Make Your Home Among Strangers (26 page)

—He was not a loser! Neyda said, and I swallowed to make sure those words hadn't come out of my own mouth. He had a car and stuff! And irregardless, he had a job, right?

I wiped my mouth with the back of my hand. It had taken exactly one big red oval around an
irregardless
in an early discussion paper in biology for me to leave that word behind, sequestering it for good to my Miami Vocabulary. I slid a step away from this cousin, impressed with myself for hearing now how stupid that word sounded in someone else's mouth.

—He has a job, I said. I just haven't talked to him lately. You know I'm away at college, right?

I looked at Leidy, hoping she'd stick up for me again, though I wasn't sure for what this time. She rolled her eyes, took a long gulp of sangria from her cup. When she pulled it away from her face, a red smear arched across her upper lip. She sucked it in to clean it off, but the stain remained. I drank from my glass—careful, now that I saw what the drink could do, to avoid it lapping over my lip again—the punch burning all the way down.

*   *   *

Over the course of the night, assorted relatives in various stages of drunkenness told me that I: looked skinnier, looked fatter, looked pale, looked sick, looked sad. One volunteered a cure for the faint bands of acne that had recently colonized my cheeks—egg whites mixed with vinegar. One asked if Omar and I were engaged yet (I'd slurred, Not yet!). One old uncle asked if I was jealous of Leidy for getting all the attention because of Dante—this after the baby made the rounds and charmed everyone just as Omar had the year before; another kept calling me Leidy but didn't call Leidy Lizet—Lizet just didn't exist. Neyda asked me if I was going to get back with Omar in a voice that made me think she would ask for his number if I said no. An hour or so before we sat down to eat, the new boyfriend of one of my older cousins showed up in his tricked-out Mustang, and after introducing himself as Joey to some, Joe to others, we all had to go out to the driveway and listen to the new tube speaker he'd installed in his trunk because my cousin had helped pay for it. The bass rattled the car so much that I swear the bumper vibrated, but when I pointed out the buzzing to a somewhat-drunk Leidy, she said I was seeing things and rightfully noted I was pretty buzzed myself, ha ha. She handed Dante to me and asked if I thought my cousin's new boyfriend was cute. I told her no just to be safe, and she stayed put, eventually taking Dante back into her arms.

The boyfriend had a seat assigned to him at the kids' table with us (the oldest person at the kids' table was twenty-six that year). I assumed he'd take Omar's spot—Zoila hounded our mothers about our breakups and new romances starting in November, gossip hiding behind the pretext of head counts and place settings—but when I passed the table later on my way back from the bathroom, the little card with his name on it (it read, for some reason,
Joey/Joe
) sat next to a card with another name: Omar. I picked it up with two fingers, balancing myself against the wall as I stared at it. It was the same card from the year before (the ink was blue, the same color as most of the family's cards, which Zoila kept and reused year after year) and it had an oil stain on the corner from where he'd dripped mojito on it while spooning oil-slicked onions from the plastic tub onto his own plate.

I scanned the back windows of the house for my mom outside. Hadn't she told Zoila that Omar wouldn't be here this year? Did she just assume that our morning breakfast (which hadn't actually happened, of course, but which she didn't bother to ask me about after getting back from Ariel's) hadn't ended in the breakup I'd said was inevitable, that I'd hinted at over a month earlier? I spotted her sitting on a cooler, waving away an uncle who was threatening to reach between her legs to grab a beer. She clamped on to the cooler's side handles and screamed so hard she almost fell off of it. I checked the area around my mom's seat for a place setting for my dad: there wasn't one. I checked each of the fifty or so spots. None of them were for him. So my mom and Zoila
had
talked at some point; my mom had told Zoila my father wouldn't be coming, but she hadn't said a word about Omar. Or maybe she had, and what she'd said was,
Leave it there.

I crushed the card with Omar's name in my hand and rushed through the open glass door, almost tripping over the metal guide rail on the floor. My mom had moved off the cooler and was now sitting on Zoila's lap. Zoila was pretending my mom was a baby, bouncing Mami on her thighs and trying to force my mom's head down to her chest.

