Bird of Paradise Page 5

  Papito makes Mami dress up all the time, even when they practice their disco routines in the basement. Today Mami picks out a sky-blue halter dress and white heels with chunky bracelets that match her shoes. She does her hair and puts on makeup while Papito parks his canary-yellow Porsche in the driveway, leaving the cherry-red motorcycle inside, like they do when he throws house parties. I watch Papito and Mami practice their routine for hours. Mami labors through the Hues Corporation’s “Rock the Boat” and anything by Donna Summer, Chic, or the Bee Gees, all with an uneasy smile plastered on her face. They run through the routine over and over until they perfect the combinations Papito choreographed. He takes a break to go to the bathroom, leaving Mami downstairs. She looks like an empty shell of a woman with her soul hovering above her. We believe in spiritual guías in Santo Domingo. Hers is her own self. I can see Mami’s soul desperately trying to find its way back into her small body.

  “Mami, can I get you some water?” I ask. She looks through me and doesn’t respond. Papito’s obsession with disco is slowly killing Mami. Disco fucking sucks.

  Papito’s other obsession is karate. He’s a black belt. The walls of the house are lined with daggers and swords covered with brightly colored velvet sheaths, Chinese stars, and martial art–inspired art. In Papito and Mami’s bedroom, I found a pair of nunchakus in a wicker chest full of black whips and magazines with naked men and women hurting each other. Sometimes, especially when Jean comes to town, they take the weapons off the wall and wildly stab the air like musketeers on coke.

  * * *

  My sister, Giselle, came out of nowhere. I barely noticed Mami’s belly expand, like those of the pregnant ladies I’ve seen at the supermarket and Jack in the Box. I used to think they found her, a gorgeous brown ball of flesh with large eyes and long eyelashes similar to Papito’s, at the nightclub.

  Giselle’s arrival doesn’t change things much at home. Mami is still treated like an imprisoned African Grey locked in a twenty-four-karat gold cage. She’s expected to give birth, slim down, and fit back into her disco clothes in no time flat. Even after she does, Papito remains more preoccupied with his Rosie’s looks than their newborn daughter.

  I instantly fall in love with her, my new roommate who occupied Mami’s body for months and months, like I did six years earlier. Giselle doesn’t cry much. Papito probably trained her to fall in line while she was in the womb.

  Stalking Dickie proved to be a tawdry undertaking. I’m now content staying in my room with my baby sister. I climb up and balance myself on the railing of her white crib and watch her sleep for hours, placing my index finger under her nose to make sure she’s still breathing.

  * * *

  The noise comes from the guest room next door. It starts with faint groans and quickly escalates into terrible high-pitched shrieks coming from a woman who isn’t Mami. Papito pounds on the door, demanding that Jean, who’s in town again, open it. Mami, visibly shaken, stands behind Papito. I guard the entrance of our bedroom, virtually unnoticed. Jean, sweating profusely and dressed only in a pair of bright red high-waisted jeans, opens the door.

  “This bitch doesn’t know how to behave,” he yells. His girlfriend for the night, a lanky woman taller and darker than Jean, is prettier than a Virginia Slims model. She’s kneeling on the carpet in the background, her tiny tetas are out, holding her smooth long arms over her short ’fro. She is trembling.

  “Jean, please keep it quiet,” Papito says calmly.

  Jean, sweat pouring from his hot head down to his bare chest, grabs the model by her ’fro and drags her, wailing, farther into the room. She begs Mami to help her, but from experience, I know that appealing to her will get this poor woman nowhere. Mami is speechless; her eyes are bulging out of her head. I peek in.

  “Put your dirty face in this, bitch,” Jean screams at her. He takes out his ugly thing from his pants and takes a leak on the avocado-green carpet.

  “Jean, stop!” Papito yells, but Jean doesn’t seem to hear him.

  “Please stop, please stop. Help me!” screams the model between sobs. She lifts her head, guarding her face with her bloody arms. She looks at Mami for help, but Rosie does nada. The model notices me standing by the doorway and starts weeping quietly. I can’t help her. I don’t want Jean to attack Mami, Giselle, or me in her stead.

