Magical Realism for Non-Believers

by Fajardo, Anika

  I hated living with my stepfamily, hated my stepfather. It hadn’t been my idea, and I have never liked things that weren’t my idea. Being part of that family was like role-playing for me. I never fully engaged, was always waiting for the curtain call. In the five years I lived with this assortment of people called my blended family, I had never bonded, never cared for them, never even respected them. Did I? I loved my mother fiercely, but I hated the way her marriage had changed everything in my life, hated the way the marriage had changed her. I had been an only child for the first thirteen years of my life, and sharing wasn’t a skill I had ever mastered. I always imagined myself a little like Cinderella—only with stepbrothers and a stepfather. I was the oldest, the girl, the one who had to mow the lawn, skim the pool, cook, vacuum. We were wealthy now that we were living on my stepfather’s salary, but I would have preferred our food-shelf salad dressing to the grilled steaks. I was resentful of his demands and expectations. My mother was too downtrodden to stick up for me, too caught up in the drama of pleasing an unpleasable man to have energy left over for a self-reliant teenager. There were the forced hoedown nights when everyone gathered around my stepfather and his banjo. His sons sang uproariously, and I was embarrassed for all of us. I strummed the autoharp and wished I was somewhere else, wished my mother wouldn’t play along, wouldn’t pick at her guitar with such willingness. Everyone pretended they were happy to strum old, out-of-tune instruments and wonder what to do with a drunken sailor. But, in truth, no one cared. At one point my mother and her husband talked briefly of having another child. She was only in her late thirties and, as a romantic teenager, I thought that a baby could repair this family. But they knew they needed to fix whatever was wrong before having more children. I should have known that a baby doesn’t solve a marriage’s problems; it hadn’t solved my parents’.

  Once, in an attempt to forge a relationship with me, a temperamental teen, my stepfather took me out on his brand-new BMW motorcycle. The bike was his latest shiny and expensive new toy (this was before my mother gave herself third-degree burns when leaning too close to the exhaust pipe). I remember how I tried to balance without wrapping my arms around his waist. My head rattled around in the yellow helmet and seemed to shut off my brain. My body was there, exposed, experiencing this ride, but my mind was disconnected.

  When my mother and I moved our things out of the house and into a second-floor walk-up apartment, the first snow of winter began to fall. The brown grass and leafless trees were methodically dusted in white, erasing their sharp lines and hard edges as if the past itself was being wiped out. How easily the past could disappear if you let it.

  In my father’s house, I watch a tiny bird the same color as the baby carrier fly into the courtyard between my room and the dining room. The broken bottles that top the walls are no obstacle for her turmeric wings. After soaking in the nectar of a bright-pink hibiscus, she takes a wrong turn. Instead of darting upward and out of the courtyard, she swoops through the dining room and then lands on the glass coffee table in the living room. She taps at her reflection and chirps several times before finally making her escape.

  I let the sheer curtain fall, obscuring my view of the bird as she flies out of the airy and open house. In my stocking feet, I run silently through the tiled hallway and out into the yard behind the house. My breath catches in a jagged gasp before I exhale.

  5

  When she came to the realization that she was trapped, she was twenty-five and had an infant under the age of one. She was trapped in a drafty house, couldn’t leave, couldn’t pack up the moment she felt ensnared, couldn’t escape in the middle of the night like a cat burglar. She had a baby.

  I’ve seen the house. It’s at the end of a country road near a single-lane bridge. The house as I saw it was big and airy, ceramic tiles worn from decades of footsteps, a slightly overgrown courtyard out back with a dry fountain. Renzo and Nancy rented the house—half the house—from the widow who owned it. She had divided the house in two with thin wallboard, right down the center of the living room. They lived in the half of the house where the woman’s husband had shot himself. Worn with debt and despair, the man had chosen the living room for his last breaths. And my young parents lived in that house with their infant—me. This is where my mother was trapped.

