It made me wonder what the hell I was?
“Get out of here,” I said to her when she was done. Maybe it was the gleam in her eye that made me lose control like she was gloating over how she was right. “Get out of here!” This time it was a scream. Heather poked her head in the room. “You guys all right?”
Yo looked scared. “Come on, Lucinda,” she said. “We’re cousins. We’re not going to let Roe come between us.”
“He has come between us,” I said, hot tears in my eyes.
“Well, I’m willing to give him up,” she said, her jaw all set, “if you are.”
I burst out laughing. “Sorry, charlie, I’m not going to cut any deals. Let Roe decide who he wants.”
She gathered her packet together and left the room with overdone dignity, brushing past Heather still standing in the doorway. As she rounded the corner, I couldn’t help calling out, “May the best man win!”
Then I heard her voice calling back down the hall, “May the best woman win!”
The very next weekend was winter carnival, and I managed to get on Roe’s team for building a huge Puff the magic dragon for the snow sculpture contest. When we were done with our part on Puff’s tail, we slipped away into the woods behind the dorms, and I let him have it.
“Come on, Lucinda,” he kept saying.
“You come on,” I said to him. Tears I had tried to keep back were coursing down my cheeks. He was kissing them away, and damn it, I was letting him.
“You got to understand,” he pleaded, “I really thought you wouldn’t talk to me if I blew your cousin off.”
You know what? It sounded plausible to me. Hadn’t I heard Battleaxe talk about those big, mafiosa Latin American families that impeded the growth of democracies. I could see where Roe might think I’d stand by my blood rather than him. “Well, you better talk to her if you want to keep seeing me.”
“Sure, sure,” he said, looking down at me. Those eyes, those soft gray eyes . . . they got me every time.
“Ay, Roe, I want to be your muse, I want to be your inspiration.”
“You are my muse,” he said, and bowing his head so that our foreheads touched, he whispered some lines that sounded very like e.e. cummings:
“and now you are and i am now and we’re
a mystery which will never happen again.”
“So will you talk to her?” I asked before I let him kiss me again.
“Sure I will, Yolinda,” he said. I swear I heard “Yolinda.”
He must have talked to her because Yo didn’t talk to me for almost three months, which must have been hard on her with that big mouth. Finally, we had a tearful reunion at the mailboxes on the day we found out we had both been accepted at Commodore. Though it wasn’t a junior college, Yo’s mother, Tía Laura, had talked my parents into letting me apply where she could keep an eye on me along with her daughter.
“We’ll be together again,” Yo said, wiping her eyes. When she gave me a hug, I gave her a few little taps on the back like I was burping a baby.
I should have been the more generous one, I know. After all, I was the one who had ended up with Roe. He had gotten into a college two hours from Commodore, and I was ecstatic. We’d be able to continue our romance into college and on into the rest of our lives. But you see, though I had won Roe, I had lost my peace of mind. We’d be sitting in the parlor and I’d catch Roe’s eye straying over to where Yo was writing in her journal, and I’d think, it’s Yo he wants. We’d pass by Yo walking around the circle, and Roe would say, “How’s it going, Yo?” and I thought I could hear his blood quickening when she blushed a little and said, “So-so.”
That spring there were poems by Roe in his literary magazine I hadn’t seen. They were all about a love “now lost to touch but heavy in my heart.” I grilled him about who that lost love was. “It’s just a literary convention, Lucinda,” he assured me. “Keats, Wordsworth, Yeats, everyone writes about lost love.”
“Doesn’t anyone write about happy love?” I asked. “Can’t you start a tradition?”
“I need more experience,” he said, squeezing my hand
We had talked about it, going all the way. It turned out that Roe, for all his good looks, was a virgin just like me. But at eighteen, Roe was starting to feel like there was something wrong with him because he hadn’t had sex. Not that he wanted something crass and cheap, one of the townie girls who snuck into mixers with their teased hair and flashy necklines. He wanted the word made flesh, the alpha and omega meeting in an infinity of love without end. He could go on and on until I really didn’t understand what he was talking about. One thing made sense to me: the first woman a man had, Roe said, would stay in his heart for the rest of his life.
