Never Too Real

by Carmen Rita

  “I wanted to tell you first . . . It’s killing me, though!”

  Luz had no sympathy for the newly single bachelor and regular withholder. “When did she get here?”

  “Yesterday. Right after I called you.”

  “So she was alone with you last night?”

  Tomas nodded.

  “Good thing you’re divorced.”

  “Yeah, Jeanne would have hit the roof with this girl.”

  Luz let out a big breath. They heard the television turn on. Emeli’s cell must have run out of juice. Tomas started to get up to help.

  “Sit. Leave her be. She’s not a baby.” Luz didn’t know what these feelings were in her. Her thoughts and emotions were kinetic and confused, a swirl. There was a lot of negativity roiling and she made a note to temper it. She knew much of it was selfish. She was a mother and the oldest—she was used to taking care of people. But not a foreign fifteen-year-old who looked like Luz if she had been brought up back in the ’hood— had never been “saved” by her Vineyard-legacy, black-elite father, the one who plucked her mother up and out of uptown Manhattan. Her mother, a beautiful, brown Dominican woman, younger and “exotic.” Her mother used to love that word, “exotic.”

  “Luz, I can’t keep her here.” It was Tomas’s turn to plead.

  “What?” Luz snapped back into the here and now.

  “It just doesn’t look good. She’s a teenager and all, and . . .”

  “And, what?” She wanted him to say it.

  “And she’s your, like, sister, technically as much as I’m your brother.”

  “Oh, for fuck’s sake, Tomas.”

  He shrugged. Luz understood: the gorgeous, trashy Dominicana hanging out in single brothah’s bachelor pad, lookin’ suspect. And she was really young. A teenage girl. What would he know about that? But . . .

  “You have to keep her,” Luz insisted.

  “What?!”

  Luz waved him down from his panic. “Just until I talk to Mom. And Chris. And the kids. And Dad.”

  “Luz, I can’t wait that long!”

  “Well, it’ll happen fast, okay? I’m not like you, Mr. Secret Man. I mean, how is this even possible? That we have a sibling and the man who I thought was my father is not my father and my mother doesn’t even know about this girl and I’m supposed to just pick up my life and . . . and . . . I don’t even know what the fuck!” She was standing now, gesticulating.

  Tomas just looked at her.

  “Shit, man,” Luz said. “Shit.” How could her mother have kept this secret all these years? How could her father have done the same? And how could her “real” father be someone she considered a low-life? She knew a lot of black men and the good ones knew what to do, how to act. How to take that target painted on their backs since birth and throw it to the wind, where it belonged. Like her father had done, and had done with Tomas. Sure, her grandparents, her father’s parents, were professors and he came from a long line of free, Northern, educated blacks, but still, he was a black man who had lived through times even more dangerous than the present. And he did it, he made it. Shoot, her brother did it. He kept himself straight and didn’t knock anyone up, had no baby-mamas—

  Oh Lord. Her own mama was a baby-mama. Carajo! This was a stereotype Luz had been working all her life to avoid. All these stereotypes. Fatherless, illegitimate, the sneaking around, raising another man’s child, the lies, the decades—the horror.

  “Tomas. I need you to take care of her.”

  Her brother rose to protest.

  “Nah, nah, it’ll be fine. Just give me a day, okay? Just a day. Twenty-four hours.”

  “We should do it together, right? Talk to them?” Tomas attempted to keep his responsibility alive.

  “No! You have a father, okay? Your father has stayed the same! Mom owes me answers, not you. And he does, too. Dad.” Mom owed everyone answers, as Emeli’s introduction into their lives would mean a new sibling, and for Luz’s children a new tía or auntie, too.

  Luz was tearing up now, in a way her brother hadn’t seen since their beloved abuela passed away more than a decade earlier.

  “Okay, okay. Listen, just be by your phone,” he said.

  “I can do that.” Luz pulled several tissues from her purse and blew her nose, wiped her eyes. “Shoot, you don’t have no Kleenex in this bachelor pad, or what?”

  Her little brother ran to do his big sister’s bidding—just like old times. He brought her a new box.

  “Does she have clothes, even?”

