For the first time in my life that I can remember my jaw drops of its own accord, not in some pantomined gesture of shock. I’m pacing up and down the little stretch of kitchen promising myself that I’m going to get one of those cordless phones so I can walk off steam while talking to my family. At the very least, get some of my housework done. “You’re the one who used to drive us over there, Mami, don’t you remember?”
“Why would I do something like that, mi’ja? You can’t visit Carmelites, silly. They take this vow of leaving the world and you can only talk to them in an emergency through a grate. But of course, if a little orphan girl is pounding on the door, they’re going to open it. Thank God your cousin Rosita, who had joined not long before, recognized Yoyo right away and called me.”
How can you argue with such good details? I start thinking that maybe my sister and I made up this memory of Mami threatening to dump us at the convent to make ourselves feel better about a mother suing a daughter. Anyhow, I want to hear the end of her crazy story. “So, what happened?”
“What happened? We pile in the car and go pick her up and bring her back and I’m ready to give her the spanking of her life but first I ask her why, why would she do something like this. Imagine, it’s like giving her an invitation. So she says she was just missing Cousin Rosita so much, she slipped out of the playground to the grounds of the convent, knocked on the door, and told the head nun that she’s an orphan come to see her only living family, Rosita García!” Now even Mami is laughing. “Can you believe it?”
And I’m shaking my head, no, no, because I don’t know what to believe anymore except that everyone in our family is lying.
A few months pass, and things quiet down like my husband said they would. Mami drops her suit, though she’s still not talking to Yoyo except through me, and poor Papi gets mugged while emptying his pocket change on the little metal shelf in a phone booth near his old office in the Bronx. The other sisters exchange a couple of stiff birthday cards and calls with Yoyo, everything very cool like we’re a New England family or something.
And week by week, the photos pour in that I’ve got to keep from the kids. They show a naked Sandi in profile from shoulder to living-color crotch, and on back in very neat handwriting like she’s tidying up her act for this baby, she writes, four weeks and two days, five weeks, and so on, and then in parenthesis, Eyes have formed! Differentiation of fingers going on! And then I turn the photo over and stare and stare because it really takes an act of faith to believe that a secret life is growing in that bikini-flat belly.
“And Yoyo doesn’t know a thing about it,” Sandi gloats over the phone. My knees go weak beneath me so I have to go sit down in the living room. Thank God for this cordless phone I got as an anniversary gift from my husband although the beautiful gold pendant would have been more than enough. But he says this phone might save him a heart attack from always having to run into the kitchen to see if I’m yelling because I cut off my fingers or I’m just talking to my family.
Finally, about the twelfth week I get an irate call from Sandi. Some friend of hers just called her from Florida and told her there is a story in USA Weekend by Yoyo about a single mother. “You didn’t say anything to her, did you?” Sandi is breathing so heavy that I tell her to go sit down, to think of the baby. But she won’t be placated, and though I’d like to think of myself as having more character, I take the easy way out. “Of course, I didn’t tell her.”
Soon as I hang up with her, I call Yoyo. I’m all set to say a few choice things on her machine, since I haven’t reached a live person at her house for months. But she answers and is so obviously happy at hearing my voice that it’s as if someone let a few decibels out of my anger. Still, I’m mad enough to practically yell at her that I really think she’s purposely trying to piss off everybody.
“What are you talking about?” she says in this truly shocked voice. I just wish I could see her face because I can always tell from her eyes if she’s making up something.
“I mean writing about Sandi in this USA Weekend story!”
“Sandi?” She’s rifling through her memory, I can hear it in her voice, as if she were looking for something of mine in her drawer. And then she finds it. “Oh, that story. What makes you think it’s about Sandi?”
“There’s a single mother in it, isn’t there?”
“And that makes it about Sandi?!” There is the sound of laughter on the phone, not real laughter but the kind of backslapping laughter that has a dagger in its other hand. “First off, I’d have you know, Sandi isn’t the only single mother I know. And number two, for your information—”
There is something fearsome about Yoyo when she knows she is right. She’s not just going to tell you you’re wrong. She’s going to take it to the Supreme Court.
“In actual fact, I wrote that story about two and a half years ago, no, three, three years ago, that’s right. I didn’t have my new printer yet so I can prove it.”
“Okay, okay,” I say.
“But let’s explore this further.”
Do we have to? I’m thinking. I’ve unfolded the ironing board so at least I can get everything smoothed out on cloth if not in the family.
“Maybe Sandi got the idea of being a single mother from my story, you think? I used to send you guys my stories back then, so she probably read it, and said, Gee, that’s a swell idea. I think I’m going to go kidnap a baby, too. You think?”
“Sandi isn’t kidnapping a baby. She’s pregnant.”
“Precisely. My single mother kidnaps her baby because she doesn’t want to pass down her crazy family’s genes to some poor kid. Now that part isn’t fiction.”
Laid out in front of me on the board is my husband’s favorite blue and lavender striped shirt. I put down the iron. I button it up as tenderly as if he were inside it. What would happen if we couldn’t imagine each other, I wonder. Maybe that’s why crazies shoot people in shopping malls: all they see are aliens instead of mamis and papis and sisters and precious babies. “You’re right,” I admit. “I’m sorry.” To make it up to her I fill her in on everything going on in the family, including the new baby just getting his full-fledged sex organs this week. Then I can’t help myself. I’ve got to know. “So what happened to the woman who kidnapped her baby?”
There is a pause in which I can just imagine the look of delight on Yo’s face at being asked. And I know what’s coming as if I had peeked ahead in a thick book to the last page. “Read my story,” she says.
It isn’t until that real baby is born on a bright December day that the family gathers face to face at St. Luke’s. We pore over that little guy like we’ve got to pass a test on what he looks like if we want to keep him. He’s a dark olive that Papi keeps saying is just a suntan until Sandi shuts him up by saying well the kinky hair must be a perm. “Dr. Puello screened the sperm,” Mami assures him, and again one of my loony cartoons pops in my head. Some old guy in a sombrero with a droopy mustache is sieving sperm like he’s separating egg whites into this bowl-like vagina.
Anyhow the aunties are delighted with their new nephew. I should say two of the aunts, because Yoyo isn’t here. Even though Sandi later read the kidnapping story I sent her and felt pretty foolish, the grudge is on. I suppose Yo’s absence is why I’m feeling blue even though a healthy baby’s birth is right up there with True Love and Mami’s guava flan on my scale of happiness. And something else, though I would never breathe this out loud, I feel bad that there’s no father here. Call me old-fashioned, but it seems like a baby should have a set of parents. Look at my family. What would we do if we didn’t have Papi to call us from a public phone when Mami sues us? Or when Papi disowns us, who but Mami is going to assure us that he’ll get over it?
But even this considerable sadness melts away when I look into that honeydrop face, uncurl those little fists to convince him that he doesn’t really have to fight the love that’s pouring into him from his mamma and aunts. I know his genes are only half ours, b
ut I’ve already traced every one of his features to some relation. When I put him back together again and try to figure out who he looks like as a whole, it just pops out of my mouth. “He looks like Yo’s baby pictures, you know.”
Sandi scowls into the baby blanket. “In the whites of his eyes, you mean?”
But Carla agrees, especially when the baby lets out a peal of angry crying, his little mouth opening so wide as if he doesn’t know how to work it yet. “Same big mouth, see?” Carla points out.
We burst out laughing, and suddenly we can feel her absence in the room as if there were a caption above the bed, along with all those blue It’s-a-boy balloons: What is missing from this picture?
For the umpteenth time, I tell Sandi, “I think you should call her.” Carla nods. Sandi bites her lip, but I can tell she is being swayed. Her eyes have this soft-boiled look as if the room were wallpapered with pictures of her beautiful baby. Suddenly, she cocks her head at us. “I can’t believe you haven’t told her!”
