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  “Here,” said Lydia, offering me a whole stack. “Take these home if you want.”

  “Wow. Thanks a lot.” I’d only been able to read my mother’s occasional fotonovela in secrecy, and sometimes skimmed one of Lydia’s on the morning bus ride before she traded it away at school.

  An hour later, I was heading home.

  Kissing my mother’s cheek, I went to briefly greet my father before darting back to the kitchen. As I sat down to complete emergency contact and medical forms, I wondered again how I could prepare my mother for this gym class situation.

  “Mami,” I queried tentatively, twirling the pencil between two fingers. “Should I put Dr. Sanabria down as my doctor?”

  “Oh no. Put the hospital.”

  “Jackson Memorial? That’s strange, Mami. You can’t write the name of a hospital. It has to be a doctor.”

  “¡Ay, mi’ja! Don’t put anything then.”

  Was he not a real doctor then? I worried, imagining the school’s investigation.

  In the end, I scribbled “Not Applicable.” I would have to wait and see what Miss Michaels did before I discussed any gym matters with Mami.

  After dinner, while my brothers watched television, I snuck into bed with one of Lydia’s fotonovelas disguised behind a textbook. In the distance, I could almost hear the ghostly echo of my puritanical father yelling at the mujeres sucias who flaunted their sexy wiles on the TV screen and in the pages of my magazine. I got up and went to make sure my father wasn’t actually nearby. It was only my nerves acting up, so I climbed back into bed and resumed the illicit reading. My heart kept beating rapidly in fear that he might appear. Frustrated, I ducked into the bathroom and locked the door to finish reading in peace there.

  The next morning—with sneakers in hand—I bravely reported for gym class. To my surprise, Miss Michaels beckoned me toward her office. She opened a folding chair for me. “Sit down. I want to talk to you about your health.”

  An alarm went off in my head. Would she quiz me? Quickly, I made a mental review of what Dr. Sanabria had written about my condition that “contraindicated sports.”

  “Girls your age need to exercise regularly,” Miss Michaels began. “Your heart needs it. Your mind too.”

  Was she going to make me do an alternative exercise? Calisthenics? Yoga? That would be okay if I didn’t have to change clothes.

  “Gabriela.” She leaned forward and looked me squarely in the eye. “I know what’s going on with those notes. You know very well why we have Phys Ed. It’s not a punishment, for God’s sake.”

  With her eyes probing me, I pretended to fiddle with the combination lock I held in my lap. She’d practically accused me of cheating. I’d never cheated. Ever. That stupid permission slip hadn’t been my idea, though now I felt responsible for it.

  “I’m so sorry, Miss Michaels,” I offered humbly. “I know Phys. Ed. is good for you.” I wanted to go on and explain the note, but a nightmarish vision of my father storming the girls’ locker room and ripping up gym suits while calling everyone prostitutes stopped me. How could I explain the very unusual world of home? Still, I felt obligated to try. “Miss Michaels, it’s just that—” I took a deep breath. “My family’s different.” But as soon as those words left my lips, I felt I’d betrayed my entire familia.

  “Everybody’s family is different, Gabriela. Not all Cuban students excuse themselves from gym.”

  “We’re Colombian.”

  “Whatever. You know what I mean.”

  I took a good look around at the Presidential Medals, Certificates of Achievement, and team pictures of blonde girls in tennis skirts. Things for Americans were awfully black and white. Not much room for my complications. Why, oh, why couldn’t I have been good in all the ways people expected me to be—a gym star as well as honorable to my family? I sighed in frustration, and then I sighed in defeat. The difference between my parents’ world and this one was so great that the ball—me—would never get across the net.

  Miss Michaels waited, trying not to tap her sneaker, for me to say something more.

  “I’m sorry, Miss Michaels,” I repeated feebly.

  “Okay.” She slapped her hands on her thighs and stood up straight. “Why don’t you go down to the library?”

  Silently and without looking her in the eye, I handed back the lock that I no longer needed. She folded up the chair, her silver whistle tinkling.