  “Yeah, she came with a bag.”

  “And feed her, okay? I bet you guys like the same stuff, like pizza.” Luz cracked half a smile and felt the dried salt tears on her cheeks crinkle.

  Back in the living room, Luz was surprised to find her new sibling snoozing soundly on the couch, sneakers still on, holding the remote. On the obnoxiously big bachelor screen was a reality show about a cake-maker in Jersey—not what Luz would have thought she’d be watching.

  “Wow, she must have been tired.” For the first time Luz thought of how it must feel to be Emeli. Fifteen years old, suddenly moved five class-rungs up in an apartment downtown, with a new stepbrother and half sister who weren’t exactly very nice to her. Her mother was dead, her father in jail, again.

  Brother and sister hugged good-bye.

  “It’ll be fine,” Tomas assured Luz, though in part he was assuring himself.

  Yeah, she thought. Just fine.

  Chapter 12

  As she slid into her usual pleather restaurant booth, Cat was beginning to feel that her butt and this seat were getting too comfy. For maybe a decade now it was a repeat spot for all her close girlfriends, as well as several other urban tribes, including Long Island moms post-shopping. The upscale diner was easy access via subway, cab, or foot, open twenty-four/seven, solid comfort food—salad, too, for those cleansing days. And without faltering, pics of drag queens on the menus, hinting at the neighborhood’s past. Cat visited some memories of much younger visits, usually drunk before even walking through the door.

  Maybe it wasn’t so comfy after all, she thought, as the memories piled a tad too high. Abruptly, Cat felt old and tired.

  Gabi stumbled in, brows furrowed, but smiling. Cat wondered if she was just noticing that Gabi looked particularly harried lately? Burdened. And it wasn’t just the bags she was carrying in her hands; those were a constant.

  “Hi, Mama.” They exchanged warm pecks on the cheek.

  “Ay, Catalina, the traffic.”

  “I know. Crazy.”

  Cat brought up the heavy right away. “Gabs, I am so sorry to hear about Magda’s mom.”

  Her friend sucked her teeth and shook her head at the same time, sighing.

  “How is she?”

  “Well, Magda is Magda,” Gabi answered. “She’s fine as far as I can tell, but she texted last night that the prognosis is not good. So, as much as she puts up that front, I’m concerned.” Gabi knew it wasn’t her place or her M.O. to dish further. She was a steel trap both professionally and personally.

  “Of course.” Cat didn’t want to pry too much, but she also couldn’t resist some chisme—she wanted to gossip a little. Magda and her glamorous but tumultuous life was fascinating to even her closest friends. “And this has gotta be crazy with her family and her father not talking to her, right?”

  “I’m sure. But unless I’m there with her, or she’s tossed back a few, we’re not gonna hear too much about it.”

  Cat sighed in sympathy. A casualty of being Americanized was the loss of their mothers’ tradition of reaching out across every dimension of family and friends for support. It was like playing cat’s cradle—the more loops you made, the closer your hands came together and the stronger your network became. The flip side: Their mothers could be equally adept at hiding family secrets, dirty laundry, and everyone seemed to have some.

  Cat decided to take a chance and break with her own everything-is-awesome routine.

  Rolling he
r ice water in her hand, feeling the cold wetness of the perspiring glass, Cat began to be truthful for once, her eyes down in shame. “So, Gabs. I’m not doing so well.”

  “Cat?” Gabi’s friendly empathy and therapy skills clicked into motion.

  “Yeah. Well. Things just aren’t landing.” Cat continued to look down. Admitting that she needed help was like clean-jerking barbells. But if she couldn’t reveal her disquiet and dilemma with her friend, a best-selling therapist, whom was she going to do it with?

  “But, is it just a matter of time in this business?”

  “Well, that’s just it. It’s been a lot of time . . . and in my business, timing is so important. Too much time is dangerous. You fall off the radar, you’re screwed.”

  Gabi let silence hold the floor for a moment. She disagreed with Cat, feeling more so that the real radar is you—you control the radar and you grab that light and beam it right back in your face. But she’d communicate that to Cat in a different, more customized way to her, just not right now. Right now, Gabi felt that there was something else that was eating away at Cat. Something just as big.

