The problem was I knew I’d be seeing more of the family than just the Garcías at this wedding. There were bound to be some of those upper crust aunts and uncles up from the island, though I wasn’t sure if they would still be showing up for the García girls’ marriages. (There’ve been seven so far.) To that old guard from the D.R., I’ll always be the maid’s daughter, no matter how many degrees hang on the wall and how many receptionists you have to talk to to get through to me.
And there was this added thing: this would be the first time I’d face them since my dying mother let it be known that I was related to the de la Torre family by more than her employment.
I flew into whatever city it was that has an airport close by, called a cab, and the dispatcher says he can’t tie up one of his cars to go that far out. “Why don’t you call Dwyer’s, they got limos and there’s no weddings or funerals in town today.” So I call Dwyer Car Service, and they say, sure, we’ll take you there. An hour and a half later I roll up to this meadow in a stretch black limo with a little guy in a uniform opening the door for me.
And this is what’s interesting, very interesting. Every time some of the García de la Torre clan go to introduce me to the groom’s side of the family, they hesitate. “This is Sarita Lopez . . . the daughter . . . of a woman . . . whom . . . we were very fond of.” And I’m thinking, go ahead and say it. She’s the daughter of the maid who used to clean our toilets and make our beds and calm our rages and wipe away our tears.
And then, please, go on with the story: she has made something of herself, the daughter. She got her B.S., then went to med school, and now owns one of the leading sports medicine clinics in the country. Sometimes, in fact, a patient will come in from the Dominican Republic, and I’ll have to smile because I recognize the name. Some “uncle” on my father’s side with a tennis elbow or shinsplints. Someone who would deny me if I presented myself as his niece, but here he is asking me to operate on the cartilage in his knee.
Anyhow, I have come a long way, baby, as the cigarette ad says. But you know, I’d give it all away, I would, the clinic, the club championships, to get that hard-working, dark-skinned, tired old woman back.
“I miss your mami so much,” Yo is saying. She has thrown her arm around me—like she’s been waiting to do that to someone and so I’m getting the benefit of an even bigger affection than what she actually feels for me. “I wish she could have been here. But I’m so so glad you came, Sarita. If you hadn’t, it’d be like one of the García girls was missing.”
It’s one of those lies that the heart feels is true but the head knows is a bunch of crap. Still, for the moment, I let myself believe it. And the truth is these four García sisters are the closest I’ve got to family, to people who are like me: all of us caught between cultures—but with this added big difference, I’m also caught between classes, at least when I go back to the island to visit.
“Ay, Yolanda,” I tell her, feeling a little teary myself. “I wouldn’t have missed it for the world.” But then, I glance over her shoulder at a clutch of her fancy old aunts and dressy cousins whom my mother used to serve cafecitos to on a silver tray, and I feel my self-confidence drain away as if all those degrees and patients are nothing but a story I made up about myself.
The groom comes up, a nice-looking man with a sweet, shy face. A farmer’s boy, Yo tells me later on. Sharecroppers from Kansas who stayed and scraped the bottom of that dust bowl. Poor simple folk, not unlike my island family. “Ay, Doug,” Yo says, “come meet the baby García sister.”
And that man takes both my hands like I’m some dear person, and he doesn’t have to say a word to make me feel I’m a part of whatever is going on here.
Dios santo, but I believe I recognize her in that lavender suit, with a kind of Givenchy collar, Primitiva’s daughter, the one who looks like a model and became a doctor.
The way that girl showed up the García girls. God moves in mysterious ways.
I would go up to her and introduce myself: “I’m Flor de la Torre. Your mother worked for me for many many years. As a matter of fact, it was from my house that she left to go to the United Estates when the Garcías moved up here.”
I treated her very well. When she left, I gave her an old winter coat of mine that I kept for traveling to New York to go shopping. It was February and I knew what awaited her when she landed.
She was my size back then, a tall handsome woman with cinnamon-color skin a little darker than the daughter’s and jet black hair that matched her dark eyes. She had been with the family forever—each of us sort of inheriting her when a new baby arrived or we fell ill with a flu or threw a big party. Primitiva was everyone’s right hand.
But she began nagging that she wanted to go to Nueva York. Some of the family felt she was being ungrateful, but I understood. This would be an opportunity for her. And she had a new little baby to think of, too.
Finally her chance came to join the Garcías, and Primitiva was so happy to go.
And to tell you the truth, by then I was happy to see her go, too.
My husband Arturo always had an eye out for pretty women, not unlike that blond, pigtailed guy (I recognize him from somewhere . . .) who is going around here flirting with all of us ladies, offering us those silly balloons. Anyhow, Arturo’s eye would often come to rest on Primitiva as she stood by the sideboard waiting to serve the coq au vin or pudín de pan or when she was bent over cleaning the indoor pond or up on a ladder oiling the jalousies. But that’s as far as it ever got. As he himself put it, he was a lover of all arts, including the natural art displayed on a beautiful human face or chest or, I suppose, a backside.
But then, after all we did for Primitiva, helping her out in every way we could—from that winter coat to tuition for the girl at a private colegio, you can imagine how much it hurt when she came out with that preposterous story about my husband being that girl’s father!
And you can imagine how much it hurts me now to see her arriving here in a limousine with a chauffeur as if she were trying to show us all up. I would have thought Yolanda would be more sensitive to family feelings—though come to think of it, perhaps she does not know the story. We tried to keep it quiet. Such a scandal, for one thing, and for another, my husband was no longer around, God be with him, to explain as he always did to me that appreciating beauty was not the same as enjoying it.
I’m trying to ignore her or to just concentrate on the Givenchy suit—or is it an Oscar de la Renta?—the nicely coordinated pumps. But my eye keeps wandering up to those familiar eyes, the curve of that jaw, the way she swings her arms like Arturo when she walks.
It could be coincidence. Besides, it takes more than a man’s thing to make a family. It’s something you have to give yourself to, heart and soul, so you forge a link nothing in the world can break. Look at the García girls. Had they not been family, do you think I would have let them near my children?
So even if she has the de la Torre dimple in her chin and the hazel eyes from the Swedish great-great-grandmother, even so, she is still the maid’s daughter, no relation to my family at all.
I am pretty surprised to see old Dexter Hays here. And he is pretty surprised to see me too. “Hey, Lucy, you foxy lady, you. How ya doing?”
I want to say, “Fine, fine, got any of those American cigarettes on you?” He was a chain joint-smoker back when I met him—five, six years ago when Papi was running for prez. Old Dex came down to the compound to visit Yo, who was trying to pass him off as someone from the American press. Anyhow, the air around that pool house where Dex was staying was so thick with the smell of marijuana I was afraid the gardener would get high just from cleaning the pool. Dex finally left in a huff, and Yo told me later they had broken up.
Anyhow, here Dexter is, resurrected, and running around with balloons as if he’s the groom who has had too much to smoke, and the ceremony hasn’t even started. For the last half hour, he’s been talking up the maid’s daughter—my first cousin, if I am to believe
the gossip. And from looking at poor Tía Flor’s face I’d have to agree with what the campesinos say, gossip is how God spreads the little news we might have missed.
At least none of my exes are here. It’d be just like Yo to invite old Roe up here to read an e.e. cummings poem and talk about how it was really Yo he was in love with. What does she think a wedding is? A lemon squeeze?
We used to have those every summer when the García girls came down. The girl cousins would gather in a bedroom, and we each had to say what we liked and didn’t like about each person. Sometimes we did a co-ed lemon squeeze with Mundín and the boy cousins, but that wasn’t as much—I wouldn’t exactly call it fun since lemon squeezes were never fun. But when the boys were along, lemon squeezes never got off the ground. I mean, Mundín would say something like, “Okay, Yo, I guess I don’t like—I don’t know, let’s see, I don’t like, okay, I got it, your big butt.”
“But Mundín, I don’t have a big butt!”
