The Caregiver

by Samuel Park

  My mother grabbed my hand and we continued walking. She held me firmly, as though I were something that a pickpocket could take away from her.

  “But don’t worry, my girl, one day I’m going to be rich, too, and live in a big house. A psychic once told me so.”

  “What’s a psychic?”

  “A psychic is a woman—or a man, I suppose they could be men—who tells you what you want to hear in exchange for money,” she said without hesitation.

  I laughed, though I wasn’t sure I knew why that was funny. I never knew when my mother was being serious or not. When she was imparting a lesson or just thinking out loud. Either way, from early on, I believed my mother to be special. I suppose every daughter believes her mother to be special, somehow, but when I compared my mother to my friends’ mothers, or to mothers on TV, she really did seem a little different. She didn’t keep secrets from me, she swore in front of me, we shared everything. I knew she was beautiful because of the way men on the street turned to stare at her, making me feel that I wanted to hide her, to keep her for myself. She didn’t always feel like a mom to me. Sometimes she felt like an aunt who let me get away with things, or a friend just visiting for the weekend, one you could be really intense with because you knew they would soon be gone.

  “But who needs money, anyway,” said my mother, looking at the beach. “How much do you think those tourists paid to come here?”

  “A thousand cruzeiros?” I guessed.

  My mother nodded. “Counting airfare and hotel? That sounds about right. Now how much did we spend to check out this view?”

  “Nothing.”

  “That’s right. A sale is good, a clearance is even better, but nothing beats free.”

  When we arrived at home, I sat on my mother’s lap.

  What better place was there? Where else wafted such fragrant air, filling my nostrils with the scent of azalea and jasmine? How large and constant and strong she seemed, though she was only five foot five, really not that much taller than me. She always seemed capable of handling my weight, my bones, my moods. Her legs never fell asleep, her feet were never ticklish. If I went to bed on her lap, she rocked and cradled me, and sometimes when I woke, I found her eyes fluttering, she returning from the same depth of sleep, the same place where I had been.

  From as far back as I could remember, and I could remember pretty far back, she liked to nuzzle against the crown of my head and tell me, in a sing-songy voice, “I love you in the morning. I love you in the afternoon. I love you in the evening. I love you in the spring, in the winter, in the summer, in the fall. I love you when you’re good. I love you when you’re naughty.” And she would pause there, as if I needed time to fit all that love inside me. I could feel her breath linger behind my ears, the slight rocking of her body forward. To this day, when I think of my mother’s love, it is from behind me, it is from the parts of my own body that I cannot see: The corner where the lobe of my ear gives way to the jaw. The inches that separate the nape of my neck from my shoulder. She is there, always, whispering, singing, delivering prophecies and incantations.

  Carnaval was a good distraction for our money issues at home. During Carnaval, which generally took six days, our neighborhood was flooded with strangers. The lines were long even at the pharmacy and the butcher’s shop. At the padarias, every inch of counter space boasted an elbow or an arm, with people squeezing against one another as though their bodies were accordions. No one believed in orderly lines when they were thirsty. The boardwalks, which were pretty narrow to begin with, became as claustrophobic as tunnels. To make it harder, some people chose not to walk, but instead to stand around to drink and have conversations. They did so with the same sense of entitlement as the lampposts. We had to go around. We had to go around.

  Everywhere we went, we could hear music, even if we were kilometers from the Sambadromo, where the parade actually took place. Every padaria, every store, every corner vibrated with percussion, either from a live band, or a TV airing the parade. In our apartment, that’s how my mother and I watched the show. On the Globo channel, we could see, for hours and hours, performers wearing elaborate costumes doing what I could only describe as dance-walking. Shaking, shimmying, then stepping forth, upper bodies swaying from side to side. I wondered how hard it was, to dance and walk at the same time. I could only hear two instruments—tambourines and steel pans. The women wore gigantic feathery headpieces that would put peacocks to shame and in some cases, were peacocks. On their bodies they essentially wore bikinis, but these were the sparkliest and most colorful bikinis I’d ever seen, studded with bijoux and beads, and strings hanging from them. The men wore bright, flowing pants and shirts decorated with glitter and sashes. Float after float went by, many of them featuring enormous statues and monuments of foam and papier-mâché.

