When Tito Loved Clara

by Jon Michaud

  The phone rang. She was never going to make dinner at this rate.

  “Hello?”

  “Clara?”

  “Yes? Thomas?”

  “Hi, baby. I'm just about in Philly. I thought I'd check in with you.”

  “How do you feel?” she said.

  “Good,” he said. “Optimistic. So Deysei met Gilly off the bus this afternoon?”

  “Yes. It was fine. They were eating cereal and watching cartoons when I got home.”

  “Did you talk to that guy yet?”

  Clara hesitated. “No, not yet. This weekend, I'll do it. I'll tell you all about it when you get home.” She let her voice trail off, as if there were more.

  “What is it?”

  “Well, it looks like Yunis might be coming back.”

  “Already? What happened?”

  “It's complicated.”

  “Didn't she sublet her apartment?”

  “Yes.”

  “So, does that mean she's going to stay with us?”

  “I don't know. I haven't talked to her about it.”

  “Jeez, Clara.”

  “Look, forget about it for now. We'll talk about it when you get back. It's not definite yet,” she said, though in her gut she knew otherwise.

  “OK.”

  “Good luck. I know you're going to do great in the interview. Say hi to your mother for me.”

  “Thanks. I'll see you when I get back.”

  ONE SUNDAY EVENING, in her senior year of high school, Clara sat at the kitchen table pretending to read the Spanish-language newspaper her father had left there the day before. Instead of reading, she was listening, listening to a click. It was a plastic click, a snap-snap! She heard it one more time and then heard the rush of air onto her stepmother's curler-laden head, heard Dolores put her scaly feet up on the tattered ottoman and begin to leaf through a copy of Vanidades. While Dolores sat under the dryer, Clara went up the stairs to the master bedroom and turned on the TV. The room was sparely furnished and yet still untidy—shoes on the floor, clothes hanging out of drawers. Clara had no interest in whatever secrets might lie in the bedside tables, in the half-open closets. She was there to watch television. The set was tuned to Telemundo and she reminded herself to return to that channel when she was done. Using the controls on top of the cable box (not touching the remote, which lay on the unmade bed), she cycled down through the other foreign-language channels—a Chinese news program, an Indian dance routine, a sexy Italian woman talking about sculpture—to CBS, just in time to see the stopwatch clicking through the seconds and the grave, deep voice saying, “This is 60 Minutes,” as if it were the word of the Lord. Then an antacid commercial. So she'd missed the introductory part, but none of the actual reports. All through dinner, she'd been eyeing the kitchen clock, wondering when Dolores was going under the dryer. Having missed her usual Friday salon appointment, she'd rolled her hair before serving the meal and sat at the end of the table, not eating, but looking like a popart medusa in her pink curlers and her floral robe while Clara and Efran choked down their dry pork chops and moro.

  Her assignment for that week's meeting of the Word Club was 60 Minutes. Ms. Almonte had told them earlier in the year that there were certain resources every educated, independent woman could rely on for the real news about the world. One was 60 Minutes. Another was the New Yorker magazine. A third was National Public Radio. Each week in Ms. Almonte's room, they talked about these sacrosanct cultural outposts—or at least Ms. Almonte and most of her class talked, while Clara listened. Clara had limited access to the trinity. She was not allowed a radio in her room, not allowed to watch English-language television, and she had gotten into trouble earlier that year when Dolores, snooping in her schoolbag, had come across a Xerox of a New Yorker portfolio by Richard Avedon in which a fashion model made love to a skeleton.

  “What sickness is this?” Dolores had said.

  “It's for school.”

  “School! We never studied anything like this when I was in school.”

  Clara had to bite her tongue. Dolores had been educated in a one-room school near Higüey, the salchichón capital of the Dominican Republic. Of course she'd never seen anything like the Avedon pictures.

  “You're lucky I'm not going to show this to your father. After everything he's done for you, this is how you thank him? Pornography? Sex with skeletons?” Dolores frowned and shook the rolled-up Xeroxes at her.

