Mr. Hernandez

“Why can’t you be more like Mr. Hernandez?” My mother quipped to my father as he indolently spent another Saturday afternoonlying across the sofa watching a boxing match. George Forman was attempting to wrest the title yet again from Mohammad Ali. After the match was over Daddy yelled for one of his seven children to scurry to the living room to hand him the remote from the coffee table, two feet from the couch, so he could change the channel. He thought, just maybe, there was a Jack Palanance western on channel 7.

Mr. Hernandez, on the other hand was outside his neat, cape home on a ladder industriously cleaning out his gutters. He’d spent the afternoon weeding his driveway and making minor repairs to the façade of his home. We had exactly the same home in the development in Queens Village. The only difference being the Hernandez’ house was well kept and ours was, well, lived in.

Every Saturday during the summer would find the conscientious Mr. Hernandez outside making his home immaculate with his efficiently laid out garden tools in his neat garage. The Singhs, however, had a garage door that was falling down from disrepair and Daddy would be cursing, as he could never find his tools. There were oil spots on the driveway from when Daddy occasionally attempted to make an auto repair. The lawn showed uneven spots where one of the older children tried to cut it with scissors. If Mr. Hernandez wasn’t working then he was taking his two girls and his wife on a day trip to the beach or the park. They were everything a suburban family should be.

We lived in a wonderfully diverse section of Queens–Queens Village, not quite the affluence of eastern Queens on the fringe of Nassau County, or the strife of south Jamaica. We were somewhere in the middle. The housing complex was built sometime in the 1930’s and white families moved in and settled until the 1970’s when the minorities like us moved in. For $27,000 we got a three-bedroom, one-bath cape with an unfinished basement and the dubious distinction of causing a run on the quiet neighborhood. When the neighbors saw an Indian family of nine move in, the for-sale signs popped up like whack-a-moles. A Jamaican family moved in across the street, a Dominican family moved in to the left of us and a Haitian family moved in down the block.

To the right of us was the Hernandez clan. The fiery Mrs. Hernandez was Cuban and her handsome husband was Puerto Rican. The houses on the block were built with such cookie cutter precision that when we moved there in 1974 I would occasionally walk into the wrong back yard when I came home from school. Xerox housing was a new concept for me. In Trinidad, where I lived for eight years, everyone’s house in our village was different. Houses were built one at a time, to owner specifications. No one ever built a house exactly like his or her neighbor.

My mother held the Hernandez family in high esteem. They were the benchmark to which she would compare my non-cooperative father. Why can’t you be more like Mr. Hernandez? Look, he’s taking his family out for the day again.” “Why can’t you be more like Mr. Hernandez? Look he’s mowing the lawn.” Mrs. Hernandez was a hot number or as my father would say, “she was a good looking broad.” When she came over to speak to my parents her chest fascinated me. The woman had four boobs…four! I was ten and had an ironing board plastered to my upper body. I would stare at the chest as she talked and try to figure out how she turned two ample ones into two big jiggly and two little juicy ones on top. It looked like she arranged her bra so that the abundance would spill over and form another two pack. They were amazing in their motion and number.

One summer day Mrs. Hernandez came over with shattering news—Mr. Hernandez had a girlfriend. Many days after that revelation, she came over to speak to my father to vent, to ask advice, or to recount an argument. Mr. Hernandez, my mother’s ideal, had hooked up with a teenage floozy. The couple now had violent arguments inside, outside, on the phone, with relatives and at divorce court. The beautiful, model, poster family of our suburbia simply disintegrated due to infidelity. Mr. Hernandez moved out and all trips to the beach stopped. The outside of their house started to look like ours. Mrs. Hernandez was left with two children to raise on her own. As her only work experience was baking cookies, hosting birthday parties, making rice and beans and supporting the home front, she got a job as a barmaid on Jamaica Avenue. We never saw Mr. Hernandez again. The rumor was that he’d actually married his girlfriend and moved on to play the perfect husband in another performance on Long Island.

Working in a bar was a cruel turn of events. The homemaker with the apron became the working mom who stayed out at the tavern till the wee hours of the morning, while my older sister babysat the girls. She would occasionally tell stories of wearing a diaper at the bar because it was so busy that she did not have time to use the bathroom. And there were the men too. She was, of course, still a beautiful young woman with those four breasts. The Hernandez sisters lost their luster. We spent less time having tea parties on their lawn and playing kickball on the side street. They were the first broken family on the block and they were never able to recapture their loftiness. We had fewer things in common and our families drifted apart. The girls, left to their own devices, sadly became the kind of kids that we simply didn’t want to hang out with.

The last time I saw Mrs. Hernandez she was sitting in the front seat of a Ryder moving truck, with her girls, waving goodbye as she drove south to the friendly shores of Miami. I don’t recall who moved in when she sold the house. And I never heard my mother utter those words again.