  A lot of tourists didn’t know this, but Carnaval was a contest. A contest amongst different schools in Rio that taught samba. I tried to watch enough of each school’s presentation to see if I agreed with the judges at the prize ceremony. I never did. The school that won never had, in my opinion, the best costumes or the best floats or the best themes. I liked the floats that were inspired by people we’d learned about in textbooks like the martyr-dentist Tiradentes, or the black courtesan Xica da Silva, who was deemed the most powerful Brazilian woman of the eighteenth century. Or characters in books I’d read as a child, like Emilia, the rag doll that came to life in the Yellow Woodpecker’s Farm. Or Saci-Pererê, the mischievous boy with one leg who never let go of his pipe. But I suppose if you’ve seen those characters before, they lose their novelty. Which is why the unexpected floats inspired by the Star Wars movie or the Watergate scandal garnered so much attention, even though they had nothing to do with us, or with our country.

  At first the parade dazzled us, but so much of it was the same, and it took so long to find out who won, that my mother usually changed the channel. But one person who really loved Carnaval was our next-door neighbor Janete. Janete was a travesti. I knew what a travesti was because, like most other Brazilians, I knew of the fashion model Roberta Close and her famous Adam’s apple. Roberta Close was always on TV, or on the covers of magazines. If I didn’t see her, I could hear her ubiquitous song in the speakers of the stores my mother and I went to. Everyone thought of Roberta Close as one of the most beautiful women in the world, except for Janete, who really hated her—a very personal and deep kind of hatred—and I wouldn’t have been surprised if Janete told me that Roberta had once killed every member of her family. But I appreciated Roberta Close, not least because it was through her that I understood Janete. And I understood that Janete was a man who was able to be as beautiful as a woman, a man who was going out of his way to add some glamour and exoticism to everyone else’s lives. Even my second-grade self understood what was probably implicit about the travesti—and about Carnaval itself: that it was one of those things that allowed us to understand who we were, even if that distinction had come by accident, not design.

  Janete often came by to borrow sugar or makeup, transactions that should have taken five minutes, but then she’d stay for hours. My mother loved Janete. They had met when my mother was working at a women’s clothing store. Janete came in as a man—a rather imposing, tall black man with a 100-kilowatt smile. She was awkwardly trying to figure out if a dress was her size without being able to try it on. When the owner wasn’t looking, my mother snuck Janete into a fitting room. When the owner of the store, who was Armenian, like all the owners of all the stores, found out, he fired my mother. He couldn’t believe my mother would let a travesti into the fitting room. My mother didn’t care; she liked Janete. It was Janete who later told my mother about the vacancy in her apartment building.

  In our living room that evening, my mother was putting makeup on her as though she were a giant living doll.

  “You sure I can’t convince you to come?” asked Janete.

  “To a Ball G? What am I going to do in a Ball G? I don’t have a pinto.
”

  “They don’t check at the door!”

  “Janete, imagine the guy’s disappointment if he reaches down my skirt and finds nothing there. He would be really upset. Some men don’t like holes and I have a hole. Two holes, in fact. Three, if you’re really counting.”

  “But most parties are not G during Carnaval. You know that.”

  “No, I’m going to go to bed early. I have to rest my vocal cords. Otherwise they’ll wonder why Katharine Hepburn sounds hungover for the entire movie, and you can tell by the looks of her, that woman is no fun.”

  Janete gave my mother a disapproving tap on the knee. “Do I need to remind you that Carnaval is only once a year? And it’s our most important holiday? Home on a holiday is for wilted flowers.”

  My mother laughed. “Do I need to remind you that I have a little girl?” My mother pointed at me on the sofa. “She’s small, but she’s not invisible.”

