The third husband
characterization
The first week they are back, Doug has to brace himself. It has happened before so he knows that she will come back to their life here in New Hampshire, but slowly.
He can’t tell her so, of course. Or all the little sticks will fall for him—an expression she has taught him from the island. Or he’ll be accused of not wanting to listen to her pain—an expression she has picked up from therapists in this country.
Lordy lord. That’s what they say in Kansas, where he is originally from.
The minute they are in the house all the spirit waters have to be changed before she can relax or even unpack her suitcase. Don’t ask her why. At certain windows there are saucers filled with water, again don’t ask her why. Two years ago he didn’t know what spirit water was and he still doesn’t know what it is because you can’t ask her straight questions about it.
“That’s not true,” she’d say. “You can ask questions, but you’re asking me so you can laugh at me.”
“I’m not going to laugh at you,” he promises. “I’m just curious.”
But still she doesn’t really say.
First time he encountered one of those saucers he thought maybe she’d forgotten her coffee saucer on the window sill. He took it and rinsed it out, and next thing he knows she’s storming up to the bedroom with the saucer in her hand and her eyes flashing outrage.
“Did you wash this?!”
He’d been reading in bed, getting ready for an early turn-in, and a cuddle which is how he likes to suggest sex since women get so riled up if they think you just plain want to have sex. And there she stands acting as if he’s some old Greek god who has eaten one of the children.
“Why, yes,” he says, sitting up slowly, already thinking through what he might have done to that saucer he shouldn’t have. “It was just a saucer left on the sill.” He gestures in the direction of the easternmost window that looks out on the splendor of the mountains. It is the first window to catch the light at sunrise.
“Please, please,” she says almost in tears, “don’t ever touch my things.”
“I never do,” he says, glancing over at her bureau with its little jewelry tray and half dozen framed photographs of her whole crazy family.
“I don’t mean my possessions.” She is shaking her head. And that is when he gets his first lesson on how there have to be spirit waters in the new house and how she will be setting up “little things” he mustn’t touch. And if he ever runs into something buried, please not to dig it up.
“You mean a body!” He lets his eyes go big and buggy, mugging some goofy kid he saw in Our Gang over forty years ago. She doesn’t mean a body. She means power bundles, the remains of spells, mal ojos that need to be dispersed, and so on.
She is not a wannabe witch and she is not a leftover hippy. If you stand her pedigree right next to his, he should be fanning her with a palm leaf or carting stones up her pyramid. These superstitions—he mustn’t call them that—are part of her island background, though to this day he has yet to hear one of her aristocratic old aunts talk about evil eyes or the spirits.
So every time they get back from the island—all this spirit paraphernalia has to be nailed down. Then, there’s bound to be some homesickness, and then, finally—he really can’t figure out what breaks it, she’s out in the garden asking him what is this weed called, and why do you put cages on tomato plants, and oh Cuco, come and look at this amazing, amazing butterfly.
But the re-entry this time is surprisingly smooth. No big deal about the spirit waters or the lighting of candles before the gaudy Virgencita, and the regrets she voices are mild, and more in the order of wishing they could get better mangoes in New Hampshire. She seems to have forgotten the baby she wanted to adopt—just like that, calling him up, Couldn’t she bring a baby back? No thanks, he’d told her over the phone, and he’d braced himself for months of hearing how sick for a child she was. But she seems really glad to be home, keeps humming “Home on the Range” and saying thank you, thank you, as she walks around the house revisiting each room. In fact, he is the one reminding her that those mango seeds she smuggled in should be started in water, that the little Baggie of dirt some campesino gave her for luck should be emptied in the garden, that the saucer of spirit water in his daughter’s bedroom is empty and needs to be refilled.
She stands at the landing, a hand on her hip, grinning at him. “How do you know that’s spirit water?”
He knows this: whatever he says will be enjoyed. Cuco, she calls him when she’s in one of her good moods with him. An island endearment that means bogeyman. “I know it looks like the spirit water we almost got divorced over.”
“Listen to that exaggeration. And I thought it was just us Latins that exaggerated.” She is addressing that imaginary Latino audience that moved into the house with her like an extended old world family.
“So, what’s in Corey’s bedroom?”
“Sweetening waters. Great for stepdaughters,” she says, and prances up the stairs.
Lordy lord, he thinks, if Corey should ever know Yo is putting spells on her. She will be home sooner than Yo knows and that saucer better be out of there.
At the bedroom Yo is standing at the door blocking his way. Maybe now is the time to tell her.
“Hey, big boy.” She is playing a secondhand Mae West. Most of Yo’s imitations of certain period film stars are imitations of Doug’s imitations since he’s the one who grew up with television in this country. “Come up and see me sometime.”
Corey flies from his mind. It’s been a long, lonely summer.
Later, lolling in bed and sweet-talking, which is one of the things he missed most this summer, he tells her. Corey is coming to stay with them for two weeks before going on to her mother’s.
He feels her stiffen beside him. “She was really excited when she called.” Doug is going to pitch this one high and hopeful. “I think she is probably coming around.”
“How so?” All the play has gone out of her voice. Corey has refused to stay with her father since he remarried two years ago although she also insists on having her own bedroom in the new house. She likes Yo, she says, but it’s just hard for her to accept her father being with someone else. Yo hates to be referred to as someone else. “I have a name,” she tells Doug when they’re alone, and she rattles it off, “Yolanda María Teresa García de la Torre.” But to Corey, she just says, “I understand how you feel.”
“How so,” she is pressing him. “How so is she coming around?”
“Well, she picked Spain to spend the whole summer, didn’t she?”
“How is that supposed to be coming around?”
She is sitting up beside him in bed. Whatever he says now will be the wrong thing, that he knows for sure.
“You’re Spanish and . . .”
“I’m not Spanish! I’m from the D.R. People in Spain would probably think of me as a . . . a savage.” Her face looks savage. The dramatic, overdone expressions. Sometimes she is not so pretty.
“Stop exaggerating, Yo,” he says and suddenly, he leaps out of bed. Later she will say she forgives him precisely because it was such a wonderfully spontaneous and unusual move for him. He grabs the sunrise saucer, and dumps it over her head.
Here comes Corey. Just turned sixteen, and trying to look the part of the sophisticated world traveler in her beret and vest. Oh, là là. “That’s French, Dad,” she tells him, head held high. But when they leave the crowd of other kids and their parents, he sees that scared look in her eyes. A needle in the heart to see it still there. He knows it has taken a leap of faith for her to venture so far from home, and now, to return and try the waters at her father’s house. He remembers the nervous little girl, waking up with nightmares in the middle of the night. This was before there were any problems in the marriage, so you couldn’t say—the way some therapists later did—that the kid was picking up the tension. But Yo has offered this explanation: maybe Corey ha
s a clairvoyant streak and was seeing into the future, her father with someone else.
On the long drive north from the airport, they catch up. Her summer was awesome. Her Spanish mom and dad and sister and brother all made her feel a part of their family. “It’s not like this country,” Corey informs him. “People there still basically stay in their original families.” There is a pointed silence. They pass a stretch of woods already beginning to turn—and it’s only the end of August. “It’s a Catholic country for the most part, that’s why,” Corey concludes, turning what would have been the barbed comment of six months ago into a lesson on culture. He is touched by her gracious little effort.
They’ve gone through every possible family topic and he’s caught her up on all family members on his side, and she’s talked about the trip her mother and stepfather made to Spain to visit her, but she still has not asked about Yo. “We just got back from the D.R. ourselves, you know?” Corey nods. “That’s right, I told you on the phone. Yo was there most of the summer, writing. Let’s see, what else,” he says, “we’re really happy you’re going to be with us a few days. You and Yo can yak away in Spanish.” The image is so farfetched that it almost makes him weepy, exposing as it does the raw hope. Yo has already told him that Spanish people and Dominican people don’t even speak the same Spanish.
