Emily Goldberg Learns to Salsa

by OSTOW, MICOL

  I don’t know why the thought strikes me as heresy. As much as I know of Tía Rosa, she would strangle Rafael in his sleep if she knew he had defiled her daughter. She’s very religious and definitely anti-premarital naughtiness. So I just assumed that Lucy—upstanding, responsible, mature Lucy—had adhered to her widowed mother’s wishes.

  Then again, this is the same Lucy who sneaks out to salsa clubs on weeknights, I remind myself. It’s not beyond the realm of comprehension that she would ever defy her mother. And it sort of makes sense, the whole pregnancy scare thing, in light of how off things have been with her and Rafael. I feel suddenly, unspeakably bad for Lucy, though I know she’d probably resent my sympathy.

  I don’t even want to think about how Noah would react if I were in the same boat, but thankfully I don’t have to. It’s one of the upsides of being miles away from one’s boyfriend—both physically and emotionally.

  I have to forcibly bring myself back, to remind myself that this latest crisis has nothing to do with me; this is Lucy’s thing. I’m guessing she was on the phone with Rafael. It could have been a friend, I suppose, but my limited experience with Lucy and her whole gang tells me that he’s the only one that gets her as riled up as this. The expression on her face was a Rafael-inspired special.

  Though these are extenuating circumstances. Who knows? Maybe all bets are off.

  I have to talk to her. I’m not sure how—I’m anti-confrontation under the best of circumstances, and these are hardly the best of circumstances. I have no reason to believe that Lucy, who doesn’t even want makeup tips from me, is looking for my help in a situation like this.

  I mean, I could always go find my mother, tell her about the Old San Juan plan, go back to my original agenda for the evening.

  But . . .

  I can’t. I know I can’t. Even if Lucy doesn’t want to hear from me—even if my advice is one step down from no advice at all—I can’t pretend I didn’t hear her on the phone. For one thing, it’d be an insult to both of our intelligences.

  The bathroom door slams and I hear footsteps. Lucy is walking back to her bedroom. Well, not her bedroom exactly, since that’s where my mother and I are sleeping—

  I cut the mental babbling off at the pass, square my shoulders, inhale deeply. This is my moment.

  I follow Lucy down the hall, padding just far enough behind her that she’s not aware of being semi-stalked. It’s not an especially long walk, which is a shame, because I use these last few moments to pull together my little speech. Now I’m standing in her doorway, throat dry, any semblance of speech all but forgotten.

  Lucy roots in her drawer for a clean pair of socks. Fishing one out, she turns, sees me standing in her doorway. She gasps and jumps a few inches. “Ay, are you spying on me, primita?”

  Primita is a term of endearment. It’s pretty clear that she’s using it sarcastically.

  Whatever. I take another deep breath, plunge onward. “It’s just”—I shift my weight from one foot to the other—“it’s just that I heard you on the phone.”

  Her eyes narrow. “So you were spying on me?”

  “Well, no,” I say, defensive but tentative. “I mean, it wasn’t intentional. But Lucy—I heard your conversation.” I gaze at her meaningfully. “I understood it.”

  She shrugs. “Right. I’ll bet you did.”

  I absorb the insult. “I know that you”—I drop my voice—“think that you’re—”

  “Mira!” she says, cutting me off. “It’s really none of your business.”

  “I’m not trying to be in your business,” I protest. “But that sounds like, um, some pretty heavy stuff. And I just . . . I mean, I know we haven’t exactly been close since I’ve gotten here, but I just want you to know that I’m here for you.”

  I swallow, the noise reverberating loudly in my ears. The moment is—for lack of a better word—pregnant.

  “I’m here,” I say. “If, ah, you want me to be.”

  She sighs, drawing out the breath. She crosses to the doorway where I stand, and for a moment I actually think there’s a chance. A chance that I’ve gotten through to her, a chance that she’s going to say something back to me. That we’re going to have a Talk about her Problem, and I’m going to be able to Help her. But once she’s standing opposite me in the doorway, she reaches out. For a moment I even think she’s going to slap me. I flinch, but she just grabs at the door and swings it shut in my face.

