Memory Mambo

by Achy Obejas

  “Will you cut that out?” I say, annoyed, looking straight at his crotch so he knows what I’m talking about. I’m as fascinated as ever with his brazenness, but this time, because we’re in a public place, I’m not sure what might happen—and I’m disgusted with myself for being so hypnotized.

  Jimmy laughs. “Oh, Juani, I think you’re forgetting a few things,” he says, running his tongue around his mouth again. “I mean, who the fuck do you think you are telling me how to deal with my wife, huh?”

  “Eat shit,” I say. I grab a pair of pants from a nearby pile of clothes and start folding.

  “Oh, big time memory failure!” Jimmy laughs. “Don’t you remember how much you owe your favorite cousin-in-law? I mean since you insist we’re all family and everything.”

  I say nothing, trying to avert my eyes from him in general and from his dick in particular. His huge hand caresses it through his sweats.

  “You jealous, Juani?” He asks and smoothes his pants with his fingers so I can see he’s not wearing underwear and that his penis is swelling.

  “Of what, huh? Of what?”

  “Of this, babe, this,” he says, his hand stroking his growing erection through the fabric. “Maybe things would have worked out with you and Gina if you could have given her one of these, huh?” He laughs and laughs.

  “You fuckin’ asshole,” I say, turning away from him. I can see him in my peripheral vision, grinning, eyes blurred, leaning with his back to the counter. He holds out his pelvis so anybody can see the bulge in his sweats. He’s just hooking his thumb under the waistband—the slimy slit of his cock is just peeking out—when the front door of the laundromat pops open, exploding with noisy traffic from outside. Then Caridad walks in, smiling, waving an airmail letter. Jimmy’s eyes suddenly become shiny and he turns around fast, leaning his body across the counter. The way he’s wrinkling his forehead, you can almost see football scores playing along it, a Herculean effort to soften the erection he’s hiding under the counter. His vein, my heart, pound.

  “Jimmy, aquí, another letter from your cousin Vicky in Cuba,” Caridad says, oblivious to the tension clearly etched all over her husband’s face. She’s covered up nearly all her bruises from the night before but there’s one still visible on her neck; the cuts on her hands are unavoidable. “You need to take care of this, you know,” she says, smiling at him as if nothing is, or has ever been, wrong. “Hey,” she says shyly to me, perhaps even a bit embarrassed, then turns back to Jimmy.

  I’m embarrassed too, but unable to turn away: It’s like watching a train wreck about to happen.

  Jimmy takes the airmail envelope with an expert move of his arm, not lifting his body one centimeter from on top of the counter. I imagine his dick, still bobbing up and down, underneath. “I don’t see what I gotta take care of,” he says, his eyes hooded now. Sweat slowly emerges on his upper lip.

  Caridad sighs. “Jimmy, she’s family,” she says.

  She looks over at me for confirmation of what that means, as if I could, if called upon, enumerate the duties and obligations of that. I’m amazed: How can Caridad not know something’s wrong?

  “Juani, negrita, are you okay?” Caridad asks me.

  I quickly glance at the round mirror above the door behind her, one of the four that allows us to have a quick overview of the entire laundromat. My reflection stares back: pale, my shoulders slumped.

  “Your mouth is hanging open, stupid,” Jimmy says with a laugh as his hand slaps up on my jaw. He turns around, leans on his side, his crotch calm and level. He’s wholly unrepentant. I realize Jimmy, that sly train engineer, has just steered the locomotive away from disaster.

  “¿Qué te pasa? Are you okay?” Caridad asks. She goes to touch me but catches herself, putting her arm stiffly behind her own back instead.

  “I’m fine, I’m fine,” I say. My mouth feels sticky.

  Jimmy snaps his index finger at his cousin’s letter. “She wants me to send her money and shit,” he says, wiping his lip with his sleeve. “Like it’s my responsibility to make sure she eats and gets her ass over here.”

  “Jimmy, you and your sister are her only relatives in the U.S.,” says Caridad. “How else is she gonna survive when things are so bad down there, huh?”

  Jimmy arches his eyebrows. “It’s not my concern,” he says, stretching his arms above his head. He yawns. The envelope flaps in his hand. “I didn’t see her give a fuck about me, write me letters to see how I was doing when I was in Indiana.”

