Wednesday, June 28: 54 days until I go home
When Mamá gets back from her honeymoon in Spain, she calls. A frowning Tía Ileana hands me the phone. “She thought you would have sent a card at least. She’s not happy.”
“I did write,” I tell Mamá. “I just didn’t mail it.”
“Oh?” My mother’s tone demands an explanation.
“It was really boring here at first, and then I met a boy.” I tell her about how I met Frankie and the movies we saw together.
She asks me how old he is, what neighborhood he comes from, and how we get around. Typical mother questions.
So I lie. For her, he’s sixteen, he lives in Papá’s neighborhood, and we walk or take the micro—the bus.
“May I speak with your father?”
“He’s outside with his birds.”
“Get him, please.”
I was hoping it wouldn’t come to this. Not because I thought he’d expose the stuff I made up—he’s still completely out of it—but because I remember her crying every time she talked to him. I don’t want to hear whatever he tells her that upsets her like that.
He comes to the phone right away, like he’s actually eager to talk to her.
First he asks her about Spain. He listens for a while. Then he tells her about the election campaign and the candidates who’ve stayed at the house. In the nearly two weeks since I met Frankie, two more have crashed on the sofa.
Finally, they get to me. “She’s fine. Having a good time,” Papá tells her.
There’s about thirty seconds of silence.
“Ileana has met him a couple of times. She says he’s very polite. Volunteered for us in the election. And he hasn’t brought her back past her curfew.”
Why didn’t Frankie—or Tía Ileana—tell me he actually volunteered?
Papá talks again. “No. I guess I should meet him. I didn’t expect to be this busy at work.”
Sitting across the coffee table from him, I can now hear my mother shouting all the way from the other side of the planet. From what I can make out, she’s accusing him of being a bad father for not having met Frankie yet and letting me go out with him anyway. Doing so takes her eighty-five seconds.
“Look, Vicky, you weren’t going to take her on your honeymoon. And she would have been underfoot when you were working on the house.” No, I wouldn’t have. Clueless Papá holds the phone to his ear with his shoulder while reaching for his cigarettes on the end table. “Of course, she’s safe. I give her a lot more rules than you do.”
I can tell the conversation is degenerating quickly. I have three choices. One. Do nothing and hear the whole ugly mess between them. Two. Leave the room and let them fight in private. Or three. Try to stop them before someone gets hurt.
I can be a good daughter when I set my mind to it. And besides, Papá will cut me more slack if he thinks I’m taking his side.
I cross the living room, rest my hand on my father’s shoulder, and reach for the phone.
“Mamá,” I say as soon as he hands it over. “Papá’s doing a great job watching me. And he’s a good father. He’s helping me learn about my country.”
“That boy,” she sputters in English.
I switch back to Spanish so Papá can understand. “I’m teaching him English so he can come to the United States to study. We’re not doing anything.”
Cigarette in his mouth, Papá mumbles, “She thinks you’ll go home pregnant.”
“I heard that. Tell your father it’s not something to joke about,” Mamá says.
“I’m not stupid, Mamá. Nothing is going to happen. You should be happy I’m having a good time and not begging to come home.” I think of the letter I almost sent her, now sitting in pieces in a garbage dump somewhere in the Andean foothills.
After about a dozen warnings to stay out of trouble, she hangs up. Meanwhile, Papá’s swigging whiskey straight from the bottle, and he hasn’t eaten supper yet. Ninety minutes of lucidity are going down to about forty tonight.
I sit him down and boil water for poached eggs so he has something in his stomach besides toast and avocado to soak up the alcohol. His hair hangs over his glasses and he makes no move to push it away, even while smoking. I’m afraid he’s going to set his hair on fire, but I also know he doesn’t like people touching his head. Before I call my aunt to supper, I ask him what’s going on between him and my mother that she ends up crying when she talks to him.
He perks up. “She does?”
I nod.
“Good.” He stabs out his cigarette.
You’re a jerk. I dash up the stairs and knock on Tía Ileana’s bedroom door to tell her we’re off the phone and ready to eat. At the table, she asks me how the call went.
“She’s worried. Because I’m friends with a boy,” I answer. Like I don’t have friends who are boys at home.
“She’s just being a mother,” Tía Ileana says.
Papá glares at her as if to say, How would you know? He pierces the poached egg with his fork. Yolk streams from multiple holes and pools on his plate.
Tía Ileana covers his hand with hers. “I think you’re the boy she’s worried about.”
Papá shrugs one shoulder. “Vicky’s moved on. She has a gringo now.”
And that’s all he says about it for the rest of the night.
