Vida by Patricia Engel

Author:Patricia Engel
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
Published: 2010-09-21T16:00:00+00:00

It was no surprise then when Paloma was diagnosed with cancer. Her mother’s had appeared in the pancreas, lethal, the kind of cancer that seems to take pleasure in the killing. Paloma’s cancer revealed itself in her uterus. More than one doctor told her it was because she’d never had children, as if she were to blame.

I was twenty, at college in Manhattan, when my mother told me. I was impatient and asked her flat out if this meant Paloma was going to die.

“It’s not like in the old days,” Mami told me. “They say they caught it early and she’ll go right into chemo. She should be fine.”

Paloma lost her hair. At first she wore a scarf around her head or one of her old hats left over from the seventies. She lost a ton of weight with the treatment; her cheeks sank and her eyes bulged, while her lips became floppy. Her large breasts began to sag even farther and she held a constant expression of terror. Mami said we should be extra nice to Paloma, so I tried calling her every week to see how she was feeling. She was still working despite her fatigue and treatment schedule, never mind the nausea and depression that followed each session. She was still holding out for her retirement, her pension, saying once she kicked this cancer and got that cash in her pocket, she was going on a world tour.

My mother went with her to the doctor sometimes. It was on one of those visits that a new doctor who was seeing her for the first time asked her if she’d ever had children. She said no, but the doctor went further and asked if she’d ever been pregnant.

“Four times,” Paloma answered while my mother lost her breath.

“And what happened?” asked the doctor.

“I lost them.”

Nobody knew Paloma had ever been pregnant. She never told my mother. My mother asked her why she’d kept it a secret all those years but Paloma didn’t have an answer.

My parents convinced Paloma to take a vacation when her treatments were finally over. Paloma hardly ever took vacations, especially in the spring, because she said that they needed her at the museum during tax season. Papi always said Paloma did the work of a dozen people. But Oscar was still abusing her on the job, making fun of her bald head, telling her she looked like a hairless monster.

We went to Israel. The Holy Land.

At the time, I was dating a Lower East Side Costa Rican named Roly so I was too busy missing him and hoping he wouldn’t cheat while I was away to appreciate that we were walking in the footsteps of Jesus. Paloma’s hair was growing in, a dark fuzz much curlier than expected. Her face reclaimed some of its pink and she seemed invigorated by the dust and stone of Jerusalem. Paloma never went to church in New York, probably still mad at the nuns in Jamaica, but in Israel,

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