Because I Said So (41 page)

I had one moment of hope the following year. My son Eddie came to the United States. Briefly, I had dreams that his father would tire of having the children and send them to live with me.

But my son told me that his father’s plan was for him to persuade
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me to return to Guatemala. He told me that his father was bringing women to the house; that he would leave the children alone at night; that he had a new business, a bar where the men would get out of control; and that he had begun carrying a gun. I wanted my son to stay with me and I enrolled him in school, but he decided to return. He felt that he needed to protect his brother and sister from their father. When I dropped him off at the airport, I had to say good-bye in the parking lot because I didn’t have legal status and could not risk going inside. My son told me not to cry or he wouldn’t have the strength to go on with his journey. I sat in the car and held my tears. I was afraid I would never see him again. As he walked away, he kept turning around to blow kisses to me.

In the meantime, I learned that I didn’t have to get Ruben’s permission for a divorce if I divorced him while I was living in California. I wasn’t sure if this would be my freedom or my death warrant. I was trembling and crying as I filled out the papers and filed them in court. I called Ruben, and he said he would not sign the papers. I told him that the U.S. laws were different and that I didn’t need his permission to divorce him. He just laughed at me and he never returned the papers. The divorce went through and I was free.

Coming to this country, I realized that women have value. My immigration attorney suggested I go to Woman Inc., a place that provides therapy for women in domestic violence situations. I did, and that helped me to see that even I had worth. I then sought and was granted asylum.

It has been two years now since the divorce. I was abused by my husband for thirteen years, but I escaped from that life and I feel better. I live in my own apartment. I can give an opinion, I can make decisions for myself, I can work, and I decide where the money is going to go. I am finally in control of my own life.

I live near my mother, but I can’t live with her. She is still abusive to me emotionally. When I came here to be with her, I never imagined that she would treat me this way. I thought she would be happy to have her daughter with her. Sometimes I feel like I
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never want to see her again, that I don’t want to feel this heavi-ness inside anymore. But I know that she is not a bad person. I understand why she is the way she is because of what I’ve been through now.

Over the last two years, I have called my children often and tried to be a mother to them from here. I know they have not been doing as well in school. I know that Ruben has insulted them and said they are good for nothing and stupid like their mother. The kids have told me that they hate their father; they can’t forget what he did to me—that is what they carry inside of them. They say, “What he’s done to us has no name.”

On the phone one day, my older son said to me, “I was feeling so lonely and I thought about you.” I asked, “What did you think about?” And he said, “I remember when we were going to bed and you would kneel at our bedsides and bless each one of us.

Now I kneel and pray to God to protect my mother. I miss your kisses, Mommy. But don’t worry, I’m going to take care of my brother and my sister. And someday we’re going to treat you like a queen.”

My heart hurt so much. It has been only with the help of God that I have been able to endure this pain. My faith stopped me from taking my life, because I believe that only God can decide when I am to die. I have wanted to rest, but I suppose that God had another plan for me. I prayed that Ruben would find peace within himself. I prayed for the safety of my children. I prayed that one day I would see them again. It is my children who have given me the strength to stay here. I want to make a better life for them, to make sure they get a good education. My goal is to have my own house for them to live in here.

And now, that may happen soon. I spoke to my ex-husband recently by phone. He was jovial and joking, not the man who used to yell and threaten me. He has a new girlfriend. After all I went through, he now wants to make our divorce legal in Guatemala. He asked me, “Do you want the kids?” From his perspective, he’s better off without them because they’re a financial burden. I had always been the one who was responsible for the
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kids, watching over them, so for him, it will be just one less thing to do.

I got off the phone and I was shaking. Finally, everything I’ve waited for is coming my way. I immediately started sending money to my son to pay for the airline tickets for them to come in October. I’m worried about supporting them in this country that is so expensive. But I believe that God will help me and I will have work.

There isn’t a night since I’ve been away from my children that I haven’t asked God to watch over them. I’ve asked God,
When
will my children be with me? What is the price I have to pay?
I guess the price has been the waiting for this beautiful moment.

Before we hung up the phone, my son Eddie said, “Pretty soon we won’t have kisses by telephone anymore, Mom. In October I’m going to give you real kisses.”

