Meanwhile, Marisela sat upside down in her chair, face and torso hidden by the tabletop, legs and feet straight up in the air, the toes of her sneakers lightly bouncing off the wall behind her. Look, I’m a fallen angel, she shouted from under the table. I fell out of paradise and landed upside down! Lulú and I laughed, and I took a picture with my phone. I felt something like a foreshadowing, a sense that I was going to be doing this for years, sitting at tables with Lulú and Marisela, laughing at the girl’s antics, taking their pictures.
We talked about mole de olla, and how good it would be to have a bowl of mole de olla on a cold winter day in New York. Do you miss Mexico? I asked her.
Claro que sí, she said. After a moment, she said, I don’t want to go back until I have a profession. But if I study for a profession here, maybe this is where I’ll have to stay, to work at that profession. I am good with that.
Have you thought of what profession you’d want to study?
I was good at math. I thought I wanted to be a civil engineer.
You mean build bridges and things?
Yes, she said. Or maybe be an architect.
All that following week, I thought about what Lulú had said about her desire to go to college and about her friend’s story too. Now, on the train, I look at the digital picture on my phone of Marisela sitting upside down with her legs and feet in the air and wonder, What will this photo mean to me a month from now?
The next Wednesday night in our workshop, I couldn’t help but listen and watch for clues and signs. Would Marisela say something that revealed that Lulú talked about me at home? Instead, as I sat in the ring of little girls at our table, Jazmery blurted at me: You’re old. Why are you so old? We’re the youngest children here, so how come we have to have the oldest teacher? I noticed Marisela looking at Jazmery as if this were new information she needed to pass on to Lulú. What about you, Jazmery, I thought. Why don’t you try to get your damned peregrine into the air? Don’t take your frustration out on me, chamaca. I felt hurt, as if a weakness of mine had been exposed and my stature with the girls had been toppled. You’re overreacting, I told myself.
But we went back to the Dunkin’ Donuts that evening and the next week too. We didn’t linger quite as long as we had in previous weeks, as if Lulú were wary of upsetting her cousin. These conversations were a bit like we were auditioning for each other, a little careful and deliberate. I wanted to show that I could be a good and supportive listener and that she could trust me not to pry. Lulú told me more stories about how she grew up. Country-girl stories about stealing peaches from an orchard and getting caught by the farmer or about how during a certain time of year, you’d see coralillo snakes along all the paths, a dozen or so male snakes at a time trying to mount a female coralillo in heat, massing into writhing horrible mounds of snakes. The snakes weren’t poisonous but she’d hurry past with a shudder, fuchi. Other stories were about her adolescence in Mexico State, when she wore her Ramones and Queen T-shirts practically every day, jeans with more holes than denim, and parts of her hair—she drew out the same long locks of hair that she now likes to fasten behind her head—were dyed peacock blue-green. She used to wear a metal stud in her tongue. You can’t see anything there now, she said, and stuck out her bright-pink tongue. Lulú never mentions a father in any of her stories. She speaks of her mother with little affection. Obviously there are things in her past, probably in her present, too, that are off-limits. I sense a reserve in Lulú that’s like her finely attuned twin, who steps smoothly to the fore whenever she needs her to.
