Monkey Boy

in the basement, with finished plywood-paneled walls and a smooth linoleum floor, was adjacent to our playroom, separated from it by a curtain of tiny metal rings hung from a brass rod. The first time I saw Feli she was wearing black-frame eyeglasses and a convent haircut, but a year later, she’d grown and fluffed her hair like Patty Duke’s, wore loose sweaters and skinny slacks and eyeglasses with pink frames, and was always playing Top 40 music on the radio. Down in her basement room, Feli twisted, chachacha’d, frugged, and sang along to the radio, to forty-fives on her record player or to Shindig! on TV. Frankycello-Frankycello! she liked to call to me, like I was Annette Funicello’s little brother. Swinging her hips side to side and holding out her hands for me to come and dance, she always smelled damply of detergent and Ajax. When I’d made up the name Feli, was I just mispronouncing feliz or making up a name only for her because she brought so much felicidad into our house? Feli was more fun than anybody I’d ever known. But when she’d get me to march around the basement with her loudly singing “estamos de fiesta hoy, la banda la banda,” I suspect now that was her way of cheering me up, that I was, at least sometimes, a sadder boy than I remember being.

Feli didn’t have parents. She had only one relative that she mentioned, her uncle Rodolfo Sprenger Balbuena, an army colonel fighting in the war against the Communists from Cuba and Russia. Feli and her uncle wrote to each other, his letters arriving in crisp airmail envelopes with red and blue stripes, and like all mail from Guatemala those envelopes had a distinct, stronger smell than American mail, something like a moldy raisin cake. Her uncle’s letters came right from the battlefield, Feli told me; she’d read them out loud. In the mountains and jungles the soldiers ate wild animals, including opossums, iguanas, armadillos, tepezcuintles, jabalís, crocodiles, snakes, and even monkeys roasted over campfires.

About six years after she’d come to live with us, Feli left to marry Oscar, a handsome, languid, arrogant Cuban. We went to eat cake with them in Allston on their wedding day; their small apartment reminded me of the one in The Honeymooners. Oscar eventually became mixed up in small-time gangster dealings; their marriage only lasted a few years. After Feli left, our home was never a happy one again, not even in a fleeting or illusory way, I really think that’s true. María Xum came next. Abuelita had sent her to do housework so that most days my mother could go into Boston, where now she was studying at Lesley College to become a Spanish teacher. She was probably about the same age as Feli. But neither Lexi nor I ever played with María Xum. Watching television she’d laugh uncontrollably at parts that weren’t funny or stare in bewilderment or fright at the funniest parts. All that used to make me feel sorry for her and sometimes hostile. Her feet, coming out of her black slipper shoes to rub against each other, were rough and calloused, her face dark and flat, wide cheeks, a large fleshy mouth with something fishlike about it, and her black eyes shone with a disconcerting intensity. María never took me with her into Boston on her day off like Feli used to. Soon she left to get married, too—even María Xum could find a husband!—the way every girl Abuelita sent to us left to get married. She occasionally phoned my mother to say hello, but we eventually lost track of her. María Xum was replaced by the mysterious Hortensia. After only two weeks of being our housekeeper and living in that basement room, Hortensia left to get married. I have no idea to whom or how it happened so fast. What I do remember about Hortensia is her tight sweaters and voluptuous bust, her prominent Roman-looking nose. Yolandita from Nicaragua came next, so demure and pretty, always singing along like a happy novice nun to the radio while she ironed. She had her own room downstairs in the new house on Wooded Hollow Road and was my mother’s favorite, though Mamita’s relationship to Feli was emotionally deeper. Carlota Sánchez Motta, who was my age, was the last to come, but she wasn’t a housekeeper. She was a foreign student who in exchange for living with us was supposed to help with the housework. During my senior year, Carlota went to high school with me.

More than forty years after Feli landed at Logan Airport with her little suitcase, the small settlement of Central American women founded by Abuelita in Greater Boston is in its third generation, Feli being a grandmother now, and maybe one or two of the others are too.

Mamita had married Bert because of his resemblance to her big brother, Guillermo, or Memo. That’s what used to be said, though I don’t remember by whom. Was it Feli or Abuelita who said that, or maybe Aunt Milly? They both had big noses, Bert’s classically Jewish, Memo’s a bit smaller, more triangular, classically Maya-mestizo. They both had black hair, Bert’s wavy, Memo’s tightly curly; they both wore eyeglasses and were forceful speakers. That was about it for what they had in common. Few things made my mother happier than my managing to impress Tío Memo the way I already had that day my father drove us to Fort Ticonderoga, with my energetic recounting of how on the night of May 9, 1775, Vermont’s own Ethan Allen and a feisty rabble of his Green Mountain Boys, including the future traitor Benedict Arnold, had snuck into the fort and fought their way into the British soldiers’ sleeping barracks, which used to be right over there, Tío. The redcoat commander jumped out of his bed just as the Green Mountain Boys burst in, and that’s why, Tío, when he surrendered the fort to Ethan