When Tito Loved Clara (28 page)

Maybe this was the new direction her curse had taken. No longer was she going to be prevented from having a baby. Now she was going to have to face the father of the baby she didn't want, the
baby she couldn't forget. In her most remorseful moments, she still heard the breathy little pop! of the zygote being sucked from her uterus. Tito's DNA fused to hers and turned into medical waste. It was that guilt that made up her mind to talk to him, but it was not an easy thing.

What was she going to say? Her stomach had been churning all day, but there was no avoiding it now. He knew where she lived. He would call. He would pester Deysei. He would knock on the door. She needed to do something now to prevent this thing from getting out of hand. Already, in the days since the hysteroscopy, Deysei had started teasing her about her “boyfriend” when they were alone. Thomas, perhaps stressing about his interview, had said little, an omission that Clara found somehow more worrisome than his initial offer to talk to Tito himself. Yes, she needed to take action, but she felt completely overwhelmed, completely at a loss.

She picked up the phone and dialed the cell number on the card. “Moreno,” said the voice on the other end in a way that suggested he was in the middle of something—driving or eating. It was a business voice, assertive and curt. It startled her.

“Hello, Tito,” she said. “This is Clara.”

The silence on the other end of the line lasted so long that she thought they'd been disconnected.

“Tito? Are you there?”

“
Sí,
” he said. “I am here.”

“Deysei said that you wanted to talk to me.” The whole thing was so bizarre that she wound up saying this as though they were family.

“Yes, Clara.” There was another pause, but this time she heard something, as if he were rubbing the phone's mouthpiece with a cloth.

“Tito?”

“Yes. Clara,” he said. “Do
you
want to talk to
me
?”

“I do, Tito. I think we should talk.”

“Good. OK. That's good.” There was another long silence.

“Tito?”

“Yes. I'm sorry. This is not easy for me.”

“It's not easy for me, either, Tito.” Why did she keep saying his name? Perhaps it was something to hold on to in this weird conversation.

“Could I come and see you tomorrow?” he asked.

Whoa!
“Tomorrow?” she said. So soon.

“Or . . . wait. Do you remember Ms. Almonte? From Kennedy?”

“Alicia? Yes, of course I remember her.”

“Her mother passed away this week and the funeral is on Saturday, the day after tomorrow. Maybe you want to go with me?”

“To a funeral?”

“Or just to the wake afterward. It would mean a lot to her if you came.”

“I'm surprised she even remembers me. And why did she invite you? You were never in one of her classes, were you?”

“No, but I moved her this summer. We were talking about you, actually.”

“And what was she saying?”

He hesitated. “Is it a secret?”

“Maybe we shouldn't do this on the phone. I could pick you up on Saturday, drive you into the city.”

“That's OK,” she said. “Why don't we just meet at the Piper's Kilt for lunch on Saturday? I'm not sure about the funeral.”

“Piper's. Sure. What time?”

“Two.”

“Two on Saturday.”

“I'll see you then. Bye.” She hung up, glad to have
that
over with.

She took a breath and let the air out through her nose. Her
parting from Tito was so directly connected to her finding—or being found by—her mother that she now felt compelled to hit speed-dial number 4 on the phone.

“
Hola, Mami. Soy Clara.
”

“Clara,” said her mother. “
¿Qué pasa?
”

“Is Yunis there?”

“No.”

“What's the matter?” she asked. She could tell by her mother's voice that something was.

“I am not going to take it anymore. Yunis thinks she's staying in a hotel. She goes out. I don't know where. She comes back late. Doesn't tell me anything. Then she sleeps until lunch. She thinks she's on vacation.”

This was a variation of the litany her mother had been giving her since Yunis's move. Clara had been doing her best to placate her, but she knew only too well how infuriating her sister could be.

“It's going to be OK.”

“Please God,
mija.
Yes. It's going to be OK because she's leaving. I told her she has to go. She don't lift a finger around here. Just eating and drinking. Never washes a single dish. Doesn't help me pay for a single thing.”

“OK, Mami, take it easy.” She didn't want her sister to come back. No. That was the last thing she needed now. “Did you really tell her she had to leave?”

“Yes,” she said defiantly. “I'm kicking her out. And you know, the new man is already cheating on her.”

