Chapter Sixteen
St. Louis, Missouri
1980
On the surface of things, Rafaela and Peter were in lockstep over the plan to invite Eddie’s family over: Benny would extend the invitation for Friday evening. Under no circumstances was Rafaela to cook. She would buy a cake from Morton’s Bakery in town, and they’d serve coffee to their guests. Peter would buy a bottle of rum, too, in case they were cocktail drinkers. These things they agreed upon.
Benny was still in his room getting ready, and Ruth was in the den watching the opening credits for The New Adventures of Wonder Woman . Rafaela watched her daughter from the doorway, and suspected that Ruth was wearing her Wonder Woman Underoos beneath her favorite blue corduroy jumpsuit.
“Turn that TV off,” Peter called from his station at the front window. “Our guests are arriving!”
“Do I have to, Mama?” Ruth whispered.
“They’re in the driveway!” Peter yelled.
“Turn it off,” Rafaela said.
When Rafaela and her daughter emerged from the den, the Morales y Reyes family were already seated on the blue-and-white flowered couch in the living room. So unaccustomed was Ruth to seeing people sitting on that couch that she gave a small gasp when she saw them there, and Rafaela had to lightly pinch the back of her daughter’s neck to quiet her. Rafaela had been worried that the couch might actually smell of dust. She’d beaten the cushions during the week and left them outside in the sunshine for a few hours to air them. She’d also boiled cinnamon sticks in a pot of water on the stove to create a welcoming aroma. Benny’s friend Eddie looked miserable in a sport coat and tie.
“You must be Eddie,” Rafaela said, reaching out her hand to the boy, who stood very awkwardly to shake it.
“Yes, ma’am,” he said.
“It’s nice to meet you, I’m so glad you all could come.”
“Thank you, ma’am,” the boy said, and then he half turned to indicate the presence of his parents. “This is my mom and dad.”
The parents stood too.
“How do you do?” Rafaela said, shaking each of their hands in turn. “I’m Rafaela. So nice to meet you.”
The parents both smiled and shook hands.
“Luis,” said the dad.
“Consuelo,” said the mom.
Rafaela could read nothing into their meticulously pronounced names, so she waited for them to say more as they returned to their places on the edge of the couch. They were a handsome couple, though their clothing seemed neither expensive nor particularly stylish. Rafaela could not find fault with their appearance, being neat and orderly on the whole, if perhaps a bit square. Square-jawed, square-hipped, squarely mannered, she thought. Inelegant may have been a credible appraisal, though not a generous one. And in any case, seated on the lap of Eddie’s mother was the antidote to all those right angles, in the form of one gorgeous, fat, round, little baby with blinking, wet, black eyes. The baby would put everyone at ease. She’d give them all something to look at and talk about. Her wispy black hair was gathered together into a tiny curl that sprouted from a pink bow in the center of her head. Rafaela watched as the baby’s presence pulled on Ruth like gravity. Her daughter made room for herself on the couch, squeezed in next to Eddie’s mother, and put her face close to the baby’s face.
“Hi there!” Ruth said to the baby.
The baby reached her chubby little hand out and grabbed Ruth’s nose.
“Can I hold her?” Ruth said, leaning back and speaking to Eddie’s mother.
The woman was bouncing her knees lightly beneath the baby’s weight.
“Say hello first!” Peter said.
“Oh,” Ruth laughed. “Sorry, hi.”
Eddie’s parents both nodded at her.
“I’m Ruth.”
“Hello!” they said.
“What’s the baby’s name?” she asked.
No one answered her, and Rafaela began to understand why there was so little conversation. Benny was sitting in the wingback chair and, like his friend Eddie, he was also wearing a tie with a plaid shirt, but he’d outgrown his sport coat, so at least they hadn’t had to fight that battle. Peter returned carrying their good silver tray with the silver coffee pot, and their china coffee cups with the gold rims. He crossed the room and set the tray down on the coffee table, careful to keep it out of swiping distance of the baby.
“What’s her name?” Ruth asked again.
Again, Consuelo made no answer, and rather than intervening, Rafaela said to Peter, “I’ll bring in the cake.”
