“That way no one can tell who’s here,” Mundín explains in English. “This is the high-class motel, la crème de la crème, not to get too gross. Everyone would know everyone else’s cars here.” Mundín unlocks the door to the cabin and stands aside to let the ladies in. An unabashed king-size bed made up with a flowered bedspread stands in the dead center of the room. There are a couple of rolled pillows with tassels at the head of the bed. Covered with the same wishy-washy flowered material as the spread, the pillows evoke an Arab engineer more than a lord and master of the harem.
“Is this all?” we say, disappointed.
“What’d ya expect?” Mundín is nonplussed at our lack of proper titillation. After all, he has risked getting into a lot of trouble to show us the naughty face of the Island. Nice girls at a whore house! His mother would kill him!
Sandi puts her arm around Mundín and bumps hips. She is doing her Mae West imitation just as the yardboy comes in with a tray of rum and Cokes. He keeps his eyes on the tile floor as he goes from one to the other, proffering refreshments, as if to reassure us there will be no witnesses. As soon as he exits, we laugh. “I wonder what he thinks?” Carla shakes her head, just imagining it. Mundín wiggles his eyebrows. “How many taboos can we break here? Let’s see.” He enumerates: incest, group sex, lesbian sex, virgin sex—
“Virgin sex? Who’re you talking about?” his sister Lucinda challenges with a hand on her hip.
“Yeah,” we concur, hands on our hips, facing him, a line-up of feminists.
Mundín’s eyes do a double blink. For all his liberal education in the States, and all his sleeping around there and here, and all his eager laughter when his Americanized cousins recount their misadventures, his own sister has to be pure. “Let’s go.” He hurries us after we finish our rum and Cokes. As we’re backing out of our garage, a pickup passes behind us on the motel drive.
“Hey!” Yoyo cries out. “Is that Fifi and Manuel?”
Mundín chuckles. “Hey, hey! Way to go.”
“Way to go, way to schmo,” Sandi snaps. “That’s our baby sister going in there with a guy who thinks condoms cause impotence.”
“Go back in there after them!” Carla orders Mundín.
“She’s got her rights too.” Mundín laughs pointedly as he drives through the gate, which the boy is already closing on our taillights.
“This isn’t funny,” Carla warns as we consult in the bathroom back at Capri’s. “She’s not going to come back home on her own, she’s brainwashed.”
Sandi concurs. “I mean, they wouldn’t need a motel room if they weren’t sleeping together.”
“After she promised,” Carla says, nodding, aggrieved.
There, among the pink vanities with baskets of little towels and talcum powder and brushes, we come up with our plot. We reach out our hands and seal our pact. Yoyo rallies us with “¡Que viva la revolutión!” On top of our motel rum and Cokes, we’ve had a few of Capri’s famous frozen daiquiris. The young maid who has been listening to our English gibberish offers us a pink perfumed hand towel, which Sandi accepts and waves like the flag for our side.
Our last Saturday night on the Island, the compound folks sit on Tía Carmen’s patio, reminiscing. Periodically, family stops by to say goodbye to our parents and deliver the packets of letters and bills they want mailed in the States. Now that Tío Mundo is in government, there are always other cabinet members and old friends coming over to shoptalk politics and ask for favors. The patio is sex segregated—the men sit to one side, smoking their cigars and tinkling their rum drinks. The women lounge on wicker armchairs by the wall lamps, exclaiming over whatever there is to be exclaimed about.
The young people take off for the Avenida, promising to be home early. Tonight, it’s the regulars, Lucinda, Mundín, and Fifi and Manuel, of course, and the three of us. Carla does the usual chaperone duty in the pickup and then gets dropped off at Capri’s. “They’re having some big fight,” she confesses when she joins us.
“What now?” Sandi asks.
“Same old thing,” Carla sighs. “Fifi spent too much time talking to Jorge and her skirt is too short and her jersey too tight, blah, blah, blah.”
“Rmm, rmm,” Sandi and Yoyo rev.
Mundín laughs. “Serves you girls right.”
We narrow our eyes at him. When he’s in the States, where he went to prep school and is now in college, he’s one of us, our buddy. But back on the Island, he struts and turns macho, needling us with the unfair advantage being male here gives him.
