Becoming the Butlers Read online

  There was someone crying behind all that hair. Pilar’s sobs were soft and muted as falling rain.

  “Don’t cry, Pilar,” I began, moving toward her. Then, scared that I’d join her in a grand display of grief, I pulled away, knowing now that my mother and George weren’t worth it. Pilar reached for a crumpled tissue on the night table and wiped her eyes.

  “The nuns tell me to be strong because of my studies. If I always cry, I’ll never be a periodontist.”

  “You should tell those nuns to give you a break.”

  “What I don’t understand…,” Pilar said, biting her lip and breathing hard, “is, okay, he left us, he was a real bastard, but I still miss him. I miss him so much that if someone told me the only way to get my dad back was to fail out of school, I’d do it. I’d do anything, and you know what, he still wouldn’t love me. Father Gomez tells me to talk to God, but God doesn’t want to listen.”

  “I’ll listen,” I told Pilar, hearing the faint thud of a distant brick fall to the ground.

  The doorbell rang. Mrs. Rosen, I thought, playing social worker. But two policemen stood stiffly by the buzzer, their hands filled with familiar ivory cards.

  “Is this the apartment that looks out on the corner of 116th Street and Riverside?” the shorter policeman asked. He had a blond crew cut, long sideburns, and a pencil-thin moustache.

  “Yes,” I answered uncertainly.

  “Do these belong to anyone in this household?” he continued, shuffling the cards in front of my eyes like a croupier.

  “Can I see them?” I asked.

  “Sure, why not,” remarked his partner, older, grayer, his voice raspy with a cold.

  The wedding invitations were mostly samples that my mother showed to prospective clients. Different lettering styles and sizes, some with gilt edges, others, less expensive, made from thin paper. “Mr. and Mrs. Jonathan Heller request the pleasure of your company at the marriage of their daughter, Julianne Joy.” This one was in my mother’s most traditional style, the Roman letters reminiscent of church spires. Others cards were what my mother called “pending”: invitations for weddings that were canceled, delayed, bankrupt, or maybe just forgotten. A few dated back to 1982, another as recent as last year. These made me think of stale wedding cake, the candied roses rotten and crumbling.

  “About a hundred of these are all over the sidewalk,” the older cop told me. “Someone in this apartment is throwing them out the window. Who’s in that room?” he asked, pointing to my father’s bedroom.

  “Oh, that’s my little brother’s nursery,” Pilar said quickly. “I thought he was sleeping. I’m sorry he’s causing trouble. I’ll take care of it right away.” The policemen began to follow Pilar, who slowly turned around. “Could you stay outside?” she asked, staring meaningfully at their holsters. “He’s scared of guns.”

  “Okay,” the older cop said. They both looked tired, and probably needed a cup of coffee. Pilar and I knocked on my father’s door and went in. The screech of a guitar hurled around our heads as a hoarse male voice sang something about “leather loving.” My father was leaning dangerously far out of the window, his torso wedged between the window frames.

  “What are you doing?” I shouted over the music.

  “Oh hello, Rachel, hi, Pilar,” my father said, turning his head slightly. Next to him was an old hatbox filled with my mother’s wedding invitations. He took a handful and tossed the cards out like he was flinging a frisbee. Pilar switched off the clock radio by his bed. It was hard to believe that all that noise had erupted from such a tiny thing. The sudden quiet stunned me so much that I found myself whispering.

  “James, two cops are hanging outside your door and they’re not smiling. Pilar acted fast and said you’re her baby brother so they wouldn’t arrest you. Hey, did you hear me?”

  “Yes, Rachel, thank you, I hear you loud and clear.”

  My father walked back to his bed from the window and sat on the edge of his bed. He lit a cigarette with steady hands, and stared at us with clear eyes. My father wasn’t drunk, which made everything a whole lot more frightening.

  “You see,” he explained to Pilar, “Mrs. Rosen just set me off—kind of a delayed reaction. For weeks I’ve been searching for something to destroy. But my wife—her name’s Elizabeth, did you know that?” Pilar nodded. “Well lovely Elizabeth took almost everything with her. And then I found these. All the extra wedding invitations. Not ours, of course; we were married in Reno. A big secret. My apologies to the sergeant,” my father said, blowing out three circles of smoke and poking his cigarette through the wreaths. “The entire population of Riverside Drive has now been invited to Ginger and Tony Farkas’s wedding, reception to be held at the Bronx Zoo. God bless everyone.”

