by Jon Michaud
Her luggage was checked and her boarding pass issued with alacrity. The attendants told her to hurry. They went down the escalator to the security gate, where the metal detectors and X-ray machines waited. There was no time for a prolonged goodbye, but en route from the check-in counters, Yunis had started crying.
“Oh, baby, are you going to be OK?” She clutched Deysei to her breast.
“Yes, Mami,” said Deysei.
“I’m not deserting you, baby. You know that, right? I’ll come back the minute you need me. You look after my girl,” said Yunis to Clara, a pearl-sized tear bubbling out of the corner of her eye.
“I will. Now go. Your flight is about to take off.”
“I’ll call you from Mami’s. Tonight. Bye mi amorcita.” She kissed her daughter and her sister and hustled toward the TSA workers, her big booty shaking, her curls bouncing. They watched her remove her shoes and pass through the metal detectors. On the far side, reunited with her bags, she waved at them and raced away.
“Tía?” said Deysei, a moment later.
“What?” said Clara, with more abruptness than she intended. The day’s events had left her feeling testy.
“I hope you won’t be mad at me.”
“What is it? Just tell me.”
She hesitated. “I’m hungry.”
“Oh, is that all?” said Clara, softening her voice. “How could I be mad at you? You’ve got to feed that baby. There’s the food court over there. What do you feel like?”
Deysei looked abashed.
“What is it, honey? You can tell me.”
“A Big Mac, Tía.”
“You want a Big Mac?”
“Yes, Tía.”
Clara smiled, genuinely tickled. “That’s funny.”
“What?”
“Big Macs were all I wanted to eat when I was pregnant with Guillermo. I just couldn’t get enough of that special sauce. I must have eaten a hundred of them during those nine months. Poor Thomas. They got to know him pretty well at the twenty-four-hour drive-thru on Northfield.”
“I’m just hungry, Tía,” said Deysei, clearly reluctant to dwell on the procreative bond with her aunt. “It’s not like it’s a craving or nothing.”
“That’s what you’re saying now. Just wait. Pretty soon, you won’t be able to think of anything but Big Macs. You’ll be dreaming about them.” The memory elevated her mood. No matter what the damn doctors said about her uterus, she had given birth to a healthy boy who was alive and well and busy in the world—probably getting off his school bus right about now.
Clara left her niece at a table by the window in the food court and went to the McDonald’s counter. She still felt overfed from their lunch at Church’s. Watching the petulant, poorly paid staff assemble her niece’s meal, she thought that fast food never looked less appetizing. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d eaten a Big Mac. Years. During the second pregnancy—the lost baby—her foods of choice had been gazpacho and spring rolls. Maybe McDonald’s made stronger babies, she thought, and felt the absence, as she did from time to time, of the other living organism within her, a kind of physical déjà vu. Deysei’s child was going to need every advantage it could get and she was going to do whatever she could to help.
On her way back to the table, Clara noticed that Deysei was hastily putting away her cell phone. Who was she talking to? Maybe the baby’s father? What an enabler of subterfuge those devices were. She set the tray on the table with a voila! gesture. Deysei was unwrapping the burger before Clara even sat down. She squeezed two tubes of ketchup into the top side of the carton and dipped the massive pillbox of meat and bread into it before taking her first bite. Clara found it hard to watch her niece eat the huge hamburger, the ketchup and the pinkish special sauce smearing on the sides of her face, the soiled napkins piling up on the table between them. She didn’t properly wipe her hands on them; instead, she squeezed them tight and set them down like crumpled moths. Deysei was grinning with delight as she chewed. Clara gazed beyond her niece, scanning the other travelers in the seating area: a cute young woman in college sweats talking on a cell phone; an in-love couple who looked like they were going away on their first vacation together; a salesman in slacks and a polo shirt poring over a spreadsheet (the very image she’d always had of her husband when he was on his business trips); a handsome dark-skinned man hugging a small blond boy. This last pair caught her attention for a couple of reasons. First, the striking disparity between them: the man brown and burly, the boy tow-headed and slender. Second, the man was Dominican and she recognized him. It took a moment to put a name to the familiar, if estranged, face. Then she knew who it was.