Peter began pouring out the coffee.
“Mi hija pregunta cómo se llama la bebé,” Rafaela heard Peter saying in the living room behind her.
She turned in the doorway just in time to catch a smile falling across the face of Eddie’s mother.
“Oh,” Consuelo said. “?Se llama Estela!”
“Estela,” Ruth repeated. “Hi, Estela!” Ruth offered her finger into the squishy casing of the baby’s grip. “Can I hold her?”
“Ask her in Spanish,” Peter said to Ruth.
Ruth blinked at him rapidly a few times, and Rafaela, in the kitchen, held her breath. Did her daughter remember the forbidden Spanish words? Rafaela hadn’t heard those beautiful shapes from the mouths of her children in over a year. There was a pang in the sound of Ruth’s voice as she tried.
“?Puedo cargarla?” Ruth said.
Rafaela dislodged whatever it was that had stuck in her throat with a quick cough, and then busied herself with the cake. Through the doorway she could see Eddie’s mother shift the baby’s heft onto Ruth’s lap. The baby flapped her arms back at her mother, but didn’t cry. Consuelo made noises and smiled at Estela, so the baby seemed quite content to stay there on Ruth’s lap.
“I have Chinese checkers downstairs,” Benny said to Eddie then.
Rafaela couldn’t tell for sure, but she suspected Eddie didn’t understand either. She noticed that Benny refrained from translating for his friend. He found simpler ways to communicate.
“You wanna go downstairs?” Benny pointed, and Eddie nodded, and the two boys got up, came into the kitchen, and squeezed past Rafaela, who was just transferring the cake onto a pale-blue ceramic stand. It was important to remove the little cardboard and foil disc from beneath the cake, too, before carrying it in to the guests, so it might be reasonably assumed that Rafaela had made the cake herself. As frequently happened whenever Rafaela was engaged with baked goods, she thought of Priti, which caused her heart to whip and stiffen like a speedy meringue. She still called Priti several times a year, always on Christmas and her birthday, but they hadn’t seen each other since before Trinidad. It had been sixteen years, and in that time, Priti’s role in Rafaela’s maturing imagination had scattered, flourished, wilted, and grown anew. She still missed Priti like a second mother, and although they knew each other less intimately now than they once had, Rafa felt she had come to understand Priti in new ways. Rafa was a mother now, a homemaker, and a magnificently failed chef. She’d learned how hard these things were, even without the additional injustices Priti had faced. She felt ashamed when she thought back on it now, by how utterly she had failed to appreciate Priti’s position, but Rafaela understood too well the futility of regret. With some effort, she shook her reverie into the garbage alongside the pretty pink box from Morton’s Bakery, and licked a smear of icing from the knob of her wrist.
“Oh, wait.” Benny paused in the basement doorway beside his friend. “Cake.” Then to Rafaela, “Save us some.”
The boys thundered down the stairs.
In the living room, Rafaela kept her eyes mostly on Ruth, who tickled the baby while the grown-ups ate and talked. If Ruth had any feelings about the sudden reappearance of the Spanish language as a permissible form of communication in their household, she gave no indication. She seemed interested only in the baby. Estela’s heavy head swayed when she tipped it back to grin at Ruth with her gums, and Ruth held on tighter so the baby wouldn’t topple over. There were four dimples between them, and it seemed clear to Rafaela that they were deeply in love, and that nothing else mattered at all.
Peter’s Spanish was rusty too, Rafaela noted, but whatever he lacked in precision, he made up for in determination, and Rafaela, ever the dutiful wife, smoothed it over for him when he stumbled. Peter asked what part of the island they were from, and they answered Divisoria. He looked at Rafaela as if she could explain where that was, but she’d never heard of it before.
“It’s a very small place,” Luis explained.
“In the mountains,” Consuelo added.
Which explains so much , Rafaela thought but didn’t say.
They all sipped their coffee, and even the clinking of the cup back into the saucer sounded like a little alarm bell to Rafaela. She understood that whatever was taking place inside her was like a swollen droplet plinking into the dead center of a deep emotional reservoir. There was an outward furrow now, an emerging disquiet. She felt angry at Peter, but she knew he’d done nothing wrong. She had wanted to meet Eddie and his parents as much as her husband had, but she’d failed to ask herself why. Why did she want to meet these people, what did she expect of them?
