A few weeks after the Ritzy, Anthony takes me to his mother’s birthday party so I can meet his family. Everyone is going to be there: his father, his three sisters, and a bunch of cousins. I make sure to look really pretty and be extra nice to his mother. I even say the couple of Spanish words I know to her. Anthony walks me around the room and introduces me to everyone. He seems so glad to have me there, and I think back to the first day we met. He tells everyone how I go to some fancy school, and I like how proud he seems of me. Then his cousin Angela from the Bronx has a stank face before she even meets me. She has on red lipstick, blond highlights in the front of her hair, and weighs at least three hundred pounds. She has gold doorknockers with “Angie” written on them, and I know she’s going to be trouble before she even opens her mouth.
“So you’re Anthony’s new girl,” she says.
“Yeah,” I respond in my most stank East Harlem voice.
She sucks her teeth at me and is like, “You talk funny. Where you from?”
“I’m from 110th.”
“Oh, I thought you might be from Park Ave or something. Why do you sound like a white girl?”
I hate, hate, when people tell me I sound like a white girl. This is the moment I always dread. Ever since I started going to the Whitney School, it’s like everyone I meet knows I’ve gone through some life change and this is the inevitable outcome. I try to calm myself down as I’m surrounded by Anthony’s family and don’t want to be a bitch, but Anthony starts laughing.
“Yup, you do sound like a white girl! I was trying to figure that out this whole time,” he says.
“I don’t sound like a white girl. I’m just educated.” Now that shuts them both up, and they start mad grilling me and I am pissed. I glare at Anthony and feel like an asshole and like he just spit on me all at the same time. I’m not sure which I should feel more. Never before have I pointed out the educational differences between me and Anthony, at least not to him. And now I think that it might be true, what Ms. Kennedy said, that you can never go back, and the moment I walked through the doors of the Whitney School, things would never be the same again.
When I first read that Changó exchanged the power of divination for the power of dance, I thought it was a stupid trade. But I can see it now. Dancing is a way to connect with people, to touch them, a way to find his way back to a gaggle of bodies in unrest, bodies moving and crushing on top of each other. And maybe Changó is just like the rest of us. He wants to be touched amidst all those shifting bodies, and he wants someone to stop and hold him too, and for just a few minutes in time over and over again, he doesn’t want to feel so lost.
I walk around the neighborhood by myself for an hour after leaving the party. I stop at Gomez’s bodega on the corner where me and Melo used to get our quarter juices and Blow Pops. I pass the corner we would crowd after school when we were in eighth grade, six to nine of us in our black goose-down jackets, loud and claiming this spot as ours. I pass the bus stop I used to go to junior high, taking me to another world even then. I end up by my old elementary school, and through the gates I stare at the front steps. The first place I was ever kissed. I remember how that first kiss felt like a starburst, and nothing has sincerely felt like that since.
I asked Doña Serrano for love. But it was loss. I didn’t want to lose one more thing.
My mom comes into my room, clearly my covert crying was too noisy. “Is it about the boy?” she asks. She puts her arm around me and rubs my shoulder.
“Yeah. Sort of.” I sniffle, hiccup, and shake.
“Okay, okay,” she says. She stands there rubbing my arm until she stares at my makeshift altar as if it’s the first time she recognizes what it actually is. “Is that an . . . ?”
“Why didn’t you get initiated?” I ask with needy eyes, and she only pauses for a few seconds while she gazes at my candles, one for Oshún and one for Changó, before she answers.
“Because I wanted your father like Oshún wants Changó. I didn’t know if I could be like Oshún, if I could resist using all that power for myself.” She sighs and strokes my hair as my body hiccups against hers. This is the wisdom Oshún has over her worshipers. She gives them what they want knowing it will not last. Or that it is imperfect. But whatever Oshún truly desires, she does not want it through magic.