  “I’ll take care of the police,” Pilar told me as we left my father’s room. “You just agree to everything I say.”

  The two men were standing by the kitchen, their walkie-talkies buzzing with static.

  “I’m sorry about the trouble,” Pilar announced in a smooth, professional voice. “But you know two-year-olds. Last week he tried to throw the silverware down the incinerator.”

  “Yeah,” the blond cop agreed, nodding. “My Charlie’s always driving my wife crazy. When he was two he swallowed a ten-pack of subway tokens.”

  “Thank God my daughter outgrew that,” his older partner declared. “Jenny’s only problem is coming home by midnight.”

  “Heck, I never liked tossing kids into the wagon,” said the blond cop. “Hey, you two sisters?”

  I began to speak, but Pilar interrupted.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Funny, you don’t look alike. Ask your mom about the milkman.” The two broke into guffaws, and finally left, practically choking on their laughter.

  That night, I told Pilar about the Butlers. She had won my trust when she protected my father in front of the policemen. But I lied to Pilar about the Butlers because I didn’t know the truth about them. I made up stories; the Butlers as fairy tale, the Butlers as I wanted to see them. Pilar asked questions that a child might ask her mother: “Is Olivia’s hair really that gold?” “How long are her eyelashes?” “What type of shoes does she wear?” All Olivia had to do was wink at a boy and he’d be in love forever. Edwin’s eyes were purple as amethysts. Their apartment was a triplex stretching a whole block, and there were too many maids; some were so bored that all they did was wipe the marble staircase with a muslin cloth from dawn till dark. The ballroom floor was so shiny you could slide like a skater from end to end. On the terrace was a menagerie, with ostriches, koalas, toucans, and even seals.

  “Seals!” Pilar exclaimed.

  I didn’t know why I told such lies. But I knew Pilar would believe me. Wrapped in her sheets like a mummy, she leaned toward me to hear more, her breath warm against my face.

  “We’ll telephone them,” I told her. “If you listen carefully, you can hear the seals.”

  “But it’s so late, Rachel.”

  “Don’t worry. They never sleep. But you can’t say anything when they pick up. Just listen. Promise?”

  “I promise,” Pilar solemnly swore.

  We tiptoed into the hall in our bare feet, shivering in our thin nightgowns. In the darkness the coat rack at the end of the hall looked like a thin man in a mackintosh and derby. Pilar sneezed, then giggled. The telephone, with its green glowing dial, sat on an old-fashioned stand shaped like a question mark. As I gave Pilar the Butlers’ number, the words felt as cold and bumpy in my mouth as ice cubes. She dialed quickly and cradled the receiver against her neck. I heard ringing, and then a click as someone answered. Pilar’s lips pressed tightly together in a line, only her nose twitched. She sat still for a moment, then gasped, dropping the receiver to the floor. The noise disturbed my father, who moaned in his sleep behind closed doors. I returned the receiver to its cradle and then whispered, fearful of Pilar’s disappointment, “What happened?”

  “A boy picked up the phone,” she
whispered back. “He was sleepy. I heard water splashing and thought that must be the seals. Then, someone else…”

  “Who?” I asked, incredulous that somehow everything turned true.

  “A lady. A lady singing. She sounded sad. But the song wasn’t sad: ‘Michael Row Your Boat Ashore.’ Sometimes I sing it to Gloria when she’s tired. This lady sang like something inside her was breaking.”

  Although I had never seen Mrs. Butler, I imagined a pale slender woman in an icy blue robe sitting upright in a deep upholstered armchair. Her blonde hair would look the color of bone in the moonlight which flooded the apartment; intricate patterns unfurled like lace across the walls. I saw Mrs. Butler so vividly that I reached out to touch her velvet sleeve. Instead I felt Pilar’s bare arm, with goose bumps, and wondered why she had told the policemen we were sisters.

