one hot summer

To my daughters, Sarah, Antonia, and Gabriella
The loves and passions of my life

And, of course, as always, to my beloved Cuba—
you are forever in my heart and soul

I was in an unusually upbeat mood, riding that luscious high a woman comes by when she knows she’s looking particularly fine and that she has a good time ahead of her. Earlier in the day I’d run over to Saks Fifth Avenue at the Bal Harbour Shops and picked up a new dress, a simple Armani sleeveless black sheath that fit me perfectly. I knew I would get a lot of use out of it. My previous black dress, reserved for trips to the Caballero Funeral Home, had been getting overexposed, I figured, since I’d worn it to more than a dozen wakes and funerals. It needed replacing with a fresher and more stylish model. My husband claims that I’ll jump at any excuse to go shopping. I guess he’s right.

Well, what of it?

In Cuban Miami, going to a wake at a funeral home isn’t necessarily the depressing social trial it would be anyplace else. A wake doubles as a social setting where old friends get together and reconnect before setting out for the night. And that was Miami for you—not even death can get in the way of the pursuit of a good time.

It was seven o’clock on a hot sultry early July night. I was driving on the MacArthur Causeway with the latest Marc Anthony CD blasting. The speed limit on the causeway was fifty but no one—except maybe for tourists and old ladies—ever drove that slow.

I had just left Miami Beach, where I live, heading for Coral Gables to meet my best friends—Vivian Mendoza and Anabel Acosta—at the wake for the great-aunt of Maria Teresa Martinez, another of our friends. Neither Vivian nor Anabel nor I had ever so much as exchanged pleasantries with the octogenarian lady who had passed away peacefully in her sleep earlier that day, but because of our friendship with Maria Teresa, our attendance was mandatory.

I hoped it would be a closed-casket viewing—however oxymoronic the concept. It gave me the creeps to make small talk with a dead body lying a few feet away. I could never banish the thought that the deceased was listening to us discussing what restaurant we preferred for dinner that night. It just wasn’t seemly, and, now that I was thinking about it, I realized that this entire train of thought was threatening to dampen my mood. So I pushed it away. I really wanted, no, I
needed,
to have a good time that night.

In Cuban circles, wakes are actually considered a great place to pick up dates—if not in the viewing room, definitely at the cafeteria behind the building. The quality of the pickings rose in proportion to how well-known the deceased might have been, or whether he or she came from a big family. When we were teenagers, Vivian and Anabel and I would check out all the boys at viewings and discuss their physical traits within earshot of the deceased. Not exactly proper behavior for three Catholic girls—maybe my guilt over my actions lay behind my distaste for open-casket viewings now that I’m an adult. The worst part when we were girls came when the priest started to recite the rosary. It took forever, and there was no escape—no one could possibly leave the room while the rosary was being said, that was one of the few rules that could never be broken. We used to try to time our visits to avoid encountering the priest.

I have countless memories from wakes throughout my life, and every so often my friends and I reminisce about all the viewings we’ve attended together. Of course we only remember as pleasant the wakes that involved an elderly distant relative and not someone we were close to—
those
evoked a different kind of memory altogether. The wake that night was in the former category: None of us knew the departed, and we were looking forward to having dinner together afterward. Since two of the three of us were married, there was no need to check out the scene. It was a night out for us, something we hadn’t enjoyed in at least a few weeks. Maybe longer, after I thought about it.

Driving always clears my mind. I watched Biscayne Bay shimmer like spun silver. There was some kind of regatta going on, boats with bright sails stretched taut against the wind, their masts almost touching water. They skimmed the surface, headed north in tight formation. Farther along I saw a Sealand container ship so heavily loaded that it lay low in the water; it was pulled by two tugboats through the narrow channel, almost visibly yearning for the open seas.

There were three cruise ships, so enormous they looked like floating apartment buildings, docked in a line at the Port of Miami for service before heading south to sail the Caribbean. I’d never taken a cruise, and every time I saw one of these ships I fantasized about drifting off on one, removing myself from daily life and going completely incommunicado. My temptation, or desperation, had never built to the point where I was compelled to buy a ticket and go. Still, I read the Sunday
Miami Herald
travel section every week from cover to cover.

I passed the bridge that led to Palm and Hibiscus Islands, taking my eyes off the road for a second to look for one of the dolphins that could sometimes be seen cavorting in the distance. But it was not to be. I might have been a sophisticated thirty-five-year-old woman who’d seen plenty of dolphins in the wild before, but the sight of one of those majestic animals still always made my heart race. It wasn’t such a bad thing to maintain some shred of innocence inside my soul. It wasn’t easy, not in Miami. And for a lawyer, it was almost impossible.

With the
Miami Herald
building on my right, I pulled the wheel to merge two lanes left for my exit onto I-95 south, which would take me past downtown and eventually to U.S. 1 and the final leg of my voyage. My first impulse was to get off at the Biscayne Boulevard exit, the normal route I would take to my office at the First Dade Corporation Building. That is, if I were still working there. No, I thought, I
was
still working there. Until I decided otherwise.