  It was a far cry from the beatings she had given Clara with the stick—beatings that had all but stopped around the time Clara went through puberty. A combination of events had put an end to them. Dolores had gained weight after the birth of Efran and suffered from early onset arthritis, she claimed, because of all the hand-washing of clothes she'd done in her life. The paint pole was harder to grasp even as Clara was more nimble in avoiding it. The beatings went from a less-than-daily event to just an occasional flare-up. Those dying spasms, it seemed to Clara, represented Dolores's refusal to fully acknowledge that her absolute control over her stepdaughter was gone. They had not stopped completely, however, until Efran, at the age of seven, had gone through a sensitive period. He couldn't bear to see a fly swatted, a mouse trapped, a mosquito slapped, let a lone a thirteen-year-old girl struck with a stick. One night, after he'd witnessed a particularly brutal attack by Dolores, he had started crying. “No, Mami, no! Stop it! You're hurting her. You're hurting her.” Efran was nothing if not spoiled, and his pleas were granted by Dolores—not out of mercy for Clara but because her little príncipe always got what he wanted. By then, Clara had reached the conclusion that her home life was something that had to be endured until she turned eighteen and could leave. The focus of her existence was school—her ticket out of Inwood and away from Dolores.

  Those pleas from Efran were the high-water mark in Clara's relationship with her half-brother. She'd done her share of diapering and babysitting through his childhood, had done her best not to hold it against her sibling that his mother was such a hypocritical, self-centered pendeja. For the most part, they lived separate existences. Efran's room was fixed up, painted, filled with toys. Clara's had remained almost unchanged since her arrival from the Dominican Republic. Efran's birthdays were marked with extravagant house parties at which two enormous white cakes were brought out, while Clara's were barely marked at all. Now, in early adolescence himself, Efran came and went from the house as he pleased, his evenings free of chores, his weekends unencumbered by work at the store. Clara still had her rounds of cleaning, the laundry to do, and a day behind the cash register at Lugo Hardware on the weekends. She tried, tried not to hold any of this against Efran, but it was hard, especially because of Dolores.

  Though the beatings had come to an end, Dolores found new ways of tormenting her. She was still engaged in her campaign of disparagement, belittlement, and psychological warfare, the focus of which was Clara's mother, who was accused again and again of doing much worse than coupling with skeletons.

  In adolescence, Clara had finally come to accept the idea that her mother was not going to show up and rescue her. She soothed her longings with novels. Early on it was Nancy Drew, whose pluck and self-reliance gave Clara courage. After that it was books by Judy Blume, V. C. Andrews, Sue Grafton, and many, many others, a succession of tales with female heroines who gave her succor. Clara's mother, for all intents and purposes, ceased to exist as a person—she became less believable than the characters in those books. She became an abstraction, a straw figure for Dolores to abuse and Clara to long for. Early on, Clara believed that there must be some truth to what she was being told, but when she got a little older, she began to think that maybe it was this idea of her mother that had all along been the cause of Dolores's ire—such anger earned for having done nothing more than marrying Roberto Lugo first. Clara questioned just how Dolores knew such details about her mother in the first place.

  “We hear things,” said Dolores. “Friends tell us.”

  “You know where my mot
her is, then?”

  “No.”

  “But your friends know. Can I talk to your friends? I want to see her.”

  “No. It would be too painful for you to see her. She's a whore. You would be ashamed of her.”

  “It doesn't matter. She's still my mother.”

  SHE SAT ON the bed with her notebook, waiting for the commercials to finish. Finally, she was going to have something to contribute to the Word Club. Normally she had to sit in Ms. Almonte's room and listen to Yesenia and Victoria saying clever things about Dr. Kevorkian or Frank Sinatra or the Exxon Valdez oil spill. At the end of one of the first sessions, Ms. Almonte—or Alicia, as they were allowed to call her outside school hours—asked her why she'd been so quiet. Clara explained that her father did not allow English-language television in the house.