During their time in St. Louis, Rafaela had become adept at maintaining an essential stillness. During their whole marriage, really—boiling cinnamon sticks wasn’t the only trick she’d learned. Rafaela knew not to look below the surface, not to wonder what might be roiling underneath. When she did think about the broad strokes of her life, Rafaela knew, of course, that she was deeply unhappy. She didn’t know why, but there were myriad possible reasons, and she suspected it was not only the quantity of those reasons, but also the precise combination of them that created this gulf between the empirical color she observed in her daily life and her ability to feel and experience that color as joy. In 1980, she didn’t know that the name for this gulf was clinical depression , and she didn’t know that no one was to blame. And then something about this evening with these very nice people had thrown her careful quietude off-kilter. Perhaps it wasn’t a heavy droplet at all, but a stone. Now there were ripples in every direction, all the way out to every edge. Try as she might, Rafaela could not recapture her composure.
The cake was lemon chiffon, Ruth’s favorite, but her daughter didn’t even eat until the Morales y Reyes family left, because having a piece of cake would’ve required her to part briefly from the baby. Once they were gone, Ruth sat at the kitchen table with her slice while Rafaela and Peter cleaned up.
“Don’t you guys want to have another baby?” Ruth asked, sinking her fork slowly into the yellow cake.
The response from Rafaela was a sound more bark than laughter, and she couldn’t help but notice a hurt expression briefly cross her husband’s face. He pinched it away.
“No more babies for us, pumpkin,” Peter said to their daughter.
“I would take care of it,” Ruth said. “You guys wouldn’t even have to do anything. I would change its diapers and feed it and everything.”
Rafaela knew she should make a joke or at least say something comforting. She should peel off the yellow rubber gloves and go to Ruth, place a hand on top of her daughter’s head, and tell her that there was no need to make another baby because they already had the perfect little girl right here. She couldn’t bring herself to do it. The bones in her shoulders felt hollow, her stomach twisted. She couldn’t move. It occurred to Rafaela that part of her disturbance this evening was in observing the Morales y Reyes family’s happiness, despite the many reasons Rafaela imagined they must have to feel unhappy. Each member of the family seemed so in sync with the others. There was a breeziness in the ways they accommodated each other, a simplicity in all their interactions. The way Consuelo handed the baby to Luis without a word while she wriggled into her coat, the way he reached for the baby even before Consuelo moved in his direction. They spoke the same language not just in their mouths or their thoughts, but in their muscles and bones, Rafaela thought. Perhaps that’s what was broken between her and Peter. The thought flitted through her mind like a passing bird without alighting with any permanence there. But she knew without saying it to herself that the bird’s name was Candido.
“You really weren’t yourself this evening.” Peter startled her out of her thoughts, his voice too close to her ear. She hadn’t realized he was standing there.
“I know,” she said. “I felt that too. I suppose I’m not feeling very well.”
Peter’s voice was lower than the sound of the running water, but Rafaela didn’t stop clanking the dishes around in the sink to try to hear him. He was bent over, leaning his elbows on the counter while Rafaela did all the washing herself. His sleeves were rolled up, but it was unclear why.
“Really nice family though, right?” he said.
“They were perfectly nice, yes,” Rafaela said.
“Why does it sound like there’s a but coming?”
“I don’t know, there’s no but ,” she said. “Unless you expect me to have more to say about them?”
“Well, I thought you might,” Peter said.
She was taking the clean plates out of the soapy water, and dipping them into the clear water in the second sink before stacking them in the drying rack. The lemon cake was still on the ceramic stand right in front of Ruth, and Rafaela knew without turning around that her daughter was going to sneak a second slice. They were already cut; it would be impossible to ask a child to sit there without taking a second slice. If Rafaela herself had the luxury of sitting down, she wouldn’t even have bothered with a plate; she’d have pulled a chair and a fork directly up to the cake stand. She looked at Peter.
