one hot summer

by carolina garcia aguilera

  A moment later Anabel emerged from the ladies’ room. Anabel was severely near-sighted, and I saw that she wasn’t wearing her glasses. It would take her a while to recognize me standing next to Vivian.

  Anabel was almost legally blind and, to make it worse, her eyes rejected contact lenses. She refused to wear her glasses in public unless she had no other option, such as when she wanted to drive without being charged with vehicular homicide. I had gone with her to the Florida Department of Motor Vehicles when she was issued her first driver’s license; I still remember how outrageously she flirted with the officer who tested her, in a futile effort to keep him from marking the “needs corrective lenses” box on her license. Anabel’s particular form of vanity made her feel that her condition made her imperfect, and, for her, having it branded on an official document meant all the world knew her shame.

  I knew it. Anabel was right next to me when she finally recognized me. She stepped closer, misjudging the distance between us. I hopped back and yanked my feet out of her way just in time; a little slower and my limousine shoes would have been history—and both my feet would have been in casts.

  “Margarita!” Anabel puckered her lips to give me a kiss. Then she aimed her mouth in the general direction of my face and lunged toward me. I cringed as she connected with my cheek, knowing that she had left a blood-red streak.

  Within seconds, Vivian was searching through her purse for a tissue to wipe away Anabel’s lipstick. This was part of being friends with Anabel—she routinely rearranged our makeup. I just wished she would wear her glasses. It would make life easier for everyone—or, if not easier, then tidier.

  I waited quietly for Vivian to clean me up, taking in the scene. My friends and I were dressed essentially in widow’s weeds—the appropriate attire for a Cuban wake—and looked as though we were prepared to throw ourselves on the deceased’s funeral pyre. This was the custom: Even those who didn’t know the dead person at all were expected in theory to behave as though they were suffering deeply. Unwritten rules mandated proper dress that was reserved strictly for trips to Caballero’s—conservative clothing, in black, covering the knee, nothing too fashionable or trendy. Viewings were the only occasions that didn’t require a phone call in advance to plot what we were going to wear. We all knew. That night I recognized both Vivian and Anabel’s outfits, since I had seen them a few times before.

  I waited for my friends to notice my new dress, but they were focused on my shoes. Anabel had to practically crouch down in order to see them. I considered taking one off and handing it to her, but it would have strained the boundaries of propriety. I glanced over and saw the wheels in Vivian’s mind turning as she estimated how much my Manolo Blahniks cost. She knew I only paid retail, a practice that filled her with anxiety and loathing.

  It was fairly crowded inside, with people milling around the reception area and the viewing rooms. I read a notice posted in the foyer and saw that Tia Esther was laid out in Room 2, the largest of the five inside. That meant they were expecting a big turnout. This was good news for us; we could each sign the book and do a quick run-through. We could express our sympathies to the receiving line stationed in front of the casket, then spend a few minutes with Maria Teresa purely out of form, since she barely knew her Tia Esther any more intimately than we did. Then we’d be free for a quick exit and on our way to dinner.

  The fact is, we were pros at the Caballero experience. The three of us didn’t need to consult about strategy—we all knew intuitively how things would play out and how long it would take. We were in lockstep with one another.

  Vivian, Anabel, and I didn’t go to school together. But we’d been friends since the second grade when we played soccer on the same YWCA team—our parents had all independently decided we needed some exercise in addition to our schoolwork and enrolled us against our will on the squad. Our team was one of the best in Dade County, and was nearly undefeated in the five years we played. Which sounds impressive, as long as you never saw us play. It was sheer dumb luck that my friends and I were assigned to such a good team.

  The three of us played defense. Our offense was so strong and aggressive that almost all the action took place around the opponent’s goal. Anabel was our goalie, in spite of the fact that she couldn’t see more than a few inches in front of her face. Vivian and I were simply hopeless athletically. We basically hung out around the goal and talked trash about our teammates. Then, when we got a little older, the talk turned to boys. We would break huddle to clap and cheer every time our team scored a goal—although not too loudly, since we didn’t want to attract our coach’s attention. The rest of the team thought we were great, since they were all ball hogs and we never wanted to see the thing.