I drove onto the overpass and glanced up to check out the top three floors of the building where our law offices were located. It was almost seven thirty, but all the lights were still blazing away. No surprise there. The brutal hours were one of the reasons I’d taken a year-long leave of absence from the firm. The support staff—secretaries, paralegals, clerks, assistants—pretty much kept to a nine-to-five lifestyle. But there was no such thing for the attorneys. There was really no room for a personal life for the lawyers at Weber, Miranda, Blanco and Silverman. Many times I had heard the big clock in the hall outside my office chime twelve strokes for midnight while I was anchored to my desk racking up the billable hours. And that was the core of the business, the crux of the attorney’s existence:
billable hours
.

It wasn’t all drudgery. I had made good, close friends there. We went out together and partied hard, like soldiers on leave. I had accepted the firm’s work ethic without complaint for five years. But once I got married the long hours became a problem. And when the baby came, well, my fate was pretty much sealed. For a Cuban woman—professional or not—husband and children are supposed to come first, with work placing a distant third.

And that’s the way it was.

It had been ten months since I took my leave of absence, and the maximum time allowed by the firm was one year. So I had difficult decisions to make and, so far, I had done a pretty good job of avoiding them. But the time was approaching to make a choice, and the pressure was intensifying. From all sides.

The Marc Anthony CD finished up just as I-95 blended onto U.S. 1. An old Gloria Estefan disc came on next—
Mi Tierra,
one of my favorites. The songs were all about Cuba, which would put me in the right mood for the wake. After all, I was about to enter an all-Cuban zone. Who better to prepare me than that quintessential Cuban, Gloria Estefan.

I turned west onto Douglas Road and a couple of minutes later I was searching for a spot in the lot behind the funeral home. It wasn’t easy. The Cadillac Escalade was a big car that took up a lot of space. That was what I loved about it, but parking spaces that could accommodate it were few and far between.

Cruising slowly, I passed up three or four spaces that a smaller car could have easily squeezed into. I tried to block thoughts of my husband, Ariel, from my mind: He had warned me that the Escalade was going to bring me nothing but headaches. Oh, but it was such a badass car, a huge black SUV with tinted windows. How could I resist? I knew at the time that Ariel was giving me good advice when he counseled me against buying the beast, but I had fallen in love with it the moment I spotted it in the Cadillac showroom.

When I fall in love with something, I must have it. And damn the consequences. It wasn’t exactly the best character trait for an attorney, but my great passions had fortunately been very few. Otherwise I might have ended locked up in jail instead of visiting my clients there. Going to jail, even as a visitor, is an education. You realize how one little act, one single mistake, can land you on the other side of a steel door that isn’t going to open. It’s sobering, and it makes you appreciate what you have.

Finally
. I found a big enough spot in the farthest row, right next to the security wall. I inspected my makeup in one of the many mirrors conveniently arranged every few inches inside the car, checked my lipstick to make sure my teeth weren’t stained red, gave myself a final squirt of perfume. I reached up with a practiced hand and did a quick tease of my shoulder-length hair to achieve that naturally tousled look that costs me hundreds of dollars every month. Now I felt adequately prepared to pay my respects to Tia Esther, a fine lady, to be sure.

I swung my legs around and tried to step out of the Escalade with as much ladylike grace as I could manage, careful not to twist my ankles. I was wearing a reasonably new pair of “limousine shoes,” backless sandals with high heels that made walking more than a block impossible, thus requiring the services of a limousine. The car was so high off the ground that I had to make use of the running board under the door to get me halfway down to earth.

I was walking as stiffly as a Chinese woman with bound feet as I scurried through the parking lot toward the main entrance. It wasn’t far, but by the time I got there it felt as though I had navigated the length of Pro Player Stadium. I looked around and saw that both Vivian’s Lexus and Anabel’s BMW were there. Good. There was nothing worse than going to a wake without knowing anyone there. It had happened to me in the past, when someone died who merited our family’s respects and Mamá would insist that someone go to Caballero’s to represent us. As the only daughter, that task more often than not fell to me. If Vivian and Anabel hadn’t been there, I would have been forced to make awkward conversation and offer condolences for someone I never knew. Maria Teresa would be there, but she would be occupied with the responsibilities of grieving grandniece.

One thing I knew about wakes—always sign the guest book on the table outside the viewing room. It’s like having a receipt that proves your attendance in case the grieving relatives don’t remember who they saw and who they didn’t. I was always careful to print my entire name as legibly as possible: Margarita Maria Santos Silva. I definitely wanted full credit for my efforts.

Before I went inside, I checked out the small crowd milling in front of the entrance, scanning faces for someone I knew, but they were all unfamiliar to me. There were about a dozen men of all ages, dressed either in formal dark suits or white guayaberas—the stiffly starched white shirts that were a traditional dress-up uniform for Cuban men—with dark trousers. There were two women, dressed all in black, gesticulating wildly and talking in animated spitfire Cuban Spanish. Just about everyone was holding a cigarette or a cigar, the trails of smoke ascending over their heads toward heaven in the yellow lights on either side of the front door. I adjusted my black pashmina shawl around my shoulders, which I wore as protection against the fierce air-conditioning inside, ran my fingers through my hair, and steeled myself for mingling with the A list of Miami’s Cuban exile society. No thinking about work, no thinking about Ariel, I told myself. Lately I
hadn’t been able to carve out enough time for myself and to be with my friends. I was damned well going to enjoy myself.

And then tomorrow I was going to sort everything out. I promised myself I would.