When Tito Loved Clara (23 page)

“I'm hungry. I want lasagna.”

“Girl, you eat lasagna every day.”

“I know. I like lasagna.”

“Lasagna likes you, too. You better be careful.”

“You calling me fat?”

“I'm just saying.”

All of which reminded Clara that she had been fasting since mid-night, reminded her how her life had become ruled by the demands of obstetricians and gynecologists. The nurse parted the curtain and smiled at her. “OK,” she said. “They're ready.” She had a wheelchair and Clara sat down and was pushed past the other curtained beds in the ward, occupied by women who'd just had eggs extracted or transferred into their wombs or by women undergoing the kind of procedure that was about to be performed on her—exploratory, evaluative. Down the hallway, in the operating theater, the doctor, the anesthesiologist, and a nurse were waiting, all in their scrubs. The removal of her clothes and her transport in a wheelchair left her feeling like an invalid. Suddenly, she wished Thomas could be in the room with her. Whatever his faults, he was usually calm and sensible. She stood up from the wheelchair and got onto the table, sliding her legs into the stirrups. She had the feeling of vulnerability that she always had before a gynecological exam, opening the most private part of herself to someone who was, essentially, a stranger.

“Are you ready?” asked the doctor.

Clara nodded.

“You might feel a little tickle in your throat,” said the anesthesiologist, “but by the time you do, this'll all be over.” He applied the mask to her face.

C
LARA RECEDED FROM
that suburban New Jersey operating room, receded back through the years to her bedroom in her father's house in Inwood, where she lay in a dreamless sleep. Into this blackness and silence came Dolores's voice:

“Wake up!”

The covers were pulled from her and a stick was brought down on her legs. Clara became fully conscious of everything at once: the shouted words, the sunlight coming through the thin curtains, and the terrible fact that she was no longer on the farm with her
abuelos
—that the farm, for her, had ceased to exist. She thrashed among the bedsheets, looking for a way back into sleep, back into her old life, as the second blow hit her.

“
¿Qué pasa?
” said Clara, freeing herself from the threadbare linens and jumping off the bed. “
¿Qué pasa?
” she cried. The room was small and cold and unfamiliar and there was no place for her to go that was out of range of Dolores's stick, a wooden extension pole for a paint roller that was covered in white and yellow drippings. It had a threaded steel top, which struck her on the knee as she tried to dodge the third blow. Dolores was tall, with an almost masculine build, and long arms. Clara could see the crescent wound her bite the night before had left on Dolores's cheek.

As if reading her thoughts, Dolores said, “You think I'm going to let you bite me again, you filthy child?” She swung and Clara blocked the stick with the meat of her palm. The sting sizzled from her elbow to her shoulder and then into her chest like an electric shock.

“I'm going to tell my papi!” she cried.

“Ha!” exclaimed Dolores, striking her again, this time on the shoulder. “If you tell your father that I beat you, I will only beat
you harder!” She swung again, the stick rapping against Clara's forearm.

“
¿Por qué? ¿Por qué?
” asked Clara, weeping and looking for some-place to hide. But there was no such place.

T
HOSE FIRST WEEKS
of her life in New York—before she started school—were spent almost entirely within the walls of the house, seemingly always within range of Dolores's stick, which she used to compensate for the impediment of her swollen midsection, poking Clara with it if she didn't pay attention, rapping the floor with it to emphasize the seriousness of something she was saying. Clara might as well have been in prison. And like a prisoner, she was kept to a strict schedule and subject to random acts of cruelty. Every morning she was berated from sleep, struck with the stick. She put on her clothes and went downstairs.