  Gabi was right. “And my mother . . . she’s making me nuts,” Cat stammered out at a clip. “Gabi, I think that’s why I’m nuts . . . I think that she really just hounds me because she’s so upset that she’s lost the ability to brag to people about me and that’s where I feel her terror coming from—I’m feeling her terror!—but I’m not scared so much as she’s scared . . . and now she’s making me nuts, more nuts than I’d be on my own—I can’t hear myself!” It was one breathless, lifting-the-lid-of-a-pressure-cooker sentence.

  “Okay.” Once the mother issue came up, it was all Gabi’s hands on deck. “That’s a good one—let’s hear you: I want to know, Cat, how do you feel here, now, about where you’re at?” Gabi pointed her finger down at the table.

  Cat paused a breath, then her eyes opened wide with panic. “Gabi, I’m too old for this shit!”

  Gabi was surprised and confused, which was rare. “Old for what shit?”

  “For this! For sitting here and trying to reimagine myself! For not having a husband or kids or . . . just kids!”

  The server was on his way to the table to take their orders. Protectively, Gabi waved him off.

  “Okay. Now I totally get it, I get it,” she said. “It’s a sucky time for this to happen and you worked so hard to get where you are. It’s been sewn into your identity, deeply, work and succeeding and getting ahead, you straight-A bum.”

  “You mean where I was.”

  “What?”

  “You said . . . so hard to get to where I am. It’s was.”

  “No! I mean are. Where you are.”

  “Gabi, I am nowhere right now.”

  “Bullshit.”

  “What?”

  “I’m calling bullshit on you.” A Guru-Gabi specialty, calling out the real, breaking down narratives. “You are the sum of your parts, past and present, plus your potential for the future. No one can take that away from you, Cat. No one can take away what you’ve done—what you’ve built, and where you’ve come from.”

  Cat’s eyes widened. Something sunk in. She was listening. “But, then why does it feel so crappy?”

  “Because much of your identity is wrapped up in the sash someone else puts on you—a sash that can be taken away.”

  Cat was offended at the analogy. “I’m not a beauty queen!”

  “No, but you are a Queen. And you are one without anyone else’s permission or seal of approval. Your self doesn’t depend on who hires you.”

  As if coming up against a wall, rather than a door, Cat deflated. “Yeah, yeah . . . I know. I hear you.”

  “Don’t you dare ‘yeah, yeah’ me. I’m fucking serious, carajo.” Gabi suffered no fools as soon as even a hint of whining popped up its putrid head.

  Cat’s eyes welled. She sniffed tears back as much as she could muster.

  Gabi sighed. She didn’t want to hurt her friend, but she also knew that this was a crisis point for Cat. If she didn’t start infecting her with another way of looking at her lot in life, she could lose her like she’d seen the city eat up others. “Listen, remember that dumb Blues Brothers movie?”

  Cat nodded.

  “Well, I hated that movie—friggin’ white dudes with harmonicas—but my brother was obsessed with it, and his favorite line was, ‘We’re on a mission from God.’ These two tubby guys playing music—on a mission from God. Can you imagine?!”

  Cat chuckled, remembering a music video where they danced around in black suits, fedoras, and shades, looking lumpy and frumpy, yet they were thought to be cool.

  “Think about it: What’s your mission from God? Not the mission your mother sent you out on. That was a pretty cool mission, but it was her mission, right?”

  “Yup.” Cat nodded. “But I liked it. I did good.”

  “Oh, you did more than good! You killed it! But, you also had to pay a price.”

  Cat nodded. “It was a big price.” An empty home and an empty womb.

  “So. Since you are a Queen and we are all on a mission from God, because why the fuck not, what’s your mission? Not yo’ mama’s, not the network’s. Your mission.”

  “Good question.” Cat sat up straighter in the booth.

  Gabi took a big bite of salad and winked at Cat. “You need to actually read my books, ya know.”