  TEN

  Nicole Rudomov had now been added to the list of people who ignored me, topping even Olivia Butler and my father. She changed lab partners in Bio and I was now paired off with Lily Smalls, who always wore fuzzy sweaters that made me sneeze. Lily also liked to pick the rubber bands in her braces, a disgusting habit which usually sent the rubber bands soaring out of her mouth and onto my notebook. Nicole walked quickly past my chair as she left class, her eyes focused on the floor. Once, determined to have a confrontation, I stood directly in front of her. Like Olivia Butler, she looked right through me and seemed capable of mowing me down if I didn’t step aside. I truly began to feel like an Invisible. I wasn’t a Butler, I wasn’t a Harris. Every morning I checked my reflection in the mirror, pinched my cheeks, and breathed on the glass, so grateful to see it steam. I was also beginning to feel grateful to the Vasquezes. They at least confirmed my existence. And as my father had hoped, they filled the empty dark rooms with life and light; made our apartment a home again.

  I had forgotten about the incidental sounds that made a home sound like home: voices from a Saturday morning TV cartoon, eggs frying in a greased pan, classical music on the FM radio station, the plates rattling in the dishwasher. George played basketball in the library with a foam ball, Luisa built elaborate Leggo sets in the den, and Gloria crawled beneath our legs and drooled everywhere. I had even grown used to Pilar’s vigorous gargling, the omnipresent scent of Listerine, all her A plus exams taped on her side of the wall. The kitchen, which had once smelled like a cheap bar, popcorn, and spilled beer, was heady with the aromas of Mrs. Vasquez’s cooking. I especially loved breathing the sweet, burnt scent of flan, though the custard never tasted as luscious as the smell. In the morning Mrs. Vasquez baked bread, the flour spraying over her face like powder. Then, because she had to report early for her hotel maid job, Pilar and I made breakfast—toast and cereal, or sometimes George Jr.’s favorite, scrambled eggs with sliced bananas. Before we went to school we quickly rinsed the plates, wiped the table, and loaded the dishwasher. Pilar knew I avoided housework, an aversion I inherited from my mother, who hated anything that reeked of housewives. “No Rachel,” Pilar first told me, trying to be gentle. “It’s much faster to put all the knives under the faucet first. See?”

  I watched her carefully and began to enjoy what I once considered a chore. Pilar and I worked as effortlessly as an old married couple. The soapy water was soothing, and sometimes I felt my eyes droop and my body go limp as if half-asleep. But one morning Pilar startled me by revealing an intimate family story. She claimed she felt guilty about my father’s hospitality, and hoped to make me understand her mother’s helpless position.

  As George himself had explained, Pilar told me how her father had married her mother when she was only sixteen. The first child, and then three after that, all died at birth. Convinced the infants’ deaths were God’s punishments, Mrs. Vasquez turned to the church. And George turned to America. Ever since Pilar could remember, her father talked incessantly about moving to the United States. He took English lessons at a trade school run by an alcoholic from New Jersey who always brought a bottle of tequila into class. Then, after he became quite fluent in English, George became a bus driver for American tour groups.

  When Pilar was a little girl she thought America was her father’s sleek silver bus with smoked gray windows. The alcoholic English teacher told George he knew a way to smuggle him into the United States. The price was so high that George had to sell the small farm he received as a dowry. He arrived with his family at the agreed meeting place and waited until morning for the man to show up. A sneering policeman informed George that the teacher was on old pro who had ripped off at least twenty others in similar scams. George didn’t mention America again. He quit the tour company job and became a carpenter. Luisa was born, and her restless father seemed resigned to settle down.

  “But right about my eleventh birthday,” Pilar told me, “he came into the kitchen and said he knew a way to the States, but it was very dangerous, and he wouldn’t be able to send for us for at least a year. If we didn’t hear from him after Easter, we should assume he was dead. My mother fell to her knees and begged him to stay. But that night he was gone. Just like that. Everyday we prayed for his safety. Easter came and went. When we finally decided to buy black veils, four airplane tickets to New York arrived in the mail.”

  “How did he get here?” I asked.

  Pilar shrugged and wiped a sudsy hand across her face. “He never told us. Maybe he smuggled drugs. A lot of Americans come to Mexico City just to find someone to do their dirty work. Swallow bags of cocaine. That’s how my uncle did it. Except when he got to JFK the bags exploded inside him and he nearly died. My father could have crawled through oil pipes, hidden in a truck filled with chickens, maybe even paid an American hitchhiker to marry him so he could get a green card. All I know is the way he came to the States changed him. You can see it in his paintings.”

  “I know his paintings,” I admitted with some hesitation. “I’ve seen them in the bicycle room. They scare me.”

