Ordinary Girls

by Jaquira Díaz

  As we waited on the advisor, I tapped the paper in front of me. I considered my life. I’d come all this way. I’d left my husband, my house, my job. My dogs. I’d left my whole life. I looked around the table one more time. What the fuck was “Technical Communication” anyway?

  I put an X next to Creative Writing. And then circled it, twice, just to make sure there was no confusion. My whole life, I’d always known. But the x, the two circles, they made it feel real. Now other people would know, too. And I would do whatever I had to do, but I would be a writer.

  As I walked to my car that afternoon, for the first time in my life, I actually felt like a woman, not a girl. Months after my college orientation, when it was clear that I wouldn’t go back, Cheito packed up our place in Miami and followed me to Orlando.

  As I get off the phone with Junito, I think maybe I should be crying, but I’m not. I want to ask Cheito if it’s normal that I’m not crying. He knows me better than anyone. Our two boxers, Taína and Chapo, hop onto the love seat with me. Taína puts her head on my lap, and Chapo licks my face. They do this when I’m sad, so I know I must be sad.

  On TV, the Casey Anthony murder trial is on without any sound. I turn the volume up. Casey Anthony’s mother is on the stand, and I think, That poor woman. Oh God, that poor woman.

  My grandmother is dead, and I’m feeling sorry for a murder suspect’s mother.

  Three weeks ago, Mercy called me unexpectedly. She was living with Tanisha, her youngest. Mami was at the house, too, but it was Mercy who’d dialed my number. She wanted to see how I was, she said. She asked how many years Cheito and I had been together.

  “Too many,” I said, and we both laughed.

  We talked about the Casey Anthony trial.

  “What kind of woman loses a baby and never calls the police?” she asked.

  “A guilty one.”

  We talked about the Baby Lollipops murder case. I was in the middle of writing about the toddler, about his mother—had been for months. I’d spent hours poring over newspaper articles and court documents the night before. Reading witness testimony I hadn’t seen before had left me unable to sleep. I’d been battling insomnia my whole life, but lately, it had gotten worse.

  I asked if she remembered the baby boy whose body had been dumped beneath some bushes in Miami Beach when I was a girl.

  “I remember,” she said. “It was his mother and her lesbian lover who killed him.”

  I waited for Mercy to say more, braced myself for some hateful homophobic rant. More than ten years earlier, after Alaina had come out, my mother had called me to ask if it was true. The whole time I’d heard Mercy yelling in the background about how my sister was dead to her, how she didn’t want any fucking patas in her family.

  “Put her on the phone,” I’d told my mother, coming to Alaina’s defense, but Mercy wouldn’t take the receiver. I’d finally said, “Tell that bitch she can go fuck herself!”

  But instead of unleashing hateful slurs about Ana María Cardona, Mercy took a deep breath and said, “That was, like, twenty years ago,” her voice heavy, exhausted. I assumed it was all the pills she took: antipsychotics, antidepressants, anxiety pills.

  Sitting on the couch now, I wonder: Was she high during that conversation? Was it the pills that made her call me, or was it something else?

  I call Alaina and give her the news. She is silent for a long pause, and then she says, “Wow.”

  I give her all the details Junito gave me, and ask if she’s coming for the funeral, even though I know she can’t. Alaina left Miami Beach for good as soon as she turned eighteen—left for college and never looked back. She lives in Spain, where she’s an artist and social justice activist, and doesn’t make a lot of money. Whenever she gets a little extra cash, she uses it to rescue stray dogs. But even if she could afford it, she probably wouldn’t come anyway. I don’t blame her. I don’t know if I’ll make it either.

  This is not how it feels to lose a grandmother. When Abuela, my real grandmother, died two years ago, I felt a deep, insurmountable grief, like I was completely lost. It was because of her that Mercy didn’t destroy my sense of self-worth. Abuela, who had raised us to love ourselves, our blackness, who when Alaina came out, looked her in the eye and said, “I love you just the way you are. I just want you to be happy.” But this? I don’t know what this is. What does it mean to lose someone who hates everything you are, hates the people you love?

  On the TV, Casey Anthony’s mother describes how her granddaughter had been missing for a month before she called the police herself, how she hadn’t known Caley was missing until that very moment. The newscasters play sections of the grandmother’s 911 calls over and over again. They speculate about what kind of mother goes shopping and partying and drinking, what kind of mother gets tattooed when her daughter has just died tragically. They call her “Tot Mom.” Tot Mom. It’s fucking absurd.