I see Oshún in her abode surrounded by all her magical accoutrements. I witness how she has loved Changó, danced for him, spread honey on his lips. That is how their love is: Changó pauses for Oshún but she continues for him. Yet I see her stop. That is as far as she goes. Oshún does not fail herself; she could do anything to win Changó. Instead she chooses to chase, to tempt only for so long, and lets him walk away because what must be cajoled will never stay and she has never wanted to be the third wife, the third love.
I thought my mother had no power because she didn’t get initiated. But like Oshún, she knew that to love is to barter.
THE LIGHT IN THE SKY
“I think there’s a UFO,” my mom announces with some unease. I gaze up at the sky never having thought of UFOs. It’s not a plane because its position is steady; the light in the sky blinks and blinks.
At the last minute, I announced to my mother that I had to go to Puerto Rico, and she, just reaching retirement, quickly agreed. La Parguera is the one place I had to travel to because of its phosphorescent bay. Tour companies run trips for five dollars a person, and on moonless nights, you can see how the water burns bright. I seek to be like the three Johns who came upon La Virgen del Caridad del Cobre while minding their own business fishing in Cuban waters. I am five weeks pregnant and that is the last thing I want; never having been a believer, I wish this time only that a Virgin in any incarnation would materialize and carry off this baby.
I have no inclination toward motherhood. I side with those postpartum mothers who drive their children into the water. Give them over to Yemaya. Let her have them.
My mother hasn’t noticed I’m pregnant, and I haven’t confessed it. Why speak of things that will never come to fruition? Instead of making an appointment at an abortion clinic, I made travel reservations, booked excursions, and planned an itinerary “to see the wonders of Puerto Rico.” Every day I was at home, I said I was going to do something. To make a move, a decision, but the only choice I made was to get on a plane.
The young mother across from us emits her exhaustion. She could be eighteen or she could be twenty-eight. The rest of the boat-trippers revel in their journey to the bay: teenagers are kissing, an older couple lean on each other and are mirthful, and a father and son talk fish and marine life. The young mother rests on the handle of the baby carriage, instead of her three-hundred-pound boyfriend. Even with the baby outside of her, it snuffs the life from her. She is the girl my mother warned me against being all my life—the girl who gets pregnant, retarding her future. When the baby’s calls for attention reach a certain pitch, the boyfriend’s voice overtakes all of us: “Handle that, Lisa. Damn, no one wants to hear that shit.” A scowl spreads on his acne-pocked face.
Lisa’s hand droops on the baby’s back, shushing it back and forth.
My mother pauses her UFO conspiracy babbling and whispers, “Ueeewww.”
I whisper back, “Ummhmmm.” He is the man my mother warned me against. As soon as I found out I was pregnant, I broke up with my boyfriend. I didn’t want my life to be irrevocably connected to his.
This is a place where a man will build you a house with his bare hands. Every piece of the wall, every piece of the floor that you touch will have been constructed by him. This is the loveliest of reality. When I go into these houses birthed by these men, I wonder what it is like to live your life indoors, tending to the house your man made and the kids your man conceived. I sometimes imagine this as the easier life, doing what you are supposed to do.
But these same wives ask when I will get married, have kids. My answer is never to both. And after each woman whose house I have stepped into has quizzed me with these two perfu
nctory questions, all have declared, “Good, don’t do it.” What if someone had warned this young mother sagging with sadness? She would have probably opted to ignore the sage warnings.
My mother tugs on my arm so we can get back to the UFO. “Maybe when we get to the phosphorescent part of the bay there will be a UFO ready to take us away,” she says a bit too wide-eyed. This woman sitting next to me is not the one I know on US soil. In Puerto Rico, this elegant woman peels fruit with her bare teeth, picks it off the ground and checks it for edibility—even though it seems like anything she picks up she deems edible—while I cast a wary glance on all the fruit put before me. She recounts every story of UFO sightings in Puerto Rico she has heard despite that, when we were in El Yunque last week—an area known for alien abductions (at least for people incapable of staying on a hiking trail)—there wasn’t a UFO in sight. But if some Virgin doesn’t come to pick up my baby, maybe the next best thing would be an alien abduction.