“Why?” she asked. “What more should I have to say about them?”
“I don’t know.” He sounded exasperated. “I mean, these are the first Puerto Rican people we’ve met since we moved back here. I thought that might be nice for you. I thought there’d be more to discuss than the dirty dishes.”
“Well, I don’t know why you thought that,” she said. “They may be Puerto Rican, and yes, they seem lovely, but they may as well be from Pluto for all we have in common.”
“How can you say that, Rafaela?” Peter said. “Be reasonable.”
Which was almost as infuriating as when he told her to calm down or relax , both of which had become a blessedly rare utterance between them because, whatever Peter’s faults, he was a man capable of learning. But in this instance, he seemed heedless to her growing unrest. How could he not feel what was surging through her? Wasn’t it rising up from her skin in hot waves? He did not appear to be forewarned.
“Of course you have things in common,” he was saying. “What a crazy thing to say. You have sons the same age, you’re both Puerto Rican. You both live here, in St. Louis. Isn’t that a lot of common ground right there, already?”
Rafaela stopped dipping the plates and turned to look at her husband.
“Do you have any idea how ridiculous that sounds?” she said.
“What’s so ridiculous about it? It’s true, isn’t it?”
Rafaela heard their daughter’s weight land into the chair behind her, and knew that Ruth had just committed the theft of the second slice.
“Put it back!” she said without turning around.
“What?” Ruth’s voice was mostly a squeak. “How…”
When she turned to look, Ruth’s mouth was standing open.
“Never mind,” Rafaela sighed. “Go ahead.”
“I can eat it?” she whispered.
“Quickly,” Rafaela said. “Before I change my mind.” Ruth wasted no time, so Rafaela returned her attention to Peter. “So. Your position is that we should be great friends because we come from the same country and we both ended up here?” she said.
“Well.” Peter seemed to be examining Rafaela’s statement for possible pitfalls. He couldn’t find flaw, but neither did he want to commit. “I mean. It’s not nothing, right?”
“It is nothing!” she said. “It’s very close to nothing. You and Richard Nixon are from the same country. You want to go and be best friends with him?” She plunged her hands back into the water. “You see how silly that is? How presumptuous?”
“Rafaela, come on.”
Peter tried scooting closer to her, tried bumping his hip against her hip, but the effort only calcified her. She didn’t want to be like this, but she couldn’t locate the switch that might turn off her anger and help her soften to him.
“Consuelo seems like a sweet gal,” Peter said, as if that were the question. As if Rafaela hadn’t noticed how lovely the woman was, and if Peter could only draw her attention to that, they could turn this whole thing around. “She’s overwhelmed here too,” he said, briefly leaning his cheek against her shoulder. “You remember how that felt, right?”
Rafaela breathed very slowly, in through her nose, out through her mouth, and when she’d completed the cycle, she was dismayed to find that the rage was still there, swift and uncertain of origin. Her fury became the prickle of threatening tears behind her eyes. How simple Peter made it all sound. How completely wrong he was about everything, how little he understood of her experience. He was still talking, and she was now doing him the kindness of not listening.
“And I don’t think she speaks a word of English,” he was saying. “You could help her, show her the ropes. It would be good for you both.” His voice swam back to the surface, and he leaned a little closer, perhaps so their daughter wouldn’t hear what he said next. “I know you’re lonely here, sweetheart. You hardly talk to anyone outside of this house.”
These words fell into Rafaela like into a dark pit, and she could not salvage them. He leaned against her once more.
“Wouldn’t it be nice to have a friend?”
Her anger in this moment was unaccountable, so she tried to stifle it from her voice. She answered him coldly, “I do not need a friend.”
There were many things she needed. She could provide him with a list. At the top would be a husband who would tell that country club manager to go fuck himself. Nowhere on the list would appear the friendship of Consuelo Reyes.
Rafaela could sense the shift coming over Peter, and it was this shift that sometimes caused her to back down, but not tonight. Tonight, Rafaela was a closed door, and soon Peter would be finished trying to pick her lock, to coax her open. He folded his hands into a tight knot in front of him while she watched, and Rafaela could see his growing impatience in the colors of his knuckles. She didn’t care. She spent her whole life in this place tangled up in a knot like that. Let Peter feel it sometimes too.
