by OSTOW, MICOL
Rosa sees me laughing, chuckles. “You think that’s funny, mami?” she asks. “Okay, sí, so you’re not exactly a puertorriqueña . But you can’t deny what’s inside.”
“She’s a nuyorican,” Dora shrieks, a crazy grin on her little face. “Like you said the other day.”
“That’s true, m’ija,” Rosa agrees. She finally puts down her wet dish towel, regards me. “A nuyorican and, as I say, one of my girls.”
I can live with that, I think, for six weeks.
Then I see it—the look on her face that says that we’re done with the warm and fuzzy part of the talk and on to something a little more hard-core.
“And Emilia, Esperanza, whatever we will call you for while you’re here—”
I blink. Can’t she just call me Emily? Do I need to be renamed ?
“—I must tell you that my girls know my house rules.”
I have a sinking feeling that the house rules are, shall we say, extensive. “Well, shoot. Let me have them,” I say, then immediately worry that she thinks I’m being flippant.
“We all help to keep this house running,” Rosa says. “That includes cooking, cleaning, and watching over the younger girls.”
Pitching in at meals seems perfectly reasonable, seeing as how I essentially ousted Lucy from her room.
Cleaning? Well, we have a housekeeper back home who comes once a week, but it’s not like I don’t know how to run the spin cycle on the washing machine. Mostly.
“Sure,” I say. “Of course.”
“School is finished now, but the girls are taking summer study courses through our church.”
Bible camp? Yikes. I mean, the only time my family goes to synagogue is the high holidays. And, I suppose, at my bat mitzvah. But that was, like, five years ago.
“Okay,” I say, not sure how this affects me.
“Lucy will be at work most days. The girls would normally walk a las tiendas—to the mall—after camp to meet her and she would walk them home. But this is better. This way you can walk them home.”
This probably means that I’m not exactly free to do as I please during the days. And that I will need to get a map of the city.
“Unless your mother is around. You two can work that out together. I think she is going to rent a car.”
Big sigh of relief. A car, aka freedom: check.
“On weeknights we eat at seven. The girls know this. I prepare the food in the mornings so that when they get home, they can begin the cooking.”
None of this sounds terrible, especially with the wheels factored in. But she’s not done.
“After dinner Pilar and Lucy can show you how to clean the kitchen. We mop every other day. Otherwise, the bugs.” She shudders. “We wash dishes immediately after we eat.”
“Laundry is por los domingos, on the Sundays, and el mercado is Saturday. La tele is only after dinner and only for an hour. Church is Sunday mornings, but you and your mother can decide if you would like to join us there.”
Church? Um . . .
“Curfew is eleven on weeknights, midnight on weekends.”
Curfew? Wait. What?
I haven’t had a curfew in, well, ever. I just . . . come home when things are over. This is unbelievable.
Not that I have anywhere to go, but that could change. Right?
Mercifully the front door bursts open, putting an end to Rosa’s Rules and Regulations for Nuyorican Living. José saunters into the kitchen.
“Hola, Mamá,” he says, striding across the room and kissing Rosa on the cheek.
“Hola, muchacho. Ai, estamos comiendo ahora.”
“No puedo. Tengo que encontrar a Carlos a las películas.”
Rosa shrugs. She points to the pot that Pilar still dutifully stirs. “Por favor. Eat something. Algo pequeño?”
He leans over, pulls the spoon away from Pilar, scoops up what I now see is a rice-and-bean concoction. “Mmmm. Gracias,” he says. He disappears toward his room. “Gonna grab my jacket.”
“Leave his plate in case he wants to eat something when he gets back,” Rosa says, to no one in particular. “And go call your mother. We’re ready to eat, the rest of us.”
“I think she’s reading in the bedroom,” Ana offers. “I’ll get her.”
Ana calls my mother, and we settle at the table. Lucy serves the rice and beans and Pilar sets out the salad. After a moment of contented chewing—I totally heart complex carbohydrates—we hear the door slam again. “¡Hasta luego!”
Apparently there are way different ground rules for Puerto Rican boys.
Lucy chases a black bean across her plate and onto her fork. She chews thoughtfully. If she’s got an opinion about the state of the union in the household, she sure isn’t sharing it.
But it’s probably just as well.
Later, after dinner, Lucy washes dishes and I dry. I think of our dishwasher at home—which always seems to miraculously load and unload itself—and vow then and there never again to take it for granted.
But drying itself is quiet, automatic, Zen. I focus on the task and not on the fact that Lucy hasn’t said one word more to me than is absolutely necessary.
I’m not sure exactly what she has against me. I mean, there’s the whole being-kicked-out-of-her-room thing, but still. She’s had a chip on her shoulder about me from moment one. And as teenage girls go, I’m a pretty inoffensive specimen. Forgettable? Maybe. That’s the flip side of inoffensive. But it’s better than the alternative. I have no idea what’s up Lucy’s butt.
Abruptly she turns the faucet off. The utter silence is deafening. I can hear myself swallow. “Done?”
She nods. “Do you want to go out?”
I’m so shocked, I think I actually physically recoil. “Um, what?”
“Tonight,” she says flatly. “Do you want to meet up with some of my friends?” The look on her face tells me exactly how thrilled she is at the prospect. “We’re going to a café.”
Clearly Rosa put her up to this. It’s the only explanation. And given how pissy Lucy’s been with me since I got here, the whole idea sounds less than enticing.
Declining, however, is not an option.
“Sure.” I groan. I cough and try to muster some genuine enthusiasm. “Sure!”
“Great,” she says. She looks me up and down. My jeans are covered in wet splotches from where I leaned the dishes up against them as I dried. “I’m going to change.”
She pads off toward her bedroom, leaving me to ponder her subtle hint. As of this very moment, I have exactly two tank tops and a hot pink Juicy hoodie to my name. I will not exactly be knocking them dead at the local Starbucks. But that’s okay. My expectations for this evening are appropriately low.
It’s just self-preservation. I mean, six weeks? Under certain circumstances, six weeks could be a lifetime.
And this here, this little stint in the motherland, is starting to feel like some pretty certain circumstances to me.
Four
Where’s the café?” I ask, patting the wet splotches on my jeans as if that will help them to dry more quickly.
Lucy signals, peers over her shoulder, and smoothly pulls the car into a minuscule parking spot. So she’s an expert parallel parker on top of everything else? Fabulous. Not intimidating at all.
“Um, is that it?” I ask, deciding to assume that she hadn’t heard me the first time rather than the other, more obvious alternative.
Lucy turns to me briefly as she kills the ignition. “No café,” she says shortly, stepping outside the car and slamming the door in her wake.
My mouth drops open in confusion. I close it, slide out of the passenger seat, and lock the door behind myself. Once I’m out, I notice that Lucy is buried inside the car again, digging in the backseat. She fishes out first one, then another open-toed, kitten-heeled silver sandal, which she quickly swaps for the sneakers she was wearing when she left the house. “There is no café,” she says. “It’s a disco.”
“A disco?” I repeat, aware th
at I sound mildly challenged.
“A salsa club,” she says matter-of-factly. She gives a tug on her jeans, and suddenly they sit a full two inches lower on her hip, exposing killer abs. My eye catches on her naval, which sparkles with lavender glitter.
“No way could I get a real piercing, but this is cool,” she says, catching me ogling. She shrugs off her jean jacket and I have my first glimpse of her top, which is a tight white off-the-shoulder number. The jacket is crumpled into a ball and tossed onto the backseat as well, banished to the realm of the sneakers.
Lucy rummages in her small denim bag for a moment or two longer. “Yes,” she whispers triumphantly, opening her palm to reveal a fistful of silver. In go two dangly beaded earrings. She pulls the elastic out of her hair and now she’s a vision in blond, a ringer for a pop princess, her hair tumbling down her shoulders in big shampoo-commercial waves.
“I really wish my jeans were dry,” I crack. But that’s the least of it. If my outfit—jeans, flip-flops, and a tank top—was boring before, my unfavorable comparison to Lucy has knocked me down a few pegs further. For a moment I wonder if I should just throw a bag over my head and call it a night.
She glances at me and—is it possible?—manages the slightest of smiles. “You’ll be fine.”
