Make Your Home Among Strangers (8 page)

—You haven't told me, she said, how's the food up there?

She scraped the serving plate clean with her fork and then sat back down. The food at Rawlings was decent, though everyone else talked like it was amazing, singing the praises of what we were told was the largest salad bar in the Northeast. There were other supposed wonders: sandwiches that everyone called speedies, made on demand by a chef and not a work-study student; something called the Mongolian Grill that I hadn't tried because the color and consistency of the sauce choices made me think of house paint. I ate a lot of peanut butter and jelly, a lot of soft-serve ice cream, a lot of pasta with grilled onions on top.

—Actually the food is great, I said. My school has the largest salad bar in the Northeast. It's like a thing they brag about.

—
Wow
, Leidy said. That's ah-
maze
-ing.

—You eat salad now? Mami said.

—What's your hardest class? Leidy said. She pushed the last few grains of rice around on her plate, picked one up and crammed it into Dante's mouth.

I thought about her question for longer than I had to, watching globs of oil on my plate separate themselves from the rest of the steak's juices. I picked up my fork and tried again.

—English, I said. My writing class. But for a reason I should probably explain.

—You're taking English? my mom said. Why? You already
speak
English.
Great
English. If anything you should be taking Spanish.

I dragged my fork through the separated oil, tried to get its circles to break and slip back where they belonged.

—They make you take it, I said. It's a requirement, Mami. But the reason –

—Why do they make you take something you already know?

—It's not just me that has to take it,
Mom
. It's everyone.

—They make
everyone
take English, Leidy said. For real?

—I call that a waste of time, Mom said. Making you take classes for stuff you know almost your whole life already.

With my fork I lifted the edge of the steak; the rice underneath was now stained the same gray as the meat. I lowered it and cut off the corner, gave up and tucked it in my mouth.

—It's not English like
speaking
English, I said. It's writing and research and stuff.

—Do they teach you to talk with your mouth full? Leidy said.

My mom waved her paper towel napkin at Leidy and shushed a
Stop
.

—Whatever, Leidy, I said. Because you've got
great
manners. Because you're
so
classy.

My sister stood from the table and grabbed the empty plates, stacked them on top of each other. Dante reached up for her with two oil-slicked hands.

—Excuse
me
for asking you a simple question, she said.

I chewed and ignored the clash of plates and cutlery in the sink behind me. I cut the steak into tiny pieces and then mixed them in with the rice, focusing very hard on only this and ready to say, if asked, that I was just making it Tupperware ready. I heard my mom push her seat back from the table, but she didn't get up.

—So, Mami said. Are you gonna see Omar? While you're here?

Leidy turned off the water and waited, a plate in her hands, for my answer.

I'd planned on surprising him, too—I hadn't told Omar I'd be home for Thanksgiving—but I hadn't spoken to him since we talked on the phone a week earlier, the night before my plagiarism hearing. We were, I guess, officially still a couple, but I'd made up my mind after that last phone conversation to end things the next time I saw him in person. I didn't want to face him yet, but I didn't want to set off any alarms for my mom either. She loved him; he called her Mom; she'd known his mother Blanca for years, ever since Omar and Leidy got placed in the same seventh-grade homeroom in middle school.

—I wanted this to be more of a family trip, I said.

My food had stopped steaming and didn't smell like much of anything anymore.

—He
is
family almost, Mami said. He'll be hurt if he finds out you were here.

—You really should call him, Leidy said like a warning. He's
gonna
find out you were here. You know Mami will say something to Blanca.

—No I won't! I can keep a secret. Plus it's only Thanksgiving, Mami said to her. Blanca won't even think to ask if Lizet came back for some random days. It's no big deal, not like Christmas.

I couldn't help thinking of the nights in the dorm where I didn't go in with my hallmates on pizza—I'm just not hungry, no big deal, I'd lie—because after paying so much for the flight, I was just plain broke.

—But it is. It's a big deal, I said. I wanted to surprise you guys.

—No, of course, Mami said. You did, really. I'm just saying, you know what I mean about Thanksgiving.