  The house had no phone, was miles from town, and they had no car. Nancy washed diapers by hand, let them dry in the noon sun. Renzo worked at the university and then stayed downtown after work to drink, to paint, to . . . ? I imagine her, with a twinge of the same postpartum depression I later experienced, sitting in the haunted living room, crickets jumping through the open doors, a baby playing at her feet. She is waiting. Alone, with only an unhappy ghost for company.

  The neighbor across the street befriended her, a woman whose husband was also a professor. There was another vecina down the street, another sometime companion. No replacement for a constant husband, though. Through the thin walls of the house, the widow must have heard the shouting, the arguments.

  Don Julio would arrive unannounced to visit his only granddaughter.

  “Ay, mi niñacita,” Don Julio would cry as he tossed his baby granddaughter into the air like a ripe mango. “Te quiero, I love you.”

  Nancy couldn’t fault her father-in-law for his love for the baby, but she felt invaded and exposed. Doña Rosa and Don Julio were in the midst of escaping their own troubles. Financial difficulties, the collapse of Doña Rosa’s family hotel, the end of a car dealership. Unable to support themselves, they moved in with their son Harold and his wife, Elvia, and young son, Renzito.

  Renzo and Nancy, too, had difficulty supporting themselves. There was never enough cash, there were hours of loneliness. And there were the rumors and chismes about affairs and disloyalty. Nancy heard about the women and knew about the late nights.

  She taught English in town, contributed something to the household expenses, left the house a couple times a week. Don Julio arranged for a friend, a taxi driver, to take her into town. She was uncomfortable teaching, though; she didn’t like standing in front of a class. One day a woman in her class collapsed. A young woman. Maybe a blood clot from first-generation birth control pills. Nancy knew CPR and rushed to her, administered mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. The young woman died, one of Nancy’s many guilty regrets from that time. But she became a hero for the attempt at lifesaving. Her life was becoming intricately woven into the fabric of the town. She was being tied down with wool and cotton, strung up into unrecognizable patterns.

  Please send me a book on divorce, Nancy wrote to her parents. On the lonely nights when her husband was in the cafés, she studied the book and learned the minutiae of ending a marriage, the steps you must take to undo the vows and promises. Divorce didn’t become legal in the heavily Catholic country until 1991, but that didn’t stop marriages from falling apart. Along with antiquated rules on dissolving marriages, Colombia’s custody laws were equally patriarchal. As if the country had foreseen the difficulties of multicultural marriage and procreation, fathers were granted custodial rights to their children. Without a father’s permission, offspring cannot exit the country.

  “I’m going to Minnesota,” Nancy told her husband. She told him she would take the baby for a visit, planning all along to never return.

  “Let’s go,” Renzo said. And suddenly it was a family vacation.

  How do you escape a bad marriage and a foreign country? If you had wings you would fly over the walls, scale the mountains, carry your child on your back. If you were a young woman, a woman desperate and confused and angry, you would use trickery and cunning.

  Renzo and Nancy and the baby arrived in Minnesota in August 1976. From the stoop of their midcentury rambler, her parents welcomed them with open arms, smiles of complicity pasted on their faces.

  Nancy had retained a lawyer—not a very good one, but she would do. Nancy waited for the right moment, a time when the baby was not with them. She didn’t want to compete with a toddl
ing baby while she told her husband she wanted a divorce.

  Renzo wanted to work things out, did not grasp the enormity of the chasm between them. He wanted to try counseling, he wanted to repair the union. She did not. She didn’t love him anymore, and she was deaf to his arguments. She had made up her mind. He was not the love of her life.

  The trouble with an international divorce is the child. Who will care for this child? What culture, which country will this child live in? What language will this child speak?

  “Anika is coming back with me,” Renzo told his wife. He bought two plane tickets to return to Colombia.

  And so the mother whisked the baby away. She took her away from her father. She took the baby to an undisclosed location; not even her parents could know where they were. First it was the family’s land in northern Minnesota, where the mother and child sought refuge in a log cabin with no running water. Not knowing where his daughter was, Renzo went to the Colombian consulate. Because this is what you will do to keep your child.

