Make Your Home Among Strangers

by Jennine Capó Crucet

  15

  THE FIRST THING MY MOM SAID when she saw me—what she screamed right into my ear as she hugged me in the airport terminal—was, You are so skinny!

  It sounded more like a compliment than anything she was worried about. I lost eleven pounds that fall, seven of them in the weeks between Thanksgiving and my last exam. Unlike most students, who’d put on weight all fall like pigs before a Noche Buena slaughter, I had a healthier diet at Rawlings than I did at home, having finally made use of that famous salad bar to get through finals.

  —I could say the same about you, I told her.

  She looked several pounds thinner, her makeup weirdly askew, her body draped in a faux-silk gold blouse and matching leggings I’d never seen. When she broke our hug, she looked down at the airport carpet and tucked her short, coarse hair behind her ears. Her roots needed a serious touch-up, the gray and brown pushing up in a solid band around her head. The blond streaks she’d always maintained looked detached from her scalp. She pried my fingers from my carry-on bag and started wheeling it away from me.

  —I’ve been so busy since you left, I barely have time to eat, she said. But look at you, you look so smart!

  I didn’t ask what looking smart meant. I scanned the crowd of waiting people around us for Leidy, to give her a hug and take Dante off her hands, but my mom was alone. She was already walking a few steps ahead of me and then, as if realizing she’d left something behind, she stopped and said, It’s so good to have you home!

  —Where’s Leidy?

  —Work, Lizet. She’s at work.

  She looked at the inside of her wrist, her watch’s face having rotated there.

  —Though she’s probably on her way to get Dante from daycare by now.

  —Oh, I said. Of course, right.

  She started moving again, my suitcase in tow. I jogged to her side, and she fished something out from between her breasts and handed it to me—the ticket from the parking garage, stamped almost an hour before—and told me if we hurried, we could save the extra five dollars. I was secretly relieved that her rush was due to something unrelated to me: I’d barely talked to Mami without Leidy as my go-between since the last trip, and I worried the whole flight home that she was still angry about Thanksgiving, about how I’d planned that trip on my own—that it had made her draw some conclusion about me, that I was turning into someone she either didn’t like or didn’t trust.

  As we swerved around the parking garage looking for the way out, my mom’s left leg shook and jumped under the steering wheel. We made it to the bottom level of the garage and paid—a breathy Yes! from Mami when we came in under the hour—and then she asked a slew of questions: about the trip, the planes, who I’d sat next to on each and what they were like, whether or not I’d had a chance to sleep, how many degrees it was when I left—each question interrupting the answer to the one before it.

  What Mami didn’t ask about was school. She spent the bulk of the car ride in conversation with the drivers of other cars, cursing them or begging them or ridiculing them, then saying to me, I’m right, right? She asked me if I was too hot or too cold, or hungry or tired, and I kept answering, No, I’m fine. I was exhausted and very near tears, actually. I was shocked to find that it did not feel good to be home, to have seen her standing there in the airport. The entire three hours of the last flight, though I’d been nervous about seeing her, I mostly felt very happy to be getting away from Rawlings and that first semester. But spotting her before she saw me in the terminal—in that fake gold outfit, her face oily, her hands fidgeting with the rings on her fingers—had made my stomach turn, and I just wanted to be alone somewhere to catch my breath, to have a minute to sync up my idea of home with reality. I’d seen my mother in that moment as not my mother; I saw her as a tacky-looking woman, as the Cuban lady the girls on my floor would’ve seen, alone in an airport. And I did not like that I suddenly had this ability to see her that way, isolated from our shared history. I didn’t know if she’d changed or if she’d always looked that way but now I could just see through my feelings somehow. I felt instantly cold, and then I panicked: if she looked that way to me, what did I look like to her, with my uncombed hair and my newly pale skin and the greenish, studying-induced bags under my eyes, with my horrid plane breath? By the time I’d spotted the sign for the restrooms, it was too late: she’d snagged me, thrown her arms around my neck, had said I looked smart.

  As much as I was ashamed of my hearing results, by what that long letter stated the committee had decided—that I was the product of a poor environment—I willingly took it: I wanted to be at Rawlings, and I was grateful that they’d taken my background into consideration. I wanted to rise—I used exactly that word in the thank-you e-mail I wrote to the committee after printing out the resource list—to rise above what I’d come from. I’d felt sick as I typed it, felt like a traitor after I hit send, but now, at the clash of my mom’s bangles as she turned the steering wheel to cut off a car in retaliation for them cutting her off moments before—all the while lowering her window, her arm extending out, then her middle finger at the end of that arm, waving a fuck you as she yelled the same phrase in Spanish at the driver—I knew I’d meant it.

  I eventually stopped paying attention to the street signs and turns and let myself feel lost in what still felt like my new neighborhood. Leidy was right: Little Havana did feel reffy, in a different way than Hialeah did—more like theme-park reffy, the reffiness as main attraction, on display. At a red light, we stopped a few cars back from a tour bus. A voice from its loudspeaker floated to us: And next up, on the left, you’ll see the eternal flame monument dedicated to those who died in the Bay of Pigs Invasion. The light turned green, we kept going, and then, as if they were getting paid to do it, some old Cuban guys were actually there by that flame, in sparkling white guayaberas, saluting at it and everything, and people from places like California and Spain snapped pictures of them, and the Cuban guys smiled for these pictures.

  We eventually turned onto the street of my mother’s apartment building, something I registered only because she slowed down. What I saw there was another kind of spectacle: signs down the whole block, saying WELCOME and YOU ARE HOME. I blinked and breathed through the rush in my chest, then remembered who the signs were really for.

  There were Cuban flags and American flags, signs with writing in too many fonts declaring: ¡ARIEL NO SE VA! Blown up and hanging on almost every fence was a picture of Ariel—looking chubbier than he had a month earlier—hanging onto the neck of some girl maybe a year or two older than me. Above the photo, in bold print, were the words, NO DESTRUYAN ESTA FELICIDAD.

  —Who’s that? I said.

  When I pointed, I touched the glass of the window, something my dad spent years training me and Leidy never to do. I smashed my fingertip against the glass and left a greasy print. Mami’s leg was still shaking.

  —Esa muchacha, she said, is Ariel’s cousin but is like a mother to him now. Her name is Caridaylis. Cari. They are never apart.

  Mami now had both hands firmly on the steering wheel. She sat up too close to it. I imagined, in an accident, how it would ram her chest into her spine just before her head hit the windshield.

  —She’s like an angel, Mami said. She is like a saint.

  —I don’t remember her from the news.

  —She’s only nineteen. Think about taking that on, being a mom to him when he’s gone through so much. I bet you can’t even imagine it.

  The girl had coppery hair and dark eyebrows. In the picture, she’s smiling widely and looking behind her, at Ariel. She has a too-thick gold chain around her neck, and I imagined it as on loan from a boyfriend, having belonged to him first. She looked less like a mom and more like a big sister to the boy hanging on her back, but I kept this to myself.

  I shrugged. Leidy’s twenty and she’s a mom, I said.

  —Your sister’s different. She went looking for trouble.

  She didn’t say anything else, but it se
emed important for me to try: Yeah, but Dante’s still a baby, I mumbled. And I’m sure that girl Cari has help.

  If my mom heard me, she pretended not to.

  As we pulled into the complex’s parking lot, Leidy swung through the building’s door, keeping it open with her hip. Dante sat perched on the other. She grabbed his chunky arm and made him wave to us, staying put on the tiled entrance because she was barefoot. She looked tired in a way that suddenly made me incredibly sad—her hair greasy after a day of washing dozens of other heads. As she and Dante waved, the baby looked at the car, at my mother and me opening and shutting its doors.

  Mami tugged my suitcase out from the trunk before I could get to it—I was waving back to Dante and yelling, Hey, Big Guy!—and slammed the trunk closed before I could make it back there to help. She rolled the suitcase up to the front entrance and left it there, then squeezed through the doorway past Leidy after an automatic hello kiss that caught more air than cheek. Dante reached for his grandmother’s hair but missed.

  Leidy bounced him on her hip and he started grunting Bah! Bah! Bah! She looked down and traced the grout surrounding a square of tile with her big toe as I came up from the parking lot. When I reached her, she hugged me hard with her free arm and kissed me on the cheek—real and sloppy—and that’s when I admitted something big had been off about Mami’s welcome.

  We followed my mom’s voice as it ricocheted off the concrete stairwell. She was talking, talking, talking, talking: This person moved out, this apartment has a parakeet even though it’s no pets allowed, did you see they painted this wall to cover up some graffiti? I lugged my bag up the stairs and wished she would keep her voice down. She seemed excited to have people close by to spy on and talk about. The wheels of my suitcase slammed again and again against the steps, the echo like an audience clapping.

  The apartment was clean, the carpet in the living room section of the main room vacuumed so recently that I could still see the lines from it and Leidy’s latest footsteps. It smelled like laundry, like a spray-can version of fresh sheets. In every electrical outlet, there was some kind of deodorizing thing plugged in, and immediately I imagined Dante ingesting the chemical goop heated inside each of them. There were some papers stacked neatly on the dining table, flyers with slogans and a poor-quality photo of Ariel on them. There was only one poster, which took up the bottom half of the window facing the street and which said, ARIEL ***IS*** HOME—that middle word underlined several times and written in a different color than the other two. I was happy the sign wasn’t in Spanish; it meant my mother wasn’t blending into the neighborhood as easily as she thought she was.

  Mami stood next to the television and opened her arms wide, her bracelets sliding toward her elbows. She yelled, Welcome back! and then gestured to the coffee table at a plant, a mix of jagged-edged leaves and tiny flowers clustered together like a colorful brain. A stick topped with a small Mylar balloon, the words CONGRATS, GRAD! on it, was shoved in its dirt. And on the couch behind the coffee table was a large, clear balloon dotted with white stars and topped with coils of red bow—and inside the balloon, a blond teddy bear with a similar red bow around its neck, holding a fabric heart. The bear sat on a pile of shredded green plastic ribbon meant to look like grass, the same stuff that padded our Easter baskets when we were little girls. I stepped forward to read the writing on the heart. I LOVE YOU, it said, and I feigned delight.

  —You guys, I squealed. I hugged Leidy again and Dante let out a half-burp. When I turned to hug my mom, she’d disappeared.

  —Where’d she go? I said.

  I stroked Dante’s arm with one finger, then placed his open hand on his mother’s shoulder. We heard Mami’s bedroom door shut.

  —She’s being weird, Leidy said. I think you’re weirding her out.

  I pulled my sweatshirt off over my head. Dante started to cry, but Leidy stared past him at me, looking almost sorry for me. I left my bag by the door and stepped over to the bear on the couch. I yelled, Mami?

  Through her bedroom door, I heard a muffled, ¡Ya voy!

  I sat down and put the balloon on my lap. The bear inside shifted and fell against the balloon’s back side, reclining.

  —I’m not weirding her out. I barely said anything to her on the drive here.

  I rolled the balloon to try to right the bear inside: it flopped over too far, landed facedown in the shredded plastic. So I rolled it the other way.

  —Well whatever it is, she’ll get over it. Just ask her about Ariel or Caridaylis. That’ll make her talk.

  It was late afternoon, the time of day when I usually fell asleep at my desk, my face in a book, an unofficial nap. I was so exhausted. I felt like I might cry. Instead I said, I saw her picture outside. Is she his new spokesperson?

  Leidy laughed then said, Not really. I think Mami’s still auditioning for that part.