Benny wandered into the room, already in his flannel pajamas. The feet of the jammies scuffed against the tile floor. And that was the antidote. Those footed pajamas cut through all of Rafaela’s pain and resistance like an anchor through clean water. She felt herself return, and she was rinsed of dread. There was her sweet boy, in his last ever pair of footed pajamas. And there at the table was her beautiful girl. This was their one and only precious childhood and for better or for worse, this was the place they were doing it. Let them eat cake!
“Hey!” Benny eyeballed Ruth’s plate. “Can I get another slice too?”
“Did you sneak a second slice?” Dad asked Ruth.
Rafaela looked at him. Where had he been just now, when she’d had that conversation with Ruth right in front of him?
Ruth looked at her mother and then shook her head just the tiniest bit. “No! It’s my first.” She tossed the lie like a frisbee, watching to see how it would land. “I’m just savoring it.”
Dad winked at her.
“Liar,” Benny said.
“Don’t call your sister a liar,” Rafaela said. “She’s only fibbing.”
Peter took one of the plates Rafaela had just washed out of the drying rack, wiped it with a dish towel, and handed it to Benny. “Just a small one,” he said.
Benny sat down beside Ruth and chose the largest remaining slice of cake, right from the middle. They ate in contented silence.
“I don’t understand why you won’t just give her a chance,” Peter said, returning to Rafaela just when she thought this might be over. Why wouldn’t he let it go?
“I did!” Rafaela said. “I gave her a chance, she was just here for a whole evening! Didn’t I feed her cake and serve her coffee in our good cups?”
Peter made his most perturbed, judgmental face. “Our good cups?”
“Yes.” Well. She hadn’t even known that sentiment was in there until she accidentally said it out loud.
“Our good cups,” Peter repeated.
Rafaela wasn’t usually one to double down, especially when she knew she was wrong. But there was something perverse about this whole conversation. She wanted to provoke him, to make him furious.
“Better than what she’s accustomed to, I’m sure,” she said, and felt immediately ashamed of herself. But only a little. That feeling was just one out of fifty-two cards in her shuffled deck. There was also a kind of wicked satisfaction when she observed how disgusted Peter was when she said it, the moment his face slammed shut as well. Maybe now they were even, equally sickened by each other, equally sure their spouse was a reprehensible person.
“Cake is good, right?” Benny said at the table.
It was so good Ruth didn’t even answer. Just lifted another forkful into her mouth.
“You’re being a snob, Rafaela,” Peter said, not quietly enough that the kids wouldn’t hear. They were sitting right there.
Rafaela was holding a plate in both hands. She lifted it, and for a long moment thought about smashing it over her husband’s head. Ruth and Benny were both staring at them, still eating their cake. Rafaela averted her almost-violence and instead slammed the plate back into the sink. The edge of it caught on the tap, and a chip flew off and plinked against the window. A small tidal wave swamped out of the sink and up onto the backsplash. Then it made a return trip and sloshed over the lip of the counter and onto the floor, soaking her and Peter both, their stomachs first and then their shoes. The sound that came out of Rafaela in that moment was a caustic yelp, a noise only loosely related to human speech.
“She’s a jíbara!” Rafaela said. “That whole family, jíbaros!”
In the silence that followed, Rafaela had a choice to make. If she consulted her emotional map, there’d be an exit ramp in there somewhere, she knew. If only she could locate it, she could take that emergency turnoff. This was her last chance to reverse course, reach for her husband, melt into him, and seek comfort there.
“That woman would not have been fit to sweep my father’s floors in San Juan,” she said instead.
She hated herself immediately.
But she hated Peter just a little bit more.
She didn’t even mean it, she thought. Or at least she didn’t want to mean it. Peter’s response was a visible curdling of feeling. He shrank away from her, horrified. He grabbed the dishrag he’d just tucked into the door handle of the fridge, and leaned down to wipe the spreading puddle from the floor.
“Oh how the mighty have fallen,” he muttered.
Then he deposited the soaked rag on the counter and left the room.
