Becoming the Butlers (3 page)

“Dance literature!” I said. “That doesn’t make sense. Kind of like architecture music, or physics poetry.”

I was quite pleased with my similes, and Cynthia frowned and asked me my age.

“Only four years younger than you. I was born when my mother was a freshman. Do you have any children?”

“No, of course not,” Cynthia said.

“You
do
realize that’s my father, don’t you? I mean, I’m not his date or anything. And we’re meeting my mom, his wife, at the airport in Madrid.”

“Oh,” Cynthia said slowly. She took out a pack of cigarettes and fumbled for matches. I gave her my Empire State Building lighter, and that was the last I ever saw of that little item. I heard Cynthia ask someone at the end of a smoking aisle if they would very much mind switching seats so she could sit next to her new friend James. The two were only five aisles behind me, but it seemed like they could be sitting in another galaxy.

“Excuse me,” the old lady next to me whispered. “But I really think you should be paying attention to the stewardesses.”

I turned my head away from my father and Cynthia
and stared at her. The old lady looked very much like our next door neighbor Mrs. Rosen. They both smelled vaguely of cat food, wore Aran cardigan sweaters with two missing buttons, and had bad perms which made their frizzy hair look like steel wool. But this woman seemed gentler than the formidable Mrs. Rosen, and her hastily penciled eyebrows gave her face a fuzzy expression.

“I’m Mrs. Simon,” she told me after the stewardesses finished modeling the inflatable vests. “This will be the first time I’ve been to Europe.”

“Europe,” I said. “Funny, but I just can’t think of Madrid as Europe.”

“But of course it is. Don’t you know Geography?”

Her voice had a familiar authoritarian ring, and as I guessed, she was a school teacher.

“Today’s schools don’t teach Geography,” she told me. “My students think Hiroshima is the teriyaki place in the shopping mall.”

“See,” I began, but gave up. How could I explain that my mother was all Madrid meant to me. My father had shown me glossy guidebooks with pictures of flamenco dancers and toreadors, and bought me a Berlitz tape, which I erased and used to tape a “Who” album. I didn’t want to learn Spanish, didn’t want to go to the Prado or eat tapas or drink sangria. Europe was a place where passengers on
The Love Boat
were always headed. Neither I, nor my mother, belonged there.

“Excuse me,” I said quickly, feeling the onset of another crying bout.

“But you should stay in your seat until we take off,” Mrs. Simon cried as I nearly stepped on her foot to make my way. My father didn’t notice me as I passed his seat. He and Cynthia were both drinking Bloody Marys and sharing a bag of Planters Peanuts. The bathroom cubicle was so small that I could sit on the sink and prop my
sneakers on the wall. The white light made my face look mottled and yellow as cheese. I felt nauseous and took two and a half Dramamine pills even though the directions said to take one. Then I grabbed a handful of the rough brown paper the airlines called tissues, and began to sob. If only I didn’t look so awful afterward. My lids would swell up and resemble potato skins, my nose would look like a red turnip, and my throat would burn as if I just ate a handful of jalepeño peppers.

This was becoming more than a daily routine. I’d cry while buttering my toast, cry in the dark sanctuary of the girls’ locker room, sniffle in the middle of Chemistry, sniffle while waiting in the cafeteria line, and as soon as I got home, let it all come out in torrents in my bedroom. I was so surprised by how much water my eyes were capable of spilling that I took to sleeping on bunched-up towels.

The funny thing was I never really knew for whom I was crying. My mother, of course, was the prime candidate. Even a month after she was gone, I still woke up convinced I heard her high, mellifluous voice chiding the news reporter on WINS radio for mispronouncing the governor’s name, or washing the coffee cups she forgot to rinse the night before, or whistling “Happy Birthday” to Dixie, our old cat, who would only then consent to leave her precarious perch on the fire escape.

Then I realized the WINS news announcer was reading the headlines to an empty kitchen, the clanking of the coffee cups was the sound of steam escaping the radiator, and “Happy Birthday” only the whistling teakettle my father neglected. Sometimes I wished she was dead. Dead was more heroic, more concrete, and I could visit her grave every Sunday, knowing that beneath the muddy soil there was a body, a substance to be reckoned with. Instead, I could only sniff her green silk jacket that hung
in the closet like an abandoned antique, still reeking of jasmine perfume.

I suppose a part of me cried for my father too, who often couldn’t even make it to the front door and fell asleep in the hallway, his shirt collar damp with vodka, a drowning man. I was powerless to help him. The purplish bruise, shaped like a pressed violet, was still faintly visible over his left eyebrow. A couple of nights after my mother left, my father had walked, stone cold sober, into his bedroom wall. When I found him on the floor, weeping, he threw his shoe at me and told me never to enter his room without knocking. After that I always felt as if I were scaling a barbed wire fence. If I kept up with my father’s sardonic comments I could reach the top, jump over, and be free. But his bitterness made me slip and fall, and there I was, at the bottom, hoping the twisted metal wouldn’t cut me too much as I started up again.

But mainly I was crying for myself, astounded by just how bad things had turned. I too was terrified about what we would discover in Madrid, and then, what would happen afterward. My father would never be Cary Grant, and my mother wasn’t the type to let anyone carry her down any grand staircase. And even though I tried to hate him I knew George wasn’t a Nazi but someone who unfortunately fell in love with my mother.

The pills began to affect me. My limbs felt heavy and clumsy; tiny purple dots swirled before my eyes. I returned to my seat and found Mrs. Simon snoring loudly and curled up in a ball. The movie had started but something was wrong with the projector. The picture was out of focus and flickering; I could just barely make out a blonde girl running across a field of daisies. Most of the passengers were asleep and those awake didn’t seem to care about the faulty film. The flickering scenes made me dizzy and when I closed my eyes and then opened them,
other floating images had replaced what was on the screen. Hallucinations, I realized, either from the pills or my exhaustion. I saw Cynthia Lime distributing her anti-jet-lag cereal to a cluster of pigeons on Broadway, Mrs. Simon trying on sweatshirts at the airport shop, my father balancing a pyramid of plastic cocktail cups on his head, and superimposing herself on all these crazy images, my mother, serene and smiling, whispering something I couldn’t quite hear.

TWO

At Barajas airport, men in flannel shirts, looking like lumberjacks, tried to take our suitcases and store them in taxis. The Spanish they spoke was very different from the Spanish I heard on Amsterdam Avenue; softer, thicker, the words
shag carpet
came to my mind. My father and I looked longingly at the arrivals gate, both of us too embarrassed to admit that somehow we hoped my mother would be there. But the airport was deserted at that early morning hour, and red helium balloons, left over from a late night welcome party, dipped half-heartedly from the ceiling as if we weren’t worthy of their buoyancy. Cynthia was staying with an exchange student from college, and had written her address on the back of a pack of matches with a purple pen that matched her raincoat. She said she hadn’t slept well on the flight, and a clumsy stewardess had spilled red wine over her sleeve. The stain looked like a strawberry, and she fretted about how she could clean the blouse in Madrid.

“I assume one can buy laundry detergent somewhere,”

James said with a yawn. He hadn’t slept much either, and his creased face looked gray.

“Oh, it’s not the detergent,” declared Cynthia, “it’s the water. The water is filthy. My friend says if you took a teaspoon and placed it under a microscope, you’d see
The Night of the Living Dead.”

“No, you wouldn’t,” I snapped. “Water’s water, wherever you are.”

We were all tired and irritable. I wanted to get rid of this girl who kept looking at my father with hungry eyes, find a room somewhere, take a hot bath, and then find my mother. So far Madrid was a conveyer belt rotating the same suitcases, dirty plastic waiting chairs, luggage crates with rusty wheels, and porters in greasy uniforms who whistled through tobacco-stained teeth.

“My friend’s waiting for me outside,” Cynthia told my father. “I’d ask her if she had any extra rooms, but the Señora she lives with is very particular about men staying over.”

“Well, nice meeting you,” James said.
“Hasta la vista.”

Cynthia hitched her knapsack on her shoulder and walked away, still facing us, waving. I hoped she’d trip over a stray suitcase, back into a wall, but somehow she made it safely out the door. Her cereal bags, I noticed, were all empty.

“What does that mean?” I asked my father.
“Hasta la vista?”

“Till we meet again.”

“Well, I don’t ever want to see her again.”

“Melody,” my father said in surprise. “You’re actually jealous. Thank you, I’m really flattered.”

“I’m not jealous. If you want to go off with her, by all means go. I’ll find Mom myself. She’ll probably be a lot happier seeing me than
you.
”

My father bit his lip, started to say something, and then lit a cigarette instead. The flame of his silver lighter wavered in the air as if unsure of the new foreign atmosphere. We had left the terminal and now stood uncertainly with our bags. The bright sun made the pavement sparkle, and it was then I first noticed that the light in Spain was a yellow that could look moldy brown, like a bruised banana. Cars parked at the curb picked up passengers and then sped away.

“We’re both tired,” my father began, “and probably a little scared too. I mean, let’s face it, what we’re doing is a pretty crazy thing. But necessary. Very necessary.”

“I’m sorry,” I told my father. “I didn’t mean what I just said.”

“I know you didn’t, Melody,” my father said, holding my hand. His knuckles were red and scraped; another recent accident. “We’d better look in my guidebook for somewhere to stay.” My father made a policy of never having a strict arrangement. Too much planning took all the fun and spontaneity out of a trip. He preferred to “wing it” and was confident we would always get by. My father flipped through several pages and groaned. “Everything’s way too expensive. I thought Madrid was the budget capital of the world.” A taxi stopped in front of us and honked twice. “Hey,” my father cried, looking up. “A taxi driver should know this town. Wait here while I ask about a cheap place.”

My father went up to the car closest to him and spoke haltingly in Spanish. The man nodded his head, grabbed my father’s suitcase and threw it into the trunk. My father waved at me to join him, and when I reached him, he whispered in my ear, “Juan says he knows the perfect place.
Muy barato.
”

“What does that mean?”

“Rachel, did you ever once listen to your language tapes?
Barato
means cheap.
Muy barato,
very cheap. Juan said his cousin is the hotel manager, and that he’ll take good care of us.”

“What’s the name of this place?”

“I think he said Rick’s. Like Rick’s Café. You know.
Casablanca.
”

Rick’s Café was a café, not a hotel. What was my father talking about? The back of Juan’s cab was very hot, the vinyl seat sticking to my thighs like plastic. Over the car radio an announcer barked stories that all sounded like declarations of a national emergency. A previous passenger had left a soiled movie magazine,
¡HOLA!,
and the unfamiliar words and lurid photographs made me finally realize I was in a foreign land. Juan asked my father for an “American smoke,” and when he handed him the pack of Marlboros, the taxi driver took out one cigarette and then pocketed the box.

“Well.” My father shrugged. “Maybe that’s the custom here.” Before we left for Spain my father had delivered a lecture about culture orientation—how not to act like an ugly American. Some of his suggestions included not ordering Diet Pepsi with ice cubes in cafés, making do with cold showers, and forsaking commercial-strength hairdryers with the capacity to blow out every fuse in town. In an attempt to iron out this present wrinkle of cultural confusion my father leaned over and tried chatting with Juan. His accent, as far as I could tell, was not bad; hours and hours of intensive Berlitz tapes and hanging around the Salvadorian
mercado
on 110th Street had helped. But the driver, after securing his week’s worth of tobacco, was no longer loquacious, and shut the plastic partition. The taxi’s rocking motion lulled me to sleep. I leaned my head against my father’s shoulder, and felt his hand stroking my hair.

The radio announcer screamed in my ear. I sat up with a jolt, ready to ask Juan if he could please lower the volume. But the radio was turned off, and the loud words emanated from my father.

“You tricked us,” he shouted. “
Ladrón,
thief!”