  [ THREE ]

  TÍO VICTOR FINALLY PUT my father in contact with a Cuban contractor his lawn care business partner knew. For several nights in a row, my father patiently called the contractor to check on his roofing schedule. But after getting the fourth “call tomorrow” spiel, my father stormed into the living room where the rest of us were quietly watching a movie. For a while he stood silently, testily shifting position. Then the inevitable lovers’ embrace unfolded on the screen. Immediately, he went on a rampage, kicking the defenseless TV while struggling not to trip on his long pants. The TV wobbled, and I raced fearfully to my room.

  This fit, unlike the last, had been sparked by an embrace between married characters. Wasn’t that normal, married people kissing? What did he find so offensive about that? In the calm of my room, I tried to reason logically. He and Mami had once held hands, after all, when they went walking. But maybe that was too long ago, back when he wasn’t going bananas over every tiny thing. Maybe Mami didn’t love him as much anymore. Maybe watching romantic TV embraces reminded him that he was missing something.

  I tried to stifle my preoccupation with these incidents by reading, but my troubled mind kept returning to when my father had been predictable and behaved like a normal person, instead of a scary one who chased people out of rooms. The last happy day I could remember was in the summertime, when he’d gotten our dining room table out of layaway. To celebrate, Mami had prepared his favorite dessert, dulce de leche, the old-fashioned way, stirring the milk and sugar on the hot stove with her wooden spoon. Surely, she’d loved him then. After dinner, my father had eaten several helpings and the dessert disappeared from our yellow serving bowl. He’d tried to convince my brothers to surrender some, teasing them, “You boys are one-fourth my size. I should get four times as much.” But Manolo and Pablo had only answered by wolfing down their dessert, while my father watched longingly.

  “Toma, Papi,” I’d said then, willingly passing him my plate.

  How gratefully he’d smiled over that little portion of dulce de leche. “Gabrielita, you’re the one who really loves me.”

  As nice as the memory was, I forced myself to shake it off and focus on my assigned pages of The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter. After a while, I had to stop and rest my own heart. Sometimes the girl in that book made it painful to read.

  Perhaps the Cuban contractor had a heart too, since he ended up giving my father a roofing job a couple of days later—and it was like the windows of our house flew open.

  Construction work was dependent, however, on how many men the boss had already lined up for each project. Often, my father didn’t know until late at night whether he would be needed the following dawn. Mami hardly slept, waiting for the call and rising early to prepare his breakfast when he got asked to work. My father went roofing and came home filthy and sunburned. Though the grueling hours of physical labor wore him out, they put a fortunate end to his frightening outbursts over the TV embraces, our incoming mail, and the simple incidents of everyday life.

  The week he started roofing, I started traipsing off happily with Lydia to the Chekika public library every day after school. Outside the sleek white building, she taught me the art of smoking cigarettes, and then we went in for our books. Lydia wasn’t exactly a model student, but she loved reading Gothic novels. For me, they offered a superior advantage over fotonovelas: The darkish landscape covers were a perfect smoke screen for the passionate romances my father would have deemed trashy, opening up the possibility of anxiety-free reading in the comfort of my own room instead of the unpleasant bathroom. I immed
iately became addicted to the Gothics as well, even begging Mami to let me stay home one night when we were expected at Tía Rita’s. Mami flatly refused, saying she wouldn’t allow me to turn into a montuna—a simple country girl lacking in all social graces.

  Passion, I quickly discovered, also dominated the revelatory notas that girls in Lydia’s clique exchanged at school along with their fotonovelas. Unfortunately for me, unlike Lydia who obsessed over a flirtatious lover-boy at the gas station near the library, I didn’t “like” anyone. My father’s TV fits were giving me a complex about real-life kissing, and I hoped to avoid the boy thing altogether. Still, I wanted to fit in with the gang, so I searched for someone safe to pretend to moon over and ended up choosing a green-eyed Cuban boy who had a girlfriend and, thankfully, no idea that I existed. In my own notas to the girls about him, I aimed to emulate Gothic novels, but it was more difficult to compare El Gringo, our secret alias for him, to my metropolitan landscape than a Gothic hero to the wild English moors. My creativity was squelched by Miami’s cement and glitter, the condominiums and corner malls under perpetual construction all the way out to the unincorporated lands beyond the city. For beauty, I had to stick to Biscayne Bay. My pals had hearty laughs over “the salty waves of El Gringo’s stormy eyes,” but the fictional romance of notas, Gothic novels, and fotonovelas let me rise above my own drab and disappointing life for once, like those Frenchmen over Paris in the first hot air balloon.

