The Noise of Infinite Longing (11 page)

My parents had nothing to do with the people of the road but occasionally people my father knew came for the evening—doctors he worked with, and men from his days in the sugar mills, men he had dealings with in town. They came with their wives, and mother fixed her elaborate dinners (tablecloth, fine china, fine silverware). The men drank, and when mother talked to the wives about her work and her family, they looked at her with blanks in their eyes.

Few of my mother’s friends ever came to visit. They lived in San Juan, and she didn’t want them to see that she lived on a dirt road. Thirty-two years old and married ten years, with three children and another one on the way, she was making more money than my father, far more than many of the women of her time, and she talked to us (during those late afternoons when my father didn’t show up) about building her own house in San Juan, near grandmother and Tití. She kept up her connections, her membership in the women’s clubs in San Juan and in the Colegio de Abogados. She shopped for clothes in San Juan and read the San Juan newspapers and talked about the theater and politics as if she lived in San Juan, in her cir-

cles. But after a day’s work, she came home to a cold-water shower and the tiresome chores of the house, checking in on dinner, notic- ing the spot of dust on the armchair, the milk stain on the dining room table.

We were her little soldiers, obeying her every glance, fearing her mood those nights when dinner got cold, and she would sit on the porch, in her heels and her perfume, and wait for my father. I avoided her when I saw her like that, and avoided my father, too, when he came home late.We were in bed by the time the tires of his car rolled up the driveway and the car door slammed shut and the front door opened.

His footsteps were steady, deliberate (he never weaved or stum- bled, no matter how drunk). I listened for my mother’s whispery voice, hoping to hear laughter. One night they were quarreling in their bedroom, another fight I tried to ignore. But she was crying hysterically, her shrieks coming through the walls to my bedroom. I got out of bed and walked down the unlit hallway and stood at their door. He had grabbed her by her forearms and was shaking her. She was sobbing. He raised his right arm and the blunt palm of his hand came down and slapped her across the face. I screamed. He let go, and came toward me, ordering me to go to bed, and shut the door.

I

n the last weeks of mother’s pregnancy, my grandmother came to stay with us, and for a while there was calm in our house. But I brought home a bad report card and my parents were livid.The nuns and Mother Superior, her pockmarked, potato-shaped face reddening with anger, had warned me and had slipped a note to my parents. I had a C in deportment, my first C ever, like a neon sign at the bottom of a row of A’s. Talked too much in class, the nuns said, interrupted the teachers, disturbed the other students. My mother cried, shaking me

by the shoulders, and when my father got home, she told him. He took off his belt, rolled it around his fist, and marched me to my room. He was a methodical man.The lashes came slowly, striking me across the back of my legs and thighs. One minute. Five minutes. I held tight to the pillow, the pain of the sting unbearable.

My grandmother didn’t stand for it.They were seated at the din- ing table, the three of them, father eating, swallowing fast, lecturing. He liked lecturing.

Children are property, he said, a man’s wealth. They obey their parents, never raise their voices, and never embarrass their parents. He pointed at me, but it could have been any of us, my sister, or my brother. No one interrupted him.

My grandmother rose from the table, very tall, very thin in her housedress. She gathered her things, her small bag, her purse, and announced that she was leaving that minute.Angeles and I ran after her and mother followed us, pleading with my grandmother to turn back, making apologies for my father, but my grandmother kept walking. Together we moved as one shadow down the dirt road, my grand- mother straight as a pin, an elongated figure in the moonlight. She walked steadily, wringing her handkerchief in her hand, wiping my tears, and together we waited on the highway, at the gas station, until a public car on the San Juan route came by and she stooped in, a stub- born woman, graying and frail, giving me her handkerchief, with her embroidered initial,
M
. It smelled of talc and Maja soap.