  The games were on Saturday mornings; Tata, my family’s nanny, would drive us to wherever they were held. We discouraged our parents from ever attending, since they might have objected to our nonparticipation strategy. After the game we would spend the afternoon together at one of our houses and, depending on how much homework we’d been assigned, often spend the night. We developed the kind of friendship that can only be cemented by sleepovers and a shared promise to never keep secrets from one another, which we’ve managed to maintain into adulthood.

  All three of us were Cuban Americans, born in Miami of Cuban parents and growing up less than two miles apart in Coral Gables, an upscale residential district of Miami. I always thought the fact that we went to three separate schools—all the way from elementary school through college—kept us close. We were never in competition with each other, and we never fought over the same prizes, human or otherwise.

  Vivian Mendoza was a lawyer like me, but we were in different specialties. I was a business immigration lawyer, and she was a solo practitioner in criminal defense. At thirty-five, she was one of the few women in Miami with a thriving criminal-defense practice. She was also still unmarried—she’d had plenty of relationships with men, but none that lasted. Her last man had been married and, after months of playing second fiddle to the wife, she’d ended the affair. In her personal and professional life, Vivian had to be number one. All the same, I knew she was still hurting from the last one—the fact that she hadn’t yet found another man confirmed it. Vivian was not a woman to go without male companionship for very long.

  Although Vivian claimed to be perfectly happy staying single, Anabel and I suspected that she longed for the traditional route of husband and children. It wasn’t something that we could talk about much with her. We had to pretend to believe that she was happiest playing loving aunt to her nieces and nephews. Vivian gave off an aura of self-sufficiency and independence that I thought alienated a lot of men. The killer instinct that worked for her in court didn’t always achieve the same result with men, who, let’s face it, have to be made to feel stronger than their women whether they are or not. Men might say they liked their women strong, but most of them found Vivian overpowering or devouring. Recently she had alarmed me and Anabel with her comments about her dates’ bone structure and brains; it was as though she viewed them as sperm donors rather than love interests.

  It wasn’t that Vivian wasn’t attractive—she was tall, leggy, and a real blond with a knockout figure, the best that money could buy. She owned a small house in Coconut Grove, a glorified bungalow that she’d had decorated by one of the hottest designers in town. She had a legion of friends, and had to maintain a separate calendar just to keep her social life straight. Still, though, there was no husband and no real prospects.

  Maybe prospective boyfriends were put off once they heard about the bomb that had once been planted in the undercarriage of her Porsche Boxster. If that were true, my feeling was that those guys lacked big enough cojones and didn’t deserve her. Anyway, the police had found the bomber and he’d gotten twenty-five to life tacked on to the two sentences Vivian had been unable to get him acquitted of. It turned out that the mobster had hired Vivian to represent him because she was a Cuban woman—he figured she’d be able to
connect with a jury in an overwhelmingly Latino city. Vivian is a very good attorney, but there are limits to ethnic sympathy. This client had been pulled over on a routine traffic stop that led to the discovery of two bodies in the trunk, prints lifted off the .357 Magnum that was used for the execution, and the victims’ blood on his clothes. Not even O.J.’s dream team could have kept him out of prison.

  When a lawyer takes mob clients and is unable to produce the desired results, these things happen. Vivian took the attempt on her life with surprising equanimity. She said it was the cost of doing business. My mamá agreed. She said when you lie down with dogs, you get up with fleas.

  That was one of the few times in my life I’ve actually agreed with my mother.

