The Caregiver

by Samuel Park

  Ten years before, I had walked out of Los Angeles International Airport with only three hundred dollars and sixty-seven cents to my name. I didn’t know where to go, me and my bag, and I couldn’t even ask the cab driver for help, my English was that bad. The caramel-skinned old man kept staring at me through the rearview mirror. He left me in front of a sign saying “For Rent,” and I hesitated before ringing the doorbell. I only did so when I spotted some brown kids playing inside the complex, figuring they seemed too happy to be witness to malevolence.

  The woman who answered sized me up, offered me a room in a two-bedroom apartment on the fifth floor, and told me that if I needed work, I’d better lie about my age. She said all this in Spanish, which was close enough to Portuguese. When I asked what kind of work I could do, the woman, without hesitation, suggested being a caregiver.

  After a few years, I liked to play a game with myself in which I imagined the woman suggesting something else. Seamstress. Welder. Dance hall hostess. Waitress. And then, according to this game, I pictured myself, for the last ten years, doing that work instead. Two strangers—the cab driver and my landlady—had decided the most important aspects of my life: where I’d live, and what I’d do for a living. Later I’d move, but my job would stay the same.

  Though I’ve been here ten years now, I’m surprised by America in new ways each day. When I first got here, I remember noticing how much of it was free: The doggie bags at the restaurants. The clothing catalogues. The public bathrooms. What else I noticed: The old and the disabled got checks every month from the government. Everyone drove cars, and they exchanged them for new ones more than once in a lifetime. Women were not allowed to be beaten by their husbands and it was okay if they didn’t cook every night. Sometimes they were even allowed to cheat. The women who were single were free to be friends with the women who were married, and sometimes the latter even introduced them to their husbands. The men worked, and instead of the women staying at home to cook and clean, they got jobs, too, so their families could live in houses instead of apartments. The men who were gay did not necessarily dress like women, and were not all prostitutes. The women who loved other women were not called “women with big feet.” They had their own special name, referring to an island that none of them came from. Nobody had servants. When hunger struck, a white man in a red uniform arrived with a square, flat box. Americans ate at mini-factories where the open layout allowed customers to see the assembly line. Everyone, not just the rich, went to restaurants, where they could pick and choose ingredients.

  Americans were not all white, though it was hard not to use those terms interchangeably. Americans were black and brown and yellow and even orange. Some were considered hicks or ghetto, which surprised me because everyone looked expensive. Everyone had accents, and the white ones, the ones who didn’t know that they had accents, were the hardest to understand. Americans did not refer to each other as “my dear” or “my love.” They did not bring food to each other’s houses unless it was an event designated for that purpose. Grandparents did not live with the grandchildren. Doctors did not live above their offices. A doctor’s wife did not work as his receptionist. There were only two political parties, and neither was the Communist Party. Black hair for women was associated with malevolence in cartoons. No one ever opened their windows and everyone preferred canned air.

  In America, there were no metaphors. If a woman trusted her partner, she didn’t say that she would set her hand on fire. When a woman had all the power, she didn’t say she had a knife and a piece of cheese in her hands. When she didn’t like an offer, she didn’t tell it to go back to the sea. A smart man didn’t have an ass made of iron. An awkward man didn’t stick his feet over his hands. A flirt didn’t sing. A shortcut wasn’t a parachute. An undesirable wasn’t a leftover. A whore wasn’t a creature of adventure. An awkward situation did not imply a tight skirt. A frugal man didn’t have the hands of a cow. A tattletale didn’t have hard fingers. A rubbernecker wasn’t waiting for the circus to catch fire. A lucky man wasn’t born with his behind turned toward the moon. A fragile person wasn’t melted butter. No one said that it was bad to complain with a full belly. Or that a pathetic man looked like a mutt that fell from the moving truck. Or that lying down with pigs meant waking up in the pigsty.

