Try to Remember Read online

  Lydia wore lipstick. “Wanna try it?” she’d asked, as I watched her apply the shimmering white lip color over her mouth. She was busty and dark-skinned, with shiny black curls she greased into points at her temples.

  I shook my head vigorously.

  “¿Qué te pasa, chica?”

  I told her what the problem was: “I’m not allowed.” I explained that on my father’s moral equivalency charts, waltzing in wearing lipstick rated right alongside prostitution.

  “So what. Take it off before you get home,” she suggested.

  This girl wasn’t too knowledgeable about the fifth commandment. She had very little notion, it seemed to me, of how a person earned points for Heaven. I felt obligated to fill her in.

  “¡Ay chica! We don’t go to church,” she replied wanly, smiling as if she pitied me because I did. Then we grabbed seats together on the bus and began comparing families. I started off by listing the Miami relatives ahead of those left in Cartagena—saving for last my beloved grandfather Gabriel, who wrote me long, elegant verses praising the waves and light of the Caribbean on each of my birthdays.

  “You’re lucky,” she commented. Lydia, her parents, and her brother Emilio had arrived from Camagüey “to escape Fidel Castro.”

  I’d heard about Fidel, so I nodded knowingly.

  On the day school recessed for the year, Lydia gave me her phone number. All summer long, I couldn’t get over my awkwardness about making the call. But some greater need propelled me to do so now.

  “Hi, chica,” she answered warmly.

  “Hola, Lydia,” I replied, losing my shyness. “Hey, did you get your assignment letter?”

  “Yeah. I have that witch doctor, el brujo Silber.”

  I laughed and told her my teacher’s name, then asked about meeting at the bus stop like before.

  “Gabriela!” my mother called out. “Who are you talking to?”

  “Just someone from school!” An uneasy twinge accompanied the recollection of Mami’s admonishments against befriending anyone who didn’t come from Una Familia Decente. But how was I supposed to know if Lydia’s family was decent unless I did befriend her?

  Quickly, I finished up my phone conversation and went to see what Mami wanted. I sent a flutter of prayers up toward the Holy Family in Heaven. Let Lydia stay my friend. Let her family turn out to be decent. Please.

  The following day, after I’d typed another oddball letter, my father went to see about a real job and Mami took me to Little Havana to get my medical permission slip for gym class. No longer could a permission slip be accepted without a doctor certifying that he’d actually examined me. Last spring, after I’d turned my note in, I’d been assigned to the library with other excused Latinas whose families had ultraconservative views about female propriety. For the rest of the term, messengers periodically brought handouts, such as “The History of Women’s Volleyball in Massachusetts” and “Female Reproduction,” and marched The Excused into the auditorium for tests; but most of the time, I’d read novels galore from the library stacks.

  For my doctor’s appointment, Mami insisted I don a dress she’d made me with a rose cotton print and puffy shoulders that seemed way too juvenile. Stoically, however, I tied the sash around my back and uttered not one word of protest as I clipped my unruly hair into a ponytail. Chibcha hair, my father often teased Mami whenever the thick, dark locks defied her efforts to tame them. The reference was to the indígenas of Colombia who seemed to have left subtler traces in history than the Mayas and Aztecs, who were actually taught about in textbooks. The morning of my appointment, as I stood in front of the mirror without my mass of hair to hide behind, my eyes appeared bigger and blacker—as if I were growing up to be more my father’s daughter than Mami’s, despite the lonesome Arabic eyes I’d inherited from her side of the family.

  Little Havana was an expanding Cuban neighborhood of stucco houses with Virgin Mary statues and Santería food offerings in the yards. Not only was the neighborhood larger in size than its name portended, it had no resemblance whatsoever to the Havana of postcards I’d seen pasted to Lydia’s notebook. That Havana had breathtaking views of the Atlantic Ocean, majestic Spanish buildings with romantic facades, and prettily coiffed women in dresses and pumps.

