Tío Memo, during a business trip to New York from Guatemala, had come to Massachusetts by Greyhound to visit, and so Bert had taken us all on that weekend road trip up to Fort Ticonderoga, then across Lake Champlain on the car ferry and into Vermont, a state my uncle had never visited before. I sat in the back seat between Tío Memo and Feli, my mother and sister were up front, and Bert at the wheel, driving us to our motel through winter twilight and long rows of gray, white, and evergreen trees, past the occasional roadside farm stand selling maple syrup and cheddar cheese. Some of the souvenir shops we passed had teepees or big statues of moose out front that made my father shout, Look at that, a moose! the same way he shouted, Look at that, cows! whenever we passed milk cows grazing in a mountainside pasture. Meanwhile my uncle and Feli cheerfully bantered with Mamita, who sat partly turned around with her arm hooked around my sister, their jokes and laughter, ala que alegre, and púchica, and ala gran chucha, vos, Tío Memo regularly remembering to switch to English for the sake of my father, a rare memory of snug well-being, of happy pride in family. The way Tío Memo, at the start of every sentence he addressed to my father, said, “Bert,” in his deep, resounding voice, sounding so manly and respectful. And my father would say, Well, Memo, to be honest with you … Or, Frankly, Memo, let me tell you how I see it. They spoke to each other the way leaders at the United Nations spoke to each other, I imagined, men who understood power and how things really were, their conversations meant to deepen mutual understanding and to clarify complex matters for the rest of us. That’s why Mamita always chirped along with utterances like: No me digás, or Así es, or Oh no, they can’t do that, or, Memo, is that true? Guatemala’s improving but precarious economic and political position in the world, always threatened by powerful subversive enemies from without and within, always needing to maneuver such treacherous geopolitical currents, gave Tío Memo an urgent-sounding global outlook. My father was a serious Democrat with thoughtfully calibrated positions on world affairs and how these were complicated by US political pressures and rivalries, also from within and without, subjects that he only ever got to talk about in such a seemingly consequential way when he was with Tío Memo. In reality, considering that my uncle was a fanatical right-wing anti-Communist, and my father was just as fanatically against the Vietnam War and all right-wing warmongers, it’s amazing they never even came close to screaming at each other, the way my father and Uncle Lenny, vociferously in favor of the Vietnam War, used to scream at each other, even at one Passover dinner hurling plates of food across the table. The one thing Tío Memo and my father agreed on was that they both hated Russia.
Memo, who’d taken over and enlarged our family toy store business in Guatemala City, was a vigorous man who laughed a lot. Mamita was always quick to laugh too. She had a wonderfully jolly, occasionally silly laugh, but my father laughed less. Instead he sometimes hooted and howled as if he were faking, imitating happy barnyard animals. I’m trying to recall if he ever really genuinely laughed. Well, okay, yes, sometimes he did, though not much at home, not with us; that afternoon in the car driving into Vermont, he sort of did, with those hoots and howls it feels so melancholy to conjure back now.
Lexi once told me about a memory she said still haunted her from another of those family road trips. This was more than twenty years ago, when I’d come for a visit during one of those periods when she was living at home again on Wooded Hollow Road. It was just our parents, Lexi, and me on this road trip, and we’d stopped for a picnic lunch at a highway rest stop somewhere in Cape Cod. I was, as usual, off playing in the woods, said Lexi, and she was sitting with our parents at a picnic table. They ate their sandwiches in complete silence, she said. You could hear every bite. Their chewing was the only sound except for some cars swooshing by and a little breeze that came and went in the pine trees. I remember that breeze because it was loud compared to our silence, said Lexi. It was the most silent silence, Frank. It really started to scare me. Why don’t you say something? I thought. Mommy, Daddy, say something. Talk to each other just a little. I tried to think of something to say just to break the silence, said Lexi, but I couldn’t get a sound out. It was like they were never going to say anything again, and you were never going to come back from the woods, and I was going to be trapped in their silence forever.
Because Aunt Hannah used to fill Lexi in and
