The Noise of Infinite Longing (18 page)

They had been married fifteen years.

T

he hours away from my parents became a world within my own world. I longed for the school week to start, the pace of the school day was familiar, comforting, from math to science to geog- raphy to English and Spanish, from trigonometry to anatomy to Greek history and the history of the American colonies. I ran through the textbooks at home, finishing them before the class was through the first chapters. I memorized Portia’s soliloquies and Marc Antony’s and Othello’s. I recited them with such melodrama, words rehearsed over and over in front of my bedroom mirror, imagining myself in armor, a sword sheathed at my side, a flag raised in my hand, just as I had, when I was eight, imagined myself a ballplayer and a ballerina. School was theater, and music, poetry, writing. It was

my stage, my audience.

Our class was small, maybe twenty students in the classroom. I sat midway on the far right row, along the windows opening on the yard, behind a girl I didn’t know, a slender girl with limp brown hair and a soft, dimpled face with light coffee eyes. In the playground, she usually sat alone, reading. She seemed to have no close friends. I noticed her the first day. She was almost a head taller than I.

She tucked in her skirt when sitting, legs closed together, firmly planted on the floor, and she stacked her textbooks and notebooks on the left of the top of her desk, neatly aligned, her pencils sharp- ened, lined up. She wasn’t pretty, didn’t have the kind of beauty boys whistled at. But she walked with a certain grace, like an older woman in a Chanel suit, tall and high-necked, carrying her books in the crook of her arm.

Her name was Gabriela. She didn’t speak often in class, but when

she did, her voice cut through the noise, crisp and commanding. I glanced up every time at the sound of it, and followed her with my eyes when she walked to the front of the class to present her recita- tion. After she was done, with a smile I took to be only for me, she bowed her head ever so slightly.

I knew so little about her. She lived in a new suburb, a subdivi- sion of wide streets and big houses set back on large lawns. Her house was the color of caramel, with large windows and climbing vines. She didn’t seem to invite classmates over, but once, toward the end of the school year, she had a pajama party, and a dozen of us stayed up most of the night, putting curlers in our hair, talking about boys, dancing, spilling Coke on the rug. She and I sat in a cor- ner away from the other girls. I told her I was going away after the summer to a boarding school in Pennsylvania. She said she would write me every week.

We became inseparable.

I began to look for her in the school yard and keep pace with her long strides, and I ran to catch her at the end of the day. We spent afternoons after school on her porch, sometimes reading to each other and listening to the music she liked, piano pieces that she played. We invented stories about the writers that we dreamed we would be someday.

One day I was talking about her and my mother stopped me.

Looking alarmed, she said,You talk about nothing else.You talk about her like she was your sweetheart.

I felt something horrible. She was accusing me of something I knew she thought was frightening. I said nothing. And she never brought up the subject.

Ninth grade ended shortly after my fourteenth birthday. I heard that Gabriela had moved to San Juan. I didn’t see her again.

That summer before I went away to school, a hurricane came through the island, the winds tore into the roof of our house and the windows rattled and shook and blew open, and my mother went about with the maids nailing wood planks to the windows and the doors, and when it was over the next morning, she was still sitting on a sofa, waiting for my father in her white nightgown.

Chapter Seven

In the Land of Snow

F

or years my mother kept letters and yearbooks of my life in boarding school. I once came across them at the top of a closet—a box of letters and two leather-bound yearbooks. They were deep blue with embossed letters, and I hadn’t looked at them for several years. I noticed them on the high shelf of the closet of the guest bedroom in her house in Bryan,Texas. I climbed up on a chair and dragged them down. There they were, with all the things from

me that she kept: notes, cards, dried flowers, pictures.

I rifled through the letters, but I didn’t read them all the way through.There were so many of them, a young girl’s letters, in stud- ied handwriting, the loops made just as I had been taught in Catholic school, the sentiments so sweet. No other word could be used for them. I asked for money, I talked about the winter, I mentioned classmates and teachers and the movies I had seen in the cinema on Saturday, the only day when the school permitted us to go into town, a teacher always keeping us in line.

Tonight, at Sara’s house, after we had driven around Dallas looking for nothing in particular, we brought out my mother’s boxes again, as if they contained the key to the puzzle of our lives, as if somewhere in there the answers were spelled out and we could then understand not only us but our parents. More than any- thing we wanted to know what she had treasured from us, whose

pictures she kept, which letters, because perhaps we could then understand her.

We needed to make sense of our lives together and our lives apart, and her death. None of which could possibly become clear that night, just two nights after her burial.

We flipped quickly through the scrapbooks, stopping here and there, telling the back story, trying to remember the place and the year. There I am, age two or three, in the ballerina outfit, looking away from the camera, seated on a stool with one leg crossed on top of the other, quite unladylike; that’s me on the lawn of the University of Puerto Rico, age two, looking at a book; here we are, Angeles, Amaury, and I, on a grassy square across from our apart- ment in Mexico City, Angeles and I wearing ribbons in our hair and round-collared dresses; abuelita in her rocking chair, sur- rounded by all her grandchildren in her house on Pérez Galdós; Angeles and I, in identical dresses, holding Carmen and Sara in our living room in Gurabo; Angeles and I at the party mother gave us for our twelfth and thirteenth birthdays, a party in Caguas. We are standing at the table with the birthday cakes. Our friends from Gurabo are there and our friends in Caguas, names and faces I had forgotten. Angeles, her hair curled, is looking down, not smiling; I am standing next to her, smiling, with my hair pulled up and my eyes lighted by a flashbulb.

That is the last picture of our childhood, I thought.

My mother had sent me copies of most of the pictures when I was so far from her. “I thought these pictures,” she wrote, “would bring you fond memories of your childhood.... Please keep them safely. Hope you cherish them as much as I do.”

