Sweet Mary

by Liz Balmaseda

  She shot me an irked look as I went to sit on the bed. She held up her arthritic hands with an overdramatic gesture that meant to her both defiance and surrender.

  “Don’t you think these hands of mine have done enough cooking? Don’t you think I’ve reached the point of that’s it? What’s the use in working so hard when your father is going to squander every penny on his numbers?” she said, picking up a stack of neatly folded, blue nylon underwear and placing it in the suitcase.

  “You know that’s not true,” I said, but then she gave me one of those looks that usually precedes a lecture in which she casts herself—in the third person, no doubt—as the victim of a reckless, incorrigible man. “Come on, lighten up. Daddy’s taking you on a cruise for your anniversary.”

  “He’s not ‘taking’ me anywhere,” she said, packing an assortment of matching leisure outfits into the suitcase. “This is the trip we won at the church raffle. With my winning ticket. Paid for with my two dollars. And I’m only going because Father Lorenzo’s rosary group is going, not because it’s my anniversary.”

  “They’ll have Baked Alaska—you love Baked Alaska,” I said, trying to coax a smile out of her, to no avail.

  “How can I enjoy myself, considering the great problem I have?” she said, slipping a pair of Naturalizers into one of the suitcase pockets.

  “What problem, Mami? Talk to me.”

  Lilia pouted in silence for a long while. Then came her prologue:

  “You know Max is very special to me. But I have four other grandchildren who are not so blessed,” she said as she rolled up a pair of knee-high hose.

  She didn’t have to say much more. I knew exactly where the riff was going. Still, I let her go there anyway.

  “Your brother has made some mistakes,” she said, tucking the knee-highs into a plastic bag, “but I want you to understand he’s in a tough situation.”

  Ah, yes. This was going to be that conversation again, the one where she pleads with me to bail out my brother from some kind of mess—for the hundredth time.

  “Whatever it is this time, it isn’t my problem,” I said, picking at my cuticles, as I tend to do when I’m annoyed. “And it isn’t yours, either.”

  “He is my son—”

  “He is twenty-eight years old. This is between him and his ex-girlfriends—every last one of them.”

  “Do you know what kind of mothers they are?”

  “I do. Maybe Fatty should have gotten to know them a little better before knocking two of them up in less than a year—”

  “He’s gullible—”

  “Or, radical thought: condoms.”

  “Dulce Maria, watch your tongue.”

  “Maybe he shouldn’t be so gullible.”

  Lilia slammed the suitcase shut.

  “Forget it. Go.”

  I hate it when she does this. I hate it because I always fall for it.

  “What do you need?”

  Lilia sniffed to herself. She patted the sides of her short, fringy do, freshly tinted in her favorite Nice ’n Easy shade—Natural Medium Ash Blonde—and styled to frame her face in slimming, forward-swept wisps.

  “Did you sell that house today?” she said.

  “Yes.”

  “Could I borrow five thousand dollars?”

  “Five thousand dollars? You mean, for the cruise?”

  “For child support.”

  She looked at me defiantly, as if I was not hers. I should have been ready for that, but I wasn’t. I should have come to expect that no matter how hard I work, how much I achieve, how generous I try to be, I will always be the outsider in this house, the one mocked for her goody-two-shoes sense of honesty and civility, the one snubbed as some kind of hall monitor. Oh, but when crunch time is near, mine is the one name they all remember. In times like that, my initials might as well be ATM.

  In Fatty and his woes, my mother found her favorite lamentation, an interminable, off-key ballad to a poor, luckless, misunderstood slob who couldn’t seem to catch an even break. It had been this way since the day he was born, for even Fatty’s birth was a near tragedy. He came into the world on a feeble cot in our garage, between hurled insults and heaps of rusted machine parts, during a late-season tropical storm. The storm had gusted in from the Bahamas without much warning as my mother neared her eighth month of pregnancy. Against the advice of her obstetrician, Lilia not only refused to go to the hospital, she insisted on getting the house hurricane-ready. She dragged in the potted plants, the Don Quixote and Sancho Panza lawn ornaments, the white-vinyl-strap patio furniture, and the parakeet cage. She secured the windows with those big, unsightly masking-tape Xs, the ultimately futile ones that are impossible to scrape off. Then she whipped up a steaming pot of stew, red beans, potatoes, chorizo, and chunks of calabaza, because it wouldn’t be a hurricane at the Guevara residence without a steaming pot of some Last Supper–worthy creation.

