Make Your Home Among Strangers

by Jennine Capó Crucet

  I crushed the card with Omar’s name in my hand and rushed through the open glass door, almost tripping over the metal guide rail on the floor. My mom had moved off the cooler and was now sitting on Zoila’s lap. Zoila was pretending my mom was a baby, bouncing Mami on her thighs and trying to force my mom’s head down to her chest.

  —You think I’m a joke? Mami yelled.

  —Mom, can I talk to you? I said.

  —Come, come let me feed you like you’re Ariel, Zoila said.

  My mom wrestled her head away from Zoila’s hands and jumped off her lap.

  —That is not what I’m doing, she yelled to Zoila. We’re right to be worried. What I don’t understand is how you’re not.

  The week before I came home for Christmas, the lawyers for Ariel’s Miami family officially requested that Ariel be granted political asylum, and from what I could tell, most of Miami was pretty certain—or was pretending to be certain—that he’d get it. He was, after all, Cuban, and he had, after all, reached land. People like Zoila saw it that plainly; they didn’t think about the complications—that he hadn’t made it to land unassisted, that he was a minor with a father back in Cuba who was now asking the UN to step in and get his kid back for him. My mom, along with dozens of others who saw themselves as close to the Hernandez family, saw all those complications and allowed them to keep her up at night.

  —Ay chica please, Zoila said, flicking her wrist and splaying her fingers in the air. Stop your preaching already.

  My mom growled, Maybe you need to be paying more attention.

  Zoila leaned back, her fingers now hinged around the metal arms of her lawn chair.

  —He’s not going anywhere, Zoila said. He’ll get asylum with or without all those tears for the cameras. So cálmate, please, que you’re making a fool of yourself, like those why-too-kay people on the TV.

  —¿Qué tu qué? an uncle’s voice howled.

  The circle of cousins and tíos around Zoila and my mom crashed into mean laughter, the men slapping their knees, some of them laughing so hard it made them cough. Zoila turned to Tony in the commotion and said, The only reason she gives a shit about ese niño is because she’s lonely and has nothing better to do.

  My mom kept her eyes on her cousin and said, You know, Zoila, go fuck yourself.

  Tony lunged to the edge of his seat but Zoila, without breaking my mom’s stare, flung out her arm and blocked him from getting up. He held himself on the chair’s edge.

  —No, come on Zoila, Mom said. Let your grandson come over here.

  —Mami, I shouted this time.

  She snapped her chin toward me, her face and neck red under her streaky foundation, some cream a shade too light on her skin.

  —What do you want now, she barked at me.

  As if I’d been asking her questions all night rather than hanging close to Leidy and fending off stupid questions myself. As if she wasn’t about to get smacked after spending the whole night trying to convince her drunk and largely uninterested relatives to join her on New Year’s Day at a rally in support of Ariel’s political asylum request, one she’d told us about (instead of asking about my fake Omar meeting where one of us may very well have dumped the other) while we got dressed. The corners of the card with Omar’s name dug into my palm. My jaw tightened and I felt my words come out through my teeth.

  I said, I need to talk to you. Now.

  One uncle said, Oooooh shit! And another said, Lourdes is getting beat tonight by somebody! He flapped his hand like he’d burned his fingers on something.

  As my mom stepped over to me, Zoila said an exaggerated Thank you. Then, to Tony and the other family, Let’s see how la profesora handles her.

  Zoila lowered the barricade of her arm from Tony’s chest, but they both seemed to be waiting for me to say something back. I knew she meant the profesora thing as an insult to my mom more than to me, but I was thrilled to have some sort of acknowledgment of what I was doing. It meant they knew. They knew what me going away signified but hadn’t said anything because they just didn’t know what to say. Then I remembered the woman from the airport shuttle on Thanksgiving, my imaginary profesora, how much I’d ended up hating her for her accidental insult. And maybe Zoila was implying something like that instead, that I gave off the stink of thinking I was better than everybody. But that was fine right then. I needed it. I smiled at Zoila, but my mom grabbed the top of my arm—her nails digging into the extra-white skin of my arm’s underside—and pulled me away. Omar’s name card almost fell from my hand.

