They came every summer and were out of here by September. They had to get back to school, I know. But still, it seemed right in keeping that they should make their exit just as hurricane season was about to start. That was their way. They’d talk and talk about the unfairness of poverty, about the bad schools, the terrible treatment of the maids. Then, once they had us feeling like creeps, they’d leave for their shopping malls and their colleges, their sit-ins and their dope cigarettes and their boyfriends in rags with trust funds in the bank. And you know what would happen? All their questions would stay spinning in my head: How could I let maids make my bed? How could I let my novio push me around? How could I put fake eyelashes on top of my real ones?
The big question that kept spinning inside me long after the other ones were laid to rest was this one: how could I live in a country where everyone wasn’t guaranteed life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness?
It was always Yo popping that question. She never put it to me directly. She did her arguing with the men, the uncles and boy cousins, who were the ones responsible, she said. Personally, I think she just liked men, liked hanging around them, pitting her mouth against theirs. But she said she was raising their consciousness, and the aunts let her get away with it. Those crazy gringa cousins could do what the rest of us would have been put away in a convent for doing. Not only that, those old tías approved of Yo’s mission. I think they thought Yo was working on the men’s consciences, just as they themselves were always on a campaign to get their sons and husbands to be more religious.
Yo would be hammering away about some book she’d read about the third world. “What do you mean, third world?” my brother Mundín would argue back. “Third world to whom?” I’d keep my mouth shut, sitting in the wicker chairs with the rest of the women, talking about, yes, our hair and our nails. But sometimes I’d turn and watch, and her eyes would wander over to me, and quick, she’d look away.
She felt guilty all right. She knew if it hadn’t been for her, I wouldn’t be trapped in this world. I’d be finishing my college. I’d be having me some first-world fun. Over the years she knew that if it hadn’t been for what she’d done, I would be living a different life. And that’s why she never said a thing to me about the state of my soul. She knew that if I was a hair-and-nails cousin, it was she who had made me one.
It all began when I was sixteen, and my parents decided to send me to the States to school. The García girls had already been gone five years, but we had stayed behind, and things had gotten really bad on the island. We were having one revolution after another as if we couldn’t kick the habit of murdering each other even after our dictator was gone. Anyhow, for a couple of years, schools were all but shut down. I remember a lot of nights sleeping under the bed on account of stray bullets shattering the windows. Our pantry was stocked up with water and candles and food. It would have been a pretty claustrophobic life in that family compound, especially with the García girls being gone, except that all the people with money had built their houses pretty close together in the capital. We young people just cut across each other’s yards as if there were no war going on and visited with each other.
So that now when I read about those dark and bloody years in history books, they don’t seem the same years I lived through. I didn’t miss one birthday party, one quinceañera party, one saint’s-day party. Maybe, for lack of butter and enough chocolate, the cakes weren’t as rich, and the piñatas were kind of shabby—cardboard boxes with only nuts and pencils and satin hairbands made from some aunt’s old evening gown. But there was one thing there was no scarcity of, at least for me. I had plenty of boyfriends. And this, I believe, more than the revolutions and the lack of schooling and the fear for our lives, is why my parents decided to send me away to the States. They wanted to ensure that Lucinda María Victoria de la Torre was not going to go behind the palm trees and ruin her chances of a good marriage.
They shouldn’t have worried, or really, they should only have worried once I got to the States. Because, as you’ll remember, there was another revolution happening there that my parents didn’t know anything about. It was the sixties. Even at Miss Wood’s, the sleepy all-girl boarding school where the García girls and I were tucked away, we felt the rumbles of the sexual revolution going on. Those rumbles came down to our red-brick, wrought-iron-gated campus from the boys’ school up the hill.
I was Carla’s age, and growing up together on the island, we’d been best friends. But at Miss Wood’s I was put back a couple of grades on account of the missed years and ended up in the same grade as Yolanda. Which was a little hard on me. If I was sixteen going on twenty-three, Yo was fourteen and acting like a kid, a weird kid. And I had to be related to it.
What I mean is she got in with the artsy crowd at Miss Wood’s. I can’t remember all their names anymore, but there were four who formed the heavy-duty core. One was a large, overdeveloped girl—she looked like she was twenty-three—who had to be driven in to Boston to see a shrink once a week. It was she who put her hand through a window, to feel pain, to feel deeply alive, which she wrote a poem about for the literary magazine. Another one of them, Trini, dyed her hair blond in mockery of the blond, preppy in-crowd at Miss Wood’s. The third one, Cecilia Something, was one of those genius types, skinny with cokebottle glasses and a smart mouth. And then there was Yo, who in some ways was the oddball in the group. I mean, Yo was pretty and lively and most everyone liked her if you could get her away from Trini and Big Mama. But like I said, she was still acting like a kid, trying to get attention by making scenes out of the most ridiculous things.
