When I was in the first grade, my parents were married but my dad didn’t live with us. My mom said this meant they were separated. It was the eighties. Separated. I separated from my mom all the time. In department stores, I would hide inside clothes’ racks, playing a one-sided version of hide and seek. I wanted to see if my mom would notice I was gone. And when she frantically called my name in her guttural, manic, maternal cry, I knew she loved me. I heard it in her trembling voice.
My mother’s and father’s separation was different. My father always seemed like an apparition to me, a dream, or a ghost. He stayed with us when he was in town. I made observations about him. He blow-dried his hair. He wore cologne. He laughed loud. He ate his eggs sunny side up. His eyes squinted like crescent moons when he smiled. When he wore button up shirts, he stopped buttoning halfway up his chest, so his chest hairs poked out. I liked to grab those little stray black hairs between my thumb and forefingers and yank them right off his chest. I knew my mom still loved my dad, but I had no idea what my dad felt. He didn’t seem like a real person. He was never a daily presence in my life.
One day after school, I was playing in the courtyard of our apartment complex with my brother, a Kindergartener, and our cousins. I noticed my mother in the doorway of our one-bedroom apartment talking to a man I had never seen before. When my brother Alan and I noticed our mother talking to a stranger, we ran to see who he was.
This is a story I cannot recall on my own, so I fleshed out parts using details from my mother. She told us, “This is your father’s friend.”
My father’s friend interrupted before she could say anything else. “I am going to be staying with you for a while. I am waiting to see your father.”
My mother says we were satisfied with that explanation, even a little excited at the mention of our father, and we left to play with our cousins. My mother says at that point, my father’s friend parted open his jacket, flashed his gun at her, and quietly forced himself inside her apartment. He stopped when the door was shut behind him. He wanted to know where my father was. My mother hadn’t spoken to my father in a week, and he never stuck around. My father lived in a bachelor pad and slept on a mattress laid directly on the floor. I had spent the night at his apartment a couple of times.
My father’s friend said, “I have business to discuss with Ramon.”
My mother answered, “I don’t know where my husband is.”
“I am not leaving until we have settled the matter.”
Through his actions, he was saying I am taking you hostage. Then, my father’s friend told my mother he had to make a phone call. She led him to the phone in the kitchen and listened to him report in Spanish that my father was not around. My mother could tell he was on the phone with my father’s boss who lived in Florida, the hub of my father’s occupation. He wasn’t selling vacuums door-to-door. My father’s friend told his boss that my mom didn’t know where my father was or how to get a hold of him. Then my father’s friend turned to my mom and said his boss wanted to speak with her.
The man from Florida never identified himself. He told my mother he was upset because my father disappeared with a kilo of his coke. Back then, a kilo of cocaine was more valuable. Today, you can’t buy a nice house with the money you make from selling a kilo of blow; however, you can buy a larger, mid-size SUV. My father’s boss said he was concerned about his merchandise and his money. When my mother told him she didn’t know where my father was, he said he would have to kill her and her children if my father didn’t show up.
She hung up the phone and told my father’s friend, “I guess we might as well get comfortable because it looks like you’re going to be here for a while. Ramon isn’t going to show up anytime soon.”
What I remember about my father’s friend is mostly peripheral. He was not much taller than my mother. He had short black hair, a little longer on the top. He wore slacks and an outdoor jacket that he never took off. I imagine that’s where he hid his gun. He never sat comfortably, and I never looked him directly in the eye. My mother wanted to keep me and my brother physically safe, and she didn’t want this episode to scar us emotionally either. So, she decided to carry on, as if the gunman was an old friend staying with us.
My mother says that evening when my brother and I finished playing outside, she had dinner ready, and we sat down to eat at our kitchen table with the guy ordered to take us hostage. My mother invited my father’s friend to eat dinner with her family to acknowledge his humanity, to show him she knew he was capable of empathy. The minute he accepted her invitation to eat with her and her children, my mother had one more weapon besides her deft ability to read people. She knew he would not hurt her. My mother knew the sight and sound of a hardened person. This guy wasn’t. My mother says my brother and I giggled and joked at the table. We turned on the charm and became pawns in my father’s business.
When I was seven months pregnant with my first child, I interviewed my mom and wrote about this story for NPR’s show This American Life. My mother answered all my questions cheerfully and breezily, like we were dining at a luncheon, not sitting in a dim radio booth. Strangers often mistook us for sisters, partially from the way we enjoyed each other’s company, and mostly because my mother was young and pretty. In some ways, we grew up together. In that dark, soundproofed room, we sat across from each other as I attempted to excavate our past, notepad in hand, my questions written out ahead of time. I was nervous, but my mother didn’t look nervous. Years later, she told me she was.