  Despite a rare scolding from Daddy, Lilia worked herself to the point of exhaustion. Her ankles swelled up like jellyfish and her cheeks grew cold and pale. I was barely five, but I remember the exact moment when my mother cried out:

  “Call 411! Call 411! The baby’s coming!”

  I picked up the telephone beside her green recliner and dialed 911. But nobody came on the other end of the line. I didn’t know it at the time, but the storm had knocked out our phone service. My father, intent on braving the wind and rain to drive her to the hospital seven miles away, coaxed Lilia into the car, only to find out the usually trustworthy vehicle, a faded burgundy Chevy Impala, would not start. The battery was dead, thanks to the storm’s low-pressure system. Gripping the dashboard in desperation, my mother called out the names of every saint she could think of, pleading for their divine intercession. Help finally came from a most unexpected source: Perica Jimenez, the hateful woman who lived across the street. Perica was the neighborhood gossip who once told my father that she had seen my mother at Les Violins Cabaret canoodling with Father Lorenzo—hence Daddy’s paranoia. Of course it wasn’t true. It turned out Perica was merely deflecting her own guilt, for it was she who had snuck out with Father Lorenzo. But thanks to her obsessive snooping, Perica was watching that stormy day between the taped Xs of her kitchen window as my mother waddled out of the stranded car and nearly collapsed at the door of the Impala. A former nurse’s assistant, Perica scrubbed her hands, grabbed her first aid kit, and sprang into action. She bolted across East Forty-fifth Street in the blinding rain and ducked into our garage as my mother howled in pain. There was no time to help Lilia up the garage steps into the house, so Perica grabbed a cot from a nearby pile of garage clutter and set it up. My mother wanted none of her help, but she had no choice. She pushed when Perica told her to push and spat insults at the detested midwife between contractions. It went like this:

  “Push harder, Lilita, push!”

  “I’m pushing, you imbecile whore!”

  Then, in a miraculous instant, my mother pushed out a baby boy. She cried and cried at the sight of him.

  “My poor little angel, born in a junk pile. My poor little son, brought into this world by an imbecile whore,” she cried. “I will spend my life making this up to you.”

  And that’s exactly how she raised Fatty, with a stifling amount of pity. This is why I was so tough on her that night as she asked me to bail him out.

  “No,” I said, getting up to leave. “Fatty needs to pay his own damn child support.”

  “Dulce Maria, please…”

  “Please what? You could have at least congratulated me first.”

  Before I reached the bedroom door I heard a tiny voice coming from the hallway.

  “Aunt Mary!”

  There, barely visible in the darkened corridor, was a sleepy-eyed three-year-old boy, Fatty’s oldest son. Jaz wore a giant, raggedy shirt and torn socks. I scooped him into a hug.

  “Where were you hiding?” I said.

  “Daddy’s room. I was sleeping.”

  “You must be
hungry—”

  But Lilia shattered the moment with a clap of her hands.

  “Ven acá mi chiquitico,” she said, summoning the boy. He rushed into her arms.

  She sat on the bed and rocked him like a baby as she gave me the evil eye. Years of living bitterly, always on the defensive, had etched a scowl on her otherwise graceful face. But now, as she cradled the boy, she softened, all the hard angles relaxed, offering a glimpse of the striking beauty who once starred in a national soap commercial in Havana. That was years before a forced exile, before she was torn from her parents and her twin sister, years before she’d realize her displacement was permanent and that she would have to make her life as a garment factory worker on foreign soil and stand by, powerless, as telegrams drifted in from eastern Cuba with the news of her father’s political imprisonment, his mysterious death in confinement, her mother’s emotional collapse, and her twin’s rebirth as a militant of the revolution. The portrait of my mother, an island of a woman, cradling that boy was more than I could tolerate.

