Make Your Home Among Strangers

by Jennine Capó Crucet

  She spun around and said, You know, I almost wish it was Omar you’d seen?

  She snatched the used grocery bag holding the dirty wipes from the knob on her nightstand.

  —God no, that would be worse, I said. And for sure he wouldn’t give us money.

  We laughed, but too hard; we were both pretending. She knotted the bag’s handles to seal in the smell, then rehung it on the knob.

  —I’m surprised he doesn’t run away, I said.

  —Huh?

  I came all the way into the room and pointed at Dante, who was still on the bed and gazing at his mom, his belly button peeking out over his new diaper. I sat down by him and traced my finger around the tiny hole. He didn’t so much laugh as he did scream, a piercing noise like a parrot’s shriek filling the whole apartment. It disappeared so suddenly when I flinched away that Leidy and I cracked up in the emptiness ringing after it.

  —Yeah, that’s a thing he does sometimes, she giggled. Watch this.

  She sat on the bed and leaned over, pulled his shirt higher and blew hard—really hard—on his stomach, the farting sounds quickly drowned out by the same scream-laugh.

  —You are so freaky sometimes, she singsonged to him as she sat up and smushed his face between her hands, the pads of her fingers on his cheeks.

  I laughed more and said, Why does he do that?

  —I have no idea, she said. It’s just what he does.

  Together, up until Mami came home glowing with the news of everything going into Ariel’s first Noche Buena in Miami, we hovered over Dante and tickled the bottoms of his feet, the skin behind his knees, the palms of his hands before he could shut them to keep out our fingers. He did it almost every time, in response to almost every spot we tried—the parrot shriek taking over his throat as he tried to roll away from us. We did it for too long, covering up our private thoughts with Dante’s noise, our normal-sounding laughter rushing in every time to fill the silence that took over the instant we pulled our hands from him.

  20

  WE DIDN’T SEE MY MOM’S whole family often—mostly just at Noche Buena, weddings and births, funerals—but we acted like we did. That half of my family was big and messy, sprawled around the city and good at pretending we cared very much about lives we knew little about. As we drove over to Tía Zoila’s house, after watching my mom fling on the same gold shirt and pants she’d worn to pick me up at the airport (ignoring Leidy’s pleas that she wear something less reffy-looking), I realized I wasn’t sure if everyone in my mom’s family knew about my parents splitting up for good—or, if they knew about it, whether anyone would mention it to one of us. And thanks to my cousins on my dad’s side, I was almost certain no one really understood that I was away at college, that I was getting a college degree and not just my AA or some certificate. Still, we ignored most facts and thought of ourselves as close, as sufficiently up in everyone else’s business, and we always were on Noche Buena.

  As my mom walked ahead of us into Zoila’s house with a Tupperware full of tostones she’d fried at our apartment (the cooking making our clothes reek of oil and food hours before we even got anywhere near the pig roasting in our tía’s backyard), we heard Zoila scream, Look at that fucking skank! Baby, look who’s here!

  She came running from outside, spotting us through the glass door as she prepared a vat of sangria with her second husband, Tony. She was already drunk from tasting it to get the flavor right; her recipe for sangria included, among other things, an entire bottle of Bacardi 151. Even with all the fruit, the first sip always tasted like straight-up poison.

  —Who you calling a skank, you puta? my mom laughed back. She handed me the Tupperware and then let her cousin body-slam her into a hug.

  Zoila and my mom liked to say they were more like sisters than cousins. This wasn’t true—even when you considered the fact that my mom had lived with Zoila and Zoila’s mother when she came from Cuba up until getting pregnant and married—but they really, really believed it. Yelling obscenities at each other was something they thought sisters did.

  —You are so fucking skinny, you slutty chicken, Zoila said into my mom’s hair. And look at this one! she said to Dante, scooping him out of Leidy’s grip. ¡Mi gordito!

  She rolled the R for way longer than she needed to. She started to pretend-bite his arms. Dante, who should’ve been used to noise, sat on her hip, stunned.

  —This one I’m gonna eat instead of lechón, Zoila said.

