retired to the master bedroom, where Javy was already sacked out, his cigar stub in a glass ashtray like a set of false teeth.

  While they slept, Yunis took her sister on a walk around the nearby streets, showing her the crucial sites: the supermarket, the drugstore, the Laundromat, and the subway station. It was a much more mixed neighborhood than Inwood. No color or race pre-dominated. Seeing the station, with its blue-circled A, Clara had to smile. All this time her mother had been no more than a train ride away. She would not have even had to change trains to get here! In running away from her father, she had done nothing more than travel from one end of the Eighth Avenue line to the other. And yet, she had changed her life. She was still in New York but felt very far away.

  After they had seen the main street, Yunis led her over to the ocean. It was not a beach day—a little too cool—but there were a few clusters of die-hard sunbathers and swimmers arrayed on the brown sand.

  “When are you due?” Clara asked.

  “November,” said Yunis. “I can't wait for it to be over.”

  “Was Mami upset when you told her?”

  “A little. She cried a lot. She said I was too young to be a woman. But she couldn't have been much older when she had you.”

  “She was eighteen, abuelita always said. My age. I'm going to be a tía. That's amazing.” Clara looked out at the water. “Did she ever talk about me?”

  “Yes,” said Yunis. “She told me I had a sister, that someday I would meet you. I want you to be the baby's godmother,” Yunis exclaimed loudly into the onshore breeze.

  “Of course!” said Clara, and hugged her sister. “I would be honored. Do you know what you're having?”

  “Yes. But I ain't told no one. Can you keep a secret?”

  “Yes.”

  “It's a girl.”

  “Who's the father. Do I get to meet him?”

  “Luis,” said Yunis. “He's down in Flor
ida. Once he finds a place, I'm going down there to be with him.”

  “He's older?”

  “He's twenty-one.”

  When they got back to the apartment, the door to the master bedroom was still closed. Yunis asked her. “You hungry?”

  Clara said she was.

  “There's bacalao and rice,” she said, showing her the covered pots on the stove. “Help yourself. Mami's a good cook.”

  Clara served herself a modest portion and put it in the microwave. Even before the bell rang, her mouth was watering. She carried the plate back into the living room, where Yunis had turned on the television.

  “What shows do you like?” her sister asked.

  “I don't know,” said Clara. “I never got to watch TV at my father's.”

  “For real? No wonder you wanted to bust out of there. Oh, good, they're giving Soul Train.”

  Clara put the first bite of bacalao and rice in her mouth and closed her eyes with happiness as the memory of eating codfish cooked by her abuelita on the farm in La Isabela came back to her. That was the clincher. Only her mother could have made food that tasted like that.

  She and Yunis watched Soul Train, commenting on the clothes and hairstyles of the dancers. Yunis got up to try a couple of the moves, but was hindered by her enlarged belly. Then the Sunday movie came on. A little later, they heard stirring from behind the door of the master bedroom, stirrings and laughter. The laughter stopped and the stirrings gradually assembled themselves into a steady, accelerating compression and release of bedsprings.

  Clara looked at Yunis. “Are they?”

  “Bet your ass, Sis. Every Sunday afternoon, Papi gets some action.” She aimed the remote at the TV and turned up the volume.

  THAT NIGHT, JAVY offered to buy Chinese to celebrate Clara's arrival. The delivery man brought cartons of lo mein and spareribs, which were spread out on the coffee table. Clara's mother brought in the plates, which had the Ramada logo on them. The liter of Pepsi that came with the dinner was poured into glasses. Javy opened a beer.

  “So, Clara, do you have a job?” her mother asked.

  “Not anymore,” said Clara. “I used to work in Papi's store.”

  “You turned in your resignation today,” said Javy, laughing.

  “I guess he won't be sending your last check,” said Yunis.

  “I never got a first check,” said Clara, and everyone broke up.

  “You're going to need to get a job,” her mother said. “You want to buy clothes. You want to go out. You need a job. I don't have money to pay for you.”

  “It's going to be hard for me to find a job now. I'm going to start school in a couple of weeks.”

  “School? High school?” asked her mother.

  “College.”

  “Where you going?”

  “Cornell.”

  “Where's that?”

  “Upstate. Ithaca.”

  “Eee-ta-ka,” her mother repeated. “How far is Eee-ta-ka?”?

  “I don't know. Five or six hours by car.”

  Her mother's face soured and she glanced over at Javy, who raised his eyebrows. Then she said: “You can't do that. I finally get my daughter back and she wants to go away from me?”

  “But Mami, it's a good school and they are paying for me. I will be going there almost for free.”

  “They don't have good schools in New York City? You want to run away from me so soon? You need to be here.”

  “But Mami.”

  “If you are going to go to Eee-ta-ka, you are going now.” She pointed at the door.