  “I’m fine,” she snaps, just before the latch clicks into place. “Now leave me alone.”

  The next day passes in a blur. Lucy goes to work and drives her sisters to camp. Tía Rosa heads off to her job. José does not make an appearance; he must be caught up in the girlfriend or something. I forget to suggest Old San Juan to my mother, and instead we spend our morning at the supermarket, squeezing produce and pawing through cuts of chicken. When we get back to the house, I try to read but find myself skipping over the same sentence time and again. After half an hour on the same page, I give up, head out for the pool. I drag Pilar’s rubber raft into the center of the pool and climb on top of it, floating.

  I’m useless. My mom’s little breakdown in San Lorenzo had nothing to do with me. The best I could do was to hold her hand. And Lucy, well . . . Lucy wouldn’t take my hand if her life depended on it. I can’t help anyone. Not even when I desperately want to.

  I paddle with one hand, making listless circles over and over again.

  I can’t think of anything better to do.

  Lucy’s home for dinner, of course. The meal is a forced affair, even if I’m the only one who notices. I’m acutely aware of every scrape of silverware against china, every swallow, every crunch. It’s like watching dinner through a super-focus microscope, like a movie in surround sound.

  After dinner is weirder still; we do the dishes. Lucy washes, I dry. The silence is overpowering, suffocating. I have never not looked at someone as intensely as I am not looking at Lucy.

  We finish the dishes. I wring out the dish towel and hang it on its little hook over the sink. I am overwhelmed by how badly I want to say something. But I don’t. I’ve exceeded my outreach quota for the week. Perhaps even for the summer. I rub my hands against the front of my pants—the terry ones again—and am puzzled by the noise the rubbing makes. It’s thick and wet, the sound of a dog rooting through the trash. That’s when I realize that the noise has nothing to do with my pants.

  The sound is Lucy, crying.

  She cries somewhat noisily, though I’m clearly meant not to notice. She keeps her head bent low over the sink, bites her lip. After a beat or two she rubs her fist into the corners of her eyes, one after the other. She sniffs once more, shakes her head (as if to say, “No, I wasn’t crying”), and coughs. She double-checks the faucet to be sure that it’s off, wrenches it in place forcefully. Two residual drops snake their way out of the tap and hit the basin with the tiniest of echoes. Satisfied, Lucy retreats to her bedroom without another word.

  Three days pass in excruciating silence. Lucy and I have both been reduced to automatons, wordlessly carrying out our respective household chores. To the casual observer, I’m guessing it would seem like nothing’s wrong. To anyone who knows me, only my bitten-down fingernails would give me away; after all, me being quiet is not a huge, cataclysmic, unheard-of event.

  And Lucy? Well, I don’t know what the norm is for Lucy, but I would guess that it isn’t this ephemeral fluctuation between a vacant, glassy-eyed stare and a practiced stoniness that sets my teeth on edge. No one else in the house seems to notice it. Or if they do, they sure don’t say anything. So I don’t say anything either. Just dry the dishes and bite my lip. Sometimes hard enough to taste blood.

  It’s late, after dinner, and Lucy and I have long since finished our wash-dry routine. My mother and Tía Rosa are out, pitching in for the food drive at Rosa’s church. My mother is social action chair at our synagogue back home; I wonder if being involved in the church food drive feels odd, or oddly famili
ar, to her.

  I am scribbling a postcard to Max—Puerto Rican beefcakes sprawled on a beach, WISH YOU WERE HERE spelled out in sunblocked letters across their backs—when I spy my mother’s Camel Lights tossed casually on the living-room table. All I can think of is how people say that smoking eases tension. And I’d really like to do that right about now.

  What the hell? Lucy is reading to her sisters in bed, and Mom and Rosa won’t be back for at least another hour. I swipe the pack and head outside.

  Once I’m there, though, I can’t bring myself to do it. I fire up the lighter, stare at the flame, entranced, bring it close to the tip of the cigarette. Click. The flame disappears, swallowed back up inside the lighter. I tap my fingers impatiently against the box of cigarettes in my lap, jiggle my crossed legs up and down so that the box bounces. Click. Now I’m captivated, watching the flame fan bright, then dim. Click. Way more interesting than smoking, which always seems about as appealing as licking the bottom of an ashtray. I always wished it didn’t look so . . . well, cool.