As usual, we’re to wait for the lovers at Capri’s. Twenty minutes before our curfew, they’ll pick up Carla, and we’ll all head home again like one big happy group of virgin cousins. But tonight, as we’ve agreed, we’re staging a coup on the same Avenida where a decade ago the dictator was cornered and wounded on his way to a tryst with his mistress. It was a plot our father helped devise but did not carry through, since by then we had fled to the States. Tonight, we are blowing the lovers’ cover. First step is to get Mundín to drive us home. Male loyalty is what keeps the macho system going, so Mundín will want to protect Manuel.
Lucinda works a version of her Kotex custom officer trick. She complains to her brother that she’s just gotten her period and needs to go home. “I’ve got terrible cramps,” Lucinda moans.
“Can’t you take something for it?” Mundín asks, inconvenienced and awed by the mysteries of the female body.
Lucinda nods. “It’s at home, though.”
Mundín shakes his head at his sister. Nevertheless, he is her protector. Ever since her quip at the motel, he’s been watching her closely. “Okay, okay, I’ll take you.” He turns to us, his cousins. “You guys have to stay here and cover for Manuel.”
“We can’t stay here without you,” we remind him. Rule númeio uno: Girls are not left unescorted in public. “We’ll get in trouble, Mundín.”
Mundín scowls. This is unexpected prissiness from us. “Well, I’ll tell them I left you here with some cousins who showed. Then, I’ll come back for you. By then Fifi and Manuel should be done.”
Should be done. A cannon shot across the bow. No time for further delay. We smile three churlish Che Guevara smiles. “We’re going with you.”
“But what about Fifi and Manuel?” Mundín is flabbergasted. If everyone except Fifi and Manuel shows up at the compound, the lovers will be in deep trouble. Rule número dos: Girls are not to be left unchaperoned with their novios.
“We came with you, we stay with you. We don’t want to get into trouble.” Our good-girl voices don’t quite convince our cousin.
“I won’t do it!” Mundín folds his hands on the table.
We remind him of last night’s outing to the motel. Should we mention that to his father? We know what sword of Damocles hangs over his head—an electric razor for the military school crewcut Mundín would have to get. For just as we, his American cousins, are threatened with Island confinement, military school is what’s in store for Mundín should he step out of line.
He looks us straight in the eyes. “What are you girls up to?” he fires at us. We meet his look with bulletproof smiles, stone faces on which, with his myopic macho vision, he can’t make out the writing on the walls.
The compound driveway looks like a Mercedes Benz car lot. A Jeep and two Japanese cars say some of the younger generation are also here. Lucinda spots Tía Fidelina and Tío Orlando’s pale salmon Mercedes. “This is going to be muy interesting,” she whispers.
The patio is packed with relatives. Mundín hurries over to the men’s side, knowing the first bomb will explode among the women. We sisters go on our rounds, kissing all the aunts. Tía Fidelina’s milky dark eyes are almost totally sightless. “And which one is the novia?” she asks, squinting at her nieces.
“Yes,” Mami agrees. “Where is Fifi?”
“With Manuel,” Sandi offers smoothly. Her tone implies we have no problem with that.
“Where are they?” Mami asks more emph
atically.
Carla shrugs. “How should she know?”
There is an embarrassed silence in which the words her reputation are as palpable as if someone had hung a wedding dress in the air. Tía Carmen sighs. Tía Fidelina unfolds her fan of overly-gorgeous roses. Tía Flor smiles wildly at the rest of us and asks us if we had a nice time. Mami looks past the crowd at Papi, over there happily exchanging dictatorship stories with the other men.
Steely-faced, she stands up and nods for us to follow her. The three of us single-file behind Mami into Tía Carmen’s bedroom again, the scene of Mami’s courtroom. Tía comes along, counseling patience.
Once the door is closed, Mami loses her temper. First, she berates Carla, who as the oldest was in charge and had orders to stick with Mundín and Fifi as their in-car chaperone. Then, we get chapter and verse on being bad daughters. Finally, she swears, in front of our aunt, that Fifi is going back with us. “If your father should find out!” Our mother shakes her head, reviewing the consequences. Rather anticlimactically, she adds, “A disgrace to the family.”