  Abruptly, I jump up off the love seat, frightening Taína and Chapo, and run to our bathroom, where Cheito is in the shower. They run after me, wagging their nubs as I sit on top of the toilet and stare at the waffle-weave shower curtain. It all seems so pointless now: this overpriced shower curtain from Pottery Barn, our oversized four-bedroom house, the flat-screen TVs, the expensive furniture, the two-car garage, the two cars, the motorcycle. We’d bought this house five years ago, a debt we couldn’t afford even with our two salaries. Here I am living in this house with more rooms than I even know what to do with, and my mother is living on the streets half the time and doesn’t even have a phone.

  “My grandmother is dead,” I say to Cheito through the curtain.

  He doesn’t say anything, and I realize it’s probably because he thinks I’m talking about Abuela. Every time in the past two years I’ve said those words to him—My grandmother is dead—it’s been the beginning of a new wave of grief, followed by days in bed, unable to eat or sleep, unable to have a conversation. How long has it been since I’ve referred to Mercy as my grandmother? How long has it been since I even mentioned her?

  “I mean Mercy,” I say. “She took a bunch of pills.”

  Mercy had become a mother at fifteen, a grandmother at thirty-two. In her youth, she was known for brawling in the street with other women, with grown men. She never, ever backed down from a fight, no matter who threatened her. Once, Alaina and I watched her attack a neighbor outside a drugstore, knocked her down and started kicking her, because the woman had called Mercy crazy. Later, we found out that the woman was dating Papi.

  Mercy was fierce and unforgiving, had a list of every person who’d ever wronged her, loved to tell stories of how she’d gotten people back. The woman who’d cut in front of her in line at the supermarket? Mercy had purposely bumped into her and told her to fuck off. The guy on a bike who’d looked at her wrong? She’d slashed his tires later. The boy who’d beaten up one of her daughters? The next morning she’d gone to his sister’s job and slapped her, told her it was a message for her brother, and that the next time she would cut up his face with a razorblade.

  The first time Papi left Mami, Mercy was livid. The only reason a man leaves the mother of his children is another woman, she said. Together she and my mother concocted a plan to get him back: I was supposed to listen to all of Papi’s phone calls and find out the woman’s name. Then they’d scare her into staying away from him, drag her out of her house and kick her ass in the street. Mercy would use her straight razor and carve my mother’s initials into the woman’s face.

  But instead of spying on my father, I told him about their plan. When she found out, Mercy called me a chota, said I was dead to her for helping my father cheat on my own mother, and if she couldn’t find out who the woman was, my father would do. She would give him gills, like a fish.

  My uncle Junior, Titi Xiomara’s husband, was also on Mercy’s list. Junior and Xiomara had fallen in love when they were teenagers, then had two boys, Junito and Angel. They loved their boys—and each other—fiercely. Alaina and I had g
rown up with Junito and Angel. They were like our brothers. When we lived with Mami, Xiomara often came to check on us, brought us food. Sometimes Xiomara and Junior rescued us, took us to their house when Mami was having one of her breakdowns. Junior had rescued Mercy, too. Once, he beat up a guy who’d felt her up at a party, tried to assault her. But still, when Junior pissed her off, Mercy would threaten him like anybody else.

  Like my father, Junior was black, so Mercy had been against their marriage from the beginning, and even in front of Junito and Angel, she would remind them: how Xiomara came from a white family, how Mercy’s father was a blue-eyed blond, how Junior’s family were a bunch of negros. Mercy claimed that Junior’s mother was a witch who used brujos against her daughter, that she had left a voodoo hex outside Xiomara’s door one afternoon: a green bell pepper used as a pincushion, with a long, X-shaped needle inside. X for Xiomara.

  Once, after a telephone argument with Junior, Mercy finally decided to follow through on her threats. Xiomara and the kids had spent an afternoon at Mercy’s house. Junior went to pick them up, strapped the kids into their car seats as Xiomara got in the passenger seat. Then, right there in her neighborhood, in the middle of the moonlit sidewalk, people walking their dogs and riding their bikes and returning home from the grocery store, as Junior closed Xiomara’s passenger door, Mercy pulled out a box cutter and sliced his face.

