Try to Remember Read online

  “Hah!” exclaimed my father, grasping the handlebars joyfully.

  “It wobbles,” said Manolo as he dismounted. “It’s no good, Papi.”

  “Qué va.” A vein appeared on my father’s red forehead and he cuffed Manolo really hard.

  That rattled me, especially when I glimpsed that our neighbors, elderly Mr. Krantz and chatty Mr. Anderson, were observing the whole thing with their arms crossed. They took a few steps toward us, and my father made a show of straightening a bike spoke with his wrench. “Sin petroleo colombiano,” he announced loudly, and I flushed in embarrassment.

  Mr. Anderson and Mr. Krantz looked at each other. Neither of them had any clue what my father had said in Spanish, but the weird petroleum comment seemed to distract them from the whack he’d given Manolo. “Sorry?” Mr. Anderson called out, cupping his ear.

  “Tell them your father is fixing the bicycle, mi’ja,” my mother murmured quietly.

  “Um, my brothers are practicing,” I yelled over in the neighbors’ direction as Manolo shoved the handlebars at Pablo.

  Pablo saluted, mounting the bike. Luckily, he rode around without any antics. On his return, my father slapped his hands together. “Again,” he ordered enthusiastically, sending my brother out for another tour instead of letting him dismount.

  My father continued to order Pablo and Manolo to take turns in the hot sun, and it became apparent to me that he intended to keep them out riding, over and over, as if to force them to appreciate his gift. When the neighbors had finally retreated to their houses, I absconded into ours, glad, despite my guilt, that I wasn’t required to participate. Mami had made it clear to my father that bicycle riding wasn’t ladylike, particularly while trying to hold down one’s dress to keep the underwear from showing. Since feminine morals of any sort were wildly popular with my father, he’d agreed. Manolo had scowled at me from across the table at the unfair result, but I’d merely batted my eyes in response.

  Now, as Mami stood watching from the window for my father’s bicycle whim to pass, I wondered if she was as disturbed as I’d been by my father’s comportment. Even if hitting your own kid wasn’t the same as Assault on a Minor, it had been a distressing reminder that my father was still in that probationary status and needed to keep his temper under control.

  Later in the day, when things settled, Mami managed to sweet talk him into taking Manolo to the hardware store for sink washers. A nice, normal, fatherly activity.

  “Bring back a newspaper,” she added, before they took off.

  Manolo smirked at me, as if to say, payback time.

  When they returned, I was reading in my room and overheard Mami reprimand my father for having bought “those useless magazines” instead.

  “No fue nada,” he protested tersely. “They cost next to nothing. Less than five dollars.”

  “That’s a few more we could apply to the chairs,” she complained, despite the fact that we’d long ago stopped paying off the layaway for the remaining furniture. “¡Ay Roberto!” she lamented. “We can never invite people over.”

  How little my mother wanted, I realized suddenly. The meager wish for a few matching chairs consumed her. Into my mind slipped the saying she’d often recited when I wanted something I couldn’t have: Hay que aceptar lo que Dios ha puesto. Accept what God has given.

  “As long as the house is clean, Evangelina, you can invite people,” my father pronounced pompously, his own Godly pride more important than hers.

  “Humph,” she muttered, growing silent. After a moment, though, she regained her momentum and added, “Maybe to ride that rusty bicycle. Nobody else wants to.” She traipsed off, ordering Pablo to wheel himself right back to the Farm Stores for the newspaper my father should’ve gotten in the first place.

  A half hour later, she appeared in my doorway with the hefty Sunday Sentinel in her arms. “Mark all the factory jobs, mi’ja,” she said, dropping the bundle near my feet.

  “But they don’t always say if they’re factory jobs,” I explained, reaching for the newspaper. “How am I supposed to know?”

  “Ay, mi’ja. Read and see.”

  “ All of them?” I lifted up Section F to show her how thick it was.

  She shrugged her shoulders. “If necessary.”

  “Why don’t you ever make Manolo do this stuff?” I demanded.

  She completely ignored the question and walked out.