  “Can I get a light?”

  I leap in my seat, sending the lighter and the cigarettes clattering to the ground, respectively. Lucy chuckles or at least does a damn good impersonation of a chuckle. “Didn’t mean to scare you.”

  “You didn’t . . .” I start, but trail off since, I mean, it’s pretty obvious that she did. I run through my mental database of pre-rehearsed scripts, but every opening line seems insufficient. I swallow, sigh, offer a half-dozen false starts. I finally settle on, “Are you okay?”

  She shrugs, looks down. “Not really.” I want to shake my head, Q-Tip my ears, so surprised am I to hear her admit this. Then Lucy does something even more amazing. She squares her shoulders, tossing her hair back in the now-familiar gesture of defiance. Defiance or preparation. She looks me dead in the eyes. “It’s just . . .” She starts to turn her head again but redirects her gaze so that we’re still focused on each other. “It’s just, I need your help.”

  What do I say? What should I say? What can I say?

  “Of course.”

  Thirteen

  The thing is that when I say I will help Lucy, I mean it. But I am poorly equipped to do so. Really, really poorly. My experience with these sorts of things is based entirely on what I’ve seen on the WB. None of my friends back home have had to deal with anything remotely like this. Or if they did, they kept it to themselves. Now I find myself wondering. . . .

  But that’s hardly the point, of course. The point is that Lucy—Lucy!—has come to me asking for help. This is momentous. I mean, she must be desperate. And I’m resourceful enough. Together we should be able to figure something out.

  I put the cigarette that I’ve been toying with back in the box, totally intact. Obviously I was never serious about taking up this new little hobby.

  “Well, first things first,” I say, adopting a falsely chipper tone. “Are you sure that you’re pregnant?”

  Lucy shakes her head. “It’s just that I’m always . . . regular.”

  “Do you have reason to believe that you’re pregnant?” I press, like I’ve suddenly been possessed by the spirit of a school nurse.

  She raises an eyebrow. “I’m always regular,” she repeats stonily, as if she’s speaking to the severely brain-damaged.

  “Right,” I say, choosing to ignore the fact that she is being slightly pissy. I have to cut her some slack. After all, this is a pretty stressful situation and it is Lucy. A certain degree of grouchiness is to be expected.

  “Well, I guess the first thing to do is to figure out whether or not you really are pregnant.”

  “I’m not going to a doctor,” she says, crossing her arms over her chest. “The doctor would tell my mom, and my mom would kill me.”

  “They’re not allowed to do that,” I say. “Confidentiality and whatever.”

  Lucy’s response is yet another raised eyebrow.

  “But I don’t think that’s necessary anyway,” I say hurriedly. “We can just get you a pregnancy test.”

  Lucy’s eyes widen as though I’ve suggested something unspeakable. “Mira, chica, and who’s going to buy the test?” she stage-whispers.

  “Uh, we will?” I offer uncertainly.

  Mind you, as far as Embarrassing Things to Purchase at the Drugstore goes, a home pregnancy test is pretty high up there on the list, but what can you do? I don’t see many other options right now.

  Lucy shakes her head again, making as though I am a totally hopeless case. “We can’t,” she says, sounding sad and resigned. “It’s too . . . it’s just not done. If anyone were to see us—it’s not something that a single girl our age can do. Not here.”

  “Well, I don’t live here,” I say, logically enough. “What do I care about my ‘rep’? I could just go and buy the thing, couldn’t I?”

  “You’re my cousin. It would reflect on our family,” Lucy protests.

  I shake my head, frustrated. “This is crazy. You’re freaking out, but we can’t go get the test because it’s awkward?” I ask.

  Lucy crosses and uncrosses her arms even more emphatically, further evidence that we’re really not operating on the same page. “It’s not crazy; it’s the way it is here. We can’t go buy a test ourselves.”