  She dragged me back into the house, where no one outside could hear us.

  —Who do you think you are, talking to me like that in front of people?

  I pried her hand from my arm and said, Nobody.

  She jammed four fingers, hard, into the muscle right above my left breast and said, That’s right. She pushed me back—the side of my head bumped against the edge of a shelf bolted into the wall. She said, Maybe you forgot that up there. Maybe it’s time you remember better.

  I leaned my head away from the shelf and took the card from my palm, smoothing it out in the space between our faces.

  —I just want to know, I said, why this was on the table.

  She didn’t even have to look at it. She knew what I meant.

  —So Zoila forgot to take out Omar. So what?

  She went to grab it and I snatched it up higher.

  —She forgot? I said. Or you told her to leave it there?

  —Maybe you needed a reminder, to remember what’s really important.

  —Omar? Are you serious?

  —You think you don’t need anybody. Four months away and all of a sudden you’re too good for him?

  —You don’t even know what’s going on with us! You haven’t asked me one fucking question since I’ve been back. About Omar or college or anything.

  She grabbed both my shoulders and slammed me against the wall for good, pinned me there. If I’d turned my head to the left, I would’ve caught the edge of the shelf in my eye.

  —I have to ask you questions now? I don’t need to ask you shit.

  She let go of me but stayed in my face. Even though I should’ve kept quiet, I squinted and hissed, Don’t you want to know what happened this morning? Who I was really with while you were out distracting yourself?

  Her hand swept up—for sure she was about to slap me, and I would’ve deserved it—but instead she went for my fist and tore Omar’s name away.

  —Distracting myself? You don’t get to talk to me like that! You don’t know shit about sacrifice. You don’t know shit about shit!

  —Zoila’s right, you only care about Ariel because what else do you have going on?

  She shoved me again and the room spun, the sangria sloshing in me, and I lunged forward to keep her in one spot, reaching for her shoulders, but she took a wide step away from me—she was letting me fall. So I reached back instead and caught myself, slid my hands against the sandpaper of the wall, pressed my spine against it and sank to the ground, my butt hitting the floor too fast and too hard.

  —You can go to whatever college for as long as you want, but about some things, you’ll always be fucking stupid, she said.

  She tossed the paper at me on the floor and said, You think you have problems? You, your sister, your idiot tía out there? You made your problems.

  She turned her back to me and walked out of the room, screaming as she left, Nobody has any idea what Ariel and Caridaylis are going through right this second, but I do. I know what it means to lose so much. None of you know shit because you haven’t sacrificed shit for anyone. Selfish pigs, that’s what you and your sister are.

  —Mami, I yelled after her, but she exploded from the house, slamming the front door behind her.

  The room’s walls swirled around me along with her words—how could we be the selfish ones when she was the one spending all her free time away from us, fooling herself into believing she belonged somewhere else? I was making my own problems
—with Omar, with school, too, in her mind—but she wasn’t? I worried maybe the sangria was coming back for me, that I would throw it up right there on Zoila’s floor. I sat still until the spinning stopped, then looked over to a wispy pile of dust and hair in the corner. The crumpled name card floated on top of it. The years that my dad hadn’t shown up to Noche Buena, someone—Zoila or her first husband or even Leidy assigned to do it by some other tía—was quick to get rid of his place setting, to make the paper plate and the plastic fork and knife and napkin disappear, the rest of the seats shifting to absorb and erase his space. From my spot on the floor, I looked at Omar’s seat, the foldout chair squatting in the same spot he’d sat last year, next to me. He’d been a smash hit: spoke the best Spanish he could muster to every old person, drank a ton and didn’t show it, called every man papo or papito and sold it as sincere. He’d only made me cringe once, when he’d told one of my cousins that the rum he was pouring for him from my aunt’s bar was one-hundred-percent proof. My cousin had said, Sweet, and taken two shots with him, but I still logged it as something that would help me make the decision to leave for college if I got in anywhere far enough away. This year, Omar’s seat was still there, even though my dad’s place at the table was gone; in Miami, coverage of Ariel’s first Noche Buena in the United States—footage of his first lechón, him dancing, him meeting a big Cuban Santa Claus—trumped all things Y2K; I sat on the floor of my aunt’s house, there because my mom was mad for too many reasons, the sangria thick in my throat, and I thought of the excuse Leidy had used for Roly the year before, how I could recycle it—Omar just couldn’t get off of work—and I promised myself I’d tell everyone at the table that Omar was really sorry he couldn’t make it. He’s real sorry, but next year? I’d say, Next year will be different. I didn’t understand what my mom had accused me of, but I thought I knew how to undo it, how to backslide into something more recognizable.

  While we ate, Mami sat as far from us as she could. Omar couldn’t get off work, I kept slurring, even after Leidy kicked and kicked my shin under the table each time I forced out the excuse. Dante crawled around on the floor next to her, moving from cousin to cousin, begging to be lifted. I kicked Leidy back and said it anyway—Next year, you’ll see—to Neyda, to people who’d been whispering about my mom’s outburst, her door-slamming and her curses to her cousins: Watch, next year, I promised them, my mouth and fingers shiny with the grease of familiar food.

  21

  I CALLED OMAR THAT NIGHT. I waited until my head was clear, until Leidy and my mom were asleep. I used the kitchen phone, my back against the wall and my butt on the floor again, this time in my mom’s apartment. I was ready to hear it from him too now, for him to chew me out for being a baby and a bitch and a bad girlfriend.

  —I was wondering if you were gonna pull another Thanksgiving on me, Omar said almost right away, after sighing at hearing me say, It’s me, it’s El.

  Despite what I’d thought up to that moment, it felt good to hear his voice, to hear him say he missed me. He’d just gotten home from his own family’s party and was sweet instead of angry because he’d been drinking. But only a little, he said. We were flirty, joking around in a way we hadn’t since we’d first confessed to liking each other. He told me some of our friends had called him to go out, telling him to let me know too, since no one had the apartment’s new number, but that he was waiting on me to call him first.

  —You’re the one visiting, he said.

  He admitted he did and didn’t understand what was up with me, but that he knew I was freaked out about school and the hearing results. I know how you get, he said—the same phrase my dad had used at breakfast to warn me about my mom.

  —I thought maybe they’d given you the electric chair or something, he said. You never called me back. How bad was it?

  I kept quiet. Only a few days had passed since my last exam, but it all felt so far behind me that I couldn’t go back to it, not with his voice so close in my ear, with how easy it was to talk to him about anything else.

  —It wasn’t bad, I said. It was a big misunderstanding. It’s fixed now, it’s over.

  I closed my eyes, praying he wouldn’t ask for more because there was nothing else about it I could bring myself to say to him.

  —So you don’t have to come home?

  —No, I said. Are you sad?

  I meant it sarcastically, but he said, Yes and no. He said he’d been thinking a lot about me, about how I pushed him away whenever I got stressed, but that he figured we were meant to be, so neither of us had to work too hard.

  —What we are is bigger than talking every night on the phone, El, he said, and every little hair on my arms stood straight up. Maybe I was making my own problems. When he asked if he could come over the next day, on Christmas, I twirled the phone cord around my finger and said, Why? You got a present for me?

  —I do, he said. Got it a while ago.

  I let the cord unravel back into place. I hadn’t gotten him anything and said so.

  —I didn’t expect you to, he said. Your roommate what’s-her-name made it sound like you’d moved into the library. Still though, a Rawlings T-shirt would’ve been nice.

  He waited and said, It’s not like you don’t know my size.

  I pulled my knees to my chest. A tiny plastic Christmas tree on the dinette table was the only sign in the apartment of what tomorrow was; my mom made us leave Zoila’s before any presents were given out or the leftover food divvied up, so there were none of the annual post-Noche Buena trappings: foil-covered containers on the kitchen counter; hunks of flan in the fridge; gift boxes of cheap booze—matching tumbler included, a shiny bow the only attempt at wrapping—left on the floor by the couch. There were no cards from anyone either—the only ones we ever got being from our optometrist’s and dentist’s offices, from the public library I’d volunteered at one summer, people reminding us of some obligation—and I wondered if my mom had forgotten to update her address with these places.

  —I’m sorry, I said. You know people asked about you at Noche Buena?

  —Really? he said.

  —Yeah. It was kinda bad tonight actually. My mom?

  I struggled to think of how to work the entirety of my mom’s behavior into one sentence, the way she’d shoved me then let me just drop, the march around the block she took before deciding to come back and eat, the way she’d pushed Leidy away when she asked my mom to hold Dante while Leidy served herself some food, how she’d acted like nothing had happened when she talked to Zoila or Tony or anyone else who’d messed with her about Ariel, but then the minute after she’d helped clear the plates—when the party traditionally really got started—she’d yanked Dante off the floor and told us to say bye to everyone while she strapped him into his car seat—We’re getting out of here, she’d said, and not added another word the whole ride home.

  While waiting for me to say something, Omar let out what sounded like a little burp or a sigh, then said, You there? So I abandoned any hope of nuance or complexity and just said, My mom is super pissed at me, I think. She’s not talking to me.

  —Uh-oh, he said.

  His voice sounded like he was ready to hear the rest of a joke, and I knew it could turn into that, so I said instead, You know they set a place for you at the table?

  —Ha! Why’d you tell them I was coming?

  —No, I didn’t. It just existed. It started this bad fight with my mom.

  He shushed me. He said, Everything’s cool now, we’re talking again, El. It’s cool.

  —Okay, I said. I was sort of thankful he didn’t want to hear it, because it meant I didn’t have to think hard about anything for a little while.

  —Listen, I said, come whenever you want tomorrow. No, wait. Come as early as you can.

  He laughed and said, So you want me to come early, huh?

  —Omar, god! You know what I mean. Just – just come over tomorrow.

  —All right, he laughed.

  I inspected m
y knees, the spikes of hair on them I needed to shave.

  —Hey, I said. I should warn you I’ve gotten really, really fat since you last saw me.

  —For real? I heard him shift the phone to his other ear. I didn’t expect him to play along with my joke, but he said, Like how big are we talking?

  —I probably gained two, three hundred pounds I’m guessing.

  He whistled into the phone. He said, You’re still fucking weird, El, but that’s okay I guess.

  After a second he said, I can’t blame you for beefing up for the winter.

  I laughed, and he said, But is it okay if I’m still ripped as hell? Because I am fucking fine. I’m still lifting like crazy and I am so fucking cut up these days it might be hard for you to keep your fat hands off me. That’s okay, right?

  I’d blocked out so much of our last night together before leaving for New York—the humiliating tow truck, the birth control I didn’t mention because he’d assume it meant I was planning to cheat on him. But the good parts of that night—him sucking on the spot where my shoulder met my neck, the lick of cool air that rushed over the tips of my breasts just as he’d snatched off my bra—flared in the quiet of that moment like headlights through the windows. I thought of his chest and arms stretching the fabric of the Rawlings shirt I hadn’t bought him, of the way Jillian had gawked at the very first picture of him I’d ever shown her, her mouth an open O.

  —I guess that’s fine, I said.

  * * *

  I spent a good hour after hanging up sitting in the living room and promising myself I would not have sex with Omar, no matter how good he looked, no matter what else I ended up doing with him out of sheer horniness. I will not suck his dick and I will not have sex with him, I told myself as I thrashed around on the living room couch, hoping to work out my frustration in advance of seeing him while Leidy and Dante and my mom slept in their rooms. I told myself Omar could suck on any part of me he wanted, stick anything he wanted into me, so long as it wasn’t his dick. As long as his dick didn’t make its way into any orifice, I’d be free and clear to let our relationship dissolve. We could be what Jillian called friends with benefits, except the one benefit she’d talked about—sex—would be the only thing we wouldn’t do. Because sex with Omar meant too much: Omar was my first, and I was his second (though he’d only done it with the first girl three times—she was older than him, an aspiring dancer for the Miami Heat that he’d met at a club the summer before we got together). Sex meant, for both of us, that we were a serious couple destined for something together, and until I had my grades—until I knew for sure what my future at Rawlings would be—I didn’t want that pressure back again. I vowed not to let it happen.