  She fake-chewed the fat she fake-bit from Dante’s arms. Then she greeted me and Leidy, calling us various combinations of the words slut, whore, bitch, skank, and chicken—that last word being her new one this year. The cursing was also connected to Tony; he was, at twenty-eight, twelve years younger than her, and she used moisturizer and profanity the same way since meeting him, hoping to seem younger than she was.

  Tony came inside, his fingers stained red. The more he tested the sangria, the more acceptable it seemed to him to stir it with his hand instead of a long spoon after each adjustment.

  —Hey Lizet, Leidy, he said, kissing each of us on the cheek as he said our names.

  He’d grown a stubby ponytail since his wedding to Zoila, but he still had the same creepy facial hair—a thin, too-many-cornered beard outlining his jaw—that every other guy in Miami between the ages of twenty and thirty had in 1999. Tony looked at Leidy’s chest and said, Being a mom is making you more beautiful than ever, sweetie!

  He tacked on the sweetie to sound like the uncle we were supposed to think he was now, but it didn’t work: he was only eight years older than Leidy, and cute enough that we’d wondered aloud to each other, while chewing mustard-slathered Vienna sausages at their wedding reception a couple years earlier, what the hell he saw in Zoila. Leidy’s theory was that she let him put it in her butt. I hear guys love that, she’d said, her mouth full. After trying to think of any other reason—maybe he needed citizenship, maybe she was dying and secretly rich, maybe he thought she was fun and beautiful and was going to age well—I’d tossed back another sausage and agreed with her.

  Zoila held my mom out at arm’s length, zipping her scrunched, liner-shellacked eyes around my mom’s face, clearly wanting to ask about something—probably about my dad. She would say, Where is that motherfucker? Where is that cocksucker tonight? But she was not so drunk to bring this up right away. It was coming, though; whatever was making the gossip-fueled questions hover over her mouth now would find its way out before the food hit the table. She kept looking over our shoulders, as if waiting for one more from our gang to come through the door. I wanted to tell her the way I’d told Leidy: I’m the one who’s seen him. It would likely be a more welcome topic of conversation than what classes I’d taken or what snow felt like. Zoila handed Dante back to Leidy, effectively obscuring Tony’s view of my sister’s chest, and he wandered away to wash the sangria stains from his hands.

  When we got to the backyard, about half the family was there and already in various states of inebriation, and my heart filled with a sort-of-happiness at the fact that the scene looked like it did every year.

  —¡Llegaron las niñas! someone yelled, and everyone turned to us, the girls. Some people held up their drinks in recognition of our arrival but stayed put, knowing we’d eventually take a lap around the yard to greet everyone. My mom, although still a Ramirez in name, was the only one from her branch of the Rodriguez clan—her brother, our real uncle, went every year to his wife’s sort-of-religious family’s Noche Buena party, which was alcohol-free and therefore tamer than ours. He’d managed to convince his wife to come to our family’s party only once: it ended badly, with one of the other uncles siphoning all the gas out of their car and using it to start a fire in the driveway “to help Santa find the party.” They hadn’t been back since.

  One of my cousins, Neyda, who was my age but in her senior year of high school, came over, kissed us each on the cheek, and then, without even making small talk, asked Leidy if she could hold Dante. Except she did
n’t know his name: she asked if she could hold him just before asking what she should call him.

  —I love babies, Neyda said in a voice that made her sound like one. Maybe when I finish school, me and my best friend, we’re thinking of opening like a daycare?

  —Cool, I said. My smile felt too wide.

  —Just don’t put him on the ground or anything. He’s not crawling super good yet, Leidy said as she handed him off. Neyda’s eyes popped at him, and he swung his hand at her face, as if trying to smack her.

  Leidy turned her head from us and said, Where’s that sangria?