“Ya, ya.” Tía Carmen lifts her hand for her sister-in-law to stop. “These girls have lived so long away, they have gotten American ways.”
“American ways!” Mami cries. “Fifi’s been living here for six months. That’s no excuse.”
“There must be an explanation.” Tía Carmen changes course. “Let’s not anticipate where the coconut will fall when the hurricane hasn’t hit yet,” she advises.
Mami shakes her head conclusively. “If she can’t behave her-self here, she goes back with us, period! I’m not going to send them anymore to cause trouble!”
Tía Carmen puts her arms around us. “Don’t forget, these are my girls, too. And they’re good girls, no trouble at all. What would I do”—she looks up at us—“if I didn’t get to have them with me every year?”
We look at each other, and then, drop our gaze to hide our confusion. We are free at last, but here, just at the moment the gate swings open, and we can fly the coop, Tía Carmen’s love revives our old homesickness. It’s like this monkey experiment Carla read about in her clinical psych class. These baby monkeys were kept in a cage so long, they wouldn’t come out when the doors were finally left open. Instead, they stayed inside and poked their arms through the bars for their food, just out of reach.
It is close to midnight when we hear the pickup laboring up the driveway. Out on the patio, the visiting relatives have left, and only the compound folks remain, talking in low, preoccupied voices. In our bedroom, we have been defending ourselves to each other. We all know Fifi was headed for trouble with M.G. “She’s only sixteen,” we keep exclaiming. She thought she could be all Island. We know better.
But still, we feel rotten when a pale Fifi marches into our bedroom awhile later after a grueling interrogation in Tía Carmen’s bedroom.
She says nothing to us but opens the closet and begins packing all her clothes. For a moment we panic. Is she going to elope with Manuel?
“What are you doing, Fifi?” Yoyo asks.
Fifi continues to pack from a pile of clothes she has emptied out of her drawers onto the floor. Silence.
“Fifi?” Carla touches her shoulder. “What happened?” She means, of course, out in the patio or even—since the dull, absent look on Fifi’s face implies more—before.
Fifi turns to us, her eyes are red and weepy. “Traitors,” she says. The sound of her suitcase latching closed gives the accusation an eerie finality. At the door, she raises her chin proudly, and then we hear her steps echoing down the hall to our cousin Carmencita’s room.
We look at each other as if to say, “She’ll get over it.” Meaning Manuel, meaning her fury at us, meaning her fear of her own life. Like ours, it lies ahead of her like a wilderness just before the first explorer sets foot on the virgin sand.
Daughter of Invention
Mami, Papi, Yoyo
For a period after they arrived in this country, Laura García tried to invent something. Her ideas always came after the sightseeing visits she took with her daughters to department stores to see the wonders of this new country. On his free Sundays, Carlos carted the girls off to the Statue of Liberty or the Brooklyn Bridge or Rockefeller Center, but as far as Laura was concerned, these were men’s wonders. Down in housewares were the true treasures women were after.
Laura and her daughters would take the escalator, marveling at the moving staircase, she teasing them that this might be the ladder Jacob saw with angels moving up and down to heaven. The moment they lingered by a display, a perky saleslady approached, no doubt thinking a young mother with four girls in tow fit the perfect profile for the new refrigerator with automatic defrost or the heavy duty washing machine with the prewash soak cycle. Laura paid close attention during the demonstrations, asking intelligent questions, but at the last minute saying she would talk it over with her husband. On the drive home, try as they might, her daughters could not engage their mother in conversation, for inspired by what she had just seen, Laura had begun inventing.
She never put anything actual on paper until she had settled her house down at night. On his side of the bed her husband would be conked out for an hour already, his Spanish news-papers draped over his chest, his glasses propped up on his bedside table, looking out eerily at the darkened room like a disembodied bodyguard. In her lighted corner, pillows propped behind her, Laura sat up inventing. On her lap lay one of those innumerable pads of paper her husband brought home from his office, compliments of some pharmaceutical company, advertising tranquilizers or antibiotics or skin cream. She would be working on a sketch of something familiar but drawn at such close range so she could attach a special nozzle or handier handle, the thing looked peculiar. Her daughters would giggle over the odd doodles they found in kitchen drawers or on the back shelf of the downstairs toilet. Once Yoyo was sure her mother had drawn a picture of a man’s you-know-what; she showed her sisters her find, and with coy, posed faces they inquired of their mother what she was up to. Ay, that was one of her failures, she explained to them, a child’s double-compartment drinking glass with an outsized, built-in straw.