  “Jimmy, you know she said she wrote—you know she said the letters probably got intercepted,” Caridad chimes in. She’s talking to him as if he were a little boy.

  “Funny,” he says, wrinkling his nose, “my mother’s letters got through, my sister’s letters got through. Just not my cousin Vicky’s, whose kids are suddenly all out of school and jobless on that miserable island and it’s sure nice to have primo Jimmy in the United States to send care packages and try to get visas for everybody.”

  Caridad crosses her arms across her chest. “See what I mean?” she says to me. “See how he’s so American about some things?”

  I keep thinking of her in the tub the night before; I realize I know the exact location of every single bruise on her body.

  “I already got one charity case in this family with Rafael in Peru,” he says, snickering. “I’m not going to start sending fifteen dollars a month to those descara ‘os in Cuba, okay?”

  Caridad snatches the letter from his hand. “She’s your cousin,” she says, “your blood cousin, your prima hermana.”

  I stare at them. Everything Caridad predicted the night before, everything she feared, is true: Jimmy has worked his magic, obliterating all trace of his prior terror and destruction. It doesn’t matter now—again—that every move Caridad makes will cause dull pains all over her. She might as well be dead, animated only by the bolts of lightning that come from his eyes, Jimmy Frankenstein.

  CHAPTER 6

  MY COUSIN PAULI, Caridad’s younger sister, never thought Jimmy was a potential serial killer, the way Nena had. Nor did she think he was a petty hustier, like I originally envisioned. Pauli didn’t even think he was a comemierda, as Tío Pepe always described him. For Pauli, he was simply Jimmy Frankenstein (pronounced Frankhen-ess-tein, since life in Mexico produced a sudden accent in Pauli’s English), but her reference was not to the hapless monster, whom she regarded as an innocent, but to the scientist, the evil Victor who pieced together cadavers and animated them in his own earthly hell. As far as Pauli was concerned, Jimmy had found a way to kill Caridad and then bring her back in his own distorted image, compliant and anesthetized.

  “You guys don’t notice because you’re around her all the time and change is so slow, so tiny, that it’s hard to see,” Pauli said when she arrived from Mexico for Caridad and Jimmy’s wedding. She’d just started working at the Mexican rock club and the family was still in shock. “But I haven’t seen her in almost eight months—I mean, I can really tell—and I’m telling you, that’s a zombie, that’s not my sister in there.”

  Pauli nodded in the direction of her parents’ house, from which Patricia, Nena and I had just rescued her. After spending a chaotic afternoon with Caridad and her parents, all of whom were trying desperately to get her to quit her go-go dancing job and come home, Pauli wanted dinner somewhere “away from everything, por favor” with just the girl cousins.

  “I’m telling you, man, something’s wrong,” she said climbing into Patricia’s VW Rabbit (which Patricia and her American Jewish husband, Ira, insist was built by American workers in Philadelphia, not Germany). “That Jimmy Frankenstein has done something to my sister. He’s drilled holes in her head, he’s poured chemicals in her brain.” Pauli and I were squeezed so miserably into the back of that VW that she refused to go home with us after dinner, opting to take a cab back to her parents’ house instead.

  Even Patricia, who prides herself on her ability to see the family from a measured and civi
lized distance (she’s a political science professor at the University of Illinois who uses her mental health benefits for therapy twice a week), didn’t exactly disagree with Pauli’s assessment of Caridad. Although we might not have had the benefit of Pauli’s distance, among the cousins we’d all commented on the changes in Caridad.

  “I think it’s a few things,” Patricia said as she maneuvered the VW into a spot in front of the restaurant, a pizza parlor with thick-stuffed pies that Pauli adores and the rest of us hate. “One, I think, it’s timing: after so many years—I mean, Caridad’s thirty and, feminism and all that aside, the fact is she’s still living at home and probably just got lazy—and, whether we’re willing to admit it or not, Jimmy does love her. Two, there’s something disgustingly Cuban about him, and I think, in a way, that appeals to her, like a primordial memory.”

