by Alisa Valdes
After college, Rebecca worked as a magazine editor for Seventeen, and two years ago launched her own monthly magazine, Ella, which quickly became the top-selling magazine for Latinas in their twenties and thirties. She’s starting to make a lot of money all on her own, and doesn’t need Brad’s. I would bring it up with her, but Rebecca has always been a very reserved person, a woman who prides herself in self-restraint, a calm and calculating person who I have never seen either lose her temper or dance. She comes from an established family in Albuquerque—you know, that ridiculous-sounding New Mexican city you only hear about on Bugs Bunny?—and they’re the kind of people who have lived in the Southwest since before the pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock, Mexicans—er, Spaniards—who did not come to this country, but were overtaken by it. When she speaks Spanish, it’s antiquated and awkward, as if someone broke out Chaucer’s English in the middle of a frat party. Elizabeth and Sara get a kick out of it. Rebecca’s family is actually from northern New Mexico, and those people just kind of froze in time up there, speaking that old mother tongue and wearing lace on their heads.
She insists on being called “Spanish,” too. God forbid you call her a Mexican. She swears she can trace the family tree back to royalty in Spain. Now, I’m no anthropologist, but I do know what a Pueblo Indian looks like. And Rebecca Baca, with her high cheekbones and flat little butt, fits the description. If any of us sucias were to be chosen to play a “Latina” in an Edward James Olmos production, it would be this chick, okay? And it doesn’t matter how many times Amber comes at her with that Mexica Movement “we are Indians, not Hispanics or Latinos” mumbo jumbo about Aztlán and the indigenous holy war against the pinche gringos, Rebecca ain’t buying it. “I’m Spanish,” she’ll say, calmly, patiently, with that sweet smile, “just the same way you have people in this country who are German and Italian, I’m Spanish. I respect very much who you are and what you believe, and I support everything you’re doing. But trying to recruit me to your Mexican cause makes as much sense as going after the Korean who owns the market.” Don’t try to ask her about the straight black hair and the brown skin and the nose that looks like it came out of an R. C. Gorman painting, though. She’ll wrinkle said dainty hook nose, as she does when people curse or raise their voices, and say with a smile and a mock exasperated sigh, “Moorish, Lauren. We have some Moorish blood in us.” And that, my friends, is that.
Rebecca walks in a straight line to the table without moving her hips. Usnavys tumbles up to give her one of those bear hugs that knocks your wind out. “Sucia!” Usnavys cries. Rebecca gives a pained smile and doesn’t answer with the usual reflected “sucia” cry. Rather, she pats Usnavys gingerly on the back, as if the very pudge and jiggle she finds there is offensive, and says, “Hello, Navi, hello, Lauren. How are you both?” Usnavys doesn’t notice the dis. I do. I always do. Usnavys sees the best in people. I see the worst, I guess. Rebecca hasn’t used the term “sucia” since college, even though she still comes to our gatherings. She thinks it’s immature. It makes me feel even more like a loser than I usually do, because I love saying “sucia” and that must mean I’m about as immature as people come, so, like, whatever, dude.
Rebecca hangs a red peacoat on a wall hook, wrinkling her nose at the brown smudge on the wall. I notice again that she’s a tiny woman, barely five feet tall, with the delicate wrists of a cat. I daresay she’s anorexic, in a fashionable David E. Kelley series kind of way. She wears a dark gray wool pantsuit, with understated but clearly expensive silver jewelry. Or is it platinum? Her tiny earrings have tinier rubies embedded in them. I’m amazed they make bracelets so small. She never eats more than a bowl of soup or white rice when we get together, and usually only half of that, and never drinks. Not that I’m big, really, but I would be if I didn’t stick my finger down my throat every now and then. Skinny does not begin to capture the essence of Rebecca. She’s wiry, muscular, delicate, and fierce, all at once. And, you know, for all our female talk about how awful we supposedly think it is to be skinny like that, the truth is I’m as conditioned as anyone else, and I’m envious. Mad envious. Rebecca is everything I’m not: diplomatic, evenhanded, publicly nonjudgmental (who knows what she thinks to herself), rich, dedicated to a good diet and exercise plan, generous with time and funds, and good at numbers. I think mostly about myself. I bounce checks. Maybe I am jealous of her. Probably. Men never get sick of Rebecca and decide they need space.