  The doctor’s office was not even in a hospital or clinic. It was in a stucco house with the typical Florida door—an aluminum frame that held rows of windowpanes you cranked open with a lever. Inside the house, the doctor sat behind a desk in a dark, paneled office. The dim illumination was a good thing, since Dr. Sanabria was so unattractive. It was hard to decide which feature—his extremely large size, the loose hair on his scalp, or the big stains on his hands—was the ugliest. The doctor seemed too tired to get out of his chair, and my examination consisted of questions directed exclusively to Mami about my general well-being and character as a person.

  “Se diría que es nerviosa.” This was stated more as an assertion than a question.

  My mother reflected. “Yes, I would say she’s a little nervous.”

  “Y la menstruación—¿padece de dolores?”

  Mami looked down modestly, fiddling with her pocketbook. “Oh yes,” she agreed. Her daughter suffered from menstrual cramps too.

  For five more minutes, Dr. Sanabria continued to suggest symptoms of some malady that he seemed sure afflicted me. I felt grateful that there would be no actual physical examination, though its omission made me suspicious about whether the guy was a real doctor. In Latin America people with degrees, like lawyers, were customarily referred to as doctor, but that didn’t mean the same thing here.

  At the conclusion of the appointment Dr. Sanabria extracted a sheet of stationery from his drawer. Slowly and in large, terrible penmanship, he wrote out the permission slip that was to excuse me from the Flagler Junior High School Physical Education Curriculum.

  When we returned home, Mami told me not to say anything to my father about the note because it would only upset him to hear about these immoral aspects of public education. Of course, I did as I was told.

  Passing his silent bedroom cavern, I could only hope he’d found a more constructive way to use his time than the frantic writing that was becoming a burden to me.

  In the living room, oblivious to anything else happening in our household, my brothers sat watching TV. As if I didn’t have a care in the world either, I ambled in, joining my youngest brother, Pablo, who was comfortably ensconced on the two-seater couch with the orange cushions. Manolo was in a chair by himself. Shortly afterward, Mami came in and started flipping through the channels until she settled on a movie about gladiators and sat down. Sunlight jabbed us through the blinds as we became engrossed in the movie.

  Then my father made his entrance. He stood off to the side at first. Mami patted a chair near her, but he continued to stand, and after a while we forgot about him altogether. That is, until the kissing started.

  Hercules had untied his hands and managed to extricate himself from a primitive stone torture wheel. Male slaves turned the wheel, and one of the bad guys continually whipped them to turn faster. Earlier on, Hercules had won the slaves over, so they revolted and helped him escape. Now, quickly, he made his way up a winding stone stairway into the gloomy dungeon where his sexy girlfriend was being restrained. Valiantly, he broke in, and the lovebirds embraced with passionate kisses.

  “¡Basura!” my father burst out in anger.

  Caught up in the drama, we all ignored him. We wanted to see how Hercules would slip himself and his true love out of the dungeon without getting stabbed by the army of bad guys in the process. But just as Hercules and his lady love untangled from their embrace and the muscular hero unsheathed his knife, my father whacked the TV off with his palm and yelled at us again that it was garbage. As his attack continued, Pablo and I backed up to protect ourselves from his swinging arm.

  Mami tried to object. “Pero Roberto—” She didn’t finish the sentence, because when my father turned around his face was
terrifying.

  That was the moment I seized to creep away. With my heart racing, I escaped into the bathroom and pulled in the wall phone to call Lydia—just to hear a normal voice. Maybe I’ll tell her about that questionable Dr. Sanabria, I planned out mentally, but as we began chitchatting, I heard my father screaming his head off about how his mujeres weren’t going to be watching any more of that basura!

  “What’s that noise?” a startled Lydia asked.

  “Um, my parents are having a fight,” I mumbled apologetically. “I mean, about what our family can watch. My father’s kind of strict.” Even that minor disclosure felt disloyal.

  “My parents let me watch whatever I want,” Lydia confided. “They have bad fights too, about worse stuff.” She admitted that sometimes her father didn’t come home until the wee hours of the morning, and that her mother waited up all night to yell at him and call him names like ¡mentiroso! and ¡mujeriego! “I don’t even care if she does get a divorce,” Lydia concluded, “as long as my brother and me get to stay in the house with her.”

