The Noise of Infinite Longing (21 page)

Barbara was the first Jew I had known, and she thought that sep- arated her from the other girls. It made no sense to me. I knew noth- ing about being a Jew. She looked like everyone else.We talked about that and the way I grew up, and she held my hand when I cried talk- ing about the island, how far it was, and how different. She had a boyfriend, a college boy who came on weekends and to the dances the school held every season. I had Roland and the boys who came for the mixers, busloads from Pottsville and Valley Forge and Lawrenceville, boys who couldn’t dance, who plunked one foot down and dragged the other foot like a chain and wore thick glasses and stared hypnotized at a point right below my neck, at my breasts. But she and I didn’t talk about that, about boys. She talked about voice lessons and music and wanting to study opera and going away to Oberlin the next year. I went to her home several times, and went out with her brother, who had the awkward manners of a fifteen- year-old and the pudgy body of a boy who has yet to build muscles. At night, Barbara and I stayed up talking for hours, until she fell asleep, her arm around me. Her parents took to me like a daughter, like I was Barbara’s little sister.We went to the Colts games, her hand on mine in her coat pocket, in the drive to Baltimore. We had big dinners and bigger breakfasts, gefilte fish, smoked salmon, matzo balls. Her parents seemed like people from the movies. All the par- ents seemed that way to me, like Loretta Young and Doris Day, like

Gregory Peck and William Holden. Perfect specimens.

When Barbara was not alone in her dorm room, I would sit in a corner farthest from her desk, out of the way of half a dozen seniors who liked to get together in Barbara’s room, fixing their hair, putting on makeup, and playing 45-rpm records, dancing to Bill Haley and

the Comets and Elvis, and sighing to Johnny Mathis—girls dancing close together, longing for their boyfriends. Music bounced off the walls in those late afternoons, until the housemother rang the bell for dinner.

The day Barbara graduated, her shoulders sagged and her face looked ridiculous under the hard-board hat and tassel. But she was happy. She was going to Oberlin.

After Barbara had left with her parents and balloons drifted on the lawn at the feet of empty chairs, Jean came looking for me. Taking my hand, she ran with me just as we had that first time in the snow.

The next day I took a plane in Philadelphia and flew home. “Walk on with hope in your heart... .” Barbara had sung that for

me so many times I thought she had invented the song.That summer, we wrote nearly every day, and in later years we occasionally saw each other, but we grew further apart until there was nothing left of our talks at night and she no longer sang. Not a note. She dropped out of Oberlin, her voice had failed her, she said, and moved to Cal- ifornia.

Many years later, her brother called me. Barbara was dying. She had cancer. I spoke to her on the phone. She could hardly talk, and we said words that had no meaning, polite and strained, like two strangers.

Chapter Eight

The Crackup

S

ara and I sat in the backyard, her dog running around us, the air still hot.

The boys had returned with six-packs of Corona and a bottle of Tanqueray, bags of ice and bags of groceries. Sara was pointing at the new shrubs she and Rick had planted to edge the paths around the patio. She had a way with plants, and would make them grow even during the long Texas droughts. She even knew their Latin names, and in the winter, when the freeze came, she and Rick moved dozens of planters to the nursery they had made in the garage. Flowers didn’t die on her.

We heard shouting coming from the kitchen. Amaury’s voice. Carmen came out to the backyard, almost running, her short steps almost tripping one on the other. Her thin shoulders were shaking, and mascara was running down her cheeks.

What happened? Sara and I asked at the same time.

He’s drunk, Carmen said.We knew who she meant right away. But what did he say, what was all that shouting about? Sara said. By this time Olga was also with us, also crying, but angry, too. It was a chorus.

Finally we made out what the screaming and crying were all about. Nothing was clear, as it never was when all of us got together

and someone screamed and someone cried. He was mean to Car- men, Olga blurted out. He can’t do that to my sister.

Olga could start a war with a single match, and this was a match. Okay, okay, I said, what did he say?