  I threw the paper back on the floor and propped myself, arms folded, against my pillow. From the floor, the head on the mast of the Seminole Sentinel stared sternly at me, as if to imply that I was being petty. It was supposed to be the head of a Seminole chief, although Mr. Lanham had informed us that the term “Seminole” was a bastardization—he’d paused to make sure no one giggled—of the Spanish cimarrón, a person who has escaped something like the slaves in Cuba or the Creeks into the Everglades.

  In that case, we were all Seminoles, I’d concluded. Everyone who’d come to Florida. The elderly white people, referred to as “snowbirds,” who escaped winter by claiming South Beach with their rocking chairs; the Cuban refugees who’d escaped Fidel for Calle Ocho; and my own family, fleeing the Queens Urban Renewal Plan that tore down our brick building to make room for a highway. Here we were, the lost tribe of Seminoles. United at last.

  The next morning on the school bus, I passively listened to Lydia boast about things she’d gotten that dumb Rique boy near the gas station to do for her. When she’d drifted on to a glum monologue about her adulterer father, I was tempted to share my conflicted feelings regarding my own kooky father’s return, but Mami had prohibited me from ever disclosing our domestic problems beyond the family. The only thing I was allowed to say was that he was experiencing temporary difficulties finding work; under no circumstances was I to “disrespect” him by divulging personal details.

  I confined myself to carping to Lydia about the classified ad searches that would now be keeping me busy. When I complained in a similar vein to Alina during math class later, I accidentally lapsed into Spanish and got into trouble. Mrs. Goddard blinked at me in surprise and said she had no choice but to punish us both. I felt ashamed. But the punishment turned out to be nothing more than consignment to separate seats on the patio outside our classroom trailer with the sprinklers pleasantly spraying nearby. But the fresh afternoon air couldn’t quell my growing disappointment over the return of my hot-tempered father and his oil fixations. Whatever the future held for my father, I sure wasn’t going to be la-di-da’ing with Lydia and Alina anymore.

  [ SIX ]

  ALTHOUGH MY FATHER ZEALOUSLY FOLLOWED the classified ads, the jobless days continued. Thanksgiving recess arrived, and every day I faced the taunting black-and-white block ads: Clerk, Lab Technician, Physician’s Assistant. The gray columns of entire categories: Professional, Services, Sales.

  All the jobs my father couldn’t have.

  At night in bed, I struggled to conjure up from darkness an image of my father at work somewhere, perhaps piecing mechanical bits together, perhaps building them into equipment and machines, although the job I searched for by day—the disappearing GRINDER position—involved breaking things down.

  The applicable Sentinel listings had definitely shrunk.

  When Tío Victor dropped by one evening to see how things were going, he tried to reassure me. “It’s just that those heavy industrial jobs are getting phased out,” he said. “Look for different ones.”

  Other jobs, however, required special training, licenses, the fluent English my father didn’t speak. More important, they required a person without my father’s difficult temperamento. As he ranted to my dubious uncle about people at job sites who failed to comprehend anything at all about the refinery business, I began to speculate that the story about the lost apartment in Massachusetts had been made up: No doubt my father and the shoe factory chief had had one of those harebrained oil drilling conversations—or worse.

  When Mami came by my room after my uncle had gone that
night with her usual “sleep with the little angels” refrain, I sat up straight in bed. “Mami, I don’t know if any of those jobs will work out for Papi,” I said.

  “Keep trying mi’ja,” she encouraged, coming to sit beside me. “We’re all depending on you.”

  “Tío Victor thinks he might get into one of those… discussions with somebody,” I warned vaguely.

  She studied the butterflies trapped between my bedside lamp-shade’s wax paper layers. “We have to find something,” she said, sighing deeply. “In Colombia, we’d end up in some desolate jungle with only a pitiful chance of finding work. And even then, with miserable pay!” Bitterness cracked open more of her fears. “Dios mío, how could we leave como unos miserables, deported! What a disgrace! No, mi’ja, that can’t happen to us!”

  “Us?” I asked abruptly. “Would they deport us all? With handcuffs and everything like those people on TV?”

  As the images took hold, Mami’s eyes, still fixed on the lamp-shade, filled with melancholy. “You always expect to return to your tierra, but only to be buried, and with honor.”