Finally I asked Lulú out to dinner. It was the night of the snowstorm a couple of weeks ago, when Lulú decided to stay over, though she knew she might have to deal with her cousin’s fury later. Even before we reached my apartment, on the walk from the pizza restaurant on Court Street—she’d never been to a pizza restaurant, either, as opposed to an ordinary pizza parlor—I knew I’d fallen a little in love with her. Clinton Street in the snow looked like a long, straight logging road through a frozen forest, snow-piled branches, blanketed parked cars and trash cans, the occasional taxi rumbling past like a Red Army tank; behind the trees, lamplight-filled brownstone windows; all this seen through a gossamer streetlight glare caused by snowflakes splashing into watering eyes, mine and surely Lulú’s too. In both directions, men were riding bicycles, some with bike lamps, the clacking and clinking of pedals and chains, wheels softly hissing through snow, hoods up, stocking hats pulled low over dark eyes peering steadily ahead, scarves tied over faces, freezing cheeks exposed, leather pizza satchels balanced atop handle bars and other food containers and bags in the baskets, the deliverymen and boys of Brooklyn, mostly mexicanos, surely some chapines, guanacos, catrachos too, bringing dinners to the people living in all those warmly lit brownstones. Mira los pelícanos! Lulú exclaimed as we stopped on a corner, los pelícanos flying through the snow. She laughed as if delighted by her own wordplay. Pelícanos? I asked. She looked at me with a grin and said, They fly in straight lines through the snow, bringing food like pelícanos. Haven’t you ever seen how pelícanos fly, Panchito? Lulú, I love that, los pelícanos. Bringing food, she went on, to the rich people in their warm houses. Imitating a baby pelican opening its beak wide for food, she looked straight up and opened her mouth to the snow. Within seconds, we were kissing.
In our shared lexicon mexicanos are now pelícanos. Marisela and the other girls in my workshop are pelicanitas. The next week, when I came out after class to meet her, she was standing on the sidewalk with her back to me and I overheard her saying into her phone: Le encantan sus elotes con mayonesa y queso, qué pelicanita es!
No matter what happens, I’ll never forget los pelícanos or our lovemaking later that night, the most joyful I’ve felt in years. But the second time she slept over, Lulú discovered that her period was starting. We kissed, fondled, made each other come; that was lovemaking too. Burying my nose in her soft wild hair and neck, kissing her incredibly smooth skin, up and down her long country-girl legs, kissing her as if we were both young and passionate and hungry for each other’s beauty—I know that she can’t possibly find me beautiful in that way, but hopefully, maybe, in other ways—I felt that same incredulous joy that I had during our first time. While it’s true that we’re just getting to know each other, we’ve had meaningful conversations. We’ve revealed parts of ourselves that maybe we ordinarily don’t share so easily, I know I don’t. Yet that second morning, for no reason I could identify, I had the feeling she felt disappointed or was having second thoughts or was feeling ashamed, as if maybe our age difference had inevitably and viscerally kicked in. I even sensed I was like a stranger to her, as if she didn’t give our “good conversations” the importance I did. I felt wounded and confused, guilty and worried. What did I do or say wrong? That was the weekend before last.
Last night we didn’t go to the Dunkin’ Donuts on Wyckoff near the L train stop like we’ve been doing every Wednesday night since January. She doesn’t feel the same excitement and urgency to go to Dunkin’ Donuts anymore, I thought glumly. After all, we’re fucking now, so who needs Dunkin’ Donuts, I told myself. Lulú said she was feeling tired and was worried she was coming down with something. The lower rims of her eyes were a little reddened. We kissed each other just on the cheeks, like we always do when Marisela is there, and I gave Marisela the usual vigorous handshake goodbye, bending forward like an old-fashioned gentleman.
A depressing subway ride on the L to the G. Already over with Lulú. Well, you knew that was going to happen. You promised that you’d feel grateful for what Lulú has already given you. I’m grateful. Finding true love, loving, and being truly loved back—dismissing for the moment questions about what that actually means—for the very first time at age forty-nine, can anybody believe in such a fairy tale? When I came out of the subway station on Smith Street and had internet service again, my phoned buzzed in my pocket, and I pulled it out and there was a messag
e from Lulú, in English:
“Panchito, have fun but hurry back. We can ride bicycles in the park. Here comes the spring weather!”
I immediately thumbed back: “Yo más puesto que un calcetín,” a saying that has always kind of annoyed me. But Lulú, like Gisela, loves those old abuelita sayings and expressions, too, and that was the one that came to mind. Not even sure what the equivalent of being más puesto que un calcetín would be in English: More pulled on than a sock, I’m so ready. My calcetín message she answered right away with a smiley face. Of course she did.