  Then one night at home, the little bubble of optimism burst. The contractor called to say that my father’s roofing job was no more.

  The next morning, Saturday, I was forced awake early by the sounds of Mami clobbering around the house while reciting her trials and tribulations. With my eyes closed, I listened for a lament over the untimely demise of my father’s roofing job, but the only new woe I heard in the litany was that the washing machine had given out.

  My father devoured his breakfast in seemingly peaceful oblivion. Putting aside the Sentinel ads I’d marked up at my mother’s command, he escorted my brother Manolo and me to the nearby Laundromat with our hampers of dirty clothing. While I loaded washers, my father chatted with the Cuban owner whose friendly demeanor seemed false to me, but at least the guy didn’t appear to mind my father’s conversational eccentricities. After a while, my father left me with my twelve-year-old brother to chaperone. Manolo didn’t want to stay, but my father reminded him that he was the man of the family in his father’s absence and pathetic Manolo believed him. When our clothes were fully dry, I was supposed to send Manolo to fetch my father. Why I required a paternal escort back and forth if I was left to my own devices in between was another unsolved mystery in my father’s moral code.

  Arnoldo, the owner, was a balding guy with gold teeth he flashed while offering Manolo and me free Cokes. When Manolo went to sit by the chairs, Arnoldo walked over to hand me my soda. I thanked him, popped the can open, and then lifted it to my lips, but suddenly Arnoldo came around behind me and his grubby hands began rubbing my breasts. In shock, I choked, dropping the Coke.

  Laughing evilly, Arnoldo let go of me. “I’ll get you another one.”

  “No, thanks.” I dashed to the chairs, plopped myself next to Manolo, and placed our laundry basket on the other side, my arm on top so that the sicko couldn’t sit there.

  After our clothes dried, I went for my father instead of sending Manolo.

  I was terrified of telling my father what had happened. What if he blamed me? The outfit I’d worn consisted of a baggy T-shirt and shorts that camouflaged my developing body. But still, what if he didn’t believe that I hadn’t invited the guy’s lewd advances?

  When we returned home later with all our clothes done, I thought I would go tell Mami about it and found her outside, gardening. Before I could find the words to explain, I saw her kneeling beside the níspero seedling our elderly neighbor, Mr. Krantz, had given her. A confusing shame overcame me and I quashed the impulse to confide. Turning around, I went back inside to put away the clean clothes.

  When I’d returned to help plant, someone called my name from across the street. It was Lydia, waving and coming toward us.

  Awkwardly, I introduced Mami and Lydia to each other.

  Lydia smiled and commented on how nice it was that my mother was growing her own tree. “I wish my mother would try that. We only have bushes by our house.”

  “We’ll have to see if it grows,” Mami replied with a shy smile. “Si Dios quiere.” Despite giving God the credit, she seemed pleased that Lydia had recognized her contribution to the process.

  Lydia asked if I wanted to go the library, but after that awful Arnoldo episode, I wasn’t in the mood, so I told her I wasn’t feeling well.

  She turned to Mami. “Do you need anything from the 7-Eleven, señora? I have to stop on my way back.”

  Mami declined the offer politely and Lydia took off.

  “That girl has good modales,” Mami concluded, as she knelt back down in the dirt, pleased I’d found a friend with such good manners.

  Off and on for the rest of the week, the Laundromat lecher slipped into my thoughts uninvited. Somehow, in the frenzy of typing my unemployed father’s perplexing letters, I managed to forget about it until Manolo jostled me awake on Saturday morning with the news that our washer was beyond repair.

  Thunder cracked out my window. Clouds drifted rapidly across the sky, the way one would expect them to on Judgment Day if God were really as mean as in the images from my old catechism text. Maybe, if luck were with me, it would rain. Deliver us from Laundry Duty, I prayed.

