Becoming the Butlers (17 page)

“They scare me too,” she answered. “Something terrible must have happened to him to make him paint that way. Maybe it’s better I don’t know. He wouldn’t look at us when we arrived at the airport. Even after we settled here, he still pretended as if we belonged to someone else. My father would talk to me and even touch me but I knew he wasn’t hearing or feeling. He even forgot the baby. We should have stayed in Mexico,” Pilar concluded.

During the day, Mrs. Vasquez’s sister watched the baby. She was a spare, stooped woman who wore the same shapeless white cotton dress and white plastic thongs every day. Her name was Roja, after the cherry-shaped red birthmark across her right cheek. The first time she came to our apartment she wouldn’t go beyond the front hall, and clung to the doorknob with both hands. Her sister spoke sharply to her, pushed her into my father’s armchair, gave her a box of crayons and a coloring book. I thought Roja might be retarded, but Pilar explained that her aunt had suffered a breakdown in Mexico City and was undergoing treatment at Bellevue Hospital.

“Do you think the baby is safe with her?” I had asked.

“Yes,” Pilar answered. “The only person Roja hurts is herself. It’s very sad. Her groom ran away with one of her bridesmaids the morning after the wedding. When Roja found out, she tried to throw herself through the hotel window.”

Pilar’s aunt now had a romantic, doomed aura which I envied. I wished I could be so dignified. Roja fed the baby and sang to her in a high toneless voice in a language I knew wasn’t Spanish and sounded like the chirping of extravagant birds or the buzzing of magical bees. I only saw her in the mornings, before I went to school, her right thumbnail tracing the black lines in the coloring book.

Other relatives and friends of the Vasquezes also came to visit. They were mostly middle-aged women with stiff black hair piled high on their heads like tiaras. Their gifts were the same: bowls of candied fruit, plastic hair combs, and movie magazines. One girl not much older than me brought champagne and seemed surprised not to find newlyweds or a newborn baby. These women filled our apartment with their musk cologne and cigarette smoke, chattering loudly as they painted their nails and dropped ashes all over the carpet. The radio was always tuned to a Spanish station, and the women danced in pairs, hooting loudly along with the bright tunes, hollering in ecstasy whenever a Julio Iglesias song played. Sometimes they even washed their hair in the sink, and I would find thick black strands clogging the drain.

My father was “Señor Harris,” in reverent tones. These women obviously didn’t find the Vasquezes’ present living arrangement strange. My father slept on the fold-out couch in the living room, so there wasn’t any suggestion of impropriety. Perhaps they thought it was only right. My mother had taken George away, therefore my father should give the abandoned Vasquez family something in return. In their eyes our spacious apartment with two bathrooms was more than an even exchange.

My father had decided to continue learning Spanish, and Mrs. Vasquez would be his teacher. Their lessons were very unique. Every night, after dinner, he and Mrs. Vasquez would go into the living room and watch that evening’s scheduled television programs. Mrs. Vasquez, in her faded yellow muumuu, sat in an armchair three inches away from the set, a tray containing a glass of iced tea and lemon cookies balanced precariously on her lap. My father sat attentively next to her on a stool with a pen and notebook. Pilar would flip the TV channels (nobody cared about a specific station) and for the next three hours Mrs. Vasquez would chatter loudly in Spanish over the dialogue of each program. Pilar told me that because her mother couldn’t understand English she simply supplied her own narrative. Her imagination was terrific. A comedy about two car salesmen was transformed by Mrs. Vasquez’s own script into a serious drama about two young seminary students struggling to understand God. The Eyewitness News sportscaster wasn’t elaborating about the college NCAA finals but discussing different fashions in boys’ sneakers. And Johnny Carson was a doctor who invited his glamorous patients on air to discuss their ailments.

Pilar had given up trying to correct her mother a long time ago, and could tune out Mrs. Vasquez’s ravings and listen to the actual broadcast. But my father, who thumbed
continuously through his dictionary, hung on her every word. When he couldn’t find a definition he’d raise his hand like one of his own pupils. Mrs. Vasquez then lifted herself wearily from the cushions and trudged through the apartment until she discovered the item in question. I remember her bringing in a bottle of Listerine, a pair of shoelaces, a stuffed animal from Gloria’s crib, a styptic pencil, and one of my old training bras. If it was something intangible, such as a physical or spiritual condition, my father and Mrs. Vasquez would play their own sort of charades.