“She always says that the first few days of re-entry are the hardest. You’re neither here nor there.” He looks over at Corey, for she has not said a word. It can’t be that after two years he still can’t mention Yo or she’ll pout. She is looking out her window, struggling with something on her face. When she turns to Doug, whatever it was has been replaced with a tentative smile. “I wouldn’t call it hard,” she offers. “It’s now when you see things you missed before, you know?”
He has to agree with her, he says. He is so glad Yo isn’t here or he would be turning himself into a human pretzel, saying, yes, it is the hardest time those first days, but oh isn’t it wonderful how you see things in a new way.
By their third supper together, Doug has had enough of Spain and the D.R. Let’s talk about China, he wants to say. Let’s imagine the sunny grape arbors of central Anatolia.
“The weirdest thing happened today,” Corey begins, and instantly Doug and Yo are too attentive, too grateful any time Corey joins in the conversation. “There was this collect phone call. It was a man from the D.R. José, he’s a farmer or something?” She looks over at Yo, who says, “José!”
“He’s going through a hard time,” Corey continues. “He lost his job and he’s being thrown off his land or something. He left a number. Says he’ll be there tomorrow afternoon, to call him.”
“Your Spanish is pretty good if you could get through all that!” Doug says because he doesn’t know what to say. Who is this José character and what’s he doing calling here collect with his troubles? “Do you know who this guy is?” he asks Yo.
“He was the night watchman at Mundín’s house. Where I spent the summer up in the mountains writing. The village you and your dad went to,” she adds for Corey’s benefit.
“Well, after he was done telling me all about himself and what I should tell you and where you should call him and all”—there is that roll of the eyes Doug knows well, a sign of impatience she learned from her mother—“he asks me who I am, and I can’t think of the word for stepdaughter—do you know what it is?” She turns suddenly to Yo.
Yo thinks a moment, and then shakes her head. “You know, I don’t think I’ve ever heard it. People there don’t usually get divorced, so all that vocabulary of melded families—I just never hear it.”
“Like in Spain,” Doug offers.
“Anyhow, I didn’t know the word for stepdaughter so I just tell him I’m your daughter—” She says this without a hitch. There is a sunny moment in Doug’s head. He imagines them all calling out goodnights like The Waltons before they turn in tonight.
“— And he starts asking me like am I married and how old I am and how nice of me to talk to him and how I have a good heart and he can tell I’m pretty by my voice—”
Yo and Doug are both shaking their heads in disbelief.
“— and finally, he just like right out asks me if I would marry him and bring him to the States!”
“What a guy!” Doug says. “Proposing to my daughter on my nickel.”
Yo, too, is taken by surprise, a surprise in layers, she will tell Doug later. First surprise is that the guy would dare call her at all with such an enormous request. Then, that this same José might have had a little something going for her. And that now he’s going after her stepdaughter over the phone.
“I told him I was too young to get married, and so he asks me how old I am, and I say sixteen, and he says that’s old enough.” Corey giggles.
“The man has no shame,” Doug is saying.
“He sounded really, really nice!” Corey casts Doug a righteous look. She is at that age when all need and sorrow are little kittens. He better keep his mouth shut or he’ll be cast in the role of the mean farmer with a sack wanting to drown the whole litter. He looks towards Yo hoping she’ll throw her weight on his side, call this José a rascal, but no such luck.
“He is a nice man. Probably desperate. He’s so poor.” Yo recounts her visit to José’s farm up in the mountains. The skinny naked kids, the sad hovel, the barefoot pregnant woman who would not come out to say hello. She and Corey are dewy-eyed with sympathy. “So you can see why people really want to get out.”
“Like my little wife here,” Doug jokes to lighten the mood. Both women blaze looks at him that could start a forest fire.
Yo is explaining to Corey how there is a whole phoney-marriage business now. You pay some American citizen to marry you because then she can “ask” for you and you can get your papers. Once you’re here, you get a divorce. “People are paying up to three thousand bucks just to be married on paper.”