Downstairs was Dolores's domain. Downstairs was dirt. Down-stairs was the disarray of a house that had never been fully moved into, a house that was only half-habitable, semi-renovated. Down-stairs were filthy floors that Clara would sweep and scrub with a handheld brush. Downstairs were dusty windows that she would clean with newspapers she could not read. Downstairs were photo-graphs of Dolores's family with their bony noses and high-yellow complexions. There was no picture of Clara, no picture of anyone in her father's family. Downstairs was an archaeology of dirty dishes in daily layers going back a week. Downstairs was a place far from what she had imagined when she thought of her parents' life in New York. Downstairs was the refrigerator, which bore drops of blood from leaking plastic meat packets, hardened mounds of molding cheese, the sour scrim of milk. Downstairs was Dolores herself, demanding, displeased, uncomfortable, talking constantly on the phone, complaining about her, listing her woes to family members near and far. When Clara asked about where her father was the answer was always the same way: “He's at the store.”

Downstairs the stick was never far away.

On the farm, she had come and gone as she pleased, unremarked and unscheduled. Only darkness reigned her in. But here her life was reduced to her bedroom, the ground floor, and the basement. The basement was unfinished, with a dirt floor and no lights, the only illumination coming through the small cellar windows. In a corner stood the washing machine, a cantankerous, jittery white beast that gurgled and snorted its way through the loads, foam bubbling at the seams of the door, a drool of water leaking out from its undercarriage. When it had whined and barked its last, Clara took each item out and hung it on the lines her father had strung from wall to wall. The lines were high—intended for Dolores's reach—and the wet clothes seemed to get heavier and heavier as she worked her way through the load, until she could barely lift her arms, could hardly pinch into place the ancient clothespins, smooth and pallid, with rusty springs and eyes like dragonflies. Clara never made it through hanging a load without dropping something—usually something white: her father's undershirt, her stepmother's brassiere with padded cups the size of pot holders—onto the floor, where it immediately became filthy. When Dolores saw the soiled item hanging on the line, she would bring out the old wooden washboard and make Clara wash the soiled garment in the bathtub, scrubbing the dirt from the cloth and rubbing the skin from her fingers, up and down on the ribbed wood, strumming and strumming to no tune.

She always seemed to be going down when what she wanted was to go up—upstairs to the unfinished third floor of the house, where she could grow wings and escape through the window, up into the sky to fly home to her
abuelitos.
New York, the little she'd seen of it, was not anyplace she wanted to stay, and she could not understand why her parents had ever come here, why people back home spoke of it like heaven. In the rare moments when she was left alone, when Dolores had gone to visit a neighbor or stepped
out of the house on an errand, Clara climbed the wooden steps to the gutted top-floor rooms, imagining it was the
ranchito
of her
abuelitos,
the beams of the ceiling visible, the shutters open, and the sounds of the pigs and the chickens drifting in. There were no salamanders up there, only spiders and mice, but she did not mind. She sat by the window, looking down on the people walking along the sidewalk, waiting for Dolores to return. She never thought of running away. As frightening as Dolores was, the unknown city around her was even more terrifying.

C
LARA'S FATHER WAS
rarely home. Six days a week he worked at his fledgling hardware store. Sometimes she saw him briefly in the mornings, but usually he was gone by the time Dolores woke her with the stick. He stayed away for lunch and came home late, the three of them sitting in the kitchen eating Dolores's gruesome food: flavorless yucca,
bacalao
that was too salty, soggy rice, and under-ripe avocados, which had the same consistency as slivers of soap. If her father was not drunk by the time he got home, he became so as quickly as he could after his arrival, kissing, in succession, Dolores, Clara, and a bottle of Brugal, the last kiss being the longest. Inebriation was a mission, a calling, pursued with intensity. One night, when Dolores had gone to bed early, Clara complained to her father about the way she was being treated, but even in his rum-fuzzed state, he had no sympathy for her. “That is your mother you are talking about. She has welcomed you into our home. You must show her the proper respect. Then she will treat you better.”

“But, Papi, she hits me.”

“That's your fault. If you were good she would not hit you.”

“When are you taking me home?”

“This is your home, Clarita.”

“Why did you bring me here, Papi?”

“Because you are my daughter.”

“Where's my mother? Does she know I'm here?”

“Your mother is upstairs, sleeping.”

“I wish you never had come for me.”

