by Jon Michaud
She always seemed to be going down when what she wanted was to go up—upstairs to the unfinished third floor of the house, where she could grow wings and escape through the window, up into the sky to fly home to her abuelitos. New York, the little she'd seen of it, was not anyplace she wanted to stay, and she could not understand why her parents had ever come here, why people back home spoke of it like heaven. In the rare moments when she was left alone, when Dolores had gone to visit a neighbor or stepped out of the house on an errand, Clara climbed the wooden steps to the gutted top-floor rooms, imagining it was the ranchito of her abuelitos, the beams of the ceiling visible, the shutters open, and the sounds of the pigs and the chickens drifting in. There were no salamanders up there, only spiders and mice, but she did not mind. She sat by the window, looking down on the people walking along the sidewalk, waiting for Dolores to return. She never thought of running away. As frightening as Dolores was, the unknown city around her was even more terrifying.
CLARA'S FATHER WAS rarely home. Six days a week he worked at his fledgling hardware store. Sometimes she saw him briefly in the mornings, but usually he was gone by the time Dolores woke her with the stick. He stayed away for lunch and came home late, the three of them sitting in the kitchen eating Dolores's gruesome food: flavorless yucca, bacalao that was too salty, soggy rice, and under-ripe avocados, which had the same consistency as slivers of soap. If her father was not drunk by the time he got home, he became so as quickly as he could after his arrival, kissing, in succession, Dolores, Clara, and a bottle of Brugal, the last kiss being the longest. Inebriation was a mission, a calling, pursued with intensity. One night, when Dolores had gone to bed early, Clara complained to her father about the way she was being treated, but even in his rum-fuzzed state, he had no sympathy for her. “That is your mother you are talking about. She has welcomed you into our home. You must show her the proper respect. Then she will treat you better.”
“But, Papi, she hits me.”
“That's your fault. If you were good she would not hit you.”
“When are you taking me home?”
“This is your home, Clarita.”
“Why did you bring me here, Papi?”
“Because you are my daughter.”
“Where's my mother? Does she know I'm here?”
“Your mother is upstairs, sleeping.”
“I wish you never had come for me.”
“No more, Clara! No wonder Dolores hits you, talking back like this. If I hear that you are misbehaving, I will spank you myself.”
In despair, she went to bed and wept.
Clara changed her tactics for a few days, as her father suggested. She called Dolores “Mami,” even though it caught in her throat. She did not protest when she was told to get on her hands and knees to clean the floor with a scrubbing brush, that this was the only way to clean it properly, that Dolores would have done it herself if she wasn't pregnant. She accepted the stick without resistance or evasion, even when she had done nothing wrong and wondered if this was how she was going to spend the rest of her life, cleaning the house and being hit with the stick. But her passivity and obedience made Dolores even angrier. “I know what you are!” she said. “You can't fool me.” And then she brought the stick down on Clara again. “Stop pretending. I will never believe you.”
Once the wound on Dolores's cheek healed, Clara measured time by the swelling of her stepmother's stomach. As she became bigger, her moods became even less predictable. Everything would be fine, then the phone would ring, there would be shouting, then Dolores would take her anger out on Clara. Dolores would depart, leaving Clara alone for a few minutes; she would return in a rage and chase Clara around the house with the stick. Once, in a paroxysm of anger, she'd hurled a gallon of milk at her stepdaughter, but she'd missed and the plastic had burst on impact with the floor, sending a torrent of white washing across the tiles. The cascade made Clara laugh, which in turn made Dolores even angrier.
“Clean it!” she shouted. “Do you see how you've made me waste our milk? Do you know how much a gallon of milk costs?” Clara did not know how much a gallon of milk cost, but she did know that money wasn't the problem. Dolores and her father had money from something referred to only as “the accident.” That money had bought the house and paid for the hardware store. That money meant there was always food in the refrigerator, even if it was poorly cooked. That money had purchased her father's ticket to the Dominican Republic. That money had brought her to New York. Clara thought that maybe the “accident” was what had made Dolores so angry. She got out the mop and cleaned up the milk. The next day there was a half-gallon in the refrigerator, but Clara had to eat her cereal dry, had to drink water with her dinner.
CLARA STARTED SCHOOL in April and from the beginning she saw it as an escape from the prison of her father's house and the unpredictability of Dolores's moods. In her mind, she would always connect the start of school with the end of winter, the end of being trapped in the house. She retained a clear memory of standing in the schoolyard on her first day, having been deposited there by her father, and feeling that she needed to take her coat off because, in the direct sunshine of the April morning, she was too hot, the only time since her abduction that she'd felt so warm. Unfortunately, the moment she took off her coat, one of the older kids standing nearby made a comment about her sweater.