Mostly, I wish I had a mom like Rebecca’s. La Doña Baca never calls her daughter from jail, asking for bail money, like mine did. Rebecca’s mother, at graduation, was there, and not just there, but there in a nice suit and smelling of Red Door perfume, with a bouquet of flowers for her daughter, and genuine tears in her eyes. “I’m proud of you,” I remember she told Rebecca. Me? I stood to the side and scanned the crowd for my dad, who had found another unsuspecting victim to talk to about Cuba B.C. (before Castro) for the rest of the afternoon. Playing once again the role of the fascinating foreigner, he all but forgot about me. Mama wasn’t there; she’d said she was coming. When I called her later, she answered the phone in Houma (she moved back in with my granny last year) with a sleepy voice and apologized. “I forgot, sweetheart,” she said. I could hear crickets over the phone. “But I guess it’s official now, you got your degree and I bet you think you’re better than me now.”
In my quiet moments, when no one’s looking, I wish I could switch families and pasts with Rebecca—only I’d never marry Brad.
No wonder that cute British computer software mogul thought Rebecca’s idea to start a magazine was so good he cut her a check for two million dollars to start it up. What’s that? You thought maybe her little orbiting millionaire-to-be husband was footing the bill? Uh, no. I don’t think so. I asked her about that, too. Turns out Brad had asked his parents for the money, and even asked for a loan, but when he told them what it was for, they’d answered by saying, “Bradford, dear, these people don’t—how shall I put it?—enjoy literature. You might as well throw your money away.” These people? I don’t know how Rebecca can stand it. But then, Rebecca probably doesn’t think she’s one of “these people” anyway. She’s Spanish, remember? She art dethended from Thpaniard kingth and queenth.
We sit and wait for the others to arrive, drink strong Cuban coffee from small polystyrene cups. Usnavys orders a couple of appetizers, fried, of course. Rebecca opens her Coach briefcase and extracts a couple of copies of the latest issue of her magazine, with Jennifer Lopez wearing a business suit on the cover. It’s a beautiful publication. She asks me again when I’m going to write for her, and I explain, again, that I am property of the Gazette plantation. “Massa don’t let me write for no uddu peoples, Miss Sca’let,” I say. She smiles tightly and shrugs. Usnavys tries to smooth the moment over and suggests we take bets on which sucia will show up next, but it’s pointless, because we all agree: the next sucia through the door will be Sara, with Amber in tow. Elizabeth is always late to evening functions, mostly because it’s the middle of the night for her. She has to get up at three in the morning to get ready for the morning show, and by the time evening rolls around she’s usually balled up under the covers, sound asleep. For the sucias she makes an exception.
Sara shows up next, skidding down the now-icy street a million miles an hour in her shiny metallic green Land Rover. She’s always in a rush, this one. You got as many things going on as she does, you’d probably always be in a rush, too. Just because she’s a stay-at-home mother does not make Sara less busy than we are. You hear her schedule, and between the driving around of Seth and Jonah, volunteer work, and continuing education classes at Harvard Extension (wine-tasting, sushi preparation, interior design) she’s got a packed life.
Her driving, all that skidding and screeching, is also in keeping with the way Sara moves her body through space. Sara, for all her charm and beauty, is clumsy. I have never known one woman to land so many times in the emergency room. Her mother once told me Sarita had been like this “s
ince she got boobs.” And now that she has two young sons, forget it. The woman is covered head to toe with scrapes and cuts, meted out, she says, by miniature fingernails and a variety of expensive, non-battery-powered, highly educational wooden toys. Clumsy, lovely, loud, and charming. And usually quite punctual in spite of all this. Our Sara.
Amber’s airplane must have been delayed. I’m looking forward to hearing the story; with Sara, a story is not just a story. She has the gift of storytelling, something all our professors noticed at B.U. Everyone thought she should have been the one to go into newspapers or magazines, her stories were so amazingly written. Only problem was half the stuff in them wasn’t true. Big no-no in journalism. Sara exaggerates. Okay, fine, she lies. That better? She’s Cuban. What did they expect? We like to exaggerate, the fish getting bigger with each new telling of the story. She weaves a tale with drama and tension, infuses it with mystery and intrigue, even if all she’s talking about is buying new drapes for her upstairs study. For this reason, she’d never last in a news job, and she knows it; I think that’s why she stays home, but what do I know?
She parks—next to Rebecca’s ride in the grocery store parking lot—and steps out of the Range Rover. Amber jumps down from the passenger’s side looking like Marilyn Manson’s dream girl. What a freak. Every six months, one of us foots the bill for Amber’s plane ticket back here from Los Angeles, and the sucias with the cars pick her up at Logan. Amber can’t afford it herself, see. We tease her about it, and she says, “Just wait, soon you’ll be standing in line for my autograph.” She doesn’t laugh when she says it, because ever since she discovered the “Mexica Movement” Amber has lost any sense of humor she used to have. The Mexica Movement, for those who don’t know, consists of Mexicans and Mexican-Americans who insist on being called Native Americans, and specifically Aztecs, instead of Hispanics or Latinos. Anyway, Sara’s laughing and talking, slicing her hands through the air for punctuation. She’s still talking, loud as always, when they get to our table for hugs and sucia cries. The two could not look more different if they tried. It almost, almost, makes me laugh.
Sara Behar-Asís is dressed like Martha Stewart, her idol. That’s how she always dresses. You’d think she’d want to lounge around that big house of hers in sweats or something, but I swear to you she can’t function if she isn’t coordinated. Gets catatonic or something. Even in college Sara lived for coordination, and her family—former Cuban rum barons—gave her a clothing allowance greater than my dad’s yearly professor’s income. Blew my mind, I’ll tell you that. I always scooped up her leftovers and hand-me-downs, and I still get the occasional spare cashmere sweater.
She’s perfectly put together tonight, of course, coordinated down to the blush on her rosy cheeks, but probably thinks she looks very casual. Dabs of concealer mask a couple of gashes under one eye, handiwork, she says when Rebecca asks, of her kids’ latest adventure with their new junior golf club set. She looks like the perfect, calculatedly casual, colossally klutzy Liz Claiborne–issue suburban mom. She wears beige wool slacks, a white turtleneck covered by a thick cable-knit sweater in the palest of yellows—a color she would no doubt refer to as something like “lemon wash.” I can’t tell for sure, but I think I see a spot of red scabby skin peeking up over the sweater’s collar, the last healing bit of evidence from our ill-fated New Hampshire ski trip last month with our men. While Roberto and Ed slalomed along the black diamond trails, chuckling and back-slapping as their type of filled-with-crap male will, I hunkered down at the side of various blue trails and stared in horror from behind my goggles as an overly ambitious Sara flung her pink-parka-wrapped body like a wet rag over moguls and into frozen pine trees. She even plowed through a family of five at one point, taking down the smallest child in a chorus of parental shrieking. She’s not what you’d call the outdoorsy type. After she slid down half a mountain on her throat and face, skis splayed in the air like the antennae on an old television, I gathered her up and we retreated to the lodge for hot chocolate and watched competitive aerobics on ESPN for the rest of the afternoon. Tonight, she wears stylish hiking boots that have never been hiking and, if she’s lucky, never will—just like her SUV should never go off-roads unless someone else is driving—and a black leather jacket. Her naturally blond hair with the salon highlights might as well be Martha’s, too. Same cut, same color, same vibe. She is white, a fact that would no doubt shock my editors, but which would not shock anyone from Latin America or Miami, where white Cubans still ban other shades of people from their social organizations.
In spite of her lack of grace, it’s hard not to be envious of Sara. She’s married to Roberto, her high school sweetheart, a polite, tall, white Jewish Cuban lawyer from Miami whose parents have known her parents since they were all back on the island; she has two beautiful children who just started kindergarten at the most expensive day school in the area—basically she has it all. Great guy, great house, great family, great twins, great car, great hair. No need to work for money. Her ski trips come for free, not like mine, which cost me. Ed makes a lot more than I do, but does he pay for anything? Heck, no. Fifty-fifty, he says with that wink. That’s the only way to know our love is true, he says. Roberto would go into cardiac arrest if Sara ever wanted to pay for anything herself. He buys her presents all the time, too. Just because he loves her. Been with her since they were in high school, and he still does these things. A Range Rover with a big white bow on the hood, just because he loves her. A diamond tennis bracelet hidden at the bottom of a box of kosher chocolates, just because he loves her. A newly remodeled bathroom, decorator everything, just because he loves her. And his head is not enormous and deformed, either, like some heads we know. As a matter of fact, Roberto has a very nicely shaped head, which goes nicely with his nicely shaped everything else. He’s yummy handsome, that Roberto, in a taller–Paul Reiser sort of way. I think every sucia has had Roberto fantasies. We all want Roberto, and because he’s taken, we all want a guy exactly like Roberto, only problem is he appears to be the only one out there. A guy who’s faithful, dependable, rich, handsome, kind, funny, and who has known you since you were a goofy girl covered with pimples, accidentally falling into the canal behind your parents’ mansion and he jumps in with all those muscles to save you from yourself. Together, shivering on the grass, you watch his velvet yarmulke float toward the sea and you think—this is it, he’s the one. A wonderful guy who continues to save you from yourself for the rest of your life.