  “Mara is old enough to stay home by herself,” said Janete, glancing over at me, smiling. “Aren’t you, my love?”

  I nodded.

  My mother shook her head. “I’ve had my share of Carnavals in the past. And I already get my share of being groped on the bus every other day of the week.”

  She sat back on the sofa and lit a cigarette. I looked around for an ashtray before my mother made one herself. She could make one out of any piece of paper, like origami. She preferred white paper, the kind my homework was often mimeographed on, so I had to be vigilant. I’d shown up to school more than once with black burn marks where my answers should be, and though my mother always apologized profusely, she never stopped doing it.

  “How do I look?” Janete asked, twirling for our admiration. She really did look as beautiful as Roberta Close, or even more so. Although I probably felt that way because Roberta Close was far away and Janete Éclair was right there in front of us, and sometimes admiration is just a matter of distance.

  “Beautiful. Delicious. You’re going to make a lot of money tonight,” said my mother, between puffs of her cigarette. She let out the smoke slowly, like the women in the old black and white American movies she dubbed. I could see in her eyes a glint of envy. If it weren’t for me, chances were my mother would be going out with Janete.

  “Maybe we could drop off Janete wherever she’s going?” I suggested.

  My mother squinted. Maybe I’d been wrong to believe she wanted to go out. I was filled with a feeling I’d had before, realizing that I’d acted after reading a person wrong, and then being stuck both with the person’s puzzled reaction and my own surprise that there could be more than one reason for a look, for an expression.

  Janete dropped her head in an exaggerated manner, her eyes smiling from temple to temple.

  “Your daughter’s a genius. And I could use the help. Navigating all those steps in this dress and these heels is not going to be easy.”

  The dress was green and sparkly, molding to her hourglass silhouette. Janete made a quick show of stumbling in her too-tight dress, but I knew she was faking it because she always had exceptional balance, and I’d seen her run after a bus wearing tighter outfits.

  My mother looked over at us and she scoffed. Not in a contemptuous way, but in a way that let us know she found us silly and ridiculous. Then she kept her gaze upon us quite intensely, as though she weren’t just seeing us, but seeing her thoughts reflected back to her. I sometimes noticed this faraway glance in her eyes, when I could tell she was thinking of something or someone who wasn’t there in the room. Who else did she need to consider, when we had each other?

  “All right, let’s go,” she finally said, smiling. “Afterwards we’ll take advantage of everybody being out to go moonbathing.”

  “What’s ‘moonbathing’?” I asked, knowing, but wanting to hear my mother explain it.

  “It’s like sunbathing, but you don’t need to put on sunscreen and your skin doesn’t peel off the next day. And unlike the sun, the moon doesn’t have to share space with the shade because it is the shade.”

  My mother reached into her closet and pulled out a short dress stamped with swirls, floral patterns, and every color of the rainbow. It had a scooped neck, flowy sleeves, and came with a matching headband. She took off her clothes quickly and put the dress over her, in a single move.

  “You look beautiful, Mom.”

  “You are correct in your assessment,” said my mother, reaching into the closet again for something for me to wear. There were really only two options—she chose the turtleneck with an embroidered red bib and ruffles on the neck and sleeves, and matching polyester pants with flared legs—the set had been one of my mother’s most extravagant purchases.

  “We have to make you look good, too,” said my mother, under Janete’s approving gaze. “After all, I can only be as beautiful as the company I keep.”

  I took off the orange nylon shirt with lace-up shoulders I always wore and put on the turtleneck. “And being beautiful means putting on good makeup and nice clothes, right?”

  “Of course. When God gives you a canvas, it is a sin not to paint it,” she replied.

  “Like Michelangelo and the Sistine Chapel.”

  “That’s right,” said my mother, proudly, stroking my chin. “My smart girl. I’m glad I never talked down to you while you were a baby. You were listening to Tchaikovsky when you were two. You could tell a Portinari painting from a Lasar Segall when you were three. You knew what a travesti was when you were four.”