Both Carla and I look down to hide the guilty look in our eyes.
“I see, I see,” she says. “No one in your family can keep a promise,” she tells her little boy. As she picks up the phone, she adds, “I guess that includes me.”
And then, I could kill Yoyo, because I can tell from the look on Sandi’s face that she’s getting that stupid machine that says to call Yoyo’s agent. Sandi rolls her eyes, and as if on cue that baby starts to cry with the big mouth of his aunt.
“Ya, ya,” she coos to the baby and then in this prepared voice you use for machines, she begins. “Yo! It’s me, your real sister number two, and I know you know you’ve got a new nephew who everyone says looks like you, god forbid, but I personally think he looks like our handsome Tío Max on Mami’s side, though if he turns out to be as big a womanizer, I’ll cut off his baboodles, just kidding, just kidding, did you hear those lungs? He’s got the cutest toes without a nail on the little toe which he gets from Papi, and you know what they say about why the Garcías don’t have a little toenail—”
I take that baby from her because I can just tell she’s settling into a long one. It’s as if Sandi is filled with nine months’ worth of news that she’s going to deliver now that she’s finished giving birth to her son. And she’s talking to a machine, for heaven’s sake! I suppose it’s her one chance to say all she wants without someone in the family cutting in with their version of the story.
Part I
The mother
nonfiction
To tell you the truth, the hardest thing coming to this country wasn’t the winter everyone warned me about—it was the language. If you had to choose the most tongue-twisting way of saying you love somebody or how much a pound for the ground round, then say it in English. For the longest time I thought Americans must be smarter than us Latins—because how else could they speak such a difficult language. After a while, it struck me the other way. Given the choice of languages, only a fool would choose to speak English on purpose.
I guess for each one in the family it was different what was the hardest thing. For Carlos, it was having to start all over again at forty-five, getting a license, setting up a practice. My eldest Carla just couldn’t bear that she wasn’t the know-it-all anymore. Of course, the Americans knew their country better than she did. Sandi got more complicated, prettier, and I suppose that made it hard on her, discovering she was a princess just as she had lost her island kingdom. Baby Fifi took to this place like china in a china shop, so if anything, the hardest thing for her was hearing the rest of us moan and complain. As for Yo, I’d have to say the hardest thing about this country was being thrown together in such close proximity with me.
Back on the island we lived as a clan, not as what is called here the nuclear family, which already the name should be a hint that you’re asking for trouble cooping up related tempers in the small explosive chambers of each other’s attention. The girls used to run with their gang of cousins, supervised—if you can call it that—by a whole bunch of aunts and nanny-maids who had wiped our bottoms when we were babies and now were wiping the drool of the old people who had hired them half a century ago. There was never any reason to clash with anyone. You didn’t get along with your mother? You had two sisters, one brother-in-law, three brothers and their wives, thirteen nieces and nephews, a husband, your own kids, two great-aunts, your father, a bachelor uncle, a deaf poor relation, and a small army of housemaids to mediate and appease—so that if you muttered under your breath, “You bitch!” by the time it got to your mother it would sound something like, “Pass the mango dish, please.”
And this was true for Yo and me.
Back there, that one was mostly raised by the maids. She seemed to like to hang around them more than she did her own kin, so that if she had been darker, I would have thought she was a changeling that got switched with my own flesh and blood. True, from time to time we did have our run-downs—not even three, four dozen people could always block the clashing of our two strong wills.
But I had a trick that I played back then, not just on her, but on all my girls, to make them behave. I called it putting on the bear. Of course, by the time we left the island, it no longer worked there, and it was only by mistake that it worked once here.
It started innocently enough. My mother had given me a mink coat she used to wear when she and my father were traveling a lot to New York for vacations away from the dictatorship. I kept it at the back of the walk-in closet, thinking maybe someday we would escape the hell we were living in, and I’d get to wear that coat into freedom. Often I thought about selling it. I hadn’t married a rich man and we were always short on money.