For instance, we didn’t have uniforms or anything like that, but we had a dress code, skirt and blouse and tied shoes to class, and something called a tea dress to dinner every night. When I got to Miss Wood’s, all I had was a suitcase full of brightly colored skirts and lace blouses and satin dresses that were totally out of place. So Carla and I went downtown during one of our supervised Saturday afternoon outings, and we each bought ourselves a couple of nice Villager outfits at the local shop that we interchanged and shared with each other. Maybe we did look like two Hispanic preppies as Yo liked to tease us, but so what? She and her friends looked like they’d just stepped out of a funeral parlor.
The headmistress called them in and told them they had to stop dressing all in black. She ordered them to put on light pastels and plaids and tweeds like the rest of us were wearing. But they went around with black armbands in protest, their skirts hiked up above the knees. I mean it was embarrassing when the in-girls in our class, the Sarahs and the Betsys and Carolines, would turn to me, their eyes wide, and ask, “Are you really related to Yolanda García?!”
I probably don’t need to tell you that she and her friends ran the literary magazine, which was mostly an anthology of their stuff with a few of us roped into submitting something by our English teacher. The cover usually featured a sketch of someone walking in a graveyard with a bare branch swaying in the breeze and some poor butterfly hovering above a tombstone. The name on the stone was fuzzed up, but the dates were clearly those of a suicide, someone our age who had died too young. “Probably stuck his hand through a window to feel more deeply alive,” Heather, my roommate, suggested. She liked to read the poems out loud.
“‘And take your warm heart in my wormy arms’?!” Heather tossed the magazine up in the air as if it were contaminated. “Truth is, Lucy-pooh, I can’t believe you’re related to old Yo-gore here.” Heather had a thing about nicknames from Winnie the Pooh. She herself was Heffalump.
We had to keep journals in English class. Everyone else on that faculty seemed like they had been let out of an old-age home to teach for the year, but the English teacher had just graduated from college with a degree in creativity. She made Carla’s class write essays from the point of view of an inanimate object. (Carla did a bra.) Another class had to hug a tree and then write about what it felt like. I suppose my class got off easy just having to keep journals.
Well, I wasn’t going to let little Yo García dampen my happiness. Sure, I missed my family and friends, and many nights I woke up panicked that something horrible had happened on the island. I also didn’t especially like being in a strict all-girls school, forced to take American History and listen to Battleaxe Ballard lecture about the USA lending a helping hand to the primitive countries of Latin America. But one thing kept my spirits up: there was a boys school up the hill, and I had discovered that my talent with the opposite sex translated across cultures.
Don’t get me wrong, I wasn’t a flirt. Yo was more of a flirt than I was if it came right down to it, riding the surface of a boy, splashing water in his face, bailing out if he came close. But I dove down to that cool place at the bottom where I could feel the strong currents coming through their tweed jackets and wool pants, and I waited, days, weeks if need be, and they always came round. My first three years at Miss Wood’s, there wasn’t a cool guy up at Oakwood that hadn’t come down from his high hill to call on me, his long nervous hands stuffed in his pockets, his pale face flushed as he talked on and on about his family vacation to Barbados or Bermuda, which I understood was his hazy-geographical way of relating to my heritage. I’d listen for as long as it took for him to feel interesting. And then I’d give him one of my looks, and say, well, next time you’re in the neighborhood, you better drop in and visit me! In nine cases out of ten the boy was smitten.
But it was the one case I’d end up being interested in. Maybe it was the old thing my mami always said about girls playing hard to get. I liked a man who didn’t instantly come to feed out of my hand. Anyhow, during my senior year at Miss Wood’s, a guy I’d had my eye on for a while came calling: James Roland Monroe. Everyone called him Roe, and he was the one I fell for. The problem was, so did my cousin Yo.
Roe really was more of a Yo-type guy than my usual blond blushers with all those lacrosse badges back in their rooms. Also a senior, he was tall and slender with blue-black hair just grazing the regulation length at the bottom of the earlobes. Like Yo at Miss Wood’s, Roe was part of the artsy crowd up at Oakwood, the editor of their literary magazine, and the drummer of their rock-and-roll band, the Beatitudes. He wore the usual preppy clothes but with a difference. He’d be dressed in his navy blue Oakwood blazer and gray wool pants but if you gazed down the length of his long pantlegs, you’d see he was barefoot. He hung his tie over one shoulder as a protest at having to wear one. And always there’d be a copy of Hesse or Kahlil Gibran or D. H. Lawrence in his jacket pocket to show off, I suppose, that he had a deep soul.
But you know, in his case, it wasn’t a scam: the guy was deep and in demand—a guy who could fill up your whole life if you let him. That first Sunday he came calling on me, I sensed the jealous faces lined up at the windows of the dorms that ringed the circle where we walked round and round with our callers. (That’s what Sunday calling hours amounted to.) Up there, Yo must have been looking down on us, thinking it wasn’t fair. Not that I saw her. I had made the mistake of looking right into Roe’s soft gray eyes, and an hour later when he left, I still hadn’t come up for air.
