Tuesday, June 13: 69 days until I go home
I expect Papá to drag himself around the house hung over the entire next day, but he’s gone to work by the time I wake up. Also gone are Tía Ileana and the politician who crashed on the sofa.
At least Tía Ileana returns for la comida.
After she leaves, I decide to explore the neighborhood. I figure it’s hard to get lost because the mountains on the eastern edge of the city always tell you which direction you’re headed, even if clouds cover their peaks. Still, I recheck the number in front of Papá’s house because the duplexes on his street look exactly the same behind their cement walls and high fences, and I don’t want to try the gate key on every house.
By the middle of the second block the sky turns dark and huge raindrops pelt me. I pull my hood up and turn back. I don’t know what I’ll do for the rest of the day until Papá and Tía Ileana get home from work. A motorcycle speeds past, its rider’s jacket a flash of orange in my peripheral vision. When it’s gone, I realize the bottoms of my jeans are soaking wet. I break into a run.
Graciela meets me at the door. “Would you like me to wash your clothes?” she asks.
Mumbling gracias, I strip off my soggy sweatshirt and hand it to her, but I don’t want to take off my pants in front of her. I did it all the time for my nana when I lived with Mamá’s family, but I was younger then, and my nana wasn’t part of an underground resistance along with the person she worked for.
I change clothes in my room, take my waterlogged jeans downstairs to Graciela, and write a letter to Petra, telling her about the flight and the movies I saw on the plane. I ask her to fill me in on last night’s St. Elsewhere even though it’s a summer rerun and I’ve probably seen it already. Ten episodes—that’s how many I’m missing while stuck at the ends of the earth.
At seven thirty, Papá and Tía Ileana return. The first thing Papá does when he gets home is feed his birds. Then he brings Pablo into the house for a conversation, downing a shot of whiskey and a beer chaser while Pablo sprays drops of water all over the kitchen and squawks, “Curado!” This new papá thinks it’s funny that his parrot calls him a drunk. After he takes Pablo back to the cage outside, he wipes the kitchen cabinets and counters while my aunt reheats leftovers in the microwave for her and me. She pops two slices of bread into the toaster and mashes an avocado with lemon for Papá. He eats with no appetite, only the need to line his stomach for the tumbler of straight whiskey he drinks before he goes to sleep.
We have about an hour and a half before he’s glassy-eyed and drooling and Tía Ileana has to help him upstairs to bed.
It rains again on Wednesday. I sleep on and off throughout the day, and while lying in bed, I think of things to do with Papá at night. Maybe he’ll let me read to him. Or we can work on a jigsaw puzzle or play board games. I saw a couple of puzzle boxes on top of the bookshelf in the living room and Clue and Jenga on the mantle above the fireplace.
I remember how my old papá used to read to me before bedtime. He drank only a glass of red wine with supper because sometimes he’d have to go back to work at night. Even then, he would wake me up and kiss me on the head as soon as he came home, letting me know that he made it back all right. I’m here, he would say. I hope you dream of something nice.
Tía Ileana returns at seven to eat with me, but Papá doesn’t even come home until I’m asleep, and then he and his friends wake me up with their drinking games. I don’t bother to get up and find out who won.
Thursday is dry but still cloudy and the coldest day since I arrived. And since Papá’s house has a washing machine but no dryer, my sweatshirt is still damp, which means I’m stuck inside another day. The good news is that I find The House of the Spirits in the original Spanish and discover that I understand nearly everything. I make a small pile of other books I’d like to read and bring them upstairs to my room. In one of them, I learn about the tapestries on my walls. They’re called arpilleras and have been made by women whose family members were killed or disappeared under the dictatorship.
After supper, I sit with Papá in the dining room because it’s my only chance all day to see him. Tía Ileana is upstairs in the master bedroom looking over plans for a shopping center that her company is building.
I sort through the pieces of one of the jigsaw puzzles. No one has opened it before, and a bunch of pieces are stuck together. I go into the kitchen for a paring knife to separate them, but I can’t find any knives in the drawers or on the drying rack.
“Papá?”
My father looks up from the magazine he’s reading. “Yes?”
“Do you know where they keep the knives around here?”
“No.” He takes a long drag from his cigarette and stares at the stream of smoke he blows out. I’m not surprised. At home Evan and my mother cook together all the time, but I never saw Papá or Daniel as good for anything more than boiling water.
“I’ll ask Tía Ileana.” I start toward the stairs.
“If her door is closed, she doesn’t want to be bothered,” he tells me before returning to his magazine.