Through her last years, when I saw so little of her, the pictures came periodically, on my birthdays, on Christmas holidays, some- times without any special reason. I glanced at them and bundled

them in a manila envelope, not to look at them again, not until she had died.

Now, in Sara’s house, the years flashed back, like scenes from an old movie, with every page we turned.

Angeles was laughing. She pointed at a blurry picture of me on a horse. Boarding school, the stables, the only time I got on a horse in my life. I was bundled up for the winter, and my face was pudgy, chubby. I looked like a stuffed doll.

You loved that school, Angeles said with her malicious grin. It was coming, I knew.

I thought it was a jail, she said, not bitterly, but as if stating a fact known to all mankind except me.

I know you thought so, I said, annoyed that I had loved something she had not cared about at all.

She had been enrolled in the school my second year there, forced to go by mother. Angeles didn’t want to leave Puerto Rico and live in a strange place where she didn’t have her family around her. She hated it instantly, the way she could hate—from the minute she arrived.

I paid attention then to her misery, and was angry about it; and now, too, when gray had come to our hair and we had lives that had been lived so differently, I paid attention again. I always paid atten- tion to whatever she said.

It’s because you hate everything American, I said, teasing her.

No, she said, laughing. It was a jail, all those girls piled up in the dorm, all those rules—get up at this hour, go to bed at that hour, get up for breakfast—and those boring hours in study hall. All that nice- ness.

Nice,
the damning word.

I read over one of the letters I had written my mother. It was too nice. Nice. I talked about the weather and the hockey games, and the

Halloween dance at Valley Forge, but mostly I asked for money, twenty dollars a month (I was very precise about this) to buy movie tickets and ice cream and toothpaste. Reading the letter, I had to laugh with Angeles. It was so . . . innocent. I didn’t tell mother half the story.

My mother had talked since we were children about sending Angeles and me to school abroad, to France or Spain or Switzerland. She imagined us in the Alps, speaking fluent French, learning the courtly manners and cultured diction of the Europe she adored. She imagined visiting us in Paris or Barcelona, and she spoke of El Prado and the Louvre and the Left Bank. But when the time came, she didn’t have the money to send us to Europe, which was too far. She would send us instead to the United States.

I was going first and Angeles would follow.We would finish high school in the United States and return to Puerto Rico for college (the college years were the dangerous years for girls, she said, they needed to be home). That was the plan. She pored over magazines advertising private schools in Massachusetts, NewYork, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania. She sent away for brochures and studied the pic- tures and the requirements and asked me to read every one of them. All of them seemed alike: great brick buildings with gables and spires and immense lawns covered in snow, girls on horseback, prom dances with boys in military uniform. I had no idea what a prep school was, had no notion that it was special or spectacularly expen- sive. But I knew that I would be two thousand miles away from my family, in a place I could barely imagine, living with other girls. Like a big pajama party, mother said, building it up. Like a big pajama

party, I told my friends.

I was enrolled at a small school in Pennsylvania, a Protestant school that my mother chose precisely because it was small, two hundred students, in a very small town. She didn’t want a coed

school, and she didn’t want a Catholic school. She believed we had had enough of Catholic schools. She wanted to broaden our lives, she kept saying, to give us the social polish that came from having gone abroad, like the daughters of her friends in San Juan. She painted such a picture that I was happy to be going.That picture was all I knew and I tried to see myself in it, in a wool coat and mittens, walking in the snow. It was like a movie I had seen, with lights reflected in the snow and Bing Crosby crooning in the background. It didn’t occur to me to be afraid or to imagine the loneliness I might feel, taken away from the life I had lived, from everyone and everything I knew.

Why did you like it there? Sara asked.

Now, looking back, I’m not so sure I did like it, I said. But it changed my life. Being there began to change the way I saw our lives in Puerto Rico.

What do you mean? Sara said.

Well, I think I began to realize we were not what we thought we were.

What’s that? Carmen asked.

Don’t know exactly, I said, but I started to think I wouldn’t go back home, that I wanted another life. I think that’s when I started to leave home.

#

I left the island with my new trunk and suitcases filled with cardigans and plaid skirts for the northern cold, for a place of apple trees and stables and hockey fields in a small town near Philadelphia that smelled of hot pretzels and melting chocolate. I left with my mother and Tití on a Pan Am flight to New York City, the plane packed in

the back cabin with hundreds of islanders, mainly laborers and campesinos joining relatives and looking for luck in New York, car- rying their shopping bags and cardboard boxes.

Unlike them, we had seats in the front of the plane, and friends of my mother’s from her university days were waiting for us at the air- port to drive us into the city.We had matinee tickets to Radio City and evening tickets to
My Fair Lady
and room reservations at the Waldorf- Astoria, a table booked at the Peacock Alley and seats reserved at a fla- menco show at the Waldorf’s Starlight Roof. My mother had treated this trip like a law case, and had seen to every last detail. My entire family came to see me off at the airport.

There was such a commotion.

Everyone at the airport seemed to be talking at the same time. Somebody was taking pictures. Suitcases were weighed and labeled. The terminal, at the new international airport the government had just built on the outskirts of San Juan, was crowded, stifling, every passenger with his noisy caravan of relatives and friends seeing him off. I kept looking at the boarding sign, distracted, clutching my boarding pass. Finally they announced the flight, and I rushed to my relatives, saying good-bye to aunts, cousins, my brother and sisters, and abuelita. In her soft cotton dress, she smelled of Maja powder and the cologne she sprayed on her handkerchief, her kiss leaving wet smears of tears on my face. My father held me a long time, bury- ing my head in his hands. Angeles stood back, waiting to be the last, with the saddest face, those black eyes dark with what she didn’t say, and a fleeting kiss on the cheek.