He made fun of me, Carmen said. I could imagine. He had been doing that for years, laughing at Carmen. She was easy to poke fun at, she was so conventional, so square, so proper, so . . . well, white, gringa, definitely not like Amaury.

He’s just like father was when he gets drunk, Carmen said. Few things scared Carmen more than father. She couldn’t bear the sight of him.

Get out of here, Olga screamed when Amaury came out to the yard.

I was just teasing her, he said, laughing; she can’t take a joke.

Angeles was right behind him and pulled his arm and led him back into the kitchen, coaxing him, as she had since he was a boy, protecting him.

I could picture him at eleven years old, in his shorts, crying in the bathroom the day mother told him she was leaving father.

He’s been like that for a long time, I said. I didn’t know exactly what I meant, and the girls certainly didn’t know.

Carmen and Olga left the yard, holding each other, looking for their children, for their husbands. Rick is used to this by now, Sara said; he knows our dramas. He just stays out of the way. Sara and I went back to our chairs.The sun had set, the house was quiet again, the TV news the only sound reaching us through the closed sliding doors.

When did you know? she asked suddenly, out of the blue. Know what? I said.

About our parents, she said, about their separation.

I was the last to know, I said. I was away at school, remember, and

mother didn’t tell me. All she told me was that you were all leaving Gurabo and moving to Caguas. But I thought father was moving, too. Well, that’s not true. I’ve known since I was very young it was a dis- aster but I never thought she would leave him.

You found out when you returned home, Sara said, amazed.That was some homecoming.

How did you find out? I asked her.

I don’t remember, Sara said after a long while.Then she said, One day we moved to Caguas, but we didn’t really know why. We were too young to know. But Angeles knew, she was the first.

Yes, I thought, she is always the first to know.

Sara picked up my glass. Do you want some wine or a gin and tonic?

Wine, I said, and could you bring me my cigarettes?

I watched her walking so straight, so high-chinned, to the kitchen.

The sky was gray blue, lights had gone on in the house, in the houses around us, and the air smelled of summer dying. Rick lit up the grill. They were going to charcoal some steaks, he said. How do you like yours? he asked me. Rare, I said, and Sara reappeared with my wine and my cigarettes and sat down.

Angeles knew first, I repeated. I know the story.

She was standing in a corner on the main road in Gurabo, wait- ing for the car to take her to school, when she saw father, saw him in his car with a woman. She knew at that moment that what she had heard around town was true. I can only imagine what she felt because, you know, she won’t talk about it, I said to Sara. All I know is that in the afternoon when mother came home from work, Ange- les told her.

How did she do that? I wondered. How does one say a thing like that to one’s mother?

I had a picture, something I created, of Angeles in her school uni- form, standing alone in that corner, her heart racing, her heart breaking. But I had no details. I had only that story, that image. For most of my life, I believed it.

But, of course, it wasn’t the whole story.

Nothing between my parents was exactly as it seemed.

Angeles didn’t tell me what happened that afternoon when she went to my mother. Not for many years, not until our mother was long dead, and then one night she told me, but even now I don’t really know.

#

We move slowly through the years that are endings, circling them in our memory, and we return time and again to them, searching for the exact moment when the end of childhood came, when a passion died, when a marriage ended.

It was the summer of my fifteenth year, and I was arriving home after nine months away. Nine months that seemed years.The journey from Philadelphia was long. Six hours, a stop in Miami, restless dreams during a light sleep over the sea, my eardrums aching. My family strained to catch a look at me in the crowd of passengers lum- bering down the landing stairs and across the tarmac. They were pressed against the gate, and I was walking slowly, feeling the sudden change in temperature, the salt air heavy with heat, wet steam rising from the concrete pavement.

They had all come.