“Sick?” my father would guess as Mrs. Vasquez swayed back and forth holding her stomach.

“Maybe she’s pregnant,” I suggested.

“Then why wouldn’t she stick a cushion under her robe?”

Mrs. Vasquez moaned.

“I think she’s hungry, Dad.”

“Hungry? Hmmm, you may be right, Rachel.”

Of course Mrs. Vasquez couldn’t tell us if our guess was correct or not, and I was sure my father learned a whole category of words which, if he ever returned to Madrid, would cause him great embarrassment. As for me, I couldn’t watch Johnny Carson again without half expecting a stethoscope to slip out from beneath his tie.

I wouldn’t have minded my father’s Spanish lessons so much if he hadn’t tried to repair things too. James bought himself a mammoth kit from Sears, with tools that looked more useful for a sixteen-wheeler, a high-grade flashlight that could blind a raccoon, and a thick paperback titled
Big Jim’s Fix-It-Yourself Handbook.
I didn’t know if he was trying to be George or didn’t trust the new super, a recent Russian immigrant who, according to Mrs. Rosen, was such an idiot that he had nearly electrocuted
himself when he tried to plug her broken iron into the wrong socket. My father made the blades of Mrs. Vasquez’s blender whirl again, installed an illegal cable television unscrambler for George Jr., fixed the tire on Luisa’s tricycle, and built a small bookcase out of pine boards for Pilar. His last project, thankfully, was our leaky shower-head, which had come to resemble Niagara Falls. Luckily the apartment had two bathrooms, or we would have burst waiting for my father to finish. He promised he’d only be an hour, but by midnight was drenched by the shower, which was beginning to make painful whining noises as if the pipes were being slowly strangled to death. James decided to call it a night and continue working the next day, but the shower committed suicide in the early morning hours. We woke up to a loud crash—and saw the bathtub porcelain shattered in pieces like a dried lakebed, the broken shower-head surrounded by rusting metal coils. In the end my father paid eight hundred dollars to The Elegant John, Inc. and
Big Jim
wound up in the trash, which pleased me immensely.

He was also trying to learn to draw. This was a secret which I accidentally discovered. One night, when I couldn’t bear another one of Mrs. Vasquez’s Spanish specialties, I decided to order-in Chinese. My father usually kept the take-out menus crammed with other junk in his deep desk drawer. I couldn’t find the menu but I did discover a roll of papers bound together with a heavy cord. I quickly untied it, expecting to find legal documents with the Vasquezes as exclusive beneficiaries. At first I thought the sketches were George’s. Although they didn’t resemble his expressionistic style, I couldn’t believe my father, in addition to Spanish and his handyman activities, would also attempt to be an artist. He wasn’t very good, but I could tell he had spent a lot of time erasing and redrawing
every line. All this revision made my mother look watery, blurred, like a reflection in a rippling pond. She stood in profile in every scene, her long hair blowing about her shoulders, her arms outstretched as if ready for an embrace. She also wore the same outfit, a long cape with billowing sleeves and, I suppose because my father had trouble drawing feet, her legs stopped abruptly at her ankles. I traced my forefinger over my father’s lines the same way Roja studied her coloring books. The paper felt warm and rough, almost like flesh. On the top of every page was the title: “Elizabeth in the Park,” which confused me because I didn’t see any trees or grass. In the lower corner my father had signed his full name, James Campbell Harris, in large sloping letters: a proud declaration of love.

“That’s not a take-out menu,” I heard my father say behind me.

I whirled around, trying to hide the sketches behind my back. My father had been helping Mrs. Vasquez with dinner and brought in with him an odor of smoke and onions. His face was still red from the oven heat and the white apron loosely tied over his hips was splattered with gravy stains. As he lunged for his charcoals he dropped a pan he had been carrying in his right hand.

“Don’t!” I cried as he wrestled the sketches from my grasp. “They’re good.”

“No they’re not,” James muttered, tearing the pages in two. “Not good enough. Anyway, what’s the point of saving them? She’ll never come back.”

I reached out and grabbed my father’s arm, hoping to save at least one drawing. James pulled back so suddenly that I slipped and banged my head against the wall. My left eye throbbed in pain and I suddenly imagined a violet scar blossoming over my brow, exactly the same as my father’s old bruise.

“I’m sorry, Rachel,” my father gasped. “Are you all right?”

I swayed unsteadily as the room swirled about in colored streaks like my mother’s spin art. Why couldn’t everything for once be still? My world would never stop revolving. Even the sketches, which my father dropped, seemed to whirl in midair before they drifted downward.

“Mrs. Rosen was wrong,” James said quietly. “I don’t really want to be George. I don’t want to be anyone. Do you know what Limbo is?”

I shook my head.

“Now I don’t mean a low stick you shimmy under on a crowded Caribbean beach. I’m talking about the place for souls barred from heaven, a state of oblivion, according to my dictionary. Well, this is the place where I thought the Vasquezes would bring me. What I strove for was not happiness or unhappiness, but just being. A kind of constant anesthesia, which had to be better than Finlandia. A well-mixed martini can bring Limbo for a couple of hours, but you’ll always be in hell the next morning.”

“Did you get to Limbo?” I asked.

“No, I’m still in hell, even without the hangover,” he answered gravely. “Do you know that every time I draw a diagram in class I see Elizabeth’s face? My students must think I’m mad the way I keep gaping at the blackboard. Once, when bisecting an angle, I saw George’s face instead, and started stabbing my notebook with my compass. Those two haunt me everywhere. The token clerk at Seventy-ninth Street has George’s squinty eyes. Suzie Winchester who sits in front row in my ten
A.M.
Geometry class has Elizabeth’s profile. The Vasquezes all look like George, even Isabel. What did I think I was doing? They’ll
have to leave one day. Or maybe I’ll be the one to leave.”

There was one last sketch my father didn’t destroy. As he turned around I crouched down and grabbed the page to my chest.

“Put that under your pillow,” my father instructed, “and make a wish. Maybe fairy tales do come true.”

I gazed down at the sketch I saved. It was barely finished: mostly smudges. My mother looked like a shadow, an impression burned upon a blank wall.

That Friday I stayed in the library after school, and slipped into the stairway when the librarian began to lock up. When I was convinced there was no one left inside the Winfield Academy, I stole pliers and a hammer from the shop room, and a trash bag from the school’s supply cabinet. The only light in the hallway was a red exit light, and I had trouble making out the numbers on Olivia’s lock. The cleaning woman, a drunk the students called Jenny Gin and Tonic, had broken a glass vial in the Bio lab and the strong chemical odor stung my eyes. Upstairs, on the rooftop gym, a sole basketball player shuffled about with a lumpy-sounding ball. I hammered on Olivia’s lock several times, until the metal latch finally came loose.

Of course I had been inspired by Nicole’s story about Cecily and the theft of the Cartier watch. But my real motivation was James. No one could help him, and I realized I had better start helping myself. I didn’t really believe that Olivia would be my best friend because I robbed her locker. I wasn’t even sure how I would hide everything and then pretend to discover it and be hero for a day. As my father once said, “Extreme circumstances call for extreme measures.” The theft was an extreme act that would have extreme results. I couldn’t stand floating
about in my current state of limbo. Something had to give, and I didn’t mind being the first one to go.

Olivia’s locker door swung open a few inches and
the contents came tumbling out like a bouquet released from its bow. And what flowers! At least six silk scarves made by Italian designers, one hundred dollars each, were carelessly tossed at the bottom of the locker. On a hook a damp green bathing suit that smelled of chlorine dangled like an African vine next to a baby blue cashmere scarf. In the locker slats were black-and-white postcards of Manhattan, old movie stills: the Woolworth Building at night, the Brooklyn Bridge in a silvery mist. No messages marked these postcards, the address box empty of words and stamps. A warped forty-five of a song called “Dazzled!!!” by Malcolm G. was stored on the top shelf, along with a Plaza Hotel towel and a tube of pearly shampoo, a drop of which I poured in my hand and rubbed between my fingers. On to Olivia’s notebooks, the pages crammed with exams and compositions. One teacher’s remark read: “Excellent, you truly comprehend Conrad’s dualism,” and on a midterm, “A, as always, but were you really trying?” I examined Olivia’s handwriting, delicate and spindly, the letters at times resembling elegant spiders. “Sundays are absolute doom,” she wrote on one notebook page, “because Father can’t smile and lie at the same time.” Crumpled on the floor was a melancholy poem I picked up, unfolded and still can quote: