Make Your Home Among Strangers

by Jennine Capó Crucet

  —You’re happy about this?

  —Of course! Lizet, I graduated from school. So did Roly. This makes sense, this is what’s next for us.

  Leidy looked down at the test again, and I wanted one for myself: some test that would measure whether or not I was really headed for the same future. When she left for Roly’s house, I went to the library and found those lists made year after year by important people, the lists of the very top schools in the country. These schools, I saw, were next to impossible to get into, but like the plus sign on Leidy’s test, I wanted whatever result my actions brought—positive or negative—to indicate something irrefutable about me.

  Leidy correctly predicted Roly’s freak-out, but she didn’t predict him leaving her once she confessed, a few weeks later, that she’d stopped taking her birth control and had purposely not informed him of that decision. Our dad wanted to step in, maybe talk to Roly’s parents, but Leidy said she didn’t need his help: she was certain Roly would see his son growing inside her and forgive her, would go back on his decision to throw away the four years they’d been together—basically since freshman year! she told anyone who’d listen—and do the right thing, even if it was true that she’d lied to trap him. We all kept waiting for it, buoyed by her certainty, by the example of our own dad’s choices, our own family’s origins. I made a mistake of my own, thinking that the biggest difference between a college and a university was that a college (which I thought must be more like Miami Dade Community College than Florida International University) was easier to get into. So I sent off applications to that year’s top three colleges without anyone’s knowledge or help or blessing just to see if I could get in: just to know if I was meant for something other than what Leidy and my mom had done for themselves.

  A couple days after mailing them, I told Omar I’d applied on a whim to only one out-of-state school: getting rejected from one wouldn’t sound as bad as three come April.

  —I thought you didn’t want to leave Florida, he said.

  His hand reached around and hugged the back of his own neck, and I knew for him Florida was another word for Omar.

  —Leidy’s pregnant, I said.

  He made the requisite Whoas and Holy Shits, but those eventually led to I’m not totally surprised and, finally, At least you’ll make a cute maid of honor.

  I thought of how three phone calls and a few faxed pages of the tax return copies my dad had already given me (for verifying my reduced school lunch application) was all it took to get the fee waivers for those three applications, and for the first time, I wanted not just to get into one of those colleges but to go—like immediately. I wanted to be gone already. It was a relief to think maybe I’d given myself a chance, and with that came a new feeling: guilt.

  Omar elbowed me in the ribs and said, What? You know it’s true. He’s gotta marry her, probably should’ve proposed to her already.

  But he never did, and even when Leidy went into labor, he refused to show up, instead dropping by the hospital hours after (with a couple friends but no gift) to see Dante—just Dante—on his birthday: March 25, six days before the arrival of my Rawlings acceptance. I’d spent the intervening months driving Leidy to her doctor’s appointments, going with her to Babies R Us and La Canastilla Cubana, planning her a baby shower that Roly’s mom refused to attend but for which Blanca—Omar’s mom—made three kinds of flan; all this while barely missing class and staying on top of the clubs I’d joined as a freshman, back when I had time to waste. I didn’t know the rule about thick or thin envelopes—I wouldn’t get the two rejections for another week—so when I read Congratulations on the Rawlings letter, I thought the sleep deprivation from having Dante in the house was making me see things. But I read it again, right there with the driveway’s hot concrete burning my bare feet, and I started to organize my arguments as to why I should be allowed to go. I folded the letter back into the envelope and ran on my tiptoes to the house, already knowing none of my reasons would work: unlike with Dante, my parents hadn’t been warned this was coming. And unlike Leidy, I couldn’t even try for a little while to pretend this was an accident.

  The next morning, on the anniversary of Dante’s first full week around and with no more visits from Roly to hint that meeting his son had changed his mind about Leidy, I faked my mom’s signature on the deposit waiver the school had mailed along with my letter and returned with it the card saying I accepted my spot in the class of 2003. I eventually mustered the ovaries to show them the folder full of papers Rawlings had sent me with my financial aid package, using the official-looking forms to confuse them into thinking it was too late to fight me about it. Leidy didn’t really care; she’d miss the help but was relieved there’d be one less person around to see how completely wrong she’d been about her own plan and Roly. But my betrayal—that is the word my parents used over and over again for what I’d done—gave them permission to finally abandon their marriage, and my dad took my impending fall exit to mean he could do the same, but even sooner.

