by Alisa Valdes
He has said this sort of thing since we first did it, when I was sixteen. I like sex, liked it from the first time. I’m not shy. And Roberto’s the only one I’ve ever been with, but he’s convinced there must have been others, because I like it so much. “No woman is born loving sex the way you do,” he says. “Someone taught you this filth. When I find out who it was, you better tell him to hide.” I try to tell him it’s just chemistry, that I love his body, his smell, the whole package. But he is suspicious. Que cosa más grande. He is forever accusing me of cheating on him, even though I am completamente faithful.
Fíjate, chica. If you’re born in this country, you might think Roberto is about eighty years old because of the way he acts. He’s not. He’s my age, twenty-eight. He is like most men raised in Latin America—or Miami—which is to say he thinks women come in two flavors: pure and dirty. Pure women are sexless and you marry them and pump them full of babies and they are not supposed to like sex. Dirty girls love sex and you seek them out for pleasure. So a wife who is too sexual, too pretty in public, too demanding in bed—these are all thought of as bad things to men like Roberto. At first it got to me, his criticism, but then I got to B.U. and Elizabeth convinced me to take some feminist theory classes with her and we realized it was all bull.
Like me, Roberto has spent a lot of years in the United States, and he knows at some level how ridiculous this is. We’ve discussed it. I’ve shown him diagrams about the female body and explained to him that all women are wired the same and have the same kind of sexual response, that even his mother has a clitoris and it’s wired just like a penis—all the stuff I learned in college, that Mami never bothered to teach me. He slapped me for that one and stormed out of the house for a few hours. It was so funny, that look on his face as he imagined his mother having an orgasm, it was worth it.
He finally admitted that it was natural for a woman to like sex, “But it shouldn’t be as much as a man likes it,” he insisted. “Only women who are psychologically messed up love sex as much as you do.” Oye, chica. Can you believe it?
I’m working on that. He’ll come around.
But lately, with the pregnancy, I don’t like sex so much. I just do it to keep up appearances. After we finished and Roberto started to snore in the bed next to me, I had to keep running down the hall to the other bathroom, to throw up. I didn’t want Roberto to hear me and figure out what’s going on, know what I mean? I don’t want him to know yet.
I’ve got two boys, twins, five years old and running all over the place with heavy boy feet and a thousand questions a minute. What is this? How does this work? Why? Why? Why? You’d think they were the trained reporters, not me. They say boys and girls are the same unless you make them different, and I don’t think that’s true at all. My boys were all boy from the beginning, looking for dirty things to stuff in their pockets, gurgling over their toy trucks, scampering around the house in those sneakers that squeak like parrots on the hardwood floors.
I want a little girl. When I was shopping for linens for the downstairs bathroom a few days ago, I couldn’t help but notice the little girl clothes and toys in the department stores. I’m tired of tiny jeans and race cars. I’m ready for velvet dresses and baby dolls.
Don’t misunderstand me. I love my boys. They are my world, chica. My entire day revolves around them, taking them to school, picking them up, taking them to music classes and swimming lessons at the health club, combing the cowlicks out of their hair before we go to temple, washing their bodies in the bath at night, reading their bedtime stories, comforting them when they wake with scary dreams, singing Cuban bedtime songs, and telling them about Miami and how much I miss it.
I remember when Jonah was three years old I told him about Miami, always talking about Miami, and he finally said, “Mami, I want to go to your-ami, too.” He breaks my heart, that one. He’s more sensitive than Sethy, who, I’m sorry to say, takes after his father.
You try not to pick favorites, and with twin curly-headed boys that no one but Roberto and I can tell apart, you try even harder to treat them exactly the same. But you find a favorite one anyway, without wanting to. My Ami. What a sweetheart, that one. You could just eat him up with those big green eyes.
No, te lo juro chica, I would be happy to have nothing in my life but these two gorgeous, energetic little men. But a girl would complete me, you know what I mean? A girl would make the family a real family at last. She would be someone I could shop with, someone I could take to concerts on the Esplanade in the summer and she wouldn’t spend the whole time looking for a tree to climb so she could spit on people walking below. Boys embarrass you with their misbehavior.
We’ve been trying, but I want to wait to tell Roberto about the pregnancy until our anniversary in March, when we go on our yearly trip to Buenos Aires. I want it to be special. He’s noticed that I’m gaining weight, even though it’s just one or two pounds. He keeps telling me to eat less. He always tells me to eat less. And I always ignore him. Ha.
He’ll be happy, too. He always complains that our house is too big. We live in a six-bedroom, three-bath, Tudor-style home near the Chestnut Hill Reservoir, on two acres of land with our own little patch of forest. I grew up in a house bigger than this on Palm Island, with marble floors, a swimming pool, dozens of palm trees, and a gated entrance. But there were four kids, and lots of parties, parties for everything you could think of, with the people Mami and Papi knew in Cuba drinking mojitos and eating little sandwiches with butter and pimentos, acting like they never left the island. Our house in Miami never felt empty, because it never was.
This place feels empty, because Roberto doesn’t have any real friends in Boston, only acquaintances, and he doesn’t like it when I have my friends over. He always thinks we’ve been talking about him if we laugh. Of course, we’re never talking about him at all, but it got too hard to explain. He gave me a bloody lip after the sucias left the house last time, and I’ve just decided it isn’t worth it to try to bring friends here anymore. I love to give parties, the planning and execution of them. But I love not bleeding even more than that.
All Roberto’s friends are in Miami. Our marriage would probably be different there. Violence in the home is rare in Cuban Miami, because everyone’s always visiting. Someone is always watching your back. My own parents would have hit each other—and me—a lot more if there weren’t always friends and relatives around, sampling our pantry. We’re a passionate family, and a little yelling, name-calling, and hitting never killed anyone. It goes with family. I just wish we lived somewhere else. Roberto’s rage is getting scary. We’re alone here. He’s got a good job.
I want to fill this house up with little feet. Little girl feet, clicking around in their patent leather Mary Janes. I am two and a half months along. I told Dr. Fisk I don’t want to know the sex until the baby is born, but I already know it’s a girl. I’ve had such morning sickness, day and night. I don’t know why they call it morning sickness, every woman I know who got it had it worse at night. That’s how my mother was with me, but not with my brothers. It’s a girl. I sense it. If I am wrong, I’ll keep trying until my daughter comes along.
I know Roberto wants a baby because he’s been talking about having a corner of the backyard leveled and cleared so we can put in a toddler gym again. He thinks we’ll have another boy, but that’s just the way he is, sabes. I don’t even pay attention to it anymore. It’s not worth fighting about certain things with Roberto. It really isn’t. Te lo juro, chica.
He swore he’d get help after the last time we fought really badly, in the hotel in New Hampshire after the day of skiing, when he fractured my collarbone. He was convinced I’d spent the afternoon in the lodge so I could get it on with the teenager who served me and Lauren hot chocolate. “I saw the way you looked at him,” he said. It was completely crazy. I didn’t even remember what that boy looked like. Roberto thought the red marks on my neck were from that guy sucking on me in the bathroom, and so he planted his foo
t on my chest until the bone snapped. I told Lauren I’d fractured it skiing, and she believed me, thank God.
I’m not blameless. Sometimes I get angry and hit him, too. He’s a lot bigger than I am, but I can get loca, believe me. That last time, he’d done the usual thing and shoved me and called me ugly names in front of the boys and told me to pack my things; he has never come right out and hit me in front of them, you know, like slugged me. He does that, and worse, only when we are alone. That’s something I don’t understand. Society always blames the man in physical marriages. But my mom used to belt my dad, and I regret to say I inherited that tendency. Sometimes, when he hits me, poor Roberto is only defending himself. I don’t expect outsiders to “get” it. That’s why no one knows. We are usually very happy, and that’s what counts.
He’s usually a great father and provider to his boys, that is the main reason I have stayed. He has a good sense of humor, and even though most people would find this strange, he’s gentle most of the time, and thoughtful. He noticed I was sad last week, and came home with a bag full of chenille pillows from Crate & Barrel that I mentioned I liked as we raced past the store on our way to a movie. I didn’t even think he was paying attention when I told him I liked the pillows, but he was. He does that kind of thing all the time. I have conservative beliefs about family and marriage, and I honestly feel the good with us still far outweighs the bad. He always feels terrible after he loses control, and does the nicest things to make up for it. How do you think I got the Land Rover?
I know he doesn’t mean to do it, that it’s just the way he was raised. His dad was (still is) a drinker, and when he was drunk he lost his temper. Poor Roberto used to get beaten, I mean really beaten, chica, with tire irons, things like that, until his bones broke and he had to tell the doctors he fell off his bike. I’m the only one who knows about it. Not even my parents know, and they’ve known his parents for years.
It’s not like we’re some welfare family where the guy is slopping around in his undershirt beating up on the little wifey, right? Por favor. He has never left a long-lasting mark on my body anywhere people can see it—I stayed in for a few days after the bloody lip. Oh, and there was the time he left finger impressions on my arm when he thought I was flirting with one of our gardeners (I wasn’t, of course) and that went away in about an hour. I slugged him one time, and the skin under his eye turned purple for a week. He told people he got hit with a racquetball.
Roberto and I love each other. We know how our relationship works. Is it ideal? No. But it’s love. Love is never ideal. If I can control my own temper, I think he’ll get his in check too. It’s as much my fault as his. He can change. I know he can. You think that sounds like a stupid woman talking. I don’t care. He’s my soul mate and my best friend. I can’t remember my life being empty of Roberto. Like a brother, he’s always been there. Our dysfunction, if that’s what you want to call it, runs deep.
Roberto’s grandparents and mine ran a rum company together in Cuba, and both our families originally came from Austria and Germany many generations ago. Our parents stayed in touch once everybody fled to Miami in 1961. I pulled his curly brown hair at his fifth birthday party, and we wrestled all over the yard at his bar mitzvah. We’ve had the kind of rough physical contact you have with a sibling for as long as I know. At my quinceañera (I was one of the first Jewish girls in Miami to have one) he threw me in the pool at the hotel, in my beautiful silk dress. I grabbed his ankle and yanked him in, too. We dunked each other for ten minutes, and finally shared our first kiss, floating in the water while my Mami screamed from the shore.
I haven’t told the sucias about the really rough stuff. I’ve told Elizabeth, my best friend, about our fights and the occasional slap, but that’s it. I can’t tell the rest of them. Knowing the sucias they’d call the police immediately and have him thrown in jail. They think everything is abuse, every man evil. The sucias would want me to leave him, but they all have careers. After eight years of being a housewife, the thought of being alone terrifies me. What would I do for money if I were alone with two—ay, chica, I mean three—kids to raise? I have no real job experience, and I’m accustomed to a certain kind of lifestyle that requires adequate funds, money of a quantity I could never earn on my own.
My parents aren’t rich anymore, no matter what it looks like. They still have the house on Palm Island, and the ten-year-old Mercedes. But that’s all they have now, except credit cards and each other. When my mother called me last week, it was to ask for a loan. Their neighbors don’t know anything about it, but my father had to file for bankruptcy five years ago.
My grandparents, God rest their souls, owned whole hillside towns in Cuba. They brought a lot of money to Miami and tried to start a few new businesses: Laundromats, pharmacies, restaurants, radio stations, one or two with Papi in charge. But my dad is better at throwing parties than running businesses. Same with Mami, who is still very beautiful. And now, with Papi’s father dead almost ten years, there hasn’t been anyone to run things.
Mami still gets new clothes every week, a habit she developed when she was a tiny, spoiled girl with starched dresses, growing up on Quinta Avenida in Miramar. She never learned to pace her spending, and why should she have? I love Papi, but chico, he’s never been the smartest bulb on the string. He puts bank statements in a file without bothering to open them. Last time he came to visit, I was saddened to see he was still crumpling his ATM receipts and tossing them in the nearest trash can.