She patted my hand and said, Of course you coming is a big deal. But really mama, think about calling Omar. It's a waste of a trip if you don't see him.

The cold food in front of me—
that
was a waste; the time Leidy spent waiting for Roly to come around—another waste; but until my mom said that about Omar and my trip, I hadn't considered the money I spent to come home as belonging in the same category.

Leidy came back to the table, the drying towel smushed up in her hands. She smoothed it out, then folded it into a square—the skin of her hands strong and tan, almost glowing, nothing like mine, with its winter-induced alien damage. She picked up our napkins and said, What time you need to be at the airport tomorrow?

I scratched at the back of my hand. Noon, I lied.

My flight actually left at two, but almost as a family rule, we always ran late, and since I was the only one who'd seen my itinerary and my true time of departure, I gave us plenty of padding for our tendency to run on Cuban Time.

—Perfect, Mami said, smiling. I need to be down the street by one for an Ariel meeting. You think I'll make it back in time?

I almost said no, almost gave her the real time.
My bad
, I could've said,
I had it mixed up in my head.
But if I kept it from her, then that was me letting her go to that meeting—granting her that—rather than her picking the meeting over me. Somehow that made me feel better about the money I'd wasted to be there.

I said, You should be more than fine.

She squeezed my hand, then let it go and reached for my plate. With her fingers she picked the meat from my rice mess, placing each bite in her mouth as she looked out the living room window. Her shoulders lifted with a heavy breath, but her jaw kept grinding.

—This is such an exciting time, Mami said, mouth full, toward the night.

—I know, I said, pretending she meant it for me.

 

8

OMAR AND I HAD BEEN
a couple since the summer before my junior year. He graduated a year ahead of me, was taking one or two classes a semester at Miami Dade while working part-time at Pep Boys, which is where he spent most of his paycheck in an effort to make his Acura Integra
the
most-tricked-out-est Integra in all of Hialeah. Though he never talked much about a future that was more than a year or two away, he had, the night after my own high school graduation, wondered out loud about getting engaged, and I'd made us both laugh by saying, You'd be smart to put this on lockdown. But I left for Rawlings without that promise, not wanting to be the one to bring it up again and thinking—because he'd admitted to being proud of me for going—that we were headed that way no matter what. I'd drifted away from that kind of certainty since leaving, and I talked with him less and less about school in the two weeks since he'd made me admit, when I started to sob on the phone the night after the meeting with my writing seminar professor, what was
really
freaking me out (another set of
Holy Shit
s and
Damn
s—he barely said anything else, and I started to suspect he didn't understand how seriously a place like Rawlings took honor-code violations). But my decision to break up with him came after our most recent phone call, when I explained why I was so nervous about the hearing: that it could result in me being kicked out of school. He'd stayed quiet on the line and then finally said, That ain't the worse thing, right?

I only managed to say, The
worst
thing, Omar. And yes. It would be.

You're so dramatic, he said back. Then crackly sounds like he was breathing right into the phone. You don't even
like
it there, he said.

During my first weeks away, not wanting to admit to my mom or sister what a huge mistake going so far and to such a hard school felt like sometimes, he was the only person I'd confessed my homesickness to—and he had my sad list of Reasons Why I Shouldn't Be There memorized by that point. But instead of telling me the usual (You
are
smart enough, Lizet; no, it's
better
being away from your sister and the baby right now, she needs to figure her shit out; you
won't
freeze to death, stop exaggerating), he presented the list back to me as evidence, used it against me. I sat on my end, silent, letting him pelt me with everything I'd cried about since August, each of my unspoken retorts sounding childish as they scrolled through my head (I don't
hate
Jillian; I'm not the
stupidest
person in
all
my classes; not
every single person
on this campus is rich). As that new, defensive list formed inside of me, I decided I needed to start thinking of Omar as
my high school boyfriend
, leftovers from
the old me
. I loved Omar, but his reaction told me that he thought of my going away for school as an experiment that could fail, or an adventure that I might, at any time, give up.
You can always just come home
, he kept saying, but after that conversation, I heard it as a threat.