Must be nice.
We sucias are happy for Sara, por supuesto, but we hate her at the same time because our lives are not nearly that neat and perfect. I think she could make a decent living as an interior designer, provided she left the vases and pottery and such to someone with less butter on their fingers, and I’ve told her so. She has expressed interest in pursuing a career once the boys are old enough not to “need me at home,” but she seems to be in no hurry. Give her a couple old curtains and a junkyard and she’ll come up with something fabulous. Not cool, not interesting, not great, but fabulous. We used to joke that she should have been a gay guy.
Now, Amber. Ugh. I don’t know where to begin with this girl. When I first met her, in freshman media writing, she was a little pocha from So Cal, a coffee-skinned, pretty girl with an unnaturally flat tummy. She plucked her eyebrows completely off, and drew them back in as thin arching lines. (“Pocha,” for the uninitiated, refers to the kind of Mexican-American who speaks no Spanish and breaks into a sweat if she eats anything hotter than Old El Paso mild salsa.)
Back then, Amber wore her dark, shimmering hair long, with heavy bangs curled under, and she wore the kind of baggy girl clothes and fake gold “dolphin” earrings that probably seemed normal where she grew up but that seemed a little ‘hood-ratty to us. She had grown up in a coastal town near San Diego, a town full of clean-cut U.S. Marines, where pretty much everyone had a Spanish surname and a Camaro with a worn-out Bon Jovi cassette in the tape deck. She was only vaguely aware of being
a Hispanic when she got to B.U., and didn’t think much about it until she met Saul (pronounced Sah-OOL), a longhaired, emaciated rock guitarist from Monterrey, Mexico. He was a Berklee College of Music student who told her he thought she looked just like an image of the Virgin of Guadalupe he saw in a dream, dropping to his knees in reverence in the middle of the B.U. quad in a snowstorm. She thought that was cool, and thought Saul, with his pasty skin, yards of tattoos, and constant reefer rolling, was just weird enough to freak her Republican parents out for a while. He gave her all kinds of books on Chicanos and the Mexican immigrant struggle in the United States and started dragging her to these “movement” meetings and concerts. And that was the end of Amber as we knew her.
Amber plays awesome guitar, flute, and piano, and always had an incredible voice. She has tried for the past six years to get a record deal, but it never quite works out. She invariably calls us (collect) for pep talks when she gets rejections, and we always oblige. We may question her fashion sense, or her ethnic identity, but none of us has ever doubted for a minute that Amber was phenomenally talented.
Amber actually attended B.U. on a classical music scholarship and took communications classes just in case she couldn’t become the next Mariah Carey, her original goal. She could always play the guitar, better than Saul did, in fact, thanks to her uncle giving her lessons at his auto body shop in Escondido, California. Her full-blown Chicana awakening happened when she boarded a crusty old green VW bus with Saul, and trekked across Mexico and the southwestern U.S. one summer on the “Free Chiapas” tour with his band. She came back having exchanged all “ch”s with “x” and all “x”s with “ch.” Like Chicana was now Xicana, “just like the Aztecs spelled it,” she said. Don’t ask me how the pre-Columbian Aztecs had access to the Roman alphabet, but according to Amber and her Mexica friends, they did. Mexicans were now “Mechicans” too. She still painted her eyebrows in, but now they looked more like angry upward slashes than surprised arches. She began to collect eagle feathers, ankle bells, and gold shields, and spoke almost nothing but Spanish, a language she never before spoke much beyond the words she heard growing up: m’ija, albondigas, churro, cerveza, make mimis, abuelo, sopa, and chingón.