  “They scare me too,” she answered. “Something terrible must have happened to him to make him paint that way. Maybe it’s better I don’t know. He wouldn’t look at us when we arrived at the airport. Even after we settled here, he still pretended as if we belonged to someone else. My father would talk to me and even touch me but I knew he wasn’t hearing or feeling. He even forgot the baby. We should have stayed in Mexico,” Pilar concluded.

  During the day, Mrs. Vasquez’s sister watched the baby. She was a spare, stooped woman who wore the same shapeless white cotton dress and white plastic thongs every day. Her name was Roja, after the cherry-shaped red birthmark across her right cheek. The first time she came to our apartment she wouldn’t go beyond the front hall, and clung to the doorknob with both hands. Her sister spoke sharply to her, pushed her into my father’s armchair, gave her a box of crayons and a coloring book. I thought Roja might be retarded, but Pilar explained that her aunt had suffered a breakdown in Mexico City and was undergoing treatment at Bellevue Hospital.

  “Do you think the baby is safe with her?” I had asked.

  “Yes,” Pilar answered. “The only person Roja hurts is herself. It’s very sad. Her groom ran away with one of her bridesmaids the morning after the wedding. When Roja found out, she tried to throw herself through the hotel window.”

  Pilar’s aunt now had a romantic, doomed aura which I envied. I wished I could be so dignified. Roja fed the baby and sang to her in a high toneless voice in a language I knew wasn’t Spanish and sounded like the chirping of extravagant birds or the buzzing of magical bees. I only saw her in the mornings, before I went to school, her right thumbnail tracing the black lines in the coloring book.

  Other relatives and friends of the Vasquezes also came to visit. They were mostly middle-aged women with stiff black hair piled high on their heads like tiaras. Their gifts were the same: bowls of candied fruit, plastic hair combs, and movie magazines. One girl not much older than me brought champagne and seemed surprised not to find newlyweds or a newborn baby. These women filled our apartment with their
musk cologne and cigarette smoke, chattering loudly as they painted their nails and dropped ashes all over the carpet. The radio was always tuned to a Spanish station, and the women danced in pairs, hooting loudly along with the bright tunes, hollering in ecstasy whenever a Julio Iglesias song played. Sometimes they even washed their hair in the sink, and I would find thick black strands clogging the drain.

  My father was “Señor Harris,” in reverent tones. These women obviously didn’t find the Vasquezes’ present living arrangement strange. My father slept on the fold-out couch in the living room, so there wasn’t any suggestion of impropriety. Perhaps they thought it was only right. My mother had taken George away, therefore my father should give the abandoned Vasquez family something in return. In their eyes our spacious apartment with two bathrooms was more than an even exchange.

  My father had decided to continue learning Spanish, and Mrs. Vasquez would be his teacher. Their lessons were very unique. Every night, after dinner, he and Mrs. Vasquez would go into the living room and watch that evening’s scheduled television programs. Mrs. Vasquez, in her faded yellow muumuu, sat in an armchair three inches away from the set, a tray containing a glass of iced tea and lemon cookies balanced precariously on her lap. My father sat attentively next to her on a stool with a pen and notebook. Pilar would flip the TV channels (nobody cared about a specific station) and for the next three hours Mrs. Vasquez would chatter loudly in Spanish over the dialogue of each program. Pilar told me that because her mother couldn’t understand English she simply supplied her own narrative. Her imagination was terrific. A comedy about two car salesmen was transformed by Mrs. Vasquez’s own script into a serious drama about two young seminary students struggling to understand God. The Eyewitness News sportscaster wasn’t elaborating about the college NCAA finals but discussing different fashions in boys’ sneakers. And Johnny Carson was a doctor who invited his glamorous patients on air to discuss their ailments.

  Pilar had given up trying to correct her mother a long time ago, and could tune out Mrs. Vasquez’s ravings and listen to the actual broadcast. But my father, who thumbed continuously through his dictionary, hung on her every word. When he couldn’t find a definition he’d raise his hand like one of his own pupils. Mrs. Vasquez then lifted herself wearily from the cushions and trudged through the apartment until she discovered the item in question. I remember her bringing in a bottle of Listerine, a pair of shoelaces, a stuffed animal from Gloria’s crib, a styptic pencil, and one of my old training bras. If it was something intangible, such as a physical or spiritual condition, my father and Mrs. Vasquez would play their own sort of charades.