  I followed Leidy across the uneven cement patio, through the haze of smoke surrounding the aboveground pit where the pig roasted, and stood next to her at the folding table propping up the family booze. She slid two plastic cups off the stack by the punch bowl and served each of us too much; she was careful to leave the ice in the bowl lest it take up any precious room in our cups. Poison or no poison, I suddenly felt like celebrating the first normal feeling I’d had since being home: Noche Buena, me looking like nothing more than the echo of my bored sister, both of us ready to watch the yearly show play out, neither of us important enough to be at its center. Her son was a nameless baby floating around the party, our dad a worry we left back in our room. She jutted her chin out at me and said, Cheers, but didn’t push her cup toward mine. As she sipped and scanned the backyard, she held the cup in both hands, looking like the girls at Rawlings parties, like how I must’ve looked against a wall with my own plastic cup. I took a big gulp of sangria, and Leidy said, Okay then! She seemed to be standing up straighter now that she didn’t have Dante in her arms, and her long earrings—the only part of her outfit she hadn’t swapped out for something else while we got ready—brushed her shoulders, tangling and untangling themselves in the chunks of her hair. She dropped one hand from the cup and let it dangle at her side and said, What?

  —Nothing, I said, my eye twitching at the drink’s aftertaste.

  —Zoila is freaking crazy, right? She looks old!

  We both took another sip, trying to hide how tough it was to swallow.

  —Tony was looking at your tits, I said.

  She almost spit out the sip she’d just taken and said, I know, right? He’s so gross.

  —Nice ponytail, I said into my cup.

  —Shut up, she laughed. She slugged my shoulder.

  A few seconds later, she said, Oh my god, look over there. She gestured with her cup to Zoila, who’d followed us outside and was now hoisting up her shirt. She pressed her breasts together, each of them encased in a black lace-striped cup; her nipples peeked at us from behind the stripes like neighbors through slats of a fence. Our mom and the other older cousins watched as Zoila shoved her breasts up under her neck and shouted, Once I have the surgery, they’ll be like this but bigger.

  Leidy and I looked back at each other, shock melting into stifled laughs. It felt like Zoila’s wedding again—before Dante, before her plan to get Roly to commit had backfired so fantastically, before I’d even heard of Rawlings College—the two of us on the same team. If there’d been a way to hold on to that—to stop Neyda from hustling across the cement to us, Dante’s spit all over her halter top—I would’ve used it then.

  —Okay, so your kid? I think he shit or something.

  —Maybe it’s your upper lip, I said into my cup again, but Leidy didn’t seem to hear me that time. She handed me her drink and reached out for Dante. She stuck her finger down the back of his diaper and just said, Nope.

  Neyda clapped her hands like she was dusting them off and said to me, So is Omar coming later?

  Omar had impressed my family last year by being handsome and just showing up, but I was still surprised Neyda remembered his name. Then, right away, I wasn’t: I remembered what I looked like to them this time a year ago; I was graduating high school soon, Omar had a decent job, and the family probably circled the word around the yard that they expected him to propose or get me pregnant by the time summer rolled around. Come on, mira la otra, they’d probably snickered, throwing an eyebrow at Leidy’s belly. It was worth their time to remember the name of someone at whose wedding reception they planned on having too much to drink.

  —We broke up, I told Neyda. I shrugged and sipped, wondering if it was true.

  —Oh no! she squealed. That’s so sad, oh my god! Who dumped who?

  —She dumped him, Leidy said, the him having the same ugly sound around it as it did when I’d given her the envelopes earlier, when the him was our dad. She kicked him to the curb, Omar’s a loser, she said.

  My stomach cramped and I wanted to blame the sangria, but I knew it was the loser that made me put my hand to my gut. Even though I half believed the things I told people at Rawlings about him, hearing Omar’s name roll out of my sister’s mouth as part of another lie to help me save face made me need to turn away from them talking and put the cup to my mouth. But I couldn’t swallow another drop. I tilted my head back to mime drinking, the sangria lapping a cold band against my lip. Above us, an airplane was coming in to land—Zoila’s house sat underneath the flight path of anything coming from the north and touching down at Miami International—and I wished the roar of it were worse: that it would cover up the new shouts in my head defending Omar, block the rush of him, how we’d known each other so long and so well. I wanted those feelings gone, smothered by sound, so that I could lie to myself and believe I would forget Omar, that he wouldn’t matter to me months and years from that day. And I wanted the noise to block out the fact that though I hadn’t called Omar since coming home, he hadn’t bothered to call me either—that maybe I was the loser. But the plane overhead was a small one, the wail of it too high-pitched to flood the backyard completely and make everyone stop talking for the four or five seconds it usually took to fade away. People shouted over it; I could hear Leidy laughing and saying, Right Lizet? My stomach churned again. I watched the sky until the plane disappeared behind the canopy of leaves shading the street. I made myself nod.

