Make Your Home Among Strangers (6 page)

—You smell that? I tried. When Jillian didn't answer, I decided to go back to snow and said, You know, there's places in America where people can trick-or-treat without worrying about freezing to death.

She didn't laugh, so I turned around to face her judgment only to see her nodding along to a song: at some point—I couldn't tell when—she'd put her headphones back on.

The morning that snow finally came—a week into November—Jillian woke me by slapping two damp mittens on my back. I jumped, and before I could ask why her hat and coat were flecked with water (Had she showered while dressed? Got caught in a sprinkler?), she screamed: Liz! It snowed! All last night and this morning!

I rubbed my eyes and slurred, Class is canceled?

She barked just one
Ha!
and pulled my comforter all the way off me.

—Wake up,
wake up
, she said. Let's go, before you have to get ready for class.

She ran from our room and left the door open, pounded her hands on the doors down from us and yelled, You guys! It's Lizet's first snow! Let's do this! Tracy, get your camera. Is Caroline still – Shit, Caroline, finish drying your hair and come outside!

As her voice disappeared into the cave of the hall bathroom, I looked out the window. I'd seen snow on TV, had played in some soapy, manmade snow at the mall when I was little, but to see that now-familiar square of campus totally transformed: what was, as I'd fallen asleep, a brown swath of dead grass and trees suddenly cleaned up and covered. I couldn't believe it was the same Outside. I would've bought that I'd been moved in the night to a different planet; I couldn't believe the planet I'd lived on for eighteen years was capable of looking like this—and I couldn't believe people lived in it, vacationed specifically to glide over it. More than anything, I needed to touch it—immediately—to know it like everyone else did as quickly as I could. I flung myself from the bed, slid my feet into my shower flip-flops, ran past Jillian and her
Hey, wait!
in the bathroom doorway, and charged down the stairwell at the end of the hall to the nearest exit—the dorm's loading dock—throwing my whole weight against the metal double doors.

Those first fifteen seconds: down the loading dock steps, flip-flops slipping on ice, stepping on the snow—two feet high and still falling—and expecting to walk on top of it. Hearing a soft crunch, then one leg then the other crashing down, the snow reaching just past my knees, hugging my feet and calves. And I was stuck. And I laughed so hard I fell on my butt into more snow, soft but not soft enough, the white stuff packing into my armpits because I'd extended my arms to brace for the fall. Those first fifteen seconds, I got it: I got how people could love snow. But then, creeping in like the very real tingle I started to feel in my feet, was the fact that snow was frozen water—that snow was
wet
and not fluffy like cotton or like the mall's soap-bubble snow. I'd locked myself out of the dorm by accident, and as I held a clump of snow in my hand for the first time and squeezed it hard, my skin turned red. It burned. My toes burned, too—I scrunched them to make sure I could still feel them, thinking of those stupid girls on Halloween—and I looked up to find Jillian next to Tracy, both waving from the other side of the door's glass square. Then Tracy lifted her camera to her face.

Jillian pushed her way out and yelled, Oh my god, you are
crazy
! You're practically naked! She pulled off her coat and twirled it over my shoulders.

Tracy took another shot from inside, this time of Jillian with her arm around me and giving a thumbs-up.

—Make sure you get her flip-flops, she yelled.

More people came down, from our floor and other floors. I ran back up to get socks and real shoes, threw a pair of baggy jeans over my soaked pajama pants, and returned to a full-on snowball fight. Later, amid Jillian and Tracy and other people I'd seen all fall trekking in and out of the bathroom in nothing but towels but whose last names I didn't know, we collectively decided to skip class without saying this directly. One girl, a brunette named Caroline in a lilac vest and sweatpants, made hot chocolate for everyone using milk and not powder but actual chocolate, and we all sat in the hallway outside our rooms drinking it. I had the idea to call Leidy and my mom and tell them what it was like, my first time in the snow, but I didn't want to be the only one to get up and leave, the first to say
Thank you but
and give back the mug. So I wrapped my fingers around it even tighter, let them get warmer.

A day later, during Jillian's twice-weekly night class, I told my mom and Leidy about the snow over the phone. I almost blew the surprise of the Thanksgiving trip when I said I was thinking of getting a cooler so I could bring some down so they could see for themselves, saying
at Christmas
just in time to cover it up. Mami asked if I had any pictures of me in the snow and I said yes, someone took some and that I'd track them down. But I still hadn't done that, thinking if Tracy wanted me to have them, she'd come to me.

Now that I was back home, I felt bad for not bringing any evidence along—no props to show my sister to make talking to her easier. I sipped the coffee Mami left for me and asked Leidy about Dante's daycare, about her hours at the salon, about nothing that mattered as much as what I wanted to ask her: if she'd seen or spoken to our dad. I didn't know how to bring him up. I hadn't heard from him since the night before I left for New York, when he'd stood outside my mom's building, hands in his pockets, and asked if I needed anything. I'd only shrugged and said no. After a few other vague yes-or-no questions (You know where you're going? You know how to get there? You sure?), we hugged for a second too short and he left in his work van for his new place. He didn't even have a phone there yet. He probably had one by now, but I didn't have the number. I wondered if Leidy did and just had not given it to me any of the times I'd called home. I'd tried his work number when I made it to campus, to let him know I'd survived my first plane ride, but I got an answering machine. I called it again after moving in, meeting my roommate, and setting up my side of our room—things I'd imagined both my parents helping me do, though I don't know how we would've afforded their tickets or if they would've left Leidy alone with a five-month-old Dante—but that time, it just rang and rang. After that, tired of wasting phone card minutes on answering machines, I left it up to him to call.

I wanted to ask Leidy if he'd been ignoring her the same way he was ignoring me, but we hadn't so much as uttered
Papi
since the night before I left for New York: we still blamed him for our move. Our home was only in his name—something neither of us knew before that June when, a couple weeks after he moved out, some woman from the bank came on his behalf and told my mom he wanted to put the house up for sale. My mom was too confused and proud to fight it, and by the end of July, the house belonged to some new family—another set of Cubans. For three weeks we stayed with my tía Zoila, with Roly not even hinting that Leidy and Dante could stay with him and his parents, and the three of us plus Omar moved everything from Zoila's to Little Havana just before I left for school. And because the second move of my life came so close to the first, I just
missed
the house; I didn't really get to say goodbye to it, didn't even know how to do that, since it was the only place I remembered ever living.

Leidy bounced Dante in her lap as she watched the TV. She rubbed his back and said, I freaking
hate
this neighborhood. It's so freaking reffy, everyone got here like five minutes ago from some island.

Dante shoved his fist in his mouth, muffling his own noise. I let the blinds clink back into place and turned around, settled onto the couch next to them.

—So how's school going finally? Leidy said.

—It's okay, I said. I swallowed and rubbed at the sore spot on my neck, feeling for the old home of the strands twisted up in Mami's ring the night before. I said, It's way harder than I thought it would be.

—Ms. Smarty Pants can't hack it, huh?

She flipped back to the news, where people in front of a chain-link fence a block away gave speeches. She tried to raise the volume, smacking the remote a few times to get it to register, and I was grateful for her distraction, since it meant she missed my recoiling at what she'd said. In my mind, I called her a stupid bitch, then pushed my anger into pity—of course she'd say that, she had no idea what college classes were like. She'd probably never know. I imagined myself paying her utility bill someday, or her calling me to help Dante with his biology homework. It wasn't fair, but it helped me answer her.

—I can hack it. It's just that Hialeah Lakes was a joke compared to the work I gotta do now.

She returned to the talk show, where a woman's hands were lost in another woman's hair. I let Dante wrap his hand around my finger and said in a voice that sounded a bit too high, So have you talked to Roly?

She nodded to the TV.

—He came by here to see Dante last week. He brought him that.

She gestured to a toy on the floor, the one with colored panels that I'd spent the morning showing him, singing along with the songs it played.

—It's stupid, she said. He's too little for it still.

—But that's nice of him, right? I tried.