“Hahaha! Gotcha there, didn’t I?”
Remember we were all in our early teens, and you know what they say about boys maturing much later than girls. At forty-one, Mundín’s still going on sixteen.
Anyhow, the next summer after my parents found out via Yo’s diaries about my keeping company with Roe at boarding school and I was grounded on the island, we all gathered for a lemon squeeze. It’d been a while since we’d had one—I mean we were all about eighteen and had really outgrown them by then, but I suggested one for old time’s sake. Yo must have sensed something because she kind of backed off and said she thought lemon squeezes were mean-spirited. That even though we were supposed to say both what we liked and what we didn’t like, it was always the didn’t like part that everyone seemed to fix on.
And I said, “Oh come on, Yo. Just make believe you’re writing in one of your journals and let it all hang out.”
She looked at me with a kind of questioning look. It was finally dawning on her that I knew how my parents had come by their information.
“I’ll start,” I offered. “Let’s see.” I looked straight at Yo. “You know what I hate about you, Yo García. I hate how you snitched and made it look like you were just being creative. How you used your pen to get back at me. How your writing is one big fucking excuse for not living your life to the fullest. I hate—”
“Hey,” Sandi, the prettiest of the sisters, interrupted. “You’re being kind of mean, Lucinda. It wasn’t Yo’s fault Mami went snooping in her diary.”
But I couldn’t stop myself, I kept right on. I mentioned every goddamn last thing I couldn’t stand about her and then I made some things up. What was surprising was—given her big mouth—how she let me do it. Like she knew she had to accept this punishment from me. And I wanted to punish her. I wanted to destroy any relation between us. If there’s such a thing as divorcing brothers or sisters or family, I wanted to divorce my cousin.
Finally when I ran out of things, I burst into tears. But it wasn’t what you might think, penitent tears, no. They were tears of fury because I knew for all I had said, I couldn’t destroy the fact that we were still family.
“Come on,” Sandi urged. “Hug each other and make up.”
Yo reached for me, but I said, “If you touch me, I’ll scream!”
She backed off. She was crying, too. Then she said something that made me forgive her—in my heart—though I’ve kept her guessing to this day. “Remember, Lucinda, I was in love with Roe, too. But that doesn’t mean I would try to hurt you. In fact, I wrote all that stuff down so I wouldn’t hold it in my heart against you.”
I was still too mad to let her know I believed her. Instead I laid on the guilt. “I hope you know you’ve changed my life forever.”
“I know,” she said with a heavy sigh like a burden had descended on her shoulders.
Her arm comes around my shoulders now, and she nuzzles her face in my hair. These García girls are too affectionate. “Lucy, honey,” she teases me. “You getting ready to catch my bouquet?” Just last week I announced that I’d be marrying my fourth in October. Of course, this bouquet business is a joke since Yo is dressed in a very unbecoming pajama outfit, and she’s not doing anything traditional like carrying flowers.
“I don’t know if we should be catching each other’s bouquets,” I say. After all, I’m thinking, we two seem to have had the worst luck with men.
But she takes it a different way, as if I were referring to that old wound. I see it on her face, and maybe that’s why she pops the question one more time. “Hey, Lucy. You are happy now, aren’t you? I mean things turned out okay, after all?”
I give her a long look because I’ve withheld this admission for so many years, I don’t even know how to tell her. I look out at this hillside and this crazy group of people, a stepdaughter with her shoulders all squared for battle, Dex out there trying to pick up a date, an explosion or maybe a celebration about to happen, and I think, she needs all the luck she can get.
So I tell her, “I’m happy, Yo. I wouldn’t change one thing in my life, not the highs, not the lows.”
We hug, and it’s as if that old burden has slipped off her shoulders the way Yo says, “Thanks, cousin, I needed to hear you say so.”
But all this hugginess makes me squirm, so I try to get us onto a new topic. “Tell me, Yo, what are those animals over there?”
“Sheep,” she says, and then she has to add her smart two cents. “You’re such an outdoor girl, Lucy-cakes! What’d you think they were, big bunnies?”
