The Woman She Was

by Rosa Jordan

  Kneeling down to disentangle Keri from his legs, Vera had replied sweetly, “Of course, Joe. As long as you have them home in time for dinner, which as you know is at six. We all feel better when we get to bed at a reasonable hour, don’t we, Keri?”

  His daughters were home in plenty of time for dinner because the outing never took place. Vera conveniently failed to notify the school that he was to pick them up, and the school, under strict instructions to not allow the girls to leave with anyone other than their mother, the maid, or their maternal grandparents, would not allow Joe to take them. The superintendent had tried to reach Vera by phone but only got the maid, who would not confirm anything, other than that she would be right over to get the girls if Miss Vera wasn’t there. Vera of course was unreachable.

  Leaving Amy in tears and Keri in the midst of a full-fledged tantrum, Joe had stormed downtown to his lawyer’s office. Three hours later, a letter was hand-delivered to Vera. It was sufficiently threatening that when Joe drove up in front of the house the following morning the girls were ready and waiting. He didn’t even have to ring the bell.

  By then he had a new game plan. The trouble with the previous one was that he had only aimed at solving the problem of the moment. He thought he could prevent Vera from manipulating him by not asking anything from her, not even access to his own children. Now he saw that he’d have to factor in the girls’ desires.

  One of their desires was to spend time with animals. Joe himself had no time for a pet, and until the advent of Fluffy the kitten, Vera had objected to pets on the grounds that they harboured diseases. Probably as a result, their petless children were fascinated with all visible life forms, from sea slugs to elephants. For that reason (and to annoy Vera), most of Joe’s post-divorce time with them involved animals. When they had a day together he took them to the zoo or Sea World. If their time together was brief, it might entail pony rides or a trip to a park where they could feed the ducks. On that particular Saturday, because it was what Joe figured would be his last visit with them for a long time, he had something special in mind. When the girls quizzed him about where they were headed, he said, “To a really scary part of the Everglades, to see alligators.”

  Amy, who was just beginning to develop her mother’s habit of implying that nothing was quite enough or good enough, turned down the corners of her pretty mouth and said, “We saw alligators at the zoo. They just lie there. Boring.”

  “Yeah, but these are wild alligators. We’ll be lucky if they don’t bite the paddle in half and leave us stranded out there in the swamp all night.”

  In fact, Everglades alligators were so accustomed to sightseers that they did lie among the reeds like logs. But the airboat driver thrilled the girls by coming in close enough that, had he had a paddle in hand, an alligator could have chomped it.

  Later they visited an alligator farm where a Seminole Indian “wrestled” an alligator. Joe, who didn’t care for the stupidity of the so-called sport, stood back, preferring to admire his beautiful children as they clung to the wire fence, their blond hair wildly tangled from having been blown about during the airboat ride.

  Watching them brought to mind a trip he had made with Celia to the Laguna de Tesoros back in their college days. She had been fascinated by crocodiles in a fenced pond behind the restaurant. This was a similar scene—pretty girl pressed against a wire fence, beyond which lay a body of water infested with ugly reptiles. His feelings, though, were in no way similar: paternal pride now and something altogether different then.

  He had stood behind Celia, admiring her well-shaped legs and imagining their upper reaches, concealed by shorts snug against her firm ass as she leaned over the fence to get a better look. He wanted to bed her right then and there in one of the romantic cottages scattered about on small islands in the lagoon. But that was impossible; far beyond his means at the time. Instead, they had returned to Jagüay Grande on the bus and stayed with a friend who obligingly lent them one of the family’s two bedrooms.

  The alligator-wrestling show was appropriately concluded by a helper who, in throwing fish to the big reptiles, revealed a hook in place of a hand. The girls came screaming to Joe in delicious horror, and he assured them that, yes indeed, the hand had been bitten off by a gator. Which he supposed it could have been, given the nature of the “entertainment” on offer.

  They lunched in a diner at the alligator farm. As soon as they had settled into one of the red vinyl booths, Joe told the waitress, with a wink, “Three gator-burgers, two orders of fries, two orange juices, and a draft beer.”