Why he came calling on me, I don’t know. The current revolution had ended, and we were finally having elections back home. My father was running for president—one of his many times, as it turned out. Anyhow, I became a minor celebrity at Miss Wood’s, a would-be president’s daughter. Don’t think Battleaxe didn’t give a grand lecture on the difference between democracies and wannabe democracies. But I don’t believe it was my VIP status that lured Roe to take an interest in me. It was the poem I’d written for one of her crazy assignments that my English teacher submitted to the combined autumn issue of the Oakwood and Miss Wood’s literary magazines. Actually the poem had turned out pretty well, if I do say so myself, one of those données, as she said the French called them, a gift from the gods. In my case, it had to have been a gift all right. I guess the gods got me confused with another dark-haired Latin American kid, my poet cousin. We were supposed to look a little alike.
I’m sure Yo was jealous when my donnée won the literary contest. It was as if I’d trespassed into her creative ken by making a big splash with my pen. What was that poem called? “Immigrant’s Love Song,” something like that. I still remember the first and last stanzas.
When I left home I was lost
as if the sea had no land,
no place to let loose its waves,
no dryness in which to run.
But now beside you at night
I discover a new continent,
in your hands I find it mapped,
in your breath I hear my anthem.
I actually thought my poetry debut would ruin my reputation up at Oakwood, turn me into one of those artsy fartsy freaks. But I got even more callers after the poem was published. Heather guessed it was that last stanza with the intimation that I’d gone all the way. She kept reading it over in a sexy Marilyn Monroe voice.
“So?” she finally came right out and asked me.
“So what?” I asked.
“Lucy-pooh!” she cried in exasperation. “So did you go all the way with some guy?”
“My lips are sealed,” I said. A popular claim at Miss Wood’s those days.
My confession would have been pretty disappointing. Of course I was a virgin. The whole point of sending me to Miss Wood’s was to keep me pure for some Dominican macho, who had probably been doing it with the maid since he was twelve. In virgin terms, my parents had been successful.
But not in other ways. I’d gotten ideas in school. Winning that contest was only one thing among others that had convinced me I had a brain. I’d even managed a B+ from Battleaxe, who now was buttering me up. Maybe she thought if the D.R. became a democracy she could claim to have been an influence through the president’s daughter. During our monthly conference, the headmistress kept encouraging me to apply to college. But what could I do? Unlike the Garcías’ mother and father, who had changed their minds living in this country, my parents still didn’t think girls should go to college. I was scheduled to go back to the island after graduation in June.
Then my father, who had been in D.C. talking to some senators about supporting his candidacy, came up for his first parents’ weekend ever. The headmistress got him in a corner and said something like the daughter of a democratic president should be setting a good example. My father agreed, and what’s more, he went back and convinced my mother that it would be the best thing for me: two years at a junior college, max. I said, sure, even though I had set my sights on the whole shebang: four years of college, a couple of years working in New York City, and then marriage. The face of that husband had been a hazy dream until Roe came calling.
But Yo stepped up to claim she had first dibs. After all, she and Roe had gone to the junior dance together. (“As friends,” Roe explained.) She and Roe had spent a lot of Saturday and Sunday calling hours talking together. (“About literary magazine stuff,” he assured me.) And Yo had solid evidence to back up her claim. One January night of our senior year, she came to my room to show me a packet of letters.
I read most of those letters through, and I could feel the blood draining from my fa
ce. She was right, they were love letters, full of poems that were e. e. cummings clones, not unlike the ones Roe was now sending me. But you know, instead of being mad at Roe, I was mad at my cousin for destroying my peace of mind. “Why are you showing me these?” I asked, tossing the packet back into her lap. She was sitting at the foot of my bed, and I was at the other end. Heather had slipped out of the room to give us a little privacy, but not before rolling her eyes to the ceiling as if to say, you poor thing.
“What do you mean, why am I showing you these?” Yo’s eyes were full of tears she was blinking back. She had grown prettier this past year, I don’t know, like she cared about the way she looked. Maybe it was Roe who had inspired her.
“I mean, you guys maybe had something going last year,” I told her, trying to keep my voice calm. That’s the way I was explaining it to myself. But I was looking at Yo now with more than a pang of jealousy, thinking, maybe she is prettier than me. “It’s over, Yo,” I told her as if it were for me to say so.
“Don’t kid yourself, Lucy girl.” She was shaking her head, smiling ironically. But there was a hurt look in her eyes. “This last letter was written two weeks ago,” she said, holding up the pale blue envelope. It was one of the ones at the bottom of the packet I hadn’t bothered to look at. After all, I’m not a glutton for punishment.
“Shall I read it to you?” she went on.
I looked her point-blank in the eye. “No,” I said. “I’m not interested. Not in the least.” Of course, I was dying of curiosity but I wouldn’t let on. Plus, I knew my cousin Yo. If she had a point, she was not going to leave it alone. She’d read me that letter if she had to tie me up to listen to it.
And read it she did, sobbing, as my face got stonier, and my heart shattered like those windows in my house during our revolutions. In his last letter, Roe seemed to be answering some desperate note Yo had written him. (Of course, she made no mention of that.) “What we have is forever,” he wrote. “But our love is platonic”—a word I was glad I’d learned from my SAT list. “You are still my inspiration. You are still my muse.”
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