Memory Mambo

by Achy Obejas

  Eventually, the Polish guys sold the building and the new people who live upstairs knocked down the walls between apartments. The new people don’t buy furniture. They’re mostly Anglo artists, long-haired and cool, who eat standing up and sleep on futons. Day or night, they have their lavish lights on. Through the windows you can see huge canvases with swashes of color and the flickering of computer and TV screens. Downstairs, the Polish guys wander aimlessly around the store during business hours, worried about their long-term store lease and their suburban mortgages. They’ve gotten so desperate they’ve even hired a Spanish-speaking salesperson—a Marielito named Chacho—in the hopes of luring us back to Polonia Furniture. I think our brood’s one of the last of the original Latinos—not the new Hispanics who’ve moved in, driving German compact cars and recording English-only messages on their voice-mail. Anyway, we’re buying mostly at Sears and Homemakers now, and I don’t know what Polonia Furniture could offer to get us back.

  “Hey, you coming in or what?” asks Caridad, standing at the door of her apartment and acting annoyed, as if she’s doing me a favor by letting me in instead of me doing her one by coming over in the middle of the night.

  I step inside where it’s dark; Caridad won’t look at me. She pulls her worn pink robe closer to her body, swats the hair dangling in her face and walks into the kitchen where there’s a small light on. I follow but she doesn’t pay any attention to me. She grabs the broom she left leaning against the kitchen table and carefully sweeps around a small pile of debris in the center of the floor. There’s glass and coffee grounds and bits of food. Caridad keeps her head down, not letting me see her face, not because she’s bruised there but because she’s been crying, and she’s ashamed, and she’s not ready to talk about it just yet.

  Caridad met Jimmy at our family’s laundromat. We all knew Jimmy—all of us who worked there—because he always came in by himself on Monday nights and did exactly one load of laundry. He didn’t separate his clothes, just tossed them in all together and sat very quietly, not reading, not playing pinball, not really talking to anybody. He’d sit with his elbows propped on his thighs, fingers entangled together, foot tapping restlessly. The vein in his head would vibrate, in and out, threatening an aneurysm at any moment.

  When his wash was done, he’d take all his clothes in his hands—never a cart—and deposit them all together in a dryer, then go next door to the bodega and make a phone call. Nena thought he was dealing drugs, as did I, but my father volunteered that he thought Jimmy was just calling his mother—or a brother or girlfriend or something like that—to say the wash was almost done. My father was sympathetic even before they’d been introduced and wanted to believe Jimmy was the responsible type who would check in without making a fuss about it.

  But the rest of us—Nena, Pauli, me, all the women who worked in the laundromat at that time—we knew Jimmy wasn’t making a personal phone call. We believed he lived alone, because when the drying cycle ended, he’d carefully pluck out each piece of clothing—his hospital janitor uniform, T-shirts and jeans, Jockey underwear and long black socks—then carefully fold them into a neat little pile on one of the tables. There was never a bra or a blouse, a towel or a sheet of linen. We couldn’t figure the guy out at all. Later, after Caridad started with him, we found out he was temporarily living with his sister Adelaida and her family, and that the phone call was just to check the Little Lotto winning number, which is always announced Mondays at six. Jimmy, like my father and practically every Cuban man I’ve ever known except my Tío Raúl, plays the lottery every week and dreams of winning—of being delivered from his life’s drudgery with one magical combination.

  Jimmy started coming in to the Wash-N-Dry when Nena was in charge, while she was still finishing her B.A. and before she had moved to Miami to work at that Spanish-language allnews radio station. Back then, she was always trying to think up new things for us to do at the laundromat, new ways to draw more customers and keep the business fresh. The pinball machines, of course, were very successful. But some of her other ideas were real flops.

  There was, for example, the time she got some flyers about the laundromat translated into Korean and put them up at a nearby Korean grocery. It turned out there was a mistake in the translation which said our machines would transform clothes into charred meat. It was a big joke: For months afterwards Korean people kept coming into the laundromat, peering uneasily into our Speed Queens and just cracking up. Nena would shoo them out with a broom, embarrassed and angry with herself. The rest of us would just try to stay out of her way, containing our laughter until we were well out of earshot.