  When the girls had exhausted their repertoire of gagging sounds—not allowed in front of their mother—Joe brought up the reason for the day’s rendezvous.

  “I’m not going to be able to visit you much anymore,” he confided.

  “Why?” Keri demanded.

  Joe mentally flipped through the answers he had prepared, trying to decide which would best serve his plan. Amy beat him to the punch with the truth.

  “Because it makes Mommy mad,” she said, without looking up from the drawing she was creating on the back of her paper placemat—an alligator with a large, four-fingered hand dangling from its mouth.

  Keri frowned at her sister’s drawing, then smiled brightly at Joe. “We could sneak down to the corner and meet you. She wouldn’t know.”

  Joe’s heart went out to his youngest daughter. Like Amy, she was a preschool version of their doll-pretty mother, all fair skin, blond curls, and deep blue eyes. But Keri’s soul was pure Joe Lago. Where Amy was quick to learn the rules and follow them for adult approval, Keri was just as quick to look for a way around them to achieve her own objectives. Even as Joe recognized this quality of himself in his not-yet-five-year-old daughter and loved her for it, he felt compelled to say, “No, Keri, I don’t think that would be a good idea.”

  “Why?”

  Again Amy answered before Joe could. “Because we might get grabbed. By a pervert.”

  “A pervert wagged his weenie at me,” Keri informed Joe solemnly and collapsed against her sister in a spasm of giggles.

  “Wagged his weenie!” Amy echoed. Amidst chortles, they chanted, “Wagged his weenie, wagged his weenie!”

  Joe couldn’t help laughing even as he shook his head with incredulity. Was that what Keri had told the fuzzy-haired old judge? If so, had Her Honour also wondered where a preschooler might have learned such slang, let alone its meaning?

  Seeing the waitress heading their way, he shushed the girls. For the next two minutes they behaved like well-designed robots programmed with perfect table manners. However, the second the waitress turned her back, Amy drowned her fries in half a bottle of ketchup, while Keri opened her bun and with delicate, none-too-clean fingers lifted the patty off the burger and placed it on Joe’s plate.

  “It’s not really alligator,” Joe protested. “I was just kidding.”

  “It was a live something,” Keri stated. “I don’t like eating live things.”

  “Why not?” Amy smirked and pushed aside her plate so she could admire her drawing. “Some of them want to eat you.”

  “I don’t care.” Keri again examined her sister’s drawing of the alligator and the hand. “Where’s the other finger?”

  “I told you,” Amy said, although she hadn’t. “He ate it.”

  Keri leaned back in the booth and began picking at the bun of her now-vegetarian burger, scattering broken bits on and around her plate. Something, or perhaps everything in their lunchtime conversation, had clearly upset her.

  “Like I said,” Joe tried again. “I’m not going to be visiting you very often from now on. But I’ve got a surprise for you.” From the pockets of his khaki cargo pants he produced two small, beautifully wrapped packages.

  The girls ripped off the wrapping and squealed with such ear-piercing delight that the waitress on the other side of the room turned to stare, then smiled. It was a cellphone for each girl in what he knew to be her favourite colours: red and g
old for Amy, turquoise and silver for Keri. They were familiar with cellphones; Vera had one and occasionally allowed them to use it; for example, when they were out together, to call the maid to let her know what time they could be expected home for dinner.

  “The house is programmed on number 1,” Joe explained. “Just like on Mommy’s. Mommy’s cellphone is number 2. Why don’t you try it, Amy?”

  Amy punched number 1. Vera promptly picked up. “Mommy,” Amy said breathlessly. “Guess what? Daddy gave me a cellphone!”

  “Me too!” Keri shouted into the mouthpiece of her sister’s phone.

  Joe could hear Vera asking where they were. He held out his hand for the phone. Amy passed it over. “Hello, Vera. I thought it would be a good idea for the girls to have these in case of, well, something like before. I programmed the house number in on 1 and your cell on 2. Is there another number you’d like me to program in on 3?”

  “Not yours?” Vera asked in a tone that implied he hadn’t included his own number because he didn’t want to be bothered.

