El Accidente

Enrique

In the 80s I lived in Manhattan’s Upper West Side on the corner of Amsterdam Avenue, the main thoroughfare for driving uptown from a night of downtown reveries or going to Harlem in ermine and pearls for even more reveries. If the cars hit the lights right they could keep up a rushed pace, and, given the reveries, every night there were crashes I could hear from my bed, even if my apartment window, open on balmy nights, did not face the avenue but the lovely courtyard of a neighboring building.

The sudden crunch of metal was, as the commonplace has it, sickening. It sickened me as it woke me, for it reminded me of the first time I heard it, many years before, long before I ever dreamed of living in New York. That first sickening crunch of automobile metal hitting automobile metal was the climax of the unhappiness that enveloped me in those years, a moment that remained frozen for what seemed like an eternity of an inescapable bad dream, the time went bad things got worse and that even when things had been much better for a long, long time, my mother, the last of my elders, in her last and 91st year still referred to by the words my family used from that morning on and each time filled me with the dread of hearing an evil incantation. El accidente.

Sheila

We had an auto accident about a year after we came to the USA. Mammy was in the hospital for a week with severe head injuries. We had never been without her and Pappy was no help. He cried and blamed himself for disfiguring her face... he did not cook, we had to remind him to change clothes and shower. Henry and I were scared. From that day forward we measured time “antes o después del Accidente”

Thank God for our grandmothers who came to our collective rescue. Mammy came home wrapped like a mummy, unable to see, her eyes were swollen shut, she had multiple bruises and cuts in her arms and legs and was generally sore. Pappy did not work the following year, our savings dwindling. Mammy started getting stronger, the facial scars slowly disappeared. It was a tough year. Then came the trial, another nightmare in itself... 

Enrique

The fear. In the year or so following the accident I lived a constant anxiety. My mother's scarred face, which would eventually heal leaving her unblemished, kept reminding me of the horror of that moment. The fact that we had no auto insurance drove us deeper into financial doom. Meetings with lawyers, as suit and countersuit were prepared, were confusing even if a little bit hopeful. And my father, whose volatile mental state was stretched beyond anything like health, seemed more desperate and irrational.

Of course, I had no template. What was rational in this country we'd moved to? How did things work? I was too young to know how anything worked anywhere, and my parents were too embedded in the world they came from to understand this one, which was very slowly being revealed to me. My father in particular.

Sheila

We did not speak about it between us. Because of the accident we lost our money that we brought with us. My father had been promised a job that never came through. His English was marginal and he believed Tampa was more Spanish speaking than it was. Also we came with the understanding that we would live with my mother’s sister, Tia Elena, for some time. Plans of mice and men... So we bought a house, down payment, stove, refrigerator, furniture, linens, winter coats for all of us, and behold a house heater with a huge kerosene tank outside! What were we thinking? All our savings going out the door fast and my parents without jobs. Oh we sold toilet tissue, door to door, sewing machines, iodine, combs. Mammy got a job as a seamstress at a shirt and pants factory, Pappy went to cabinet shop, lasted three days, then he hit the streets door to door... And then one year and one month to the date, someone ran a red light and destroyed our beautiful Studebaker that we brought with us from Havana. 

Enrique 

At one point, desperate to find out who the driver of the other car was, he had all of us, which might have included my younger sister, scour the city's telephone book looking to match a phone number we had, I don't know how, with a name. It was madness. And I don't remember if we found anything, probably not.

But my biggest fear was not my father's derangement, but the upcoming trial. No settlement had come from the suit (my father's) and countersuit (the other driver), so we were headed for court. My father insisted this failure to reach a settlement was due to our lawyers “selling themselves” to the other side. It was the template he had from our native country's corruption. Or at least, an explanation where he might lose everything but, to himself and his family, save face.

At the core was the fact that he'd been charged with running a red light. He claimed he hadn't. I had no idea; there was no reason for me to look at the light from the back seat of our Cuba-bought Studebaker that Sunday morning at the first major intersection on the way to church.

Still, my father insisted my sister and I had to say, in court and under oath, that we had seen a green light. I was supposed to lie, perjure myself, in front of lawyers expert in extracting the truth from witnesses. I lived in a panic. For months. As usual, my parents, or at least my father, were unaware of my pain. Not that my father was uncaring; on the contrary, whenever I was sick I could see in his face that terrible empathy I would feel one day whenever any of my own children were hurt or sick and my own nervous system duplicated theirs in distress. But it never occurred to him in this instance that his insistence on my saying something that was not true was hurting his son worse than any sickness or accidental pain.

It ended in anticlimax. At the trial no one called me or my sister to testify.

Sheila

We were the Cubans. The driver of the other car, an American businessman. That was it. Pappy broke down crying when they showed him pictures of Mammy’s face and our mangled car, charged him with leaving the scene of the accident, no matter that he had broken ribs and two children who could not be left unattended. 

Enrique

We were awarded an amount much less than was asked, deducted from which was the small amount the court awarded to the other driver’s suit, minus the usual one-third for our lawyers. It was barely enough to buy a beater car and pay medical bills.

Mostly, my fear was over. The moment of perjury never arrived. I was saved. Or so I thought.

It is only now, as I address this for the first time in my long life, that I know I was never saved.