  Like the rest of us, Pauli, Caridad’s younger sister, had to put in time at the laundromat too, but she didn’t work out. It wasn’t that she was lazy. To the contrary, we could always count on Pauli, who’s all muscles (she was once a dancer at a club in Mexico City where they play rock nacional), to do the really hard work—refilling the Very Fine machine, scrubbing down the bathroom, re-stocking the supplies. She likes to keep busy and she was very strong, even then, so she really got quite a bit done. But the problem was that all her boyfriends would visit during her shift, causing fights and scandal. We had to have my mother or one of our aunts come in all the time, just to keep the boys at a distance. Tío Pepe and my father concluded that if somebody else in the family needed to be around to chaperon her anyway, then there was no benefit in having her work, so they fired her. That caused quite a sensation. Cubans don’t fire family, but we fired Pauli. It was Nena, of course, who did it: Even though they made the decision, neither Tío Pepe nor my father could bring themselves to face Pauli, the family’s most difficult child.

  Of course, Caridad worked with us too. She loved it actually: The gossip from the neighborhood’s always fresh, the pinball machines are fun, the radio’s going all the time. Caridad loved playing with the little kids that mothers always bring in, flirting with all the guys and sitting around reading Glamour and Vanidades in her spare time. She wasn’t especially good at money. Her register was always a little short but nobody would have ever accused her of stealing—besides, she always offered to make up the difference, which both Tío Pepe and my father, embarrassed, would decline, but which Nena would gladly accept. Caridad wasn’t especially good at doing the drop-off laundry either—she’d forget to move the clothes from the washers to the dryers, or she’d take an eternity folding things. Customers would show up hours later to pick up their laundry only to discover it all in a pile on top of a washer, wet and wrinkled. Caridad would charm them, though: Nobody ever got mad enough to complain. She had such a sweet way that everybody loved her—even Nena—and we kept her on.

  Caridad could have had that job forever but shortly after they married, Jimmy forced her to quit—even though that was just about when Nena and Pauli both left and the business needed Caridad most. For a while, she’d come down and do her laundry and just hang around, working informally, but that stopped when Jimmy, in a fit my Tío Pepe said was just to spite us, bought her a Maytag portable washer and dryer for the apartment. At first, I thought Tío Pepe was exaggerating, his alcoholism finally manifesting itself as paranoia, but when I saw the look on Jimmy’s face as the Maytags were hauled up the stairs, I realized my uncle had read him right all along.

  When Jimmy first started coming in to the laundromat, Caridad didn’t pay the slightest bit of attention to him. It was Nena who was obsessed with him. “See the way he just sits there, all tense like that?” she’d whisper to me as we watched Jimmy and his vein vibrating in front of a washer. “It’s like he’s a dealer or serial killer or something, you know?”

  Nena’d shadow his every step and ask the neighbors about him (but nobody knew anything, which was strange because, in our neighborhood, if people don’t know something about somebody they just make it up—except I think Jimmy’s so scary nobody dared, just in case he found out). Nena even went through his clothes once while he was at the bodega making his Lotto call, desperate f
or any clue about who he was or why he always seemed so tense, but all we got was his name from the patch on his hospital janitor uniform.

  “I just don’t like him in here,” she said. “He’s creepy. He seems dangerous. I’m trying to run a family laundromat.”

  Of course, Tío Pepe agreed that Jimmy was spooky but even he didn’t think that was grounds for tossing him from the premises, which is what Nena wanted to do. “So he’s a comemierda—you can see that, the way he sits there thinking he’s so important,” Tío Pepe would say. “But he’s paying. And he doesn’t bother anybody.”

  “What are you talking about?” Nena would protest. “He scares people. He looks like he’s going to blow up any minute. You’re just afraid of him, that’s all.”

  “Oh yeah? Oh yeah?” Tío Pepe would yell. Then he’d get huffy and walk out of the laundromat, offended—a perfect excuse to avoid the question of Jimmy and go get drunk somewhere.