  Jean slams the model to the floor, grabbing her hair once more. He goes on to rub the model’s hair and face against the carpet where he pissed, so hard that the model stops crying. She looks like she’s surrendering to something, her body goes limp. Mami and I start crying.

  “Please, Pascal. Please, Pascal. Please, my love, do something,” she says softly into his ear.

  “Jean, that is my carpet, and this is my home. Stop it, now. You will leave tomorrow,” Papito screams. “My God, brother, we have sisters, a mother.” Mami says nothing but is wearing an expression I’ve never seen. She looks livid, almost determined. She stops crying and helps the model get dressed.

  I run back into the room and sit down cross-legged on the floor in front of Giselle’s crib.

  * * *

  It happens one morning not long after Jean left. Gerard is in town visiting us from New York. As usual, I’m spending the morning climbing up his lanky body while Giselle sleeps in our room and Mami makes breakfast.

  “Rosie, why are you dressed like that?” I hear Papito ask Mami. The familiar sound of Papito scolding and then smacking Mami reverberates down the hallway. Oddly, Mami doesn’t cry or beg him to stop, like she usually does. Instead, a deafening silence fills the air. I stop climbing and start walking slowly behind Gerard toward the kitchen. Halfway there, I hear Mami smack Papito so hard it makes me shudder.

  “That is enough, Pascal,” Mami says.

  Mami and Papito are at a standstill in the kitchen. He’s rubbing his cheek with his right hand, and Mami’s fists are balled up in front of her and she is standing like Muhammad Ali, ready to rumble. Mami is usually dressed up, even in the morning. However, today her hair is pulled back into a tight ponytail, and she’s wearing a pair of tight faded Levi’s, a fitted blue-and-white-striped T-shirt, and dirty white Chuck Taylors. Her long nails are painted blood red.

  “She smacked me. This bitch smacked me,” Papito says to Gerard, all the while staring at Mami.

  “Pascal, let’s stop this,” Gerard says.

  Papito lunges at Mami, striking her in the face. Her head snaps back, but she doesn’t scream. She doesn’t cry. It’s like she doesn’t feel a thing. Mami punches Papito squarely in the face, and the two fall to the floor, punching and scratching each other. Despite his tall stature, Gerard can’t separate them. They are rolling around on the tile floor, taking turns on top of each other. Punching. Smacking. Scratching. Jabbing.

  After a few long minutes, Mami pushes Papito off. She gets up and leaves him bleeding on the floor. Pieces of his skin are hanging from the tips of her long fingernails.

  “That’s enough, Pascal,” she says, “no más.”

  Mami grabs me by the wrist and drags me down the stairs and out onto the street, leaving Giselle in Gerard’s care. We run until we stop at a pay phone, where Mami places a collect call to Santo Domingo.

  “Hello, Antonio? Dios, por favor, help me. He’s going to kill me.”

  Antonio is standing at our doorstep less than forty-eight hours later.

  * * *

  Those three weeks Antonio stayed with us in 1980 were the first since Papito came into our lives that there was no hitting of any sort. Antonio found Gerard hot and Papito adorable, though bordering on effeminate. In the beginning, Papito came off solemn and charming, underplaying how bad life really was in his beautiful prison. Mami didn’t challenge him, wanting to keep the peace until we were safely out of Papito’s house and back in Paraíso before she told Antonio the truth.

  Papito showed Antonio how to use the bus, gave him a tour of the city, paid for lavish dinners, and introduced him to his friends. He treated Mami with deference,
like he did his own mother—that mean witch. It crosses Antonio’s mind that things weren’t as bad as his sister made them sound when Rocío called him, crying hysterically.

  During the second week things become clearer.

  “Oh, I’ll drop you off at the store so you and Gerard can work a little bit for us,” Papito says to Antonio one morning at breakfast. “My Rosie needs a break.”

  “Who the fuck is Rosie?” Antonio asks.

  “Your sister—that’s what I call her. Rosie suits her better.”

  Antonio looks over at Mami, washing dishes in the kitchen. He notices for the first time since his arrival that something is awfully wrong with this picture. He doesn’t see the headstrong woman in his sister anymore.