  He ended up in the hospital, had to get about twelve stitches that left him with a v-shaped scar above his eyebrow.

  Years later, when I was thirteen, after getting into a nasty fight with an ex-boyfriend, I threatened to carve my initials into his face.

  Growing up, I thought my aunts in Virginia and Puerto Rico were lucky. Their mothers, the women who’d actually raised them, were loving and self-sacrificing. Abuela was the same way for me, even if I hadn’t always gotten to live with her. Abuela died the week of Mother’s Day. Ever since, I’ve thought of myself as motherless.

  Every Mother’s Day, I spend hours at the drug store looking at cards. I buy one and leave it sitting out for weeks, then store it in a shoebox in my closet. This year’s card is still on the kitchen counter, next to the glass bowl where we keep our car keys. Staring at it, I wonder what will happen to my mother now that Mercy’s gone. Who will keep her company? Who will make her morning coffee? Who will be there late at night when she comes home wasted?

  All these years, I’ve thought of myself as a runaway, having left Miami Beach to be as far away from my mother and Mercy, and their drama, as possible. Before I left Miami, my mother had been living on the streets. She’d gotten arrested a few times, and I’d wanted to send her to a rehab facility in Virginia, where my aunts could check in on her once in a while. It was a place that specialized in treating women addicts who also suffered from mental illnesses, a place that could help her get her life together. But when Mercy found out I intended to get a court order to send my mother away, she told Mami I was going to lock her up in a mental hospital. Every day for a week my mother called, threatening me. I had been a mistake, she said, a failed abortion. Who the fuck did I think I was? Shortly after that, I left.

  Since then, I’d gone to college, then graduate school. I had been a teacher, worked as a financial aid counselor, edited a magazine. Alaina and I had taken care of Abuela. We both had worked our asses off to have the kind of lives we wanted. But most importantly, we had separated ourselves from Mercy, and from Mami.

  But now, as soon as I hear the news, Mercy’s death becomes like a release, and it arrives like a flood, the desire to see my mother.

  I tell Cheito I need to see her, to make sure she’s okay. We pack our bags, hustle the two dogs into the car, and make the 220-mile drive south to Miami Beach. I listen to the radio and stare out the window while Cheito drives.

  In Clewiston, we stop at a burger joint to use the bathroom. I wash my face in the sink and study myself in the mirror, my eyes rimmed with red, my lips chapped, face pale.

  A year ago, during a trip to Washington, DC, I stopped by my titi Iris’s house. I hadn’t seen her since I was a fifteen-year-old juvenile delinquent, my hair in cornrows, wearing dark brown lip liner and over-plucked eyebrows, a nose ring and gold door-knockers and sixteen other piercings. When I’d come to her house this time, with no piercings and very little makeup, she took my face in her hands.

  “My God, Jaqui,” she said. “You look just like your mother.”

  I didn’t believe her, but when I got home a few days later, I searched through old photo albums and found a picture of my mother at twenty-one, her blond hair cut in a short bob, and for the first time in my life I realized that I had her round face, her cheeks, her smile.

  Now, staring at myself in the bathroom mirror, I don’t see any resemblance.

  Back on the road, my cellphone won’t stop ringing. Junito calls. Angel calls. Papi calls. Alaina. Titi Xiomara.

  Xiomara is in Mercy’s apartment, says the paramedics came and went, and now the cops are there. People keep walking in and out of the bedroom while the body is just lying there, she says. It’s been hours. She still can’t find my mother.

  I turn off my phone. From the driver’s seat Cheito takes my hand. I’m glad he’s not the type of man who says shit like, “She’s in a better place,” or, “You have to remember the good times.” But in the car, I find myself doing exactly that—trying to remember something good about Mercy.

  There is this: she told me stories. When I was a kid, she told me about her first love—my grandfather—a man she met in New York. She was just a teenager, and he was much older and married, but she loved him anyway. She told me about all the men she’d loved, about her baby brother who’d died, about her supernatural experiences: She’d once lived in a haunted house and seen the ghost of a woman who’d died by drowning. She’d been bitten by a poisonous alacrán and survived through the power of prayer. She’d witnessed an entire caldero of rice just throw itself across the room. Things like that happened to Mercy all the time. Chairs would move on their own. Empty glasses would fill with water. Cars would flip over seventeen times, and she’d make it out alive, without even a scratch. Dead birds would be resurrected in her hands when she prayed over them. And once in a while, she’d run into someone she’d known in another life.