Invisible Worlds

N o r a O k j a K e l l e r

When my older daughter was three,
she started visiting the “invisible world.” Slipping into a seam of air, she’d enter this imaginary country where she was proclaimed queen.

“There are so many children there, Mama,” my then only child would tell me, “so many friends.”

Playing the ultimate hostess, she often invited these friends into her world and insisted that I treat them as family. “Don’t forget to brush Asha’s, Annie’s, and Sarala’s hair too,” she’d say when I braided her hair. Or: “Aki just loves the way you read
Goodnight Moon
,” she’d gush. “Will you read it to her again?”

On those days, I would hear my daughter tromping through the rooms of the house, providing the ambassadors from the invisible world with informational tours: “This is the bedroom, where dreams come from. . . . This is the bathroom, where doots comes from. . . . This is the refrigerator, where milk comes from.”

And always when they reached the kitchen, I would have to supply my daughter and her entourage with snacks—pouring not just one glass of milk, but three or four; offering cookies not just to the only child I could see, but to a gang of unseen ones as well.

“I’m like the Old Woman in the Shoe!” I wailed to my mother, only half-joking as I described the way my daughter talked to and about her invisible friends.

Instead of chuckling over my daughter’s imagination, my mother scolded me: “I told you not to have so many kids!”

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“But, but,” I stammered, thinking my mother misunderstood.

“They’re not real kids!”

“So?” she scoffed. “The work is real, isn’t it? Tell her to send them all home!”

But I was reluctant to take my mother’s advice. Perhaps because I spend so much of my own time exploring the alternate universes provided by books, I wanted to indulge my own child, to nurture her own creations. “You go right on playing with your pretend friends,” I told my daughter.

“Don’t call them pretend!” my daughter chastised. “Just because you can’t see them doesn’t mean they’re not real.” And with little murmurs and coos, she turned to soothe her slighted friends’ hurt feelings.

Five years later,
my second daughter turned three. “Mama!”

she yelled after an afternoon of playing in her older sister’s bedroom. “I went to the invisible world carnival! And somebody came back with me!”

I squinted and nodded to the air next to her shoulder. “Hello,”

I said, ready to handle a new batch of imaginary playmates. “Nice to meet you.”

My daughter laughed. “No, silly. My friend is here,” she said, pointing behind her. “W is shy.”

W, the invisible friend, just happens to love ice cream bars and Popsicles, Gummy Bears, and chocolate chip cookies—my little girl’s favorite snacks. She also likes to color on walls and tables, doorways and couches; the walls of our house are adorned with hip-height, prehistoric-like paintings of stick people with bulbous heads. When I found the first rainbow-hued mural scrawled across my bathroom door, I took a deep breath and thought about how to reprimand my daughter in a way that was stern yet supportive of her emerging creativity.

“I love your artwork,” I said, “but we do not scribble on the walls. Crayons go on paper.”

My daughter took a deep, mother-type breath herself, then let
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it out in a long-suffering sigh. “That’s what I told W,” my daughter replied. “But she said they don’t have paper in the ’visible world.”

One day, W brought a gift from the invisible world. “Look, Mama,” my daughter said, running toward me with her hands cupped. “It’s foo, foo!”

“Food? Food?” I repeated and lifted the invisible offering from her hands. “Thank you!” I said and, smiling at her and where I thought W might be, popped the morsel into my mouth. I put on a big show: smacking my lips, closing my eyes as I chewed with relish and delight. I made loud gulping noises as I swallowed the imaginary snack.

I opened my eyes to see my daughter, stunned with horror, burst into tears. “Foo Foo!” she screamed.

“What’s the matter?” I asked, patting her back, frantically scanning for spontaneous cuts or bruises. “Are you hurt? Tell me!”

My daughter wailed louder, and when I couldn’t get her to calm down, I called for her older sister.

“What’s she saying?” I asked, hoping she could interpret what had gone wrong. “All I did was eat some of her pretend food.” Making another attempt to placate my grief-stricken daughter, I added a compliment: “And it was delicious.” I rubbed my belly. “Mmmm-mmmm, good.”

My older daughter gasped. “Mama! She’s not saying, ‘Food, food’; she’s saying, ‘Foo Foo’!”

“Foo Foo?” I repeated slowly, knowing something bad was coming.

“Foo Foo!” my younger daughter screamed.

“Foo Foo,” my older daughter confirmed, “is W’s puppy dog.

I think it was a poodle.”

I tried coughing Foo Foo back up. “There,” I said, spitting into my hand and pretending to pet a soggy lump of regurgitated dog. “Good as new.”

Both daughters shook their heads. Foo Foo was gone, never to return.

• • •

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In the first few weeks
after the alleged digestion of Foo Foo, when my daughters’ grief was still palpable, I tried to resurrect him numerous times. Pointing into various corners, I claimed Foo Foo sightings. “There, he’s back! I see him under the piano.” I cocked my head and whispered, “I hear barking. . . . It’s Foo Foo, behind the couch!”

“No,” my baby would say each time. “He’s gone forever. In your stomach.”

Even now, months later, my daughters continue to reminisce about the demise of their invisible pet. The other night, the girls and I rented
Good Boy
, and after the movie about a dog and his boy was over, my younger daughter snuggled up to her older sister and sniffed, “Remember Foo Foo?”

“Yeah,” my older daughter said, shaking her head slowly and sadly. “He was such a good dog.”

My younger daughter turned her face up toward the ceiling and howled, “Why did Mom have to eat him!” I almost expected her to shake her fist at God and curse her fate.

“Oh, please!” I said, finally impatient with their ongoing drama. “You know that’s not true!”

My older girl narrowed her eyes at me. “What’s not true?”

she growled. “Are you saying you think that Foo Foo was just pretend?”

“He was real! He was real!” my younger daughter cried.

“Of course he was—is!” I backpedaled. “I just meant it’s not true I ate him.” I whirled and pointed out the window. “Hey, there he goes now! Foo Foo just ran under the lanai chair!”

“No, he didn’t!” My younger daughter fisted her hands on her hips and stamped her foot. “Don’t try to trick us!”

My older daughter pursed her lips. “Mom,” she said, “you shouldn’t act like you see when it’s obvious you don’t. Only children see the invisible world. Only children really believe.”

I looked at her, suddenly struck by how old she seemed. “Do you still see it? Do you still visit there?”

“Of course,” she said.

Later that day, she came back to me, her journal in hand. “I’m writing down everything about the invisible world,” she explained.

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“May I read it?” I asked.

She shrugged, passing it to me, and this is what I read on the first page: “Some people believe in magic when they’re kids and totally disbelieve it when they’re grown up. I don’t want that to happen to me. I don’t want to stop seeing the invisible world. I don’t want to stop believing in magic.”

“Keep writing everything down,” I told her, thinking that the journal will be a good way for her and her sister to remember what they saw and imagined at this age, that these memories themselves will one day provide another type of magic; hopefully, the words my daughter writes now will later remind her and her sister to keep believing in their own dreams and visions, even if—

especially if—the rest of the world doesn’t.

As for me, I still keep an eye out for Foo Foo, hoping to catch a true glimpse of him under the kitchen table as I cook dinner, between the bookshelves as I dust, behind the desk as I write, coaxing various imaginary characters onto the page, conjuring my own invisible worlds.

The Babysitters’ Club

A n n H u l b e r t

For spring break
my almost thirteen-year-old daughter begged me to take her across town to help out with day care at Martha’s Table, which runs children’s programs and a soup kitchen in Washington, D.C. A seventh-grade service project with school had introduced her to the Classroom A kids—three- and four-year-olds—and she wanted to see them again. Needed to see them: that was actually how she put it. Clare isn’t a saint, but she is adored by Zachary* (who looks, she told me, like a little football player). And she’s the one who can get Terrell to go down for his nap. (“I miss my mommy, I miss my mommy, I miss my mommy,” he chants as she pats his back.) Javier is her small shadow, grateful for her efforts to speak rudimentary Spanish, the only language he knows. Over the weekend, before her vacation stint of child care was going to begin, she asked me more than once, “Do you think they’ll have forgotten me?”

