one hot summer (8 page)

“Jingle Bells” began to sound again just as Yolanda came in with plates for the main course. For some reason Mamá hadn’t heard the sound, or else she was so pleased to have a captive audience for her savaging of Tia Norma that she was just going to ignore it and expect me to do the same.

I waited for a break in Mamá’s description of Tia Norma’s neck—suffice it to say the skin was reminiscent of a chicken’s—and broke in before Mamá could get started on the too-tight muscles around my aunt’s mouth.

“I’m so sorry,” I said. “But I have to go to the bathroom before we begin the next course.”

I vaguely pointed to the empty iced tea glass in front of me as an explanation for my breach of etiquette. At Mamá’s table, getting up during a meal was forbidden.

My mother sighed deeply to demonstrate how wounded she was, and shook her head slightly from side to side as she reached for the silver bell on the table. Yolanda dutifully appeared seconds later.

“Please wait a few minutes before the main course, until Señora Margarita has returned,” she ordered. Yolanda nodded.

I ignored my mother’s look of annoyance and sprang out of my chair, racing toward the bathroom and grabbing my bag along the way. The phone was still ringing, and as soon as I had closed the door behind me I pressed the button to answer. I had thought that this was an important call, and my instincts were on target.

“Daisy,” Luther said.

“Luther,” I said, trying to keep my voice calm. My heart beat in my ears.

“Can you talk?” he asked.

“Just for a minute.” I tried not to think of Mamá sitting at the table, fuming and checking her watch every fifteen seconds.

“I know I was supposed to wait for you to call me,” Luther said. He paused. I could tell this wasn’t easy for him, so I waited for him to continue. “Look, I really need to talk with you as soon as possible.”

“We’re talking now,” I said.

“You know what I mean. In person.”

I didn’t consider the implications of what Luther was saying, or the gravity of his tone. Instead, I started to think of ways to get together with him.

“I’m at my mother’s house having lunch right now,” I told him. “But I’ll be done in about an hour.”

Luther thought for a moment. “If I know my Miami geography, you have to pass by Coconut Grove to get from Coral Gables to Miami Beach. Right?”

So Luther remembered that my parents lived in Coral Gables. It almost felt as if the years hadn’t gone by at all, like it had been a dream.

“Right.”

“I’m still downtown at the office,” Luther said. “But I could get out of here and meet you in the Grove someplace. Would that be all right with you?”

There was a hesitance in Luther’s voice I had never heard before.

“Well, how about meeting at the Dinner Key Marina, across from the Grand Bay Hotel?” I suggested. I didn’t know what was going on, or what I was doing. I was following a logic I didn’t understand. “There are some benches there where we could talk. It’s reasonably private.”

I was about to give Luther better directions, but he cut me off.

“I’ll find it
,” he said. “See you in an hour.”

He hung up before we could say good-bye. I put down the toilet seat and sat down. As the reality of what had just happened set in, I panicked. I didn’t know what I had just agreed to. And I wished I had dressed better, washed my hair, and put on makeup that morning. Maybe Mamá was right. Maybe a woman should always look as if she had just stepped out of the pages of
W
.

Well, one hurdle at a time. I had to get back and finish lunch before Mamá sent out Yolanda as a search party. The real question was how I was going to be able to eat a single bite of food.

I had instinctively suggested meeting Luther at Dinner Key Marina because I needed to be near the water for what I knew was going to be an important encounter. I liked to make all the big decisions in my life in the presence of water. I was like most Cubans in this regard—the ocean was best, but a lake would do in a pinch. We’re island people; water surrounds our thoughts and souls, it gives us life and protects us.

But there were other reasons. The marina would afford us privacy, and it was highly unlikely that I would encounter anyone I knew there at two in the afternoon on a weekday. And it was a public place, which meant nothing physical could transpire between us. Not that I was planning on anything, but having a deterrent in place seemed like a good idea.

After I had finished talking to Luther, I had shut off the phone and ran water in the sink, then flushed the toilet for good measure. There was no harm in covering my tracks. Then, cell phone back in my tote bag, I left the guest bathroom.