  But the skies didn’t deliver a single drop of rain, and off we went. I was greatly relieved to see a noisy family also doing their laundry this time. After my father had gone, I hung around near the mother while her kids were off pushing metal carts against one another and keeping Arnoldo busy pulling the carts away. He tried to chastise the kids without offending their pudgy mother, a lady in pink rollers and painted-on eyebrows who appeared to be a graduate of the Ay Bendito school of mothering—throwing her hands up in the air and uttering “¡Ay bendito!” each time one of her children did something bad. Arnoldo kept giving her his fake laugh.

  When my clothes dried, I stationed myself at the folding area next to her. Feeling safe, I sent Manolo home for my father. I didn’t count on them taking so long to come pick me up, though. When the lady finished and wheeled her cart away, I threw my unfolded clothes into a cart in alarm and wheeled after her, but Arnoldo was faster. He caught me in both arms and started the horrible rubbing thing. Somehow, he pinned me between himself and the table and went straight for my crotch. I nearly hyperventilated out of panic. A nauseating odor of cumin mixed with sweat, as if he’d used spices for deodorant, overwhelmed me as I tried to wriggle out of his grip. Only when one of the lady’s kids began shaking the Coke machine on the other side of the Laundromat and quarters started popping out did Arnoldo finally release me to attend to that.

  Seizing the moment, I grabbed my clothes basket and made a mad dash for home. Cars swished past me down Calle Ocho at a dizzying speed with other lecherous Arnoldos beeping out of them at me. When my father and brother came into view, I ran to meet them, handed over the basket, and sped homeward.

  Mami complained about the wrinkled clothes. “See what happens when you don’t fold first,” she said, showing me a crumpled shirt.

  “I’ll iron it,” I offered wearily, knowing then that I would never tell her.

  The next morning, I went to the early services at St. Stephens. It was a contemporary church with pale pastel windows, as if Florida had drained them of their original color. My mother attended Mass there sporadically; my father and brothers, not at all. I’d become the family emissary, my prayers very weighted. But without the Benedictine sisters around to guide me, I felt lost in the echoing vastness of this Miami church where a person was utterly exposed. How I missed my small, dark church in Queens!

  I’d always been afraid of God and avoided praying
directly to Him. Instead, I prayed to the Holy Family—Baby Jesus, the Virgin Mary and gentle Joseph—with God the Father merely hovering nearby. This time, I prayed to them all from the heart. I asked for the Laundromat sicko to leave me alone; for a miracle job for my difficult, desperate father; for relief for me and the entire family from his horrible temper; and for Mami to lay down her worries once and for all. Most and hardest of all, I prayed for a stronger faith in both my parents.

  Like a sign from Heaven, a tiny path was illuminated through the quagmire of my father’s moral doctrine by the TV Guide. “Look,” I exclaimed to Mami that afternoon as we stood at the A&P checkout counter and I pointed out movie descriptions. “I can try to figure out which ones Papi will like, so he won’t get mad.”

  She brightened at the prospect of relaxed TV viewing too. “All right, mi’ja,” she said, adding the digest to our cart.

  When we got home, I read the whole week’s worth of TV Guide listings and highlighted the programming that seemed unlikely to spike my father’s temper. The Wizard of Oz, game shows like You Don’t Say!, and cartoons seemed like good choices. I picked out a couple of horror movies too.

  Later that night, as we all sat watching complacently, a scene in the horror movie nevertheless managed to incite my father’s wrath. Mami tried to defend the vampire, who wasn’t kissing the girl, he only wanted to suck her blood. But when my father was on a moral rampage, you couldn’t sit around and discuss the subtleties of a movie. My brothers and I fled.

  Hours later, I ventured out of my room and noticed that Mami was still sitting alone and quiet, with her arms folded over herself, in front of the dark television set. Watching her, I began to worry whether any job existed that would work out for my father, if no one could tame his terrible temper.

  Tío Victor and Tío Lucho arrived the following Saturday in response to Mami’s call for help. While my father was taking a shower, the uncles sipped tintos and Mami planted herself across from them to plead for a job, any job my uncles could think of, that my father might perform at their tailor shop. The problem was, my uncles were only employees, though both had worked at Sal’s a long time. Tío Lucho had been employed there eleven years. Marrying early, after his father died, he’d become the first to immigrate here. I had trouble understanding how Mami could expect my uncles to rescue us from the entire problem of my father; but it was as if she refused to accept that perhaps there were some things in life from which no one could rescue you.