Make Your Home Among Strangers

by Jennine Capó Crucet

—No! Little Fito said. I mean, yeah, he did, but we figured you were around, like at Miami Dade or FIU.

  I was a breath away from telling him about Rawlings before thinking of Leidy. The fourth or fifth time she accused me of acting white was the afternoon of my second day home, when I told her how, when I’d gone to pick up Dante from daycare, the girl ranked ninth in my graduating high school class was there, working as a teacher’s helper and five months pregnant with her boyfriend-turned-fiancé’s kid. Without really thinking about it, I told Leidy that seeing that girl there was depressing. I think my exact words were, It just really bummed me out. She’d said, What the fuck is bum you out? Jesus, you sound so freaking white. I’d said, What does that even mean, stop saying that, and she’d said, Then shut the fuck up already, before storming from the living room, claiming Dante needed his diaper changed. I’d hurt her feelings without realizing it, which, based on my time at Rawlings, felt to me more white than anything else I’d done since being back—that, and what seemed like my atypical reaction to the daily Ariel Hernandez protests, which I felt were pretty intense but which most of Little Havana treated as a totally acceptable response. My inability to get as upset as my mom about Ariel’s possible deportation made me for the first time worry that Rawlings could change me in a way that was bad.

  I decided to explain Rawlings to these cousins by saying how I’d first thought about it, which wasn’t accurate, but it would get me past them into their apartment.

  —The school I’m at is more like UM than FIU in that it’s freaking expensive, but it’s sorta different, like the football team is shitty, and I got this stupid scholarship that covers a lot of it, so, yeah, that’s why I’m there.

  Little Fito nodded and smiled, said, A scholarship, damn.

  Weasel pulled the cigarette out of his mouth, tossed it over my head into the parking lot, grabbed the sliding glass door’s handle, and said, You want a beer?

  Inside sat Tío Fito—Fito the Elder—eyes glassy and with a can of Becks (la llave, we called it, because of the little drawing of a key on the logo) snuggled between his legs. He was watching a Marlins game, which confused the hell out of me until Little Fito explained it was a tape of the 1997 World Series.

  —Two years later and he still don’t believe we won it, Little Fito said.

  Weasel laughed and went to the fridge to get cans for everyone. I almost joked that I was just happy they were watching anything other than the news like my mom, but then I thought better of saying her name, or Ariel’s.

  Tío Fito stood up after placing his can on the tile floor and staggered over to me for a hug. He was shirtless and, aside from the preponderance of gray chest hair, the broken little veins sprawling over his cheeks, and the deep lines on his forehead that spelled out the eleven years he had on his younger brother, looked pretty much like a beer-drenched version of my dad, down to the goatee and the heavy eyelashes. He was the only one of my tíos to come from Cuba on the Mariel Boatlift, and his English wasn’t as good as it would’ve been had he arrived earlier and as a young teenager, like my father.

  —Meri Cree ma! he slurred.

  His hug was loose and floppy. The warmth of his bare chest and back felt weird—almost damp—against the insides of my arms.

  —Merry Christmas, Tío. Where’s Papi?

  He shuffled out from our hug and dropped onto the couch. He breathed in sharply, then pressed his hand to his belly and burped.

  I laughed, then said toward Little Fito, He’s drunk already? Isn’t it maybe too early for that?

  From the kitchen, Weasel said, Shut the fuck up.

  —Eh? Tío said. ¿Tu papá? No here.

  He shook his head and flapped an arm around to indicate the living room and kitchen of the apartment.

  Weasel yelled in my direction, You forget how to speak Spanish in New York?

  —Relax, Wease, Little Fito said behind me.

  —No, Tío, I mean where does he live?

  —You don’t know where your dad lives? Weasel yelled into the fridge.

  —Okay, that’s just messed up, Little Fito said.

  I whirled around to him and yelled, He never told me.

  Beers in his hands, Weasel yelled from the kitchen doorway, You ever ask?

  I hissed at them, Of course, and believed it for all of two seconds. Because, as I turned back to Tío Fito, whose face, in the glow of the TV screen, looked brighter and younger than it should, I scanned the last four months—the short phone conversation at the end of study week, the messages I’d left him, the brief goodbye on my mom’s building’s steps—for the moment where I actually said the words, Papi, can I have your address? Or even, This is my phone number here at school. I couldn’t find it—it wasn’t there—and I started to worry that Papi had a good reason to be mad at me.

