Emily Goldberg Learns to Salsa (17 page)

“What. Is. Going. On?” my mother asks, mildly bemused. She caps her pen, lays it on the table, and turns away from the crossword to regard us. “Since when are you two partners in crime?”

I shoot Lucy a meaningful look, thinking she should be the one to break the situation down for my mother. It's her issue, after all. But no dice. She steps backward, gives me a light shove. Okay, then. It's my show.

My hands feel clammy and I'm breathing at twice the normal rate.
This is for Lucy
, I remind myself. For some reason, that makes it easier to act completely and wildly out of character.

“We have a problem,” I say. “We were hoping you could help.”

Twenty minutes later we're in Rosa's car, careening down the main strip toward the twenty-four-hour pharmacy.

I've got to give my mom credit—she was as cool as I hoped she'd be. She listened to the news impassively, turning calmly to Lucy after we'd finished. “The test is for you?”

I can't lie; I'm relieved that she didn't assume it was me. It's not a bad sign, as far as her opinion of me is concerned. Of course, I feel guilty for even thinking that way. What exactly do I think it “says” about Lucy's character?

“We really appreciate this,” I gush from the backseat. Lucy sits beside my mother in the front, gnawing frenetically on a fingernail.

“You couldn't go yourself,” my mother matter-of-facts.

“That's what I told her,” Lucy says, almost managing a half smile. “She didn't believe me.”

My mother
tsk-tsks
, waves her hand in my direction dismissively. “Emily, do you have any idea the gossip if someone saw a single girl Lucy's age buying a pregnancy test? Trust me, as it is, if we run into anyone we know, they'll manage to pass along the story. But I'm married, so it's less scandalous.”

“It's the same with birth control,” Lucy tells me. “Good girls aren't even supposed to know what it is. Using it
is
, like, a double sin.”

I am in total disbelief. “So what do you do, then?”

“Don't ask, don't tell,” Lucy says. “Rhythm method. Pull and pray. Or get knocked up”—she flinches—“and people find out. It's embarrassing. More than embarrassing. At that point you pretty much better hope the guy marries you.”

I'm stunned. Maybe it's naive, and it's not like I didn't realize that things were more . . .
traditional
here, but this feels downright archaic. Girls back home worry about their reputations, sure, but somehow it's not quite the same.

“Well, this is good, then,” I say, trying to lighten the mood. “Or were you hoping that Rafael would propose?”

A storm cloud darkens across Lucy's features. “We broke up,” she says simply. “Last week.”

A lump forms in my throat. Oh.

 

My mother buys the test without incident (“At least as far as I know,” she tells us, emerging from the Rite Aid thoroughly nonplussed) and drives us straight over to the closest McDonald's. We can't take the test into the house, my mom assures me. Someone might see the box or the stick or Tía Rosa might simply
smell
that something's amiss.

Lucy runs into the bathroom, and we split a super-size fries and a chocolate shake while we wait the requisite three minutes for the test results. I have never felt more like a refugee from an after-school special, the sight of my mother slurping on a fast-food shake lending the whole experience a particularly surreal quality.

Three minutes and fifty-nine seconds later, Lucy gingerly digs into her tote bag where the stick is wrapped in thick wads of toilet paper. She tentatively strips away the paper like layers of an onion, and I can tell she is both dying to look and desperate not to look.

The suspense is killing
me
; I can only imagine what it must be doing to Lucy. It takes every ounce of restraint to resist flinging myself across the table and wrenching the stick out of her hands.

Finally the stick is clean and paper free. Lucy bites her lip, wrinkles her forehead, looks up at us. “There's a pink line,” she says, her voice hollow.

I squint at the packaging. “One pink line or two?”

“Just the one,” Lucy says.

“The test line or the one in the window?”

“Wait—which is supposed to be the test line? I think it's . . . maybe it's . . .”

Mercifully my mother takes the test from Lucy to confirm. “There's nothing there. In the test window,” she concludes. “You're not pregnant.”

“But I'm usually regular. What if the test is wrong?”

“How late is your period?” my mother asks.

“Two weeks,” Lucy says, nervous.

My mother shakes her head. “Nope. This thing would have picked it up. It's designed to pick up trace hormones as early as two days after your missed period.”

“Are these things reliable?” I ask, because I know that's what Lucy's thinking.

My mother nods emphatically. “They are. Remember I helped put together the curriculum for Feminism, Law, and Reproductive Biology last semester.”

Sometimes I forget that my mother's job is actually really cool.

“So why is it so late?” Lucy asks.

My mother shrugs. “It could be anything, really. Stress, changes in diet . . . all of these things will affect your cycle. And then I'm sure worrying about being pregnant didn't help . . . ironically.”

“I guess I have been upset,” Lucy admits. “With
abuela
passing and . . . I really never thought that Rafael and I would break up. Ever.”

I had assumed that their breakup had something to do with the pregnancy, but the way Lucy's talking now makes me think that there's more to the story, that the pregnancy scare is the end of it rather than the beginning.

“I had a friend who went through the same thing,” my mother says. Her voice is far away, and I get the feeling that she's talking more to herself than to either of us, lost in her memory. “At pretty much the same age. And of course, we had no idea what to do. I couldn't very well ask my mother to pick up a test for us.”

“So what did you do?” I ask.

“What could I do? Nothing. We didn't have anyone we could go to, and we were young, scared, and naive. We chose the ‘duck and cover' technique. You know, we pretended it wasn't happening.”

“So you just . . . did
nothing
?” I ask, incredulous, even though of course that's exactly what she just said. My mother, the most responsible person in the world, would never do something like that. Never.