  —He was not a loser! Neyda said, and I swallowed to make sure those words hadn’t come out of my own mouth. He had a car and stuff! And irregardless, he had a job, right?

  I wiped my mouth with the back of my hand. It had taken exactly one big red oval around an irregardless in an early discussion paper in biology for me to leave that word behind, sequestering it for good to my Miami Vocabulary. I slid a step away from this cousin, impressed with myself for hearing now how stupid that word sounded in someone else’s mouth.

  —He has a job, I said. I just haven’t talked to him lately. You know I’m away at college, right?

  I looked at Leidy, hoping she’d stick up for me again, though I wasn’t sure for what this time. She rolled her eyes, took a long gulp of sangria from her cup. When she pulled it away from her face, a red smear arched across her upper lip. She sucked it in to clean it off, but the stain remained. I drank from my glass—careful, now that I saw what the drink could do, to avoid it lapping over my lip again—the punch burning all the way down.

  * * *

  Over the course of the night, assorted relatives in various stages of drunkenness told me that I: looked skinnier, looked fatter, looked pale, looked sick, looked sad. One volunteered a cure for the faint bands of acne that had recently colonized my cheeks—egg whites mixed with vinegar. One asked if Omar and I were engaged yet (I’d slurred, Not yet!). One old uncle asked if I was jealous of Leidy for getting all the attention because of Dante—this after the baby made the rounds and charmed everyone just as Omar had the year before; another kept calling me Leidy but didn’t call Leidy Lizet—Lizet just didn’t exist. Neyda asked me if I was going to get back with Omar in a voice that made me think she would ask for his number if I said no. An hour or so before we sat down to eat, the new boyfriend of one of my older cousins showed up in his tricked-out Mustang, and after introducing himself as Joey to some, Joe to others, we all had to go out to the driveway and listen to the new tube speaker he’d
installed in his trunk because my cousin had helped pay for it. The bass rattled the car so much that I swear the bumper vibrated, but when I pointed out the buzzing to a somewhat-drunk Leidy, she said I was seeing things and rightfully noted I was pretty buzzed myself, ha ha. She handed Dante to me and asked if I thought my cousin’s new boyfriend was cute. I told her no just to be safe, and she stayed put, eventually taking Dante back into her arms.

  The boyfriend had a seat assigned to him at the kids’ table with us (the oldest person at the kids’ table was twenty-six that year). I assumed he’d take Omar’s spot—Zoila hounded our mothers about our breakups and new romances starting in November, gossip hiding behind the pretext of head counts and place settings—but when I passed the table later on my way back from the bathroom, the little card with his name on it (it read, for some reason, Joey/Joe) sat next to a card with another name: Omar. I picked it up with two fingers, balancing myself against the wall as I stared at it. It was the same card from the year before (the ink was blue, the same color as most of the family’s cards, which Zoila kept and reused year after year) and it had an oil stain on the corner from where he’d dripped mojito on it while spooning oil-slicked onions from the plastic tub onto his own plate.

  I scanned the back windows of the house for my mom outside. Hadn’t she told Zoila that Omar wouldn’t be here this year? Did she just assume that our morning breakfast (which hadn’t actually happened, of course, but which she didn’t bother to ask me about after getting back from Ariel’s) hadn’t ended in the breakup I’d said was inevitable, that I’d hinted at over a month earlier? I spotted her sitting on a cooler, waving away an uncle who was threatening to reach between her legs to grab a beer. She clamped on to the cooler’s side handles and screamed so hard she almost fell off of it. I checked the area around my mom’s seat for a place setting for my dad: there wasn’t one. I checked each of the fifty or so spots. None of them were for him. So my mom and Zoila had talked at some point; my mom had told Zoila my father wouldn’t be coming, but she hadn’t said a word about Omar. Or maybe she had, and what she’d said was, Leave it there.