Her daughters would seek her out at night when she seemed to have a moment to talk to them: they were having trouble at school or they wanted her to persuade their father to give them permission to go into the city or to a shopping mall or a movie—in broad daylight, Mami! Laura would wave them out of her room. “The problem with you girls …” The problem boiled down to the fact that they wanted to become Americans and their father—and their mother, too, at first—would have none of it.
“You girls are going to drive me crazy!” she threatened, if they kept nagging. “When I end up in Bellevue, you’ll be safely sorry!”
She spoke in English when she argued with them. And her English was a mishmash of mixed-up idioms and sayings that showed she was “green behind the ears,” as she called it.
If her husband insisted she speak in Spanish to the girls so they wouldn’t forget their native tongue, she’d snap, “When in Rome, do unto the Romans.”
Yoyo, the Big Mouth, had become the spokesman for her sisters, and she stood her ground in that bedroom. “We’re not going to that school anymore, Mami!”
“You have to.” Her eyes would widen with worry. “In this country, it is against the law not to go to school. You want us to get thrown out?”
“You want us to get killed? Those kids were throwing stones today!”
“Sticks and stones don’t break bones,” she chanted. Yoyo could tell, though, by the look on her face, it was as if one of those stones the kids had aimed at her daughters had hit her. But she always pretended they were at fault. “What did you do to provoke them? It takes two to tangle, you know.”
“Thanks, thanks a lot, Mom!” Yoyo stormed out of that room and into her own. Her daughters never called her Mom except when they wanted her to feel how much she had failed them in this country. She was a good enough Mami, fussing and scolding a
nd giving advice, but a terrible girlfriend parent, a real failure of a Mom.
Back she went to her pencil and pad, scribbling and tsking and tearing off sheets, finally giving up, and taking up her New York Times. Some nights, though, if she got a good idea, she rushed into Yoyo’s room, a flushed look on her face, her tablet of paper in her hand, a cursory knock on the door she’d just thrown open. “Do I have something to show you, Cuquita!”
This was Yoyo’s time to herself, after she finished her home-work, while her sisters were still downstairs watching TV in the basement. Hunched over her small desk, the overhead light turned off, her desk lamp poignantly lighting only her paper, the rest of the room in warm, soft, uncreated darkness, she wrote her secret poems in her new language.
“You’re going to ruin your eyes!” Laura began, snapping on the overly bright overhead light, scaring off whatever shy passion Yoyo, with the blue thread of her writing, had just begun coaxing out of a labyrinth of feelings.
“Oh, Mami!” Yoyo cried out, her eyes blinking up at her mother. “I’m writing.”
“Ay, Cuquita.” That was her communal pet name for who-ever was in her favor. “Cuquita, when I make a million, I’ll buy you your very own typewriter.” (Yoyo had been nagging her mother for one just like the one her father had bought to do his order forms at home.) “Gravy on the turkey” was what she called it when someone was buttering her up. She buttered and poured. “I’ll hire you your very own typist.”
Down she plopped on the bed and held out her pad. “Take a guess, Cuquita?” Yoyo studied the rough sketch a moment. Soap sprayed from the nozzle head of a shower when you turned the knob a certain way? Instant coffee with creamer already mixed in? Time-released water capsules for your potted plants when you were away? A keychain with a timer that would go off when your parking meter was about to expire? (The ticking would help you find your keys easily if you mislaid them.) The famous one, famous only in hindsight, was the stick person dragging a square by a rope—a suitcase with wheels? “Oh, of course,” Yoyo said, humoring her. “What every household needs: a shower like a car wash, keys ticking like a bomb, luggage on a leash!” By now, it had become something of a family joke, their Thomas Edison Mami, their Benjamin Franklin Mom.