“We did nothing,” she says flatly. “After about three months, of course, she started to show. Cecilia—her name was—Cecilia had been very slender, so at a certain point there was no hiding what was going on, no matter how baggy she bought her clothes. Anyway, they shipped her off to have her baby with some distant relatives in the countryside, and then I guess they put the baby up for adoption. Eventually Cecilia came back to school, but she never wanted to talk about it. So we never did.”

My mother drums her fingers across the linoleum tabletop. I can tell she'd kill for a cigarette. “That was when I knew,” she says. “That I had to come to the mainland for college. That I had to go to college. Somewhere . . . there would be more options.”

“Is that why . . .” I trail off, not sure I have the guts to ask the question that's been nagging at me. “Is that why you broke ties with Grandma and your family? Why you converted?”

“It's why I met your father, sure,” she says. “He was a big hippie back then too, so we kept running into each other at all sorts of rallies and things. It was pretty obvious very early on that we had a lot in common. And then when I got to know him and his values, I really related to them. Being Jewish felt . . . it felt right,” she says finally. “In a way that nothing else ever had before.”

“So why couldn't you be Jewish and still be connected to your family?” Lucy asks.

For my part, I am simply unable to believe that my mother, who is fiercely loyal to my father, Max, and me, would just turn away from her past like that.

“You're missing the point,” she says, a crooked smile on her lips. “I would have loved to be connected to the family. But it wasn't an option. I didn't sever ties with Grandma, sweetie. Grandma severed ties with me.”

And suddenly, everything that I thought I had known about my mother is completely and utterly turned around.

L
ucy and I decide to go for coffee—that is, to
really
go for coffee this time. Mom tries to protest, telling Lucy to go home and take it easy, but Lucy and I both know that we've got a free pass for the day, and we've both got big, sloppy mountains of pent-up nervous tension to expend.

“Your mom, she's great,” Lucy understates, stirring an espresso with telltale intensity.

“She is,” I agree, meaning it differently, more fully, than I ever have before.

“I never knew . . . well, I always figured that she was the one who turned away from the family. I assumed that was why my mother said—” She flushes, cuts herself off abruptly.

“Your mother didn't have such nice things to say about mine.” I shrug, trying to let Lucy off the hook. “I guess she didn't approve of my mother's choices.”

It was a vicious cycle, I realize. Mom's parents cut her off, her family judges her, and in time she stops reaching out to them. How hard it must have been for my mother to come home now, I realize. Especially knowing that she wasn't going to have a chance to make things right with her own mother.

No wonder she's trying so hard with Rosa. No wonder she's going along with the laundry list of “to-dos.”

Maybe—and this is really just a maybe—that's why she was so cool with Lucy. Why she didn't judge. Maybe being back here, helping Lucy out, was her way of reconnecting with her past—but drawing on the person she's become since . . .

Well, since she left.

Maybe.

“Yeah,” Lucy replies, snapping me out of my reverie. “And my mom—you know, she's so traditional.” She shakes her head, almost in disbelief. “And I think she gives me a hard time.”

It occurs to me that Tía Rosa does give Lucy a hard time. The way that Lucy lives, the household chores, the level of responsibility that is expected of her always seemed excessive to me. It never dawned on me that it might seem excessive to Lucy too.

“I owe you an apology,” Lucy says.

“For what?” I ask.

“For being such a bitch,” she says. I open my mouth to protest, and she laughs and cuts me off. “You know I was. I was, I don't know. . . . From everything my mother told me, I was expecting you to be this spoiled brat from New York.”

“Which I sort of was,” I say, cringing to think of how resentful I was when we first arrived.

“Yeah, but I didn't make it any easier. It was a weird situation. I could have handled it better.”

“We both could have,” I say, knowing that it's the truth.

The moment is starting to feel a little too Dr. Phil for my taste, but there's something more that I need to ask. “Why did you break up with Rafael?”

It's none of my business, and I can't believe how uncharacteristically nosy I'm being, but what the hell. I'm really curious, and there's no guarantee that Lucy will ever be this open with me again. So it's sort of now or never.

“Oh, you know, the usual stuff,” she says. “We had been together for so long, it was starting to feel like we were one person.”

I frown. Isn't that the whole point of being with someone? Getting close to them? “I thought that was a good thing.”

“Yeah. I mean, I guess it's what you want eventually. But this isn't eventually. I'm barely out of high school. I need to figure myself out before I'm attached at the hip . . . to
anyone
.”

It occurs to me that perhaps I haven't given Lucy enough credit.

“He was so pissed,” she continues, more to herself than to me. “And the girls . . . well, everyone thinks I'm making a huge mistake. In Puerto Rico you have your boyfriend and you stay with him and eventually you marry him and you have babies.” She flinches on the word
babies
.

“Yeah,” I say, as though I get it, even though I so don't. But I'm trying to. I'm definitely trying to.

“You've got a boyfriend back home?”

I nod. “Yeah. Or, well, a something.” I frown. “It's ending, I think. We're both going off to different colleges and . . . we've been avoiding talking about it. But yeah. It's ending.” As I say the words out loud, I know that they're true. “Ugh. I have to call him. I hate having things up in the air.” Which of course is how they've been all summer. Shana Rivers can have him, I tell myself. Then I realize I'm slightly bitter, slightly sad, and nostalgic. But definitely ready to make a decisive move.

“You're a little bit into Ricky,” Lucy says. It's not a question.

“It's confusing,” I tell her.

“I know. But he's my friend. And he's a good guy. So just . . . don't hurt him,” she says.

She turns back to her espresso, and I can see that the subject is closed.

 

Later that night I steal outside to the pool to call Noah. He answers quickly, on the second ring, so quickly that I guess he's been napping on the sofa in front of some game or another. The blaring television in the background tells me that I guess right. “Hey,” I say, willing my resolve not to crumble.

“What's going on, babe?” he asks blearily.