Right now I’m thinking that her hurry-back message didn’t merit that surge of optimism. It could have just been a you-can-probably-tell-this-is-over-but-just-in-case-I-change-my-mind message. We’ll go for a bike ride. Panchito. If the weather is good. Probably be a blizzard.
Right now, staring at my blank phone screen, I find myself marveling that any second incoming words might change my day, possibly even my life. That’s what having even a little love in your life, after none for years, brings, so long as you own a mobile phone. But Lulú isn’t a big texter. I’ll go days and nights without hearing anything, then there’ll be a flurry.
Proust wrote in his novel that a man, during the second half of his life, might become the reverse of who he was in the first. When I first read that a few years ago I liked the line so much I wrote it down on a piece of paper and put it into my wallet. Then I found a similar one in Simenon’s The Prison: “Alain Poitaud, at the age of thirty-two, took only a few hours, perhaps only a few minutes, to stop being the man he had been up to that time and to become another.” I decided to fill a notebook with quotes conveying that sense of the possibility of a seemingly magical personal metamorphosis, but then I didn’t come across many more. But I did find this one by Nathaniel Hawthorne that’s like the others but with an intriguing twist: “In Wakefield, the magic of a single night has wrought a similar transformation, because, in that brief period, a great moral change has been affected. But this is a secret from himself.” Something, even overnight, has changed you for the better, but you’re not even aware of it. But can’t it be something that has been building for years and that finally gathers enough weight, even from one day to the next, to tip over from bad into better or even into good? How will you know? Because someone will love you who wouldn’t have yesterday.
The train has just crossed from Rhode Island into Massachusetts. Along this stretch, it’s been like watching our town out the window sliced into views and arrayed along the tracks: thick pine forest, sparse winter woods, low stone wall, cold dark pond, fen of gray-green water in which dead tree trunks stand like ancient stone columns, fallow farm fields, yellow-brown meadows. We’re inland now, the land stretching away into the southeast corner of the state, toward Buzzards Bay and New Bedford, where Lexi lives. These are the old Wampanoag lands of King Philip’s War, and of Weetamoo, revered squaw sachem of Pocasset, entrusted by her brother-in-law, the warrior chief Metacom, aka King Philip, with the care and safekeeping of the famous captive Mary Rowlandson, who was taken along by Weetamoo when she led her tribal followers, mostly women, children, and elders, on a march deep into the wolf-infested forests to escape the Puritan colonial troops who would have killed or enslaved them. They were internal refugees, just like the Maya CPRs in the mountains and jungles of Guatemala. All around here there must be so many people who wouldn’t exist today if it hadn’t been for Weetamoo leading their ancestors to safety; maybe there are still descendants of Mary Rowlandson out there too. The Puritan soldiers finally captured Weetamoo a few years later, cut off her head, and stuck it on a pole for all to see.
Beginning around when Feli left to get married, day after day, from after school until dark, I used to disappear into our town’s forest, woods, and swamps, roaming alone for hours. Alone out there in the forestland I could escape the ordinary self that seemed unable to do anything right. If I went slow, picking my way through thorny underbrush, I could imagine I was going fast, outrunning my pursuers. Hopping from hummock to hummock to cross a stretch of swamp, I could lose my balance, plunge a sneakered foot into ice-cold mud up to a knee, and still tell myself nobody was a nimbler hummock jumper than I was. The forests in our town were a remnant of the same vast unbroken evergreen and deciduous wilderness that had once covered all New England and in its deepest parts still seemed as majestically primeval. Those hours of freedom were often paid for when I got home, especially if I was late for dinner or if my clothes were muddy or torn or full of burrs, bloody scratches on my skin. Any of that could set my father off. But it was still mostly shouting or a cuff to the side of the head, the real beatings hadn’t quite started yet; those were waiting just around the next bend.