“Oh, God,” said Clara. She couldn't take much more of this. “What about the inheritance?”

“The lawyers, they are all fighting about it. You know, that man, her papi's papi, had eight children with a bunch of different women. It's going to be long time before she gets those moneys.”

“Can you tell her to call me when she gets back?”

“Who knows when that will be?” There was a brief silence.

“Think about giving her another chance, Mami.”

“I'm not talking about it anymore,
mija.
She's leaving. How's everything there? How's my grandson?”

“He's fine.”

“And Thomas?”

“Fine, too.”

“You pregnant?”

“No, Mami. We're working on it.”

“It's not really work, is it?” she said, laughing.

“OK, Mami, that's enough. I'll talk to you later. Tell Yunis to call me. Bye-bye.”

“Bye,
amorcita.
”

Clara hung up. Yunis coming back. It hadn't even been a month. The timing, as usual, was terrible. Just when she started to feel that she was getting somewhere with Deysei. On the phone, she'd heard merengue playing in the background and someone laughing. She could picture the scene: Tía Gigi and Tío Plinio sitting at the kitchen table slicing a mango or maybe smashing the shells of walnuts. A cousin or two with a toy on the floor. The adults would have been sharing one of those large Presidentes, drinking it in small glasses to keep the beer from getting warm. The windows would be open, the doors ajar, and a breeze drifting through the room, an early warning that they could expect rain later in the evening. But later, not now. Now it was time to drink and cook and tell stories. Clara wanted to be there. She wanted to be on vacation in Santo Domingo, to be catered to by her family, to be away from all these troubles. Her aunts would take Guillermo and feed him, entertain him. They would do her laundry; they would make her favorite foods and that oatmeal-milk-and-mango drink she could never quite get right herself. Now that she was in the midst of the kind of craziness that was the norm in Yunis's life, she could see just how tempting running away to D.R. must have been to her sister. And, indeed, it was wonderful in short spells—as long as
your money held out. Because there were expectations in the other direction, too. An aunt who needed a new TV, another whose car had broken down, the cousin who had lupus and couldn't afford the medication. These were the unwritten rules of her family relations, the tithes you were expected to pay if you visited from New York. Her mother, now that she had retired there permanently, was the worst of them all, the neediest. She had First World tastes on a Third World budget. There was always something to be repaired at the house, new tile for the bathroom, new cabinets for the kitchen, new locks to keep out the handyman who'd stolen the keys to the old locks. Her mother held the position as the matriarch of the clan, the underfunded provider for the under-provided. That slow financial bleed would have been at least part of the problem for Yunis. The cousins and aunts and uncles and their hangers-on would not have understood that she couldn't keep a job, would not have understood that she relied on welfare to help her with the rent, food stamps to feed her daughter; all they knew was that she came from New York, which meant that she had to have money, an assumption Clara had once made about her parents. As if that were not enough, there would also have been the issue of the boyfriend. Thrice married, twice widowed, and once divorced, their mother was currently without male companionship of a certain stripe. She would not have enjoyed seeing Yunis coming and going with her latest
marido.
She would have undermined, complained, done whatever she could to make sure that the relationship failed. Once she realized that Yunis was broke, that she was there to mooch until this “inheritance” came through, she would have done whatever she could, in her passive-aggressive way, to drive her back to New York. No, it was not surprising at all that it was happening—only that it was happening so fast.

The phone rang. She was never going to make dinner at this rate.

“Hello?”

“Clara?”

“Yes? Thomas?”

“Hi, baby. I'm just about in Philly. I thought I'd check in with you.”

“How do you feel?” she said.

“Good,” he said. “Optimistic. So Deysei met Gilly off the bus this afternoon?”

“Yes. It was fine. They were eating cereal and watching cartoons when I got home.”

“Did you talk to that guy yet?”

Clara hesitated. “No, not yet. This weekend, I'll do it. I'll tell you all about it when you get home.” She let her voice trail off, as if there were more.

“What is it?”

“Well, it looks like Yunis might be coming back.”

“Already? What happened?”

“It's complicated.”

“Didn't she sublet her apartment?”

“Yes.”

“So, does that mean she's going to stay with us?”

“I don't know. I haven't talked to her about it.”

“Jeez, Clara.”