“You’re heading for a lemon squeeze,” I warn her.
“I know,” she says, smiling this nervous smile. “I’m getting married.”
I don’t think I’ve seen Yo this nervous since that time way back when she had her first post-divorce boyfriend Tom over for dinner. She’d been through two failed marriages and five or so years of self-imposed celibacy, and she was as jittery as a virgin on a prom weekend. We were living together that summer, Yo and I, and some people in the neighborhood had their questions about that.
I had some lovely men back in those days before AIDS made us all cautious lovers. There was an Israeli guy, a plumber, an ex-priest, and of course, dear Jerry, who since married his therapist.
Everyone was seeing therapists back then. As a matter of fact, Yo and I were part of that therapy group Brett Moore assembled called Looking for the Muse. What I remember most during those sessions was Brett Moore and me sort of fighting over Yo’s soul—whether she was going to go the gay route or not. I had no problem with Yo being gay if that was what she was. But I thought Brett was projecting her own preferences onto Yo, who was really floundering back then. I should know, as her best friend, I heard it all: how she wanted to know what she was meant to do with her life, how she felt torn between giving herself to art or to political action, how she didn’t know if she was meant to love men or women. Yo was never one to take the big questions in bite-size, chewable portions. It was always What is my place in the universe instead of where can I park the car and not get a ticket or what apartment can I rent that includes the utilities.
Old Brett still doesn’t know when to quit. She comes up to me and says, “Who’s that hot-looking chick Yo’s all over?” Brett has a locker room mind when she’s not in her office practicing therapy.
I say, “Brett, dear, that happens to be Yo’s cousin Lucy-Linda to whom I was just introduced.”
“So?” she sasses, taking off her cowboy hat. This one’s got a red band either as a festive touch or in support of AIDS research, I don’t know. “Ever heard of kissing cousins?”
By now we’re just doing this joking out of some kind of habit. As we’re talking, I hear one of the babies start to cry. “How’s Mimi?” I ask her. Her partner Mimi and she both got artificially inseminated by the same donor’s sperm, so technically those two kids are sisters, but they don’t really have a father but a donor and their aunts are really each other’s mommy’s lover. Try to explain that to those old Dominican grande dames
sitting under that hickory grove stirring the air with their hand-painted fans.
Funny how many different kinds of family I can see just on this hillside. And that’s what I want to tell Yo when she comes up to me and Brett, looking a little down at the mouth.
“Pretty overwhelming?” Brett suggests, feeding her her lines.
Yo rests her head a moment on my shoulder, not saying a word. Then, she looks up at us and sighs. “I guess it was unrealistic, thinking everyone would really come together and have a good time here.” In her pretty gray Indian tunic and pants I helped her pick out, she looks less like a bride and more like some guru groupie who has just flunked her transcendence exam.
“What do you mean?” I ask her, looking at Brett as if we’re both in charge of this patient together. “Everyone’s doing fine. You shouldn’t be worrying about us.”
“That’s right, this is your wedding!” Brett adds. Mimi comes up and adds her two cents: two howling babies. “I’ve got to change them,” she reports wearily to Brett. “Do you have the keys to the car?”
Off they go together, a dozen or more pairs of Dominican eyes on them. And I’m left consoling Yo.
“I mean,” she goes on, “you’d think for one day only, my family would not get into some tiff about something, my aunts could try to be nice to Sarita and stop staring at Brett and Mimi, and Corey could maybe crack one tiny smile—”
“Hey, hey,” I say, making the time-out sign. “It’s going a lot better than you think.” It’s true, pastels are starting to cluster around bright-color dresses, dark skin by fair skin; strangers’ children approach the old, beckoning tías who take little chins in hand to tilt the small, bright faces this way and that, trying to figure out a resemblance in the family. And isn’t that Corey chasing after one of the García kids? Finally, as if letting his high jinks go and accepting the blow of an old flame going out, Dexter Hays releases what balloons he has left to the heat-hazy sky.