Becoming the Butlers Read online

  Mrs. Vasquez was the only person who knew about our trip. My mother’s parents were dead, and my father’s mother lived in a senior citizen’s home near Dartmouth College. My Aunt Ruth, my mother’s sister, had married into an Orthodox Jewish family and decided my mother was as good as dead for marrying a minister’s son. My father’s brother, an English teacher in Japan, fell in love with a Geisha and lived with her in Osaka. Because I was too embarrassed to tell my friends what happened to my mother, I quickly dropped all of them and wouldn’t return their phone calls. As for my father, his drinking and frequent nastiness alienated both colleagues at school and his ever-shrinking circle of friends. We were embarrassed: my mother and our building super wasn’t Masterpiece Theater, but something crude and outlandish, like an outdated episode of Love American Style.

  At the airline check-in counter I told my father I refused to sit next to him on the plane.

  “But this is a six-hour overnight flight,” he argued. “Who knows what you’ll be sitting next to, or what could happen at four A.M.…”

  “But James,” I moaned. (I called him James when I was annoyed, or trying to wheedle something out of him, or felt like he wasn’t being much of a father.) “This is Iberia Airlines, not Times Square. And anyway, my health would be more endangered if I sat next to you in the smoking section.”

  My father couldn’t disagree with that. He was a chain smoker with yellowing blistered fingers and sloppy habits. He left a trail of ashes wherever he went, and I would find crushed cigarette stubs on the top of my cereal box, in the soap dish, nestling between the sugar packets in the sugar bowl. My mother hated his cigarettes too, and for a long period when I was in seventh grade walked about the apartment wearing a surgical mask. But our efforts were in vain, and after my mother left, my father’s smoking became nonstop.

  “All right,” my father finally relented. “But if anyone lays a finger on you, kick him where it’s most painful and add that your dad gave permission to gouge his eyes out too.”

  My father and I argued in the souvenir shop. I wanted to buy several sweatshirts and he said no, that once we were in Madrid we should look like natives, not tourists. The sweatshirts I wanted had stencils of the Manhattan skyline with a round, red setting sun or the Statue of Liberty surrounded by sailboats. The cashier kept punching the price in, my father would shake his head, and she’d have to get her manager to void the receipt. My father bought himself an anthropology magazine which seemed to be covered in the same white dust as featured in the lead story about the Sahara. It didn’t seem fair to leave without any memento of my hometown, so I shoplifted a fifty-cent Empire State Building chrome lighter, which I would lose thirty minutes later.

  As we waited to board the plane, my father suddenly told me to hold his place in line. “I’ll be right back,” he said urgently. “Don’t move an inch.” His face was pale and his eyes, usually blue, looked washed out like faded denim. I didn’t know if he was scared of flying, or suddenly terrified at the thought that this could all be a failed mission. At the airport bar he ordered shots. My father thought vodka didn’t smell. His choice used to be whiskey, but one of his students complained, and my father, rather than cut back, decided to change drinks.

  I watched him make his way through the crowd, his shoulders hunched forward as if any moment he expected a crushing tackle. My father still walked with a slight limp from his accident. A bike messenger on Sixth Avenue had run over his left foot. My father claimed the messenger was high; the teenager said my father was drunk and crossed against the light. Both were probably right, and all I could think was what if the bicycle had been a truck?

  My father wore his usual outfit: faded chinos, scruffy loafers with worn down heels, an old, Irish fisherman’s wool sweater with a wrinkled Brooks Brothers striped shirt and a creased navy blue jacket. I once heard a family friend describe my father’s style as “definitely decadent Andover.” According to my mother, he just picked up whatever was on the floor and hoped nothing clashed too much. That morning my father had visited the barber, and his pale blond hair was cropped so close that in some places you could see the pink scalp. The newly exposed back of his neck looked as fragile and white as an eggshell.

  Over the loudspeaker a breathless female voice announced exotic destinations as if they were pop songs: Tobago, Port-Au-Prince, and Jakarta, which sounded to me like an exotic tea with rose-colored leaves. The lounge’s seats were filled with passengers or piles of luggage; one man in a trench coat embraced his leather suitcase as if it were a person he couldn’t bear to leave.

