Make Your Home Among Strangers (12 page)

—How have you not died of heatstroke? she said, not really wanting an answer.

Jillian was Jillian, never Jill. She'd said it just like that the day we met—
Never Jill
—and I liked her for it. She flipped over on the mattress and said, How was your break?

I meant to say great but instead I said, It was okay.

—Oh my god, that's right! she said, bolting up from her pillows. That baby from Cuba. Was any of that happening near you? My parents were all, Isn't your roommate Cuban? And I was like, she sure as fuck is.

I turned around at my desk, confused the news had made it that far north.

—He's not a baby, I said. He's like five or six.

—Whatever, were you near anything?

—Sort of, I said to my hands, to my lap. My mom lives around there. But how was
your
break?

—It went well. She reached to her nightstand drawer for a hand mirror. Same old same old, she said.
Amazing
food. My brother is a jackass. The bus back was a nightmare.

In the mirror, she inspected her eyelid for something, picked at whatever she saw, then said to her reflection, So did you see any of it? It's such a crazy story, right?

—How'd you even hear about it?

She lowered the mirror and looked at me in a way that felt dramatic but that I'd come to learn was only her way of teasing me.

—Are you kidding? she said. It's
everywhere.

I leaned back in my chair until it hit the desk's pencil drawer, where the notice from the dean's office still hid along with her mittens.

—Why is the news in Jersey about some Cuban kid in Miami? I said.

Jillian tossed the mirror onto her quilt and hopped off her bed, swinging her slick black hair over her shoulder and saying a deadpan
You are so funny, Liz
as she opened the mini-fridge under her bed. She pulled out a bottled water and stared at me as she took a long drink; she had eyes I can honestly say I'd never seen before in real life, blue flecked with gray, crisp, the kind of color I'd seen only on models in magazines. Her eyebrows were perfect though I'd never seen her pluck them. She had very, very smooth skin, which she'd started wrecking a couple times a week by going to tanning salons with some girls she knew from intramural softball. She was one of the most beautiful people I'd ever seen, but she made no sense to me back then: she was athletic but kind of prissy, super smart and always talking about being a feminist but still spending hours a day applying five different shades of eye shadow to various zones above and below her eyes before heading out to class or softball practice. I'd pegged her, on our first day as roommates, as Greek or Italian—way more interesting than Cuban because there was so much more ocean separating this country from either of those (you couldn't build a raft out of random crap and make it across the Atlantic)—but when I'd asked her where her people were from, she said, Cherry Hill, and then, when it was clear I didn't know what that was supposed to mean, she added, In Jersey—the good part. She climbed back on her bed with her water after putting the mirror away in her nightstand.

—You have to tell me what it's like down there. Is it like World War Three or what?

On my desk sat my bio textbook, opened to the chapter I was supposed to have read already. I said to it, You know, I didn't even really notice anything?

—Why are you
lying
? she blurted. They had people losing their minds on television. It looked totally nutso.

—That's just TV, I said.

—And now that kid is basically stuck living with strangers until he goes back home. Jesus, what a nightmare. What could possibly possess a woman to force a little boy to make that kind of a trip?

I sat on my hands to keep them under control. I'd encountered this a couple times so far at Rawlings—people hanging up Che posters in their rooms, not realizing that most Cubans know him as a murderer; people talking about the
excellent healthcare system
in Cuba and just not believing me when I explained how my mom sent a monthly package that included antibiotics, Advil, soap, Band-Aids, and tampons to my aunts still over there—but I hadn't heard any of this from Jillian. Her worst offense (which I wasn't even sure
counted
as an offense) was that, without fail, she introduced me to anyone she knew—the softball girls, the friends she'd brought along from high school—this way:
This is my roommate, Liz. She's Cuban.
Her doing this bothered me but I didn't know why exactly, so I kept telling myself: It's not like it isn't
true
, what would I even
want
her to say?

I said, I don't think you understand how bad things are in Cuba.

I almost said,
His mother died trying to get him here
, but I didn't want to risk sounding like a hysterical TV Cuban, so I pulled my book from my desk and held it in my lap to give my hands something to hold on to and added instead, She wanted a better life for him. It's really, really bad there.

—But you've never actually been there yourself, she said. Right?

Another question I got a lot at Rawlings, usually after Jillian's
She's Cuban
introduction. I never got asked this in Miami, and I'd never asked it of anyone after learning where their parents or grandparents had been born (
You're Irish? Have you ever been to Ireland?
). I knew saying no to Jillian's question would, for some reason, wreck the credibility of anything else I said, which is maybe what she was trying to do, so I said the truth: I have a lot of family still there, on both my mom's side and my dad's side.

—And you talk to them? I've never heard you talking to anyone in Cuba.

—It's not like calling someone in another
state
. You can't just
call
people.

—That's ridiculous.

—Not everyone has phones, I said as she hoisted her duffel by its long strap onto the bed and started pulling out clothes I'd never seen.

—And I'll tell you what else is ridiculous, she said. All the Cubans down there saying he's going to stay. No offense, but that's just insane.

I couldn't talk—I dropped the textbook on my lap and held on to the arms of my desk chair to keep from jumping up. I'd been on the other side of this conversation with my mom and Leidy just a couple days before, but I suddenly couldn't remember any of it, what I'd said or why I'd said it—only the part where I'd asked for sources and made my mom angry. When everything in Jillian's bag was newly sprawled on her bed and I still hadn't said anything, she announced with a sigh, I'm just saying it seems totally clear he shouldn't stay.

I slammed my book shut and slid my chair back into my desk to block the drawer where I'd hidden the hearing notice. Jillian didn't know anything about my academic integrity hearing, had no idea that the blazer she'd loaned me before Thanksgiving break was not for a presentation in my writing seminar. I said, No, I don't think it's
that
totally clear.

—Of course you don't, she said. You're too connected to the whole thing.

I tossed the book on the desk behind me and said—too loud and leaning too far forward—What the fuck does
that
mean,
connected
? I'm not fucking
related
to the kid.

—Don't get ghetto, Liz, she said. I'm just saying that, no offense, but as a Cuban person, you can't really expect people to believe that you'll be completely rational about this.

She held the water bottle loosely now, between only a couple fingers. I tried to match her ease by leaning back in my chair.

—I was born in this country, I said, not knowing what point I was trying to make.

I righted my chair and tried again. I said, Look, I would argue that I – I can speak
more
intelligently about this than you because I know more about it than you ever could.

—Wow, she said, her water bottle heading back to her mouth. Let's just leave that there before you get any more racist.

I didn't think I'd said anything racist, and I'd let her
ghetto
comment slide because I couldn't in that second articulate
why
it bothered me. Jillian had read more books and had taken more AP classes than me; I guessed she knew how to cite things properly in a research paper; she'd even been to other continents already: if she thought I was being ghetto, then there was a chance, in my head, that she was right. She screwed the cap back on her bottle and turned away from me, to the clothes on her bed.

—I am not being racist, I said to her back. I can know things you don't know because of where I grew up. That's not me being racist.

She kept ripping tags from the clothes, mumbling
Shit
and checking the corner of her thumbnail after one gave her trouble. She didn't look at me as she dropped the tags in the recycling bin, then grabbed a fist's worth of hangers from her closet.

—Well, whatever, she said to a long-sleeved blouse as she tugged it onto a hanger. I'm sorry, but I'm just saying people of color can be racist, too.

I covered my face with my hands, finally feeling the heat of the room on my neck, in the sting of my armpits. I dragged my hands down and let them slap my lap.

—Fine. That kid lives in a house two blocks from my mom's apartment, I finally admitted.

She dropped the hangers on her bed—her new clothes suddenly way less interesting—and came over to my desk. She looked down at my textbook, capped one of my almost-dried-out highlighters, and said, Well, I hope for your mom's sake that people can manage to stay calm.

So she hadn't assumed that my mom was part of the perceived hysteria, and I was grateful for that. I took the highlighter from Jillian's hand—her nails still wet-looking with a burgundy polish, her cuticles nonexistent—and dropped it into my desk drawer.

I said, I hope so too.

I shoved my hand in the drawer, pushed the mittens and the letter back even more, and asked Jillian if she minded, but could I borrow that blazer again.

 

11

THE OLDER WOMAN WHOSE LIPSTICK
had marked off her mouth greeted me Monday afternoon with another levitated smile—the fillings in her molars glinted at me from the very corners of it. As I sat in the lobby, Jillian's blazer scratching the back of my neck, I tried not to watch her typing at her desk, a pair of glasses perched on the tip of her nose. Then, as if God himself had tapped her on the shoulder and told only her that it was time, she stopped typing and tugged off the glasses, stood and said, They're ready for you.

Before she opened the second set of wooden doors that led into the conference room, she told me, Don't be worried, sweetheart. The last thing I felt before stepping through the doorway was the cold replacing her warm hand, which had, without me registering it, rubbed a circle on my back to push me forward.

It was the sort of room you only really needed when staging the ceremonial signing of a new constitution—ornately carved wood panels reaching halfway up the walls, paintings of someone else's wigged ancestors groaning against their frames—old and regal in a way that stunned me even this second time inside, though as I entered I didn't repeat my original mistake of staring at the ceiling, something that afterward I worried made me look like I didn't care that the committee was already there, seated around the massive table taking up most of the room. This time, I mostly ignored the elaborate masks huddled up in each corner, looking at them only just long enough to see that I'd been wrong—the masks, I saw now, were actually shields.

Each member of the committee sat in the exact same spot as the first time, which gave me the very freaky feeling that they'd never moved, that they'd skipped their own Thanksgivings to instead stay right there and talk about my case. I laced my fingers and put the ball of my joined fists on the table. The wood was lacquered with something thick and yellowish that reminded me of the cheap bottles of clear nail polish into which Mami and Leidy dropped chopped-up chunks of garlic, the resulting phlegmy goop supposedly making your nails grow twice as fast. I knew, because I'd looked it up after my hearing, that the table was very old; it had been built for this room (and
in
this room, its builders foreseeing that it wouldn't fit through the doors), commissioned by the college's first president for this—the college's first conference room.

—How are you, Lizet. Did you have a nice break.

I nodded double-time though I didn't know if I should, as the phrases didn't sound like actual questions. Still, I wanted them to see I was listening. I made sure to look each of them right in the eyes: four white men and one white woman, each with the word
Dean
in their title. The men spanned maybe thirty years, their hair creeping along various stages of gray except for the bald one, who was, ironically, the youngest-looking of them all, the tufts ringing and dolloping his head still black. He was officially my faculty advisor, though I'd only met him once before, during orientation week. The woman—seated closest to me, to my right—looked around forty, a faint streak of gray-blond darting up and over her otherwise dark head. Nothing sat on the table now; the last time, they'd each had a thick folder in front of them containing copies of all the same documents. I leaned forward in my seat, using as little of the chair as I could, feeling the strain of this choice in my thighs.

The oldest man, seated directly across from me at the head of the table, said, I'm sure you're anxious to know the findings of the committee.

He twisted his nose in a lazy attempt to work his glasses back up his face. He went on, As I'm sure you're fully aware by now, we take our duties very seriously, and we have given your case in particular very careful attention.