Chapter 13

In Which Mom Is Introduced
to the Barrio

After Lúpe died, his family was left rudderless, frightened. Martín took the helm and abruptly assumed his father’s duty as patriarch and chief pederast-in-charge. He dropped out of high school and began working a night shift at the new windshield-wiper factory near the airport, giving his mother his entire paycheck at the end of every second week like a dutiful peasant. If this arrangement was to his disliking, he told no one; he seemed happier for the unburdening of education and the chance to get his hands where they belonged: manufacturing goods. Kept them from roaming elsewhere.

We were long expecting Lúpe to expire, but still, when it happened, it came as a surprise. We, as kids, had the good sense to go by our own clock, preoccupy ourselves with the chores and desires of our adolescence, and on that Monday, when Lúpe finally lapsed, Dad had taken Dan and me out of school and had us working the sand pit, with Dan on the backhoe loading sand into the beds of the rare few trucks that showed.

Lúpe’s death had become a sort of a holiday in the barrio, and no one was really working that day, but Dan and I were oblivious. We did what we were told unquestioningly and waited patiently for the next truck to show, though on that day, it would be hours between loads, when it was usually just a few minutes.

And so we sat in the swelter, keeping ourselves preoccupied with what we could, when eventually no one else showed, after lunch. My job was to be in the bed of the dump truck while Dan maneuvered the boom and bucket of the backhoe. He loaded the truck with scoop after scoop of river sand, and I was to avoid getting killed if I could, or buried under the sand, while removing all errant roots and matter that was decidedly not sand, or unsandlike. Dan and I had a game where he would bring the boom over, and I’d stand still, and he’d try to bury my shoes, and then not hit me with the bucket as it unfurled, inches from my head and chest. I had complete trust in him, and he never once did touch me, though the hydraulic machine could have crushed me in a matter of seconds. Dan, even at age twelve, was that good at the backhoe.

We were baking in the cab of a loaded truck—our one driver doing tandem runs—listening to the local classic rock station, when Dan inexplicably slipped out of the driver’s side, not saying a word. About fifteen minutes later, I became curious and lifted my head from the sweaty crook in my arm and looked over to where Dan should be, and in the side-view mirror, I saw his head bobbing in the collected brown yuck pool that had appeared there some days before, after a particularly hard rain and flooding of the Rio Grande, which was now resting peacefully back within its banks. I saw his head come out of the water like a tiny round Loch Ness Monster, spitting out water and thought, Oh, bliss.

I was down to my Y-fronts and in the water in half a minute, chasing after Dan and splashing. It was only a few feet deep, and terribly disgusting, probably frothing with heavy metals and bases from the manufacturing plants, but we didn’t care: It was a pardon from the sun.

Dan had emerged from the pool and was on the shore, about to jump on me from a muddy outcrop, when we heard a car turn the corner into the sand pit. Both Dan and I instinctively charged out of the water and grabbed our clothes, determined to pretend we were working so as not to incur the wrath of Dad. Then we both just sort of stopped, understood we were caught red-handed, put on gritty, dampened jeans over our murky wet legs, and waited for our feet to dry in order to wear our shoes again. The car slowly pulled up parallel to the truck, and we came around the other side. We noticed that it was not just Dad, but Mom, too, and Joe, my eight-year-old neighbor proxy, in the backseat, which was terribly unusual.

I think I can speak for Dan when I say that while we were standing there, waiting to get reamed by Dad, we were surprised that rather than violent and full of rage, Dad was instead distracted, quiet, not even out of the car yet. This was quite unusual as well. I called through the back window to Joe, who looked like he wanted nothing more in the world but to jump out of the car and join us in the water. I said, “Hey, Joe; how’s your dad doing?”

“He’s dead,” said Joe, his wandering eye wandering further, looking uncomfortably at my Mom, like he was about to ask permission from her to join me and Dan.

Dad had come by to park the backhoe and close down shop for the day, take us back home to clean up for the wake, which would be held later that Monday night, and we did it slowly, automatically, and . . . well, funereally, because no one wanted to be in the car with Joe.

Lúpe’s impending death had created a stranglehold on the barrio, had kept everyone in a sort of holding pattern for the better part of a year, because Gramma had become the midwife of his expiration—nothing excited her more at this point than a visit from the Angel of Death—and Dad, beholden to Gramma all his life, had gotten locked into her rhythms, and subsequently, so had the trucking business. Attending to the dying man had filled her days, fulfilled her completely, perhaps allowed her to pay penance for Grampa’s death, and now that her sister’s husband was dead, it wasn’t only her that felt like her direction had been lost, it was Lupíta as well, and also Dad now, who lost his way for a few days.

