Friday Night Chicas

by Mary Castillo

  I felt my orgasm build, surprised again that it was even there, and held my breath, afraid I might frighten it off. But stroke after stroke, Rick drove me higher, until I grabbed his shoulders, tight, and jammed my mouth into his arm to keep from crying out loud. Then, the feelings too intense, I wrapped my legs around him to stop his movements. He didn’t stop. His breathing grew ragged, and with strokes so deep they almost hurt, he came, too.

  No one else had taken me this far, not my body, not my heart. The phone rang, and he shot me an apologetic look and answered, still panting.

  He listened for a moment. “Okay, be right there.” He hung up. “It’s the shop on Cicero. I need to run out there. I can drop you off at your hotel so you can get ready for tonight.”

  Tonight. The reunion. Damn.

  “Sure,” I said, and started to gather my clothes. I bit my lip. Lovemaking this intense was supposed to be followed by tender words, gentle caresses. We’d had some of that, but this abrupt departure cheapened the moment.

  It didn’t help that I’d decided to leave. I couldn’t stay, couldn’t spend more time with Rick, followed by a painful good-bye.

  It was ironic. I’d made my peace with Elmwood Park, and Rick, my sole friend fifteen years ago, my first love, was now the reason I had to go.

  Chapter Nine

  The nine o’clock flight to LaGuardia out of O’Hare would be crowded. I sat in the packed passenger lounge, wondering if my old school chums were over their hangovers.

  I smiled as I remembered the crazy night, especially the finale. The smile faded as I thought of the future Rick and I would never have.

  Maybe I’d email him in a couple of weeks—I’d picked up one of his cards from his dresser. I owed him an apology.

  My row was called and I stood and trudged toward the jetway. Behind me a man muttered an oath. I glanced at the long, grim line behind me. Someone was making a scene, shoving his way forward. A security guard came out from behind the gate attendants’ desk.

  I hoped it wasn’t a nut. I didn’t want to sit on the ground any more than I had to. Now that I’d come this far, I wanted to be home.

  “Excuse me, sir,” the guard said to someone behind me.

  I faced forward, maintaining my New York detachment, but part of me wanted to know what was going on.

  “Sir? If you’d step this way?” The guard waited impassively while the unruly passenger stepped out of line. He grinned at me as he passed. It was Rick.

  I felt my mouth drop open. “Rick?”

  The guard stopped. “Are you two traveling together?”

  “No,” I said.

  “Yes,” Rick said at the same time.

  I glared at him. “You are not. What are you up to?”

  He shrugged, ignoring the curious looks of our fellow passengers, all eavesdropping like Inquirer reporters. “I figured if you were going to miss the reunion party, there wasn’t any point in my being there, so I decided to come with you.”

  “Did I invite you?” Never mind I’d deserted him without any explanation.

  “New York is a big city,” he said with a condescending smile. “I don’t need your permission to travel, Princess Cali.”

  Rick in New York. The thought was exciting. “What about the reunion?”

  He shrugged again. “I figure they got enough excitement out of me last night. The question is, did you?”

  I felt myself turn red. Twenty pairs of curious eyes turned to me.

  Rick reached into his jacket and pulled out a clear plastic corsage box. He opened it and lifted a creamy orchid from the inside.

  He held out the corsage. I felt light-headed. I’d thought it was the aftermath of too much rum, but it was the dreadful, teenage feeling. Longing and uncertainty back full force.

  “Don’t leave, Cali. Let’s get to know each other again. Remember how we used to talk?”

  I nodded. “You don’t think it’s too late?”

  “Heck, no. And now that everyone knows who you are, you’ll have lots of fun.”

  “They’ll think I’m a dork. Still a dork,” I revised.

  Rick pinned the corsage on my lapel. “What is it, Ms. Montalvo, reunion or New York? Either way, it’ll work out.”

  We could be friends again. Every relationship didn’t have to end in marriage. But I studied him, wondering what it would be like to be married to him, to see him every day, sleep at his side every night. Damn marvelous, that’s what.

  His arm went around me. “Did I ever tell you about Nona, my psychic grandmother?”

  “Don’t think you did,” I said, enjoying the weight of his arm, the feel of his chest against me.