  6

  THE STREET IN FRONT OF OUR BUILDING buzzed all morning, the sidewalks overflowing with crowds that trampled each yard’s overgrown grass. From our apartment window, the rally below looked more like spectators camped out for a choice spot along a parade route than an actual rally. Some people had salsa or talk radio playing out of boom boxes. Some sat on coolers and handed out water and cans of soda whenever a new person they seemed to know walked up. Wisps of conversations reached our window from the street: such-and-such reporter had said something about Ariel going back by the end of the weekend, so clearly she was a communist. The people down there, on the street, all nodded their heads and said, Claro que sí. I leaned forward more, Leidy, Dante, and the TV behind me, my cheek touching the window screen, and looked up and over the blocks of houses and palm trees spreading far out like stripes parallel to the horizon. It was gorgeous outside—bright white sky, not so hot you could kill someone, not so humid, almost a breeze—the beginning of winter in Miami. I couldn’t believe I had to go back to the gloomy half-lit days of upstate New York, to snow turned to dirt-slush pushed into every corner for miles, to inescapable cold everywhere you turned. Before ever seeing snow, I thought that even if I couldn’t bear the cold that came with it, its novelty would carry me through at least four years, no problem. I’d actually been eager for it to come after the surprise of fall colors wore off, after maybe half the leaves on campus ended up pressed between the pages of my textbooks. Once those were gone, everything looked stark enough that I asked Jillian one night, while she studied on her bed and I sat at my desk highlighting pretty much every sentence in my chemistry textbook, when the snow would show up and cover it all.

  She pulled her headphones off and said, My brother told me that one year, they had snow here on Halloween. Three, four feet overnight. He said all the girls in slutty costumes couldn’t stand to put coats on over them, and like a dozen stupid bitches ended up in the hospital due to exposure.

  —Wait, you have a brother? I said, and she gasped and smacked her book with both her hands, then pointed with a He-llo? to a photo of her and a guy much taller than her, their arms wrapped around each other’s waists, her in a bikini top and shorts and him in a tuxedo. I’d assumed he was a boyfriend she only talked to when I wasn’t around, the way I did with Omar. I asked if he’d gone to Rawlings too, and she told me no, he went to another college—one I’d never heard of but that was just a few hours away by bus, and so he’d come to Rawlings to visit a high school friend a few years earlier. He was already a senior, she said.

  —I can’t believe you’ve never even seen snow in real life, she said.

  I looked out our window and tried to imagine a snow-friendly sexy Halloween costume. Sexy astronaut? Sexy female polar bear?

  —I can’t believe you didn’t know I had a brother, she said a few seconds later. That’s weird, I thought you knew that.

  A door slammed in the hallway and a male voice laughed.

 
I eventually said to my reflection in the window, It’s not that weird. You don’t know I have a baby nephew, do you? His name is – my sister named him Dante.

  I’d imagined this moment already—the moment where I’d explain Dante’s name to my roommate—back when Jillian was just an idea, just a name printed in a letter from the school. I’d planned to tell the theoretical Jillian that Leidy named Dante after the famous writer, a name she came across when she looked over my shoulder at something I happened to be reading (not for school, just for fun, I’d say). This was nowhere near the truth: Leidy said the name Dante was super original and that’s the only reason she gave anyone for picking it. At the sonogram appointment where we learned the baby’s sex—I’d skipped sixth period to drive her—the tech had swirled a finger over the screen and said to us, There’s the penis, and Leidy was relieved: she thought Roly would be more likely to forgive her if she gave him a son instead of a daughter. I was relieved, too, since by then I’d learned about history’s Dante, and I could tell people, when they asked, that she took the name from that.

  But I hadn’t anticipated utter silence as my roommate’s response when I planned this conversation in my head, hadn’t visualized the bags under my own eyes staring back at me in the dark window. I couldn’t bear to turn around and see Jillian’s open mouth, or maybe she was laughing so hard that she couldn’t make a sound. I waited for the rustle of her turning a page, but there was nothing. Down the corridor from us, a rollicking song with a female singer started playing from someone’s stereo, but the stereo’s owner closed their door seconds after the first notes hit the hallway. From the kitchen came a peppery smell—someone cooking instant soup.

  —You smell that? I tried. When Jillian didn’t answer, I decided to go back to snow and said, You know, there’s places in America where people can trick-or-treat without worrying about freezing to death.

  She didn’t laugh, so I turned around to face her judgment only to see her nodding along to a song: at some point—I couldn’t tell when—she’d put her headphones back on.

  The morning that snow finally came—a week into November—Jillian woke me by slapping two damp mittens on my back. I jumped, and before I could ask why her hat and coat were flecked with water (Had she showered while dressed? Got caught in a sprinkler?), she screamed: Liz! It snowed! All last night and this morning!

  I rubbed my eyes and slurred, Class is canceled?

  She barked just one Ha! and pulled my comforter all the way off me.

  —Wake up, wake up, she said. Let’s go, before you have to get ready for class.

  She ran from our room and left the door open, pounded her hands on the doors down from us and yelled, You guys! It’s Lizet’s first snow! Let’s do this! Tracy, get your camera. Is Caroline still – Shit, Caroline, finish drying your hair and come outside!