  Renzo and the consul drove slowly through the suburban neighborhood of his wife’s childhood, watching for a young woman, searching for a child.

  “Where are they?” the consul questioned the maternal grandparents.

  “We don’t know,” they answered honestly. This had been part of the plan. The intricate plan. Because this is what you will do to keep your child.

  Renzo returned to Colombia alone. Nancy kept the baby. They both escaped, and everybody lost something.

  6

  A small, brown-haired girl sits at the second desk from the right. It is 1981. The girl is near enough to the bank of windows to watch the evergreens fill up with snow. To her left is a blond boy named Chris—one of four in the first grade—and behind her is a skinny girl named Deborah. Beyond Deborah, she spots Mandy’s yellow pigtails curling beneath red bows of thick yarn.

  They are all bent over their papers, the room quiet. Ms. Brinkman walks back and forth between the desks. They are the kind of desks that open on top, leaving room inside for workbooks and pencil boxes. This little girl’s pencil box has an incomplete set of colored pencils—the pink went missing, and she thinks Valerie took it. There is also a tiny bottle of Elmer’s Glue with its irresistible coating of clear, dried glue on its orange tip. She likes to reach into the pencil box and pick at the glue, hoping it will come off in one piece, making a tiny cone.

  Every desk has an identical worksheet on it and five crayons. Each child has chosen crayons from Ms. Brinkman’s gallon bucket. The title on the paper says: “My family eats breakfast.” There is a large square with a cartoonish table. The assignment is to draw your family at the table and fill the table with the food you eat for breakfast.

  The little brown-haired girl is confident. She’s a good student, learning to read and write. She understands the task perfectly and prides herself on her artistic skills. She knows that she is naturally artistic because her father—a man she knows is her father but doesn’t know at all—is an artist, who occasionally sends her sketches through international mail. She has spent many, many hours with blank paper. She used to have a packet of markers until her mother learned of the possible dangers the ink could inflict on a growing child. Then the markers were replaced with colored pencils and crayons, tools never as satisfying as felt-tipped markers. She is sometimes allowed to use her mother’s sketch pad, one that is filled with charcoal renderings of flowers, shells, hands, and even a nude. She skips past the sketch of the naked man to find fresh, clean paper. The little girl has a rough understanding of perspective, is learning that objects meant to seem farther away will be smaller.

  The little brown-haired girl carefully draws her family: first there is a figure with short hair, glasses, and an apron. This figure has a broad smile on her face, and the hands have been drawn clutching a coffee cup with two squiggly lines of steam rising up. The second figure is markedly smaller than the first, a miniature version of the other one, this time with long hair. The little girl chooses a darker-brown crayon to make the child’s hair, but she uses the same red to make another smile. The table is piled high with pancakes, a bottle that surely must be syrup, and a square of yellow butter. A lopsided pitcher holds something orange and liquidy, two cups filled with the same color.

  “You need to draw your whole family,” Ms. Brinkman says as she leans over the little girl’s desk, the scent of stale coffee and face powder drifting down.

  The little girl looks at the paper her teacher is holding. She sees her family, expertly drawn, at the table.

  “I did.”

  “No, honey, your whole family. Where’s your daddy?”

  The little girl looks down at the paper and then back up at her teacher. Ms. Brinkman is pretty and round, a sort of human version of Miss Piggy. She wears beautifully tailored clothing, favoring pink and pale yellow. Her eyes and lips are accentuated with thick makeup, and her skin is a darker shade than you might expect to find on a blonde in January in Minnesota.

  “I don’t have a dad.”

  “Of course you do,” says the teacher. “Families have a mom and a dad.”

  The little girl brings the paper home to her mother.

  “I was supposed to draw my whole family.”

  “Very nice. What are they eating?” her mother asks her.

  She smiles. “Pancakes.”

  “Is that what we eat for breakfast?”

  “Sometimes,” the little girl admits. Usually they don’t eat pancakes. More often there might be oatmeal, Cream of Wheat, or thick whole-wheat toast with jam.

