Clap When You Land(37)
I will make it alone on my own two feet. I give Yahaira the information to wire cash. She promises to do it this week.
I hang up the phone without saying goodbye.
It seems easiest not to get attached to this sister, to not give her a single reason to get attached to me.
Yahaira sends me the money & her flight plans.
She bought the flight with a credit card that her mother doesn’t check.
She asks if I can pick her up from the airport.
& I want to ask her what car she thinks I have.
Or maybe she imagines like a mule
I will sling her across my back?
I may be a pobrecita right now,
but I am no one’s errand girl.
Perhaps she thinks she’s bought my compliance?
Perhaps that’s what I implied.
But I am annoyed to be treated like a servant girl.
All that money & she can’t just order a taxi?
But honestly, the taxi drivers are thieves.
& what if something happened to her, a gringuita alone? Tía would kill me.
My father’s ghost would probably haunt me.
My guilt for sure would. I already feel horrible about the money that was transferred to Western Union.
I picked up the fat envelope yesterday & taped it to Papi’s picture on Tía’s altar in the living room.
So I tell her I will be at the airport.
I don’t tell her I’m unsure how I’ll be getting there.
Is this what sisterhood is?
A negotiation of the things you make possible out of impossible requests?
Camino Yahaira
Mami won’t let me see the real remains.
The airline representative mails us a catalog of all the bits of cloth, & bone & hair & suitcase things that probably belong to my father.
I stare at the photos. All the bits & pieces that will be buried of Papi.
& I think about everything my father left behind that won’t be in that box: the swollen questions
that are bursting the seams of our lives.
The huge absence that stretches over every waking moment.
The disrepaired—the broken that fell apart long before his plane did.
I look at the scraps of a body they have piled into a casket & called a man.
I know the remains are strewn around us.
In this everyday life of the left over.
Forty-Nine Days After
Before Papi is shipped to DR
Mami decides we need to hold a wake.
The funeral parlor that will ship his body prepares for the event. No viewing.
Although Tío Jorge
seems upset with Mami
for how she spoke to him last time, he picks us up for the wake.
When he opens the car door for me, he grabs me up in a tight, tight hug.
I find it hard to look at him, to smell his scent. Sometimes if I let myself forget my father is dead I can look at Tío Jorge & see him here standing before me, looking so much like my father.
Tears are gathered in his eyes.
& in his choked voice.
He waves a hand in front of his face as if it will clear both.
He tells me “I love you, Yaya. Bella negra.”
I bury my face in his neck & to myself I whisper, Bella negra. Bella negra.
Papi’s right here. He’s with us.
Papi was embalmed in sea salt, like an ancient insect caught in honey, unmoving, from a different time.
Papi was always in motion,
his smile bursting forth,
bursting the way my heart feels when I kneel at his casket
& every big emotion inside me makes my chest shake.
But I blink away tears,
& I throw my shoulders back.
“Never let them see you sweat.
& even if you have to forfeit, smile.”
As Mami & I sit in the front row, people come up to us to pay their respects.
Such a funny phrase, pay respects.
As if suffering is a debt that can be eased by a hug & a head nod.
I have no need for this currency of people’s respect: My cousins shuffle awkwardly
from foot to foot.
Dre, with Dr. Johnson beside her, sits behind me, her hands in her lap ready to jump to my rescue.
Wilson stands with his fiancée in the back of the funeral parlor, his big hands full of white carnations.
I cannot fold any of their respects into my dress’s pockets.
I cannot tie these respects together into a bouquet to lay at my father’s headstone.
Their respects are quick-footed
& I am sludging through this hardened mud of loss.
Wilson is wearing a black button-down & slacks, & on a different day, I would joke that he looks like he’s going to a job interview.
But, today, my father is dead.
His body that held so much noise is in a box.
& so I don’t diss Wilson,
I don’t reach for his hand;
I give him a small smile
& sit with my mother.
Papi always liked Wilson, & I wonder: would he have been upset Wilson asked for money?
I’m not sure he would have been. He was a generous man.
I wonder if maybe I should be less angry about something neither one of my parents would have been angry about. But I don’t know.