  When she said this, we laughed aloud. The concept was typical Patricia: She always sees a connection to Cuba. “No, really, think about it,” she insisted. She shut off the ignition and turned to face us. “Cari came to the U.S. when she was—what, seventeen?—right smack in the middle of her prime, as far as Cubans are concerned. Just as she was at the age to have formal relationships, she was dropped into the barrio, where everything was scary and she didn’t know English, and the men were all potentially dangerous. Don’t you remember how Tía Celia would always tell you guys not to get on CTA buses if it was only you and the driver because he could be a rapist?”

  We all laughed again, perhaps even louder. Certainly, we had all been overprotected girls: Every one of us had had a chaperon on our first date, all of us had gone out in groups for years, and it was only recently that any of us had dated Americans (except Patricia, whose parents emigrated to the U.S. before the revolution and always had different ideas about everything).

  “Your father hates Jimmy,” Nena told Pauli as we crawled out of Patricia’s VW and headed for the pizza parlor.

  “I know,” Pauli said, smiling. It was a cool night in the city, with just enough moisture in the air to make everything shiny.

  Nena and I looked at each other. Pauli seemed uncharacteristically smug.

  “It’s really killing him,” she said. “The wedding’s killing him more than I’m killing him, and that’s the first time that’s ever happened.”

  All our lives, Pauli had been Tío Pepe’s pearl and headache—something to marvel at, with her snappy wit and flexible limbs, but also something to fear in many ways. When she got mad, she didn’t yell like the rest of us, just shut down cold; we used to call her the Fortress of Solitude. With her straight A’s and cool temper, Pauli was often unpredictable to us, especially to our parents.

  Caridad, by contrast, was Tío Pepe’s comfort. If Pauli annoyed him with the long line of tough admirers she always attracted and the troubles they caused, Caridad assuaged him by asking his opinion of the men in her life, seeking his advice for her problems and often having dinner out with him. We’d see Tío Pepe and Caridad out by themselves for a bite at Maria’s Kitchen, Tío Pepe laughing and relaxed, proud and cocky. He’d raise his drink and wave through the window whenever any of us drove by and honked. Caridad didn’t mind his drunkenness, and she seemed not to notice his infidelities.

  Pauli, though, was a whole other ball game. There’s a story the cousins tell among ourselves (except around Caridad) about Pauli when she was about twelve, just as she first realized her father was a philanderer. She and Tía Celia were out running a few errands when they saw Tío Pepe across the street, flirting shamelessly with another woman. (“A saucy, red-haired woman,” Patricia always says when it’s her turn to tell it.) Tía Celia didn’t say anything, of course, just endured, biting her trembling lower lip and taking deep breaths all the way home. Pauli, though, understood everything: her mother’s pain, her father’s indiscretion, her own humiliation.

  Later that same afternoon, Pauli tracked down Tío Pepe’s mistress at the counter of the Busy Bee, an old Polish diner at the corner of North, Milwaukee and Damen. But instead of trying to appeal to the woman’s better sentiments by explaining Tía Celia’s dismay, or even her own anger, Pauli—never letting on that she was Tío Pepe’s daughter, not just some street urchin—told the woman she’d been looking for him to no avail.

  “Do you think you’re gonna see him later?” Pauli asked her. She spun mischievously on a stool as she spoke, a small paper bag in her hand. “I’ve looked all over and I just can’t find him.” She gripped the bag with white knuckles, glancing at it now and then, underscoring its mystery and importance with every spin on the diner’s stool.

  “Who wants to know?” Tío Pepe’s mistress asked while smacking her gum and clearing some dishes from the counter. (She was a saucy, red-haired woman, all right.) Amazingly, she took Pauli’s bait hook, line and sinker: Every time the bag danced by the counter in Pauli’s girlish hands, the woman would anxiously stare at it.

  Pauli shrugged and sighed. “It’s just that…” She hesitated, then looked around the smoky diner. In the corner, two uniformed cops were on break having some blood sausage soup. “I’m supposed to…no, never mind, I can’t tell you,” Pauli said, starting down off the stool. “I’m just gonna have to find him myself.” She leaned on the counter, the bag teasingly floating above its surface for just an instant.

  “What, honey, what?” the woman asked. She had huge breasts which sat on the counter like loaves of bread when she bent down to talk to Pauli.

  “Well, he asked me to bring this to him and…no, I can’t, he’ll get mad at me,” she said, shaking her head. As she stood up, Pauli put the paper bag on the counter to use both hands to zip up her sweat jacket.