  As her voice disappeared into the cave of the hall bathroom, I looked out the window. I’d seen snow on TV, had played in some soapy, manmade snow at the mall when I was little, but to see that now-familiar square of campus totally transformed: what was, as I’d fallen asleep, a brown swath of dead grass and trees suddenly cleaned up and covered. I couldn’t believe it was the same Outside. I would’ve bought that I’d been moved in the night to a different planet; I couldn’t believe the planet I’d lived on for eighteen years was capable of looking like this—and I couldn’t believe people lived in it, vacationed specifically to glide over it. More than anything, I needed to touch it—immediately—to know it like everyone else did as quickly as I could. I flung myself from the bed, slid my feet into my shower flip-flops, ran past Jillian and her Hey, wait! in the bathroom doorway, and charged down the stairwell at the end of the hall to the nearest exit—the dorm’s loading dock—throwing my whole weight against the metal double doors.

  Those first fifteen seconds: down the loading dock steps, flip-flops slipping on ice, stepping on the snow—two feet high and still falling—and expecting to walk on top of it. Hearing a soft crunch, then one leg then the other crashing down, the snow reaching just past my knees, hugging my feet and calves. And I was stuck. And I laughed so hard I fell on my butt into more snow, soft but not soft enough, the white stuff packing into my armpits because I’d extended my arms to brace for the fall. Those first fifteen seconds, I got it: I got how people could love snow. But then, creeping in like the very real tingle I started to feel in my feet, was the fact that snow was frozen water—that snow was wet and not fluffy like cotton or like the mall’s soap-bubble snow. I’d locked myself out of the dorm by accident, and as I held a clump of snow in my hand for the first time and squeezed it hard, my skin turned red. It burned. My toes burned, too—I scrunched them to make sure I could still feel them, thinking of those stupid girls on Halloween—and I looked up to find Jillian next to Tracy, both waving from the other side of the door’s glass square. Then Tracy lifted her camera to her face.

  Jillian pushed her way out and yelled, Oh my god, you are crazy! You’re practically naked! She pulled off her coat and twirled it over my shoulders.

  Tracy took another shot from inside, this time of Jillian with her arm around me and giving a thumbs-up.

  —Make sure you get her flip-flops, she yelled.

  More people came down, from our floor and other floors. I ran back up to get socks and real shoes, threw a pair of baggy jeans over my soaked pajama pants, and returned to a full-on snowball fight. Later, amid Jillian and Tracy and other people I’d seen all fall trekking in and out of the bathroom in nothing but towels but whose last names I didn’t know, we collectively decided to skip class without saying this directly. One girl, a brunette named Caroline in a lilac vest and sweatpants, made hot chocolate for everyone using milk and not powder but actual chocolate, and we all sat in the hallway outside our rooms drinking it. I had the idea to call Leidy and my mom and tell them what it was like, my first time in the snow, but I didn’t want to be the only one to get up and leave, the first to say Thank you but and give back the mug. So I wrapped my fingers around it even tighter, let them get warmer.

  A day later, during Jillian’s twice-weekly night class, I told my mom and Leidy about the snow over the phone. I almost blew the surprise of the Thanksgiving trip when I said I was thinking of getting a cooler so I could bring some down so they could see for themselves, saying at Christmas just in time to cover it up. Mami asked if I had any pictures of me in the snow and I said yes, someone took some and that I’d track them down. But I still hadn’t done that, thinking if Tracy wanted me to have them, she’d come to me.

  Now that I was back home, I felt bad for not bringing any evidence along—no props to show my sister to make talking to her easier. I sipped the coffee Mami left for me and asked Leidy about Dante’s daycare, about her hours at the salon, about nothing that mattered as much as what I wanted to ask her: if she’d seen or spoken to our dad. I didn’t know how to bring him up. I hadn’t heard from him since the night before I left for New York, when he’d stood outside my mom’s building, hands in his pockets, and asked if I needed anything. I’d only shrugged and said no. After a few other vague yes-or-no questions (You know where you’re going? You know how to get there? You sure?), we hugged for a second too short and he left in his work van for his new place. He didn’t even have a phone there yet. He probably had one by now, but I didn’t have the number. I wondered if Leidy did and just had not given it to me any of the times I’d called home. I’d tried his work number when I made it to campus, to let him know I’d survived my first plane ride, but I got an answering machine. I called it again after moving in, meeting my roommate, and setting up my side of our room—things I’d imagined both my parents helping me do, though I don’t know how we would’ve afforded their tickets or if they would’ve left Leidy alone with a five-month-old Dante—but that time, it just rang and rang. After that, tired of wasting phone card minutes on answering machines, I left it up to him to call.

  I wanted to ask Leidy if he’d been ignoring her the same way he was
ignoring me, but we hadn’t so much as uttered Papi since the night before I left for New York: we still blamed him for our move. Our home was only in his name—something neither of us knew before that June when, a couple weeks after he moved out, some woman from the bank came on his behalf and told my mom he wanted to put the house up for sale. My mom was too confused and proud to fight it, and by the end of July, the house belonged to some new family—another set of Cubans. For three weeks we stayed with my tía Zoila, with Roly not even hinting that Leidy and Dante could stay with him and his parents, and the three of us plus Omar moved everything from Zoila’s to Little Havana just before I left for school. And because the second move of my life came so close to the first, I just missed the house; I didn’t really get to say goodbye to it, didn’t even know how to do that, since it was the only place I remembered ever living.