“You OK, Tía?” asked Deysei, then tucked the last of the ham-burger into her mouth and took a long draw on her soda.
“Yes,” said Clara, standing up. “Let’s go. You can eat those fries in the car.”
THEY WENT BACK out to the parking lot, Clara hustling her niece.
“What’s the hurry, Tía?” Deysei asked.
“Nothing,” said Clara.
“Then why we rushing?”
“Come on,” said Clara, not explaining.
In the Odyssey, waiting to pay for parking, Clara ran her tongue along the inside of her lower lip. There was the scar tissue where her teeth had nearly been driven through her own flesh—but the scar tissue also covered another, deeper wound that she could not touch. Tito Moreno. Where else but in an airport—a place of transience, a place of such consternation for her—would she see for the first time in years the boy, now a man, for whom she had such complicated feelings? And, to further complicate those feelings, he was there in the airport with a beautiful blond child. Was Tito that child’s father? It hardly seemed possible, but then wasn’t she often mistaken for the nanny of her own light-skinned son? He looked well, fit and healthy, though she thought she saw (or wanted to see) melancholy in his face as he hugged the boy. It was conceivable that the boy’s mother had just departed on a trip. Clara imagined her as a businesswoman, like one of the attorneys she worked with. It was hard to believe that Tito would have ended up married to a lawyer, but anything was possible.
They were on 1-78. Soon they would be home and then she would have to figure out what to do about her niece. Then she would have to talk to Thomas about what the fertility doctors had said. And now Tito. What was she supposed to make of that?
“Tía?” said Deysei from the passenger seat, as if reading her mind. Clara glanced over. Deysei was staring at her, the empty red carton of fries cupped in her hand.
“What is it? Are you still hungry?”
“No, Tía. I want to tell you something.”
“What?”
“I want to tell you who the father is.”
Whoa, she thought. “OK.”
“But first you have to promise me you won’t tell anyone.”
“I promise.”
“You mean it, Tía?”
“Yes. It will be a secret. I won’t tell anyone.”
“Not even Tío Thomas?”
“Yes. Not even him.”
Deysei paused. “It’s Raúl,” she said.
And Clara pulled off to the shoulder, because otherwise, she would have crashed.
Tito
Now and then Tito got a call for an estimate in New Jersey, usually in Bergen County, where Dominicans from the Heights moved when their ships came in. Sometimes the suburbs weren't all they were cracked up to be and people decided they wanted to move back to the city. They missed the very things they were trying to escape: the noise, the crowds, the filth. One woman actually said that to him. “The streets are too fucking clean over here. It makes me feel like I can't walk on them.”
The house was in Oradell, a white Cape with a sloping lawn on a quiet cul-de-sac lined with pear and apple trees. Tito parked the car and climbed the steps, pausing to look around. It was a street he had visited many times in his imagination, the street he dreamed of living on. His wife and two children resided her
e. In the back of the house were the graves of a dog and two goldfish. To his left lived the friendly neighbor, the one who lent him the expensive lawn equipment and power tools he never got around to buying himself. On the right was the loud, uncouth neighbor, the one who fought with his wife and drank too much—just the sort of person you thought didn't live in the suburbs.
Tito rang the bell.
The door was opened by a good-looking high-yellow Dominicana in her fifties. Her hair was straightened and styled short, like Condi Rice's. She was wearing dark blue jeans, an ivory blouse, and a pair of silver reading glasses, which dangled from a chain around her neck. It was those glasses, as bright and sharp as surgical instruments, that caught his eye. He glanced down at his clipboard to check the name but found that he already knew it.
“Buenas tardes, Ms. Almonte,” he said. There was an awkward pause as he waited to see if she would recognize him—but why would she? “I'm with Cruz Brothers,” he continued. “I'm here to give you an estimate for your move.”
