—
Our first class was physics and Joseph arrived at the same time as the teacher.
“Phew, I nearly didn’t make it, I missed the bus!” Joseph said, not speaking to anyone in particular.
Everyone carried on murmuring and the teacher ended up getting upset.
“What’s got into you today? If you keep talking then I’ll stop teaching.”
No one would admit to not having seen us kiss, and as the story reached Joseph and grew more detailed, it became Claire who had thrown herself on me.
I looked at Joseph out of the corner of my eye, and saw him listening to what Ian was telling him. Ian sat at the desk next to him and was also his best friend. Joseph’s face seemed to be collapsing as he listened and there was a moment when our eyes met. I could see pain, disappointment, and anger there. I could not hold his gaze, so I lowered my head to keep looking at Claire out of the corner of my eye. I could see her indignation and disgust, but no surrender, and I admired her for that.
The teacher ended the class ten minutes early because no one was paying attention and the murmurs kept getting louder.
Joseph came straight over to my desk and stood in front of me.
“They were right when they said that you were a pig,” he said, managing with difficulty to restrain himself from hitting me.
I shrugged, but this time I did hold his gaze.
“Don’t get mad at him, get mad at the one who started it all,” one of the girls said.
“Jennifer’s right. You tell me who could resist a girl throwing herself at him,” another student said.
“Motherfuckers!”
Joseph’s exclamation surprised us all. Until now we had never heard him swear.
“Ask Claire what happened,” Jennifer suggested, maliciously.
But Joseph just took his books and left the classroom. Claire went after him. Joseph’s voice came to us from the hallway.
“Leave me alone! Go and find someone else to make out with.”
“I didn’t do anything, I swear it was Thomas who threw himself on me…” Claire whimpered.
Their voices faded down the hallway but I was satisfied. I knew that there was no way that Joseph could forgive Claire, not because he didn’t want to, but because he felt humiliated. If he had forgiven her, then everyone in the class would have said that he was a wuss.
From that day on I found myself in a new situation. A lot of the girls who had previously ignored me now seemed to find me interesting. Some of the boys also treated me differently, with more respect, as if I had accomplished some great deed.
I don’t know how Claire and Joseph managed to avoid each other after that, as they had classes together every day. He spoke only to his group of close friends; as for Claire, everyone ignored her. No one spoke to her, they treated her like an outcast. When the year was over she left the school and we never heard anything more from her.
What did I gain from my despicable action? Actually, nothing. I got rid of Claire but lost Joseph forever. Because Joseph did not forgive me. He never spoke to me again and steered clear of me whenever he saw me.
I have to admit that I enjoyed the situation for a while. I was comforted by the knowledge that I had been able to execute a plan that, for all its wickedness, was nonetheless difficult to pull off.
I know now that this victory did not taste like success. I could have called it off but did not:
When Claire came over to me, innocently, to help me with the physics problem, I should have backed out of the plan. I could have listened to her explain how to solve the exercise and then thanked her.
“Good thing you told me how to do it. I was trying to work it out last night and couldn’t manage. And I’m sure that the teacher will call on me to explain it today. You know how he likes to catch us off guard.”
“I don’t mind helping you. I’m good at physics and math,” she would have said.
Then I would have said something to Joseph like: “Claire helped me with the physics problems. She’s pretty smart.” And he would have been proud of her.
Yes, I could have stopped then, or even fixed things later.
When Claire insisted that it was I who had thrown myself on her, I could have admitted it.
“You’re right, I’m sorry. I don’t know what came over me. I…Well, I’m sorry.”
The girls would have called me “pig” and the boys would have thought I was a loser. Joseph would have gotten angry.
“If you go anywhere near Claire ever again, I’ll break your face.”
“Joseph, I’m sorry. I…I don’t know why I did it. Please forgive me.”
“I’ve warned you, don’t even think of getting close to her again.”
I know that the rest of the class would have laughed at me and blamed me. They would have shunned me, but in the end perhaps Joseph would have forgiven me. I don’t know. And as for Claire…Well, I don’t think she would have forgiven me. She would have decided I was “horny” and, once she had gotten over her fright, she would have laughed at me, along with the other girls.
—
But I didn’t do any of that, and so I ruined the first flowering of true love between Joseph and Claire, and probably, despite the years that have passed since then, neither has forgotten what happened, and neither has forgotten me. Their hatred has probably followed me throughout my life, even though I, as the years have gone by, stopped thinking about them until today.
What happened that day taught me that I was very good at causing trouble, and reminded me that I had unfinished business with my mother.
I never understood why my father had married her. They were so different. He was a perfect WASP. His family was rich. My grandfather James was a lawyer and my grandmother Dorothy was from an elite family, so my father and his sister, my aunt Emma, were both able to go to Harvard. She majored in classical literature; he studied law. And the education they received there marked their ways of being in the world from then on.