The door to the master bedroom is shut, so I go across the hall to my room and get a deck of cards for solitaire. I think about writing some of my other friends besides Petra, but there’ll be time after my father and aunt go to sleep. And tomorrow. And the day after that.
I slip inside the half-opened door to Papá’s bedroom. It’s hardly big enough for a bed, a chair, and a dresser. On top of the dresser are a small TV and a boom box. The chair faces the dresser but sits under an open closet door where there is a flimsy-looking pulley, the same kind Papá used to exercise his bad arm in Madison. His bed has a black, brown, and tan woven blanket that matches the one on mine. Unframed posters of rallies and concerts cover the walls. The bareness of the space and the faint disinfectant smell make me think of the nursing home where Petra and I did a community service project last fall.
“Tía Ileana was busy,” I say when I get downstairs.
Papá nods. His splinted left arm rests on the table and he squeezes an orange ball while counting out a rhythm. A few rounds of solitaire later, he asks me, “What do you think about your aunt?” He has trouble pronouncing his words. Less than a quarter of the glass of whiskey remains.
“I like her. She’s nice.” I flip over the first three cards to start a new round.
“You know she never married.”
I shrug and place the nine of clubs under the ten of diamonds. I didn’t know that, though I could have guessed, seeing as she was available to move in with Papá when he needed someone to help take care of him.
“Do you know why she never married?”
I’m not thinking of an answer because I’m thinking of her name. Ileana Aguilar Gaetani. De Nobody. Belongs to herself and herself only. Not like Mamá, who used to be Victoria Fuentes de Aguilar and is now officially Mrs. Evan Feldman everywhere but at work.
“Es tortillera.” He pauses, then spits the next word out as if it’s a bad taste in his mouth. “Maricona.”
Pretending not to hear him, I lay the two of hearts over the ace. Lovers of the same gender. Fine with me. Obviously not fine with him.
Papá swallows the rest of his drink and slams the glass on the table. I jump.
“What do you think about that?” he slurs.
I flip three cards from the pile to reveal an eight of diamonds. I add it to the row under the nine of clubs, and move three cards from another row underneath. “I don’t think anything about it,” I say, wanting to remind him that Tía Ileana has at least bothered to come home in the middle of the day to keep me company.
“You get what I’m talking about?”
I think of Max’s cousin, whose mother and stepfather threw him out because he was gay, and how Max’s family took him in, even though they live in a tiny apartment. Putting the kid out really sucked, and I hated those parents even though I never met them. I sweep the cards into a ragged pile, destroying my game. “Sure, I get it. I go to an alternative high school. Half the girls at my school are lesbians.” I glare at him. “How do you know I’m not?”
That’s right. He hardly knows me and hasn’t made much effort in the past four days to change that situation. I hardly know him, either, but what I’m finding out, I really don’t like.
“I didn’t hear this,” Papá says. He slaps the ball from the table with his wrist splint. His strong right hand clenches into a fist. He never hit me like that in Madison, only with his open hand, but I’m not taking any chances. I push away the cards, ready to make a fast break for upstairs. He scrapes his chair back, but instead of going at me, he lurches out of the room.
The next day I pretend to nap upstairs while Graciela blasts Oye, Nino, which she listens to every day between noon and one while she cooks. I don’t want to hear his voice again. Last night’s encounter still creeps me out, but I’m proud of myself for sticking up for my aunt and letting my father know he was acting like a jerk.
A few minutes after the show ends, Tía Ileana comes home from work. She wants to take a walk before eating, which sounds good to me because I’m not hungry. I still haven’t gotten used to eating a big meal in the middle of the day and nothing before bed except a few tasteless leftovers.
“What happened last night between you and your father?” she asks as soon as the gate clangs shut behind us. She speaks in a hushed voice, even though there’s no one on our narrow street.
“Did he say anything to you?” I ask, tugging the hood of my finally dry sweatshirt over my head. The air is damp and heavy, again threatening rain.
“He had a bad night. I’m surprised you didn’t hear him.”
“I had my headphones on. I was writing letters. To my friends.” I recall the times in Wisconsin when my father woke up screaming. “Did he have a nightmare?”
She shakes her head. “He told me he said something to you that he probably shouldn’t have.”
I kick a stone farther up the street. It crashes against the low wall in front of a house on the corner. The graffiti in black on the wall reads “nunca más”—never again. Next to it is a sketch of the blue, white, and red Chilean flag outlined in black. Another one for our side.
“Did he say what it was?” I ask my aunt.