  Joe smiled at how accurately he had predicted her response. “Well, sure, I could. But since these are mainly for use in case of emergency, and I’m out of the country so much now, maybe somebody more accessible, like, I don’t know. Your parents, maybe?”

  There was a long silence, during which his smile grew broader. He knew Vera was trying to figure out his game and knew she could not. At last she said, “My parents, yes. That would be fine.”

  “Give me the number, then, and I’ll program it in right now.” To the girls he said, for Vera’s sake, “Finish your lunch, girls. I’m putting Grandmother’s number in on 3.”

  He repeated Vera’s parents’ phone number after her, programming it as he went. When he finished, he said, “Okay, great. See you in a couple hours.” He hung up before she could ask anything else and turned his attention back to his daughters.

  “There’s something special about these cellphones. A secret.”

  “What?” Two pairs of blue eyes fastened on his face, expectant.

  Joe pointed to Numbers 8 and 9. “These are my numbers. If you call this one you’ll get the apartment. If you call this one, you get the office. Go ahead, try them. You, Keri, call the apartment. And you call the office, Amy.”

  Each girl punched a number. Being Saturday afternoon, the secretary had left the office so Amy got the answering machine, as Joe had known she would. “This is Mr. Lago’s daughter,” Amy said with stiff pride. “His daughter calling for him to call me.”

  Meanwhile Keri had reached the answering machine at the apartment. “Daddy, it’s me, Keri,” she giggled, then hung up.

  Amy touched each button in turn, reciting what it was for. Then she lifted her eyes to Joe. “Why, Daddy?”

  “Why what?”

  “Why are your numbers secret?”

  “They’re not really secret,” he said. “Your mother has them. But it’s a secret that they’re on your phone. If you tell her, I expect she will make them go away.”

  Both girls fell silent. Joe’s heart ached. Why the fuck did it have to be like this, children so young already learning to distrust not just strangers but their own parents?

  Keri got up on her knees in the booth and leaned across to Joe. “I will never tell. Cross my heart.” She drew an X on her chest, leaving streaks of ketchup across the happy face on the front of her yellow T-shirt.

  “Me either,” Amy said, although to Joe’s knowledge there was not a word he had ever said to her that she hadn’t repeated to her mother under cross-examination. She was, after all, the child who most wanted to please.

  “You can tell her if you like,” Joe emphasized. “Because it’s your secret, not mine. But if you do, you know what will happen. As long as they’re there, though, you can call me anytime, day or night. If you get the machine and I don’t call right back, it’s because I’m out of the country. But if you leave a message, I promise to call back the minute I get home.”

  He repeated that last to them, with variations, until he was fairly certain that they had grasped the fact that they couldn’t expect him to be immediately accessible, but they could expect a call from him as soon as he returned. On the way home they practised calling until he was sure the programmed numbers were fixed in their memory. Just as surely, he knew Vera would gain access to those memories. In a matter of weeks, if not days, she would de-program his numbers to prevent unmonitored conversations.

  Cellphone memories she could erase. What was in the girls’ memories she could not. They would remember this day. They would remember the alligators, remember he had given them the wonderfully adult gift of their own personal cellphone, remember that by programming in his numbers he had made himself accessible.

  They would likewise remember when their mother took the numbers, and possibly the cellphones, away from them, thereby cutting off that access. Amy would cry and Keri would tantrum and Vera would do it anyway, trusting them to get over it, which they would. But ten years from now, at an age where mother-daughter relationships were at their most poisonous, it would be one more thing for them to hold against her; the fact that Daddy had tried to stay in touch but Witch Mommy had driven him away, even to blocking their phone calls. Joe wasn’t concerned about missing out on childish babble, which he wasn’t much interested in to start with. He was looking ahead to the future; say, ten years from now, when the girls would be a lot more interesting to spend time with and he’d be the favourite parent.

