one hot summer (7 page)

Mamá greeted me with a smile on her face when she looked up and saw me come into the living room. Then she looked all around me.

“Where’s Marti?” she asked.

“I didn’t bring him,” I blurted out, dutifully kissing her proffered cheek. “He stayed at home.”

My mother stiffened, her smile vanished. “Why? Is he sick?” She stepped away from me, looking me over as though searching for lies.

I tried not to shrink away from those laserlike eyes. I was a grown woman of thirty-five, but my mother could still make me feel like a child who had committed some grave infraction. She made me feel guilty for thoughts that had yet to pop into my mind.

My mother used to tell me about one of our ancestors in Cuba at the turn of the century. His father whipped him ten strokes with a belt every morning before breakfast. He hadn’t done anything wrong yet, the father explained, but he would slip up at some point during the day. Best to get the punishment out of the way early was the rationale. I still thought about that.

My mother and I were exactly the same height, so she was able to stare right into my eyes. It was the perfect angle to make me feel like she was inspecting my soul. My friends’ mothers’ eyesight had worsened with age, but not Mamá’s; if anything, it had gotten sharper. I shouldn’t have been surprised.

She wasn’t conventionally beautiful, or even very pretty, but Mercedes Santos was a stylish woman who knew how to make herself look attractive. She was sixty-eight, but carried herself like a much younger woman. Even taking into account her three face-lifts, the liposuctions, the standing appointments for Botox injections, and various nips and tucks, her youthful appearance was due more to her iron will than to surgical intervention. My mother was one of the early adherents to the “my body, my temple” philosophy.

I suppose it would be hard to look too shabby in her designer clothes and beautiful jewelry, not to mention the massages, facials, weekly hair appointments, and personal training sessions. But Mamá took full advantage of all these things. She was a poster child for the battle against the ravages of aging.

Needless to say, I was my mother’s worst nightmare. She had tried, I had to give her full credit, but vanity about my looks has never been high on my list of preoccupations. I was no bag lady, and I was no stranger to the cosmetics counter and hairdressing salons, but I never defined my identity by how I looked. My mother thinks I’ve turned out to be a tough American broad, a militant for equality who lets her looks go as a political statement. It’s just one of many things she fails to understand about me.

Besides, I was no frump. I was even a member of the elite Saks Fifth Avenue First Club, open only to individuals who spent a sufficiently ridiculous amount of money in the store. I worshipped at the altar of the Saks shoe department, and had toyed around with the idea of stipulating in my will that my wake should be held there, with my body displayed amid the pumps and high heels. Hey, compared to alcoholism, smoking, and drug addiction, a little shopping fetish was nothing.

Great, I thought. One minute in my mother’s presence and I was already defending myself inside my head.

My mother’s motto could have been “I look good, therefore I am.” It took me decades to get used to her vanity, and to resist the temptation to look down on her shallowness. Vivian and Anabel were walking encyclopedias on the subject of Mercedes Santos, after listening to me rant and rave about her for decades. They offered me advice and support but, most important, they always backed me up in my fights and disputes with Mamá. I was eternally grateful to them, in no small part because they had probably saved me hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of therapy.

Mamá was dressed for my visit as if the queen of England were coming over for tea, in a yellow Escada linen suit, a flowery silk blouse, and cream-colored pumps. Her brown hair had subtle highlights, giving her a golden glow. Her porcelain-white skin—her best feature—was accentuated by the light blush on her cheeks, making her look as though she had just emerged from smelling the blooms in some idyllic rose garden.

Whatever the occasion, I knew I was underdressed for it in my pink Gap capris, white T-shirt, and striped espadrilles with matching tote bag. My hair was pulled back into a ponytail, and I wasn’t wearing makeup. I looked like an overgrown escapee from a prep school. As I stood there, trying to figure out how to explain Marti’s absence, my mind was flooded with one distracting thought: My pants were too tight. Mamá’s eyes had narrowed a fraction when checking me out. She hadn’t said anything, but I had failed to escape her judgment.