  The Americans didn’t have a name for someone who took advantage all the time. They had words that came close, but without the right sting. Or a name for someone who had no shame, or had a lot of nerve. Or for someone who missed someone else very much. There weren’t appropriate labels, only approximate ones.

  In America, I was constantly asked questions that weren’t really questions. “How are you?” “Were you able to find everything you wanted?” I was surprised to learn that I couldn’t knock on my neighbor’s door and expect a cup of coffee. I had to walk faster on the street. I had to wait for the glowing white flash of a stick figure in order to cross the street. The people I met sounded nothing like the English-language tapes I’d studied. The commercials were slick and clever and full of noise. There were no ads for condoms or sexual lubricants on TV. The boys did not congregate on the street to play soccer. No one, in fact, congregated on the street.

  In America, I liked to ride escalators, elevators, walk past automatic doors. The rooms were enormous, the sidewalks generous. In parking lots, I liked to watch the kind and guarded couples coming out of their starship-sized vehicles, their obedient children in tow, wearing clothes specially purchased for the season. They glided over the blacktop, their minds on things lovely and sweet, utterly sure of what the next day would bring.

  In America, I’d lie in bed at night and think of Brazil. I’d think about how much I wanted to talk to the woman I’d lost there, my own mother. I wanted to call her on the phone, but I knew she wouldn’t answer and she wouldn’t call me back.

  In America, there weren’t ghosts everywhere.

  It was all so different from what I’d left behind.

  Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

  The mid- to late 1970s

  Mara, age eight

  chapter one

  THE FIRST INHABITANTS OF COPACABANA were not the fishermen, or even the Indians. They were the two whales that washed ashore in the closing days of August 1858. No one knew how they ended up there. Some said they were beached whales, stranded, victims of rough weather and poor navigation. Others said they were free, healthy visitors, just resting on their bellies. Either way, hundreds of people pilgrimaged to see them, including the emperor and his retinue, braving the rough paths that led to the ocean. The emperor didn’t wear his crown and mantle, just a simple sooty tailcoat with trousers and a cravat. Some say he brought his wife, others his mistress. I would like to think he brought both.

  Following closely behind, the members of Rio’s high society rode past the brushwood onto the beach, in horse-drawn carriages. They set up tents so the sun wouldn’t wrinkle their faces. Others came on horseback. Many on foot.

  After two days, the whales disappeared. It is said that those who came to see them and missed them stayed anyway, and embarked on a long picnic that lasted three days and three nights. The views after all were magnificent, the beach fortressed by moss-covered granite hills on one side and infinity on the other. The white foam of the seawater bubbled and blistered, rose and fell, the rhythm as even and soothing as that of a mother rocking a crib. The sand mirrored the sun, gold-speckled powder. The breeze tasted of sea salt.

  This wasn’t the last time the beach had unexpected visitors. In 1941, four fishermen from the drought-ridden Northeast, men of the humblest ilk, got on a simple raft and sailed for sixty-one days along the coast, without a compass or a map. They wanted to get to the capital and speak to the president. They wished to explain how unhappy they were that they had to share their catch with the owners of the rafts and the middlemen who sold the fish to the markets. As they crossed the length of nearly the entire country, a good 2,500 kilometers, the fishermen fought off storms, waves, and shar
ks. Only the stars guided them; only their patron saints guarded them. When word got around of their story, other boats began to follow and circle them as they neared Guanabara Bay, turning their arrival into a procession. Hundreds awaited them at the beach. They were greeted as heroes. Their raft was lifted onto a truck like a royal heirloom, as the crowd applauded.

  Back in the 1970s, when I was eight, I knew of Copacabana only as my home, not a resting place for mysterious whales or fisherman on a political pilgrimage. I read these old stories in the library at school, but was more concerned with knowing the city itself. I knew how long it took for me to get to the subway station. Which padaria had the most flavorful café con leche. Which restaurant would give me a stomachache afterward, and just to be sure, I religiously took the pills that my mother gave me to prevent tapeworms. I knew which section of the promenade I could go to without running into one of the bullies who liked to pick on me. I didn’t set foot in the ocean for weeks or even months at a time. Its reminders were only the old men in tight swim shorts strolling down the avenue, true Don Juans, and the tanned teenagers dragging folding chairs on the scalloped limestone asphalt. It didn’t compute that someone, somewhere in America had written a song about a nightclub named after our neighborhood.