I was deep in thought and preoccupied by the meeting an hour away, and I walked slowly back to the dining room. I dreaded returning to the table, knowing that Mamá would be angry that I had interrupted lunch. It was a mortal sin to have left her there, seated and alone at the table. She probably wouldn’t say anything, but her attitude would convey everything she wanted me to know. I was already in her bad books by not bringing Marti, and getting up from the table would have sealed my fate.

The instant Mamá saw me come into the dining room, she rang her silver bell to summon Yolanda. I might have been imagining things, but it felt as though the temperature in the room had dropped about twenty degrees since I left.

“Señora Margarita has returned,” Mamá told the maid as I slipped into the seat. “We will continue with lunch, please.”

“Sorry again,” I said.
“Perdoname, por favor.”
I knew what sort of groveling would at least partly appease my mother.

Yolanda returned with a huge silver tray on which two portions of fish lay majestically on a bed of parsley surrounded by white rice and peas. I waited for Mamá to serve herself, then did the same.

My mother took one bite of the grouper and laid down her fork.

“Dry,” she announced with profound disappointment.

Her implication was clear to me. Had I not left the table to go to the bathroom the fish would have been served at the proper moment and would not have dried out in the oven for those extra minutes. Subtlety wasn’t Mamá’s strong suit, but payback was.

I took a bite. I thought the fish was cooked just right, but there was no point getting into a pissing match with Mamá about it. I had learned well over the years that it was no use contradicting my mother. And since I had to be out of there within the hour, I didn’t want to get into a prolonged discussion with her about the damned fish.

Instead I turned the conversation toward a subject I knew Mamá would like: my other aunt. Tia Veronica, and her liposuction. I knew I was selling out, but I was on a tight schedule. And who was I to stand on principle? I was scheming how to get out of the house to meet an old boyfriend.

I ate everything on my plate, accepted a serving of flan for dessert, and topped off the meal with coffee, even though I feared it would spoil my breath for my meeting with Luther. The tin of Altoids in my bag, I hoped, would take care of that problem.

As soon as lunch was finished, I kissed Mamá good-bye and mumbled something about having a few errands to run before I went home. I sprinted out to my car, giving her no chance to comment on my horrid manners. If I had hung around I would have been on the receiving end of a major lecture.

Actually, if I thought about it, Mamá had been on her best behavior that day. It must have been painful for her to suffer in silence what she must have thought were so many social gaffes on my part. It was too much to hope that she was mellowing with age, but she might have been moving gradually, slowly, in that direction.

Mamá’s attitude, never entirely easy for her family to deal with, took a sharp downturn three years before when, completely by accident, she discovered that my father had been having an affair for ten years with Ofelia Carrera, a Cuban woman who worked as a bookkeeper for Santos Pharmacies. If my father had been a womanizer, his behavior would at least have been understandable if not excusable. For Cubans, it was almost expected that men cheated on their wives at some point in their lives—again, it might not be excusable, but it was chalked up to the appetites of the male of the species. But this hadn’t been a one-night stand. Papa had been involved deeply with one woman for a very long time, and that was what made the situation so upsetting for the entire family.

To top it off, the manner in which their affair came to the surface was uniquely tawdry. Papa suffered a heart attack while visiting Ofelia in her apartment—which, it turned out, he had bought for her. When she realized how seriously ill Papa was, Ofelia had been forced to call up my brother Mickey and tell him that paramedics were on the way to the apartment and that Papa was lying down and having difficulty breathing. She told Mickey that she wasn’t sure Papa was going to make it, and that the family should be prepared for the worst. And there was a practical matter—as a nonrelative, she would be unable to consult with doctors about his treatment. Papa needed one of us right away.

Until that phone call, my brothers and Mamá had thought of Ofelia—when we did, which was rarely—as the competent and reasonably attractive bookkeeper at Papa’s office. Unlike others who worked in the executive office, Ofelia generally kept to herself and was very circumspect about her personal life. Now we knew why.