S

chool was out in May, and my new sister was born prematurely, weighing less than five pounds. My mother lay in a bed at the hospital for several days, her slender arms bruised from intravenous needles, the skin of her face brittle like wax. She looked exhausted, her hair matted, her lips bitten. The baby, smaller than some of my

dolls, with shut eyes and a full head of hair, was hooked to tubes in an incubator, barely stirring. She was so little, so bony, I wanted to cry. Mother had a desperate look, but when she noticed us, Angeles and I, standing in the doorway of her hospital room, her face changed, the grimace turning into a smile, as if miraculously the pain had disappeared.We were still wearing our confirmation dresses, the ones she had had made for us, stark white, light as cotton frocks. She had wanted to be there in church with us, but the baby had come suddenly. She sat up in her bed, pushed herself up by the elbows, and spread out her arms, giving us kisses that smelled of hospital and sour breath. They named my little sister Carmen Monserrate, after my grandmother, and in a few days she was taken out of the incuba- tor and they brought her home.

A few months later, my father finished his residency, and we left the road in Fajardo and my afternoons playing baseball with the boys, my games of jacks with girls whose names I would not remember for long, and those days when I dreamed I was a ballerina.

Chapter Five

The Doctor’s Town

T

he house had gone to sleep, doors locked, porch lights out, and soft breathing was coming from the bedrooms down the

hall. A low light burned in the kitchen. It blinked, going off and on, throwing ghostly light on the table. Angeles and Amaury were still there, whispering, occasionally laughing, breaking the silence like thunder in a dry night. I could hear them from my room, could hear the refrigerator door click open and shut, the bottle caps rolling on the floor.

They are still at it, still drinking, Sara said, pulling the bedspread over her bare legs. She turned off the bedside lamp and pushed the door closed with her foot and leaned closer to me, spreading a blan- ket over me.The air-conditioning was huffing at full blast as it always seems to be in Texas. I was freezing. It was two in the morning, and we had buried our mother that day.

Buried our mother that day.We didn’t believe it.Why, it was just the other day, Sara started to say, and paused. She was crying. I could hear it, couldn’t see it, but could hear it. I said, Better that she went this way, fast. She didn’t get old and sick, she didn’t waste away in a hospital. Better this way, Sara said.Yes, better.Those are the circum- locutions of grief. She didn’t believe that either. There was no good way for our mother to go. There was never a right time.

People have to have lies.

We had to have lies. Sara had her lie, and I had mine. Or, to put it another way, Sara had her truth and I had mine.

That night she took me across the path of our mother’s life as she had known her.

When you and Angeles talk about her, it’s another person, she said. I didn’t know that woman like you did. She was different here, Sara said. Different? I said. Her light had gone out, I said, cruelly. Sara shook her head. She wanted the mother she knew, not mine. She wanted the story to begin after father, she wanted it to begin when she was five years old, and mother remarried and came to live in Texas.

The way mother had told the story, she met Leon at a restaurant in San Juan. He was in Puerto Rico making arrangements for an Exchange Club convention. She was at the restaurant that evening having coffee with her friend Sorrito. He came over to the table, a tall man, at least six feet, with a strong chest and a flat stomach. He had gray hair, nearly white, and his face had deep lines from the cor- ners of his eyes down his cheeks, but he was still handsome, still had the looks that could turn the heads of middle-aged women. He introduced himself and handed her his business card. He was in pub- lic relations. He asked if he could buy them a drink.

Mother said no but took notice of his drawl, which was very polite and low, as if he were tipping an imaginary Stetson hat, bow- ing slightly in the presence of ladies. He was wearing a well-cut suit in a place where no man wore a suit, and he looked at her as if he were dreaming.

She asked him to sit down and join them, and two minutes later she was taking out her wallet to show him the pictures of her six children. He smiled, saying the things she wanted to hear. But you are so young to have six children. She blushed.

Now her eyes were on him and she forgot that Sorrito, who was

looking from one to the other, was catching the moment, sitting across from her, and listening to Leon as he told her about his own children. He had two, already grown and married, with children themselves. He was a grandfather, had been married once or twice, and was now divorced. Facts and dates. He was a Texan born and bred, and there was no doubt of that from the way he walked, as if entering a corral with horses to tame.

She saw him again and he met our family, all but me and Angeles. We were away in college. Months later I got a letter from her—Leon and I are getting married.You will love him as much as I do, she said. She was leaving Puerto Rico and moving to Texas. I couldn’t believe it, my mother with another man, my mother giving up her job and the house she had finally built in Hato Rey. My mother in Texas, of all places. It didn’t make sense. But I didn’t tell her this. I told her that I was very happy for her, but I was only relieved. I could stop worrying about her, about her being alone and coming home from work and lying on her bed crying. Now she had a man.

Remember that old Cadillac they had when you moved to Texas, to Bryan? I asked Sara, grimacing. It rattled and groaned but Leon had to have his big car. Sara laughed.And that gas station they opened in Bryan, remember? Yes, Sara said, don’t blame her, that’s what Leon wanted and mother went along. She always went along, I said, no matter what she wanted. She was out there with him at that gas station in the highway the day they opened it, with all the little American flags announcing the opening, and she was handing out red carnations to the ladies. So like mother, I said. Well, that business didn’t last long, the station went broke, Sara said.

Nothing lasted very long, I said.

No. How many towns did you live in? I asked, knowing them by memory. I had seen almost all of them on my annual visits around Christmas—Littlefield, Kilgore, Sweetwater, Abilene, Cleveland,

Alice (Alice!), Abilene. Each a stop on the trail, silos and cowherds, dry land, oil drills, heat, dust storms and ice storms, flat sky, long roads, but mother found something good in each of these places, glossing them up, building them up not so much for our benefit but for hers—a little college, a cute main street, a quaint tradition that made each town special in some way, even in the desolation of West Texas.They moved from east to west, from north to south, long dis- tances in a state where a city a four-hour car ride away is considered around the corner. Leon worked for the chambers of commerce, seemed to change jobs almost every year while he looked for the next big opportunity, pulling up stakes, full of hope and good tid- ings. But he was past fifty and the offers became scarce and smaller. Abilene was their longest stop. Sara liked Abilene, and mother liked it better than any other place. It was a bigger town. They built a house with the little courtyard and Leon had a good job and she had

her office. She had somewhere to go every day, people to talk to.

Months after she had arrived in Texas, knowing not a single soul and speaking English like the foreigner she was, she took the Texas bar exam and passed it on the first try. She became pregnant with her seventh child soon after she married Leon. A forty-five-year-old woman, pregnant.We couldn’t believe it.

I was spending some time with her in Bryan that spring, taking time to figure out what I wanted to do with my life, when the baby came. She had her suitcase packed for days. The evening she knew it was time, Leon was not there—he had gone away that very day on business. I drove her to the hospital. She checked in as if walking into a hotel. She seemed so calm, signing in, while I was a wreck, holding her by the elbow should she fall, but she was steadier than I was as we got to the elevator and the nurses took her to the labor room. I sat in the reception room—the only woman, the only girl—with husbands waiting for their firstborn, or for their fifth-born. A doctor came out

and asked if my mother’s husband was there. I got up and said, No, but I’m here. I’m her oldest child, and I want to be with her. He looked at me. He thought about it, and led me to the labor room.

She was lying mostly naked on a bed with straps. Contractions were coming fast, and the nurses came and went, seeming to me indifferent. She looked pasty under the hospital lights, drops of sweat broke on her forehead and above her lips. Her hair was matted, wet. I took her hand right away. She crushed it. Old, she looked old. Her stomach bulged like a tethered leather balloon. She twisted and moaned with every contraction. But she didn’t scream like the younger women in the room. After a long time, they took her away. They didn’t let me stay with her. An hour or so later, Leon Jr. was born.

You forget the pain, she told me, looking half drugged and exhausted in her hospital room. The flowers that come with those occasions had yet to arrive. But Leon was there finally, standing by the window, in his suit and jacket, totally at ease. He was there now and they were taking turns holding the baby. I got up to leave, and kissing her good night, I said, I don’t know how you do it; I’ll never have children.

I drove to her house and told my little sisters that they had a baby brother.