  Silently I began to rue my own loss—the place I’d found for myself in the world was here now, not in Colombia—but then Mami shook herself and stood up. “Let’s not be ridiculous, Gabriela. Nobody’s going to be deported.”

  “But somebody has to make sure,” I trailed faintly as she planted a good-night kiss on my forehead.

  After she’d gone, I spun the lampshade with my finger. Were the trapped butterflies real? I wondered sadly before finally turning out the light.

  A couple of days after Tío Victor’s visit I learned that Mami had borrowed money from him to pay our December mortgage, though my proud father didn’t know it. She remained uneasy, brooding aloud to me, “How can we impose on your uncle again if things continue like this?”

  I told her that some Cuban kids I knew in school received government help.

  “Your father would never hear of it,” she told me firmly.

  One night, though, much to my surprise, the same U.S. Department of Agriculture surplus food provided to refugees mysteriously appeared in our kitchen: boxes of pale yellow powder to which you added water for scrambled eggs; cans of pre-mixed peanut butter and jelly; and a thick, pink meat spread.

  It made for a very strange dinner.

  “Yuck,” said Pablo, pushing away the disgusting pink-and-white sandwich.

  “Where’d we get this stuff?” Manolo asked.

  “It doesn’t matter.” Mami tilted her head toward my father to signal an end to the conversation. “Eat, please.”

  Even my father responded with a puzzled smile. “No meat, Evangelina?”

  “I thought you liked eggs,” she replied, digging into hers.

  My father picked up his fork and explored the dense clumps.

  I tried the fake eggs too. “Very good,” I mumbled encouragingly with my mouth full.

  Manolo, who’d pushed his plate away as well, reluctantly pulled it back to eat.

  My father devoured his pink ham spread sandwich. “One more, please,” he said, holding up a finger and smiling at us. Suddenly and very oddly, his other hand began to jerk of its own accord against the table. Was he doing it on purpose? I wondered, glancing at my mother and then back at his spastic hand. Like a reflex test, the hairy knuckles jumped up and down. I couldn’t keep my eyes off them.

  “Gabriela!” Mami admonished.

  Afterward, while cleaning up in the kitchen, I asked her about my father’s unmistakable tic, but she brushed it off as a case of nervios.

  “But he wasn’t acting nervous,” I pointed out.

  “Ay mi’ja, don’t contradict me so much. Please.” She straightened up, rubbed her back, and leaned back down to finish scrubbing.

  To expand the employment possibilities, Mami chatted over fences with neighbors about prospective jobs. “With all the building going on in South Miami,” she began explaining to me the following day, “your father should find something.” But when her gaze fell upon the unmarked Sentinel pages in my lap, her tone changed and she cried, “¡Dios santo! Is there nothing good in that newspaper?” Her desperate eyes darted around the yard like a pair of wild birds, alighting on the back wall where Pablo had indulged his latest pastime, knife throwing. Straight to the wall she suddenly marched. “See?” she said, jabbing the gouges. “This is what happens when parents are so distracted they can’t provide their sons with guidance.” Sadly, the gold glints faded from her eyes.

  This was my mother’s State of Worry. It provided some variety to her alternate State of Complaint, but not any relief. In the shadows of our backyard, I watched her work herself into a frenzy. How thankful I was when she finally went inside the house.

  Not long after, though, she summoned me in too.

  “Augh!” she began, starting another soliloquy on the endless chores to be done while tossing degreasers on the stove.

  I picked up a scraper and braced myself.

  “How am I going to get the house papers out of here without your father seeing on Monday?” she continued, moving on to some beef my father had with our mortgage company. According to him, they owed us, but Mami said it was the other way around.

  “Do it when he’s eating,” I suggested.

  “Don’t be a boba. You think he won’t notice? He checks those papers every day. I don’t know where this strange interest comes from.” She stopped to glare. “Gabriela, that’s not the way to clean a stove! You have to pay attention. Why don’t you do what I ask? What a soñadora!”