But every time I got ready to sell it, I don’t know. I’d bury my nose in that tickling fur that still held the smell of my mother’s perfume. I’d imagine myself walking down Fifth Avenue with lights twinkling in the shop windows and snowflakes coming down so pretty, and I just couldn’t bear to part with the coat. I’d slip the plastic cover back over it and think, I’ll hold on to it a while longer.
Then one Christmas, I thought it’d be kind of neat to dress up for all the kids. So I draped this coat over my head with a bit of my face poking out, and the rest of the fur falling all the way down to my calves. I had some story worked out that Santa Claus couldn’t make it down from the North Pole, so he had sent one of his bears instead.
My girls and their cousins took one look at me and it was like sheets hitting a fan. They screamed and ran. No one could be coaxed to come forward for a present. Finally, Carlos pantomined chasing me off with a broom, and as I hurried away, I dropped my pillowcase of goodies. Minutes later, when I walked back in, dressed in my red organdy, the girls ran to me, “Mami! Mami! El cuco was here!” El cuco was the Haitian boogeyman I had told them would come and steal them away if they didn’t behave.
“Really?” I said, miming surprise. “What did you do?”
The girls looked at each other, big-eyed. What could they have done but avoid being mouthfuls for a monster with an appetite for their toys. But Yo piped up, “I beat him and chased him away!”
Here was a little problem that was not going to go away by itself. Often, I put Tabasco in that mouth hoping to burn away the lies that seemed to spring from her lips. For Yo, talking was like an exercise in what you could make up. But that night was Christmas Eve, and the dictatorship seemed far away in some storybook about cucos, and Carlos looked so handsome in his white guayabera, like a rich plantation owner in an American ad for coffee beans or cigars. Besides I felt pleased with my little trick.
From then on, especially when I heard them fighting, I threw that coat over my head and went hooting down the hall. I’d burst into their room, swinging my arms, calling out their names, and they’d scream, holding on to each other, whatever fight they had been in the middle of forgotten. Step by step, I approached, until they were at the edge of hysterics, their little faces pale and their eyes wide with terror. Then I flung the coat off and threw out my a
rms, “It’s me, Mami!”
For a minute, even though they could see it was me, they hung back, unconvinced.
Maybe it was a mean thing to do, I don’t know. After a few times, what I was really trying to do was see if my girls had any sense at all. I thought for sure they would catch on. But no, each time, I fooled them. And I began to feel angry at them for being so slow.
Yo figured it out, finally. Maybe she was five, six—I don’t know. All those years have mixed together like an old puzzle whose box top is lost. (I don’t even know anymore what picture all those little pieces make.) As usual, I went howling into the girls’ bedroom. But this time, Yo broke loose, came right up to me, and yanked that coat off my head. “See,” she said, turning to the others. “It is just Mami like I told you.”
It was no surprise to me that she was the one who caught on.
Back in my room, I was returning the coat when I noticed someone had been poking around in the closet. My shoes were scattered every which way, a hat box knocked over. That closet wasn’t just any walk-in closet. It had once been a hallway between the master bedroom and Carlos’s study, but we had closed it off on both sides in order to make a closet you could enter from either room. It was almost always locked on account of we kept everything valuable there. I suppose at the back of our minds, Carlos and I always knew that one day we would have to leave the island in a hurry and that it would be handy to have our cash and valuables on hand. And so, I was fit to be fried seeing signs that someone had been rifling through our hiding place.
Then it came to me who our intruder had been—Yo! Earlier, I had seen her in Carlos’s study, looking over the medical books her father let her play with. She must have gone in our closet, and that’s how she had figured out the fur was just a fur. I was ready to call her in and give her a large serving of my right hand when I saw that the floorboards close to the study side had been pried open and not exactly wedged back in place. I crawled in under the clothes with a flashlight and lifted one of those boards. It was my turn to go pale—stashed inside and wrapped in one of my good towels was a serious-looking gun.