  Lydia’s shocking but matter-of-fact revelations unnerved me, though a part of me envied her—in her house there was no doubt that her father was the villain. You didn’t have to feel sorry for him, even when he was acting unreasonably.

  • • •

  The following Tuesday, while my brothers walked to nearby Rick-enbacker Elementary, I boarded my bus to Flagler Junior High, a pastel complex of one-story buildings that had been augmented with a cluster of aquamarine trailers to accomodate the growing number of Cuban refugees “rescued” by the Americans. No one had saved me, a Colombian immigrant, but I fit right in among them with my homemade wardrobe and old-fashioned parents. Nationality mattered less than the fact that we all ate arroz every day and spoke Spanish. Here, in contrast to my parochial school in Queens, I could speak my native language on the playground, in the halls and cafeteria, and even during class if a teacher wasn’t paying attention. All my Spanish broke free of its dams and flowed out of me.

  Since I’d moved here so late in the school year, I didn’t know many people and was eager to pal up with Lydia. Together, we headed to gym. Lydia didn’t have a doctor’s note to excuse her from undressing among strangers, and soon I wished I didn’t either. The teacher, whose face seemed to be engraved with a permanent scowl, frowned at Dr. Sanabria’s permission slip. She tapped her amazingly white sneaker against a stool and announced, “I’m taking this to the principal.” Then she pushed a lock and gym suit at me. “Go change.”

  What could be wrong with my doctor’s note? I worried as I turned to nervously follow the other girls. If only Phys. Ed. could be an elective like Spanish, I wished forlornly, imagining my father’s apoplectic face when he found out the school made us undress. Even my mother had reacted badly when I’d first brought home the gym suit payment request. “Why aren’t your own clothes allowed?” she’d demanded, examining the notice suspiciously. “The nuns never made you change your clothing.”

  “We’re supposed to exercise on a field and you sweat a lot,” I’d tried to explain patiently. “They want us to shower so we won’t smell.”

  “Shower!” Mami exclaimed.

  “Yes! They have a room with showers. And when you come out, the teacher hands you a clean towel.”

  “You’re naked?” she’d asked, incredulous. That had prompted her to spring into action. She got on the phone with relatives until she found out about the mysterious Dr. Sanabria. Though she’d acted as if her own morals were at stake, I knew they were wrapped up with those of the Latin American dictator in charge of our feminine virtue.

  Now, as other girls began changing in the locker room, I tried to figure out how to undress as modestly as possible in that very public arena. The truth was, I wasn’t looking forward to disrobing and parading around in the nude myself. Hesitantly, I unfolded my gym suit and slowly began putting it on under my jumper. Then I rapidly slipped the jumper off over my head while sliding the gym suit up to cover my bra at the same time. Out of breath by then, I jerked my arms into the suit and quickly snapped it shut over my chest. When I darted anxious glances around the room, no one seemed to be watching. The other girls were too preoccupied with how bad their own suits looked on them to judge me. I studied myself in the nearest mirror. The gym suit was made out of a white canvas material you couldn’t see through. The top half was okay, but the bottom resembled a diaper that bunched up over your rear. This totally accentuated the thighs, and mine suddenly felt more naked than they ever had before.

  Alina, a friend of Lydia’s who’d been assigned a locker next to mine, complained bitterly. “At least you have long legs,” she pointed out. “Look at these fat drumsticks.”

  I shook my head in empathy as we headed outside. Since I hadn’t brought in sneakers, I was forced to wear my flats, making my long, exposed legs stand out even more. How immoral I felt wearing that outfit!

  Soon, however, our activities made me forget about appearances and morality.

  First, we were ordered to jog around the field. It was toasty out—not a lick of dew left in the grass. I teamed up with Lydia and Alina as we seemed to be the slowest of the bunch. Other girls whizzed by, making fun of us, and Alina whistled back in defiance. By the time we reached Miss Michaels and her stopwatch, my feet ached from running in flats and I was completely drenched in sweat. Alina gave me a high-five for being the last one in with her. At least I was making friends.

