A House of My Own: Stories From My Life

  The first thing Señor Juchi tells me about my half sister is: “I think you’re mistaken.”

  He goes on: “I remember your father had a ’41 Buick, a big yellow convertible. And good suits Señor Curiel the tailor made for him, and those expensive shoes. Italian leather. They cost a lot. He liked to dress good. Beautiful suits. Beautiful shoes. 1948, ’49. I knew your uncle Little first, that’s how I came to meet your father. Through Little. Little and I were still riding bicycles, and we would see your father come and go in that big 41 Buick of his. What a car! He liked those big-shouldered suits. What I remember was the 41 Buick. But a daughter? No, I think you’re mistaken.

  “A ’41 Buick. Beautiful, but it gave him a lot of car problems.”

  Señor Juchi is a master storyteller. He takes his time when he should take his time. He slows the story almost to a halt when he has your interest, and then speeds the story along like a dancer pattering toward the footlights, pausing right before a furious final pirouette.

  “This was around the time when this girl Silvia was my girlfriend when we were just chamacos, just kids. She was maybe fourteen, so let’s see, maybe I was sixteen or so. These days Silvia takes care of my house in Juchitán when I’m in Mexico City. I let her stay there rent free, because she’s old now and I feel sorry for her, but, oh, my wife is jealous! She thinks this woman and I have got something going on. Look, she was just my girlfriend a long time ago. When we were just chamacos. Cha-ma-cos. But I broke it off, because she was fooling around on me. I said, ‘Silvia, I think it’s to your benefit if you and I go our separate ways…’ ”

  “But what does this have to do with my father?” I ask.

  “Oh, well, that. No. I think you’re mistaken.”

  —

  After I interview her about the secret sister, my mother says, “So what else is new?”

  It’s been a decade since that first conversation we had in the hospital. I’m ashamed to say I was afraid of my mother’s bad temper. She was angry with her mother-in-law for bringing the washerwoman around when she was there as the official wife. But this time, after she told me all she knew, which was about as much as I knew, she said, “That was the past. It doesn’t have anything to do with me. So what else is new?” She sounds as blasé as if talking about the weather.

  My mother doesn’t like silences. She fills them up with “So what else is new?” Or with a detailed report of what she had for dinner. Or what she bought at the grocery store. Silences are to be filled in the way one stuffs a mouse hole with steel wool. That’s what my mother’s lists of food and talk that is just talk are all about. Syllables to fill the void, so the real stories that slink about in the dark won’t come out and spook us.

  I wonder about my mother. And I wonder about myself and my own curiosity, my nagging need to poke under the bed with a broom.

  —

  Señor Juchi calls me back a few days later: “I spoke with your mother about the girl. She said she didn’t think it was true.”

  I’m surprised at my mother lying to him so coolly and ask, “Did she get upset?”

  “No. But she did say this: ‘If he has a daughter, she’s probably in Korea, because that’s where he was stationed between the wars.’ ”

  Then he tosses this Molotov: “And I managed to get ahold of your uncle Old. Old said he doesn’t know anything about your father and any illegitimate daughter. But…”

  And here he pauses for effect.

  “He did confess to having an illegitimate daughter himself! A girl he sees on Mexican television because she’s a newscaster.”

  Before hanging up, he gives me this advice: “Look, the person you should really ask is your aunt Baby Doll. She and your father were always close.”

  But when I do summon the courage to call Father’s favorite sister, they tell me she’s in Mexico. How is it when she lived in Mexico she was always visiting the U.S., and now that she lives in Chicago, you can never find her, because she’s in Mexico City!

  Maybe the antidote to my fever is to not think about her, like Mother: “That was before he met me. It doesn’t have anything to do with me.”

  —

  I telephone my oldest brother late at night when I know I’m sure to find him. He’s a doctor and rarely home. He tells me a story, but not the one I’m looking for.