  “Rachel,” I heard my father call, “I’ve been looking all over for you.”

  He clutched a half-crushed plastic cup. A young woman in a purple coat stood next to him. At first I thought she was a stewardess, and then I saw that she too held a plastic cup with melting ice cubes and an Iberia airplane ticket.

  My father crouched down till his face was next to mine. I recognized the faint scent of vodka, which always reminded me of watered-down formaldehyde.

  “Who’s she?” I asked.

  “Who?”

  My father seemed surprised the woman had followed him and began rubbing his hands nervously together. “I think her name is Cynthia. Cynthia Lime.”

  My father stood up and awkwardly nodded to Cynthia Lime. Strange women were always trying to pick him up. He was blond, blue-eyed, and tall, and had perfect teeth. Though he sounded like Cary Grant, most people thought he looked like Robert Redford gone to seed.

  “Cindy, this is my daughter, Rachel. Rachel, Cindy.”

  “Cynthia,” she corrected him. She was a tall and emaciated girl with a physique like a hat stand. Her dark hair was pulled severely back with a tortoiseshell barrette, and she smiled in a tight way that made her eyeballs recede slightly into her head. A large backpack hung from her shoulders, the bulging outer pocket crammed full. Cynthia unzipped the pocket, took out a plastic bag filled with what looked like cereal and weighed it in her hand.

  “These are my grains,” she explained. “If I eat a tablespoon from each bag once every hour, I won’t get any jet lag.”

  “Well?” I moaned to my father. “Are we leaving or not?”

  “Of course, Rachel. I don’t hang out in airport lounges for fun.” My father grinned, and Cynthia laughed in a tinkling way that surprised me. I didn’t expect something so light to come from such a grave person. She laughed the same bubbly way as my mother, a laugh, I thought, which if you could taste it would be like the sweet cherry soda the waiters made with grenadine syrup in village cafés. Maybe my father looked at her in The Pilot’s Cove because he heard that laugh and thought, Elizabeth, are you here too?

  “Well, they just made the final boarding call,” I announced, picking up my suitcase, “so I guess we’ll head home.”

  “What! Jesus Christ!” My father grabbed his bags and ran to the counter, shouting “wait” to the attendants.

  Cynthia followed, leaving a trail of cornflakes from a torn plastic bag. An angry buzzing greeted us as we made our way into the plane. I felt very powerful, as if we were important persons who couldn’t help but keep everyone waiting. My seat was in the third row. If I leaned to the left, I could see the door of the cockpit partially ajar, and the silver tips of the pilot’s pins. Next to me an old lady leafed through one of the airline’s digest magazines. I expected my father to heave a sigh of relief, or at least to ask her to keep an eye on me. But he was still engrossed in his conversation with Cynthia Lime, who told me when we were boarding that she was a freshman studying dance literature at Barnard College.

  “Dance literature!” I said. “That doesn’t make sense. Kind of like architecture music, or physics poetry.”

  I was quite pleased with my similes, and Cynthia frowned and asked me my age.

  “Only four years younger than you. I was born when my mother was a freshman. Do you have any children?”

  “No, of course not,” Cynthia said.

  “You do realize
that’s my father, don’t you? I mean, I’m not his date or anything. And we’re meeting my mom, his wife, at the airport in Madrid.”

  “Oh,” Cynthia said slowly. She took out a pack of cigarettes and fumbled for matches. I gave her my Empire State Building lighter, and that was the last I ever saw of that little item. I heard Cynthia ask someone at the end of a smoking aisle if they would very much mind switching seats so she could sit next to her new friend James. The two were only five aisles behind me, but it seemed like they could be sitting in another galaxy.

  “Excuse me,” the old lady next to me whispered. “But I really think you should be paying attention to the stewardesses.”