  “Before we go to the store, let me show you something,” Papito tells Antonio. “I’ll be right back.” He goes into his bedroom and comes back out smiling and holding a gun in each hand, instructing Antonio and Gerard to follow him to the roof. Antonio reluctantly goes, thinking that nothing too crazy will happen in broad daylight. I hear gunshots and laughter coming from above, none of which sound like Antonio’s. Mami looks like she’s going to faint and falls onto the couch. I sit next to her. Minutes later, Papito, Gerard, and Antonio come back down, and we go to the shop as if nothing happened.

  “It’s time to go, to leave this place,” I hear Antonio whisper to Mami in the car. She doesn’t respond.

  Things get tense quickly when Antonio starts making plans to leave and take us with him. Papito is more paranoid than usual, taking time off from the hospital and The Smoke House in order to keep tabs on us at all times.

  The negotiation goes down in the living room. Gerard sits next to Papito. I sit between Mami and Antonio.

  “You don’t understand. I cannot live without Rosie or Raquelita,” Pascal says. He doesn’t mention Giselle.

  “Pascal, if it were Maureen or Marie, you would want the same,” Gerard says. “Let them go.”

  “Pou ki-sa, frem?” Papito asks. “Why, brother?”

  “This so-called relationship of yours is toxic,” Gerard responds. “It will end wretchedly, with one of you dead and the other in jail.”

  Mami says nothing. She reaches over and holds my hand, something she rarely does.

  “We need to go back to Santo Domingo. I have to go back, and Rocío and the children must come with me,” Antonio says. Papito starts to cry. He is losing control.

  It’s settled. Antonio rents a Toyota, and we try to leave. Our first attempt to escape is thwarted by Papito, who trashes the car the night before we are to depart.

  “Okay, Pascal, there are two ways to go about this,” Antonio says the next morning.

  “You’re not man enough to talk to me that way,” Pascal responds. He is furious.

  “Oh, a guy like you, who wears masks, wants to talk about being a man?” Antonio says. “I don’t think you’ve been treating my sister like a real man would.”

  “Let’s prevent a tragedy here,” Pascal says, sitting on the couch, staring through Antonio at one of the swords hanging on the wall.

  “To prevent a tragedy, why don’t you make sure you don’t prevent us from missing the flight this time, because I will report this conversation to the authorities and tell them you crashed the car on purpose.”

  We wait for the next flight out of San Francisco to Santo Domingo at San Francisco International for what feels like hours.

  Tío Antonio risked his life to save ours.

  * * *

  Mama and Papa are furious with Mami.

  “God only knows what Raquelita was subjected to over there,” is the first thing Mama says to her. “You will never admit it, out of shame.”

  “No era cómo ustedes piensan. It’s not what you think,” Mami says. She’s right. It was much worse.

  In the time since I last saw Mama she decided she had taken enough of Papa’s playboy shit and divorced him. They sold our house in Paraíso to an ambassador who realized soon after he moved in that he couldn’t cope with the iguanas overrunning the place. Maybe it was for the best, because Mama and Papa’s split was short-lived, and they wanted to start the next chapter of their life together somewhere new. They moved into a new two-story house in Fernandez. Mami, Giselle, and I moved into the first floor of a spacious colonial apartment on Arzobispo Portes.

  It takes only a few weeks for Papa to call Papi and convince him to fly into Santo Domingo to pick me up and take me back to New York City with him and his wife. I eavesdrop on a few of their phone conversations. Papa doesn’t feel that Mami is stable enough to take care of both Giselle and me alone. I assume Papi agrees, because Papa tells me that I’m going to soar like an eagle in Nueva York. Now that Papi was remarried—this time to an older woman, a gringa or something close to one—that meant he was stable and presumably paid enough to take care of me.

  When Papi comes to Santo Domingo with his wife, Alice, I get excited just hearing him talk about New York City. “We’re going to make a snowman in the park this invierno,” Papi says to me. “I have room for your toys and everything.” He showers me with affection and gifts. Alice sits by, watching and smiling, keeping her distance so that I can have Papi to myself. I’m so excited that I start planning how I’m going to decorate my bedroom once we get there. My bed will be big enough to accommodate my abuelitos, Paloma and Antonio, when they drop by for a visit. When the time comes to have the conversation with Mami, it’s straightforward.