That had been my initial conclusion, back then, as a kid. I thought Dad had lost his steering because Gramma would now have nothing to preoccupy her days, and would then reinsert herself in the day-to-day management of the trucking business. Not that she had ever disengaged entirely; she just kind of did it from the reeking, cancerous bedside two doors down. But things were changing again.

Looking back now, though, I think there had been much more to this dispatching of a scourge from the planet of the acceptable than we were capable of understanding as kids.

You see, sometime back, I heard a fantastical tale of family lore, many years later when we were much older, sometime in late 2007, and it forced me to reevaluate that day, and those moments of watching Joe, watching Dad, and watching Lupé’s daughters cry out like they did at the side of his casket, as he lay shrunken, green.

About three days before, I had flown into Texas and had made a complete ass of myself after drinking way too much on the extended flight back home, and had then continued knocking back drinks rather enjoyably at Syl’s fortieth birthday party, when suddenly the traveling, the lack of food, and the inordinate amount of booze I had been drinking sort of locked in and I became an insufferable boob at her party, and had to be helped to bed. It was awful, terribly humiliating, and I was gathering the emotional capital to apologize to Syl and her husband, and eat a crow buffet, with crow juice and crow dessert, while I was staying with Marge.

Marge had waved the incident away, said I should probably be apologizing to Syl and Ruben, but emphasized more the damage to my health, which I then subsequently waved away. If life doesn’t in fact get any better, I reasoned, I don’t want more of it; I want less.

Marge is a research scientist, a PhD living in Sugarland, the city within the city of Houston, with her husband, Corwin. I can’t really claim to know what it is she does. It’s research, I know that much, but if she’s ever given me the elevator speech as to what it is she researches, I must have gotten off at a previous floor, because I don’t know what it is. But I get Marge now, as an adult, if that makes any sense. She’s civil and well-adjusted, understands schedules and calendars and planning in advance. I still can’t get Dan to commit to a string of vacation days when I visit. When I fly in to see him, he continues to work and has me wait for him until he gets done with his day. Terribly frustrating. Plus, she didn’t judge me from what she had seen that other night.

Anyhow, that morning, it was me and Marge and her two kids, and strangely, how life works, Marge is the person in the family to whom I feel closest now. Twenty years ago, after the Mimis episode, she was the one I despised most. Simply could not get along with her. Marge was establishment, I was rebellion. The foibles of youth.

It was when I was staying at her house when I remembered something that Dad had said, about Lúpe, that Dad suspected that Lúpe was actually Syl’s father. He said he remembered a day, early in his marriage to my mother, when Mom had been upset with him, had wandered off, and Lúpe had told him to sit still, in Gramma’s mother’s kitchen (Dad’s abuelita), while he fetched her. Buelita kept looking out the window and shaking her head, ominously. Finally, Dad said, when they returned, he had noticed bruises on Mom’s slender, white legs.

I remember that my first reaction to this story, when I heard it, had been indescribable. It was a mixture of things. I remembered feeling a vengeful revulsion and the memory of the old sexual assault wound at the hands of Martín and the horrible, more humiliating events that followed at the hands of Gramma and Dad—followed by an overwhelming feeling of helplessness that no one in our family was ever able to escape the hostile advances from that Ramirez family, and a deep, sincere desire for vengeance, if it was true.

But then, suddenly, during that weekend at Marge’s house, I was feeling relief that I would not have to apologize to Syl and her family for my terrible behavior at her fortieth birthday party, because it just so happened she wasn’t really related, like a disgusting deux ex machina, which I knew was just horrible of me, and I fought hard not to feel it. But it kept popping up.

Dad had difficulty adjusting when his family dispersed to the north without him, when the kids left for college and Mom fled with Derek. He would still attempt to exert his sense of patriafamilias by barging in, uninvited, to my sisters’ apartments and then settling himself down to watch cable (he found the nature shows erotic) and then have a snooze until dinner time. He even tried doing this with Mom, at her new apartment, while she was filing for divorce. Eventually everyone started locking their doors and telling him to get lost, beginning with Syl. Syl was never shy about yelling at Dad, and this had hurt his feelings. So much so that he was now wondering if, in fact, she was really his daughter.