I allow myself a moment to feel slightly more at ease. “I mean, no one’s really going to be looking at you.”
The moment is over.
“So, a salsa club?” I repeat.
This is terrible news. I don’t dance. Like, for real don’t dance. Not even beer commercial dancing—you know, when everyone’s had a few cool frosty ones and then the girls decide to do the cheesy sexy hip shake while mouthing along to eighties music at the top of their lungs.
Yeah, not even that. I’m just way too self-conscious. The tragic irony is that I took ballet, tap, jazz, gymnastics—you name it—for years. But something about an actual freestyle dance floor performance suffuses me with dread. Thankfully Noah feels the same way. I get to seem all understanding, sitting with him on the sidelines during the big Britney-style finales at the school dances.
Ha. Lucy snorts. This seems to be a favored method of indicating her generally low opinion of me. “Yes, a salsa club. But they serve coffee if you really want some.”
“Give me a mocha or give me death,” I say weakly. “So, I take it Rosa doesn’t know you go dancing?”
“I’m eighteen years old and my curfew is eleven thirty,” Lucy points out. “What do you think?”
Fair enough.
“Anyway, my friends and I, we have a system. Wednesday we say we’re at the library. Thursday it’s the café. Fridays and Saturdays we usually say we’re going to the mall. It stays open later, so it’s not, like, fishy or anything. As long as we’re home in time, no one complains.”
“But it’s Sunday,” I point out.
“Yeah, mira, this is the one place that’s even open tonight,” she agrees. “You got lucky.”
Lucky, I think wryly, following as Lucy tosses back her hair and marches down the sidewalk toward a point at the end of the street. She whips out a cell phone that I’m sure is both smaller and pinker than the one she used earlier, to field a phone call from her brother. “Ay, mira, papi, I’m with the nuyorican; we’ll be there in a minute. Cállate.” She wiggles her hips and the jeans slide down again.
Lucky, lucky me.
Inside, the club is much smaller than I expected. I’m not sure whether or not this is a good thing. On the one hand, it’s not that overwhelming. On the other, if I were to attempt to dance—or even approximate a reasonable facsimile thereof—there’s really no protective camouflage. I put my hands in my pocket, ten kinds of uncomfortable.
Lucy shrieks and clatters forward toward a group of girls huddled against the bar. They shout right back at her and shimmy in her direction. I quickly scan the uniform—jeans or capris. Unlike New York basic black, they’re all wearing very tight shirts in bold, bright colors. One girl is wearing white pants.
If the sum contents of my entire wardrobe were dropped at Rosa’s doorstep tomorrow, I’d still have it all wrong. Beyond my dark coloring, there will be no blending here.
As if that were ever a question.
I take a deep breath and cross the Spanish tiles to where Lucy and her friends are now huddled. One of them, a short, dark-skinned girl with masses of curly black hair piled in a high ponytail, steps forward. “Hola, I’m Pia.” She smiles. I do a double take. Yep, she is smiling—at me. Can she really be Lucy’s friend?
“Hi, I’m Emily,” I say. I extend my hand to shake. Pia looks surprised, but she takes it, still grinning. “Mira, this is Ramona”—she gestures toward the taller girl with long, straight hair—“and Teresa.”
Teresa is so incredibly gorgeous that I don’t know if I can bear to be in the same room with her. She has pin-straight hair so blond it’s almost white, and her eyes are Liz Taylor lavender. But she is beaming at me so openly that I can’t help but smile back.
“Bienvenida, gringa,” she says to me. “Lucy says you’re here for the summer?”
“Six weeks,” Lucy interjects flatly.
“And you’re from New York?” Pia asks.
“Westchester. New York State. It’s the suburbs, really. Kind of like this.”
“Kind of,” Lucy says, her voice thick with what I suspect to be sarcasm. She looks around. “Where are the boys?”
Pia gestures farther down the bar. “Las cervezas.”
Oh, right. Beer. Cool.
I drink about as often as I smoke. That is to say, never. God, I’m a loser.