  It was when she told these stories that I knew I loved her. But I was never sure if she loved me—or any of her grandchildren, or her daughters, for that matter. She never hugged us or kissed us. She withheld food as a punishment. She regularly kicked our asses. She threw us out on the street, called the cops on us, even threatened to kill a few of us. And she had nasty nicknames for us, even her own grandchildren: Pimple Face, The Anorexic, The Slut, The Fat One, The Bastard, The Alcoholic, La Ganguera, La Delincuente.

  And then there is this: suicide was our family legacy. Her own father, she told us, had been so heartbroken when her mother died, he’d tried to kill himself, but survived. But she would make sure she got it right.

  All my life my grandmother threatened to kill herself. She threatened to jump in front of a bus and leave behind a flattened corpse, to climb to the fifteenth floor of our apartment building and fling herself from the balcony, to take a straight razor to her wrists, to swallow three hundred sleeping pills. And when we found her dead body, she said, we would regret all that we’d done to her. Oh, how sorry we would all be.

  It’s Memorial Day weekend, and traffic is at a standstill on the MacArthur Causeway. We ride with the windows down, sweaty and silent, watching a bright-red sky turn dark. We’ve barely moved in almost an hour.

  The dogs stick their heads out the window, and I stare out at the Venetian Islands—royal palms and mansions with wraparound balconies and Spanish-style homes with elaborate tile roofs. When I was a kid, I used to check out these houses from the bus on my way to downtown Miami. I’d imagine myself in one of them, only I’d be a different girl, with a different family, and I’d swim in the pool and then go play the grand piano in the living room or watch
movies in our personal home theater. The fantasy never got old, no matter how many times I rode the same bus and looked out the same window.

  Miami Beach is overcrowded with tourists, partygoers, club-hoppers. Parking is impossible. By the time we pull up to the building, Mercy’s body has been taken to the medical examiner’s office. We double-park with the flashers on and get out to walk Taína and Chapo. Cheito volunteers to stay with the car and the dogs while I go upstairs and visit with my family, but the last thing I want is to go inside Tanisha’s apartment, the place Mercy called home, and stand in the room where they found her body.

  We wait on the sidewalk as family members arrive, teary-eyed and exhausted: my cousins Junito and Angel, three of my titis, their husbands, their kids. Cheito and I hug them one by one, Taína and Chapo wagging their nubby tails and playing with the kids. Everybody talks about how friendly and well-behaved the dogs are. They ask questions about the ride down, the traffic, my job, Cheito’s job. No one says a word about Mercy.

  I meet Tanisha’s kids, Lia and Jayden, who are eight and three years old, for the first time. They eye me warily, then go back to playing with the dogs. Lia, the older one, stops abruptly and stands with her arms crossed and head down. Then it hits me: just an hour ago Lia and Jayden were in the same room with our grandmother’s body. I wonder if they loved her. But what am I thinking? Of course they loved her.

  My titi Iris takes my hand, pulls me off to the side. She looks into my eyes. “Your mother,” she says, shaking her head. “Oh my God, Jaqui, tu mamá.”

  Then everybody goes quiet.

  Up the street, a scraggly old woman shuffles toward us in worn Converse Chuck Taylors. She wears a dingy black sweater and tattered jeans with holes in them, her hair in a buzz cut. Coming closer, she smiles a toothless smile at me and Cheito. I steel myself—she’s going to ask for spare change, a cigarette, something. Cheito starts digging in his pockets and pulls out a handful of coins. I reach for his hand, sending nickels and quarters flying to the concrete, rolling down the sidewalk. I’m still holding on to him when the woman wraps her arms around me, and I feel her bones, sharp and fragile against me. She kisses my cheek, this small, shattered creature who smells like dirty laundry and cat piss and cigarettes, this stranger. Then she pulls back, and this is how it happens, all at once—the cars blocking the intersection, the tourists headed this way and that, my family gathered on the sidewalk, the dogs barking and wagging their tails, my husband holding my hand. I look into her green eyes and something like a wave breaks inside my chest, and I know, or maybe I always knew: I am seeing my mother for the first time in seven years.