No Matter How Much You Promise

by Edgardo Vega

  “Does that mean you’re gonna help?” Vidamía said.

  “Only if Mama’s involved,” she said without turning from the window.

  “Okay, Mama’s involved.”

  Cookie now turned back, shook her head, and smiled lovingly at Vidamía.

  “You’re such a crazy girl, you know,” she said. “Half the time I don’t know why you do stuff. You got such a big heart that I worry about people taking advantage of you sometimes.”

  “I love you too, you dope,” Vidamía said. “You still up for dessert?”

  “Yeah, let’s get fat, honey,” Cookie said as the cab arrived at their destination. “That boy Mario wears me out.”

  Cookie paid and they got out of the cab and headed for Ferrara’s, where they sat for the next hour discussing their plans. They each had baba au rhum and espresso, all the while smoking cigarettes, which they didn’t inhale but which they held with considerable style, Cookie even sporting a cigarette holder and producing the cigarettes out of a silver case she’d found in an antique store in the East Village. Every man, young or old, looked in their direction admiringly.

  “We’ll talk to Mama, see if she has any suggestions,” Vidamía said. “Maybe get her to come with us and we’ll start the process, okay?”

  “Process, right,” Cookie said, arching her eyebrows mockingly.

  “What’s the matter now?”

  “Nothing.”

  “No, come on. Tell me.”

  “You talk funny.”

  “What? What?”

  “Why can’t we just get a fucking piano. Why we gotta get a process going?”

  “No, c’mon. Seriously. What’s the matter?”

  “Nothing! I like making fun of you. You gotta tell Taylor Breitenfrog, or whatever, to get his ass someplace else. You’re starting to sound like the Bride of Frankendemia, girl. Oh, God, remember when we had that fight about how you were always correcting people?”

  “Yeah, you made me cry,” Vidamía said. “You’re right about Taylor. I have never seen such a dull cute boy in my life.”

  “There you go, girl. He is so white bread. No soul at all,” she said, and suddenly brightened.

  “What?”

  “There’s this party next Saturday and I really wanna go and knowing you, you’re going to be totally obsessed with this piano thing and I’ll get dragged into it and miss the party. I dig parties and whatnot, but this is really special. And I really want you to come.”

  “Why? What’s the big deal?”

  “It’s up on the West Side, and my friend Dina’s brother who went to Harvard is throwing the party, and he’s invited a whole bunch of friends from the school who live in New York. There’s gonna be some good jazz musicians there. Older cats, but really cool people. She says she wants me to meet some of them and maybe we’ll jam. You should come with me.”

  “Cats, huh?” Vidamía said, using the opportunity to poke fun at Cookie.

  “What”

  “You talk funny.”

  “Oh, shut up, you virgin puta. You gotta go with me, Vee.”

  “Okay, okay, but I wanna get this other thing done.”

  “We will, don’t worry. We won’t party Friday night, and we’ll get up early and go piano hunting. There’s gotta be stores open on Saturdays.”

  When they finished their coffees, Cookie took the little bit of lemon rind between her lips so that one of the Italian waiters nodded approvingly. She batted her eyelashes at him and then shrugged her shoulders as if to say, “I know I’m gorgeous.”

  Vidamía paid the bill and they walked the eight or ten blocks past Italian restaurants and Chinese noodle joints, through deserted streets, their high heels clicking on the sidewalk, prompting Cookie to exclaim that chances were if anybody drove by they’d probably think the two of them were hookers.

  That Saturday they began trying to find the right piano for their father. In the evening Vidamía and Cookie went to the party, impressively attired. Vidamía met Wyndell there and suddenly began to look at her life from a different perspective. The attraction wasn’t immediate, but the curiosity was immense. He asked her if he could see her again and she said that they had mutual friends and probably would see each other if he was going to be in the city. Could she give him her phone number? She wrote out the Farrells’ number.

  “Okay,” he’d said, looking at her and smiling so that later she recalled the feeling of ease she felt in looking at Wyndell Ross.