  She plopped down beside me and Dante’s hand immediately went to the balloon, which he rubbed and which made a fart-like noise. He yanked his hand away and examined it for traces of the sound. I should’ve asked Leidy what she meant, but instead, I just swirled the bear and mumbled, Yeah.

  —Don’t worry, she said in a fake-cheerful voice. She’ll get over it. She has to. You’re here for like three freaking weeks!

  Mami still hadn’t come out of her room. Part of me was proud of myself for having such good intuition—I knew something was wrong—until I realized that my mom’s reaction meant she, like me, must not have liked what she saw coming toward her at the airport.

  —And plus? Leidy said. You got enough days here this visit to maybe go sit in the sun for a while. You look worse than last time, she said. You look so freaking white.

  Dante went for the balloon a second time, pulling his hand away and inspecting it when once again the rubbery noise came out from under it. He kept at this until Leidy finally stopped him.

  16

  MY DAD CALLED THE APARTMENT only once: the night I got in from Rawlings, to make sure my flight had landed and that I’d been on it. But since he sensed my mom standing nearby—She’s right next to you, isn’t she?—he didn’t ask anything else or arrange to see me, said only that he’d call back. Three days later, by the morning before Noche Buena and the rowdy family party that came with it, I still hadn’t heard from him, and because I wanted to remind him of what he’d be missing—he had less family in the United States than my mother did, had celebrated Noche Buena with her side since he was seventeen—and because my campus-wide-scream-induced decision to finally confront him about the house still hung over me, I decided to set off to my tío Fito’s apartment, starting my search with the brother who took him in right after he left my mom. I came to this plan after asking myself, What is the most Latina thing I could do right now? I’d thought about my choices in these terms since my first night back, when during dinner I described the new coral paint job on the house across the street as sufficiently tropical and Leidy laughed back that I should quit talking like a white girl. I decided the most Latina thing I could do was this: drive to my dad’s brother’s apartment, demand whoever was there to tell me where my dad lived now, then drive to that place and yell as many fuck-as-adjective expressions at Papi as I could generate while standing in the street in my flip-flops. It would be a lot like the fights between him and my mom, and therefore definitely not white.

  I got to Fito’s Hialeah apartment half dreading that my dad’s van would be in the visitor’s spot, but it wasn’t, which meant I would get a practice run at yelling at someone in addition to the lame sassing of the rearview mirror I’d done at red lights on the drive there. Two of Fito’s sons, cousins a little older than me, stood talking and smoking in front of the apartment’s sliding glass doors, which led out to a railing-surrounded patch of concrete just off the complex’s parking lot. I locked the car and walked up to the railing into the open arms of my cousins, who were, as they put it, chilliando (not a word, but I kept that to myself, since identifying something as not a word was a L
eidy-certified white-girl thing to do). We hugged and they held their cigarettes way out from our kiss-on-the-cheek greeting. I stood still for a second, the railing against my hip bone as my hand worked the gate’s latch, and waited for them to say welcome home or something, but the blank faces watching me from behind swirls of cigarette smoke just said, So wassup, prima?

  —I just got back from New York, I said, knowing they’d think I meant the city.

  —You went on vacation? the older one said.

  I only knew him as Weasel—most of us just called him Wease—and wasn’t positive on his or his younger brother’s actual names even though we all counted each other as cousins: they always called me and any other girl cousin prima—primita if we were little. The younger one we all just called Little Fito, after his dad.

  —No, college, bro. I was away at college. I just got back from like four months away.

  —No shit, Little Fito said. All the way in New York? That’s fucking crazy.

  —Woooooow, Weasel said, obviously less impressed. He put his cigarette back in his mouth and held it there, turning his head to the parking lot.

  —I thought we didn’t see you because of your dad! Little Fito said. Or, I mean, you know, your mom?

  He looked at his cigarette like it could answer the delicate etiquette question of how to reference my parents’ separation.

  —My dad never mentioned I was away at college? I said.

  The tip of Weasel’s cigarette flared orange.