  During the school year, which began in February and ended in December, I went to Getúlio Vargas Municipal School, where that year I was a studious and eager second grader. There was a single classroom, with the teachers coming in and out to lecture us. My favorite subject was Portuguese, because we got to talk about stories during class time. In the warm months, our classroom got as hot as the inside of a mitten. During our short breaks, the more nimble of us raced to the narrow counter of the cafeteria, where we waved our bills at the workers hoping to get their attention before the sodas ran out.

  My best friend was a girl named Debora Amaral, and because we were seated alphabetically, she was always one desk behind me, Mara Alencar. I spent half of my classes turning my head so she could whisper in my ear, and not five minutes would pass without me feeling the tip of her pencil poking my back.

  After school ended, at noon, we went to each other’s apartments to do our homework and once we were done, we watched American cartoons: the Jetsons, the Flintstones, and Scooby-Doo. We longed for the same American toys for Christmas and Children’s Day: the Easy-Bake Super Oven, a ballerina music box, the Girl’s World life-sized styling doll head that came with roller curlers, a plastic comb, eye shadow crayons, and hair color applicator pens. We often engaged in long debates as to whether the doll’s hair would grow back if we cut it. We never found out the answer, since neither of us had the money to buy one. When school was not in session, Debora went with her parents to visit her grandparents in the distant suburbs of Rio, three hours away, and because I didn’t have many other friends, I either played by myself or tagged along with my mother when she went to work.

  My mother did many things for work—cleaning, waitressing, and temping as a receptionist—but then, she was largely working in the movies. Or rather, her voice was working in the movies. Inside a foam-covered, soundproofed booth that smelled of cigarettes, my mother dubbed the voices of American actresses into Portuguese. Our fantasies and daydreams came from that country, sometimes in color and sometimes in black and white, and they required a tribute to our essential differences.

  The man who did the male parts had a paunch and too little hair, but his voice was that of a handsome man—a mellifluous instrument—and he knew just how much breath each syllable deserved. My mother and the man never looked at each other, their eyes bound to the phantom people on the screen in front of them, and I thought of how hard it must be to be in two places at once, inside that booth and inside that screen.

  As my mother juggled different inflections and intonations, voicing women and girls, I wondered how she knew to match their lips. She had uncanny timing, and knew exactly when to begin speaking and when to stop. Within a single scene, my mother’s silken voice turned throaty or nasal, adulterous or matronly. All these people lived inside of her and took turns emerging from her throat. I was caught between being proud of her and being sad that no one watching the movie later would know who owned that laugh, who owned those cadences. They might even laugh along, not knowing who they were laughing with. My mother was talented, and for the talented mother, a child feels pride. But fear, too.

  At the end of one session, I heard my mother talking to the sound engineer. He had long curly hair and wore a necklace made out of small bones. He wasn’t making eye contact with her, instead focusing on putting the earphones and microphones away. The other actor had already left.

  “I’m starving, Raul. You can’t say no to me,” she said, standing next to him, in a voice so quiet she must’ve thought I couldn’t hear. “It’s my money, anyway. It just hasn’t made its way into my pocket yet.”

  Raul brushed his knuckles against his beard and shook his head. “I can’t. You’re going to have to wait until the end of the month.”

  My mother wouldn’t let up. She straightened her back, as if needing to make herself bigger, and crossed her arms. She wore a puffy bright neon yellow jacket, and a heavy, thick red bracelet on her left arm. On her cleavage hung a pair of sunglasses—giant round ones, meant for funerals and dramatic expressions of grief. She’d recently gotten a perm—thick black curls chasing down her round face.