The night before my very first trip on an airplane, in the hours before I left for New York late that summer—after the too-short hug and too-short talk with my dad in front of my mom's building, after I promised my mom that everything needing to be packed was packed, so yes, I felt fine going out for a little while—me and Omar were
together
together for one of the last times I let myself remember. We were parked in a new spot, one we'd never tried out before, and we were kicking ourselves for thinking of it so late, after a year of wasting gas while we argued the pros and cons of every other spot on our list of places one could park and fuck. Omar had made the trek from Hialeah to Little Havana to get me—had come into the apartment wearing baggy jeans and this gray V-neck shirt that stretched tight across his chest and shoulders, and then moved some heavy boxes around for my mom without so much as sweating, Leidy gawking at him, then at me for being
such an idiot
to leave such a perfect guy, one who
obviously
dismissed the fact that I wasn't on
the same level of hotness
as him—and from there we went north, up through Miami Lakes, to a golf course we'd passed a million times, with its big islands of grass and spats of sand and palm trees and some other trees that didn't belong in Miami.

It was my idea—we were both trying to save money, so neither of us offered to cover the cost of a couple hours at a hotel by the airport—and I wasn't sure it was a good one until we made the familiar climb into the Integra's backseat: I looked down at Omar's jeans to tear off his belt and realized we were shrouded in such darkness I couldn't see the buckle. We couldn't believe it was as easy as just driving over a curb and onto the grass, out to the darkest place—the very middle of the course, behind the trunks of banyan trees whose branches spilled back to the ground to make more trunks. We couldn't believe that we could just turn off the headlights and become invisible. We couldn't believe there were no cops around. Cops were everywhere we went—our school's parking lot, the back road by the abandoned overpass, behind the Sedano's Market some gangbanger guys Omar sort of knew had tried to burn down. Here were most Saturday nights that year: Omar would come, and I'd be just about to, I thought, and we'd hear the
thud thud thud
of a flashlight against the rear window and see, behind me, a beam of light searching for my bare ass. It got so predictable that I joked that Omar was telling the cops where we'd be and then flashing them some signal when he was done and it was time to bust us—why else were they not giving us tickets for public indecency like they said they would with every
next time
? Omar didn't laugh at my joke though. Omar didn't think of me as particularly funny.

That last night, he made his sad faces and looked into my eyes more than usual and handed me all his excuses (
But I trimmed the hair around my dick and everything
;
I showered with that soap you like instead of the soap at the gym;
I brought baby wipes, the ones with the aloe stuff you say makes your skin soft
), which is why I gave in to his pleas not to use a condom. That, and I'd been on the pill since Leidy learned she was pregnant, just over a year by then—something I couldn't tell Omar because he'd think it meant I planned on sleeping with other guys now that I was about to be
one of those college girls.
Before that night, we'd only had no-condom sex when I was on my period and when he remembered the towels—had them waiting in the Integra's trunk—to put down on the backseat.

He'd pulled out, and I'd cleaned up, and then we sat there, sticky and holding hands, his thumb not stroking the back of my wrist in a soft way, but instead each finger gripping around to my palm, owning it. Every minute or so, he'd squeeze it and hold the squeeze, sending some secret code through our hands, his pulses reminding me of just a few minutes before, when I'd felt that same kind of throb up in me—that sudden fullness meaning I needed, quick, to slide off and get out of the way. I thought I could sense Omar's thoughts, and in between those squeezes—the weird smell of bleach and musk surrounding us, a balled-up baby wipe in each of our free hands—I was sure that we'd stay together. That we wouldn't break up the way our school's guidance counselor, a sad woman I'd only talked to twice who never weighed in on
anything
, warned me we inevitably would if I left. That his plan to maybe get married, maybe the summer after my junior year of college, could actually happen. Yet at that same instant, Omar's hand squeezing mine, I saw some foggy future me—flanked by smart women with tame hair—already looking back at Lizet in the car, there in the backseat, with her hair matted at the base of her neck, her chest slick with saliva and sweat, saying to that animal girl: No, no, no. I don't know how, but I believed both versions: I believed we would find a way to be together, and I believed there was no way I could let that happen.