“Yes, come in,” she said, and walked him around the house, pointing out what was staying and what was going. Inside, it was not at all the cozy, domestic space he'd dreamed up for himself and his phantom family; it was spare and clean to the point of being ascetic, with modern art on the walls, books in every room, and no television. There was an austerity to the wooden furniture that reminded him of church pews—you wouldn't be able to get too comfortable, he thought. Only the bathroom matched his imaginings. It had just been redone, she told him, fitted out with his and hers sinks, a whirlpool tub, and one of those showers that blasted water at you from about eight different directions. To Tito, it seemed like something a long-married couple would treat themselves to in lieu of an active sex life. A lot of the stuff was staying, which in his experience meant a divorce. It was not a house where children lived.
When the tour was finished, they sat in the dining room and Tito asked her how soon she wanted to move. He sipped at the glass of ice water she had given him, making sure to place it on the coaster and not on the glossy surface of the table. The glass was slippery and he was worried about dropping it.
“The first of September,” she said.
“Bien. Where you moving to?”
“English, please,” she said. “I'm moving to Sherman Avenue in Manhattan.”
“You're moving to Inwood?” he said, and stopped himself from asking her why.
“Yes. But some of the items are going to go into storage. I assume you offer that service?”
“We do,” Tito said. “For how long?”
“Indefinitely,” said Ms. Almonte.
He nodded and got to work on the estimate, giving her a better price than she would get from anyone else, though there wasn't much he could do about the monthly storage rates. He wrote the figure at the bottom of the sheet and passed it to her along with a Cruz Brothers brochure and his business card. She looked it over. He could read nothing in her face. “I'm getting some other estimates,” she said. “I'll give you a call when I decide.”
“Of course,” he said, taking another sip from his beaded glass. The water in New Jersey always tasted like chemicals to him.
She walked him back to the door. The whole time he had been there, he had debated saying something. Now he had to decide. Just before stepping outside, he asked, “Does your Word Club still exist, Ms. Almonte?”
Her eyes flickered at him. “Were you a student of mine? I never forget a student and I don't remember you.”
“I was at Kennedy,” he said, “but not in your class.” And then, after a pause: “I was friends with Clara Lugo.”
She appeared to consider him anew. “So, you were Clara's boyfriend?” she asked.
Tito did not answer the question. “Let me know if I can help with your move,” he said, and walked back down the steps.
DEPENDING WHO YOU asked, Ms. Almonte was either the greatest teacher in the history of the world or a hardass, stuck-up mulata bitch who thought she was the Queen of England and Miss Manners rolled into one skinny, titless body. She taught A.P. English and was known to fail students for a few misspelled words or for not knowing where to put an apostrophe. But the worst thing a student could do in her presence was throw Spanish words into an English sentence. “This is an English class,” she would say. “I want to hear English. Your future employers will want to hear English, too.”
She had followers, mostly college-bound girls who imitated her in every way they could—some more successfully than others. These devotees belonged to the Word Club, an after-school program that had begun as a prep class for the verbal portion of the SAT, but soon morphed into an extracurricular finishing school for a handful of bright, ambitious, assimilated girls headed for scholarships to the Ivy League and Seven Sisters. Behind their backs—and sometimes to their faces—they were called lesbians and wannabe whiteys, but the fact was that almost every boy in the school was in love with Ms. Almonte or one of her girls in a way that the boys would never fully understand or admit to one another. She and her girls were beyond them; they lived in the territory of the imagination.
Clara Lugo was Tito's Almonte girl. She was neither the prettiest nor the best dressed of them, but she had, by some measures, come the farthest to be there. She was dark skinned and had Chinese eyes. At her temples grew swirls of hair that looked like wispy reinterpretations of her ears. For a Dominican girl, she didn't have much of an ass, but she was tall and her hair was long and thick.