A raucous speedboat swerves too close to us, and my mother snaps, “Dios Santo!” clutching her chest as the speedboat’s wake makes our rickety boat squirm in the water. “Wooooooo!!!!” the speedboaters hoot and holler as they race away. “You know, this boat was late to pick us up, but there wasn’t anyone on the boat when it arrived,” she whispers to me. “So, if there wasn’t anyone on it, why was it late? What if that speedboat is full of thieves and they’re going to kill us all when we stop?” I keep a straight face as my mother says all this because I respect fear. Any other day I would have been exasperated, but tonight she vomits what I cannot expel.
When we finally reach our destination, we are in the midst of black waters, no phosphorescent lights in sight. The captain announces that two crew members will jump into the water on both sides of the boat and swim around to stir up the microorganisms that make the water glow. The men breaststroke and backstroke, creating a shell of blue sparkle around the boat reminiscent of La Virgen de Guadalupe’s aureole. I grab my mother’s hand, comforted by the illumination of the water. I could lie down here in the middle of the boat and wait for La Virgen’s arms to reach up, envelop me, and separate this baby from me.
“It’s a blimp put up by the Coast Guard. It’s to catch drug dealers coming in from the Dominican Republic,” we overhear the captain answer when the father and son ask about the light in the sky.
“Ay qué locura,” my mom chuckles shaking her head, the restoration of her self now palpable. This whole time, she channeled my fear, but she didn’t really need the implausible.
When I look back at the water, the radiance has dimmed because the swimmers have retreated onboard. Everything fades to black.
One by one, as the lights disappear, only the speedboat remains. I reach for a life jacket. Finally, swimming to be enfolded by miraculous human hands, birthing my own luminescent streak.
LOVE WAR STORIES
Our war—our love war—bravely fought against our mothers for the past three years, the war that led my friends to unabashedly fall in love our first year in college and left me waiting for summer break to start fighting again—that war—I know is going to come to a resounding end a week or so after we come home from college, all because the boyfriends quickly start reneging on a thousand pledges made through the course of relationships that started, at most, a mere eight months ago. Ruthie’s man writes her from California saying he’s dropping out of school and moving to Alaska to work on a fishing boat, and that maybe in another life they can continue where they left off. Alexa’s man just stops calling her back. And Yahira. That’s the worst one of all. He tells her that every utterance of love, memory created, caress given—stomp on the grapes, suck the juice—all of it’s a lie.
Yet, the most important contract broken by the departure of these boys is the one we girls made with each other when we started this war against our mothers: to believe in love. Just the summer before—fighting, yelling, believing—me, Yahira, Alexa, and Ruthie and a host of other girls would tell love stories. And our mothers would tell anti-love stories. And we did this every week in Springdale Park for three years until we went off to college.
This was our war.
And now, love is fighting all of us—it’s kicking our asses.
“Maybe they were right,” my friends say about our mothers.
“I don’t know what to say. I mean, I’m sorry this happened to all of you, but I don’t want to give in to what our mothers want,” I say.
“Did you even date anyone?” Baby Ruthie counters.
“Yeah, Rosie, you spent this whole year doing what?” Angry Alexa asks.
“How can you know how we feel? We can’t believe in this love shit anymore,” Yahira, my best friend, says.
Their worlds may be falling apart, but my worldview is falling apart. Listening to them, I start to think I do know what it’s like to be heartbroken. They don’t even want to go out there and fight. They’re sluggish when we go to our side of the park. Their declarations are muddied, half-hearted, brokenhearted. My friends sometimes seem to linger on our mothers’ side of the park before crossing over to ours, and I imagine that if there were a fence between the two groups, my compatriots would leisurely hang on it, heads resting on their hands, and actually listen to our mothers.