  —He’s still in Hialeah, Tío said in Spanish.

  He kept his eyes on the screen while picking up his can and said, In the apartments by your old house, what are they called? The Villas, him and that Dominican guy from his job, they’re roommates.

  The idea of my dad having a roommate almost made me laugh: all this time, the stories we could’ve told each other, maybe helped each other out. Then I thought about Jillian, now back in Cherry Hill, gearing up to celebrate not Noche Buena but just regular storybook Christmas Eve, sledding and drinking boozy eggnog and reading Dickens around a fire and hunting geese or whatever real white people did on Christmas. If my dad’s roommate was the Dominican guy I’d seen a few times who hung drywall, who’d lived in the U.S. maybe a couple years and who Papi met at a jobsite a few months before I left, then our experiences of having roommates probably didn’t have much in common.

  —Apartamento dos, Tío said.

  —No, Papi, el doce, Weasel said to him. He stepped across the tiny living room and tipped a can in my direction. He means unit twelve. He’s bad with numbers.

  —Why do – wait, you know where my dad lives?

  —You mean my uncle? Weasel said. He pulled the can away. Yeah I fucking know. You want to say something about it? You want to bitch about it like your mom?

  Little Fito stepped between us and yelled, Chill bro! It’s like Christmas and shit!

  He put his hand on Weasel’s chest.

  —¡Oye! Tío Fito yelled. He shushed us and pointed at the TV.

  The most Latina thing I could’ve done then, I think, was smack Weasel and tell him there was more coming if he wanted to talk shit about my mom. But the slashes of his eyes, the aggressively cocked head, the fist choking the can of beer, the muscles around his jaw—all of it said, Get out. And I felt suddenly cold and scared of him. Had he always been so quick to get mad like that? Did me noticing it for the first time right then mean that I’d already been gone too long, that I was already used to nice, mostly quiet people like Jillian, who showed they were mad by folding their laundry extra sharply and clearing their throats while they did it?

  —Number twelve, I said to Little Fito. In the Villas?

  —Yeah, he said, letting his hand drop. He took the beer his brother had offered me. I stepped back toward the sliding glass door. Tell your dad we say wassup, he said, opening the door for me.

  —Or don’t, Weasel said.

  He stared me down hard, then disappeared down the apartment’s hallway, his words—in an annoying, high-pitched girl voice and in an accent I knew Leidy would have a word for—trailing behind him: Oh he’s drunk? It’s maybe too early for that!

  Out by the railing, Little Fito said, Wease is a dick. Forget him.

  He kissed me on the cheek and opened the gate for me—the bitter beer on his breath wafting across my face. I wanted to ask him what I was missing, but to need him to tell me was worse than not knowing. Asking questions would only show him that his brother was right to hate on me.

  —Merry Christmas, he said, the gate still open. Hope things get better with Tío.

  I said, Me too. I clicked the gate shut and hurried to my mom’s car, only getting it w
hen I turned the key in the ignition, the car baking me inside even in December: he didn’t mean Tío Fito. He meant his tío. My dad. He meant that what came next could be worse than just a drunk uncle. That the person guilty of so much silence could be me. By the time I pulled out of the spot and passed their apartment, no one waited outside, new cigarettes in hand, to wave goodbye. The glass door was shut, and through it, the glow from the TV, the green of the baseball diamond on its screen, washed over my uncle, making him look like a memory of someone—a ghost I barely recognized—as I drove away.

  * * *

  The trip to my dad’s apartment through my old neighborhood made me feel a little like those tourists on the buses that went through Little Havana—Look, there’s that high school I went to that those deans told me they’d read about!—but I couldn’t help that I felt hungry looking at everything, proud of myself for remembering what was on the next corner before actually seeing it. A stack of banged-up grocery carts humped each other in a metal orgy in the far corner of the new Sedano’s parking lot. On the next street down, a heavy woman wearing not enough of a bikini under a neon mesh cover-up screamed at a shirtless man holding a rooster to his chest. I laughed at how everything looked like something I was and wasn’t surprised to see. I fought off the urge to pass by my old house even though I could on my way to the Villas; I didn’t want the sight of it to muddy my original intentions any more than the fight with Weasel already had. I didn’t want my sadness about no longer living there bleeding into my anger. I didn’t want Papi getting a boost from a loss he’d caused.