I still remember Jane, the teenager who babysat for me and my older brother and younger sister the summer I was seven. In fact, if democracy had prevailed in our household, there would have been a living memorial to her in our family: that fall, when a new baby sister arrived, the three of us lobbied very hard to name

*The names of some people in this story have been changed to protect their privacy.

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her Jane. It strikes me now as an apt, if upside-down, tribute. The status we had just acquired, thanks to our “afterthought” baby, was something like what Jane enjoyed: she was in a sense a sibling caretaker. She wasn’t a squabbling competitor (as we three older kids often were with one another), but she wasn’t an adult authority figure, either—though I recall we were flustered, and fascinated, when she showed up one day with a boyfriend. Jane was the relevant future seen up close, and no gesture, expression, intonation, item of clothing—or, that day, bit of flirtation—went unnoticed. And yet Jane, whose energetic swagger I swear I could still recognize if I saw her on the street, had us convinced that she hadn’t yet forgotten our language. She was still one of us, and we worshipped her.

The feeling was not awe, but a kind of highly charged enthrallment—altogether different from the honor and reverence that children are said to have felt for their parents once upon a time. It’s more like the imaginative allegiance inspired by those magically young-at-heart nannies—Mary Poppins, even the Cat in the Hat—who have starred in children’s favorite escapist literature for decades now. Yet it isn’t quite that. Young babysitters aren’t mother substitutes who usher their charges into an exotic realm, but who can be counted on to have them scrubbed and calm when the parents return. They’re more like parent apprentices, nominally in charge but subliminally aware, as their charges are too (and so are their employers), that they’re in less than complete control. Those fictional nanny figures, supervising fairy tale–like flights from the familiar, help sustain a sort of extended childhood. But girl (and more rarely boy) babysitters are testing their autonomy, teetering on the brink of maturity and encroaching on the edges of adulthood, with their charges in rapt (and sometimes unruly) tow.

Or at least that’s my rather romantic memory of it, from both ends—as Jane’s acolyte and, later, as a sought-after babysitter myself, caught up in the role of undercover agent in other families’ lives. Paid to be an ally of children, which came naturally to me, I found myself well placed to spy, indirectly, on parents—

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who, since they weren’t mine, invited probing. Perusing bookshelves and even poking into drawers, I couldn’t resist prowling once the kids were asleep. As penance of a sort for my snooping (my biggest finds were a diaphragm and a copy of
Fanny Hill
), I rarely indulged in the expected babysitter misbehavior. I didn’t raid the refrigerator or tie up the telephone (not that parents back then ever called to “check in”—at least I certainly don’t remember it). I was a low-impact interloper.

I even made sure to look cheerfully clueless when my employers returned flushed and loud, and when the fathers who gallantly walked me home bumped into me more than a few times along the way. Little did they know what an expert I was at assessing states of parental inebriation, much less that I, an overly dutiful adolescent who was finding it hard to rebel, was busy ferreting out (or at any rate, fantasizing about) the dark side of domesticity. I was convinced I had intuited the true story of the trim tennis-playing mother who hired me for the meltdown hours of the day, 5:30 to 7:30 P.M. She came to the door all dressed in white and ready to play, but her real mission was elsewhere: a martini in the lounge area by the neighborhood’s indoor courts, or was it adultery? (I wavered, wishing I knew more about her husband, a handsome preppie whose cologne-tinted scent wafted from his closet but who never got home from the office before I left.) Her kids hurtled toward me ready to play, too.

The rumpus was wild, and as it got wilder, I started sweating along with them—seized with that radiating anxiety I could remember as a riled-up child myself. Who was in charge here? The adult-imposed order seemed fragile as I got the hot, damp bodies fed and bathed, but I also had a rare feeling: a sense of my own power.

Amid the bright lights and antiseptic smell at Martha’s Table, Clare’s child-care avocation makes my babysitting forays as a kid look amateurish and sheltered and yet also—like so much in the unregimented past of my adolescence—a little dangerous by current safety-conscious standards. Poison control, the rescue squad, even a phone number where parents could be reached: I have no memory of being equipped with an emergency list, and did infant CPR even exist? In the late 1960s and early 1970s, I was still
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