  That was the first sign that living with her mother was not going to be the utopia she'd always imagined. The first of many signs. Clara lay on the couch that night thinking about the pictures of the dorms she'd seen in the Cornell brochures that Ms. Almonte brought to their lunches in the Riverdale Diner. Ms. Almonte. What was she going to tell her? Clara lay on the couch and remembered other pictures from the brochure—the view of the snow-covered lake, the stone bridge over the waterfall. She could have those things still. In her bookbag was her life's savings: $512. She could get a bus to Ithaca. She could go right now. The A stopped at Port Authority. She wouldn't even have to change trains. She could leave both of her parents on the same day. Yes, she could. But she wasn't going to. For a start, she'd promised to be the godmother to Yunis's baby. Clara blinked, looking into the gloom of her new home, and considered her options. It was all so sudden that she did not know what to do. Perhaps she could defer her entry to Cornell for a year. Perhaps she could start a semester late. Would they let her do that? It was her first night in her new home—the first night since Efran's birth that she hadn't spent under her father's roof. She didn't want to be rushed into doing anything anymore. She had pined for her mother—for her real family—and now she had her. Clara rolled on her side and looked into the murk of the apartment. Just sleep, she thought. Things will be clearer in the morning. You've come far enough for one day.

  CLARA WAS DOUBLE-PARKED outside the house on Payson Street. She had not been there since escaping with her mother, sister, and Javy. On all her subsequent visits to Inwood, she had avoided Payson, which was easy enough, given that it was a one-way residential street only two blocks long. She had just left Tito standing on Seaman Avenue, had run from him through Isham Park, to the Odyssey, which she'd parked on 211th. Beside her, on the passenger seat, was the folded-up photograph of her husband kissing another woman. Clara had intended to get out of Manhattan, to go straight home. But she was shaken by what had just happened, and as she waited at a light on Broadway, she realized that she might never come back to Inwood again, realized, in fact, that she would make every effort not to come back. She turned right on Academy Street and then cut back to Payson, driving past the forested section of the park and coming to a stop opposite her father's old house. Dolores had sold it not long after her father's death. The new owners—or a succession of new owners—had finally fixed the place up. The stoop had been reconstructed. A shiny red door had been installed. There were modern windows everywhere and curtains visible on the topmost floor, where she had once retreated from Dolores's beatings.

  She remembered all that had happened since the morning she had fled in Javy's cab, remembered how she had lived in her mother's apartment for two years, commuting into Manhattan to attend classes, remembered how she'd found a parttime job with a filing service that worked in law libraries all over Midtown, remembered how, when Yunis's baby was born, she took her turn in the rotation of feeding and changing her, sharing these duties with her mother and sister. She remembered taking her $512 and buying a crib and bedding and formula for the baby, remembered how tired she had been all the time in school and at work, remembered realizing one day that months had passed since her last period. She told nobody about it and went by herself to have it done in a place in Manhattan, a place whose address she'd gotten from an ad in the subway.

  One day Yunis had stopped talking about Deysei's father, stopped talking about moving to Florida. Not long after that, she met the ex-sailor from Virginia, who had an apartment up in Inwood, where Yunis and Deysei moved. She remembered the long, slow thaw that took place between her and her mother, how it wasn't until she had gotten married and had a child of her own that she felt a real bond develop. She remembered library school and the early days of her courtship with Thomas, a heady time when, she thought, nothing could go wrong for her anymore. But of course it could. Not much later, right around the time she and Thomas had moved in together, she got the phone call telling her that her father had been murdered. He had been killed during a holdup of the store, shot four times in the chest and head. He'd been robbed before and had always just handed over the money. But Clara was willing to bet that he'd gotten sick of it, that he'd put up a fight and paid the price.

  That call had come from inside the house she was looking at now. Clara stayed parked there for half an hour, partly in the hope of seeing one of the house's current residents and partly because she
was still reeling from all that had happened that afternoon. All these years later, Tito still carried a torch for her. It sickened her to think of it, to admit that the unborn baby had always been more important to her than the loss of Tito—that she pined for it much more than she had ever pined for him. It shamed her to think how little she had accounted for him. But what was she supposed to do now? He was unstable. A reasonable relationship between them was not possible. To see him again would only encourage his outrageous hopes.

  And then there was Thomas. Had he really gone to Washington? Or was he somewhere else entirely? At a bed-and-breakfast in Vermont with the blonde from the photograph, sleeping in a four-poster bed decorated with an absurd number of pillows, which they would use to experiment with different sexual positions, sleeping late and waking to classical music and buckwheat pancakes. Or perhaps they were in a hotel suite in Atlantic City, where her husband, who never gambled, would play roulette, the blonde, in a slinky dress, clutching his arm and jumping up and down as the ball landed on his number, bringing him a small fortune, which he would spend on her. Or perhaps they were in a cheap motel on Route 22, the two of them running out to get fast food between fucks, eating it while watching the free HBO.

  Clara's imagination could conjure a string of these appalling scenarios with little effort. She'd had her suspicions all along but had always pushed them aside because Thomas was so unflirtatious with other women, so straight, so square, because, until the last six months or so, she had always felt herself to be the main object of his desire. It had been a difficult year, she would admit that. But she was used to difficulty, used to waiting out the bad times. She had counted on Thomas being the same way but, really, what difficulties had he ever faced in his life? Raised in the suburbs. His prosperous parents had divorced, but it had never seemed like a traumatic event for him. He was in college by then and often said that divorce had been the right thing for both of them. It was easy to romanticize hard times when they happened to someone else, even someone you loved. It was much harder when it happened to you. Maybe Thomas was only now finding that out. Yet, she felt that her willingness to trust her husband had somehow made her complicit in his cheating.