  “Nothing? Not even a news program?”

  “No, he says English-language TV will poison me and make me forget that I am Dominican. The only show we ever watch in English is the Miss America Pageant.”

  Alicia gave a laugh that was also a kind of snort. “Perhaps I should talk to your father.”

  “No, no, that's OK.”

  Clara knew that if her father got one look at Alicia, it would all be over. She'd have to stop going to the Word Club, which she'd billed as an SAT prep class, even though she'd already taken her SATs, had, in fact, already been accepted to both Cornell and Hunter with the promise of substantial financial aid. (All of her college application correspondence had gone through Ms. Almonte.) Not only that, but she would have to switch out of Alicia's AP English class just as they were about to start reading How the García Girls Lost Their Accents. She would lose everything that she'd spent her entire time in school trying to achieve.

  Clara's plan had succeeded. She had taken that name-calling and mimicking of her accent in grade school and used it to push her-self to speak better English than all of her attackers—to speak like her teachers. Of course, by the time she had mastered her adopted language—by the time she had removed all traces of her accent, by the time she learned to say bed sheets, not bed shits, and thank God, not thanks God, by the time she was reading S. E. Hinton, John Steinbeck, and Madeleine L'Engle—she was being ridiculed for being too smart, for being a little brownnoser, for being a little Americanita, for not being street: in short, for being a phony. But she did not mind. She wore those insults as a badge of pride. Clara knew she had achieved her goal when Tito, one of her worst tormentors in her first year in New York, started following her around in high school, giving her the eyeball. He seemed to have forgotten about the names he had called her—the jibara remark on the day of Efran's birth and many other insults. Delighted and surprised, she planned to encourage his interest for a while and then reject him in the most embarrassing manner she could come up with. But the more she got to know this older, less surly Tito, the more she liked him—the more he reminded her of his father, Don Felix, for whom she still felt great warmth. The prospect of thumbing her nose at the ridiculous feud between their fathers by befriending Tito also appealed to her. Her plan to set him up and then spurn him withered with each walk home they took together, with each kiss he gave her. Plus there was the other thing. The sex thing. Tito had grown into a fine-looking young man, his body trim and strong from moving all that furniture. In the Word Club meetings, Alicia had been encouraging them to explore sex before they went to college so that they could be in full control of their liberated selves. She encouraged them to be fearless, not to wait for a boy to ask them out, but to turn the tables on the boys. “You don't need a man to be happy,” she said. “But you do need one to have sex. You are going to need men just as you need books, music, and art. And as with those things, you need to be educated, you need to have taste, you need to know what you're doing.”

  So here she was, getting ready to graduate, on her way to college, the world opening up around her, the possibility of sex with Tito becoming increasingly real, and meanwhile, she could not watch a television news program in her father's house. The ads finished and Lesley Stahl appeared, introducing a segment about Édith Cresson, the first woman to become prime minister of France. Alicia would be all over this, Clara thought as she began to take notes.

  As the show went into its next commercial break, she heard something in the hallway—Efran's voice. She turned off the TV (there was no time to reset the channel to Telemundo). She stepped across the room to her father's dresser and picked up a pair of nail clippers that were always there—her ostensible reason for coming into the room, even though her nails were bitten to the quick.

  “See, Mami. There she is,” said Efran.

  Dolores followed him into the room looking exasperated, the curlers still in her hair and her face red from the heat of the dryer. “Clara, why are you in here?” she asked.

  “Just cutting my nails with Papi's clippers.”

  “Efran says he heard the TV.”

  “No. I'm just about to start on my homework.” Clara held up her notebook.

  “Let's see,” said Dolores, and reached not for Clara's notebook but for the remote. Ed Bradley appeared, talking about the possible detrimental health effects of dental fillings.

  “Coño, Clara! What did your father tell you?”