In the middle of the next block of duplexes, a medium-size dog with matted black hair and no collar trots up to me. It’s a lot less skinny than the dogs I saw on the way here from the airport, but it reeks of rotten fish and poop. Tía Ileana claps loudly and hisses to shoo the beast away.
“Could you tell me what he said, Tina?” she asks stiffly as soon as the dog slinks off.
“He called you a lesbian. But not nice words.” I hope she isn’t mad at me for telling her.
She grunts, as if she’s heard it before. “And then?”
I tell her exactly what I said back to him, expecting her to find it amusing. When she doesn’t laugh, I say, “I chased him from the room.”
My aunt presses her lips together. “This isn’t a joke.” I send another rock flying into a cinder block wall with red-and-black graffiti and a stenciled portrait of Che in blue. The rock pings on Che’s nose.
At the next corner a boy in his late teens with olive skin and short dark brown hair adjusts something on the back of his motorcycle—closer up, I see it’s a grimy plastic milk crate attached with a bungee cord to the silver and black moto. He wears an orange rain jacket with the logo of a sneaker.
Was he the guy who splashed me on Tuesday when I got caught in the rain? He gives me a slight nod, as if he’s seen me before.
Tía Ileana turns right and crosses into a different neighborhood, one that has sprawling one-story houses with terra-cotta roofs and huge yards that separate each house from the one next to it. The block ends in a cul-de-sac of thick-bladed grass, flowers in a rainbow of colors, and palm trees. Wild parrots fly free beneath the purplish smog clouds.
We’re long out of our neighborhood and the sight and earshot of Motorcycle Boy when Tía Ileana speaks up again. “I don’t like that you’re around your father when he’s drinking. Neither does he. He said to take the TV from his room, put it in yours, and for you to go there after supper.”
I dig my clenched fists into the front pocket of my sweatshirt. “Why are you guys punishing me? He started it.” It will be a long boring summer—except that it’s winter—ahead of me, full of cheesy war movies, telenovelas, and variety shows because they don’t have St. Elsewhere and Hill Street Blues here.
“One of these days you’re going to set him off,” Tía Ileana says, nudging me forward.
I turn from my aunt and gaze at a red, yellow, and black bird with a pointy beak perched on a palm frond. “He never hit me when I was little.”
Tía Ileana lays her arm across my shoulders. “I’m sorry, amorcita,” she says, like someone died and will never come back.
I consider asking her to enroll me in school so I could meet kids my age and have something to do. Like homework when I’m stuck in my room. And something to help me forget about my new papá—like some decent weed if I’m lucky enough to find a source. Mamá gave me the choice, but I couldn’t see going to school for three months now and then having nine more months at home. Even at my alternative school there are papers and tests and having to wake up early.
School’s an option for when I get truly desperate, but I’m not there yet.
Before returning to our neighborhood, I ask Tía Ileana, “Why do you put up with this anyway?”
She squeezes my shoulder. “What do you mean?”
“You moved in with him and do all this stuff for him, and he hates everything that you are.”
Tía Ileana quickly puts her finger to her lips to shush me, though I don’t think I was talking that loud. Anyway, the boy with the motorcycle is now gone. “You have to be careful. There’s even more prejudice here than in your country. Sometimes there’s violence, too, which the police do nothing to stop.” Her jaw clenches, and I see the veins pulsing in her neck.
“Have you ever been attacked?” I ask.
She shakes her head. “It’s worse for men. For us women, it’s, ‘How cute, they’re best friends holding hands’ when you’re younger. Then when you’re twenty, the same people tell you it’s time to get married and make babies.”
“And if you don’t? Do they kick you out?”
“You’re the maiden aunt expected to devote the rest of your life to any family member who needs help.” She presses her lips together for a moment. “Of course it bothers me that my brother’s the way he is. But ever since your grandmother died, he’s the only family I have.”
My grandmother died while Papá was in prison. Mamá said Nonni Rosa died of a broken heart, knowing what the government was doing to her baby. And there was a sister between Ileana and Papá, who would have been my Tía Cecilia, except she and her boyfriend were killed in a car crash when she was nineteen.
Tía Ileana continues, “And because you and Daniel are so far away, I’m the only family he has. You take care of family.”
“Have you told him how you feel?”
“He knows prejudice is wrong. He just doesn’t apply it to himself.”
The cold concrete of my father’s neighborhood closes in on me. Even if he isn’t my old papá, someone has to tell him that it makes no sense. Just like it makes no sense that he’d demand visitation rights for the summer and then never be around. Or that when he is around, he’d rather drink than spend time with me.