When I turned sixteen and asked for a convertible, Papi bought me a new white Mustang. Mami took me shopping for my prom dress on Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills. I didn’t know it then, but now I realize they were slowly going broke the whole time. They would hire fifteen people to work serving drinks at parties in our huge backyard, and I’d weave through the adult legs to the shore of the canal and throw nickels and dimes into the water. Not pennies. Our family vacations lasted a full month. There were cruises, jazz festivals in Europe. We went to Rio de Janeiro for Carnival one year, and the Cannes Film Festival another, with some other families from my school. Mami took us shopping in the spring in New York City and in the fall in Buenos Aires, for shoes and handbags.
Neither of my parents went to college. They moved to Miami when they were about eighteen and had to hit the ground running. Like many of their friends, they never bothered to learn English. There were enough Cubans around, it wasn’t necessary. All of them thought (and still think) they would go back one day, as soon as the Marines arrive and overthrow that hijo de puta. (We are forbidden from saying the name Castro in my parents’ house.)
Even with bankruptcy, they’re still throwing parties for their friends, and offering anyone who drops in a full meal and a bottle of fine wine, prepared by a live-in cook they can’t afford. They still keep the thermostat on the air conditioner set at sixty degrees, which is really cold; all the richest Cubans always sit around the house in sweaters and fuzzy slippers, just to show how rich they are. I tell them to turn it off and use fans, or to get little window unit air conditioners for the rooms they use the most, but they won’t hear of it. That’s insulting to my parents, who want uninvited guests (Cubans drop in whenever, wherever, as Shakira sings) to freeze. That’s the way my parents are, and they don’t know how to be any different. They are too embarrassed to be any different. They asked for a loan because they had run up such a huge bill taking too many guests out on that old leaky yacht. I told Mom to sell the yacht, and she started to call me those names she calls people when she’s not happy with them: Buena cuero, cochina, estúpida, imbécil, sinvergüenza.
Roberto knows all of this. He gave them the loan, but made sure I understood that if it wasn’t repaid, I would be the one to suffer the consequences. He knows the situation I’m in. I won’t inherit a dime. This gives him even more power over me than he had before. Now he can threaten to throw me out, too. And he does, all the time. His favorite thing is to grab a suitcase and start throwing my things in it and lock
me out of the house while the boys cry for Mami and scratch at the glass on the front door.
Roberto is downstairs already, talking to Vilma about something. Sharon, our Swiss nanny who lives in the guest house out back and studies for correspondence courses in her free time, took the boys to school this morning because I was too sick, so they’ve already gone. Good old Vilma. When my parents couldn’t afford to keep her in the house on Palm Island anymore, she moved up here to work for us. She has never known any family other than mine. She’s almost sixty years old, and like a mother to me. We offered her the guest house, of course, but she says she prefers to be in the small back bedroom off the kitchen. All she has in there is her old television—she won’t let me buy her a new one, and won’t let me hook her up to cable even though it wouldn’t cost anything extra—her Bible on the bedside table, a rosary she hung on the wall, a few postcards from her daughter in El Salvador, and a few changes of simple clothes folded in the dresser. She’ll be happy for us, too, when the time comes for our daughter to be born. She doesn’t care that we’re Jewish, she loves us. I think she already knows about the pregnancy; she’s the one who takes out the bathroom trash, and there haven’t been Tampax for months now. Vilma is observant. Lately she tells me not to strain myself and she’s started trying to get me to drink that paste she says is good for pregnant women, with cornstarch, water, and cinnamon. The smell of it sends me reeling.
Oye, I can hear Roberto’s booming voice going on and on about something he saw in the newspaper while Vilma runs the water. People say I’m loud, but they should meet my husband. I’m serious. You think Cubans are loud? Try Cuban Jews. Te lo juro. I didn’t realize how loud we were until I came to Boston for college and had a hard time hearing people who were talking to me. The whole city seemed like it was going around whispering all the time in the snow and ice. It was crazy to me. Miami is loud, hot, and wet. My house growing up was even louder. I’ve never known life any other way.