  The Villas were a city block of squat town houses alternatingly painted yellow or peach. A nine-foot-high concrete wall surrounded the whole development, but it wasn’t a gated community; you could move in and out of it freely, without someone writing down your license plate number for no real reason other than to say they wrote it down. The wall was more for keeping the run-down Villas hidden from the busy avenue running alongside them. The speed limit was forty-five on that street, and the base of the concrete on that side showcased a collage of plastic bags, paper food wrappers, cans, bottles, napkins smudged every color. Tall weeds poked out from the garbage, looking themselves like a kind of trash. The walls were tagged in only a couple places, but each wall was a quilt of different paint shades from where tag after tag had been covered week after week, a patchwork of primer and gray. I turned the air conditioner to high, pointed the vents at my suddenly-drenched and stinging armpits, and pulled into the neighborhood.

  I slowed down to twenty miles per hour—the speed limit inside the walls—and what seemed like the same two town houses scrolled by on each side of the street. The Villas had a reputation for being trashy: leases were month to month, driveways were places to party and fight, and no one enforced rules about the number of saints you could prop up in the small squares of lawn. There were no sidewalks. There were no speed bumps. I’d never been inside the neighborhood, though I’d apparently spent the first months of my life there: my parents had moved to the Villas while saving for the house, which they managed to find and buy before I turned two. Number twelve came up quickly enough, in the section of the Villas where the town houses didn’t have their own parking spots. I couldn’t tell if any of the white work vans in the wide lot ringed by the units was my dad’s. I parked in one of the spots marked VISITOR, directed a final blast of cold air down each of my T-shirt sleeves, then turned off the car.

  I sat there until the heat coming through the windshield started to rise again, until my cheeks pulsed with the sun beating down on me through the glass. Maybe I was trying to darken myself up before he saw me—maybe I was worried he wouldn’t recognize me. Maybe I was stealing some fire from the sun, something to fuel a rage I was certain I should unleash but that my time away had morphed into something more subdued—what Leidy would call more white. I shook my hands out and thought of Weasel’s flaring cigarette, then got out of the car.

  My dad’s rental looked less lived-in than the others. The lawn was uniformly dry, with nothing on it to give away the religious leanings of its inhabitants. I walked up the concrete strip connecting the asphalt to the front door, stuck my fist between the bars guarding it, and knocked.

  A man coughed from inside. I almost turned and bolted for my car—the fingers of my left hand all of a sudden went numb. But within a couple seconds a male voice I definitely didn’t recognize yelled, ¡Ya voy!

  The drywall man swung open the door, a gold cross dangling from his neck and resting on his dark chest. His shirt was draped over his shoulders, unbuttoned. ¡Ay dios mío! he said when he saw me. I started to introduce myself but his fist went for the lock on his side of the bars, and he opened those, too, swinging them out so that I had to step away from the door to avoid getting hit. He smiled and said, ¡Es la hija!

  He hugged me like I belonged to him, said, Come in!

  Over his shoulder, I could see the rectangular living room with a small kitchen on the left, the sparse, mismatched furniture—a trunk acting as a coffee table, a beige faux-leather love seat I remembered from our house, a black vinyl recliner I’d never seen before—all arranged around a huge projection television that was on but with the sound muted.

  He let go of me and said in Spanish, You’re Ricky’s youngest one. Lizet, right?

  —Uh, yeah, I stuttered. And you’re …

  He pointed his broad hands at his own chest. Hunks of gold the size of class rings sat like extra knuckles on each of his middle fingers. He said, Rafael!

  I smiled, then raised my palms between us as if offering an invisible tray of food, my shoulders inching toward my ears.

  —¡Pasa, pasa! he said, waving me in and closing the bars behind me.

  The room smelled like my own armpits and bleach and cigarettes. I wondered if my dad had started smoking, then noticed the pack in Rafael’s front shirt pocket, hovering near his purplish nipple. He wore white jeans, which made him look darker, and the hair that trailed down his stomach disappeared higher up. He leapt over to the love seat and held out his hand, told me to sit.