“I didn’t come here directly from home, Mamá,” I explained. “I stopped at Starbucks in the Grove, to talk to Vivian and Anabel. I didn’t want to take him there.”

Mamá slowly digested what I had just said. Then she nodded slowly. “You’re right,” she said. “Starbucks is no place for a Cuban baby.”

I sighed. At least we found something to agree on. “I’ll bring him soon,” I said. “I promise.”

Thank God I had slipped in a mention of Vivian and Anabel without getting a reaction. Mamá never approved of them, even when we were young girls. Now that we were full-grown women Mamá thought they were filling my mind with what she called “women’s lib ideas.” I had made it clear that my friends were off limits, but Mamá couldn’t resist getting a jab in now and then.

Mamá glided over to one of the three-seater sofas by the window, sat down, and nodded for me to sit at the other end. The cushion between us would remain a buffer zone. We weren’t a touchy-feely family.

Mamá was a complex person. She mystified me even when I was a little girl. She could be petty, vindictive, and decidedly difficult even with her own children. But if any of us were ever in any kind of trouble, she was there to protect us and help us out. She had never been one for long talks over milk and cookies in the kitchen. For her, nurturing meant making sure we weren’t starving and that we had clothes on our backs—once those were taken care of, we could make our own way in the world. It was almost as though she felt strong maternal feelings were a sign of weakness, and that she had to use iron discipline to stave off her natural tendencies. Maybe leaving home and going into exile had made her that way, or maybe it was just the way she was. In her world, sentimentality was a character flaw, one that would inevitably exact a price. My brothers and I knew we would never learn what was behind her coldness. Her advice to me on managing my emotional life was that crying stretched the fragile skin under the eyes and caused wrinkles, not to mention runny mascara.

The maid, Yolanda, materialized from out of nowhere bearing a small silver tray with a glass of iced tea for me. She was dressed in a blindingly white uniform, so heavily starched that it could have set off sparks as she moved. Despite the season she wore white nurse’s stockings, and ballerina slippers. Her black hair was pulled from her face in a braid, and her nails were short and unpainted. All our maids always looked and dressed that way; in a closet off the kitchen was a rack of white uniforms in sizes from two to twenty, reminders of former employees.

I thanked Yolanda quietly while my mother watched with eagle eyes as the maid put the glass and a white, crisply ironed linen napkin on the table in front of me. Mamá said nothing to her. That was, according to my mother, the way it should be. Yolanda was the latest in a long line of maids who had worked for our family. In the beginning, the women were always recent Cuban exiles, but as time passed they had been replaced by Central Americans—mostly Salvadorans, Nicaraguans, and Hondurans. I could always tell which countries were having economic and political problems at any given time by the nationalities of women looking for domestic work.

No one in our family was going to be able to run for political office, because none of these women ever had proper immigration papers. Checking documentation before hiring a maid was an abhorrent idea to my parents, almost as bad as withholding Social Security money. My parents would rather have paid a fine to the INS than pry into their employees’ personal lives. And none of these women was going to retire in the United States; their plan was always to work in America, save money, and return home to buy a house. They would never see a penny of Social Security money, so there was no point in their paying into the system.

My parents never took advantage of the maids’ illegal status, or exploited them in any way. In fact, they paid better than most Miami households. Mamá, no matter how difficult and demanding, remembered what it was like to live in a strange country. She helped the maids with unexpected bills, and paid for their children’s education. She understood how hard it was for them to find work without papers, with little education, and little knowledge of English. She paid them in cash, with no questions asked and little information volunteered. My parents believed that the government had no place intervening in private, household matters, and that these women could make their own decisions and spend their money in the way that they saw fit.

I took a sip of iced tea. Mamá watched me expectantly.

Our house had been professionally decorated, and it showed—not, to my mind, in an always flattering light. My parents hadn’t had much money when they first bought the place, so Mamá had furnished it herself. It had been great in those days, homey and welcoming. Then, every time the family’s finances improved, my mother redecorated—with an increased budget. My brothers and I called these major overhauls Mamá’s five-year plans.

The most recent decorator had been a very fancy, socially connected descendent of the Spanish Grandees. And he had definitely gone overboard. The couch in the living room was modeled after one in the Velázquez painting
La Maja Desnuda,
on which a nude woman was being served by a Nubian slave. I really didn’t want to think about what this said about my mother’s self-image.

All the furniture in the room was upholstered in silver brocade, with fringed tassels hanging from every corner of the massed pillows artfully arranged to convey a contrived image of casual ease. The window treatments used up at least a week’s production from a factory in Seville. And the silkworms must have worked overtime on the sofas. I think the decorator must have been on Ecstasy. And my mother must have been on Valium when she agreed to the plans.

When the latest living-room decor was being installed, my mother was filled with so much pride that she refused to let anyone see it until it was finished. On the final day, the decorator’s assistants had put in twelve hours seeing to the finishing touches. Then Mamá invited us all over to admire her choices. My brothers and I still wince to think of the monumental hangovers we incurred from that night—the only way we could hold our tongues was to drink our way through the unveiling.

The place had been converted to Madrid East. Well, I didn’t want to be the one to remind Mamá that our ancestors had lost their lives fighting in the revolution seeking independence from Spain. The place looked like the palace built for the Spanish Infanta, and it had left my brothers and me with post-traumatic stress disorder toward anything Spanish. Forget Spanish restaurants and Almodovar movies. It had taken me six months before I could even contemplate drinking a rioja.

In the ensuing year I’d grown accustomed to the decor—although I was still a wreck every time I brought Marti there with his three-year-old’s dirty hands. I thought of my mother as a tasteful woman, but this latest decorating scheme shouted out “refugee done good.”

“Your father is in the office,” Mamá said. “So he won’t be able to join us for lunch.”

“Well, I—”

“It’s just as well,” she interrupted, “since Marti’s not here, and it’s just you.”

Dios mio.
Mamá and me, alone over lunch. How were we going to get through it?

We had just finished off the gazpacho, the first course, and were awaiting the next, when I heard the faint melody of “Jingle Bells.” That was the music I had programmed my cell phone to play when a call was coming in, so that meant it was coming from my tote bag in the next room. Mamá didn’t approve of cell phones, and insisted they be turned off in her house. Usually I obeyed her rule, but that day I had forgotten. I had plenty of other things on my mind.

I glanced up at Mamá, hoping she hadn’t heard. Thankfully, she was well into a long and intricate story about how the surgeon had botched my Tia Norma’s latest face-lift. A sure way to distract Mamá was to ask her about any of our relatives—she could gossip about them for hours. She was pleased to think I was interested in her stories, and I was happy not to listen to her free advice about how to run my life. I had learned long ago that the best defense was offense, and that asking about one of my aunts guaranteed the topic wouldn’t turn to my conduct.

I looked around the dining room, as if ignoring the sound of “Jingle Bells” was going to make it go away. It wasn’t my favorite tune, by any means, but I had never heard anyone else use it, and I figured it would make my phone stand out from the millions of others in Miami. Where else could you hear “Jingle Bells” in July?

Our lunch was Spanish style—what else?—and served in a room where Don Quixote might have been faithfully attended by Sancho Panza. The table was massive, big enough to seat a dozen guests, with fabulously uncomfortable wooden chairs upholstered in red brocade. The mustard-colored walls were painted in a faux scrolling black ink pattern that was supposed to look elegant and sophisticated. Instead, it always made me think a horde of insects were crawling their way up to the ceiling. The French doors leading out to the garden were covered in yards of black velvet, and the lighting was provided by a massive black iron chandelier that hung over the table and swayed like the sword of Damocles whenever the air-conditioning came on. An enormous gilt mirror was placed over the wooden sideboard—Mamá claimed it was from the times of Columbus and Queen Isabella, but I thought the decorator must have found it in a brothel. Whatever the case, eating in that room made me feel as though it was me facing the Spanish Inquisition. I rarely escaped without indigestion.