I’m wide awake and buzzing with anticipation when Frankie comes for me at eight thirty the next morning. It’s Thursday, the sun is poking through the haze, and he’s going to take me on his deliveries with him so I can see Santiago in the daytime. We weave in and out of rush hour traffic on our way downtown. While gripping Frankie’s jacket, I stare at the giant snow-covered mountains to my right, the peaks so high I can’t see them through the blanket of smog. No more than an hour from where we are, we could be up there skiing.
At the edge of downtown farthest from the mountains is a shabby row of warehouses and small offices. An orange and yellow metal sign above one of the offices reads SPEEDY COURIERS, the name in English. The tail of the S ends in the shape of a sneaker. I wait outside while Frankie punches in and picks up his first delivery. He returns with a plastic envelope, hands me his leather jacket, and puts on an orange rain jacket with the sneaker logo.
I touch the rubbery sleeve. “You were the one who splashed me!”
“I did?” His eyes are wide. Innocent. Or faking innocence.
“The day after I got here. It was raining, and you sped through a puddle. Got my jeans all wet.”
He flips my ponytail. “I didn’t notice. But if I was rushing to a delivery and did, I’m sorry.” He kisses me, then says, “Check your pocket. There’s a surprise.”
I pat both pockets of his jacket. In the left one is something hard with sharp edges. I pull out a book. Romeo y Julieta.
“My uncle loaned it to me. I’m up to the part where he goes to the party where he’s not invited, looking for some other girl.”
I laugh. “You just started!”
“I’ll finish it. I promise,” he says. I examine the slender paperback. The papers’ rough edges are yellowed with age but the unbroken spine tells me no one has read the book, ever. Frankie drops the envelope into the milk crate. “Job number one. Pick up documents from a law office in Bellavista, deliver to a law office in Macul. I’ll show you the river right away.”
He guns the engine. We take a wide avenue along the Río Mapocho, which runs from the mountains east to west through the city. The current is fast and the water gray and smelly, as if the river is the city’s main sewer. We stop in front of a three-story building in the shadow of the Cerro San Cristóbal. Frankie runs up the outdoor staircase to the top story, taking the steps two at a time. Minutes later, he’s back with a manila folder.
We cross a bridge over the river, pass by the downtown skyscrapers, and end up in an area of one-, two-, and three-story buildings not far from Papá’s house. Frankie drops off the documents.
After another errand we stop for hot chocolate while he calls his boss from a pay phone. He gets assigned a doctor’s office in the La Florida neighborhood, with files needing to go to a specialist in Providencia.
“Get ready for a long ride,” he tells me. “It’s about twenty kilometers.”
La Florida is a newly built suburb in the shadow of the Andes. When I lived here before, it was nothing but fields and shantytowns. Seeing the almost identical brick houses with shingle roofs makes me think of the new suburbs just outside of Madison, like Middleton and Fitchburg, where people have moved to get away from the big city.
On the way back to downtown along a flat highway, Frankie shouts, “My family lives one comuna over.” He points to the opposite side of the highway, where there’s a field and beyond it, a row of squat plywood homes that look like barracks. A pack of stray dogs—nearly two dozen of them—roams the field next to the highway.
“Can we stop off there?” I shout back. I think I’d like his mother and sisters, from what he’s told me about them, and I’m guessing that his drunken father, far less functional than mine, won’t be up this early.
“No,” he snaps. I can tell that this has nothing to do with the tightness of his schedule.
I don’t have a city map with me, but I’ve drawn a mental picture of all his delivery routes. With the exception of one run to the airport, we’ve stayed in the eastern half of the city, from La Florida in the south to the hilly, rural La Dehesa in the north, where Pinochet has one of his homes. Frankie points this out matter-of-factly. I would have expected him to say something critical of the dictator, but he doesn’t say anything, and I don’t want to say the wrong thing. As Papá explained, there are many different parties in the opposition known as the Concertación, from the Christian Democrats who once supported the military government to the Communists and Socialists who were enemies number one and two from the start. And just because Frankie’s father is with the Socialists doesn’t mean Frankie is, especially since Frankie hates his father.
Things get quiet in the early afternoon, so we stop to eat at McDonald’s in the Plaza de Armas, in the center of the city. The plaza is between a bunch of government buildings and the Metropolitan Cathedral, near where Papá worked as a human rights investigator after he sneaked back into the country. I see soldiers all over the place, which makes me realize how good a cover Papá must have had when he was underground. Daniel said he disguised himself as a beggar. I believe it. There are plenty of those, and enough of them look the way Papá used to before he cleaned himself up.
In the late afternoon, Frankie picks up bank documents to deliver to an office in one of the glass skyscrapers downtown. He squeezes his motorcycle into a small triangle of striped pavement. “Watch my bike, okay?” he says. “This space is very illegal.”
“What if a cop comes?”