  Anabel Acosta, on top of her vision problems, was also mildly color-blind—a condition usually associated with men. Somehow she managed to work as an architect, a successful designer of upscale homes. The great tragedy of her life was her inability to ever fully view any of her creations, even with the help of the strongest lenses on the market. She was happily married to her high school sweetheart, with three kids—triplet five-year-old girls. Vivian and I thought she cruised through the day blissfully unaware of the world around her, but of course we would never tell her that. In fact, I always admired the way she organized her life. Anabel lived in a grand home in Coral Gables—she designed it herself, and it had been featured in glossy magazines. She was a partner in a three-person architectural firm that she founded along with two of her fellow graduates from the Yale School of Architecture. She was so naturally talented that she was able to overcome the daunting obstacle posed by her faulty eyes.

  For the past few years Anabel and her partners, all Cubans, had become increasingly involved in restoring historic buildings in Havana that were in a process of rapid deterioration. Anabel got a lot of satisfaction from the work—she got to save Cuban treasures that might otherwise be lost, and she became intimate with the city that loomed in every exile’s dreams.

  Anabel’s terrible vision dictated many aspects of her life, but the most obvious was how it influenced the way she dressed. Sometimes she turned up looking like an upscale bag lady, with mismatched shoes and a riot of clashing colors. She wore expensive designer clothes, but they looked as though they’d been mixed in a blender. I wouldn’t have been surprised if she were banned from certain shops—the way she looked sometimes gave designers a bad name.

  She was tiny, barely over five feet, and weighed about a hundred pounds soaking wet. Still, Anabel commanded attention. She had naturally red hair that she helped along, usually to a flaming result. Her hair came halfway down her back, and she wore it loose. Her bright blue eyes were always open wide—as though that was going to help her see better—and so she always seemed to be in a state of perpetual amazement. That night at Caballero’s she had managed to select such different shades of black that the colors actually clashed. Vivian, of course, looked perfect down to her jewelry and could have won the prize for Best Dressed. As usual, I was someplace in the middle.

  “Well, chicas, let’s sign the book and go pay our respects,” I suggested. “I’m hungry.”

  The three of us circled the small table on which the condolence book had been placed. We dutifully and carefully printed our names and addresses, made our final adjustments, and entered Room 2. We took our place at the end of the line making its way toward the family and the coffin, which I now saw was mercifully closed. My eyes had barely adjusted to the dim light when Vivian stiffened and grabbed my arm, gouging my skin with her long pointed nails.

  “I have to get out of here,” she whispered to me. “Now!”

  With that, she turned around and headed back toward the door. In the same moment Maria Teresa spotted us and raised her head in recognition.

  Anabel, in line in front of me, looked around confused. “Where’s Vivian?” she asked. “Did she get sick or something?”

  “I don’t know,” I said, shaking my head and stepping out of line. “I’m going after her.”

  Anabel took a moment to consider. “Me, too,” she said.

  We were close enough to the front of the line for our exit to create a noticeable scene. The only person not shocked by our display of insensitivity and bad manners was Tia Esther. We walked out with our heads down and caught up with Vivian in the reception area.

  “What happened?” I asked her. “Tell me why we just embarrassed ourselves in front of the whole Martinez clan.”

  It was my turn to grab Vivian’s arm. She looked miserable, her eyes were filling up with tears.

  “He’s here! He was in the line ahead of us.” Anabel and I exchanged worried glances. “Him! Luis! With his wife!”

  Now it all made sense. Vivian was talking about her married lover, the one she had broken up with. I had noticed a good-looking man ahead of us, but I’d thought it wasn’t appropriate to check him out in front of Tia Esther. Vivian still had feelings for him, that was obvious, and it must have been a nasty shock to see him there with his wife. The bastard. It probably wasn’t his fault, but still: the bastard.

  The reception area was full of people, and conversations stopped when Vivian began openly sobbing. It wasn’t unusual to see people crying in a funeral home, but no one thought a woman as tough as Vivian was broken up over Tia Esther’s passing. This scene was taking on real meltdown potential.

  A moment later the ex-lover appeared in the doorway to Room 2; he paused, his face turning white when he spotted us. His wife simply looked confused. I couldn’t have him witnessing Vivian in this state, so I looked around for a quick escape route. I steered her in the other direction.

