Monkey Boy, Francisco Goldman [best story books to read .txt] 📗

of my mother’s unhappiness, a gradual but disorientating recognition that would culminate months later during my freshman year at Broener on a December weekend just before our Christmas break when I came from Wagosh upstate to New York City to accompany my parents to some other distant relative’s wedding out on Long Island. Lexi had started going to a private boarding school for girls that fall, one in the next town near the women’s college, and she didn’t want to spend any weekend away from there. I went out by bus to the horrible hotel by LaGuardia airport where my parents were staying, and when I let myself into the room I found my mother alone, sobbing facedown on the bed. Ma, what’s wrong? I asked and then asked again. Finally her small smothered voice said into the pillow: Oh, Frankie, it’s nothing. Her posture didn’t shift. There was a cot at the foot of the bed, put there for me to sleep on. Where’s Daddy? I asked. She didn’t answer. He was probably somewhere watching a football game he’d bet on. Ma, have you been drinking? I asked. Ay, Frankie, no seas baboso, she said into the pillow; she even made a weak attempt to laugh. Why didn’t you call up first? she said a moment later. Frankie, leave me alone for a few minutes, please, so I can compose myself. She was crying softly again. Okay, Mami, compose yourself, I said and let myself out of the room. For a moment I stood out in the hallway wondering if I should go back in. I felt helpless but also hurt. I probably would have fled back to the city whether my mother had been crying or not, because there was no fucking way I was going to sleep on that cot like a dog at my father’s feet.

I’d asked my mother if she’d been drinking because that same spring as my cousin Denise’s wedding and the fight in the car, I’d come home one evening and found her passed out on the kitchen floor. Mamita had never been a drinker, though she liked her glass of sherry after dinner in the evenings with a bowl of salted peanuts as she sat with feet up in her reclining armchair to watch an I Love Lucy rerun or Carol Burnett on TV, Mary Tyler Moore too. Now she was drinking sherry before dinner. It took little to get her smashed; three small glasses were enough to put her on the floor, hands folded on her tummy.

Not long after my first year of college my parents would finally separate, as my sister had been urging my mother to do. My sister’s world was opening up in a way it couldn’t have if she were going to our high school. Mamita, determined to spare Lexi that ordeal—she’d had a rough enough time in middle school—had persuaded Abuelita to pay for her to go to the fancy private girls’ school and even board there, though it was so close to home.

In the parking lot outside Cousin Denise’s wedding that day, it was as if my sister and I felt obligated to remain in the back seat of the car while my parents rabidly bickered, as if we were keeping vigil in a hospital they’d been taken to after an accident. Finally, as the fight began to subside, the silences between agonized outbursts growing longer, Lexi and I traded looks, and we got out of the car. We crossed the gravel parking lot and went through an arched entrance in the faux old Colonial New England brick wall into the tree- and tent-shaded yard where the wedding was being held. Carlota had come hours earlier to help with the wedding preparations. Aunt Milly was paying her, of course. But what if Carlota had said she didn’t want to work that day? Would Aunt Milly have invited her anyway? I spotted Carlota standing alone in a walled-in corner by forsythia in frothy yellow bloom, arms crossed to clasp each elbow, repeatedly lifting the cigarette held in one hand to her lips. I’d never seen Carlota smoke before. Smoking, drinking, Communism, maybe screwing Chip, she wasn’t such a good Mormon girl anymore. Eyeliner ran in dried dribbles down her cheeks. They’re treating me like a fucking maid, she answered when I asked what the matter was. I’d never heard her say fuck before either. Who is? I asked. Them, she said, your aunt, the people in charge, the flower lady, púchica, everyone.

How are they treating you like a maid?

The flower lady made me pluck thorns off roses, look. And Carlota held up her fingers, but her fingers looked normal. They were still bleeding a few minutes ago, she said with a pout. They don’t even know my name, she said, taking a deeper draw from her cigarette and blinking rapidly. Mees, Carlota mewed caustically, come here to iron these tablecloths. She exhaled smoke again and said, But the flower lady’s son helped with the roses. At least he is nice.

She meant the ophthalmologist. He’d come early, too, to help his mother, the florist, an old friend and neighbor of Aunt Milly. At a table where the florist and her two assistants had done their work, that love scandal’s first course had been served. As they plucked thorns, had he told Carlota that she reminded him of his favorite female character in One Hundred Years of Solitude? I don’t remember noticing the ophthalmologist at the wedding, but he and Carlota started going out right after. He was in his late twenties, tall with long, muscular arms, a mop of soft black curls on his head, swarthy, and he drove a dark-green MG, often with a kayak strapped to the roof. As far as I know, the florist never forgave my aunt for having brought Carlota to the wedding, where that Guatemalan girl, surely described to her as Bert and Yoli’s maid, had stolen her only child’s