Amá, Your Story Is Mine: Walking Out of the Shadows of Abuse

The Curse

~ 152 ~ boss came running into the room shouting, “Money! Money!” I looked around, thinking that money was miraculously appearing somewhere, but he was pointing to the dripping faucet . “You’re throwing money down the drain!” I worked in that crazy place until lunchtime.Then I walked out the door, went home, and never came back. In fact, I threw my new nurse’s shoes and uniform in the trash and put my career as a dental assistant permanently out to lunch. My part-time job at Stacy and Stewart’sWig Shop became full-time. I styled movie stars’ wigs and was promoted to manager of the shop. I had a hot pink uniform and a wild beehive hairstyle with cascading curls and bows. I was hot and successful! Stacy and Stewart even gave me a key to the store. Meanwhile, Jenny and Sylvia discovered they hated being dental assistants, too.They quit their dental assistant jobs and turned their part-time, temporary jobs at the insurance company and the clothing store into full-time work. The Curse ~ By this time my father had disappeared completely from our lives. We heard through family members that he had become a recluse in theValle de Guadalupe, along with the even more incredible story that he had become a minister and lived off the land now. He had dragged along his last party girl, who became his live-in maid. It had to stay that way, because he still considered himself married to Amá even though they had ~ 153 ~ been separated for fifteen years. Amá referred to him as “ese hombre” (“that man”). Apá had moved, we were told, to a dreadful hole of a place, a piece of hidden desert.The land was powdery, bare of growing things, without houses or paths. All day he fought the dust in his mouth and eyes. There was no way to combat the blazing sun.There was no shelter from it in his roofless brick house. In the heat of the burning sun, Apá worked along in his fields. At fifty-eight, he labored, with his eyes nailed to the ground, in salty clothes stained with sweat. His hard, dry hands were indistinguishable from the ground itself. He tilled the parched and hostile fields with a pick and shovel. He must have hoped that distance could undo a lifetime of cruelties, abuse, abandonment, utter lack of conscience. But no pounding of his heart or walking on his knees could erase the memories of the torture he inflicted on others.The reality was that he was a man who hated women. Perhaps his quest was to get even with all women for what his mother had done to him. He relived the pain he, a bastard child, had gone through until his heart was hollow and shrunken. He passed on his ache by bringing into the world twenty-one living children and supporting none of us. He kept his hate going by substituting vengeance for conscience. I am one of his five surviving legitimate children, thanks to Amá. In the end, nothing helped him to escape la maldición, the curse of self-destruction that he had brought upon himself. Ultimately, Apá died alone. He was fried and tossed to the ground while working on a power pole. About his demise Amá said, “As you live, so shall you die.” ...