  Mami, Tía Zenaida and Tía Celia, Caridad and Pauli’s mother, had another theory: They thought Nena was attracted to Jimmy and was bugged because he didn’t seem to notice her. They’d laugh and tease Nena until she got so angry she’d threaten to fire them—which, given the combination of her steely temperament and Tío Pepe and my father’s lack of spine, she’d have been able to do easily.

  “Ah, c’mon, Nena, you sure you don’t like him just a little bit?” Tía Zenaida would say. “He’s awfully handsome, and mysterious too—like in a telenovela.”

  Mami and my aunts would laugh and laugh as Nena glared and stomped off to the back room where she’d immerse herself in tax forms and public relations textbooks. Out front, Jimmy would stare intently at the clothes whirling in the washer, oblivious to the havoc he was already causing in our family.

  My cousin Caridad is beautiful—that is important to say. She’s more beautiful than her sister Pauli, more beautiful than Patricia or me, and even more beautiful than Nena, which is hard for me to admit because Nena is my sister and a real stunner. Caridad doesn’t have Nena’s fine cheekbones or stature, Pauli’s hard stomach, Patricia’s elegance, or eyelashes as long or thick as mine, but here’s what’s all hers: the blackest eyes, skin like butter, lips as juicy as a slice of mamey, and the sexiest way about her of anybody I’ve ever met—which makes her choosing Jimmy as a husband all the more puzzling. She really could have had anybody in the neighborhood but, to everyone’s dismay except my father’s, she picked him.

  Caridad took note of Jimmy because of Nena. The day it happened, she was busy hanging out, laughing with customers, reading a letter from Pauli who was then just vacationing in Mexico. Since everybody in the family seemed to think Nena had some bug about Jimmy, Caridad finally decided to check him out.

  I was there when she did it. I was at a folding table, carefully creasing a pair of long cotton pants for Emilia Fernández, who always dropped off her clothes with us even though—especially after she was appointed the first Dominican on the school board—she could easily afford a more expensive laundry service, one that would pick up and deliver clothes to her door.

  Caridad strolled over to Jimmy, his elbows nailed to his thighs, watching his clothes tossing around in the washer as if this were the most compelling thing he’d ever seen. She just looked at him for a moment, studying him, I think, and understood right away how ridiculous the situation was. In anybody else, this realization might have provoked laughter but not in Caridad—because what she saw as absurd was not Jimmy, but our making fun of him, our focusing on him as an object of fear and ridicule.

  I watched from across the room, still folding Emilia Fernandez’s clean laundry (a beautiful black negligee, a pair of black tights, a lacy pink bra), as Caridad spoke to Jimmy and he answered, his eyes never leaving the washer, his vein quivering as his entire face flushed red. And I realized, watching as she leaned into the washer and partially obscured his view, that this was probably the first time any one of us had ever actually spoken to him. I watched as he twitched and twisted his fingers, looking at the floor, then finally up at Caridad. When they made eye contact—and I saw it, so nobody can tell me any stories about it—she was already enchanted by him and his nervousness, and he was practically on his knees, hypnotized by her.

  Neither of them remember it quite this way. Caridad says he was flirting with her from the go, winking at her from across the laundromat, all cocky and sure. According to her, he made the first move by complimenting her on her skin when she walked by which, she says, “is a very different, very observant kind of compliment from a guy.” He denies this, of course, insistent that it was her who was cruising him, walking back and forth in front of him and “showing off the merchandise.”

  All I know is that Caridad didn’t work much the rest of her shift. She sat by Jimmy as the washer kicked into the rinse cycle, then into spin. I finished Emilia Fernandez’s laundry and started cleaning filters on the dryers, all the while watching them laugh, with Jimmy occasionally blushing, and Caridad twittering and tossing her head back. They were so hooked on each other that Jimmy’s washer stopped and neither of them noticed. Later, when Jimmy went to make his call at the bodega, Caridad rushed over to me, as giggly as a teenager.

  “I can’t believe we’ve been so mean to him,” she said.

  “We haven’t been mean to him,” I said.

  “Well, we’ve had mean thoughts,” she said. “He’s just lonely. He doesn’t have any real family here, that’s all. He’s a little scared.”

  “And scary,” I added. “I mean, Cari, he’s kinda weird.”