—You think I'm a joke? Mami yelled.

—Mom, can I talk to you? I said.

—Come, come let me feed you like you're Ariel, Zoila said.

My mom wrestled her head away from Zoila's hands and jumped off her lap.

—That is
not
what I'm doing, she yelled to Zoila. We're
right
to be worried. What I don't understand is how
you're
not.

The week before I came home for Christmas, the lawyers for Ariel's Miami family officially requested that Ariel be granted political asylum, and from what I could tell, most of Miami was pretty certain—or was pretending to be certain—that he'd get it. He was, after all, Cuban, and he had, after all, reached land. People like Zoila saw it that plainly; they didn't think about the complications—that he hadn't made it to land unassisted, that he was a minor with a father back in Cuba who was now asking the UN to step in and get his kid back for him. My mom, along with dozens of others who saw themselves as
close
to the Hernandez family, saw all those complications and allowed them to keep her up at night.

—Ay chica please, Zoila said, flicking her wrist and splaying her fingers in the air. Stop your preaching already.

My mom growled, Maybe you need to be paying more attention.

Zoila leaned back, her fingers now hinged around the metal arms of her lawn chair.

—He's not going anywhere, Zoila said. He'll get asylum with or without all those tears for the cameras. So cálmate,
please
, que you're making a fool of yourself, like those why-too-kay people on the TV.

—¿Qué tu qué? an uncle's voice howled.

The circle of cousins and tíos around Zoila and my mom crashed into mean laughter, the men slapping their knees, some of them laughing so hard it made them cough. Zoila turned to Tony in the commotion and said, The only reason she gives a shit about ese niño is because she's lonely and has nothing better to do.

My mom kept her eyes on her cousin and said, You know, Zoila, go fuck yourself.

Tony lunged to the edge of his seat but Zoila, without breaking my mom's stare, flung out her arm and blocked him from getting up. He held himself on the chair's edge.

—No, come on Zoila, Mom said. Let your grandson come over here.

—Mami, I shouted this time.

She snapped her chin toward me, her face and neck red under her streaky foundation, some cream a shade too light on her skin.

—What do you want
now
, she barked at me.

As if I'd been asking her questions all night rather than hanging close to Leidy and fending off stupid questions myself. As if she wasn't about to get smacked after spending the whole night trying to convince her drunk and largely uninterested relatives to join her on New Year's Day at a rally in support of Ariel's political asylum request, one she'd told us about (instead of asking about my fake Omar meeting where one of us may very well have dumped the other) while we got dressed. The corners of the card with Omar's name dug into my palm. My jaw tightened and I felt my words come out through my teeth.

I said, I need to talk to you.
Now
.

One uncle said, Oooooh shit! And another said, Lourdes is getting beat tonight by
somebody
! He flapped his hand like he'd burned his fingers on something.

As my mom stepped over to me, Zoila said an exaggerated
Thank you.
Then, to Tony and the other family, Let's see how la profesora handles her.

Zoila lowered the barricade of her arm from Tony's chest, but they both seemed to be waiting for me to say something back. I knew she meant the profesora thing as an insult to my mom more than to me, but I was thrilled to have some sort of acknowledgment of what I was doing. It meant they knew. They knew what me going away signified but hadn't said anything because they just didn't know what to say. Then I remembered the woman from the airport shuttle on Thanksgiving, my imaginary profesora, how much I'd ended up hating her for her accidental insult. And maybe Zoila was implying something like that instead, that I gave off the stink of thinking I was better than everybody. But that was fine right then. I needed it. I smiled at Zoila, but my mom grabbed the top of my arm—her nails digging into the extra-white skin of my arm's underside—and pulled me away. Omar's name card almost fell from my hand.

She dragged me back into the house, where no one outside could hear us.

—Who do you think you are, talking to me like that in front of people?

I pried her hand from my arm and said, Nobody.

She jammed four fingers, hard, into the muscle right above my left breast and said, That's
right
. She pushed me back—the side of my head bumped against the edge of a shelf bolted into the wall. She said, Maybe you forgot that up there. Maybe it's time you remember better.

I leaned my head away from the shelf and took the card from my palm, smoothing it out in the space between our faces.