“Tell them I’ll be back. They don’t care as long as someone’s standing by.” He lifts off my helmet and kisses me. I wrap my arms around his neck and inhale the mixture of rubber and sweat from his Speedy Couriers jacket. His leather jacket that I’m wearing smells so much nicer, and I can’t wait until we finish the deliveries. Tonight he’s taking me to a different mall with what he says is the best pinball arcade in the city. I plan to kill him at Ms. Pac-Man there.
Fifteen minutes pass while I babysit Frankie’s motorcycle. Fumes from the cars and buses make me dizzy. Well-dressed men and women push past me, knocking me into the bike. I wonder if there’s been a mix-up that Frankie’s had to sort out upstairs. My head swirling, most likely from lack of oxygen, I wander into the lobby. I know waiting inside rather than on the street won’t make him return faster and will probably get him a ticket. But it wouldn’t help if I passed out from the pollution, either.
Then I see him, next to a bank of elevators. Standing with him is a short brown-skinned girl with long straight hair and a big butt. They appear to be talking. He has his arm around her shoulders. She snuggles against him and rubs his back, just above his waist.
The dizziness returns. Frankie and the other girl turn into one big blur.
Hey, maybe you should change the name on the jacket from Speedy Couriers to Cheaty Couriers. I can’t think of the words in Spanish, I’m so mad.
Frankie turns his head toward me. Quickly, he pulls away from the girl and calls my name.
But it’s too late. I stomp over, ready to make a scene. “I’m waiting outside and you’re—”
“Tina, this is Sofia Méndez. Sofi, meet Tina Aguilar.” Frankie clasps my elbow. I shake his hand away.
Frankie continues, apparently oblivious. “Sofi is a friend from colegio. She’s a secretary.” He pauses. “Tenth floor, right?”
Sofia names a company, but I don’t listen. How could Frankie do this to me? But two days ago he asked me to choose between Papá and Evan. Maybe that was his way of saying he wanted to choose, too.
The girl holds out her right hand, but I stick mine behind my back. She shrugs and looks at Frankie, as if to say, Let’s get rid of this little twit and do our thing together. I notice her bright red lipstick and eyelashes three times thicker than any normal eyelashes. None of my friends at home wear makeup like that, unless they’re going for total Goth. This Sofia looks at least twenty years old, and going for total skank.
Frankie glances at his watch and frowns at me. “I hope I don’t have a ticket.”
“Good luck, Pepe,” Sofia says.
Pepe? What the hell is that? Some pet name?
She stands on her tiptoes and hugs him. He kisses her on the cheek.
Frankie runs back to the moto, leaving me to follow. There’s a ticket attached to the handlebars. “Mier . . . colés!” he shouts, shoving the paper into his pocket.
“I didn’t come to be your ticket insurance while you go off with your girlfriend,” I yell at him.
“She’s not my girlfriend. Just an old school friend,” Frankie says.
“Old is right. She’s, like, twenty.”
“She’s eighteen. Same as me.”
“Right. And what’s this ‘Pepe’? What your sweetheart calls you?”
Frankie stammers. I can’t make out what he’s saying. He shakes his head.
My voice breaks. “I thought you cared about me. We were going out.”
But he never said, I love you. Neither did I, though I couldn’t stop thinking of him. Maybe I should have said the words. Maybe it would have made the difference.
“I’m sorry, Tina. You and I are . . . going out.”
“You like her more.” That’s the way it always is. Papá likes Daniel more than me. Max dumped me for a freshman at the beginning of our sophomore year. Their romance lasted six weeks, but it killed ours forever.
Frankie reaches for my arm. I yank it away.
“You go back to her. I’m leaving!” Pedestrians stop to watch us, but I don’t care.
“It’s nothing. I mean it. She’s just a friend,” Frankie says.
“How can I believe you? You spend two days a week with me. What are you doing Mondays? Because we never get together Mondays.” I do the math in my head. Two days, me. Five days, her.
Frankie squeezes the handlebar of his motorcycle. But he’s looking at his hands. He won’t look me in the eye because he’s lying. I know it. “I can’t. It’s a family thing.”
“Yeah, right. And how about the other days? The weekends?”
“You’re the one who went out of town last weekend. Remember?” He stares up at the hazy purple sky. “You don’t know how good you got it, you selfish little brat.”
I rip Frankie’s precious leather jacket off and hurl it into the milk crate. “Jerk!”
Sofia’s tits and butt are bigger. She isn’t a brat.
She calls him by another name. Pepe. Pepe is normally a nickname for José, but who knows what they have going?
“I’m sorry.” Frankie steps toward me, and I back away. “I’m just dealing with a lot, Tina.”
“That’s right. A lot of girlfriends.” I turn from him and fast-walk to the end of the block, where I let the crowd push me around the corner. He doesn’t follow me.