But like Yo, I had been raised Catholic. Our eternal souls, if not our good marriages, hung in the balance if we gave up our virgin flower without the sanctity of holy matrimony. But looking into Roe’s eyes, I could feel my insides going soft, and I worried that Lucinda María was going to go with her body.
Am I still in Roe’s heart, I wonder? I tried to track him down one time, between marriages. I got as far as calling the alumni office and finding out that James Roland Monroe III (I hadn’t remembered a number) was working in a big law firm in Washington, D.C., that he’d married Courtney Hall-Monroe, had three kids, Trevor, Courtney, and James Roland IV. I wondered if every time Roe made love to Courtney, he heard the lapping of the Caribbean sea, the faint rustling of palm trees? I decided not to try to find out. What if I called him up and he said, “Lucinda who?” Or worse, “Oh yes, Lucinda from Barbados, wasn’t it?”
The truth is that for a long time it was Roe who was in my heart. The many men I fell in love with could all have been his double. The black shank of hair, the fatal look, the same charm I couldn’t resist. Problem was, neither could other women. If my father made a career of running for president, I made one out of marrying the wrong men. But never again did I have to compete with my cousin, Yo. She didn’t seem to find the same kind of man attractive anymore. Maybe because of the fiasco she brought about that ended things between me and Roe.
Remember those English class journals? All that spring of her broken heart, old Yo was writing down her collected grievances, blow by blow. Me and Roe French-kissing. Me and Roe going steady. Me and Roe applying to nearby colleges. Me and Roe planning to elope and not tell our families.
I’m just making this up. I don’t really know what Yo told in her journal, but it was enough to ruin my chances of going on to college or ever seeing Roe again.
What happened was that Tía Laura, Yo’s mother, came across the journal—she called it a diary—in Yo’s room and read it cover to cover. They’re all snoopers in our family. My parents opened every piece of mail from a boy. I wasn’t allowed to talk to guys unless an adult was in the room. But no one had remembered to tell them there was a boys school up the hill from Miss Wood’s. No one had described calling hours. No one had mentioned winter carnival, spring break, homecoming.
No one, that is, until Yo.
That summer Tía Laura appeared in the compound, supposedly bringing the García girls down for their annual visit. Suddenly, my mother had her eye on me all the time. My father barely spoke to me. I tiptoed around, on my best behavior, spending the evenings at home while the García girls went out on the town with Mundín, having a grand old time in their summer-vacation homeland.
Then the day came round when I was supposed to leave with them for freshman orientation. I’ll never forget that morning in my parents’ room, my father pacing back and forth, my mother crying, a rosary in her hands. They wanted me at home at their side, they informed me. Tía Laura had discovered a filthy diary. They knew that my cousin Yo had a big imagination. They knew that it was all invention, but still, just the fact that such stuff could be in their niece’s head meant the States was no place to send their daughter. There was to be no further discussion. If I wanted an education, I could go to the local college.
I cr
ied and pleaded and even threatened to kill myself. I sounded just like one of those literary magazine poems back at Miss Wood’s. I wrote Roe, shamelessly begging him to come rescue me. But I heard nothing back for months. Finally I got a note via Carla on that same pale blue stationary. He had met someone over the summer. And though I still love you, Lucinda—I tore that letter up into as many pieces as he had broken my heart. I didn’t want to hear about how what we had was forever. And I certainly didn’t want to come across the word platonic.
As for Yo, we had it out when she came the following summer. She was full of apologies. I had to believe her that she hadn’t left that journal out on purpose. I had to believe her that she had wanted me to come to Commodore. That she didn’t hold a grudge about Roe. She must have asked me about a hundred times that summer was I happy. Did I forgive her? I told her I forgave her, sure. But I never answered her question about being happy. To tell the truth, at that point I was miserable. I had been ready to spread my wings and fly, and it was sort of like being an evolution mutation, all set to be a bird only to find out I was going to have to be an earth creature.