  “Did I do a good job or did I do a good job?” she asked.

  Raul sighed. “You did an excellent job. As always.”

  “And we finished early,” said my mother. “Don’t think I don’t know you pay for the booth by the hour, so I’m pretty sure I saved you some money today.”

  “Ana . . .” He was already crumbling a little.

  My mother shrugged her shoulders. “Well, you can hire some other girl next time, who’ll take twice as long and cost you twice as much.”

  I knew my mother was bluffing. I’d heard her say how much she loved this job and would never let someone take it from her, and how much better it was than anything else she’d ever done. But Raul wouldn’t know that from looking at her face, a careful mosaic of confidence.

  “All right, all right,” said Raul, shaking his head. He reached into a drawer and pulled out a pad. He wrote down a receipt for the cash advance, keeping a carbon copy for himself. At that rate, I knew my mother’s payday at the end of the month would be tiny, but what other option was there? Raul took ten five-cruzeiro bills and handed them to my mother.

  Afterward, my mother and I sat victorious in a padaria, eating coxinhas. My mother ate ravenously, practically attacking the poor little chicken strips battered in crispy flour. I ate more slowly, savoring my food, gulping my Guaraná soda. My mother got one for me, but not one for her.

  The night was a vinyl record, dark and full of scratches, in perfect sync with the needle of God. But in the padaria, our bodies were lit up too much under the fluorescent lights, as if none of us had earned the tenderness of shadows.

  “Mom . . .” I said, getting her attention. “What if that man hadn’t given you the money? What would we do for supper?”

  My mother looked up from her coxinha. “Have I ever let you go to bed without food in your belly?” she asked, with a hint of woundedness in her voice.

  “No,” I lied, already regretting having asked. But when you live so close to the cliff, you wonder what resides at the bottom of it.

  My mother pushed away her plate and stared straight into my eyes. “I will always take care of you. I don’t care what I have to do, and I can think of a degrading thing or two.” And at this, she made the sign of the Ghost and the Holy Spirit, “but you’ll always have a roof over your head and food in your belly.”

  “I know that,” I said, embarrassed, wishing I hadn’t said anything.

  “I may not have money or an education, but I’m not ugly, and I’m not dumb, and I have a big mouth and big ears, and that’s always served me well.”

  I turned back to m
y coxinha, not entirely reassured. She reached for me and brushed her fingers against my hair. She smiled, pressing her cheeks against mine. My mother’s touch had a way of reaching into my heart and letting it beat more tranquilly, a musician turning a metronome.

  “Drink your Guaraná,” she said gently. “You need sugar in your blood.”

  I gulped from the bottle; it was only half empty, but I asked if I could have another one.

  She did not hesitate. “Of course, girl, of course.” She waved grandly for the waiter, as though ordering at the Ritz-Carlton. “Everyone has a peak, and mine’s about to start,” she said with a grin. “Nothing beats the combination of skills and luck.”

  On our way home, we walked hand in hand down the boardwalk of Copacabana. My mother strolled casually, taking in the breeze from the ocean. The beach at night wasn’t like the beach during the day; it slept, cocooned, a different kind of endless. Just because you couldn’t see it didn’t mean you couldn’t feel it—its throbbing, its breaths. Streetlights reached far up into the sky and lit our path like a thousand mini-moons. In front of us, we followed the quartz stones made to resemble waves, their sinuous lines making us move forward. The bodies around us walked slowly, the men with their big bellies and the women showing off their tans. The air smelled of beer and fried foods.

  When we reached the driveway of the Copacabana Palace, my mother stopped and pointed to a group of tourists getting into a van. They were in town for Carnaval. They looked American, with their yellow hair and sunburned skin, their tight shorts and cameras around their necks.

  “You know who they are?” asked my mother, lowering her head toward mine, our cheeks brushing against each other’s. She pointed at them. “They are from America. Everyone there is rich. Even the poor people. When you arrive in America, they hand you a magical plastic card that lets you buy anything you want.”