Here’s the problem, though: It would be just like Dad to choose to believe that his young bride had been raped so many years prior rather than have to accept his oldest daughter’s unwillingness to put up with his unannounced visits and regularly boorish personality. It’s the only thing that made sense to him.

But it was absolutely ridiculous. Syl had always been the strongest of the kids, the most able with confrontation. She had forged borders in a family that had none, created boundaries behind her when Dad—especially Dad—was at his most repulsive, or belligerent. And that is why he would rather believe she wasn’t his than learn to cope with her boundaries.

“You have to promise never to repeat this story to your mother,” Dad had asked of me and Dan.

“Of course not,” I said, already calculating when I could get a moment alone with Mom to ask her the truth of the statement.

“So why do you think it happened?”

“Well, because we couldn’t have kids when we first started out,” he said.

This was an issue with my sisters, conception. Marge and Mare had had a difficult time of it. Marge’s husband wanted to name their daughter, the second child, Porsche, because she cost as much to conceive. Mare struggled through her pregnancy as well. But Syl was like India: Too many people to keep track of, so that her kids would eventually develop a class system.

Listening to this story, I had a martini of a reaction: revulsion, revenge, and pity for Mom, being thrown into the den of wolves like that, a poor half-white city girl thrust into a hive of stinging locusts . . . and then uncertainty: This was, after all, Dad’s story.

“So then what?” I asked.

“Well, then she was pregnant with Syl,” he said.

The revulsion came back, with the image of this field tramp, his groin green with the virulent fertility of machismo, his ugly, ferocious seed on a seek-and-destroy mission. It was a putrid, disgusting fecundity, turning my stomach, imagining what my mother could have suffered from that fieldhand, who obviously intimidated my father.

This had been my mother’s position in the barrio of my grandmother: If Gramma and Dad were reviled as outsiders, Dad’s new, unMexican wife was absolutely detested, a source of fear, distrust, and highly sexualized fantasy. She was America come knocking, next door. So the rape would have been acceptable.

Dan and I talked about this later, over beers.

“Dad said he always had a suspicion about Syl,” Dan had said.

“And everyone else ... ?” I said. “I mean, six kids; that’s not exactly barren.”

“That’s what he said,” he responded.

I don’t remember the further explanation about the prolific stream of children that followed. I usually make fun of Mom by telling her that she needed an Excel spreadsheet to keep track of all her kids, and that she kept forgetting to scroll all the way to the last column, where my information was kept, and that’s why she forgot about me so often.

“Aye, June!” Mom would say. “You’re so crazy.”

Indeed.

A couple of days later, after my awful behavior at Syl’s party, Mom and I were in a car traveling to Austin to visit Derek, who was pretending to be in college there, and I had some personal business besides. If it’s one thing the roads in Texas are good for, it’s for putting distance between bad memories.

We had two hours or so to talk, and, of course, I asked her about Lúpe, even though Dad had asked me to keep silent. I’m sure Dad knew I couldn’t possibly keep this to myself.

Mom’s face deflated in a kind of sadness, tensed in another response I couldn’t read.

“That never, never happened,” she said quietly, after I finished relaying the story I got.

“Your father, he’s just . . . I . . . ” and then she couldn’t say anything. Her face hardened.

And I believed her, believed the body language more than the language she couldn’t evoke.

The car was quiet as we drove the complicated east to west route. These trips are unusual in Texas; normally you’re either driving up or down, north or south, I mean. Hardly ever does one have reason to drive left and right on the map. Texas, in my mind, is long, not wide. Texas is deep, not . . . broad.

I was reminded of the drives of our youth, all the time I was forced to ride with Mom for company, when I was incapable of escape. Things were different now. I usually had a drink or two before I got in the same car with anyone in this state, which made the unfathomable distances tolerable.

“So he made it up?”

Mom slowly shook her head from side to side, looked like she was about to tear up, but she didn’t.

“That poor man,” she said. I’m sure she meant Dad.

Nothing else was said for a while. The thrum of the highway played under the carriage of the car, the usual background sound to Mom’s and my relationship. Our relationship was a travelogue. Once, in a magazine contest where you had to write your life story in six words or less, I came up with, “Mom said, Leave before you’re left.” I never heard back from them. The wankers. A little too much truth, probably.

Anyhow, I was much relieved to hear it from her, that she had never been sexually brutalized in that manner. Not like Dan and me.

But, on the very heels of that, I have to admit I was also a little disappointed because it meant that I had to, at some point or another, apologize to my oldest sister and her husband for ruining her fortieth birthday party.

I am, after all, my father’s son, selfish and cowardly.