Don’t get me wrong, I turned out to be a happy woman after all. I’ve got five beautiful kids, the oldest the age Yo and I were when Roe came into our lives. I’ve got a string of boutiques selling my designs faster than my factories can make them. Wife, mother, career girl—I’ve managed them all—and that’s not easy in our third world country. Meanwhile the García girls struggle with their either-or’s in the land of milk and money.
Especially Yo. And maybe because of her own struggles, she still feels guilty about me. Every time she comes down here and we all gather together, I catch her eye straying over to me, wanting answers.
Those times, you know what I do? I turn to her and I flash her one of my hair-and-nails smiles, a smile I know she does not trust. And I see her wincing as if it still hurts her not to know after twenty years whether it was the right thing for me to end up with the life I’m living. Whether it’s all her fault the hard times I’ve had along the way, the bad marriages, the problems with my parents, my kids without a live-in father. And looking at her, in her late thirties knocking around the world without a husband, house, or children, I think, you are the haunted one who ended up living your life mostly on paper.
The maid’s daughter
report
I was eight years old when my mother left me in the campo with my grandmother to go off to the United States to work as the maid for the García family. My mother had been working for the de la Torre family most of her life which is how she finally landed this job with the Garcías. Mrs. García was born a de la Torre and knew all about my mother’s background, so when she and her husband decided to stay living in New York after our dictator was killed, she asked my mother if she wouldn’t like to come help her with the hard life of being a housewife in the United States.
Mamá jumped at the chance. For years, she had been saying that she wanted to go to Nueva York. Whenever any of the de la Torres went off for an extended stay, my mother made sure she helped pack their bags. She would sprinkle in a special powder made of her ground fingernails and bits of her hair and some other elementos the santera had charged her twenty pesos to prepare. It worked. Over the years, all those little bits and pieces of my mother collected in New York and set up a force of attraction that finally drew the rest of her to the magic city.
Off she went full of promises about how our lives were finally going to change for the better. I believed her, even though, at first, my life changed for the worse. I had been living in the capital in the boarding school she had put me in so I could be near her. It was a nice enough place with toilets and electricity and uniforms and dark-skinned girls, many of whom had light eyes and good hair on account of they were the illegitimate daughters of maids and the young or old dons of important families. There was a whole hierarchy based on whether or not your father had “recognized” you: whether he had admitted that he indeed was your father and had given you his family name. I was pretty low on the totem pole as I was there only because the de la Torre family had talked the nuns into taking me in so I could be near one of their favorite maids, my mother. Or so I thought, back then.
Anyhow, after Mamá went to the States, I was sent way out to the countryside to be with my old grandmother, who ate with her hands and brushed her teeth by chewing on a piece of sugarcane. We slept in a palm-wood hut, no electricity, no toilet, no nothing. Every month we went down to the capital to the de la Torres to collect the money my mother had sent for us. Along with the crisp green bills came letters I read out loud to my grandmother as she didn’t know how to make sense of those chicken scratches. Mamá’s letters were full of fairytale news about buildings that touched the clouds and air as cold as the inside of the deep freeze at the colmado. There were also pictures of the four García girls, all a little older than me by one, three, four, and five years, all very pretty, with their arms around each other, their heads tilted this way and that in a friendly sisterliness that made me feel sad that I didn’t have a sister, too. On the back of these pictures, they signed their names, and once, the one called Yo added a little note, Dear dear Sarita, we love your querida mamá and we thank you so much for lending her to us.
Well, at least they’re grateful, I thought.
Five years Mamá worked for them, saving up money, coming to visit us only twice, the second time putting me back in the boarding school because she said I was becoming a jíbara like one of those Haitian children who’d never worn shoes. Well, I’d already been three and a half years with the old woman, and I’d grown attached to her, and now it was hard to go back to sleeping on a mattress, eating with utensils, and being a young lady full of pretensions. But how could I complain? My mother was working so hard to give me all the opportunities she never had. I couldn’t let her down by showing a preference for the old life she had left behind.