My mother was born in Miami, the daughter of a Hispanic father, an immigrant who married an American woman as poor and as graceless as he was. When my maternal grandfather arrived in the States, he had with him the address of a Catholic charity that helped immigrants. My grandmother worked there. I’ve always thought that my grandfather must have married her just to get citizenship, because she never could have been attractive. But they had worked hard to fulfill their American Dream and my grandfather, who was an accountant, managed to attain a certain degree of wealth and status and so, not without sacrifices, they were able to send my mother and my uncle, Oswaldo, to a private school. In the case of Uncle Oswaldo it was a wasted investment, because he never liked studying, but my mother dreamed of becoming a nurse and eventually managed to do so.
My mother spent her childhood in Miami; later, when she was a teenager, the family moved to New York City. My grandfather had gotten a better job. Even so, they couldn’t afford much in the way of extras, and my mother used to tell Jaime and me how she had done everything, babysitting, flipping burgers, selling T-shirts, anything that would help pay for nursing school. She didn’t go out much, and spent only what she had to: her sole goal was to end up a qualified nurse.
My parents met on one of those days when rain spoils the end of a New York summer; she was working in a hamburger joint near Rockefeller Center. She was walking through the rain without an umbrella and met a young man who had one. She didn’t know him, but asked if she could share his umbrella, and where he was going. Although he was disconcerted, the stranger not only agreed to share his umbrella, but also walked the young woman to the subway.
When we were younger my father would tell Jaime and me that he had fallen in love with my mother as soon as he saw her.
I didn’t understand this. I could not understand what anyone could find attractive about my mother. Her skin was dark and so was her hair, and her black eyes declared her Hispanic origin. She was always on a diet because she had a tendency to get fat. Her backsi
de was too big and this stopped her from being elegant, for all that my father tried to teach her about dressing and behaving in accordance with his own family’s standing.
Years later, when the animated movie Pocahontas came out, I was appalled to see how much the Indian princess looked like my mother.
It didn’t help that I looked like her. My hair and dark eyes were my genetic inheritance from her, as was my tendency to put on weight. Jaime looked like my father. He had the same blond hair and the same blue-gray eyes, although Jaime’s were a little darker. Like my father, Jaime was tall and slim; they both had a natural elegance lacking in my mother and me. It didn’t matter that my mother wore designer clothes, nor that her elegant bags were the envy of all her coworkers at the hospital. There was always something vulgar about her. I compared her with my paternal grandmother, Grandma Dorothy, who was elegant even when dressed in clothes for the country. I suppose her height and thinness contributed to that.
I was ashamed of my maternal grandparents. Grandpa Ramón and Grandma Stella were vulgar if you compared them with the Spencer side of the family, but I forgave Stella because, although she was fat and ugly, she was at least of pure American stock. But my mother had not taken after her at all, did not have her blue eyes or chestnut-brown hair. Ramón’s genes had dominion over Stella’s.
My grandparents’ greatest achievement was their oldest child becoming a nurse. To my relief they lived in Queens, a long way from Manhattan, and when I went to school I was the only person who knew anything about this borough. None of my classmates had ever set foot outside Manhattan.
When my maternal grandparents came to visit us they looked out of place. It didn’t matter how pleasant my father was toward them, or that my paternal grandparents treated them politely. We had nothing in common with them, nothing to say to them, nothing that tied us to them except for my mother, and that was not enough for me.
But if my grandparents made me feel ashamed then Oswaldo, my mother’s younger brother, made me feel even worse. He looked like what he was: a son of an immigrant who, because he had failed at school, earned his living with a little studio that he had set up himself. He laughed loudly and ate as if he were always hungry, and more than anything else I was disgusted by his fingernails, which always showed traces of paint.
My mother was aware that her family did not fit well with ours, but even so she had no pity for my father or my paternal grandparents, and from time to time she inflicted her relatives on us. The worst of it was always the Christmas meal. My Spencer grandparents went down to Florida after Thanksgiving and didn’t return until the beginning of the new year, so we always spent Christmas in Queens. Jaime did not seem to notice the change from one side of the city to the other. For me it was like crossing a border into a different reality. From Manhattan into an immigrant borough in which the human texture was different, just as the shops on Fifth and Madison Avenues were different from the little businesses in Queens.
My mother was proud of her Hispanic ancestry and had given us both Spanish names. She had also insisted that Jaime and I be baptized Catholic, even though my father was Episcopalian. But I resisted and refused to be called Tomás instead of Thomas, and eventually she gave in.
I must say that Jaime seemed to find my maternal grandparents pleasant company and was always affectionate with them.
I was embarrassed to be seen with them, so I preferred to visit them in Queens rather than have them come visit us in Manhattan, where I shuddered to think that I might bump into a classmate and have to explain that this man with odd features and olive-green skin was my grandfather.
And I was not wrong: in spite of all the discourses about equality, I knew that Hispanics in the United States were barely above black people on the social scale.
Yes, I know that Clinton came to power on the back of the black vote and Obama came to power on the back of the Hispanic vote, both of them important minorities in the service sector. But I did not want to have anything to do with them.