Tito and Clara had played together as children. Clara's father owned a hardware store on Dyckman Street, and Tito's father was the building superintendent for 222 Seaman Avenue—a good customer. On Sunday afternoons, when the store was closed, the two families met for picnics in the park. Tito retained a clear memory of the last afternoon the families spent together. The Lugos were still wearing their good clothes from Mass while Tito and his parents were dressed casually. He and Clara were in the Emerson Playground, twenty yards from the picnic blanket. Clara came too close to the swing he was on and his foot clipped her in the mouth. It felt like nothing to him, but she cried out and brought her hand to her face. When she drew it away, her fingers dripped with blood. She ran to the blanket, where their parents were sitting with Clara's baby brother, Efran, eating pastelitos and drinking beer. “¡Que bar-baro!” he heard his mami say, and then his papi came and yanked him off the swing to make him apologize.
Soon after that, his father and Don Roberto stopped speaking to each other. At first Tito thought it was because of the bloody lip, but, he later learned, the issue was a faulty power drill that Clara's father refused to take back, saying that it had worked fine when he sold it to Tito's father. The dispute escalated and Tito's papi took his business to the Jewish hardware store on Broadway—a declaration of war. Clara's papi started saying things about Tito's father, implying that he had lived too long in that building full of white people, that he had forgotten he was Dominican, that his son watched too much TV. He was going to grow up godless and unable to speak Spanish. Tito had always been afraid of Don Roberto. He was big and loud, with a chipped tooth and pockmarked cheeks. How could a man so ugly have produced a daughter so becoming? He liked to slam his hands on the counter of his store when he was making a point to one of his customers—and, it seemed, he always had a point to make.
Tito was forbidden from playing with Clara and she became, in time, just another neighborhood girl, glimpsed in the subway station or crossing Broadway. Over the following months, his mother subjected him to a propaganda campaign about Clara's family. She said that Doña Dolores was not actually Clara's mother, that everyone in Inwood knew this. Don Roberto, she claimed, had abducted Clara from the Dominican Republic and brought her to the United States. Her father was strict with her, and her stepmother was wicked—straight out of Cinderella. At the time, Tito thought this was all just part of the feud between his parents and the Lugos and he forgot about it. Soon enough, he befriended some of the kids in the building his father
managed and Clara all but slipped from his mind. That is the way things stayed until high school, when in a process as mysterious and unmeasurable as the growth of fingernails, she reemerged from the general population of girls to become, first, a girl and, then, the girl. By then, she had grown and filled out, matured. Once she joined the Word Club, she began straightening her hair and wearing stylish clothing. She occupied more and more of Tito's mind and took on a significant role in his fantasy life. Between classes he looked for her, and when she did appear from the throngs in the halls, he trailed behind her, floating in the wake of her smell—of gardenias and candy—like a cartoon character following the scent of a freshly baked pie. Sometimes he would trail her all the way to the other side of the school, far from his next class. The bell would ring and he would come to himself alone in the hallway, late again.
LEAVING MS. ALMONTE'S, Tito drove back to Washington Heights, his mind in turmoil. He had not seen Clara for fifteen years, but he continued to think of her often. When he conjured his imaginary family life in the suburbs, the role of his wife was usually played by a grown-up Clara, especially when he was between girl-friends, as he was now. She was the template for his longings.
Tito had just moved out of his parents' apartment and was still unpacking his new studio on Broadway and 190th Street. When he got home, it took him a while to find the box, the one marked MISC. PAPER. Inside the box he dug through an assortment of documents in plastic sleeves—his tax returns, his U.S. passport, his naturalization certificate, his high school diploma, his Dominican passport, his birth certificate—to find the Ziploc bag of envelopes and postcards that represented nearly all the real mail he had received in life. Within the bag he leafed through the sheaf of birthday cards, valentines, and love letters until he found the note from Clara. He knew the words by heart, but still he unfolded the single page from its smudged and wrinkled envelope and read the following:
