by Edie Meidav
But when Lili’s fifteenth birthday started coming up, she and her sister started hinting about it during my fourteenth just like their party would go beyond even Sheryl Lansing’s pool party at the end of the year in sixth grade. Like this would be the party to end all of them. I couldn’t help being insulted because for my party I had worked hard, saved babysitting and carwash money and done other stuff I don’t want to talk about and in the end no boys came to my fourteenth, not even Nolan or Henry or even Paxton, it was just Lili and Ros and our pack of girls looking at some stale dip, with crucial people like Sheryl not even bothering to explain why they didn’t show up when I made a special point of inviting them.
So I was a little mad at the people who did show up, which doesn’t make sense, I know, and then at my party the sisters started talking about Lili’s fifteenth in front of me in our pack of girls like her birthday would be such a big deal? Everyone might have guessed I’d be big-time disappointed. I ended up picking the scabs on my knees on the back porch finally with only Ella keeping me company before her mom came and got her too in the middle of us gossiping about how Lili’s mother worked cleaning people’s houses.
I’d never heard Lucia say any English words other than how are you. Far as I knew she didn’t work in the houses of anyone I knew personally. But before Lili’s big fifteenth she was apparently going to take time off to start gluing little white bows onto pins, stuff like that, and needed the sisters, so after my birthday, each day the two of them left school with a big air of mystery and importance and also never asked me to come help.
Two years earlier, probably at the peak of our friendship, there had been an even bigger party for Ros but they hadn’t invited too many people and anyway I’d been recovering, wearing a brace, one thing I don’t really like to remember, my mom’s work paying for the back operation which went bad, which meant any time I complained to my mom about anything, like about the twins being born, she’d say, yeah, and would you rather have your back still crooked?
Maybe it’s enough to say it took me a couple of years to feel comfortable going out in public, and that was partly why my fourteenth birthday should have been a bigger deal while meanwhile Lili started to act like her party was going to end time.
As the day came closer, the sisters let slip to our group of friends little stories, like how Lili’s mother Lucia had gone into debt, basically, selling off housecleaning services for the next year so they could pay for the party. That’s human slavery! Ella said. And the dad who anyway worked long hours was working overtime and according to Lili was never home anymore.
So I couldn’t help it, I started getting into the spirit of Lili’s party, and maybe it was me who started this story going around but easily it could have been any of us that at Lili’s party we were all going to go around in one of those big limousines a few of us had seen cruising around town, a long black submarine of a thing you could rent if you had enough money, and then Ros denied it, but the rumor had life and suddenly the girls could not have the party without a limousine.
For all the stories about my memory, one more thing my mom turns out to be wrong about, okay, maybe I partly started the chatter but when Lili heard it, my guess is that the sweet part of her, the part that could still sing lullabies to bunnies, didn’t want to let any of us down, especially not the person who’d been her first friend. Because of me, she’d learned a ton. So really you can say it was more the sisters’ fault since they were the first to start building up the party. When people came to our valley to get married, they always hired a limousine and the sisters started making it seem like the limo had always been a natural part of the plan.
The main thing is someone worked hard on Lili’s parents to convince them, and maybe it was Ros coming to her aid like she always did, but who knows?
At school we heard dribs. At first the parents weren’t even going to celebrate Lili because they had spent too much two years before on Ros, but that wouldn’t be fair, I guess, or they couldn’t bear Lili losing face or something was that important to their family.
So they were going to have the limo. And there was going to be a deejay, laser lights, fountains next to the cake. And Lili’s dress—she was looking everywhere for the dress. She didn’t want white, she wanted yellow and her hair curled. So what if I ended up renting a yellow dress and had curled hair too? Let me not get ahead of myself. Ella and I sometimes hung out with Lili and Ros to rehearse all the moments of the night, everything that might happen, and how can you blame us, our heads stuffed from the reality shows we liked, the shows about brides or whatever we watched on Ella’s new mohair sofa.
The bummer was I’d have to wear the back brace to the party because, that fall, I still wasn’t allowed to take it off. The brace, when everyone was going to be wearing the kind of thing we were all wearing around then? If you weren’t strapless, at least a dress with one half coming off the shoulder. Finally I figured out a way to have one strap, too, like the rest of them, from the place where we rented dresses in town, and my curled hair would hide at least one part.
I could say lots here about the warm-up to the actual event but maybe I just want to skip ahead to the way each of us guests, the eight of us American girls who ended up with the migrant boys, got a little movie left in our lockers afterward, one part of the plan Ella and Ros and Lili and I cooked up.
The woman who filmed it was someone whose house was cleaned every week by Lili’s mother. I hadn’t paid much attention to her when we were all standing outside waiting to get into the limo at first. So it’s too bad that in the movie, in the dark outside that veterans’ hall they’d rented and tried to make a little less rinky-tink with balloons and streamers, you hear me talking about Lili and her dress, saying her yellow dress copied mine. Then you see me on camera asking Carol, another friend of ours who now has five babies of her own, to fix my back brace, pulling it up and adjusting it under my dress, fixing it under my hair. All that is captured forever.
And then you see us getting into that dark limo, all of us laughing. Those serious Spanish-speaking boys from our school had greased their hair back for the night but gave up their seriousness in that limo where we all got royally drunk on Jim Beam. We even ended up getting the driver, hired by the company, lost, not that he drank, just that we decided since we had wheels he should show us the gardens near the water that used to belong to the aristocrats who had summer houses plus the strip where old planes used to take off, the hulk of the chocolate factory, the river by the campus where all those badly dressed college students lived, everything else emptied and burnt down.
From inside the limo, our town looked different. We wanted to sniff it the way a bunny let out of the cage touches its nose to everything as if its nose is so clean and nice when really it was poking around in wet newspaper a second earlier. That night made us part of everything. Whatever happened later, I will never forget how every moment was a joke getting us toward something higher. Like I had predicted everything, how good it could be to be connected to Lili back when I got sent outside way back in third grade outside Miss Connor’s class, back when I’d been sitting outside kicking my heels or playing with the CURB YOURSELF sign.
In the limo, like they had planned it, Lili looked like a yellow sun while Ros was beautiful like the moon with her dark-shadowed eyes and purple gown. The sisters and their mom had spent all those weeks making the tiny white flower brooches we were all wearing, and I felt that even with all our differences, who cared, like the song at the time said, the world was ours, we all had big open choices ahead.
At one point, I nudged Lili and was like: See, don’t be mad about the limo, it was a good idea, right?
And whatever she might have thought, I knew she forgave me right then, her eyelashes so long and giving me the same tender face she showed the bunny. It’s fine, she said.
You’re having a good time, right?
I am, she said, though something in her eyes could have swallowed me.
Later
that night Ros stood up and made a speech to her sister and Henry who was the only real nerdazoid invited tried to translate for me.
In English, Ros said to her sister: It’s so great to have this party together and celebrate with our friends.
In Spanish, though, according to Henry, she said: We’ve been through a lot, the lows and highs, sister, things have been tough and it’s not always easy for you or me, but trust me, it will get better soon.
She ended with something else in English, thanking the guests and all that.
After Ros’s speech, her dad had a special dance with Lili, tugging her too close. I’d have been creeped out dancing with my dad in front of everyone like that, his hand resting on her waist while she did that little one-two swishing hip thing they always did. I was standing next to his old parents who had come all the way from their country. Lili’s mother had cleaned enough houses to pay for their plane tickets, and I liked the grandfather, a tough old cowboy tearing up, waving away the photographer who got on him like a vulture before she took photos of the grandmother who was more of a backwoods peasant, acting as if she didn’t know what century she had crawled into, just wearing one of those long gray trailer skirts and wringing her hands in front of her.
There was a lot of announcing in English and Spanish by the deejays, important moments, all that echo and boom I knew from the one bad Spanish radio station they had on in their trailer. Why do they all love echo so much? That’s the least of my questions. Her parents presented her with a ring and then came the moment when Lili’s little brother came to scatter rose petals with the mother from a basket. There was also the dance where a few boys from our school did some awkward steps with Ros, Lili, and two other girls from our pack. I wasn’t mad I wasn’t chosen, or maybe I was, but I figured it might have had something to do with the brace.
To distract myself I watched one woman dancing near the kitchen, by the cake with its fountains, someone shimmying more freely than any other woman in the place. If anyone spoke to her, she never stopped and just said: I love to dance! She kept adjusting her zebra strapless dress. I didn’t get why she had no shame and everyone else was so much stiffer. Most other women seemed to have come down from the mountains like Lili’s mother, mostly ignoring the single men who worked like Lili’s father on some farm but who on that night sat under their cowboy hats at long tables with only their beer bottles for company. Behind everyone hung a big flag commemorating 9/11 which a lot of people used as backdrop for photos before they lined up for the food, foil trays of rice and beans, chicken, pork, and some kind of wilted iceberg lettuce with heavy ranch. I remember thinking: Is this what they serve at a fancy party? None of it went with Lili’s dress, the cake fountain, any of it.
One of the boys told me we’d taken too long in the limo. The food wasn’t supposed to come before Lili returned and there’d been a long period when we were getting the driver lost that everyone just sat at long tables under the streamers, the cowboy-hat men and their bottles waiting for us. Because the party started so late, the parents would have to pay everyone overtime.
Well, once the real party started, I wasn’t the only one who had a good time. The lights went down, the lasers started flipping out, we all danced but the truth is I do remember feeling a little sick after the drink and bad food, plus my brace kept sticking out of my dress, at least as I saw it in the photos later. The week after I didn’t care about any of that, more about what happened when someone started the rumor.
Girls at school whispered I had done it. Whatever made Lili push her mom so much to have such a big event: it all came from me. Not just the limo. The cake and dress, the whole bit. That at first the family wasn’t even going to celebrate.
Me? I said, flipping my hair back. Why would Lili make me the one to decide? Hadn’t she started talking to me about it? Hadn’t she been so nice in the limo? Wasn’t I one of the chosen who got to ride? But I was secretly flattered, even if that began a whole period when Lili and I didn’t even talk to each other. Everything I know about her or what happened later came to me through others. Here’s what I heard:
That after the dad took his old parents back to the airport, he got sad, thinking it was the last time he’d ever see them: he didn’t have any documents. Because the laws changed after 9/11, he couldn’t go back and see them, even though he had a kind of driver’s license, and was the only one in the family who could drive the mom to cleaning jobs. Of all of them, the only legal one was baby Harold who’d just been born in the trailer. You see how none of this is my fault. So the dad was sad and then went down a bad spiral. He started getting mad about the girls going out. Two weeks after he’d danced with Lili, the girls went without permission to town for ice cream at Udder Heaven and, suspecting something, the dad came looking and caught them hanging out under the big wooden statue of the cow where he found them talking to boys, going against his rules and curfew and all. Supposedly you could smell the liquor. According to one of the friends, he was drunk later that night when he beat Ros with a paddle. I don’t know if it was the first time or if it explains the way Ros started acting so sullen at school. As a junior she could have been practically a queen but I saw her like a dead puppet rehearsing with the others for the year’s final show.
When the school counselor got suspicious and Ros still wouldn’t talk, they called in Lili to explain. Lili was the one who got okay grades but Ros had always been kind of decent and now she wasn’t. Alone with the counselor, Lili must have ratted her sister out enough for the court to order that the dad couldn’t get five hundred feet close to his own trailer. He could only see his own kids if there was someone court-approved with him. Then a mean lady lawyer took the mom’s case and started saying well, you could always divorce? Both the father and mother had to take time off from work to show up all round-eyed in court, this was the part I heard from Ella who had enough Spanish that she agreed to come once as a helper or witness for Lili in court. The girls had to sit alone together while the lawyers talked about their family and later they translated for their mom. They all had crushes on the lawyer for Lili and Ros because he was this really nice kind bearded guy, so different from the lawyer for the mother born Puerto Rican but who spoke bad Spanish and was always screaming at the mom, saying: I am doing this in your best interests!
Then their mother would just stare back, frozen. Family court was crazy, according to Ella. The girls’ lawyer told them that any lawyer that manages to stay on has to have some kind of personality disorder because the place was the cesspool of the system, where everything broken came to stay. That’s what it sounded like. Nothing ever happened. The mom and dad kept coming back and their case kept being delayed. Through it all Lili’s mom stayed loyal to the dad, even when the court slapped him with two drunk-driving tickets. Two! I only have one so I know what this means, and lost my chance to even seal my record.
Here’s the thing. Even before her party was when I started drinking a little, just stealing sips on the side whenever I could, whenever something was near and no one noticed. And so I was interested in the details they slapped on the dad, the rehab classes and anti-alcohol services he was supposed to get if he wanted to see his own kids. After the party was when I started thinking about my own dad again. Because usually I could just shelve thoughts of him away, but sometimes I liked to think of him like I did when I was a kid, seeing him as if he were a TV dad with a really intense side-part, a pilot flying overhead, always secretly keeping tabs on me but having sworn a vow he couldn’t let anyone know.
After the last drunk ticket, Lili’s dad fled before his court date. I tried hearing what I could, not because I was to blame, just wanting to get how everyone in the family could actually lie in court, saying they had no contact when they still talked every day on the phone and knew he was back in their country. The mom kept losing cleaning jobs because she couldn’t understand the stuff of America. I’d heard from Lili that she grew up with a dirt-floor hut where they had a garden with their own bean
s and walked miles just to sell them in the market, just so they could buy other stuff, and plus that when it rained, her floor ran with mud. A girl named Hannah whose family had Lili’s mom come clean sometimes told me she was no one’s idea of a cleaner, that they let her keep coming because they liked her, but all the mom did was pile stuff on top of other stuff, sweeping everything into piles, mopping toward the corners, throwing stray coins inside the heirloom vases. Hannah said the mom could keep only about three loyal houses going which meant that even with government help they got because of the little brother who was not even a baby anymore, their family was barely scraping by.
During this whole period, I watched Lili from the corners of my eyes, not wanting her to know, because I knew people kept blaming me for all that was happening to their family. Not like I ever sat Lili down and said flat out that none of us are going to accept you if you don’t have this huge party. Ella told me Lili was looking so tired because it turned out the dad didn’t want anything to do with his own family, not just with the mom but with everyone, like he had given up on his American life, just left everyone to fend for themselves. Now the mom had no one to drive her around to houses she cleaned and had to take the loop bus, which was slow and came only two times a day. Plus she was so depressed, she had to find strength in her church. But the family couldn’t even stay in their trailer, that miserable place to start with, if the dad wasn’t working the farm. I mean, the Portarellas tried giving the mother a grace period, I knew because I sometimes babysat for one of the Portarella kids and overheard crucial details.