Memory Mambo

by Achy Obejas

  “How does Manolito know all this?” I asked. “And why do you believe him?”

  Nena shrugged. “I just do, he’s not a liar.”

  I guffawed. “Nena, everybody in our family’s a liar,” I said. “Mami and Papi make up stuff about the duct tape fortune, Caridad lies about Jimmy, Jimmy lies about everything, Patricia lies about Titi, god knows Tío Raúl and Pauli both have tons of secrets, and hey, you’re lying about Bernie. Everybody’s dancing around the truth. I mean, how do you wander through it all? How do you tell Bernie about our family? What do you say?”

  “Well, I just tell Bernie what’s true for me, and I let him know I have doubts, and that there are varying stories,” Nena said. “For example, if I were gonna tell him about Titi and Patricia, I’d tell him Manolito’s story and then maybe your story and then my story—what believe—and by the end, there’s a new story—Bernie’s.”

  I shook my head. “Very relative,” I said. “It must take forever to tell all the stories.”

  “Hey, we’re into communicating, okay?” she said with a chuckle. “It’s sort of like singing ‘Guantanamera’—everybody gets a chance to make up their own verse.”

  “Memory mambo,” I said, one hand in the air, the other on my waist as if I were dancing, “one step forward, two steps back—unnngh!”

  Nena waved me off. “So, your turn: Tell me about Rosa’s father.”

  I leaned back on the chair, tilting its front legs off the floor, just like I always do at Tía Celia’s. “His name is Ali Ahuja,” I began. “And he’s a cab driver.”

  As the morning wore on, I told Nena how I met him, and how I’d put together that he must be the one. She asked questions and added her two bits. While chatting, we did the dishes and wiped down the table, threw out the garbage and made up the couch. We were so relaxed, I was so happy that we were able to talk again like before. Then, as I was grabbing some fresh clothes in order to shower and change before Bernie got home, Nena intercepted me on the way to the bathroom. She put her hand on my arm.

  “So, are you gonna tell me what really happened with you and Gina?” she asked.

  I stared right at her big brown liquid eyes, so loving and open. And I took my own hand and put it over hers, sat her back down on the couch, took a deep breath and started talking.

  “Well,” I said, “Gina and I were sitting on the couch, exhausted from a long, late dinner party celebrating her mother’s saint’s day. Everybody had left already. Then we both heard this noise, like a footstep on the stairs on the way up to her apartment. And I think we both got kind of tense but we didn’t really pay any more attention to it. I know I closed my eyes, I was so tired. And then, the next thing we know, there’s this raving lunatic in the apartment, and he’s heaving this chair at us…”

  As I spoke, I put my whole body into it, ducking the imaginary chair, slicing away with a chair leg at the phantom assailant.

  All the while, I watched Nena. Of course, she believed every word I said. And the more I spun my tale, my impossible version of events, the more I realized what was happening: Nena wasn’t listening to the story at all, she wasn’t concerned with its logic or coherence. Nena was listening to me, her sister, whom she trusted completely. And though I should have been comforted by her faith in me, I was sickened instead. Her utter confidence in the fact that I couldn’t lie betrayed how little she knew me, how far we’d already drifted from each other.

  CHAPTER 19

  “STOP WASTING MY TIME WITH THIS STUFF,” Jimmy says, bunching the letter from his cousin Vicky into a ball and tossing it overhead with both hands into the garbage a few feet away.

  Caridad and I both watch the balled-up airmail envelope as it lands softly on top of used paper towels, empty detergent boxes and sticky pop cans. Cari sighs and looks down at the laundromat floor. Then she walks over to the garbage, reaches in and wordlessly picks the ball out of the heap. She irons it out on one of the counters, using the palm of her hand. Jimmy watches, satisfied. No one speaks.

  Then the phone rings. I reach over the counter and pick it up. It’s Tía Celia. “Pauli and Rosa are coming home!” she says excitedly. “They’re coming home! They’re coming home!”