No sooner has Lucy asked about “the boys” than a tall, muscular one with close-cropped black hair is leaning over her for a kiss. She obliges, smiling. I can’t help but notice that Lucy is really, really pretty when she smiles. I still have no idea what rare form of personality disorder it is that prevents her from smiling at me, but since her friends seem to be immune to it, I can probably get through this night at least.
Bolstered by the warm reception I’ve gotten from Pia, Ramona, and Teresa, I step toward Lucy’s boyfriend. “Hi, I’m Lucy’s cousin, Emily,” I say.
He nods. “Right. Lucy mentioned you were coming out. Rafael. It’s very nice to meet you. ¿Cómo estás? How are you liking Puerto Rico?”
“It’s great,” I say, realizing as the words come out that I’m sort of lying. “It’s beautiful.” That much, at least, is true.
“Yeah, we like it. Bummer excuse for a vacation, though, huh?”
“I, um, didn’t really know my grandmother. I mean, I never met her,” I stammer, flushing. I’m mortified to realize that I almost forgot why I was here in the first place.
“Quiero bailar,” Lucy says, not to me.
Rafael shrugs. “Sure, chica. Ricky’s in the bathroom, I think, but he’ll be out in a minute.” He looks at me questioningly. “Tú quieres? You up for some salsa?”
I bite my lip. “You know, not just yet.” I try to make it sound like it’s just a matter of time before I’m grinding on top of the bar. Like I’ll be all Coyote Ugly (“but without the bar brawls,” my interior Izzy champions) in just a few short moments.
“Are you sure?” Pia asks, sounding genuinely disappointed.
I nod. “Just for now. I’m kind of tired. I’m still, uh, really jet-lagged.”
Lucy’s friends are kind enough not to point out the total lack of time difference between New York and Puerto Rico. They scamper toward the dance floor, squealing.
I settle back against the bar, grateful to be out of the spotlight. I watch the girls—and Rafael—dance. It’s amazing; they’re all ridiculously good. And they’re dancing for real, not the sort of hip twitching that passes for dancing in New York clubs. They’re actually step-ball-changing forward and back, weaving in and around each other with little cha-cha-cha flourishes and sexy hair tosses (the girls, that is; I mean, Rafael is dancing but without any hair-tossing).
“Well, now, if you’re
not going to dance, you can’t just stand here empty-handed.”
A cold bottle of beer is thrust into my hand and I turn. “Oh, um, thanks,” I say.
My benefactor is a curly-haired guy with light brown eyes and freckles scattered across his nose. He’s wearing a short-sleeved, linen button-down shirt that’s one part school nerd, one part refugee from a Fitzgerald novel.
Somehow, though, on him it works.
“Ricky,” he says.
“You were in the bathroom,” I offer, immediately wishing the ground would open up and swallow me whole. “Rafael said,” I finish weakly.
“Well, yes, it’s true, but I didn’t realize it was my claim to fame.”
I laugh, feeling no less moronic but slightly better about it. “Emily,” I say.
“The nuyorican.”
“Why does everyone keep saying that?” I ask. “It’s like you’ve never met anyone from the mainland before.” It feels so good to be talking to someone who is actually talking back that for once I don’t seem to have any internal censor.
“Well, you have to know that you’re sort of a legend around here,” he says. “At least, your family is.”
“What?” I’m totally baffled. There is nothing legendary about the Goldbergs. Like, my dad tends to win the annual Woodland Thanksgiving Turkey Trot, but I doubt Ricky would know about that.
“You’re the New York family, the family that no one’s ever met, not since Gloria left for college. That’s a big deal. You’re like . . . the Loch Ness Monster. Or Bigfoot.”
“Oh, that’s a compliment,” I tease.
“Well, you’re a source of speculation,” he says. “Lucy was incredibly curious to meet you.”
I must have some sort of involuntary facial twitch because he explodes with laughter. “She’s not that bad.”
I don’t say anything, just struggle to keep my features neutral.
“Her bark is worse than her bite,” he finishes.
“It’s a pretty loud bark,” I say, before I can stop the words from coming out of my mouth. I have to mentally pinch myself, remind myself that he is actually Lucy’s friend and therefore probably likes her. Talking trash about her simply will not do.