  I turned my head away from my father and Cynthia and stared at her. The old lady looked very much like our next door neighbor Mrs. Rosen. They both smelled vaguely of cat food, wore Aran cardigan sweaters with two missing buttons, and had bad perms which made their frizzy hair look like steel wool. But this woman seemed gentler than the formidable Mrs. Rosen, and her hastily penciled eyebrows gave her face a fuzzy expression.

  “I’m Mrs. Simon,” she told me after the stewardesses finished modeling the inflatable vests. “This will be the first time I’ve been to Europe.”

  “Europe,” I said. “Funny, but I just can’t think of Madrid as Europe.”

  “But of course it is. Don’t you know Geography?”

  Her voice had a familiar authoritarian ring, and as I guessed, she was a school teacher.

  “Today’s schools don’t teach Geography,” she told me. “My students think Hiroshima is the teriyaki place in the shopping mall.”

  “See,” I began, but gave up. How could I explain that my mother was all Madrid meant to me. My father had shown me glossy guidebooks with pictures of flamenco dancers and toreadors, and bought me a Berlitz tape, which I erased and used to tape a “Who” album. I didn’t want to learn Spanish, didn’t want to go to the Prado or eat tapas or drink sangria. Europe was a place where passengers on The Love Boat were always headed. Neither I, nor my mother, belonged there.

  “Excuse me,” I said quickly, feeling the onset of another crying bout.

  “But you should stay in your seat until we take off,” Mrs. Simon cried as I nearly stepped on her foot to make my way. My father didn’t notice me as I passed his seat. He and Cynthia were both drinking Bloody Marys and sharing a bag of Planters Peanuts. The bathroom cubicle was so small that I could sit on the sink and prop my sneakers on the wall. The white light made my face look mottled and yellow as cheese. I felt nauseous and took two and a half Dramamine pills even though the directions said to take one. Then I grabbed a handful of the rough brown paper the airlines called tissues, and began to sob. If only I didn’t look so awful afterward. My lids would swell up and resemble potato skins, my nose would look like a red turnip, and my throat would burn as if I just ate a handful of jalepeño peppers.

  This was becoming more than a daily routine. I’d cry while buttering my toast, cry in the dark sanctuary of the girls’ locker room, sniffle in the middle of Chemistry, sniffle while waiting in the cafeteria line, and as soon as I got home, let it all come out in torrents in my bedroom. I was so surprised by how much water my eyes were capable of spilling that I took to sleeping on bunched-up towels.

  The funny thing was I never really knew for whom I was crying. My mother, of course, was the prime candidate. Even a month after she was gone, I still woke up convinced I heard her high, mellifluous voice chiding the news reporter on WINS radio for mispronouncing the governor’s name, or washing the coffee cups she forgot to rinse the night before, or whistling “Happy Birthday” to Dixie, our old cat, who would only then consent to leave her precarious perch on the fire escape.

  Then I realized the WINS news announcer was reading the headlines to an empty kitchen, the clanking of the coffee cups was the sound of steam escaping the radiator, and “Happy Birthday” only the whistling teakettle my father neglected. Sometimes I wished she was dead. Dead was more heroic, more concrete, and I could visit her grave every Sunday, knowing that beneath the muddy soil there was a body, a substance to be reckoned with. Instead, I could only sniff her green silk jacket that hung in the closet like an abandoned antique, still reeking of jasmine perfume.

  I suppose a part of me cried for my father too, who often couldn’t even make it to the front door and fell asleep in the hallway, his shirt collar damp with vodka, a drowning man. I was powerless to help him. The purplish bruise, shaped like a pressed violet, was still faintly visible over his left eyebrow. A couple of nights after my mother left, my father had walked, stone cold sober, into his bedroom wall. When I found him on the floor, weeping, he threw his shoe at me and told me never to enter his room without knocking. After that I always felt as if I were scaling a barbed wire fence. If I kept up with my father’s sardonic comments I could reach the top, jump over, and be free. But his bitterness made me slip and fall, and there I was, at the bottom, hoping the twisted metal wouldn’t cut me too much as I started up again.

  But mainly I was crying for myself, astounded by just how bad things had turned. I too was terrified about what we would discover in Madrid, and then, what would happen afterward. My father would never be Cary Grant, and my mother wasn’t the type to let anyone carry her down any grand staircase. And even though I tried to hate him I knew George wasn’t a Nazi but someone who unfortunately fell in love with my mother.