My father was there, holding me tight, strumming my back, as if he could bring me closer to him. Angeles had lost the skinny flat body, and her face was no longer childlike but grown-up, filled in,

with a defined shape; my brother, now eleven years old, with his sullen face, the face my mother liked to believe looked just like Tyrone Power’s (for her, nothing less than a movie star) was too timid, too much of a stranger, to come bursting into my arms. Tití was there, looking not as tall or as blond as I remembered, and grandmother stood at her side, in a familiar flowery shirtdress she wore on special occasions, her hair pulled back in a bun, her face more angular, her eyes more pronounced, but her lips had shriveled with age and her hands had wrinkled, her wedding band now too large for her thinning fingers. Everyone was talking at once as they always did at family gatherings.

My mother, even before putting her arms around me, had teardrops floating on the rim of her eyes. She clung to me, her fingers holding my wrist. Everything seemed the same, the arrangements of family, their exhilarated greetings, those exclamations, but I could see in my mother’s tired eyes that something had happened. I felt sealed off, as if the distance I had gone and the time that had passed had rewritten the language, the script by which I saw things and the sense I had of myself in the presence of my family, in my country.

Words in my family were used to hide, or to dress up, or to wash out layers of lies and illusions only to reinvent them all over again, each layer building one on the other, metaphors, similes, beautiful lines thrown away. So, of course, we were a happy family, there, at the airport, at that moment.

The afternoon had faded by the time we arrived home, which was not the house of seven terraces in the small town where we had lived for four years. Gurabo was gone; Gurabo was not to be remem- bered.We buried places.

Mother had rented a two-story house in Caguas, just two blocks from her office, close enough so she could come home for lunch. She no longer had to drive her old Ford on the patchy tar road to

Gurabo, driving at ten miles an hour behind sputtering trucks loaded with loose cords of sugarcane; she didn’t have to daydream through the dreary routine of her late afternoon drives when, too distracted to know if a truck was heading her way, she would shift the gear and, her mind wandering (her eyes open, her eyelids lowering), forget until she was right up against someone’s fender that she was behind the wheel. Now, living in Caguas, she walked to work and she walked home, her car parked in the driveway behind the locked metal gate of the house.

The house had no front yard, only a thin patch of grass along the front wall.The street was a few feet from the front steps that led up to a portico, a very small square porch. In this house, there were no terraces with cracked tiles, no terraces at all, or hovering trees graz- ing the roof, and no dancing hall next door, as there had been in Gurabo, with the night-and-day drifts of men playing dominoes and bulbous women swinging their buttocks.

Mother showed me around the house when we arrived after the ride from the airport. Her voice had become higher. She was ner- vous, flushed, her hand on my arm. Angeles and I shared a bedroom as we always had.This one got the best sunlight, on the second floor, looking to the street. We had our same plain single beds, the same night table, and the same flower-print vanity table that I think had once belonged to Tití.

Downstairs, in the living room, the maid was bringing trays of drinks, and we were all gathered: grandmother, Tití, Roland, all of us waiting, expectant, my homecoming having to be celebrated, toasted in some way. Mother had plucked flowers from the court- yard, narcisos and violets, and had placed them in a glass bowl. I could see her doing this, looking at the flowers from every angle, looking for perfection, arranging and rearranging, but I didn’t appre- ciate then that she did those things.

She did it for you, Angeles said later, only for you.

My father cleared his throat and raised his glass and said something about my becoming a woman (or maybe I have this confused with another instance, another equally momentous pronouncement of his, or maybe I just can’t remember a word he said). Soon he was rustling each of us, the way he did his good-byes, approaching each of us one by one, giving me a peck on the top of my head, the hard glaze in his eyes showing maybe regret, maybe love. I didn’t know, but I did know that our life was no longer the same life we had known for fifteen years. Something had been crushed.That was in his eyes.

I

don’t remember much about that night. I was lying down next to my mother in her bed, very still and silent, my eyes on the far wall. She was telling me why my father wasn’t there. She was crying the way she used to when I was younger and he didn’t come home and she wandered around the house in her nightgown. I couldn’t see her tears but could feel them the way you feel rain before it comes. Finally, she said, Your father has another woman. I watched the shapeless shadows on the wall, the reflection off the streetlamps falling in jagged angles on the window shades. I felt everything qui- eting down, the lights of the street flicking off, the cranking of pass-