She said that night, after she settled my brother and me into bed, she went to the bathroom, grabbed a towel, and bunched it up against her face. She started screaming into it, as quietly as she could, and then began to weep. I imagine she was terrified. She felt like she had no choices. How would she do this? She knew better than to lose it, so she reigned in her feelings and told herself, “Okay, that’s it. This guy can’t know that you’re upset or that you’re fearful. Because the moment he sees fear, he’s going to think he’s got control.”
Even if she had to spin reality from the web of her own imagination, she knew she had to gain control. But how does a single mother with two small kids gain control over a hired gunman? Moments after her tears in the bathroom, my mother saw an opportunity. She went to the living room and a movie started on TV. It was The Godfather.
The Godfather. Can you believe it?
When she saw the movie on TV, she told my father’s friend this: “Yeah, you know. I have an uncle that’s in the mafia.”
As she described her uncle’s role in organized crime, my father’s friend’s eyes grew bigger. He stood up quietly and called the guy in Florida to say, “I’m not sure we should be here in this place with this woman because she has connections.” When my father’s friend returned, she continued talking like nothing had happened. She told me, “I saw that I had the upper hand at that moment, so I was going to just go with it.”
My mother’s uncle actually wasn’t in the mafia, but his family all believed he was because that’s what he told them. He was actually hiding a girlfriend, and later on another family, from his wife. He was a polygamist and not a goodfella. This lie, however, struck a nerve with the hired gunman, who had settled in and slept on our sofa. My mother served him food and drinks. She had to make this guy care about her. The next day, my brother and I went to school, and my mother spent the whole day in the apartment with this stranger. My father’s friend had been hired to terrorize my mother, so my father would return. I can’t imagine how far down she had to bury the weight of her feelings. At one point, my mother looked straight into my father’s friend’s eyes and said, “You will have to kill us all because I don’t know where the hell my husband is.”
Where does a 110-pound woman all of five foot two find the audacity to double-dog dare a hired gunman to pull the trigger? Her roots and her upbringing—she told only sad and violent stories about her own father. My mother says when she and her two older brothers misbehaved, her father punished them by sending them to the back room of their house, where they were ordered to kneel on top of grains of rice, Arroz Carolina Long Grain to be exact. She still remembers the five-pound bag with red and white letters, a staple in their pantry. Her father weaponized their food. Once in that back room with no ventilation, as she and her brothers knelt on grains of rice in the suffocating August heat, her oldest brother passed out.
It wasn’t just misbehavior that set off her father. He reacted to other signs of weakness, too. My mother told me another story. When she was in elementary school, she said her shoes had holes so big, her toes became wet in the rain. Adding insult to her poverty, kids at school teased her for her tattered shoes. She asked her mother, my Grandmother Virginia, for new ones. Grandma Virginia told my mother to ask her father. Even though my mother feared her father, she was tired of her ratty shoes, so she asked her father for new ones.
He told her to beg. He wasn’t made of money, after all. My mother had to beg for her own basic needs to be met.
“Please, daddy, please. Please can I have money to buy new shoes?”
“On your knees,” he said.
She lowered her body to the ground and begged once more. Her father didn’t see her humanity or didn’t value it. He threw some bills at her. I only met my grandfather once, so I can’t accurately conjecture about why he acted this way. From my knowledge about human beings in general, I can discern that he wanted to feel powerful. Maybe he didn’t understand that his daughter needed him to love her and treat her with dignity because he lacked those experiences himself. When my mother was eight, she said her father once beat her with a belt buckle until welts rose up in small hills on her back. She refused to cry even as he yelled, “¡Llora, llora!” but he wouldn’t break her. There is no good explanation for behavior like this, but I can see how his life experiences could have hardened him.
My grandfather enlisted in the military in Puerto Rico, and he moved with his family–two sons, one daughter, his wife—to the United States in the 1950s. In the U.S., he was stationed in Louisiana, where segregation was legal. He was married to a light-skinned, red headed Puerto Rican, my grandmother. Legally, he was not classified human enough to occupy white spaces, so when he walked down the street, he was ordered to walk in the gutter while his wife was allowed to walk on the sidewalk.
Maybe my grandfather saw danger everywhere. Maybe the vulnerability required of being a parent felt disjointed to him because he had to be hard. Being hypervigilant against peril, it was a family heirloom passed down to my mother, then me—the yearning to sense danger before it materializes and engulfs us. My mother was always on the lookout for danger, and she met it with bared teeth. My own neurons shoot back and forth also, looking for trouble, sensing trouble, avoiding trouble, because trouble was always there, underneath, even as my mother and father pretended we were okay. I still sometimes worry that in my life, one day, the jig will be up.
Most people would shrivel at the idea of a drug trafficking henchman coming to take their family hostage with a loaded gun, a gun I never saw, a gun my mother saw once. My father’s friend wasn’t expecting his victim to fight back. […]
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