  The pills began to affect me. My limbs felt heavy and clumsy; tiny purple dots swirled before my eyes. I returned to my seat and found Mrs. Simon snoring loudly and curled up in a ball. The movie had started but something was wrong with the projector. The picture was out of focus and flickering; I could just barely make out a blonde girl running across a field of daisies. Most of the passengers were asleep and those awake didn’t seem to care about the faulty film. The flickering scenes made me dizzy and when I closed my eyes and then opened them, other floating images had replaced what was on the screen. Hallucinations, I realized, either from the pills or my exhaustion. I saw Cynthia Lime distributing her anti-jet-lag cereal to a cluster of pigeons on Broadway, Mrs. Simon trying on sweatshirts at the airport shop, my father balancing a pyramid of plastic cocktail cups on his head, and superimposing herself on all these crazy images, my mother, serene and smiling, whispering something I couldn’t quite hear.

  TWO

  At Barajas airport, men in flannel shirts, looking like lumberjacks, tried to take our suitcases and store them in taxis. The Spanish they spoke was very different from the Spanish I heard on Amsterdam Avenue; softer, thicker, the words shag carpet came to my mind. My father and I looked longingly at the arrivals gate, both of us too embarrassed to admit that somehow we hoped my mother would be there. But the airport was deserted at that early morning hour, and red helium balloons, left over from a late night welcome party, dipped half-heartedly from the ceiling as if we weren’t worthy of their buoyancy. Cynthia was staying with an exchange student from college, and had written her address on the back of a pack of matches with a purple pen that matched her raincoat. She said she hadn’t slept well on the flight, and a clumsy stewardess had spilled red wine over her sleeve. The stain looked like a strawberry, and she fretted about how she could clean the blouse in Madrid.

  “I assume one can buy laundry detergent somewhere,”

  James said with a yawn. He hadn’t slept much either, and his creased face looked gray.

  “Oh, it’s not the detergent,” declared Cynthia, “it’s the water. The water is filthy. My friend says if you took a teaspoon and placed it under a microscope, you’d see The Night of the Living Dead.”

  “No, you wouldn’t,” I snapped. “Water’s water, wherever you are.”

  We were all tired and irritable. I wanted to get rid of this girl who kept looking at my father with hungry eyes, find a room somewhere, take a hot bath, and then find my mother. So far Madrid was a conveyer belt rotating the same suitcases, dirty plastic waiting chairs, luggage crates with rusty wheels, and
porters in greasy uniforms who whistled through tobacco-stained teeth.

  “My friend’s waiting for me outside,” Cynthia told my father. “I’d ask her if she had any extra rooms, but the Señora she lives with is very particular about men staying over.”

  “Well, nice meeting you,” James said. “Hasta la vista.”

  Cynthia hitched her knapsack on her shoulder and walked away, still facing us, waving. I hoped she’d trip over a stray suitcase, back into a wall, but somehow she made it safely out the door. Her cereal bags, I noticed, were all empty.

  “What does that mean?” I asked my father. “Hasta la vista?”

  “Till we meet again.”

  “Well, I don’t ever want to see her again.”

  “Melody,” my father said in surprise. “You’re actually jealous. Thank you, I’m really flattered.”

  “I’m not jealous. If you want to go off with her, by all means go. I’ll find Mom myself. She’ll probably be a lot happier seeing me than you.”

  My father bit his lip, started to say something, and then lit a cigarette instead. The flame of his silver lighter wavered in the air as if unsure of the new foreign atmosphere. We had left the terminal and now stood uncertainly with our bags. The bright sun made the pavement sparkle, and it was then I first noticed that the light in Spain was a yellow that could look moldy brown, like a bruised banana. Cars parked at the curb picked up passengers and then sped away.

  “We’re both tired,” my father began, “and probably a little scared too. I mean, let’s face it, what we’re doing is a pretty crazy thing. But necessary. Very necessary.”