  “Have a nice time on the cruise. At least try,” I said, feeling my eyes turn misty in frustration. I left the room to avoid saying anything I might regret, but I couldn’t shake the image of my mother and the boy.

  As I reached the front door of the house I took my checkbook out of my purse and wrote a check for $5,000. I ripped it out and left it on top of the TV, which still droned with the endless blue skies and farm-girl fantasies of my mother’s telenovela.

  The scene at my parents’ house nearly derailed me. Writing that check tore a chunk out of my spirit. It wasn’t about the money—it was about this realization: Just as I was moving along at a nice clip, inevitably something dragged me back into the sinkhole, the emotional pit of my childhood in Hialeah. Whatever municipal poet nicknamed Hialeah the “City of Progress” should have informed the Guevaras—they missed the bulletin. They live in no such place. Their city is defined not by progress, but by a plague of inertia.

  For my own survival, I had tried my best to gain a healthy level of detachment. And I have to confess that if not for Mr. Motivation I might have succumbed to the burn of self-pity that night. After Max settled into bed at nine o’clock, I hit the elliptical machine and the play button on the iPod, and I let Gary Zarkan’s sports anchor voice carry me off:

  “Get in the game, people. You can get anything you want if you just get in the game…”

  I notched up the volume on the audio and resistance control on the elliptical.

  “Let’s talk about the Porcupine. That’s when you throw the buyers’ questions back at ’em. Buyer says, ‘Do you have it in green?’ You answer, ‘Would green best suit you?’ People, this is huge. Some of you have lost major deals just because you forgot the Porcupine. You forgot to appropriate your buyers’ questions and hurl them right back!”

  Okay, admittedly, some of the Zarkan methods have that shark-tank, early-’90s, The Firm vibe to them. But that’s only when they are utilized by sweaty sales guys who wear double-breasted jackets over tight T-shirts and a lot of product in their hair. You expect the shtick—the Porcupine, the Tie Down, and the “mirror your client” techniques—from them. You don’t expect it from Ida Miller or any other classy woman.

  “Why do we settle? Think about it, people. We settle because we are conditioned to believe that we have only one or two options for any given situation. Well, this isn’t true. Life is not a multiple-choice question. Life is an open-ended essay question and we never, ever have to settle.”

  I climbed to levels unknown in my Zen blue bedroom as I stared out the window at the twinkle of suburban normalcy on Hibiscus Lane below. Tiny garden lights flickered on the Dixon family’s gazebo across the street, catching the unmistakable silhouette of Dale Dixon, the pudgy, semiretired accountant who heads the local orchid club. Buster, the neighbor girl’s American bulldog, scampered across my lawn on his nightly walk, dragging her along as he does. He stopped to sniff the mailbox, then suddenly lunged toward the curb as if he had spotted a cat or maybe a squirrel. The girl tried her best to pull him back, but Buster puffed up his chest in that bulldog stance and ferociously barked toward some parked vehicle on the curb. He barked so relentlessly that several porch lights clicked on. He didn’t stop until a white van, the object of his alarm, pulled away from the curb and sped off.

  I finished my workout and soaked myself in a warm, gardenia-scented bath. I checked on Max, preset my coffee pot, and nestled into bed, feeling renewed.

  THREE

  THE NEXT MORNING, I woke up to the aroma of Bustelo Supremo brewing in my kitchen, just as I had programmed it to the night before. I woke up Max and hustled downstairs in my sweats. Through the window, in a slant of sunlight, I saw Sam, the gardener, hauling a sack of soil in the yard. His small, wiry frame possessed unusual strength for a man of sixty-five. I had asked him to come by and spruce up the hedges of the front lawn to help me boost the curb-appeal factor, as I was hoping to put the house on the market in the following days.

  I waved hello to him as I walked outside to pick up the newspaper. But just as I stooped down to grab the paper from the lawn, I noticed something curious: a white Windstar van. It was the same van I had seen parked on the curb the night before. Now the hood was propped up and two men—young and muscular types, both white—chatted beside it. One of the men, a seemingly handsome dude with close-cropped hair, leaned into the open hood, but he didn’t seem to be checking the engine—he was checking me. Nice-looking mechanic, I thought. I might have been more intrigued if I hadn’t been distracted by the frightful sight of hefty Dale Dixon in his too-tight robe, watering his yellow oncidium orchids.