Decimated hearts. Blood everywhere. I’m looking at a battlefield full of wounded soldiers.
My mother, along with a long line of conspirators, told us always, “Never trust a man. A man only wants one thing and as soon as he gets it, he’ll be gone.” The repercussions for falling in love were always the same: a broken heart and a bad-girl rep, at best. At worst, a life of welfare checks and a baby every other year. Our mothers wanted something new for us. But it was really something old. Something borrowed. They wanted marriage. The divine notion of marriage. Our mothers didn’t believe in love between men and women anymore, though. They just wanted our future husbands to stay. “Marry,” they said, “but don’t believe.”
The neighborhood women always gathered at my house to preach about how dirty men were. They’d begin by discussing a female literary figure and note how she too had been scorned by men. “And see, don’t women come from a long line of rejected people?” Then they’d move on to the neighborhood women, how times hadn’t changed. Mr. Rivera, who left his wife for that no-good Ms. Medina, was seen coming out of—you guessed it—Mrs. Torres’s house, and now Mr. Torres was out of town visiting “familia,” again. Men cannot be trusted. Amen. This was their weekly prayer.
It all started with my mother. The day my father left, all anybody could hear throughout the neighborhood was twenty-six years of marriage shattering. The dishes cracking. Her heart splitting. Everything they had ever been told about love, marriage—all of it broken. And the women started coming one after the other, bringing handkerchiefs, pastries, and their own stories of crushed love. For that one night, their lives held no clear trajectory. No absolute truths. Only emotion, chaos, and open doors.
During the first year of their meetings, all my mother could do was talk about my father. Stories about him were bubbling from her mouth at every meeting. And it was like you could see inside her—the tributaries of memories pumping into her heart and back out. But then one day in the Chicopee Public Library, she came across “Ethan Brand” by Nathaniel Hawthorne (she had taken to going to the library to find out why her husband had left her), and she realized that she didn’t have to spend the rest of her years with her heart dangling from her blouse.
I imagine that she came home that night lightly coated with snow, took off her winter coat, studied herself in the mirror, and realized that nobody in her life had really told her her husband could leave her. She scanned her bedroom and moved the furniture around. Noticed the dust that had accrued over the years and thought it was easy to wipe away. And placing her bed in the center, she must have reached into a medicine man’s suitcase, full of tubes, syringes, cotton, and marble. Lain down and allowed the blood to drain out of her, while the marble poured in. And much li
ke my father the year before, she walked out of her bedroom, unencumbered by a heart.
“Boys? At your age?” My mother glared at me, Yahira, Alexa, and then Ruthie. If I was guilty, so were they. As it turned out, the news for this week was that Yahira’s mother caught me getting felt up by Robby Rodriguez in her stairwell.
Three years ago, when we were fifteen, was the first and last time they let us, their daughters, into one of their gatherings. We walked in looking somber, but deep down inside we were giddy. We had been eavesdropping on them since their first meeting when we were twelve, envisioning their expressions as they talked, and I always figured the room looked different each time they went into it, that like a dress, it took on their shape.
“You’re old enough to be running around with boys, huh?” My mother’s voice was one notch below yelling. I knew she was mad, but she said this all in English, so I knew we, or I, hadn’t passed her threshold for anger. “Don’t tell me. Don’t tell me that’s what you really think?” The other mothers shook their heads in unison. “I know you girls live in a more liberal world, a more American world.” (My mother liked to throw out the A-word whenever she really wanted to insult us.) “But we don’t.
“Carmencita was the one we compared ourselves to,” my mother continued. “If we did this would we be going too far? Is this something Carmencita would do? And if we thought the answer might be yes, no matter how fast the thought came and went, we didn’t do it. We were not going to be like her. Clearly, Carmencita was a . . .” I knew my mother wanted to use the word “puta,” but she was a coarse prude who would never utter such language. My mother’s raspy voice grated on my nerves constantly, but today more so than usual.
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