Five years after she left, the incredible news came. Mamá had asked Mrs. García if she could bring me to the States, and Mrs. García had agreed! Ever since I had become a young señorita, Mamá was sick to death leaving me without supervision in a country of wolves. “I know what I’m talking about,” she wrote in one of her letters. Later my mother would tell me the truth she had kept from me back in the old country. She was the illegitimate daughter of my country abuela and the wealthy rancher who said he owned the land my grandmother had been squatting on. As for my own father, my mother refused to name him.
The de la Torre family put me on the plane in Santo Domingo, and when I landed at Kennedy airport, there they were, all lined up and leaning over the railing, Mamá, Mrs. García, and the four García sisters. The minute I came through the door, a scared, skinny girl of thirteen, still holding the Barbie they had sent me for Christmas, with my two braids pinned to the top of my head and my pink sweater clashing with my new plaid dress (what did my old grandmother know of matching?), those girls pounced on me.
“Ay, Sarita, our little sister, Sarita!” They kept hugging me as if they’d known me all their lives. I looked over their shoulders at Mamá standing there, smiling proudly, and waiting for her turn. When the girls were finished, I reached for my mother’s hand, kissed it, and asked her blessing. I did the same to Mrs. García, who seemed pretty impressed, and later lectured the girls on the way home about how they should learn from little Sarita how to be well-behaved. There was enough rolling of the eyes in the back seat that the car should have rocked down the highway to their house in the Bronx.
From the first, those girls treated me like a combination of favorite doll, baby sister, and goodwill project. They gave me clothes they had outgrown and jewelry they had gotten that I wasn’t supposed to wear in front of their mother. And all of them spent special time teaching me things. Carla often asked me how I felt about this and that (she was practicing to be a psychologist), and then she explained to me how I really felt. It was fun—like reading my horoscope in a magazine or hearing Abuela predict
what was going to happen to me from the stains in my coffee cup. Yo and Sandi taught me how to make myself up so I looked like exciting things were going to happen to me. Afterwards we had to scrub my face because we knew that Mamá would disapprove. Fifi was more like a playmate since we were almost the same age. Sometimes she would get jealous at the attention I was getting, and Mamá would take me down to the basement where the two of us lived.
“One false step and we will be sent back.”
“With your permission, Mamá,” I began, “I didn’t do anything—” Down came that hand in a slap across my face. Tears brimmed in my eyes, but I could not cry. Mamá had already instructed me on how we were not to make any commotion in this house.
“Don’t you give yourself airs,” she hissed at me, her voice just above a whisper. “Don’t you think you can start disagreeing with me like those García girls with their mother!” She jerked her head up to indicate their upstairs status. Soon that gesture became a shorthand between us. Whenever she wanted to hush me or to send me packing from a room or bond the two of us in a moment of collusion when the girls were around, she’d jerk her head that way. Those García girls! Don’t ever think you are one of them.
But they did treat me like one of them. Every once in a while, they’d talk Mamá into letting me go out with them. They had to tell her step by step what they were going to do—even if they then detoured drastically from their plan. Mostly, they said they were taking me to the library or a museum or a movie that was on the list Catholic girls could watch. Then instead of heading for the Metropolitan or the Sacred Heart auditorium, we went down to Washington Square in the Village and watched American kids get high. Sometimes one or the other sister would get picked up, and of course, we’d all go along. One time we ended up in a loft with two long-haired guys listening to loud music that sounded exactly like someone had put forks and spoons in a blender and turned it on high. Those guys started in that they didn’t believe we were really all sisters—which is what the García girls had told them. For one thing, Sandi was fair and blond, Fifi was tall like an American girl, Carla and Yo were light olive, and I was café con leche with long, black hair and hazel eyes—so we looked like a ragbag family, all right.
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