  “Nah,” she said, smiling. “He’s like a lost little boy, like a little stray kitten.”

  Then Caridad told me—and, later, all of us—how Jimmy had been sent to the U.S. by himself on the Mariel boadift, how he’d nearly died from dehydration and had to be hospitalized for weeks. Caridad said that as soon as he got better, the Catholic Church helped place him with an American family in Indiana. They were kind to him but different from everything he’d ever known, and though Jimmy never felt that he was a part of their family, he got so Americanized without even realizing it that when his real sister showed up from Cuba years later and he came to live with her, he didn’t know her, and didn’t know how to be with her. He’d say “excuse me” all the time, preferred Folgers and eggs to Bustelo and toast for breakfast, and couldn’t dance to save his life.

  “See, he doesn’t belong in either world, Cuban or American,” Caridad said, shaking her head in pity, patting her heart with an open palm. “And his parents are still back in Cuba. Me da tanta lastimá.”

  I didn’t say anything after that because I knew then what had happened. Of all of us, Caridad’s the one who always feels the most for the miserable people of the planet, los infelizes. She’s the one who won’t take the L downtown in the winter because she can’t bear the sight of so many cold and homeless people. She’s the one who sends fifteen dollars a month through Christian Charities to a Peruvian orphan who lives in the mountains (his name’s Rafael and she writes him letters and has his picture in a place of prominence on her bureau). And what had happened was that Jimmy had tapped Caridad’s strongest emotion—not love but sympathy. From that moment on, he could have anything he wanted, including her.

  It’s about one in the morning and Caridad and Jimmy’s apartment is humming, like mine was when I got home earlier in the evening. After a minute or so of watching Caridad sweep, I take my place at the kitchen table and sit in silence. Caridad sweeps around the perfect pile, and me, then stops, sighs heavily and pulls a pack of cigarettes from her robe pocket. She extracts one, lights it on the stove, then leans against the kitchen sink. She takes one giant toke and lets out a slow cloud of blue and white smoke that obscures her face completely.

  “Why do I put up with this, huh?” she asks, but she isn’t talking to me. This is a conversation with herself, with the ghosts of all the previous fights she’s had with Jimmy right here in the kitchen. “Why, huh? Why?” she asks again, this time coverin
g her face with her hand. “I mean, I’m not stupid. Am I—am I stupid? No.”

  And, of course, I agree she’s not stupid. And I say so, but it comes out in mumbles. What can I—of all people—possibly say to her? I cross my arms across my chest, momentarily touch my scarred breast, and remember Gina. Caridad just stands there, not quite crying, not quite angry anymore.

  “You know what’ll happen now? He’ll show up and say he’s sorry and that he’ll never do it again, but that I made him do it and that if I stop, he’ll stop,” she blurts out. “And you know what? It’ll work—I don’t know how, I don’t know why—but I’ll feel sorry for him and I’ll promise I won’t provoke him anymore. And then, for about a week, he’ll treat me like a queen, give me everything I want. And he’ll tell me he can’t live without me and that I’m the only person he loves, and the only person in his life—”

  “I know, Cari, I know,” I say, annoyed, my hand in the air. “Please stop.” I’ve heard all this before but repetition never dulls my discomfort. (I need to talk to Gina, I know.)

  “But this is the problem,” she says, smoking and pacing now, her face all serious. “Because I’ll forgive him, and then I’ll forget it happened, and I’ll start seeing him in a good light again, and as soon as that happens—bam!—he’ll do it again.” She hits her fist in the air to make her point. “What the fuck is my problem, huh, Juani?”

  And I think, Maybe it’s genetic, this ability to see only certain things. Tía Celia, Caridad’s mother, managed to never notice how often Tío Pepe cheated on her, or the frequency of his binges or, sometimes, even that he’d disappeared. Once, my father actually suggested Tía Celia file a missing persons report because Tío Pepe had been gone ten days, a record then. But Tía Celia got offended, so much so that she didn’t talk to my father for a month. Tío Pepe eventually showed up, unshaven, stinky, and fast asleep on the living room couch. How he got back there, where he’d been—nobody ever knew. Tía Celia never mentioned it; she made breakfast for him as if it were just another day.