  “What’s this, huh?” asked the woman, smacking her gum as she grabbed the bag.

  “Hey, give it back!” Pauli exclaimed loud enough for the cops to look up. As if on cue, the mistress peeked inside where Pauli had placed a well-labeled tube of Pucho’s herpes ointment. The woman’s eyes widened in horror and her mouth opened, an audible gasp escaping from between her cherry-red lips. Pauli grabbed the bag from her. “I told you I can’t say,” she said, indignant. “He asked me to pick it up for him at the drugstore and if he finds out I let you see, I’m in big trouble. So don’t go saying anything, okay? You understand?”

  It was brilliant: Within a matter of hours, the saucy, redhaired woman confronted Tío Pepe with one sensational, screeching outburst that was heard for several blocks. People gathered across the street from the fight to watch as she threw her shoes at him. Above Polonia Furniture and all the other stores along Milwaukee Avenue, women and kids leaned out their windows to get a view of the scandal.

  Although the incident didn’t stop Tío Pepe’s womanizing, it effectively ended that relationship—and it also forced him to be more discreet. No more flaunting his mistresses in the neighborhood, no more risking being seen by his family. If Pauli could think in such conspiratorial terms at twelve, it was hard to imagine what she might do as she got older.

  In American terms, Pauli refused to enable her father. In Cuban terms, she was an ingrate.

  When she got home from school and Tío Pepe was dead drunk, sprawled on the floor of the living room, Pauli would walk around him. She’d make herself a pot of American coffee, watch the news or MTV, do her homework—whatever she needed to do—without acknowledging her father’s body reeking of alcohol and sweat on the floor.

  “I’ve tried to talk to him,” she’d say, “and he won’t listen. Well, fine. I can’t do anything to help him, but I’m sure not going to contribute.”

  When Tía Celia got home from work, she’d find Tío Pepe in whatever position Pauli had left him. Sometimes he was balled up, cold or in pain; sometimes he’d spread himself out like a giant starfish. Tía Celia would help him up, direct him to the shower or the bed, make dinner and go on with her evening’s routine. But for all the attention Tía Celia gave Tío Pepe, she’d be nearly as indifferent to Pauli as her daughter had been to her father. She and Pauli would
pass each other in the hallway or kitchen, kiss hello and talk briefly about the day’s events without a single mention of the bloated body on the bed or in the shower.

  Caridad, however, couldn’t take what she called Pauli’s “coldness.” For Caridad, the sin lay in Pauli’s detachment, not her father’s addiction. If Caridad beat Tía Celia home, Pauli was assured a lecture and a fight—a physical fight, in which they’d push and shove each other, scream like cats, and leave little moon-shaped cuts all over each other’s wrists. All the while, Tío Pepe would continue to lie on the floor, sometimes drooling or moaning, waiting for Tía Celia to save him.

  Although anxious and tired from the continuing conflict with Caridad over how to deal with their father, Pauli would try to hold up, to carry on her day at home as normally as possible. Pauli believes in routines, in small rituals. She carries a list of things to do, wears only black and gray and deep reds, and spends twenty minutes doing visualization exercises every night before she goes to bed. But for all Pauli’s efforts, the fights with Caridad eventually wore her out. Instead of coming home after school, she began avoiding Caridad and going to the library or a friend’s house; sometimes she’d just hang out at the park or at some of the neighborhood coffeehouses where the people who live above Polonia Furniture also pass the time. We’d see her through the coffeehouse windows, reading and writing, scratching things off her lists.

  Of course, Pauli’s wanderings in the neighborhood led to all kinds of trouble. First, there were the boys. Pauli may have attracted little nerds with pencils in their pockets, but we never noticed them. We were too busy with the wackos and the rowdy boys. Guys twice her age would get obsessed with her and call the house hundreds of times a day. Tía Celia had to change their phone number so many times we finally just got her a personal pager (she hated it, saying it made her feel like a drug dealer, but she endured it until Pauli moved to Mexico). Boys would hang out at the laundromat from opening to closing in the hope of catching a glimpse of her, playing pinball and video games so we wouldn’t accuse them of loitering. (Nena, of course, thought this was great because Pauli made us money just by being her luminous, impossible self.)