  “She said I’d marry a Latina. Warned me against hot Cubanitas.”

  “Really?” I pretended to consider it. “Well, how will you know if you’re in trouble?”

  His lips closed over mine. Long seconds later, I came up for air. He was looking at me when I opened my eyes.

  “Well?”

  “Peligro,” I whispered. “You are in such danger, mister.”

  The security guard led us back out of the terminal, to the cheers of Aisles Twenty-five through Forty-three.

  It had turned out to be one hot, crazy Friday night. And the whole weekend loomed large. Yeah, baby.

  The More Things Change

  SOFIA QUINTERO

  The call caught me in the midst of a grant-writing frenzy. At four o’clock, I still hadn’t reined in the budget, added relevant statistics to the needs statement, or collected updated résumés, and we had to messenger the damned proposal to the mayor’s office by close of business. I only picked up the telephone because I thought my financial officer was calling with the latest figures.

  “Yes.”

  “Ricky?”

  No one had called me Ricky since college. I wouldn’t allow it. A woman doesn’t spend six years and ninety thousand dollars to acquire a Ph.D. only to let people outside her family call her by a nickname from her stint as a scabby-kneed tomboy.

  “Who’s this?”

  The voice on the other end sang, “It’s Lisa!”

  “No way!”

  “Yes!”

  Lisa Pacheco was my best friend at Barnard College. The housing lottery threw us into a double during our first year, but I couldn’t have chosen a better roommate. Despite all the hoopla over affirmative action, it isn’t every day that a Dominicana from Washington Heights enrolls at such a prestigious (read: expensive) university, and I dreaded rooming with some valley girl who claimed an affinity toward Latinos because Rosie Perez was, like, way cool and who owned every album by Miami Sound Machine. The dorm goddess smiled upon me because the housing office matched me with Lisa, a Boricua from Brooklyn who loathed Rosie Perez and couldn’t care less about Gloria Estefan with or without her Sound Machine. Just like me, Lisa clung to freestyle music, felt safer walking down noisy, bodega-lined Amsterdam Avenue than past the eerily still luxury apartments along Riverside Drive, and loved baseball (although the poor girl was a Mets fan. I never held that against her. She can’t help the way she was raised). After graduation Lisa headed to Georgetown to attend medical school, and we fell out of touch.

  “Look at you, diosa, running your own agency, serving the people. But I’m not surprised,” said Lisa. “So are you married, Ricky? Any kids?”

  “Married, yes. Kids, no.” Funny, Lisa would ask me if I married, since in college I vowed more than once that I would never—how’d I put it?—submit to such patriarchal bondage. Hoping to preempt some serious teasing I didn’t have the time or stomach for, I rushed to ask, “What about you, Lisa? When’d you come back to the city?”

  Lisa sighed. “Actually, I just came back a few months ago. You know … after a bad breakup.”

  “Oh. I’m so sorry to hear that, Lis,” I said. “How long were you married?”

  “We weren’t.”

  “Kids?”

  “No. We talked about it but…”

  Shit. It had been way too long.
I refused to strike out. “Aw, Lis, all I can say is that anyone who’d let you go isn’t worthy of you.”

  “Thanks, Ricky,” Lisa said, her voice mixed with appreciation and doubt. Then it perked up. “But guess who’s getting married next weekend?”

  I gave her question some thought. “Not Gladys?”

  “Uh, huh.”

  “Get out!” No way, get out … one phone call from a college friend and I had regressed into a silly coed. Gladys Arroyo and Miriam Sánchez became our roommates sophomore year. Although they’re both from Corona, Queens, they had not met until high school where they were the only two Latinas in their class at Our Lady of Perpetual Grace in Woodside. On their college applications, each requested to room with the other. During their first year, they shared a double at Brooks Hall but the following year somehow wound up in a suite with two other women; one they didn’t know from Eve, and the other they knew they would murder before the semester ended. The housing lottery was less kind to Lisa and me. We got tossed in a Columbia College suite with two male juniors. Neither of us were opposed to living in a coed dorm; we just weren’t keen on sharing the same suite with two men. When Lis and I went to the housing office to complain about our assignment, Gladys and Miriam were already at the window creating a scene. Lisa and I propositioned them about a switch, and they agreed. We tracked down the other two women, and the six of us marched to the housing office and demanded a swap. Gladys, Miriam, Lisa, and I landed a quad on Claremont Avenue and remained there until we graduated.