  Caridad takes the phone from me, all nerves and smiles all of a sudden. Jimmy hands her a cigarette, which she accepts without glancing up at him. When she reaches for it, I see the fresh scratches on her hands from the night before. Was it just last night that I went over there to comfort her? She pulls her hair down in front of her face with a quick, monkey-like gesture. Then she’s off, smoking and chattering with her mother, their voices squeaky and high-pitched.

  “Let me guess,” says Jimmy, leaning like a thug on the counter, “they need a chauffeur, right? Somebody to pick them up at the airport, right?” He’s beefy and tough.

  I shrug. “Hey, if you don’t wanna do it, I will,” I volunteer. “I’ve missed Pauli and Rosa, I’d love to pick them up.”

  Jimmy scoffs. “In what car, huh?” He finishes flattening the airmail envelope Cari rescued, folds it and stuffs it in his pocket.

  “Well, either in your car—”

  “Forget it.”

  “—or in Patricia’s car—”

  “Oh, yeah, like Celia and you and Caridad and Pauli and Rosa are all gonna fit into that cucaracha.” He laughs.

  “—or I could just spring for a cab.” As I say it I realize I have to be careful. It can’t be Ali’s cab, not yet anyway.

  Jimmy makes a face, like he’s impressed or something. “Oh, Miss Money Bags here… What? You filed for Crime Victim’s Assistance money? Shouldn’t I be getting a cut?”

  “Eat me, Jimmy.”

  Caridad’s still puffing on her cigarette, her body tense, arms wrapped tightly around herself. She’s still talking a mile a minute to her mother.

  “You wish,” Jimmy says, smug again, his eyes hooded again.

  “Like you’d know how,” I say, taking a little of his attitude for myself.

  But he surprises me. “You can teach me,” he says, “I hear that’s what dykes do best.” He makes a gesture with his hand like he’s going to scratch himself but just sort of pats his cock instead. “And I’ll teach you what I do best,” he says, his voice hoarse. His dick is growing again, without regard to the fact that his wife is just a few feet away. But this time, Jimmy’s self-conscious.

  “I gotta go buy a Little Lotto ticket,” he says, his voice still husky. Then he walks out of the laundromat but it’s not his usual swing.

  This time, I don’t go home and get off, I don’t shiver, I don’t get a fever at all. Instead, as I watch Jimmy awkwardly exit the Wash-N-Dry, I feel my hands go clammy, my heart speeds up. This is different, every bit of it.

  Eventually, Caridad gets off the phone. Her expression is bored, arrogant. She lights another cigarette.

  “You’re not supposed to be smoking in here, you know,” I say, barely looking in her direction.

  She shrugs. “What’s your problem?”

  “What’s my problem?” I ask back. “What’s my problem?” I’m incredulous—how does her mind work? How do her cerebral connections hook up? “Cari, don’t you have a clue what just happened here?”

  She pinches the end of her cigarette to extinguish it, as if the fire means nothing, as if it could never get through her thick skin and burn. She tosses the butt in her vest pocket. I imagine the hideous, penetrating smell of nicotine all over her.

  “Look, we know what my problem is,” she says, looking at me hard. “What’s yours, huh? I mean, what are you doing here, hanging around? It’s like, every time something goes wrong, you’re there”—she illustrates by putting both hands up, palms open—“a witness to the crime but with no blood on your hands.”

  “Excuse me,” I say between gritted teeth, “but if I remember correctly, you called me last night, isn’t that right? I mean, if I was at the scene of the crime last night, it’s ‘cause you decided I was 911, remember?”

  “So?”
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  “So how about taking some responsibility here?”

  “Me taking some responsibility?” Caridad’s face is a mess of muscles twitching. “How about you, huh?”

  I can’t believe this. I feel my chest filling up, my throat tightening and my eyes finally bursting with tears. “What the fuck is going on? Why are you doing this to me?”

  Cari’s hands tremble as she reaches back into her pocket for the butt. “You’re going too far, Juani,” she says. “You’re getting too involved in everybody’s business. You gotta let go.”

  “Cari, you called me!” My fists open and shut, open and shut. “Caridad, you always call me. What do you expect me to do, huh?”