Leidy put her hand to her mouth and gnawed on her middle finger, her face twisting to look too much like our mom's. She pulled her hand away and spit a sliver of nail from the tip of her tongue. It flew sideways and landed on my foot, and I wiped it off on the carpet, pretending to lift my leg to tuck it under me. She moved on to her ring finger and said, Roly really is so freaking dumb. He really could have everything, like a whole family, but no. Not
him
. He needs to freaking grow up, is what he needs.

She said all of this to the TV, as if Jerry were asking her to tell America why she was so angry. I imagined us on this trashy show, sitting in those perfect-for-throwing chairs in front of the angry-for-no-reason crowd, me trying—when Leidy's words inevitably fail her—to explain her make-Roly-marry-me plan to Jerry as he roams the stage, batting the microphone against his own forehead, blurting out to the audience to stoke their rage,
Oh yes, the joys of fatherhood!

—And what about – You heard anything from Papi? I finally, finally asked.

She turned Dante on her lap to face her, kissed his dark hair. He twisted his head to look at me, and she grabbed underneath his chin and squashed his cheeks, making his lips pucker but also pulling his face back to hers.

—I think Mom's given up on him, she said.

—That's not what I asked.

—I know that. I can hear, she said.

A commercial came on so she went back to the news. There, a woman was crying and nodding and wiping her face while a man stood next to her, yelling about something so much that his neck burned red.

When Leidy didn't say anything else, I waited a few more seconds and whined, Are you gonna answer me? I hated the way my voice sounded: too high, too pleading, the same voice I'd had to breathe through to steady my answers at my academic integrity hearing. A big laugh rolled up from the street below and filled the living room, and while Leidy turned to it like a reflex, I had to close my eyes and blink away the thought of the next time I'd be in that long wood-paneled room, waiting for a different sort of answer.

—Papi has called a couple times, she said out the window. But Mom just hangs up the second she hears it's him.

I jumped up to get away from her, half-tripping my way to the small kitchen, to the sink, saying
Oh for real?
with a calm so false I coughed afterward to cover it up. I started scrubbing the inside of my café con leche mug as if trying to dig a hole in it.

—It's not like I talk to him or anything, she said. Don't be like that.

—I'm not being like anything, Leidy.

I poured more soap onto the dishrag, scrubbed it against itself to make lather, then crammed the whole rag into the mug and scrubbed harder.

—Well whatever,
you
knew you were leaving and
you
got your own place, but
I'm
the one who was all stressed about being basically homeless when what I wanted was to just like
deal
with my own freaking kid and my own freaking
life
. Mom's still super mad about the house too. Dad selling it made things harder for like
no reason.

I looked over my shoulder but kept the water running. Behind me, Leidy—still looking outside, Dante back on the floor and on his belly—mumbled, Freaking asshole.

I wanted to ask who was the asshole, our dad or me, but instead I faced the sink and said, I don't have my own place. I
have
a roommate.

I scanned the kitchen counter for other dishes and decided to rewash everything already in the drying rack to calm down. The skin on my hands was chapped and cracking thanks to my reluctance to wear the one pair of mittens I had; along with her coat, Jillian had tugged mittens over my hands after Tracy took the pictures I'd never seen. She pulled them out from the coat's pocket and said, as she put them on me, Mittens are better because then your fingers keep each other company. I tried to give them back to her later that night, but she said to keep them. I have like thirty pairs, she said, and the crazy color suits you better anyway. I never left the dorm wearing them, though: The distinct green (
WILD PEA
, the tag inside one of them read) and brand name printed inside the wrists gave them away as Formerly Jillian's to anyone paying attention. I left them in my desk drawer at school but had wished for them when I got stuck in Pittsburgh. The cold there had peeled back the skin on my knuckles, and now the hot water and soap made them look even worse, made my skin itchy and angry. But I kept rinsing and scrubbing until everything was back on the drying rack, just like I'd found it. I shut off the water and, behind me, the program went to commercial. I dried my hands with a paper towel and returned to the couch, trusting that I'd taken enough deep breaths, my eyes on the carpet the whole way there. I sidestepped Dante at my sister's feet before sitting down.