  Chapter 13

  The fluorescent lights of the hospital hallway reached into Magda’s scalp and squeezed. This was the side effect of polishing off three-quarters of a tequila bottle the night before combined serendipitously with the dry, metal-tube air of her flight to Miami. As soon as Magda had gotten the call from her father in her office, she rushed to wrap up only vital items at work. Then she drank too much, per usual, sobbed on Gabi’s shoulders, passed out—and caught the first flight out in the morning. As one of the few in her family who had escaped the southern peninsula of Florida, including cousins, only a hop-skip-jump away, Magda assumed that most of the immediate family would be there already. She hoped not. She was there to see her mother. Not the whole clan who barely acknowledged that she was alive.

  As she approached the room, Magda made out light chatter in Spanish. Her stomach clenched in reflex as she rounded the door frame and gently peeled off her sunglasses. Three of her younger sisters were there: Inez, Veronica, aka Nica, and Diana. Inez and Veronica were sitting on each side of her mother’s hospital bed while Diana fiddled with a flower arrangement and an untouched breakfast tray. All of their kids must be with their fathers, Magda thought, they probably don’t want to scare them yet. On the vinyl recliner, overseeing it all, was Magda’s father. She hadn’t seen him in more than a decade.

  But Magda’s eyes gave only a cursory scan of her family, focusing her attention on only one person, her mother. Tubes snaked from the IV pole to Carolina’s gaunt, chemo-burned hands, marked with rivers of iodine brown, her charred veins. She seemed pressed far too deep into her pillows than possible for her slight weight. It was as if the gravity of her being was so much heavier than her body. All this was shocking to Magda—the transformation—but curiously, what rose to the top of her mind was that she couldn’t remember the last time she had seen her mother without makeup. Not her usual foundation, concealer, eye makeup—though she did have a slight gloss of color on her lips. Sneaking in colored lip balm. That’s my Ma.

  Carolina’s gray eyes connected with her eldest daughter’s and would not let go. And as Magda, dressed in a pale blue suit and rumpled white button-down shirt, stepped from the doorway toward the bed, everyone followed the patient’s line of sight and stopped talking. Magda’s sisters dropped their eyes, got up, and slowly carved out room for her as their father sat stone-faced for a beat, staring at Magda. She didn’t notice, though. Nor did she notice when he got up from the recliner and joined his other daughters in leaving the room.

  The disregard for a sibling or a daughter, the lack of affection for Magda, or even
attention to her, was as foreign an occurrence in a Latin family as an abuela making brown rice. At any other time, Magda would have made a snarky crack about it, something dour and pointed to turn the pain they caused her to right back at them. Magda’s heart had ached on many nights as she lay awake in bed scrolling through social media updates of her sisters and their growing families. Families she barely got to see but who so obviously enjoyed each other, far out of reach of their eldest tía’s sinful and shameful existence as un gay.

  Unlike Magda, her sisters feared their father. When he’d shut Magda out, the whole family played along. Some, out of simple fear of his rage and personal rejection. Magda figured that at least one, probably Diana, was also too afraid of losing her inheritance. And though her father may have felt betrayed by his eldest daughter’s choices, the bigger betrayal for Magda was that of her younger sisters, girls whom she’d cared for so well, protecting them often from the furor of the parent they now sided with. Instead of gratitude for Magda, she knew that they resented their sister’s defiance and ambition. Precisely the features of Magda’s that had freed her from the patriarch—but at the same time distanced her from their love. It all stung.

  “Ma,” Magda murmured as she reached gently to place her hand under her mother’s, feeling her skin barely as thick as crêpe paper. Magda’s eyes welled.

  “Ay m’ija . . . Ven,” Carolina whispered.

  Magda’s broad frame enveloped her mother’s shrunken one, petite already, now, like a fairy. Magda whispered a pained “Ma . . .” as she held her as tightly as she could without crushing her bones made fragile by the concoction that kept her alive this long.

  Carolina pushed Magda gently off of her, comforting her eldest, though she was the one very much alive. Magda pulled herself enough away to sit on the recliner pulled as close to her mother as possible, contorting herself to keep both her elbows on the hospital bed, her now tear-slick cheek nestled in her mother’s right hand.

  They sat in silence, Carolina offering her daughter a sad smile, until Magda stifled her despair enough to speak. She was going to set aside her pain and do what she did best: problem-solve.