  “Yeah, yeah, I know, but just ’cause I call you—just ’cause anybody calls you—doesn’t mean you gotta run.” She’s quaking like a house about to splinter before the swirling, massive force of a tornado. Her hands shake as she brings the just extinguished butt back up to her lips. As she searches in her pockets for a lighter, she realizes she just put this cigarette out at my request. She hates me, as she so often does the morning after I’ve held her hand through a hideous night. She shakes her head, like a dog after an unexpected shower. “I gotta go,” she says.

  I try to stop her. I put my hand out and wrap my fingers around her wrist but she jerks herself away, practically running out of the laundromat.

  Patricia’s office is stifling.

  “But I thought you said Jimmy doesn’t cheat,” she says, horrified. “Wouldn’t this constitute cheating?” But she doesn’t wait for my answer. “This is disgusting, that’s what this is. You know that, don’t you?”

  I nod. I’m standing in her office looking over some forms a career counselor on campus wants me to fill out. We had a quick interview and from the three words I said she determined I could be a writer, a business manager, or a dental assistant. She gave me these questionnaires to fill out to get a better sense of my skills and desires. Then I made the mistake of strolling over to Patricia’s, because she’d said she wanted to know how things went with the counselor. And then I compounded the mistake by telling her about the interaction with Jimmy this morning.

  “He’s a pig, a fucking pig,” Patricia’s saying. She’s totally upset, totally riled up about this. “I think you should tell Caridad, that’s what I think.”

  I laugh aloud. “Oh, right,” I say, “right—now there’s a smart move.” There’s no way I’m telling Patricia what Caridad said to me this morning—I couldn’t bear the psychoanalysis. And I feel too naked, too disturbed.

  “I’m not kidding, Juani, I think you should tell her,” she insists.

  “Like she’s gonna believe me?” I protest. I get up and I’m flapping the counselor’s papers around, like Jimmy did with his cousin Vicky’s letter. “Patricia—Caridad was right there the whole time! Do you think she’s gonna believe she missed the whole thing? C’mon, get real!”

  I wish Patricia could tell that Caridad’s not listening to anything except the voices in her own twisted brain; why can’t anybody else see that?

  Patricia shakes her head. “Well, weren’t you just saying she’s starting to get it? Didn’t you tell me that after the fight with Jimmy last night she was talking about how she had a better understanding of their dynamic?”

  I roll my eyes. I’m always amazed she didn’t go into psychology instead of political science. “I didn’t say that,” I say. “I said she said she didn’t know why she always forgives him. That’s what I said.”

  “Same thing,” she says, rifling through her desk. Unlike Nena’s and mine, which is always perfectly neat and clean, Patricia’s desk is a perpetual landfill. Stacked full of books and papers, it isn’t unusual to occasionally unearth a dead candy bar or a crushed paper cup. It’s in total contrast with her cool, patrician air.

  “Caridad needs to know,” she says.

  “Patti—Caridad already knows everything she needs to know, okay?”

  Why Caridad stays, why she still loves Jimmy—these are mysteries. When I think about them sometimes, I get jealous. Why is everything Jimmy does forgivable? How does Cari always wind up in his corner again? If they can do that, why can’t Gina and I find some way to talk again, to start again, to forgive each other? Why do I have to suffer?

  Patricia stops the excavation of her desk long enough to give me an exasperated look. “Why are you always protecting him?”

  “Who?”

  “Jimmy.”

  “Oh, please.” Why can’t she tell I hate him right now? “I’m serious—you’re not telling Caridad because you’re protecting him. Why? I don’t know, I really don’t know. It’s pathetic, and dangerous, and sick, that’s what it is,” she says, tackling the task at hand again.

  “Look,” I say, “I gotta go.” Patricia would never understand, that’s clear. I’m protecting myself.

  I’m tired, suffocating in her tiny office. Patricia doesn’t rate a window, although she does have a supply closet jammed with books and file folders bursting with papers. There used to be posters of Fidel and Ché on her walls but now there are placards from Tío Raúl’s shows in Mexico City and Paris.