My mother never stopped telling me that I had been a difficult child from the day I was born. It took me fourteen hours to come into the world, and I caused her so much pain that she said she would never forget it. For the first few months of my life I never stopped crying and never slept the whole night through. So my mother and I got off on the wrong foot, unlike with Jaime, who apparently came into the world almost without her noticing and never gave her a bad night.
I was an angry little boy, and from time to time my mother slapped me. I defended myself, of course, and as soon as she slapped me I would give her a kick, which made her cuff me. Even so, I should say that it was I who pushed her away whenever she tried to kiss me, or hug me, or pick me up. I couldn’t bear physical contact. I remember one day, when I was seven or eight years old, she tried to give me a kiss on the sly and I kicked her away, saying, “Leave me alone, you smell bad.” I didn’t like the way my mother’s skin smelled. It was a thick, deep smell, too much like the way I smelled myself.
When Jaime was born, I must have seen how my mother gave herself over to coddling him. Jaime didn’t reject her; in fact he was anxious for any display of affection. And my mother seemed to enjoy the fact that here at last was someone who would allow her to shower him with all the kindness that I had rejected. She smiled happily when she saw him, she picked him up in her arms and gave him hugs, she spent hours looking at him and rejoicing in how beautiful he was.
My father would try to calm her down, point out that I was in the room as well, that she shouldn’t distinguish between us. Then she would stretch out her hand and ruffle my hair, but I would walk away and she would look sadly after me.
My lack of affection turned into hatred. Our relationship became a permanent battle and later, proud at having broken up Joseph and Claire, I decided that the time had come to win the war with my mother.
I had to separate my parents. I wanted to force my mother to move out of our apartment. I thought that I would stay with my father, and that Jaime would go with her.
The challenge was figuring out how to accomplish this. The more I thought about it, the more difficult it was to incriminate my mother. She was dedicated to her family and to her work, and everyone who knew her liked her. Even my paternal grandfather, always a demanding man, was pleasant toward her.
I started to sleep badly, obsessed with finding a way to make my parents break up, and on one of these sleepless nights I realized that the only way to find something to use against my mother would be to follow her.
But it was not easy to leave the apartment without a good excuse. My father was very strict about how we structured our time, and my mother always wanted to know where we were, and with whom, so I told them that I needed to start running, that going out for a jog was something I needed to do to relax.
They grew accustomed to seeing me head out at any hour of the day dressed in a tracksuit: in the mornings before I went to class, at night before dinner, some afternoons.
“Well, you’ve certainly gotten into running,” my mother said, who could not understand why I was suddenly so keen on sports when up to then I had been no fan at all of physical exercise.
“He’s getting bigger, he’s growing up. Don’t complain, Carmela, it’s better that Thomas goes out jogging rather than sitting around here wasting his time,” my father said.
My mother worked as an ER nurse at Mount Sinai Hospital, not that far from where we lived. All you had to do was cross Central Park to get to the hospital, which was between Fifth and Madison. When the weather was nice, she would walk there: it took her about thirty minutes. My father didn’t seem to understand why she insisted on working so much, given that we had more than enough money to live comfortably. Sometimes I heard them talking about that. But it had been hard work for my mother to become a nurse.
Running was an excuse for me to follow her. We lived close to Central Park, on West Seventy-Second Street: a street that became famous because John Lennon lived there, in the Dakota at
Central Park West, until a madman killed him.
I knew my mother’s schedule by heart: when she went in and out of the hospital, what shifts she worked.
I used to go to the sidewalk across from the hospital and hide. I could see people coming in and out of the building, but it was hard for them to see me.
Sometimes my mother would come out of the hospital alone, sometimes with her coworkers. I usually saw her leaving with another nurse, Alta Gracia, who, as well as being her best friend, was also Hispanic.
I still think that Alta Gracia is a surprising name. Apparently it refers to a Virgin celebrated in the Dominican Republic, which is where my mother’s friend was from.
They usually stood at the entrance for a few seconds talking before saying goodbye. Other times they would walk a little way together. I was surprised by how absorbed they became in their conversations. And the way they laughed. Yes, that open and free way of laughing, guffawing almost, without caring that people stared at them.
I was frustrated to find that my mother had a routine from which she never deviated, not even by an inch. It didn’t matter if it was two o’clock in the afternoon or ten o’clock at night: when she left the hospital, she went straight home.
I thought about going into the hospital, but it would have been difficult for me to spy on her there. And security might have caught me.
I spent a month spying on my mother and was about to conclude that there was nothing going on that I could use against her, when one afternoon something odd happened.
I saw her leaving with Alta Gracia. They were walking fast and looked very serious. They walked arm in arm. Where were they going?
They walked up Madison Avenue, into Harlem, for half an hour. I followed them to a group of low buildings on 130th Street. They went up some stairs without looking back and Alta Gracia took out a key and let them into the building.
Who lived there? What were they doing there? I didn’t know where Alta Gracia lived, but perhaps it was here: I had heard my mother say that she lived on her own.