  Miss Michaels glared. “Ladies,” she said coldly, “we need to work toward an eleven-minute mile.” Then she shooed us over to the other side of the field, where a plucky girl named Connie McGill was supervising other girls on various exercise contraptions. The most intimidating of these was The Horse, a wooden podium topped with a vinyl pad that we were expected to run toward and then leap over, splitting our legs apart, to land harmlessly and gracefully on our feet. In Alina’s group, shrieks of joy rang out when somebody actually made it across safely. Miss Michaels ordered those who’d completed a successful jump to the tennis nets, then stood before the rest of us with her arms crossed. “This is not a joke. I expect each of you to perform this jump. Do you understand me?”

  Doubtful nods followed.

  Lydia strolled diffidently to the front and managed to get across with a slight push from the spotter. Her fans applauded and cheered. Next, there were two failed attempts by a big girl, Margarita Dominguez, and her friend Carmen. No one laughed this time. Miss Michaels wiped her forehead with a towel. By the time my turn came, I had a terrible case of jitters. Plus, the podium was like distant Pluto. How would I ever reach it?

  “You don’t have to start so far back,” Miss Michaels yelled at me. But I didn’t trust her. I backed up a few more steps, closed my eyes, willed the nervousness out of me, and ran as fast as humanly possible. At some point, I heard Miss Michaels yell “Jump!” and leapt at her command—succeeding in grabbing the vinyl covering before my shoulders inexplicably hit wood. I’d entirely forgotten to shoot out my legs and somersaulted over, landing on the damp grass beyond the podium. Flat on my back, I thought of my family—my mother, aunts, uncles, and especially my Jehovah-like father—hovering above my hospital bed while I lay comatose and awaiting final Judgment in that awful, skimpy white gym suit. When a pair of helping hands pulled me to a sitting position, my life returned, and I was surprised to find that despite a burning sensation in my neck nothing was even broken. I scrambled to my feet.

  Without a word of contempt, Miss Michaels pointed her pencil toward the tennis nets.

  After that nerve-wracking experience, I slid thankfully into a seat in an ordinary class. There, amid the whirring fans, I was delighted to discover that everyone around me was Latino. For the first time, I’d actually been allowed to study Spanish at school. Señora Rubio, a petite Cuban matron in an ivory blouse and skirt, began the class as if she were an agent sent there by all Latino parenthood: “¿Qué es familia?” she inquired.

  Only one person—a qu
irky, dark-haired boy named Claudio Sotomayor—raised his hand. From the back, he murmured something about family meaning heritage and human history. His serious voice made me turn around in order to hear better, but he spoke in abstractions that floated as if on parallelograms of light across the room. In the warmth of the trailer where our class was held, I began to drift dreamily with the rhythm of the sounds until the meaning of familia slipped away.

  Lydia invited me to her house after school. Eager to postpone Sentinel searches and typing, I called Mami for permission to do my homework there and hung up afterward with only a small twinge of guilt. She wouldn’t have been so agreeable had she known the scandal that was unfolding at Lydia’s house. Still, it was only Lydia’s father who was indecent, I reassured myself, not her whole family.

  As she and I stepped off the bus, we were greeted by her older brother, who was sprawled, hairy and shirtless, across their front steps. Let me just say that Emilio’s morals were nothing my parents would approve of either. His magazines were spread out so that we could clearly see naked women in them, and he was leaning back on his elbows to observe our reactions. I hesitated at the bottom of the stoop.

  “Emilio, you’re a jerk,” said Lydia, kicking his dirty magazines as she flounced up the steps. “Come on, Gabi.”

  “Maybe she likes them.” He raised one thick eyebrow at me.

  I shook my head in vehement denial and raced into the house behind Lydia.

  When we reached her bedroom, I sat in a chair and got out my math problems while she went rummaging for her mother’s fotonovelas. The sexy photograph-filled comics, with their complicated sagas of forlorn ex-wives or bitter mothers-in-law conspiring to lure sons back from the clutches of an evil woman, were wildly popular in Miami. Even Mami devoured them when Tía Rita or her new Colombian friend Camila occasionally passed one on, although Lydia’s mother seemed to be a real fotonovela junkie.