  “It's homework!” protested Clara. “Homework? Like that pornography I found in your bag?”

  “No, they were talking about the French prime minister.”

  “Get out of my room. You must think I'm stupid.”

  On her way out, Clara looked at Efran, who was smiling.

  The brief alliance that had been forged between them during his “sensitive” period was long gone. He was eleven now, devious, obnoxious. He was becoming such a Dominican homeboy that it angered her to be even partially related to him. He didn't lift the toilet seat, didn't make his bed, didn't wash a dish. She was amazed that the English-language TV ban applied to him, too, but her father, who was sometimes arbitrary in his rules, seemed to have less of a double standard than Dolores—and the TV rule was his.

  As she walked down the hall to her room, Clara heard Dolores say to Efran, “You keep an eye on her. That's a good boy.”

  LATER THAT NIGHT, Clara was writing an essay when her father came into her room. She almost never saw him sober anymore; this drunk man was her father now. More than anything, she was embarrassed by him, by his inebriation, by his small mind and his dumb Dominican habits—his stubborn refusal to wear socks, even in the winter, by his preference for using his knife like a fork, by the ridiculous campesino tin cup he liked to drink out of. Everything he did made her ashamed.

  “Clara.” He paused and looked around the shabby room, steadied himself with a hand on the wall. “Dolores tells me you were watching American television.”

  “It was homework, Papi.”

  “Television is not homework. You expect me to believe that? Ay, how I wish they sold a television that got only Spanish stations.”

  “Papi, this is an English-speaking country.”

  “Not all of it. Walk down Dyckman Street and tell me how much English you hear. You are Dominican and this is a Dominican house. When you live in this house you speak Spanish. You eat Spanish food. You dream Spanish dreams.”

  “Yes, Papi,” she said.

  He steadied himself and looked at her again. “Gustavo says he saw you in the park with a boy.”

  “When?” asked Clara, defiantly. Gustavo, who had been a couple of years ahead of her in school, now worked for her father. On Saturdays, when she did her shift at the register, he made his interests known to her. “Ay, dimelo, mamita!” he said whenever she arrived.

  “Last Friday,” her father said.

  “Wasn't he working? How did he see me if he was at the store?” This was the wrong approach, but she couldn't help herself.

  “He was delivering something. Says he saw you and a boy going into the park at 207th Street after school.”

  “I came straight home.”

  “Your mother s
ays you were late. She says you've been coming home late every Friday. She needs your help, Clara. Her arthritis. Her hip. You have to help her.”

  “I help her.”

  “Who is this boy?”

  Clara said nothing.

  “You know what he wants, don't you? You tell him he can't see you anymore. You tell him Roberto Lugo didn't raise any whore for a daughter.”

  “Papi, what are you going to do when I go to college? You can't watch me every minute. Gustavo won't see what I'm doing—as much as I'm sure he'd like to.”

  “You'll still be living here. You go to class and come home. Help your mother.”

  “What if I had wanted to go to college somewhere else? What if I had not gotten into Hunter?”

  He looked at her as if he'd never considered the possibility, as if this were the most outlandish idea he'd ever heard. Her father had always wanted her to do well at school and, yes, go to college, so long as she stayed within his gaze, never out of his reach. “Where?”

  “I don't know. California. Massachusetts. Lots of kids go away to college.”

  “Not my daughter. You wouldn't get a penny from me if you went away. You wouldn't be welcome in this house. Do you understand? I'd disown you.”

  “So, what am I supposed to do, live in this room until I'm fifty?”

  “No. Until you get married. Then you can move out.”

  Clara laughed. “How am I ever going to get married if you never allow me to go out and meet someone.”

  “You meet lots of boys. What about Gustavo?”

  “Gustavo is a pordiosero.”

  Her father shook his head. “You are never going to marry anyone with a mouth like that.” He reflected for a moment in drunken solemnity. “There's a party up in the Bronx on Saturday night. Dolores's friend Marti. You come with us.”