  “Ms. Brinkman said I was supposed to draw my dad.”

  Her mother is silent.

  The next day her mother picks her up from school. She walks down the hallway, grasping her daughter’s hand. Her mother never comes to school except for conferences. Teachers never have anything negative to say about this little girl. Her mother is like her; she is a rule follower, a smiler and a nodder.

  “Ms. Brinkman? Do you have a minute?”

  The teacher’s magenta-painted lips part into a gleaming smile. She is good at being a teacher, good at talking to both parents and children. She is musical, has a piano in her first-grade classroom. She could have been in the opera, but she damaged her vocal chords. Even still there is something operatic about her, and she still knows how to own a room.

  “Come in, Mrs. Fajardo.”

  The little girl’s mother is not a “Mrs.” She is not married. She is an anomaly in this 1980s suburban city.

  The little girl chooses crayons from Ms. Brinkman’s bucket while her mother and her teacher talk.

  “Don’t tell my daughter what a family is,” she hears her mother say. She pulls out the portrait. “This is our family,” she says, pointing to the drawing.

  Mother and daughter.

  7

  We strolled through the streets of Popayán after a leisurely lunch at a restaurant in the center of town. It was late afternoon, and the downtown was quiet, restful. The sun beat down on the dusty streets, and my father pointed out landmarks and architectural interests.

  “Wow,” I said.

  “How interesting,” I said.

  And then I said, “I’m going to be sick.”

  There is that one instant of absolute certainty when you know you’re about to be sick. It’s so quick you don’t usually have time to think about where you will be sick, why you are sick, whether you want to be sick.

  He rushed me into a little café and called out: “¿El baño? ¿Dónde está el baño?”

  Without so much as a glance our way, the proprietress waved in the direction of the little restroom, but it was too late. I lost my entire lunch right there on the tile floor of this little café. I was too sick to really know or care what was going on around me, but I remember my father taking a mop from someone and wiping my vomit from the floor. Part of me knew I should be embarrassed having this man—essentially a stranger—clean up after me. But I also had a moment of clarity when I reme
mbered how often my mother had had her chance to swab my damp brow, mop bodily fluids.

  I had been a bed wetter as a young child. My mother would awaken to my cries and come into my room, hauling me out of bed by one arm. I stood as still as stone at the other end of the room as my mother stripped the wet sheets and found fresh ones, the light from the hall streaming into the room. The wet cotton underwear stuck to my legs as she pulled it off. She wanted me to go to the bathroom, but by that time my bladder was empty.

  I had a physical excuse for the bed-wetting. My early childhood was filled with toileting and elimination issues. After suffering from one infection after another, the doctors in Minnesota discovered their cause. When I was barely three years old, I had to have bladder surgery to correct a birth defect. Congenital ureter abnormality. It had something to do with tubes and valves. Surgery solved the problem and even saved my life. My mother has told me that the surgery was one reason she can never regret leaving Colombia, bringing me to the United States. In her mind, she inflated the dangers that could have claimed my life, and this tiny, invisible birth defect was one of them. I don’t know if a hospital in South America would have given me any different care or if this is just a balm she rubs on her regret. But I can imagine now what it must have been like to watch a feverish child whose body is trying to fight the constant bladder infections, whose body can’t seem to perform the most basic of human functions. Had we lived in Colombia in the late 1970s, the chances of my receiving the care I needed would have been slim. In Minnesota, we had access to good medical care, money and insurance to pay for it, and the comfort of sterile hospitals and semiprivate rooms.

  I remember being wheeled to surgery, I remember the bright lights over my head and the nurses and doctors talking. This memory would come back with jarring lucidity when I was wheeled into an operating room at the age of thirty-two to have my baby via emergency Caesarean. There is a feeling of absolute loss of control when you are transported on your back on a gurney. You can’t see where you’re going or where you’ve been. The present—with its overhead lights coming in and out of view—is all that you have for reference. You lose track of who and where you are, and you give up, give in, surrender.