—I just want to know, I said, why this was on the table.

She didn't even have to look at it. She knew what I meant.

—So Zoila forgot to take out Omar. So what?

She went to grab it and I snatched it up higher.

—She forgot? I said. Or you told her to leave it there?

—Maybe you needed a reminder, to remember what's really important.

—
Omar?
Are you serious?

—You think you don't need anybody. Four months away and all of a sudden you're too good for him?

—You don't even know what's going on with us! You haven't asked me one fucking question since I've been back. About Omar or college or
anything.

She grabbed both my shoulders and slammed me against the wall for good, pinned me there. If I'd turned my head to the left, I would've caught the edge of the shelf in my eye.

—I have to ask
you
questions now? I don't need to ask you shit.

She let go of me but stayed in my face. Even though I should've kept quiet, I squinted and hissed, Don't you want to know what happened this morning? Who I was
really
with while you were out distracting yourself?

Her hand swept up—for sure she was about to slap me, and I would've deserved it—but instead she went for my fist and tore Omar's name away.

—
Distracting
myself? You don't get to talk to me like that! You don't know shit about sacrifice. You don't know shit about shit!

—Zoila's right, you only care about Ariel because what else do you have going on?

She shoved me again and the room spun, the sangria sloshing in me, and I lunged forward to keep her in one spot, reaching for her shoulders, but she took a wide step away from me—she was letting me fall. So I reached back instead and caught myself, slid my hands against the sandpaper of the wall, pressed my spine against it and sank to the ground, my butt hitting the floor too fast and too hard.

—You can go to
whatever
college for as long as you want, but about some things, you'll always be fucking stupid, she said.

She tossed the paper at me on the floor and said, You think you have problems? You, your sister, your idiot tía out there? You
made
your problems.

She turned her back to me and walked out of the room, screaming as she left, Nobody has
any
idea what Ariel and Caridaylis are going through right this second, but I do. I know what it means to lose so much. None of you know shit because you haven't sacrificed shit for anyone. Selfish pigs, that's what you and your sister are.

—Mami, I yelled after her, but she exploded from the house, slamming the front door behind her.

The room's walls swirled around me along with her words—how could we be the selfish ones when she was the one spending all her free time away from us, fooling herself into believing she belonged somewhere else? I was making my own problems—with Omar, with school, too, in her mind—but she
wasn't
? I worried maybe the sangria was coming back for me, that I would throw it up right there on Zoila's floor. I sat still until the spinning stopped, then looked over to a wispy pile of dust and hair in the corner. The crumpled name card floated on top of it. The years that my dad hadn't shown up to Noche Buena, someone—Zoila or her first husband or even Leidy assigned to do it by some other tía—was quick to get rid of his place setting, to make the paper plate and the plastic fork and knife and napkin disappear, the rest of the seats shifting to absorb and erase his space. From my spot on the floor, I looked at Omar's seat, the foldout chair squatting in the same spot he'd sat last year, next to me. He'd been a smash hit: spoke the best Spanish he could muster to every old person, drank a ton and didn't show it, called every man
papo
or
papito
and sold it as sincere. He'd only made me cringe once, when he'd told one of my cousins that the rum he was pouring for him from my aunt's bar was
one-hundred-percent proof
. My cousin had said,
Sweet
, and taken two shots with him, but I still logged it as something that would help me make the decision to leave for college if I got in anywhere far enough away. This year, Omar's seat was still there, even though my dad's place at the table was gone; in Miami, coverage of Ariel's first Noche Buena in the United States—footage of his first lechón, him dancing, him meeting a big Cuban Santa Claus—trumped all things Y2K; I sat on the floor of my aunt's house, there because my mom was mad for too many reasons, the sangria thick in my throat, and I thought of the excuse Leidy had used for Roly the year before, how I could recycle it—
Omar just couldn't get off of work
—and I promised myself I'd tell everyone at the table that Omar was really sorry he couldn't make it.
He's real sorry, but next year?
I'd say,
Next year will be different.
I didn't understand what my mom had accused me of, but I thought I knew how to undo it, how to backslide into something more recognizable.