It was the first of many comments she would hear about her accent, about her hair, about her clothes, about her teeth, about her skin, about her breath. As far as she could tell, she was just like the rest of the kids in the school, but she had simply not learned yet to identify the subtle distinctions that announced her as being just off the boat. Clara was picked on by the picked-on. There wasn't a person in her grade who wasn't cooler in some way. “Cool” was, in fact, one of the first words of English she learned, followed quickly by “dumb” and “black.” Later she would understand it for what it was: the cruelty of immigrants who were merely passing down the same rite of passage they had received when they had arrived.
None of it mattered much to her, partly because she didn't really understand what a lot of the taunts and jokes meant, but mostly because however bad school was, it was always preferable to being home with Dolores. At school no one swung a paint-stained stick at her. At school, she did not have to hang laundry or clean the floor. At school, the buildings were heated and the food was better than the dried out and over-seasoned meals Dolores begrudgingly made. Most of all, though, at school there were teachers whose job it was to help her learn. Clara was immediately drawn to her homeroom teacher, Ms. García, who was Puerto Rican and tall and pretty with clean clothes and straightened hair. Ms. García spoke to her kindly, explained things to her in Spanish, talked down the bullies who liked to ask Clara if she knew how to use a toilet. It was Ms. García who took her aside in the first week and said, “It's hard now, but every day it will get easier. Every day you will understand a little more.” No one else had said anything encouraging to her and Clara immediately adopted Ms. García as her unofficial stepmother.
ONE NIGHT, NOT long after she started school, Clara was woken from her fitful, dream-rich sleep. Someone was shaking her. Reflexively, she held up her hand to fend off the blow, but the blow did not come. Even before she was fully awake, she was moving out of the bed to get away from the stick, but instead, she was embraced by a pair of strong arms.
“¡Ja, ja!” It was her father, trying to calm her. “Some nightmare you must be having, mija.” There was rum on his breath and urgency in his voice. Clara could see him now, his features coming into sight in the light from the hallway. “Come, Clara, get dressed.”
In that moment she thought the impossible had happened. He was going to take her back to Santo Domingo.
“Are we going to the airport, Papi?”
“Airport?” he snorted. “We're going to the hospital.”
“Hospital?” she asked.
“Yes, hospital. The baby is coming.”
&nb
sp; “Oh,” she said.
It was still dark outside and she felt slowed by the mud in her brain. The daily muscle aches and bruises mewed along her body as she got out of bed. Her father left the room, turning on the light. In that starburst, she found some clothes, dressed, and went down-stairs. Dolores was sitting on the living room couch in her flannel housecoat and chancletas, holding her belly, and moaning in a way that Clara had heard animals moan on her grandparents' farm. Dolores seemed to take no notice of Clara as she entered the room, a reprieve she welcomed even in her drowsy state. She blinked and blinked again. Dolores was still there, moaning. Her father came in with a small suitcase—the same suitcase from her abduction—and sat on the couch, putting his arm around Dolores, rubbing his face with his other hand. The suitcase kept alive the idea of the airport in Clara's muddled thoughts, even though her father had said they were going to the hospital. They remained like that for several minutes, the only sound the grunts and moans from Dolores. What is going on? wondered Clara. Was the baby going to be born in the living room? She had been born in the house of her abuelitos, as had her mother. It didn't seem such a preposterous idea. But what about the hospital? Her father said they were going to the hospital. Then Dolores stopped moaning and, in the sudden silence, there was the sound of a car pulling up to the curb outside the house.
“The cab is here,” said her father, helping his wife stand. “Clara, bring the bag.” She lifted the suitcase, which felt empty, and she wondered if her father had forgotten to pack everything—or if he had picked up the wrong case. But she said nothing about it, fearing a reprimand. They went out the front door and descended the stoop, Dolores pausing after each step to breathe loudly. “Ay!” she said. “Ay!” Clara went behind them like a footman.
The cab took them up Seaman Avenue. Dolores had resumed her moaning with a new urgency. Clara wished the cab driver would hurry because she did not want the baby to be born in the back of the car—she did not want to see the infant come out of that cave between her stepmother's legs. The cab finally stopped in front of a large building on the corner of Indian Road and the park.
“Is this the hospital?” asked Clara.
“No,” said her father. “This is Don Felix's building. You are going to spend the night there. In the morning, he will take you to school. Now go. See, he is waiting for you.”
On the side of the building there was an open door with a man standing, silhouetted by the indoor light behind him. Clara remembered him from the night of her arrival in New York. That had been only weeks before, but it seemed longer than the entirety of her six years in the Dominican Republic. He waved at her as she stepped out of the car and began walking down the hill toward him. It was a cool but comfortable night and the park seemed especially placid in the soft darkness. When the cab had pulled away, there was almost total silence, interrupted only by her leather-soled shoes on the sidewalk. Don Felix beckoned to her: “Ven, mi amor. ¡Ven!”
The doorway opened right from the street into the Morenos' living room, a comfortable, untidy place that reminded her—in its trappings if not its structure—of the place where her cousins lived in Santo Domingo.