  So Lisa and I gambled that sharing a suite with two other Latinas from New York would work better than rooming with two blanquitas from God knows where. It did, but not after we spent a semester wondering if we had made a huge mistake. No drama, mind you, we just didn’t click right away. As close as Lisa and I were, we tried not to be cliquish. We were both at the top of our classes at lousy high schools and had suffered four years of SLS—Smart Latina Syndrome. That’s when the guidance counselor calls you a credit to your race yet only recommends you apply to “colleges” that advertise on the back of matchbooks. Meanwhile, your classmates accuse you of acting white even though you’re fluent in Ebonics and know the lyrics to every rap song on the radio. For Lisa and I, attending a prestigious school like Barnard had nothing to do with joining the elite, becoming wealthy, or distancing ourselves from our communities. We just wanted to do what we had to do to be in a position to be who we wanted to be.

  Like my parents, Gladys’s parents settled in Washington Heights before she was born. By the time she was five years old, they managed to buy a modest house in Corona, Queens, and worked two jobs apiece to put her and her two siblings through private school from K through twelve. Just before Miriam turned eight years old, her mother packed Miriam and her brother, Pablo, left Colombia (and Miriam’s father), and settled in Corona with her sister and her son.

  Miriam and Gladys, however, fell right into the elite mind-set as readily as Lisa and I shunned it. If that television show Clueless were set in Queens, Gladys and Miriam would be Cher and Dionne. Same bourgie attitude, lower tax bracket. Much lower. Still, the way they sashayed about the suite wearing clay masks and practicing French—which neither majored in—you’d think they’d cashed in their western Queens street cred for an account at Chanel. Sometimes, to mess with them, Lisa and I would start speaking in what we called Franglais (which, now that I think about it, was actually invented by Pepe le Pew). Miriam would huff, “OK, you guys are so not funny,” and Gladys would add, “Yeah,” while barely holding back a monster giggle.

  Finals have a way of making college roommates bond, and it happened to the four of us in a big way. Two o’clock in the morning on the day of my last big exam and Lisa’s deadline for a twenty-page term paper she had only started seven hours earlier, we decided to take a break to eat. The two of us usually kept to ourselves, but as we headed out the door we found Gladys and Miriam suffering in the living room. Gladys had chewed her usually perfect manicure down to the cuticles as she hunched over a massive economics text, while Miriam seemed on the verge of tears as she stared at the blinking cursor on the blank computer screen. So Lisa and I asked Gladys and Miriam if they wanted us to bring them back anything. Gladys kept changing her order until I finally said, “Look, just come with us.” So the four of us headed out to Tom’s Diner (which then was still a cool grease joint and not the chichi wannabe spawned by Suzanne Vega and Jerry Seinfeld).

  Before you know it, we’re talking and bonding over the challenges of being a working-class Latina at an expensive Ivy League university. How people smiled at us like a circus monkey when you said something insightful in class. How we busted our asses at off-the-books jobs during breaks in addition to our work-study gigs, praying to earn enough to pay what our student loans could not cover in time to register for the next semester. How we resented that there were few if any Latinos represented in the core curriculum, but you could always find a goddamn Margarita Night somewhere on campus. How every time we spotted another Latina notorious for trying to pass for white, we had to fight the urge to holler across College Walk, “¡Miras tu con las manchas de platanos!” How it killed us when other Latino students—whether they went to a public high school, a private school on their parents’ aching backs, or even to a New England boarding school on scholarship—came from neighborhoods just like ours, yet averted their eyes when the cafeteria or maintenance workers went on strike even though they could easily be our kin or neighbors. I remembered like yesterday walking out of Tom’s, catching Lisa’s eye and knowing she had the same thought. These chicas are all right.