  “Fine,” I say, resigned. Who am I to tell her what is and isn’t appropriate around here after all? I pause, try to gather my composure. As for alternatives, I can only think of . . . well, one.

  And I don’t think Lucy will like it one bit.

  “No,” she tells me.

  I don’t know how, but she reads my mind.

  “We are not talking to your mother about this,” she tells me.

  “Lucy, we have to,” I insist. “Someone has to get us a pregnancy test. We can’t go to the doctor—fine, I think that’s probably not necessary right now anyway. You don’t want to buy a test yourself—fine, I guess I don’t blame you, although it wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world. But if those two options are out, then we don’t have a whole lot of choices.” I pause. “Unless you’d rather tell your mother.”

  Lucy shudders.

  “Exactly.” I shrug. “My mom’s cool—about most stuff,” I say, crossing my fingers behind my back and hoping this is as true as I think it is. “And we know without a doubt that she will be better about this than Rosa. I mean, really.”

  “True,” Lucy admits, however grudgingly.

  “My mom can keep a secret,” I say, still with the crossed fingers.

  Lucy bites a fingernail. “Espero que sea la verdad, chica.”

  Yeah, I hope so too.

  Mom and Rosa are back by ten, what with them being mom-aged and it being a church event and all. Lucy paces, practically wearing a hole in the living-room carpet, while we wait for Rosa to retreat to her bedroom with her nightly glass of wine, a book, and her reading glasses. My mother sits at the kitchen table with a bottle of water, a pen, and a Tuesday New York Times crossword. She likes to do the Mondays and Tuesdays in pen. We hover at the doorway of the kitchen, hemming, hawing, and hedging, until way too much time has passed for us to cling to our “casual” charade.

  “What. Is. Going. On?” my mother asks, mildly bemused. She caps her pen, lays it on the table, and turns away from the crossword to regard us. “Since when are you two partners in crime?”

  I shoot Lucy a meaningful look, thinking she should be the one to break the situation down for my mother. It’s her issue, after all. But no dice. She steps backward, gives me a light shove. Okay, then. It’s my show.

  My hands feel clammy and I’m breathing at twice the normal rate. This is for Lucy, I remind myself. For some reason, that makes it easier to act completely and wildly out of character.

  “We have a problem,” I say. “We were hoping you could help.”

  Twenty minutes later we’re in Rosa’s car, careening down the main strip toward the twenty-four-hour pharmacy.

  I’ve got to give my mom credit—she was as cool as I hoped she’d be. S
he listened to the news impassively, turning calmly to Lucy after we’d finished. “The test is for you?”

  I can’t lie; I’m relieved that she didn’t assume it was me. It’s not a bad sign, as far as her opinion of me is concerned. Of course, I feel guilty for even thinking that way. What exactly do I think it “says” about Lucy’s character?

  “We really appreciate this,” I gush from the backseat. Lucy sits beside my mother in the front, gnawing frenetically on a fingernail.

  “You couldn’t go yourself,” my mother matter-of-facts.

  “That’s what I told her,” Lucy says, almost managing a half smile. “She didn’t believe me.”

  My mother tsk-tsks, waves her hand in my direction dismissively. “Emily, do you have any idea the gossip if someone saw a single girl Lucy’s age buying a pregnancy test? Trust me, as it is, if we run into anyone we know, they’ll manage to pass along the story. But I’m married, so it’s less scandalous.”

  “It’s the same with birth control,” Lucy tells me. “Good girls aren’t even supposed to know what it is. Using it is, like, a double sin.”

  I am in total disbelief. “So what do you do, then?”

  “Don’t ask, don’t tell,” Lucy says. “Rhythm method. Pull and pray. Or get knocked up”—she flinches—“and people find out. It’s embarrassing. More than embarrassing. At that point you pretty much better hope the guy marries you.”

  I’m stunned. Maybe it’s naive, and it’s not like I didn’t realize that things were more . . . traditional here, but this feels downright archaic. Girls back home worry about their reputations, sure, but somehow it’s not quite the same.

  “Well, this is good, then,” I say, trying to lighten the mood. “Or were you hoping that Rafael would propose?”