They always come back though, making the muscles around my spine contract, forcing me to sit up straighter: my father shoving me down onto the floor with hand clamped around the back of my neck, my mother chirping: Bert! Bert! Not in the head! Don’t hit him in the head! It happened so often, all the different times blend into one long memory like the loud blur of a fast train passing on the opposite track.
HaHaHa—that roared fake laughter of his that I hated. Is that what they call you, Monkey Boy? I can hear him snarling; his voice inside me always ready to mock, even though I don’t remember him ever saying exactly those words.
Whenever I think about the one beating, when I was about ten, that must have shattered a barrier inside of him and led to all the others that came after, I remember the blind coin collector. It wasn’t his fault, but the blind coin collector seems so intrinsic to how it happened, like in a fairy tale where an old hermit deep in the forest gives the young man passing through on his way to the king’s castle something with magical powers that will later either help or doom him in the completion of his task. My father knew every corner of Boston and took me to neighborhoods as a boy that I haven’t seen since. The one where the blind coin collector lived was a street of formidable but drab yellowish apartment buildings, no green growing anywhere, parked cars, windows giving off a gritty glare in the cold sunlight. That was during the early stages of my fixation with Matchbox toys. The minutia of detail in every small, painted die-cast car and truck entranced me; whenever I remember the detachable plastic ladder that came with the fire engine, its minute yellow rungs and rails, I still feel a pang of pleasure. The military ambulance with a Union Jack on top. All those diminutively armed and weaponized tanks, missile launchers, troop carriers. The trailer truck with its two dozen tiny cages holding minuscule white ducks with just perceptible orange beaks and, on its white cab door in green print you practically needed a magnifying glass to read: campbell canards ltd. I have a sense now that certain kinds of personalities are drawn to small, intricate things, a smallness that focuses fantasies or that fantasies fit easily inside of, shutting out the world’s terrors, even as, “playing,” you reenact some of those terrors on a tiny scale.
At the Music Box in the town square a Matchbox toy cost forty-nine cents. In his bedroom closet my father kept cardboard banker boxes in which he stored tax and financial records, family home movies never watched by anybody, and in one box his coin collection, comprised of stacked rows of clear plastic-capped tubes, each tube filled to the top with silver John F. Kennedy half-dollar coins. The blind man was a professional coin collector who sold coins from all over the world out of his bare little apartment, coins he could identify by touch and kept catalogued by memory in cabinets. He was who’d advised my father to invest in newly minted JFK half-dollars. My father always had these local expert connections that only a veteran insider Boston guy like himself could have. But I’ve never heard or read anywhere that people who were astute enough to collect JFK coins made a killing.
Every JFK half-dollar coin, though, was worth one Matchbox toy. All I had to do was sneak into my parents’ bedroom, pilfer a coin from one of those tubes inside the box in the closet, walk up Namoset Avenue to the square, and go into the Music Box. The Ma
tchbox toys were displayed behind glass on two shelves beneath the cash register. I’d crouch down, choose the one I wanted, and slide a shiny JFK fifty-cent coin over the counter to the shop owner, who in return would hand me the boxed toy inside a crisp brown paper bag, and a penny in change. Over and over, for a few months, we repeated this transaction. The mind-his-own-business shop owner never asked why I always came into his store carrying exactly one JFK half-dollar. But my father finally made the connection between his disappearing coins and my growing fleet of Matchbox toys. One evening he burst into my bedroom, roared a couple of questions, then beat me up in a way he never had before. I retain a visceral memory of shock and terror, screaming while frantically crab walking and being kicked across the floor, my head swatted off and spinning in a corner.
Bert could get into trouble for some of those beatings now. The time I forgot we were supposed to go to Aunt Hannah’s for Rosh Hashanah dinner and came home late from playing yard football is one. Just inside the front door, he kneed me so forcefully in the small of the back that my legs were left paralyzed—only temporarily it turned out later. The emergency room doctor, with a sharp look, tersely asked how I’d become injured, and when my father answered that I’d hurt myself playing football, his mouth tightened and his somber eyes settled on my face for a moment and looked away.
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