  In the bus, the music was in people’s heads. Everyone dressed like they were on their way to greet it, dance to it, be moved by it. A lot of samba, heavy on percussion, that music that sounded like confetti falling, batons twirling, feet shuffling. I couldn’t actually hear the music—just a lot of loud talking, some laughter—but the notes hung from the low-cut dresses and plunging cleavages, from the bright shirts left unbuttoned by the men, their pants as loose as those of circus clowns. The bus did not feel like a bus full of strangers, and if we were strangers, that was just a momentary phase.

  My mother hung her arm around my neck and shoulders, as though she’d turned herself into a coat and draped herself over me. I repositioned so we had the same view. Janete stood—by choice, really—as though she were on display, and needed to be standing to achieve the fullness of effect. She wore a very realistic black wig, paid off in five installments. We’d once heard a scream through the walls and when we came to check on her, we found out she’d spilled water on it. The dress was all asymmetrical lines, a diagonal V revealing her right collarbone and glittering sleeves of different lengths covering each arm. I thought she looked grand, and though there was some snickering, and though I distinctly heard the word bicha, I knew Janete was enjoying herself and our company.

  “Janete, I’m going to do your voice,” said my mother. I glanced over at her and she smiled back. “Next time they ask me to dub a movie, I’m going to give your voice to one of the characters.”

  “You’re talking nonsense,” said Janete, with a contradictory grin. “Like when you’re doing that American black servant girl, in Gone with the Wind?”

  “No,” said my mother, shifting a little, so I had to lean forward for an instant. “When it’s some lady, from a British movie.” My mother thought of British movies as the most exotic thing in the world, what with their posh accents, ornate costumes, and damp-looking castles. “Like Joan Fontaine.”

  “I don’t think you can imitate my voice,” said Janete, practically daring her.

  “You don’t think so?” my mother echoed, having the vowels and consonants bump into each other and adding an extra flair to the last two words in the sentence. She was imitating her almost perfectly. “You don’t think I can imitate your voice?”

  Janete threw her head back and laughed, a throaty laugh that tickled every bit of air around me. “Again!” Janete shrieked. “Do it again.”

  The woman in the seat in front of us turned around and, for some reason I couldn’t fathom, gave my mother a
dirty look. My mother winked at the woman, and when the woman turned back around, my mother shrugged her shoulders and smiled at me.

  “One day I’m going to watch your work,” said Janete, showing us her palms as though that was indicative of truth.

  My mother’s movies aired late at night, around midnight, after the news shows ended. She sometimes had me stay up late with her and watch. I’d fall asleep before they were over, listening to my mother profess her love to different men, the anguish in her voice lulling me, her words a series of declarations that made less and less sense as my eyelids fluttered and I sat on the edge of sleep. I knew she wasn’t talking to me, but as she confessed all her feelings and desires using those heightened words, it was hard not to hope for her to find peace at the end.

  As the bus started moving again, my mother’s expression had suddenly changed. She looked nervous—a look that I rarely saw, one she never allowed me to see. I’d only seen her like that when she was having a bad dream, and then I’d stare at her deciding if I should wake her. I followed the direction of her gaze, a line that was as clear as though it’d been painted, so that my eyes landed on a man at the front of the bus. He was tall, wore an ill-fitting shirt that looked like it might be silk, but was too shiny to really be so, and his black hair had been gelled back unevenly, so some parts had more volume than others. He looked out of place, and had the distinct alertness of a person from out of town. Though he was separated from us through several layers of bodies, I could tell, quite distinctly, that he was the source of my mother’s fear.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked.

  She reached for my arm, saying nothing, and began to get up from her seat. Janete’s nightclub was in Catete, and we were still a long ways from it. Without taking our eyes off the man, we stood up. There was no room for us to move. My mother reached for Janete, who looked surprised to see us getting up as though to leave.

  “I have to go,” my mother said.