Oscar Casares

Therapy Room

Amigoland, the new novel by Oscar Casares, follows a retired postman named Fidencio Rosales as he escapes his senior home and heads for Mexico with his brother to explore a decades-old family mystery. In this exclusive excerpt, Fidencio daydreams his way out of the drudgery of exercise hour.

August 2009

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He tried to nod but found it difficult with his head on the mat. After struggling for a moment he managed to push his leg down an inch or two. He could feel the tendons stretching and coming to life with every little bit that she moved his leg back up.

With all the bending and extending, his jeans had risen and The Filipina Who Looks Like A Boy was now touching his bare skin. Her little hands felt soft from the lotion she must have rubbed on them that morning. He tried to remember the last time a woman had touched him. The showers and sponge baths he didn’t count as touching since the aides were wearing gloves and working so routinely that at times it felt as though he were going through a car wash with half a dozen other old men waiting in their wheelchairs behind him.

“Very good, Mr. Rosales. Getting stronger every day.”

The Filipina Who Looks Like A Boy moved his bent leg slowly forward, stopping when she saw him straining, then extended it a ways and bent it back only slightly. He liked the way she smelled, the scent of her hair, even if it was cut so short, like a boy. After a while he relaxed a little more and allowed her to move his body through the exercises.

It wasn’t Petra who had touched him last, that he knew. She barely got next to him and didn’t so much as sleep in the same bed those last few years she was in the house. He couldn’t say exactly when this had started, though he had an idea it had something to do with one woman or other he’d been seeing so long ago that it shouldn’t have mattered anymore. She never actually caught him, only suspected or heard talk of him here or there. He wanted to remember being with a woman who lived near the highway, on the 78520 side. Earlier he’d had her up on the kitchen counter, until this wasn’t working for him and he had carried her that way, his work pants still caught down by his ankles, until they reached the carpet on the living room floor where after a few minutes he finished with a furious thrust that made her scream out and then laugh loud enough to be heard in the next trailer.

“And that?” Petra asked later that night.

“I fell walking up some steps.” He had just taken off his pants and tossed them on the chair.

“Did you get hurt?” She came to take a closer look, but he turned as if he needed some privacy to pull up his pajamas. Even after washing himself off again in the restroom at the post office, he knew he couldn’t be too careful around her.

“It was nothing, just a little scrape.” He yanked back the covers and climbed into bed.

“To both knees, and it was nothing?”

“Leave it already.”

“Why won’t you show me?”

“I need to go to sleep.”

“You’re acting like you do when you want to hide something.” She was still standing at the foot of the bed.

“Yes, Petra, I am always hiding something from you. That’s why I get up at six o’clock every morning, to hide things from you.”

“Then tell me how you could fall and not get hurt.”

“Turn the light off and come on to bed.”

“And not just one knee.”

“You try walking around all day carrying the bag, see if you don’t fall down sometimes. I wish you could, just so you would know. Maybe one of these days I’ll pull you away from the sofa so you can come see what I do all day, what I like to hide from you.”

“You never fell before.”

“And how do you know?”

“You never said anything.”

“Y qué, I have to report this to you? ‘Petra, today I fell because a big dog was chasing me and I couldn’t run with the bag.’ ‘Petra, today I fell because they sent out the Sears catalogs.’ Like that, is that what you want?” He shook his head at her ideas.

She turned off the light and climbed into bed on her side. He rolled onto his side, away from where she was fluffing up her pillow. Finally some peace, he thought. He reached down under the covers and felt where he had scraped the skin off his knees. Tomorrow morning, while she was still asleep, he would rub some ointment on the burns and in a few days they would heal up like new. By then she would let it go. He rolled back over, squinting, when the light came on again. Petra was standing next to the chair holding up his uniform, as if presenting a piece of evidence to the jury.

“He falls, scrapes both knees, but somehow he doesn’t tear his pants,” she said and turned off the light.

Never mind that he had walked mile after mile, year after year, and always come home with his paycheck, for her, nobody else. And after paying the bills to spend however she wanted. With nobody looking over her shoulder, asking so many questions as she did to him. She chose to forget that part when she finally went to live with their daughter. Afterward he wondered if she had ever been happy, maybe at least for the first few years. He would have asked her, but he was afraid of what she might say, and then the next time he saw her was years later at her funeral.

“Eh?”

“I said, ‘This far is very good for a man your age, Mr. Rosales.’ ” The girl was moving his leg up and down, up and down, like she was changing a flat with a tire jack. “These exercises are going to help your flexibility.”

Maybe it was one of the young waitresses at the cafes he used to go to after he retired. They were tricky, that he remembered. It wasn’t so easy knowing which of them might be interested and which ones were only talking to him, patting him on the shoulder, letting her hand linger a bit, as a way of getting a more generous tip. He wanted to recall being parked to one side of a cafe, around from the grease disposal, and she still being in her uniform and scooting over next to him. He’d gone to the flea market to buy a gold-plated bracelet and have her name engraved on it, as a way of getting her to come outside during her break. What her name was, what she looked like, what she smelled like, what her mouth tasted like, how she kissed him or undid his pants or what might have happened after that, or if anything did, was lost to him now. He must have still been in his sixties, before women started treating him as if he were a harmless old creature and what he had once carried between his legs had now shriveled up and fallen off, which was only slightly better than those who avoided him altogether, as if his advanced age were contagious.

Don Fidencio closed his eyes and tried to think of what he could do to fill the rest of the day. It was still another two hours until lunch, which was long enough that he could easily fall asleep for a nap. He didn’t like wasting his day in bed, though. Maybe he could go sit on one of the sofas near the nurses’ station. If he dozed off there at least he wasn’t in bed. There were some days that the mail came in before ten-thirty, the time when everyone started moving toward the mess hall for lunch. He was waiting for the day they would switch mail carriers and get one with a more pleasant nature who wasn’t always rushing off and didn’t mind sitting for a while to talk.

“How does that feel, Mr. Rosales?”

He opened his eyes and the girl was gently lowering his leg, cradling his calf in her little hand.

“Good, it feels good,” the old man said, straining to make out the tag on her scrubs.

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