“Come with me,” said Don Felix, closing and locking the door. He was wearing a bathrobe over green-and-black checkered pajamas. “You will sleep with Tito.”
He took her by the hand and led her to a short hallway at the end of which was a half-open door. Through the door there was a small, darkened room with a bed. Don Felix pulled back the blankets and pushed his sleeping son closer to the wall so that there would be room for Clara to get in.
“What's this?” he asked, pointing at a bruise on her forearm “You have an accident?”
“Sí,” said Clara, worried that he would press her for details.
“Pobre muchacha,” he said. “Come. We still have a few hours before we have to wake up.”
She slipped off her shoes and got into the bed in her clothes. She had packed nothing, brought nothing, and she wondered, for a moment, if maybe the suitcase her father had brought down had been for her. Don Felix drew the blanket up to her chin. “Tito talks in his sleep,” he said. “You can talk back to him. Say whatever you like. It's OK. He won't remember anything you say in the morning. I like to talk about the salseros who tried to steal his mother away from me before I married her. She was a real dancer and popular in all the clubs. You'd never know it now.” He gave a little laugh and stroked her head once with his hand, a reassuring gesture. “Things change. We wanted a daughter, too, but the man upstairs had a different idea. I sometimes talk to Tito about that. Those are things it's OK to talk about in the dark. You understand?”
“Sí,” said Clara, though she didn't.
Don Felix stood up and exited the room, leaving the door slightly ajar so that some light would filter in. “Good night,” he said.
Clara lay in bed, the elements of the room slowly coming into view: a baseball glove on the floor, a poster of spaceships, a small metal robot. She was wide awake. Tito breathed steadily beside her, now and then his breath interrupted by a gurgle of the sinus. From far away, she heard something click, then click again. A door with a faulty latch, a radiator cooling off. Then, through the bedroom wall, the rumble of the boiler coming to life. She waited for Tito to say something. She wanted to have an answer ready for whatever he might ask her. She decided she would tell him about killing the salamanders, how she now wished she had not done it. But he said nothing and she was still waiting for him to speak when she fell asleep.
• • •
“PAPI!”
Clara opened her eyes.
“Papi!”
It was the boy, Tito, standing beside the bed and yelling. She recognized him now, from school, one of her tormentors. “Papi!” Don Felix came in the room, tying the belt of his bathrobe about his waist
“What is it? Why are you yelling?”
“Papi! There's a girl in my bed.”
“What a bright boy I am raising,” said Don Felix. “This is Clara, Don Roberto's daughter.”
“Why is she in my bed with her clothes on?”
“You want her to be in your bed with no clothes on?”
“Why, Papi?”
“Because Doña Dolores went to the hospital last night to have the baby. Ven, Clara. Let's let the genius get dressed in private.”
She slipped her shoes on and followed him through the living room into the kitchen, where Tito's mother was making breakfast. Clara did not dare believe that the delicious smell filling the apartment was what she hoped it was; and if it was, she did not dare to think that she would be given some of it to eat. But, as she came closer to the table, there it was, mangú, a heaping bowl of it.
“Buenos días, Clarita,” said Doña Sylvia, though they had never met.
Clara did not answer. She was still staring at the mangú. It looked just like what her abuelita made. Smelled like it, too.
Doña Sylvia chuckled. “¿Tienes hambre?” she asked.
Clara looked at the older woman to see if she was being mocked. That is what Dolores would have done. But Doña Sylvia was looking at her with a bemused concern.
“Sí,” said Clara. “Sit, then. Please.”
As Clara seated herself, Don Felix came to the table, slipping a rubber band off a copy of Hoy.
“Where's Tito?” asked Doña Sylvia.
“Probably figuring how to put his pants on,” said Don Felix, turning to the back page of the paper and winking at Clara.
Clara looked back at the mangú. What was taking so long? When would she be able to eat it?
At that moment, Tito came out of his room.
“Buenos días, mi amor,” said his mother.
Tito sat without a word. His chair was directly across the table from Clara's, and she smiled at him. He looked away.
Doña Sylvia brought a bowl of scrambled eggs and peppers to the table. Then she served them, picking up each plate and placing a spoonful of eggs and a spoonful of mangú side by
side, like two yellow hills. Clara's face convulsed when she took the first bite. She was trying not to cry. Don Felix saw this and said, “Don't you like it?”
“¡Sí!” said Clara. “¡Es delicioso!” And she put another spoonful of mangú in her mouth to prove the point. During the meal, the Morenos continuously interrupted Clara's enjoyment of the food with questions—questions that required her to stop chewing and speak. They asked her if she wanted a sister or a brother. She said sister, though she did not explain that she wanted a sister to help with the chores.
They asked her how she liked school. She shrugged.
“Tito,” said Doña Sylvia, “Are you introducing Clara to your friends?”
“How can I?” he said. “I never met her before today.”
“Maybe you were never introduced, but you knew she was Don Roberto's daughter, didn't you?”