“No more, Clara! No wonder Dolores hits you, talking back like this. If I hear that you are misbehaving, I will spank you myself.”

In despair, she went to bed and wept.

Clara changed her tactics for a few days, as her father suggested. She called Dolores “Mami,” even though it caught in her throat. She did not protest when she was told to get on her hands and knees to clean the floor with a scrubbing brush, that this was the only way to clean it properly, that Dolores would have done it herself if she wasn't pregnant. She accepted the stick without resistance or evasion, even when she had done nothing wrong and wondered if this was how she was going to spend the rest of her life, cleaning the house and being hit with the stick. But her passivity and obedience made Dolores even angrier. “I know what you are!” she said. “You can't fool me.” And then she brought the stick down on Clara again. “Stop pretending. I will never believe you.”

Once the wound on Dolores's cheek healed, Clara measured time by the swelling of her stepmother's stomach. As she became bigger, her moods became even less predictable. Everything would be fine, then the phone would ring, there would be shouting, then Dolores would take her anger out on Clara. Dolores would depart, leaving Clara alone for a few minutes; she would return in a rage and chase Clara around the house with the stick. Once, in a paroxysm of anger, she'd hurled a gallon of milk at her stepdaughter, but she'd missed and the plastic had burst on impact with the floor, sending a torrent of white washing across the tiles. The cascade made Clara laugh, which in turn made Dolores even angrier.

“Clean it!” she shouted. “Do you see how you've made me waste our milk? Do you know how much a gallon of milk costs?” Clara did not know how much a gallon of milk cost, but she did know that money wasn't the problem. Dolores and her father had money
from something referred to only as “the accident.” That money had bought the house and paid for the hardware store. That money meant there was always food in the refrigerator, even if it was poorly cooked. That money had purchased her father's ticket to the Dominican Republic. That money had brought her to New York. Clara thought that maybe the “accident” was what had made Dolores so angry. She got out the mop and cleaned up the milk. The next day there was a half-gallon in the refrigerator, but Clara had to eat her cereal dry, had to drink water with her dinner.

C
LARA STARTED SCHOOL
in April and from the beginning she saw it as an escape from the prison of her father's house and the unpredictability of Dolores's moods. In her mind, she would always connect the start of school with the end of winter, the end of being trapped in the house. She retained a clear memory of standing in the schoolyard on her first day, having been deposited there by her father, and feeling that she needed to take her coat off because, in the direct sunshine of the April morning, she was too hot, the only time since her abduction that she'd felt so warm. Unfortunately, the moment she took off her coat, one of the older kids standing nearby made a comment about her sweater.

It was the first of many comments she would hear about her accent, about her hair, about her clothes, about her teeth, about her skin, about her breath. As far as she could tell, she was just like the rest of the kids in the school, but she had simply not learned yet to identify the subtle distinctions that announced her as being just off the boat. Clara was picked on by the picked-on. There wasn't a person in her grade who wasn't cooler in some way. “Cool” was, in fact, one of the first words of English she learned, followed quickly by “dumb” and “black.” Later she would understand it for what it was: the cruelty of immigrants who were merely passing down the same rite of passage they had received when they had arrived.

None of it mattered much to her, partly because she didn't really
understand what a lot of the taunts and jokes meant, but mostly because however bad school was, it was always preferable to being home with Dolores. At school no one swung a paint-stained stick at her. At school, she did not have to hang laundry or clean the floor. At school, the buildings were heated and the food was better than the dried out and over-seasoned meals Dolores begrudgingly made. Most of all, though, at school there were teachers whose job it was to help her learn. Clara was immediately drawn to her homeroom teacher, Ms. García, who was Puerto Rican and tall and pretty with clean clothes and straightened hair. Ms. García spoke to her kindly, explained things to her in Spanish, talked down the bullies who liked to ask Clara if she knew how to use a toilet. It was Ms. García who took her aside in the first week and said, “It's hard now, but every day it will get easier. Every day you will understand a little more.” No one else had said anything encouraging to her and Clara immediately adopted Ms. García as her unofficial stepmother.