  I shook off the vision and went back inside for a cup of coffee at the kitchen counter, where I packed up a FedEx box filled with real estate brochures destined for an out-of-town client. I sealed it with a label that read MARY GUEVARA, BROKER/ASSOCIATE, GRAND REALTY and stopped for a minute to look at the tiny mug shot of me on the logo. Not so bad. I was smiling my business smile, my long, brown hair partly pulled back with a demure clip to reveal understated gold earrings. A light tan glowed on my cheeks, a remnant of a serene Sunday spent afloat in the waters off Boca Chica Key.

  My reverie was interrupted by the doorbell. FedEx guy, I was sure. I grabbed the box, rushed to open the front door, and there he was, caramel god of my morning. He gave me a wink and took off, and as I watched him walk away I noticed the gardener was driving off, having left the hedges nicely trimmed and replenished with new soil. I headed upstairs to get dressed for work. As I slipped into my new gray skirt, I could hear Max slamming pantry doors in the kitchen. And just as I fastened my strappy summer sandals, I heard the doorbell again. I must have messed up the FedEx label, I thought—just what I needed when I was running late. I bolted downstairs.

  “I’ll get it!” I said.

  I could hear Max fussing in the kitchen.

  “Two minutes! Grab your lunch!” I yelled out to him as I reached the front door.

  But just as I cracked the door open, something pushed it open from the other side with a THWACK. In a blinding instant, three men in black jackets stormed into my house, guns pointed. They tore through the living room at hurricane speed, firing orders I could not decipher. Chairs and cushions went flying. Books cascaded off the shelves.

  “Take what you want and get out of my house!” I pleaded.

  Two of the invaders barreled upstairs to the bedrooms. The third one sped toward me, pointing his gun at my chest. I was afraid to call my son’s name. I didn’t want to tip off the invaders to the presence of a child in the house. I wanted to make a run for the kitchen to grab Max, but instead I prayed he had gone out the back door and headed to the car to wait for me, as he does on some mornings. Even if I had wanted to run to him, I couldn’t have gotten very far. The third invader spun me around and shoved me against the wall.

  “Hands up! Don’t move!” he ordered, pressing the barrel of his gun into my back.

  I heard a
thunder of boots and a crash of glass coming from one of the rooms upstairs.

  “Jesus God, what do you want?”

  “Are you Maria?” the third invader demanded.

  “What do you want?” I snapped back in a booming voice I didn’t recognize, the voice of a woman who has nothing to lose. I wasn’t that woman. I was petrified that the invaders would find my son and shoot us both right then and there.

  The third invader shoved the gun barrel toward my head. I was trembling but managed to glance back and take a good look at him. Trim, athletic build, late thirties, meticulously pressed black jeans. I was determined to remember him in case I had to pick him out of a lineup.

  “Hands on the wall!” He shoved me again.

  But then I noticed something else about him, something glinting on his belt, and I realized this was no ordinary home invasion.

  The third intruder wore a badge.

  “Are you Maria?”

  “Yes, I’m Maria. What do you want from me?”

  “Maria Portilla?”

  “No, no—”

  “Maria Guevara Portilla, we’re—”

  “That’s not my name—”

  Just then I heard Max at the kitchen door.

  “Mommy!” he screamed, and immediately one of the invaders darted down the stairs and dove for the kitchen door, blocking him off.

  “Don’t touch my son!” I demanded in that unrecognizable voice.

  The third invader pinned me to the wall to shut me up.

  “Maria Guevara Portilla, we have a warrant for your arrest,” he said.

  “This is a mistake!” I said.

  I heard Max cry out for me again.

  “Stay back, baby!” I called out to him.

  But his screams got louder.

  “Why is my son screaming? Leave him alone!”

  I turned around to see one of the men carry my crying boy out of the house. I bolted after him, but the third invader tripped me to the floor.

  “Leave my son! Please, take me instead!”