  They had stood there in the warm summer night just looking at one another, feeling as if they knew each other, which was crazy because they had just met. She wanted to tell him about her father and getting a piano for him, wishing for him to understand how much it meant to her to do this for Billy. She wanted to hear her father play, to understand more about jazz, which meant so much to him, and to her life now.

  31. Hanging Out

  That first summer Cookie took her everywhere and introduced her as “my sister, Vidamía”; not half sister, but sister, sometimes even saying “my big sister,” letting the pride speak for itself, because it validated her existence among her friends whose pedigree originated in Puerto Rico, that Island of Enchantment which in her eyes produced a firmament of dazzling language and music, and whose bloodlines were those of Spanish and French corsairs, Andalusian gypsies, Catalonian poets, African drummers, and Taino Indian warriors. A tie to this tanner, darkerhaired being confirmed that in spite of her own blond hair, blue eyes, and white skin she was truly part of her Rican crew. Whether they were in the Pitt Street Pool or Henry Street Settlement for their summercamp program or went over to Tompkins Square Park or the playground hanging out with her homegirls, Cookie now felt she truly belonged in her world. Unlike Elsa, who wanted to validate her whiteness by having Vidamía connected to her blond siblings, Cookie wanted validation of her Ricanness.

  “Yo, Cookie, who’s your friend, huh?”

  “Ain’t you gonna introduce us, homegirl?”

  “Yo, like, I’m sorry, Nydia. This is my sister, Vidamía. Vee, this is Nydia Torres and the bad one over there’s Patria Nuñez. S’appenin’, Patria?”

  “Your sister?”

  “Yeah, my sister.”

  “Yo, she don’t look like you?”

  “Yes, she does. Look at her nose. We got the same nose.”

  Talking like that and Vidamía watching everything as if it were going three times the regular speed, the language flying from English to Spanish, and her sister, Cookie, staying with it so that she couldn’t believe she’d say things like: “So, like we went up to the roof, right? El rufo over on Avenue C. And we was up there scopin’ on Rafael cause sometimes se baña with the window open. Yo, velando, right? Ligando, up there and whatnot. And me and Laurie Quintana are up there and, check it out, right? Ahí viene. Esnú, baby, totally without any clothes and his coso hanging down real thick and long. Yo, me and Laurie fell out laughing and Laurie almost slipped and por poco se cae del rufo, coño. She almost fell off the roof, girl. It was awesome, honey. De película, like in the movies, if you get my meaning. Full frontal, mama.”

  Vidamía was amazed at her sister’s freedom, running around the neighborhood and talking to everybody—crazy people, drug addicts, drunks, homeless people, cops, and boys of all ages, some of them saying all kinds of things to her, and she laughing and telling them things back. Like they’d say: “Looking good, mama,” and she’d just roll her eyes or answer them with “You got it, loco, but you can’t get it.” And the boys would laugh and slap each other five and whistle and walk after her with their tongues flapping like they were dogs.

  They often went into the Odessa Restaurant across from Tompkins Square Park and ordered potato pancakes with apple sauce and Cokes with the money they’d earned baby-sitting or running errands, being enterprising and offering to do shopping for elderly people for a dollar or two. Or they went to Kiev or Theresa’s over on Second Avenue and ate big kielbasa breakfasts on Saturday mornings after sleeping late, trying
on their independence at thirteen and eleven respectively, self-conscious of their figures and their budding womanhood, aware that they were being looked at by grown men and feeling odd because, although everyone independently said they were beautiful, they didn’t yet understand their appeal and simply imagined that they hadn’t dressed properly, or that a blemish on their face was marring their appearance.

  Later, when they were older and Cookie and Mario were really hot for each other even though they weren’t doing it yet, Cookie explaining that she wanted to wait until she was at least fifteen, they went down to Chinatown with Mario and some of his Chinese friends and ate Chinese food. It was fun watching Mario go back and forth from English to Spanish to Cantonese and even a little Mandarin. Sometimes he’d get mad at his Puerto Rican mother, and she’d be talking in Spanish to him, and he’d be answering in Chinese and then she’d say, “Speak English, condenao chino, you’re worse than your father,” calling him a “damn Chinaman,” while his younger sister, Carmen, translated from Chinese to Spanish to spite him. And Mario would refuse to listen and kept talking in Cantonese, which he’d picked up while staying at Lily Wong’s, his aunt from Hong Kong, when his mother went to work at the factory after Henry Wong stopped coming around and she heard that he’d found some Hong Kong floozy whose father owned a restaurant in Queens and he was going to marry her. Lily Wong consoled Mario’s mother and said she was her sister and apologized for her brother, who thought he was a movie star from the cheap Chinese movies they had over on Chrystie Street and the Bowery and could go around breaking young girls’ hearts. Lily couldn’t understand why he would behave that way since they were brought up in a nice Christian home and were taught by missionaries.