Once he got over the shock of getting a call at home from Ofelia, then hearing what she had to say, Mickey added two and two and came up with the right answer. Papa wouldn’t be at Ofelia’s apartment to discuss bookkeeping, after all. Mickey hung up and raced over to her apartment, which was just a mile away from his place. He knew for certain that his father was having an affair. What he didn’t know was whether Papa would live long enough to be confronted about it.

Mickey arrived just in time to see the paramedics lifting Papa from the king-size bed in Ofelia’s bedroom onto a gurney. They were taking him to Mercy Hospital, the closest to Ofelia’s apartment. Mickey identified himself to the paramedics, who said the situation was touch and go. Papa was barely conscious as they slammed the ambulance doors shut. Mickey stood in front of Ofelia’s apartment, his blood turned cold by the sound of the siren receding into the distance.

A few nights later, when Papa was out of danger, Mickey took Sergio and me to a bar in the Grove for drinks after leaving the hospital. It was then that he told us all the details of what happened. He told us how Ofelia had sat in a chair in the corner of her bedroom, dressed only in a tatty bathrobe, silent as she watched the paramedics working on Papa. Though it was her home, she seemed to know she was pushed to the margins of Papa’s life. Miami might be a freewheeling place, but it hadn’t reached the point at which mistresses were considered on a par with blood relatives. Mickey wasn’t particularly sensitive, but he said her expression had broken his heart when he left her there with a hollow promise to call later. She knew her days with Papa were over.

As soon as he got in his car to follow the ambulance to Mercy Hospital, Mickey got on his cell phone and patched through a conference call with Sergio and me. I don’t know which was more shocking—the news that Papa had suffered a heart attack, or the fact that he’d had it in his lover’s bed, like a character in a telenovela. I knew it wasn’t unusual for men to cheat on their wives, especially Cuban men, but I didn’t think Papa was like that. I had never really given my parents’ marriage much thought, I realized. The fact that they were still married after all they had been through meant they were still in love, I figured. They had three children, so they must have had some sort of sex life. I realized that their marriage was a mystery, just like everyone else’s. No one knows the full truth, save for the two people involved.

Sergio and I had immediately gone to the hospital, where we met Mickey outside the emergency room and went into full crisis mode on the issue of what to do about Mamá. Obviously we had to notify her, but we weren’t sure what we should say. It was possible, we realized, that Mamá knew about Ofelia, or at least suspected that Papa had a mistress. She was, after all, a Cuban woman married to a Cuban man.

We agonized for half an hour while we waited for her to arrive. Then, rightly or wrongly, we decided to concoct a story about Papa falling ill while delivering some documents for Ofelia to work on. We simply couldn’t deal with giving Mamá the sordid details. But we were spared having to lie when Mamá arrived. Mamá identified herself at the front desk before she saw us, where a triage nurse handed her the paramedics’ report. It was all there: Ofelia, the bed. Mamá didn’t need to know any more.

Mamá never discussed Papa’s heart attack with me or my brothers except as it related to his physical health. Mickey, Sergio, and I talked about it for a while, but soon they grew bored with the subject. For them, it simply wasn’t all that interesting that Papa had a mistress. They were Cuban men, and deeper explanations were unnecessary.

For my part, I felt that I understood Mamá a little better. I wish I had known earlier, because it would have made a lot of things easier to understand. My opinion of Papa didn’t change much because the truth was that I had never really known him very well in the first place. Cuban men, especially of his generation, weren’t very involved with their children’s lives, especially that of their daughters. I was at least able to view him as a complex person, with human needs and desires, and not simply the ultimate authority at home, the breadwinner and decision-maker.

I was then thirty-two years old, and I hadn’t begun to sort out the truth of my parents’ private lives. After Papa’s heart attack,
I realized that all of my thoughts about marriage were filtered through my parents’ relationship. They weren’t exactly great role models, but they were all that I knew. I hoped they were happy, though a lot of the time I feared they weren’t.

And now I was driving to meet Luther. I had a flash of my mother’s face in the emergency room, ashen, reading the paramedics’ report with a black expression. She was a lady at all costs, even in the face of catastrophe. I couldn’t have said what she was feeling in that moment.

It wasn’t an image I wanted, or needed. Not when I was minutes away from meeting an old love who said it was urgent that we talk right away.