  Our conversation over scrambled eggs and home fries was enough, but what happened on the way back home sealed the deal. Nothing unusual happened; we just didn’t expect the ordinary to go down like it did. Gladys and Miriam walked ahead of Lisa and me when they were passed by two ’hood rats who had one blunt too many. One said something so nasty to Gladys, she stopped in her tracks to stare at him as if she could not believe a stranger had been so vulgar. Next thing we know, Miriam is going off on him like cuckolded trailer trash on Jerry Springer. “¡Canto de mieRRRda, tetra hijue-puta! ¡Vete apuñala al mico, güevón! ¡Remalparido!” The Corona really came out in her (the neighborhood, not the beer). Instead of extracting his friend from the situation, ’Hood Rat No. 2 decides to add his half cent, which, of course, meant Lisa and I had to get involved. Next thing you know the four of us have Potty Mouth and Copy Cat surrounded, abusing them in two and a half languages, one of them in three dia-lects (lucky for them Gladys is Dominican, too).

  You’d think four budding feminists at a prestigious women’s college would go home and rage all night over being harassed on the street by strange men. Not us. We stopped at an all-night bodega, bought some wine coolers, and celebrated the way we handled those idiots with much pride and laughter. Lisa even raised her bottle and said, “I propose a toast to Miriam…”

  “Relieved to know ya still have it in ya,” I finished.

  Although Gladys and Miriam both put much energy into repressing it, just knowing that they remained Latina Nuyorquinos at heart proved enough for Lisa and me. When their upper-crust aspirations got the best of us, all it took to revert them was a pitcher of sangria and freestyle night at the Latin Quarter. In turn, Lisa and I even let Gladys and Miriam ply us with French fashion tips, some of which I still use to this day.

  Now after all these years, Lisa called to tell me that Gladys was getting married.

  “To whom?” I asked. “Miriam?”

  “No, silly!” Lisa laughed. “Her brother, Pablo.”

  “Oh!” That made sense. Sort of. He and Gladys dated on and off for years. Not in that tumultuous kind of way relationships at that age can be. More like they drifted in and out of each other’s lives. Gladys had a different crush every semester, but I never saw her with anyone besides Pablo, who stayed over at our place whenever he visited from U Penn where he was prelaw. The ongoing relationship between Gladys and Pab
lo always seemed so dispassionate yet inevitable. I guessed somewhere along the way they were able to discover the fire without getting burned. “So how’d you find this out?”

  “I bumped into Miriam in the Village outside of Saint Vincent’s where I’m doing my residency.…”

  “And where she was shopping.”

  “Of course. So Miriam tells me that Gladys is marrying her brother next weekend, and that although her sister gave her a fabulous bridal shower, Gladys still feels a little cheated because Pablo’s best man threw him a wild bachelor party, but that she doesn’t dare ask for a bachelorette party, let alone so close to the wedding … Finally, I say, look, let’s take her to one of those male revues this Friday. And Miriam goes, ‘Yeah, and let’s track down Ricky so it can be the four of us again. A bachelorette party, a reunion, it’ll be perfect.’ I called Barnard’s alumni office, and here I am. I know it’s short notice, but it’s a special occasion and I’d love to see you. Please tell me you’ll go with us.”

  While I have nothing against it, a male revue is just not my scene. I warned my own sister, Mena, that if a stripper showed up at my bridal shower, I’d lock myself in the bedroom until he left. The crotchless panty hose, flavored lubricant, and other racy gifts I received were cool (and quickly put to use, I admit). But I had just learned that my agency’s board of directors had me at the top of their short list to replace the outgoing executive director. I had to draw the line at some strange guy dry-humping me, especially in front of my coworkers and potentially future subordinates, who were invited to the shower. Besides, Eduardo and I passed on a lavish church wedding to exchange vows in the backyard of our new house. When you dispense with that kind of tradition in favor of such practicality, paying several hundred bucks to a man with less body hair than a newborn rat to grope me just didn’t make sense.

  So my own bridal shower consisted only of relatives and colleagues. Between finishing my doctorate, tending to my relationship with Eduardo, and building my career, I had little time to maintain old friendships or cultivate new ones. I had been so busy with other aspects of my life that I hadn’t even had the time to miss having girlfriends. And now Lisa called and the void in my gut ran so deep, my legs ached under the weight of its emptiness.