“If they’re that poor that they have to get out, where do they get three thousand dollars?” Corey wants to know.
“Corey, girl,” Doug says to her, “that is a brilliant question.” He can see the color heightening in her face, but after a moment’s study, he knows it is not because she is pleased by his praise. He has embarrassed her. She thinks he is making fun of her. “It is a smart question,” he stresses, “seriously.”
“He didn’t offer you money, did he?” Yo asks her.
“No.” Corey shakes her head slowly at first, and then more vigorously. “He didn’t mention money. Just said he would like to marry a girl who was so nice and spoke such pretty Spanish.”
Lordy lord, Doug thinks, but this time he keeps his mouth shut.
The next day at supper there is a report from the soft under-belly—as Doug has started calling Yo and Corey for being too tenderhearted. The soft underbelly called the number José left, which was the number—Doug recognizes it—of the Codetel office in the mountain town where Yo spent the summer. José was not there.
“The guy who runs the Codetel office says José was there yesterday,” Yo is explaining to Doug. Just beyond her through the big picture window, the mountains are picking up fall colors. But the sky is still that high-blue summer-evening sky that makes him want to lift up his arms in a corny, born-again Christian way. “But get this, the Codetel guy says José left for the capital this morning, saying he was going to the States.”
“You suppose he’s going to show up here?!” Corey is full of girlish excitement. Of course, if a weird man showed up at the house, Doug knows who’d have to answer the door and send the man packing, too.
Next supper, there’s yet another progress report from Corey. A call this afternoon from the capital. It was José. Again Corey spoke to him since no one else was home. “He’s coming to New York. He wants to know what to do once he lands here.”
“What kind of a salary did you pay him this summer?” Doug asks Yo. “I mean a ticket costs a mint.”
“Maybe he’s borrowed some money from Mund?
?n?” Yo is puzzled, too. “But he’ll need a passport and papers, and he can’t even read.”
“Really?” Corey says, and in her eyes, Doug sees the flash of disappointment. She’s been building up this fantasy of a gallant Spaniard who recites poetry by Lorca and has black, shiny, greased-back hair like a model in one of her teen magazines he likes to look at.
“Anyhow, I told him when he gets to New York, just to call us collect, and we’ll figure out something.”
Doug’s mouth has dropped. “You told him what?!” And as he says it, he knows his tone is all wrong. That it is absolutely totally necessary for his daughter to maintain her dignity in front of Yo, and here he has made her feel like a fool in front of her stepmother. She runs out of the room in tears.
“Ay, Doug, why’d you do that for?” Now it’s Yo, looking as if he has hurt her. And out she goes on Corey’s heels, and a little later, tiptoeing to the landing on the stairs, he hears them both talking in those cooing voices of women behind closed doors. Well, thank God for that, he thinks, heading back downstairs. He has a mind to call this José character and tell him, sure, come on up to my house, cause scenes, bring us together as a dysfunctional family. Where did he learn this kind of vocabulary? All those years of marriage counseling, he guesses.
Two calls in as many days and Doug forbids Corey to accept any more collect phone calls from the D.R. She offers to pay for every last cent of those damn phone calls and for her braces and for her summer program and for ever even being born, okay?! There are shouts and raised voices. For, of course, one thing leads to another and soon Corey has opened up the Pandora’s box of the failed marriage. Daily now there are scenes, the throats of doors ache from slamming. Yo confesses to Doug that for the first time she feels like she’s the one from a buttoned-down, stiff-upper-lip family.
And she has a theory about what is going on. They’re under a spell. And she has traced it, too. That soil José gave her! No wonder she was reluctant to bury it in her usual spot, finally letting Doug do it in his garden. Doug being the one who handled it, the spell falls mostly on him. And the one protection he might have had, she reminds him, the spirit water in Corey’s room, he made Yo remove so there wouldn’t be any problems with Corey.