  “I know a back door out of here,” Anabel told us. “Let’s go.”

  Vivian and I followed her down a hallway until we reached an unmarked door. Anabel stood there blinking.

  “Here it is,” she said. “This leads out to the parking lot.”

  We opened the door and stepped into pitch darkness. “Anabel, are you sure about this?” I asked. I wrapped my pashmina tight around my shoulders, feeling a sudden chill.

  “I’m sure. I recognize the way.” Anabel spoke with such total certainty that I knew we were in trouble.

  “Mierda!” Vivian cried out. “I stubbed my toe! Where are the damned lights in here?”

  “Anabel, are you sure this is the way out?” I asked.

  “Thank God,” Vivian said from somewhere ahead of me. “I found a light switch.”

  “Fuck, Anabel,” I said when the lights came on. “You must not have been wearing your glasses the last time you went out the back way

  . Because this sure isn’t the way to the parking lot.”

  We were standing in an icy-cold room filled with bodies lying on gurneys. One look around, and facing Luis and the missus didn’t seem so bad. I’ll take a married ex-lover over a dead body any day.

  [3]

  “I know you’re a liberated woman and everything, Margarita, but you’re a traditionalist at heart, right?” Ariel, my husband, gently teased me as he stroked my hair. We were lying in bed with only the moonlight illuminating our bedroom, enjoying the quiet peace after making love.

  “Mmm,” I murmured.

  “We can try all these different ways, but you really like the old-fashioned way best, right, mi amor?” he whispered in my ear.

  Since that had been an observation rather than a question, I burrowed my face deeper into his chest instead of answering. I could never tire of the smell of him. It was late, and I knew we should go to sleep because our mornings started early. But I was reluctant to end the day without analyzing everything that had gone on. It was a lifelong habit. I lay there in our king-size bed listening to Ariel’s breathing become deeper and more regular as he drifted off to sleep.

  After our unexpected encounter with the temporary—and rather frigid—guests at Caballero’s, Vivian, Anabel, and I had gone to dinner. We opted for Versailles, the Little Havana restaurant that was the epicenter of all things Cuban in Mi
ami. Vivian’s painful experience definitely called for comfort food, and lots of it. We had thought about going to a fancy Italian place in Coral Gables, but it wasn’t the kind of atmosphere where we could discuss the situation. When in crisis mode, Cuban exiles turn to Versailles.

  We overate and drank a little too much sangria, which is what you do at Versailles. Even visiting the morgue at Caballero’s had failed to dampen our appetites. It takes more than a room full of corpses to make a Cuban pass on a meal, especially the bounty of hot, tasty, cheap food at Versailles.

  The place was packed, as always, so we had to park in the lot across the street. Knowing parking would be at a premium, we had all gone together in Vivian’s Lexus. We crossed the road and went in through the main door on Eighth Street. Within seconds the maître d’ led us to one of the tables set for four against the long mirrored wall in the main dining room.

  Following my friends, I caught sight of us in the mirror. We were dressed in black from head to toe, and it brought back vivid memories of recent wounds suffered by the exile community that had yet to heal. If this had been a couple of years earlier, during the Elian situation, we would have been taken for women from Mothers Against Repression, an organization of Cuban women who dressed exclusively in mourning black.

  God, what a tumultuous five months, from Thanksgiving to Good Friday. The child’s fate had fluctuated wildly, and those dedicated women could be seen daily at Versailles sitting quietly, taking a break from their round-the-clock demonstrations in front of the family home in Little Havana just a few blocks away. They were a constant presence, unwavering, always standing in a circle praying unceasingly for Elian. Versailles was at the center of the controversy. The news crews—local, national, international—took up residence outside Versailles, where they interviewed patrons and tried to gauge the exiles’ reaction to whatever had happened that day. Anytime a Cuban crisis erupted—which seemed to happen about every five minutes these days—you could count on turning on the TV and seeing Versailles featured in an exterior shot.