  Some nerve she had calling me a dreamer. She hardly let me sleep! “I’ve done every single thing you asked me to, Mami. Who cleaned the bathroom? Who swept the living room?” I rose. “If my help isn’t good enough, why don’t you do it yourself!” I threw the scraper on the stove and stormed off to my room.

  But she followed, unwilling to let me retreat. With her hand on the door frame, she pressed on. “Everything is sacrifice, Gabriela. I’m killing myself inventing ways to get through the month.” Pausing to take a breath, she continued, “I have no water in my bathroom because of those pipes your father still hasn’t repaired….” She forced me to listen to her headaches and heartaches until she finally ran out of steam and left.

  Likely my mother would have returned for another round had Tío Lucho and my cousins not dropped in on their way back from the orthodontist. Mami offered my uncle Cuban guava pastries and coffee that she took out to the much cooler Florida room. My brothers and I were dispatched to attend to the three cousins in the yard.

  I didn’t care too much for my know-it-all older cousin Marisol, as much as I liked the fact that their family lived in a funky trailer park no one ever drove out of; the residents had planted colorful gardens and fenced themselves right in with cement bricks. Tía Elena was always complaining, but my mother swore, “Lucho will never leave that place.”

  In our yard, my cousin began to brush her long, black hair while the rest of us sat on the grass and watched. Marisol’s modus operandi—a term I’d learned from reading a mystery once—was to choose the oldest kid in a group and make that person part of a team that looked down upon everyone else. On this occasion, the lucky person was me. Marisol informed me that she was mad because her bottom teeth were crooked but Tío Lucho wouldn’t spring for braces. The dentist had said he would still have to straighten the top teeth in order to match the bite, so Tío Lucho had shaken his head and said, “In that case, no.”

  “She’s so conceited,” said her younger brother Luchito. “Her teeth are fine. Look at Cari’s.”

  Little Cari, who was used to being picked on, gazed up at the trees and wondered aloud if we could knock down some mangoes. Manolo found a stick and began collecting fruit.

  Eyeing him, Marisol commented, “I wonder which one of us has your father’s sickness.”

  Manolo threw a hard green mango at her, but she caught it and hurled it back. “My mother says there’s too much intermarriage between cou
sins in this family,” she went on, “and that messes up the descendants’ brains.”

  Everybody stared at her in stunned silence.

  Finally, Pablo held up his right hand. “See this,” he said to me, pointing to his index finger. “It shakes sometimes if I hold it out a long time. Just like Papi’s hand.”

  “Mine does too,” said Luchito.

  We all held up our right hands and admitted they trembled too—except for Marisol.

  “What about your eye?” Cari asked her sister. “Remember when your eye wouldn’t stop twitching?”

  “Man, I get that too!” Manolo said.

  Marisol stood up. “You guys are all crazy.” Into the house she waltzed, swinging her long black mane.

  The rest of us stayed and kept discussing unusual things our bodies did—like Luchito’s jaw slipping out of place when he ate an apple—and trying to predict who would inherit my father’s nervios. Although it got to be a joke, I couldn’t help but worry a little about whether there was any truth to what Marisol had said, that we passed these things down from generation to generation.

  After my cousins and uncle had left, I fled to my room to work on a vexing autobiografía assignment for Señora Rubio’s class. It was for the unit titled, “Turning Inward.” Stories of our common patriot Simón Bolívar and the glory of independence that had paved the way for poetry, first by Cuba’s José Martí, then by the chilena Gabriela Mistral, and soon by others. I’d gathered that our teacher was trying to be inclusive, since not all the students in class were Cuban, but it made little difference to me whether the sea that washed past Pilar in Martí’s Los zapaticos de rosa was Cuban, Chilean, Venezuelan, or Colombian—the beautiful pink shoes in the crystal case were beyond the reach of all poor girls, wherever we might be from.

  Unfortunately, though, whatever global truths I could glean from the literary panorama, my peculiar home life made me wish that rather than “turn inward,” we could continue to write about other peoples’ history. My home troubles were too global, with the deportation possibilities. And how could I openly memorialize the ad searching and typing that had become my calvario, as my aunts would say, my cross to bear? Or the sadness of being around my cuckoo father? No, our code of family silence did not permit such inward revelations.