  He said in English now, I hear so much of you! From Ricky!

  He dropped into the vinyl recliner, grinning and grabbing his knees, his feet tapping against the tile.

  —What? I said. Really?

  —Ha ha! Rafael almost yelled. You home from the college – is cold there.

  He rubbed his thumb against his other fingers and said, ¡Cuesta mucho dinero, eh!

  A wall-mounted air conditioner kicked on, filling the room with a low buzz. I scooted to the edge of the cushion and spotted, down the hallway, the shut bedroom doors.

  —Is my dad here? I said.

  —No no no. He is work – trabajando todavía.

  I felt the heat rush from my face as the noisy AC pushed new cold onto me. I took a big breath of its moldy, wet air, pointed down the hall and said, Just tell me if he’s here, okay?

  He looked at the doors—said, Oh! See, I show you—then darted the few feet to them, opened each to display the made beds they hid. On his little jog back—Rafael crackled with energy—he laughed and said, You are the smart one, I understand now, ha ha! He sat again and reached across the trunk posing as a table, wrapped his hand under my chin, turned my face from side to side. I’d never spoken to this man before in my life. I should’ve been a little more polite, but as he held my face in his hands, I felt paralyzed by how he seemed to think he knew me well enough to inspect my face like an artifact he’d spent years tracking down, so I blurted through squashed lips, Wait, how do you know that? About my college being expensive?

  —Tu papá, Rafael said. He tell me.

  He let go and leapt from his chair, a finger in the air, and rushed away to the kitchen, yelling over his shoulder, Wait! I show you!

  He dug around in a drawer and then scrambled back with a stiff magazine in his hand, something dark blue that, when he landed back in the seat, he held out to me across the trunk. I recognized it right away: the Rawlings vi
ewbook—the familiar, well-worn glossy pages I’d stashed under my mattress like my own dorky porn.

  —This is you, no? he said, thumbing through it. The diverse pallet of co-ed faces in various poses of concentration and fulfillment flipped by.

  —That’s where I go, yeah.

  —He show me. He so proud of you! Rafael said with a smile that hid his teeth.

  I wanted him to say it again, so I could really believe it. He slid the viewbook onto the trunk, and my eyes watered: I looked up at the ceiling to make the stinging of it stop. A brown stain, like a ring, clung to the corner back by the front door, where water had seeped in and ruined the already-shitty popcorn ceiling. My dad would’ve noticed something like that, would’ve probably gone up to fix it himself rather than wait for a landlord, then argued with the landlord later, after he’d taken the cost of repairs out of his portion of the rent, his labor rate exactly what it should be. I tried to convince myself that the presence of that stain meant something, maybe that my dad didn’t spend very much time here, in that living room.

  —Que te pasa, mamita, Rafael said. You okay?

  I pointed at the viewbook and said, I didn’t know he had this.

  I tugged it onto my lap, asked its cover: Why does he have this?

  Rafael started to say something, but I shook my head and said, Listen, does my dad talk about my mom or my sister?

  His hands went for the cigarette pack in his shirt pocket. He slipped it out and opened it but then shut it again right away.

  —Maybe we call him? Rafael said. I call him.

  He lunged to his left for the phone.

  —No! No, don’t.

  —You come for him, no me!

  —Right, but – I think maybe I need to go.

  —No, por favor, he said, his hand reaching out for me again, his eyes flicking around the room as if watching a fly. ¿Quieres café? I make you café!

  He darted to the kitchen. Down in my lap, the viewbook’s pages showed off places I now knew well—the library, the stunning student union—even the hockey rink, a picture I’d never dwelled on for too long but that now meant something to me. All of them did. I went there: my dad kept it because I went there. He’d shown it to this man he’d known for only a few months but had never told his brother or my cousins that I left the state to go there. Rafael banged around the kitchen, searching the cabinets for a cafetera. I couldn’t imagine either man making their own Cuban coffee, not when so many places in Hialeah brewed it all day long and for so cheap, not when my mom had made it for my dad every single morning for as long as I could remember. I pushed the viewbook away; I didn’t need to look at it any more.