Vida (7 page)

“What if they die in the Bahamas, who will take care of us?” I asked Cris as my mother blew kisses from the taxi window. Papi was busy looking over the airline tickets. He never looked back after saying good-bye.

“We’ll be orphans,” Cris said. “Maybe we can go live with the McAllisters.”

The McAllisters were our neighbors. Former Hell’s Kitchen Irish folks who invited us over whenever they barbecued—even after my uncle went to the slammer—and the only people who never called animal control when our dog, Manchas, got loose. That’s why we liked them.

“They’ll be fine. But if anything ever happens, I’ll take care of you,” Paloma said, reminding us she was our madrina, next in line to our parents.

When the taxi disappeared down the street and we went back in the house, Cris told Paloma that he’d rather eat possums and sleep in the gas station bathroom than live with her. Paloma looked sad for a second then hissed, “Chino malcriado,” but Cris was already headed upstairs to his room. It wasn’t anything he hadn’t heard before.

Paloma was my mother’s half sister, older by twelve years. Her father was a Cuban who died when his plane crashed in the Amazon when Paloma was seven. Her mother made a living buying clothes from factories in New York and bringing them back to sell to society ladies in Colombia, while Paloma went to boarding school in Jamaica and spent her school vacations in Pereira with her aunt Isabel, the family lunatic who used to lock her in the closet for hours while she went out to play cards with her friends.

Paloma’s mother, also named Paloma, found a replacement husband quick. He was a Gregory Peck look-alike, a decorated army general, grandson of a president, and man of the people, though his biggest selling point was his blue eyes, so beautiful they made women cry, making it difficult for him to be faithful. The new marriage produced three more children—the first, my mother, whom the young Paloma hated upon conception.

The Paloma I knew lived in a tiny studio apartment on East Forty-fourth street. The kitchen was the size of a broom closet and only one person could stand in it at a time. Same for the bathroom with its cracked claw-foot tub and missing floor tiles. She slept on a full-size bed pushed against the wall, and it also served as a sofa when she had
the rare guest. There was an armchair, a wooden trunk that she used as a coffee table, and stacks of books covering every free inch of the apartment—a massive collection Paloma was saving for when she retired. Until then, she mostly did crossword puzzles and word finders, with her bifocals slipping off the tip of her nose. She spent hours at it. And you couldn’t turn on the TV when she was at work on one of her puzzles. Noise really bothered Paloma. Mami said Paloma spent so much time alone that she wasn’t used to it anymore.

Paloma had enormous breasts, even after two surgical reductions, and wore pointy bras so that her breasts poked out under her loose blouses like they were looking to start a fight. She was heavy but in a way that tells you it came with old age. She still had a thin face, pale, always without makeup, and she kept her brown hair short like a schoolboy, parted on the side with wispy, innocent bangs. She always wore slacks and supportive shoes for walking the city streets, and had the glare of a real lonely New Yorker with a list of complaints about the taxes, the pollution, crime, and the mayor. Paloma had been in New York for thirty years but she spoke English as if she had arrived last week. She recklessly spliced her two languages, but she wrote perfectly in English and was skilled at dictation. Her voice, though, carried more than an accent, constantly cracking as if a thousand years of tears slept under every breath.

Paloma was married once but her husband, a Long Island gringo named Martin, died the day I was born, from a thundering heart attack while smoking a cigarette on the corner of Second Avenue. The next day, my mother’s father died.

“You see,” my brother would tell me, “you were a curse on our family.”

“You’re the curse!” I’d snap before Mami would yell at us to stop fighting like gang members.

The truth was that if there was a family curse it was my brother’s fault. He was born when our parents were newlyweds working in Puerto Rico, during a year when there was a severe shortage of baby boys born on the island. He was the only barón born in the hospital that week and a nurse tried to steal him—whether it was to keep him for herself or to sell him, we don’t know. Paloma spotted the nurse trying to leave the floor with him, ran after her, and snatched baby Cris out of her grasp just in time. A nearby security guard cuffed the nurse, who retaliated with maldicíon: “A curse on all your family” she screamed, “and never a boy to be born to you or yours again.” Three years and a miscarriage later, I was born.

Paloma often reminded Cris that if it weren’t for her, he’d be living with some Puerto Rican family in Caguas and certainly not playing video games in New Jersey. This pissed Cris off big-time and I can’t say that I blame him because
nobody wants to be reminded of the favors they owe. But Cris is also the kind of person who will listen to your secrets with best-friend eyes and then throw them in your face when you least expect it. Like when I confessed to him that I had a thing for our neighbor, Tim McAllister, Cris swore he’d take it to the grave but the next time Tim came over to play Frogger, Cris spilled the beans, and Tim pretty much ignored me after that.

There was a man Paloma considered to be her boyfriend, but my parents didn’t like him, so we didn’t see him often. He was a tall, white-haired Canadian named Gerald, who my dad said never made a move for the tab if you went out to dinner with him. He often slept over at Paloma’s place and they went on vacations together once a year to extremely boring places like Taos and Nova Scotia.

When Paloma came to watch us the week that my parents were in the Bahamas, I thought I would use the opportunity to try to understand her better. We were sitting at the kitchen table. Nila had stepped up the cooking for Paloma’s visit, probably because she knew that Paloma wouldn’t hesitate to tell my mom if she was slacking. We were eating fish, a rarity in our house. My mother is from the mountains and doesn’t feel comfortable eating anything besides a cow. But Paloma said fish was healthier. She’d gone to the Grand Union earlier that day, driving Mami’s red Cadillac, and bought the fish herself. It was just the two
of us having dinner. Cris stayed to eat at the house of his Taiwanese friend, Joe.

“Why don’t you marry Gerald?” I asked Paloma because back then I thought everybody wanted to be married.

“We’re happy as friends,” she told me, and then asked me if I’d finished my homework.

That was a subject I wanted to avoid. I was only in fifth grade and already an established underachiever. I went to my room. But later, the rest of the story came out.

Cris was late to come home, so Paloma called Joe’s house. His mother answered and told Paloma that Cris had not been there that evening. She put Joe on the phone, and after some coaxing, he confessed that Cris was really hanging around with Tania, the local Girl With Problems. He finally showed up a few hours later, high on his experience, whatever it was. When he walked in through the back door of the house, Paloma rushed him, grabbed him from behind the neck, and forced him onto a chair at the kitchen table for an interrogation.

He folded his arms across his chest, raised his chin in the air, and squinted his eyes so much he could probably only see his own arrogance through those lashes.

“You’re only twelve and you already want to be some kind of perro puto?” she yelled, and it seemed to me she was taking this very personally. If my mother were here, she’d
just tell him not to do it again and keep him moving up to his room. Cris was a perfect student—a free ride through all sorts of bad behavior as long as he kept delivering As.

Cris grinned, his silver braces catching the light and making stars on the ceiling.

“Don’t you laugh at me,” Paloma snarled.

“You’re not one to judge,” Cris ripped. I could tell he’d been saving this one.

“What does that mean?”

“Don’t call me perro puto when you’re just a mistress. Got it?”

I wasn’t sure what a mistress was but I knew it was bad, maybe as bad as a puta pagada, which is what my parents called the women my uncles sometimes hung around with instead of their wives. Paloma was stunned and Cris used the window of shock to make his escape and retreat to his room. All we heard was the door slam. Paloma was frozen, one hand on the kitchen table as if her body was laying down roots.

“Are you okay?” I asked her. Nila had already gone to bed. I was glad she wasn’t there to see the show. I offered Paloma a glass of water. Told her maybe we could make some tea. But she just shook her head, and finally I told her good night.

Paloma left her job keeping the books at Panasonic and went to work at the Museum of Modern Art, which made her happy because she could get all kinds of discounts on stationery and tote bags from the gift shop. My mom often went to meet her for lunch and a walk around the museum while my brother and I were at school and Papi was at work. My mother didn’t have many friends, but that never struck me as weird because my father didn’t have many either, just a ton of siblings who kept marrying, divorcing, and multiplying, so there were always a lot of people around anyway.

Mami was on her own in the United States, if you didn’t count her husband or kids. She left her parents behind in Colombia and they both died before I had a chance to meet them. She had a few siblings left in Bogotá: one full sister, one full brother who was institutionalized for retardation, and another half sister that her father had with a secretary. Around here, Mami only had Paloma, and they clung together like schoolgirls, linking elbows as they walked, talking for hours about people I didn’t know, about the world they left behind in South America, in a way that made it sound like a miniseries.

You could hardly tell they were related though. Paloma with her bare face next to Mami’s hour’s worth of cosmetics, perfectly layered creams and pigments, so that her eyes seemed lit from within. My mother always dressed as if she were on her way to a cocktail party, while Paloma had on
her sensible uniform—black trousers and a blouse in one of the primary colors. My mother had the soft, forgiving nature of a mother, infinite patience unless you crossed her, and then she became a viper. Paloma seemed infinitely wounded, trusted no one, never accepted when you tried to give her a gift, and always wore her purse across her chest with a hand clutching the strap, prepared to be mugged.

Paloma was happy working at the museum until a shiny Colombian compatriota named Oscar showed up, with oily hair that looked like it might drip on you if you got too close and a face that always looked wet. I saw this wonder myself one day when I went with my mother to meet Paloma at the museum. Oscar was always talking about the various women he was screwing, going into detail at the dirty parts so as to annoy Paloma, whose desk was next to his in accounting. And then his harassment became outright cruel. He’d call her fat, grotesque, mock her, told her he was going to have her fired with the false complaints he filed against her in personnel on a weekly basis. Paloma didn’t know what to do but she was tough, so she ignored the man, who was slowly poaching the few friends she’d made on the job. She had only one left. A recent college grad named Maggie, who had the kind of red hair you only see in movies. I think Maggie had a sad family story of her own and that’s why she gravitated toward Paloma.

When Paloma came to our house in New Jersey to spend the weekend, she would tell me about her. “Maggie is so sweet, she buys me a bagel and coffee every morning without my asking her to.” Or, “Maggie has to buy a dress for a party and she asked me to go shopping at Macy’s with her.”

I got the feeling she was comparing me to Maggie. At that time I was fifteen and had an especially sucky attitude. When Paloma invaded the family room, sleeping on the couch so that I couldn’t watch television when I wanted, I took to ignoring her, isolating her with my indifference. My mother never pushed us to be close with each other. Our distance seemed to reinforce her own conflicted past with her sister and every now and then she’d fall into a memory and say, “Paloma used to be terrible to me,” before she stopped herself, shook out her hands as if they were full of crumbs, and added, “Well, never mind. That’s all in the past now.”