Read Online The Miniature Wife: and Other Stories by Manuel Gonzales - Free Book Online
Authors: Manuel Gonzales
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who has treated or tried to treat his affliction.
II.
Isailo Abbasonov moved to Ben Ficklin, Texas, in 1938.
In the late fall of 1936, he and his wife, Fabia, left their home in Albania on a steamer bound for New York City. They spent two years in New York, where Isailo, a skilled accountant, worked as a line cook in a Russian kitchen, and Fabia worked as a housekeeper, washing clothes and dusting bric-a-brac. Then the two moved to the small town of Ben Ficklin, where Isailo’s uncle, Milorad, lived and made decent money constructing crude machinery that was then shipped to Mexico and used to sew rough-hewn blankets and trousers for the campesinos to wear while working in the fields picking cotton.
Less than six weeks after their arrival, Milorad died, bitten by a rattlesnake while demonstrating to Isailo how the thick material of the machine-produced trousers protected workers from burs, thorns, scorpion stings, and snakebites.
Isailo, who knew nothing about metalwork or simple construction, who had in fact been called down to Texas to help his uncle with the accounting side of his growing business, suddenly found himself in charge of an operation that consisted of a house-sized garage littered with greased machinery—cogs, springs, belts, the like—and a small staff of four. His uncle, afraid that his workers, after learning the design of his machine, would steal the design and leave his workshop to start their own businesses, taught each man how to build only one-fourth of the entire apparatus, the four separate parts then pieced together by Milorad himself, in secret. No one, it turned out, knew exactly how to connect the four parts into one whole. After six weeks, the machine parts still not fitted together, Isailo was forced to fire the four men who had worked for his uncle and close the machine shop.
By this time, Fabia was pregnant. “It was a tough time for my parents, then,” Abbasonov told me. “My dad found another job as a line cook, and my mom had gone back to work cleaning houses, and she did that until about the time I was born, and then went back to it less than a month after, and since they couldn’t afford to pay anyone to take care of me, she took me with her. The thing was, my father could have worked as an accountant, but nobody would hire him in the States, at least not in Texas, until they had some proof, some certification that he wouldn’t run off with their money. He was from Albania, and no one in Texas had heard of Albania, knew what Albania was. Most of them thought, because of his color, because of his features, that he was some mixture of Mexican and black, although nobody thought it strange that he didn’t know how to speak Spanish. But that’s how he found work as a cook, because everyone thought he was mestizo. He was working the morning shift cooking breakfast for field hands, county deputies, and farmers.” A small amount of luck befell Isailo when the restaurant owner’s husband, who managed the restaurant’s finances, was bedridden by a stroke that incapacitated the left side of his body. In order to care for her husband, the owner considered closing the restaurant, but Isailo, unwilling to look for yet another job, offered to work extra hours managing the office for free if she could find someone to run the kitchen and the restaurant floor.
Three years later, Isailo bought the restaurant from the owner, who moved her husband to Santa Fe, New Mexico, in hopes that the heat and the dry air might better suit his physical needs.
“After that, my mother quit cleaning houses, and the three of us spent most of our time there, at the diner. Most of my memories are of time spent in the restaurant, in the kitchen sitting on a worktable, or on the floor behind the counter. It was called the Olympia Diner, after the woman who owned it, and my father never changed the name. He never changed the menu, either, and when he painted the dining room walls or retiled the kitchen
II.
Isailo Abbasonov moved to Ben Ficklin, Texas, in 1938.
In the late fall of 1936, he and his wife, Fabia, left their home in Albania on a steamer bound for New York City. They spent two years in New York, where Isailo, a skilled accountant, worked as a line cook in a Russian kitchen, and Fabia worked as a housekeeper, washing clothes and dusting bric-a-brac. Then the two moved to the small town of Ben Ficklin, where Isailo’s uncle, Milorad, lived and made decent money constructing crude machinery that was then shipped to Mexico and used to sew rough-hewn blankets and trousers for the campesinos to wear while working in the fields picking cotton.
Less than six weeks after their arrival, Milorad died, bitten by a rattlesnake while demonstrating to Isailo how the thick material of the machine-produced trousers protected workers from burs, thorns, scorpion stings, and snakebites.
Isailo, who knew nothing about metalwork or simple construction, who had in fact been called down to Texas to help his uncle with the accounting side of his growing business, suddenly found himself in charge of an operation that consisted of a house-sized garage littered with greased machinery—cogs, springs, belts, the like—and a small staff of four. His uncle, afraid that his workers, after learning the design of his machine, would steal the design and leave his workshop to start their own businesses, taught each man how to build only one-fourth of the entire apparatus, the four separate parts then pieced together by Milorad himself, in secret. No one, it turned out, knew exactly how to connect the four parts into one whole. After six weeks, the machine parts still not fitted together, Isailo was forced to fire the four men who had worked for his uncle and close the machine shop.
By this time, Fabia was pregnant. “It was a tough time for my parents, then,” Abbasonov told me. “My dad found another job as a line cook, and my mom had gone back to work cleaning houses, and she did that until about the time I was born, and then went back to it less than a month after, and since they couldn’t afford to pay anyone to take care of me, she took me with her. The thing was, my father could have worked as an accountant, but nobody would hire him in the States, at least not in Texas, until they had some proof, some certification that he wouldn’t run off with their money. He was from Albania, and no one in Texas had heard of Albania, knew what Albania was. Most of them thought, because of his color, because of his features, that he was some mixture of Mexican and black, although nobody thought it strange that he didn’t know how to speak Spanish. But that’s how he found work as a cook, because everyone thought he was mestizo. He was working the morning shift cooking breakfast for field hands, county deputies, and farmers.” A small amount of luck befell Isailo when the restaurant owner’s husband, who managed the restaurant’s finances, was bedridden by a stroke that incapacitated the left side of his body. In order to care for her husband, the owner considered closing the restaurant, but Isailo, unwilling to look for yet another job, offered to work extra hours managing the office for free if she could find someone to run the kitchen and the restaurant floor.
Three years later, Isailo bought the restaurant from the owner, who moved her husband to Santa Fe, New Mexico, in hopes that the heat and the dry air might better suit his physical needs.
“After that, my mother quit cleaning houses, and the three of us spent most of our time there, at the diner. Most of my memories are of time spent in the restaurant, in the kitchen sitting on a worktable, or on the floor behind the counter. It was called the Olympia Diner, after the woman who owned it, and my father never changed the name. He never changed the menu, either, and when he painted the dining room walls or retiled the kitchen
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