  • • •

  Joe tucked the newspaper into the seat pocket in front of him and straightened his seat back as the plane descended toward Habana’s José Martí airport. If he had remained in Cuba and married Celia, would he be divorced now? Probably, given that at least half of Cuban marriages did end in divorce. Besides, he had never limited himself to one woman and Celia wouldn’t have put up with philandering. But a divorce in Cuba wouldn’t have been the same.

  The plane came in low over squared-off fields and slid to a stop on a runway rippling with heat waves. As Joe’s foot touched the asphalt he again felt the strange sensation—not of coming home, but of coming to a place where, even in the heavy heat, it was easier to breathe.

  In the immigration line, his thoughts went back to the difference between divorce in the States and in Cuba. It wasn’t that complications didn’t arise in Cuban divorces; after all, what was the Elián case if not a complication? Not to mention the hassle Fidel had had in getting Fidelito back to Cuba after his ex-wife moved abroad. But those were exceptions. Most Cubans viewed kids as indivisible community assets, and community went well beyond parents to include the extended family if not the entire nation.

  Of course, Celia, in her fury at Luis had called Liliana, “my child.” But Joe would bet the contents of his moneybelt that once Liliana came back—and he was sure she was back by now—differences had been resolved in a way that prevented Liliana from being torn apart the way his own girls would be torn apart if he tried to hang on to his fair share of them.

  The immigration official took his passport and spent an interminable amount of time doing whatever it is they do with passports out of sight behind the counter. Waiting for her to ask his reason for the trip, Joe wondered what she would say if he replied, “I have come to father a few kids in a country where I don’t have to eat shit every time I want to visit them. Are you by any chance free tonight?”

  The uniformed woman looked up and, perhaps picking up vibes from his copulation fantasy, quickly averted her eyes. Without asking the purpose of his visit, she slid his passport back and called, “Next.”

  • • •

  A sudden tropical downpour made visibility next to nil. Joe slouched in the back seat of the taxi and for the first time wondered if the States was the best place for his children to grow up. Each of his daughters had in her room such things as a Cuban child could not imagine. But what good was that if the whole of their childhood was to be spent in a barbed wire no man’s land between two wa
rring parents?

  As quickly as the storm had broken it blew over. Joe rolled down the window and took a deep breath of fresh air, slightly spiced with salt as they approached the coast. Anybody’s definition of freedom had to reference what they were running from: poverty, violence, ignorance, or in his case laws that forced him to pay a ridiculous sum of money for the privilege of spending designated hours on designated days with his own children.

  “Screw you!” he wanted to shout to Miami, Dade County, Florida, USA—his own personally chosen place in the universe. “Your ball-busting ‘family law’ can’t touch me here!”

  SIXTY-ONE

  CELIA sat alone in the small conference room at a large round table. The elegant but scarred piece of furniture had not been easy to acquire, nor could she have got it without Luis’s help. When she insisted that in order to handle her then-new job as jefa de sala for the pediatrics unit, she needed to be able to meet with her staff in the round rather than with herself at the head of a rectangular conference table, he had quietly gone about getting the addresses of homes confiscated by the government from families who had departed Cuba permanently and had taken whatever steps were necessary to gain access to the houses. They prowled the abandoned properties until they located a round table, and Luis had obtained permission for it to be moved to the hospital for Celia’s use. It was one of the many favours for which she had repaid him out of her own body—or as she now saw it, out of her own weakness.

  Neither the table nor Luis was on her mind as she counted the protocols her secretary had Xeroxed that lay on her left, and copies of the presentation she had given in Santiago that lay on her right, and waited for the doctors in her unit to arrive.

  They entered the room in a clump, continuing animated conversations already begun, raising their voices to compete with the scraping of chair legs on the bare floor. Celia never felt that she was actually in charge. Like many in her generation, she had been promoted young and perhaps too rapidly. In the 1990s, the brain drain of doctors leaving the island for better-paying positions abroad had brought swift advancement for herself, Franci, and other classmates who chose to remain in Cuba. Only lately had Celia realized that unless the government took preventive measures, an in-country brain drain caused by doctors leaving medicine to take jobs in tourism would create the same problems for the post-2000 generation—albeit the same opportunities for advancement.