  So Mario grew up going back and forth from his aunt Lily Wong’s above the Castle and Dragon Restaurant owned by Mr. Leong, Lily Wong’s lover, and his grandmother Marina Rios’s house over near Delancey Street, talking Spanish in one and Cantonese in the other and in school English and taking it all in and not seeing his father for a long time until he showed up and took him to a hockey game because he was crazy about the Langels and Jean Latelle.

  After going with Mario, Vidamía and Cookie went to Chinatown on their own and sat in noodle restaurants and dim sum houses like they were older than fifteen and thirteen, and ate, and lit cigarettes, not inhaling but blowing out the smoke in long, sophisticated plumes, at times suppressing coughs discreetly. They talked about movies, crazy about Michael J. Fox and Richard Gere, telling themselves they hated Sean Penn, but secretly admiring him and blaming Madonna totally for their breakup; shifting easily to music and the different clubs that the older girls went to, rock clubs or Latin clubs, and did Vidamía know how to dance Latin?

  “No? I’ll teach you. We’ll go up to my homegirl Nancy Almodovar’s house.”

  And on the way there Cookie’d tell her all about her friend. “Her mami’s got this awesome stereo and all kinds of tapes of great Latin music and we can dance. Nancy’s mother’s the coolest lady. Her name’s Josie. She dances topless in New Jersey. Nancy’s father got killed in a drug deal last year. And it wasn’t like Josie didn’t beg him to stop running with those idiots. But, like, he didn’t listen, right? Yo, what was she supposed to do, huh, mama?” (Cookie called her mama, like her homegirls called each other; either that or mami or mamita, assigning parental authority to each other, which had always seemed odd to Vidamía, since her grandma Ursula called her mamita for as long as she could remember.)

  They would eventually call this tradition FIAT or “Feminine Indoctrination and Training,” and laugh at the irony years later, because if any culture was a matriarchy, bar none, it was the Puerto Rican one and for all the macho nonsense the gringos laid on the culture, the women knew what they were doing calling the boys papi and papito and spoiling them rotten so that they went around strutting and posturing with their cositos in their hands waving them at pretty women; and these same women calling the girls mami and mamita and giving them responsibility and toughening them up for their hard lives ahead, but definitely handing down the reins of power to them.

  “Anyway, Nancy’s gotta take care of her two little brothers when her mother goes off to work, and she gets lonely,” Cookie explained. “She doesn’t have a boyfriend yet, so we can keep her company. Would you dance topless? No? I wouldn’t either. I don’t have much as jugs go yet, but I wouldn’t want them bouncing around. We gotta take a shower together, cause I wanna see yours. Mama’s are pointy.” Day after day, Vidamía got one shock after the other until, by the end of that summer of 1988, being with her sister was the most natural thing.

  At home, of course, it was another story because there Cookie was almost a different person, addressing her mother as Mama and responding with “yes, ma‘am” and “no, ma’am.” Always very polite and speaking English very properly like her mother, with lilting southern intonations, but if she was around Grandpa Buck she’d start talking like she was from Central Tennessee. And Vidamía had seen her talking to the Polish waitresses at the Odessa and, without meaning to, imitating their accent innocently. In Chinatown or at Aunt Lily Wong’s she would talk English with a Chinese accent. Cookie denied doing anything of the sort, and Vidamía said she’d point it out to her the next time she did it.

  A month later Grandma Brigid had asked her to begin setting the table.

  “Hortense, could you be getting the crockery for dinner?” Grandma Brigid asked.