  There are also family pictures tacked to bulletin boards, balanced precariously on bookshelves and on her desk: Tío Raúl riding a horse on the pampas in Argentina, Manolito and his family, an old black and white of the four of them from their New York days (in it, Tía Zenaida’s plump and radiant). There are photo-booth strips of Patricia, Nena and me; a few of the three of us and Pauli. There’s Patricia and Ira looking tan and fit back in their college days, his hair long and curly. There’s one—a fading Polaroid in a frame—of Patricia and Titi holding hands while sitting at the malecón. Funny how I’ve seen that photo a hundred times before and never gave it a second thought. Now I look at it and realize their fingers are tangled in a scattered, urgent way. Their faces are a little tense, a little too close.

  “What’s the hurry?” Patricia asks. She’s wearing her reading glasses, which are barely holding onto the tip of her nose.

  “Pauli and Rosa are coming home tonight,” I say.

  Patricia doesn’t even blink. “You picking them up?”

  “No.”

  She looks up. “Is there a family something I’ve not been invited to, a welcome home party or reception?”

  “No, no, no,” I say. “Jimmy and Caridad are picking them up.”

  “So my question stands: What’s your hurry?” She stops everything, waiting for my reply.

  “Fine, Patricia, here’s the deal, okay?” I say. I lean up on her desk, talking as if I were a TV lawyer giving a final argument. “They’re all coming back to Tía Celia’s, okay? And I thought I’d go over and hang out because I want to see Pauli and Rosa—I’ve missed them, unlike some people—”

  She shakes her head and leans back in her chair.

  “—and I figured, since it’s Tía Celia’s night at the Wash-N-Dry, I’d make myself available and make it easier for her to ask me to take her shift, all right?”

  “I think if Tía Celia was going to ask you to take her shift, she would have done so by now, don’t you think?”

  “No, I don’t.”

  Patricia dives into her desk again, throwing papers every which way. “I don’t think you give her enough credit,” she says. “She obviously doesn’t need you to take her shift.”

  “It’s Pauli and Rosa’s first night back—and they just called this morning, so it’s not like anybody’s had time to plan.”

  “Tía Celia’s had time to ask you if she wanted to ask you,” Patricia insists. “Whew…finally,” she says, dusting off a piece of paper.

  “Look, can I go now?” I ask, frustrated as only Patricia can make me. I’m antsy, shifting from foot to foot.

  “Yeah, of course,” Patricia says, as if this whole conversation has been my idea. “But a couple of things first.”

  “What?” I’m gritting my teeth. My fists are wrecking balls.

  “Don’t forget
the letter to Titi.”

  “Don’t worry—I won’t.” I glance over at the photo of the two of them. Now that I know, it’s so obvious.

  She looks at me suspiciously. “What does that mean?”

  “Christ, nothing!” I exclaim. I push my arms out, all tense. “Patricia, you’re driving me nuts. Now, what else? What? What? What?”

  “We’re a little testy today,” she says.

  “Is that it?” I sigh. I’m dying here.

  “My colleague leaves for Cuba in four days—that means you have three days to write the letter and get it to me if you want him to take it to Titi, okay?”

  “Fine.” I start to turn.

  “And one more thing.”

  I glance back. Patricia’s holding out the piece of paper she dug out from her desk.

  “What’s that?” I ask.

  “E-mail for you.”

  “E-mail? What do you mean e-mail? For me? I don’t have an e-mail address. Who’s it from?”

  “Bernie Beck,” Patricia says, opening a book on her desk and pretending to be casual. There’s a little smile on her face just dying to get out.

  “Bernie Beck?”

  “Yeah, he sent it to Ira to give to you.” She looks up, past her glasses. Her eyes are twinkling. Christ, she knows about Nena and Bernie. “I guess he knew how to find you.”

  “Yeah,” I say, “I guess so.” I take the paper, nod at her and walk out of the room. I offer no explanations. I figure, nobody else does, why should I?

  I wait until I’m on the train headed home before I check out Bernie’s e-mail. It’s still before the afternoon rush hour, so the train’s not too crowded. I park myself in a window seat and swing my legs onto the empty space next to me. Even though it’s cold out, the sun, coming in through the glass, is warm on my neck and head.

  I unfold the paper and read: “Subj: casein glue.” I remember, Yeah—casein glue, the adhesive made from milk that Mami mentioned to Nena the night of my outburst.