  “Mami, I have to go. I’m sorry,” I say. “I want to have a better life.”

  “What do you know about what a better life is?” she asks me.

  “I know what it’s not, Mami,” I respond. “You’ve shown me that much.”

  “Go to hell. I hope you die and go to hell with your father,” she says. “I never want to see you again.”

  It’s April 1981. I’m almost eight.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Uptown ’81

  DJ’s spinning I said my, my Flash is fast, Flash is cool.

  —BLONDIE, “RAPTURE”

  AFTER THAT CONVERSATION ON ARZOBISPO PORTES, MAMI FLEW back to San Francisco with Giselle, back to her perch on Eddy Street.

  I board the plane to New York City by myself, leaving behind the only people I feel a connection to. The plane is enormous. Legs are everywhere—thick, skinny, very light, burnt rust, like those of my primas, and dark, like those of Jean’s Virginia Slims model—racing up and down both aisles. My legs are unspectacular in comparison. They are short and light brown, like caramelito, and covered with scabs and welts from scratching. “The mosquitoes love you more than most people,” Mama said often.

  A gorgeous long pair with nude shimmering pantyhose on stops by my seat every so often to drop crayons, Pan Am 747 coloring books, a bunch of wing pins, bags of pretzels, and ginger ale on my tray. The stewardesses smile but don’t say much. I wonder if any of them are Dominican, like me. Or americana, like me.

  I look at the clouds and imagine life in New York City. I will live in a big and beautiful apartment like those old white women in Lincoln Towers. I will have a room that will look just like my room in Santo Domingo, that will be big enough for my dolls. Papi will treat me better than Papito did and never tell me to go to hell.

  I haven’t finish coloring an entire page before I’m told to put my things away in preparation for landing. The trip is so short, I’m going to ask Papi if I can come back to visit Papa and Mama on the weekends.

  Papi picks me up from John F. Kennedy International Airport with his wife, Alice. Nothing remarkable happens when we meet; he doesn’t pick me up and twirl me around, like he did back in Santo Domingo. He and his wife speak to me only in English. Alice is dressed in polyester pants and a pastel blouse with a scarf cinched around her neck. I can make out the blue veins through her blanched face, neck, and hands—the only parts of her that are exposed. Her complexion perfectly matches her blouse.

  Papi’s tousled hair makes him look younger than thirty-eight. His
face is slightly more ashen than when I saw him a couple of months ago in Santo Domingo. He’s dressed in almost the same outfit he wore in Papa and Mama’s living room: lightweight sweatpants, a polo shirt, a pair of Stan Smiths, and white tube socks hugging his skinny calves.

  I don’t like Alice. Papi pays too much attention to her, like Mami did Papito, even at the airport, where he should be paying attention to me. Alice’s razor-thin blond hair is what people in Santo Domingo call bueno, but I don’t understand how that kind of hair can be good. It doesn’t move at all, or ripple like the water in Boca Chica when I throw shells at it.

  I imagine I don’t look much better to her. My arms, legs, and neck are covered in mosquito bites, and I’m rail-thin. I haven’t fully recovered from living in San Francisco. I wonder if Alice knows how to cook as well as Mama and Papa. She reminds me of the ladies Mami used to clean for who rarely entered their kitchens. Alice looks harmless, like she won’t turn into a monster when Papi isn’t around or make me eat rotten spinach. More than anything, I hope she doesn’t start insisting I call her “Mamita” or something that will give off the impression that I am her flesh and blood.

  Looking at him in the rearview mirror of his gray Chevy Impala, I notice I have Papi’s face and lanky body and Mami’s sad baggy eyes. I guess we are somehow related, regardless of how disconnected I’m feeling to him right now.

  We drive slowly past a road onto the Van Wyck Expressway until we reach the interstate heading north, lined with black shiny bags spilling garbage on either side of the road. There are dead birds, raccoons, and squirrels everywhere and a couple of what look like decomposing dogs in shallow graves of debris and oil from the other Impalas, station wagons, and punch buggies whizzing by. It’s as if the dead don’t matter.