“Look, forget about it for now. We'll talk about it when you get back. It's not definite yet,” she said, though in her gut she knew otherwise.

“OK.”

“Good luck. I know you're going to do great in the interview. Say hi to your mother for me.”

“Thanks. I'll see you when I get back.”

O
NE SUNDAY EVENING,
in her senior year of high school, Clara sat at the kitchen table pretending to read the Spanish-language newspaper her father had left there the day before. Instead of reading, she was listening, listening to a click. It was a plastic click,
a snap-
snap
! She heard it one more time and then heard the rush of air onto her stepmother's curler-laden head, heard Dolores put her scaly feet up on the tattered ottoman and begin to leaf through a copy of
Vanidades.
While Dolores sat under the dryer, Clara went up the stairs to the master bedroom and turned on the TV. The room was sparely furnished and yet still untidy—shoes on the floor, clothes hanging out of drawers. Clara had no interest in whatever secrets might lie in the bedside tables, in the half-open closets. She was there to watch television. The set was tuned to Telemundo and she reminded herself to return to that channel when she was done. Using the controls on top of the cable box (not touching the remote, which lay on the unmade bed), she cycled down through the other foreign-language channels—a Chinese news program, an Indian dance routine, a sexy Italian woman talking about sculpture—to CBS, just in time to see the stopwatch clicking through the seconds and the grave, deep voice saying, “This is
60 Minutes,
” as if it were the word of the Lord. Then an antacid commercial. So she'd missed the introductory part, but none of the actual reports. All through dinner, she'd been eyeing the kitchen clock, wondering when Dolores was going under the dryer. Having missed her usual Friday salon appointment, she'd rolled her hair before serving the meal and sat at the end of the table, not eating, but looking like a popart medusa in her pink curlers and her floral robe while Clara and Efran choked down their dry pork chops and
moro.

Her assignment for that week's meeting of the Word Club was
60 Minutes.
Ms. Almonte had told them earlier in the year that there were certain resources every educated, independent woman could rely on for the real news about the world. One was
60 Minutes.
Another was the
New Yorker
magazine. A third was National Public Radio. Each week in Ms. Almonte's room, they talked about these sacrosanct cultural outposts—or at least Ms. Almonte and most of her class talked, while Clara listened. Clara had limited access to the trinity. She was not allowed a radio in her room, not allowed to
watch English-language television, and she had gotten into trouble earlier that year when Dolores, snooping in her schoolbag, had come across a Xerox of a
New Yorker
portfolio by Richard Avedon in which a fashion model made love to a skeleton.

“What sickness is this?” Dolores had said.

“It's for school.”

“School! We never studied anything like this when I was in school.”

Clara had to bite her tongue. Dolores had been educated in a one-room school near Higüey, the
salchichón
capital of the Dominican Republic. Of course she'd never seen anything like the Avedon pictures.

“You're lucky I'm not going to show this to your father. After everything he's done for you, this is how you thank him? Pornography? Sex with skeletons?” Dolores frowned and shook the rolled-up Xeroxes at her.

It was a far cry from the beatings she had given Clara with the stick—beatings that had all but stopped around the time Clara went through puberty. A combination of events had put an end to them. Dolores had gained weight after the birth of Efran and suffered from early onset arthritis, she claimed, because of all the hand-washing of clothes she'd done in her life. The paint pole was harder to grasp even as Clara was more nimble in avoiding it. The beatings went from a less-than-daily event to just an occasional flare-up. Those dying spasms, it seemed to Clara, represented Dolores's refusal to fully acknowledge that her absolute control over her stepdaughter was gone. They had not stopped completely, however, until Efran, at the age of seven, had gone through a sensitive period. He couldn't bear to see a fly swatted, a mouse trapped, a mosquito slapped, let a lone a thirteen-year-old girl struck with a stick. One night, after he'd witnessed a particularly brutal attack by Dolores, he had started crying. “No, Mami, no! Stop it! You're hurting her. You're hurting her.” Efran was nothing if not spoiled, and his pleas were granted by
Dolores—not out of mercy for Clara but because her little
príncipe
always got what he wanted. By then, Clara had reached the conclusion that her home life was something that had to be endured until she turned eighteen and could leave. The focus of her existence was school—her ticket out of Inwood and away from Dolores.