  “You know the story of our Tía Esmeralda in Mexico, don’t you? How she was pretty, the prettiest of all her pretty sisters, right? She’s a black widow.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “She killed all her husbands.”

  “What! But how?”

  “Well, I don’t know,” he says. “Poison maybe.”

  “But what about the family secret about our half sister?”

  “Oh that,” he says flatly. “I already knew. Papa told me in the car. He was already sick when he told me.”

  “And what did you say?”

  “What could I say? I was in shock!”

  “The girl used to play with us,” I say. “Remember?”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “But you were the one who made up the game to see if she wore underwear.”

  “How do you remember those things?” he says.

  “How do you forget?”

  —

  I think if I think the thought, my lost sister will materialize and tell me the story of her life. The one without our father. If she stayed behind in Mexico, it’s probable she never learned to read and write. It’s possible she made her living as a laundress like her mother. If she had children, maybe they made their way north to the border and crossed over. And maybe that crossing was safe and uneventful, or maybe it was dangerous and fatal, or worse. It’s always worse for women, isn’t it?

  And if her children made it over to this side, I know how difficult their lives are here. Especially now after 9/11 when politicians want to build a wall around the country.

  And I think about the recent immigrant rights marches and the sign one man carried: IF YOU DEPORT ME, WHO WILL BUILD THE WALL?

  —

  Brother Number Two and I exchange emails under the subject “The Missing Sister,” like a mystery story from Sherlock Holmes.

  Brother writes, She might be related to us, but she’s a stranger to me. Anyway, the way I see it, I have a lot of relatives I already know that I barely have time for as it is. What do you expect to get from all this?

  I don’t know, I write back immediately, I’m a writer. It’s my job to think about things. I live my life facing backward. I don’t tell him all of this bothers me because I was Father’s favorite. His reina. How come Father lavished all this love on me and none on her?

  My brother writes, Why don’t you ask Aunt Baby Doll? She loves to talk about the past.

  If I could find her, I write back, but she’s an unreliable witness. You know how she always covered up for Father.

  My brother suggests I ask our father’s friends. But most of them are gone already, crossed over the final border to the other side, where, as New Mexican poet Levi Romero puts it, “quizás están muy contentos allá en la gloria/porque no llaman ni escriben.” They must be very happy over there in heaven, because they don’t call or write.

  My father’s compadres. Even the ones who might be alive, how to find them? Drifters who worked both sides of the border, a little upholstery, a little buying here and selling there. Who knows what they did over there. They were never home, their wife and kids stashed conveniently on the other side. Sure, they sent money home. Some of them went to church every Sunday.

  Just a bunch of ne’er-do-wells, big talkers, nothing-but-story. Bullshitters. The kind of guys like Fellini’s I Vitelloni. Just a bunch of big mama’s boys. Babies with suits.

  —

  Everyone warns me not to revisit the story about the laundress’s daughter, because it’s not fiction anymore.

  Now it’s dirty laundry.

  —

  “You just want the dirt on Papa.”


  Brother Number Three is home when I call. He and our two youngest brothers, the twins, manage the upholstery shop my father left behind. It’s Saturday. Brother is minding the kids while his wife is out.

  “You just want the dirt,” he insists.

  “No, I just want to know what you think.”

  “I think everybody has secrets.”

  “Not me,” I say. “My life is an open book.” But as soon as I say this, I wonder if it’s true.

  Brother admits he knew. Cuco, one of Father’s upholstery buddies, told him.

  “Remember Cuco?” he asks. “He’s the only upholsterer I knew who wore a suit to work, like a businessman. A fat man with slick hair hammering chairs in his white shirt and tie. After Papa got sick, I used to hang around with Cuco and listen to his stories, stories about the war, stories about the relatives. He’s the one that told me Aunt Oralia had a fling with Uncle Paco before she married his brother.”

  “You’re lying!”

  “That’s what he said. He was a good guy for stories, I tell you that.”