  “Gran, would you be wanting the blue crockery or the flowered?” Cookie said most naturally, her voice dropping and then rising as if she’d been raised in Ireland.

  “The flowered,” Grandma said, from the kitchen.

  “See?” Vidamía said. “You just did it. Why did you talk like Grandma Brigid?”

  “Oh, shit,” Cookie said.

  “Did you say something, Hortense?” Grandma Brigid said, peeking into the dining room.

  “No, ma’am. Nothing. I stubbed me toe,” Cookie said, and slapped herself. “My toe.”

  They both laughed and pointed at each other.

  “You do accents,” Vidamía said. “I’ve seen you imitate Grandma Ursula and Mario’s aunt and everybody. You’re like Peter Sellers, you minkey. Maybe you should be an actress.”

  “Nah, I’m gonna be like Dexter Gordon or John Coltrane. Mama said she was getting me a soprano sax. I’m learning the solo from ‘My Favorite Things.’ The whole thing by heart. Acting is phony. I want to be a great tenor girl.”

  For Vidamía each summer spent away from her mother’s house was one of learning, primarily about her father and his family, but in a way learning about herself and her puertoricanness, if there was such a thing, absorbing details about the neighborhood and sharpening her understanding of the code of behavior of the street: who not to stare at or play with and who took no offense when you joked with them, knowing which situations to steer clear of and which offered no danger, learning that when men played dominoes girls shouldn’t stand around them. Cookie wasn’t able to explain why, but reassured her that it wasn’t done, thus establishing how attuned she was to the neighborhood.

  “Tu hermanita americana tiene razón,” Ursula Santiago would say, nodding whenever Cookie explained some fine point of behavior. If comportment among Puerto Ricans was complex, home was a haven of simplicity. Lurleen had three rules: no foul language, respect for the opinions of others, and orderliness. If you removed something from a common place, put it back where you found it; if you used dishes, wash them; if you bathed, clean up after yourself; don’t leave your junk around, pick up after yourself, always, cause other folks are busy just like you.

  They were required to be punctual for meals, especially the evening meal, which was served at six. On weekday nights they had to be back home no later than eleven, and one o’clock on the weekend. And no going uptown on the subway unless it was to a specific place, like a movie theater or a museum. But there were no subjects they couldn’t discuss, nor books they couldn’t read, nor things the
y couldn’t explore openly so that it wasn’t unusual, although it shocked Vidamía, when Cookie asked her mother how often she and her father had sexual relations. Lurleen hadn’t even looked up from her embroidering.

  “Two or three times a week,” she’d said.

  “And do you always have an orgasm?” Cookie asked.

  “Not always,” Lurleen replied.

  “Why?”

  “My mind’s not in it sometimes. Or I don’t need to.”

  “Like Papa wants to do it and you don’t?”

  “Yes, something like that.”

  “When I get old enough I want to do it. How old should I be?”

  “I can’t tell you that, but I would think that you have plenty of time to decide. Whatever you do, you must be careful and make sure you know where the person has been, because there are many illnesses that you can get from sexual contact.”

  Going on like that, like they were talking about making sandwiches or picking out a dress.

  Vidamía couldn’t imagine her mother talking with her about such things, but hearing Cookie talk about them made her even more curious about boys. Cookie was younger than she was but was so much more sophisticated about such issues. On the other hand, whenever Vidamía told her about credit cards, or Club Med, or going on vacation to Europe and riding the Talgo train from Sevilla to Barcelona or going to certain beaches in Europe and seeing women walking around without their bikini tops, for example, Cookie was like a five-year-old, lost in thinking about it. “I’ve never even been on an airplane. Is it scary? I don’t think I’d be scared, though.” Or whenever she spoke of shopping at Cartier or Bergdorf Goodman or the time she took her to Hammacher Schlemmer and then to FAO Schwarz, Cookie had literally stood with her mouth open, saying things like “Gaw” and staring at everything like she had been dropped into the middle of a jungle and was in shock.

  “What are you gonna do after junior high?” Vidamía asked one day.

  “I’m gonna audition for Performing Arts High School,” Cookie said. “Music.”