“Will you teach me the tango?” he said.
She looked at him sideways, not buying for one minute that this Argentine didn’t have at least a passing knowledge of the tango. But then she put one hand on his shoulder and another in the air, and said, “Come on, then.” He took her hand, and she taught him how to lead her across the dance floor.
My father says he couldn’t take his eyes off her; he says he marveled at how easy it was to glide with her across the room.
When they got to the end, my father dipped her and she smiled at him and then said, rather impatiently, “Javier, this is when you kiss me.”
Within a few months, he’d convinced her to elope. He told her that he had big dreams for them. And my mother told him his dreams were his own. She didn’t need much at all besides him.
The night my mother told him she was pregnant, she sat in his lap in their Santa Monica apartment and asked if he could feel that he held the weight of two people. He teared up as he smiled at her. And then he told her he could feel in his gut that I was a boy, and that I was going to be twice the tennis player he’d ever been.
* * *
—
When I was a baby, my father would bring a high chair to the courts so I could watch him play. He says I would dart my head back and forth, tracking the ball. According to him, my mother would sometimes come and try to take me out of the high chair to sit in the shade or have a snack, but I’d cry until she brought me back to the court.
My father loved to tell the story of the time when I was just barely a toddler and he first put a racket in my hand. He softly tossed the ball to me, and he swears that on that fateful day, I swung and made contact.
He ran back to the house, carrying me on his shoulders, to tell my mother. She smiled at him and continued making dinner.
“Do you understand what I’m telling you?” he said.
My mother laughed. “That our daughter likes tennis? Of course she likes tennis––it’s the only thing you’ve shown her.”
“That’s like saying Achilles was a great warrior simply because he lived during wartime. Achilles was a great warrior because it was his destiny to be one.”
“I see. So Carolina is Achilles?” my mother asked, smiling. “And what does that make you, a god?”
My father waved her away. “She’s destined,” he said. “It is plain as day. With your grace and my strength, she can be the greatest tennis player the world has ever seen. They will tell stories about her one day.”
My mother rolled her eyes at him as she began to put dinner on the table. “I would rather she was kind and happy.”
“Alicia,” my father said as he stood behind my mother and wrapped his arms around her. “No one ever tells stories about that.”
* * *
—
I do not remember being told my mother had died. Nor do I remember her funeral, though my father says I was there. As he tells it, my mother was making soup and realized we were out of tomato paste, so she put her shoes on and left me with him in the garage while he was changing the oil in the car.
When she didn’t come home, he knocked on our neighbors’ door and asked them to watch me while he searched through the streets.
He saw the ambulance a few blocks away and his stomach sank. My mother had been hit by a car when she was crossing the street on her way home.
After my mother’s body was buried, my father refused to go into their bedroom. He started sleeping in the living room; he kept his clothes in a hamper by the TV. It went on for months. Whenever I had a bad dream, I’d leave my own bed and walk right to the couch. He was always there, with the TV on, static hissing as he slept.
And then, one day, light flooded into the hallway. Their bedroom door was open, the dust that had long accumulated was off the handle, and everything of my mother’s was packed into cardboard boxes. Her dresses, her high heels, her necklaces, her rings. Even her bobby pins. Somebody came to the house and took them all out. And that was it.
There wasn’t much left of her. Barely any proof she’d ever lived. Just a few pictures I’d found in my father’s top drawer. I took my favorite one and stashed it under my pillow. I was afraid that if I didn’t, it would soon be gone too.
For a while after that, my dad would tell me stories about my mother. He’d talk about how she wanted me to be happy. That she was good and fair. But he cried when he told them, and pretty soon, he stopped telling them altogether.
To this day, the only significant memory I have of my mother is hazy. I can’t tell what is real and what are the gaps that I’ve filled in over time.