  My brother adds, “Mama didn’t like him, though, said he was a bad influence. Mama always suspected Papa was having an affair with one of his seamstresses. Well, the seamstress was nothing to look at, but I don’t know. I think, well, I went through things in my own life. But I’m good with my wife and my kids, you know. It’s different once you become a father.”

  “That’s the point,” I say. “You have a daughter you’re crazy about. Think about her.”

  “Wait, I’m not so sure Cuco is dead. I’ll ask this guy who sells Poly-Foam. He would know. And you should try getting ahold of Aunt Baby Doll.”

  He promises to call me back. But then he doesn’t.

  —

  Brother Number Two says Father was always running away from his problems. I think about this for a while and consider its truth. When the washerwoman was pregnant, Father ran to Korea. And when Mother was pregnant with her firstborn in Chicago, Father ran back home to Mexico City. But he was scolded by his own father, who reminded him, “We are not dogs.” And Father returned with his tail between his legs to Mother in Chicago, and he married her.

  —

  I think a lot about the reasons for my obsession while I’m driving the car, while I’m waiting at a red light. Maybe it’s about abandonment. It’s because I was abandoned by lovers when I was writing Caramelo, not once but twice. It’s because I know the worst thing in the world isn’t having someone leave you by death. That, after all, is not their fault. But to have someone leave of their own volition, to have someone you love alive, existing on the planet, but choosing not to share any part of that living with you.

  The weakness isn’t having the child. It’s abandoning it.

  To me abandonment is worse than death.

  —

  Why do you suppose Grandfather didn’t insist Father fulfill his obligation to the washerwoman? Was it because she was Indian? Mexico glorifies its Indian past, but the contemporary situation is another story. Indians are the ones who work the worst jobs, who are at the bottom of the social ladder. You only have to watch Mexican television to see all the stars are as white as Hollywood. It’s the mixed-bloods, the mestizos, who play the part of Indians even in the telenovelas. I don’t know of any Indians who play Indians. And when there is a role for an Indian, it’s a bit part as a servant, or in a Stepin Fetchit role that ridicules Indians. In Mexico the worst kind of insult is to call someone un indio.

  —

  The washerwoman’s daughter. My father’s natural daughter. What kind of father was he to her? It’s like a telenovela. Did the mother fall in love with my father in his good suits and yellow convertible? Or did my father simply help himself to what was close at hand? He wouldn’t have had a hard time. My father was always a charmer.

  I wonder what she felt, this washerwoman, watching my mother and her kids, watching us, watching me play, while her own daughter with the same face as my father, the darker daughter, had to work.

  We were always amolados, always traveling from Chicago to Mexico City and back on a shoestring. No seat belts. No credit cards. No stopping. Bologna sandwiches for dinner.

  Father in Korea

  Sometimes my father was so sleepy he’d swerve across the line. A truck would honk. That’s when my mother would jerk awake and scream, “Alfredo! You could’ve killed us!” And then we’d pull over to the side of the road and let Father join us for a snooze.

  —

  He couldn’t resist babies. He borrowed them from their mothers at the supermarket just so he could get a chance to hold them. He honked and waved at kids when his car paused at Stop signs. “Watch out!” we’d warn him. “Somebody’s going to think you’re a pervert.” He didn’t care. He was a lover of children even as a young soldier. Photos of him in Korea holding crying toddlers, hugging street kids, three or four in each arm. My father was always a man who loved kids. He raised seven of them.

  Above all else. Above anyone, everyone. Including his wife. My father adored kids. How could the man I knew be the same one to walk away from a daughter?

  —

  I should’ve asked my father when he was alive. After lying on the operating table having a quadruple bypass, he had almost two more years of life.

  My family suffers stories no one dares to tell.

  The grandmother who had a child from another liaison before she married my grandfather. The uncle who ran off with the army payroll. The cousin in Philadelphia who shot his wife in a fit of jealousy and had the rest of his life in prison to regret his bad temper. The maternal great-grandmother who, despite being ugly, married five times and thus is suspected by this descendant of being good in bed.

  We don’t talk about these things. Father would get angry if I even mentioned them.

  So how was I to ask?

  I should’ve asked.

  —

  Brother Number Four says he knew because of Caramelo. He’s a geologist. His wife was born in Mexico, so they go back and forth a lot. It’s because they’ve witnessed what it is to be poor over there. Every time they go, they visit an orphanage and bring gifts, donate a little money. This brother is the only one who says he wouldn’t mind trying to find our sister.

  “But how do we find her?” he asks. “Hire a detective?”

  “I don’t know,” I say. “I don’t know.”

  —

  Sister, maybe your mother saw an opportunity.

  I don’t blame her.

  Maybe she fell in love with his words, his big-shouldered suits, the fine car, the good shoes. Maybe he was the only gentleman who ever looked at her.

  Or maybe he just used her. A player like the ones I fell in love with and imagined myself in love with for years.

  I’d fall for a suit and a tie every time. A nice car. A good profession. An apartment in a neighborhood that was glamorous. Not like my neighborhood, which looked like a mouth with open sores.

  Maybe she thought he’d come to rescue her, like the stories in the telenovelas. Deliver her from the rooftop room and install her in a home of her own.

  —

  I want to see you, and I do see you, everywhere, in all the women I meet when I travel to Mexico or Bosnia or Italy. I see you in all the women, the poorest of the poor. That spring day in Sarajevo, an unforgettable picture of misery: a Roma woman with terror on her face, standing on the curbside, ignored, offering for sale half-dead lilacs wilting in the miserable heat. The indígena in the Tepoztlán market begging me to please buy another bag of chocolate even though I’d already bought one: “Por favorcito, it’s not going well for me today. Por favorcito.” In Rome the Polish refugee knitting hats on the curb of Piazza Mazzini, her wares spread on a little card table; the Peruvian nannies afraid to talk to me, homesick but afraid to complain, sunning their little charges in the pebbled park of the Gianicolo; the Asian women at Piazza Navona, silk scarves draped from their arms as if they were the goddess Kwan Yin, each desperately shouting
lower and lower prices just to make a sale. At Union Square, San Francisco, the homeless woman who says, “Thank you. You’re the first person all day who looked me in the eye and treated me like a human being.”

  Everywhere, no matter where I go, I see you.

  —

  My phone machine. Brother Number Five: “Got your message. Call me back.”

  —

  The U.S. Census form arrives by mail, and I find myself confused by the most basic question.

  “What are we?” I call out to Ray, my partner, who is working in his study. “What shall I put down for what we are?”

  We don’t agree with being classified as “Hispanics,” that slave name I connect with presidents who never even bothered to ask us what we call ourselves. What’s in a name? Everything. If it doesn’t really matter, why won’t “wetback” do?

  “Sweets, what shall I put down for what we are?”

  Ray and I decide after some conversation to check off “other.”

  But then the census form insists on details and offers ethnic categories.

  We claim “indigenous” because we don’t know how to explain it in one word.

  But after I check off “indigenous,” the next question baffles us even more: What tribe?

  “Ray, what tribe are we?” I say, shouting toward the next room.

  “What?”

  “They want to know what tribe we are. What shall I say?”

  After some discussion we agree to write in “mestizo.”

  —

  Brother Number Five calls. Says, “I don’t know anything.”

  Then a knocking on the phone cuts us off, as if our father doesn’t like us discussing his sins.

  —

  Brother Number Six, the youngest, comes to visit me in San Antonio with his wife and kid. Because they’re tourists, we consider the horse and carriages parked next to the Alamo. We’re eating ice cream sundaes and we hesitate. But the driver says, “Sure you can bring your ice cream on board.” So we climb up.

  I’m enjoying my caramel sundae and the ride when the driver, a big country woman from outside Dallas, starts talking about genealogies. How she’s one-sixteenth Cherokee and one-fourth I-don’t-know-what, and on and on. She is the color of boiled milk.