After the argument, Ruth and her brother found themselves alone in the kitchen with their mother’s anger, but also with her other emotions, the whole palpable range of them. Ruth could feel that some of those emotions were the same as hers, in different situations. There was rage, yes. And snobbery, yes, that was undeniable. But there was also fear. Homesickness. The tremendous frustration of being misunderstood. There was grief. Why couldn’t Dad see that? Where was his loyalty for Mama, why was he pushing her like that when it was so obvious she was hurting and needed him to be gentle? Ruth would help him understand.
When Mama was finished at the sink, she removed her apron and took herself back into the living room, where she sat quietly within the glowing halo of the floor lamp. She didn’t read. She didn’t pull her cross-stitch out of her sewing cabinet. She just sat quietly there beside the lamp, still wearing her wet shoes and her jewelry. She smoothed and smoothed the already-smooth skirt of her dress while Ruth watched from the doorway.
When Benny was done eating, Ruth washed her own plate and his too. Then she went into the living room and sat next to Mama for only a minute. She leaned her head on Mama’s shoulder, and couldn’t tell if Mama even knew she was there, which gave Ruth an eerie, unsettled feeling.
“It’s okay, Mama,” she whispered. “I love you.”
Ruth waited for a response, watching the pearls at her mother’s throat moving softly on the tides of her breath. Three cycles of breath before Ruth stood up and kissed her mother’s cheek.
Ruth changed quickly into her nightgown, brushed her teeth, washed her face, and then went looking for her father in the den. Dad was sitting in his usual recliner, but without the footrest up. He was leaning on one elbow, his body all crumpled with tension.
“Will you read to me, Dad?” she asked.
He was watching Fantasy Island , the volume up loud.
“Dad?”
“What?” He turned toward her.
Ruth would never know Dad the way she knew Mama, even though he was simpler, easier to grasp. She’d never understand if he was truly malleable or just better at pretending, but it didn’t matter anyway, because when his eyes moved away from the screen and landed on Ruth’s face, she saw the way his features changed, the way his expression softened. Even though she hated the way he sometimes talked to Mama, this was still true. The way he loved them was uncomplicated and pure. The television lit one side of his face with its cold blue light, and he reached a hand out to her. Ruth took a step forward.
“Will you read to me?” she repeated.
He grabbed her hand and squeezed.
“Of course I will, sweetie. Go climb in bed. I’ll be there in a minute.”
In her room, she chose Little Egret and Toro from her bookshelf because she knew it was one of Dad’s favorites. She turned on her daisy night-light, and then climbed beneath her quilt to wait.
“All ready for bed?” Dad said from the doorway, forced brightness in his voice.
“Yep.”
He came and sat down on the edge of the bed, and then he flopped back onto the pillow beside her, so she flopped back too.
“Did you have fun tonight?” he asked.
“Yeah.”
“You liked that baby, right?”
“I love her!” Ruth said.
“You were very good with her.”
“Maybe you and Mama really should have another baby,” she said again.
Dad snorted.
“Babies make everything better,” she whispered.
Dad was quiet then. “I’m not sure it really works that way.”
“It might, though.”
“You liked the cake too,” he said, changing the subject.
“Lemon is my favorite.”
Dad was looking up at the ceiling, his hands laced behind his head. Ruth started raking her fingers through his hair, mussing his part, pushing it forward onto his forehead. She smoothed it in different directions until he closed his eyes.
“Dad?”
“Hmm.” He didn’t open his eyes.
“I think I know how Mama feels.” She was nervous because she felt like this was important, and the moment was right, but she was unconvinced she’d be able to name what she was feeling, or to make him understand.
“Oh?”
She was grateful he didn’t open his eyes. “It’s like. The other day? On the playground? When Benny and Eddie went riding bikes, that day… when they came to the playground… Kathy called Eddie foreign .”
“Oh.” Dad’s voice was sad.
“And, like, I didn’t even really know what she meant by it. But…” Her own voice had dropped to a hesitant whisper. “Just—I didn’t want her to think I was foreign too.”
God, there was so much shame in that sentence. It bloomed up through her throat and she could feel it in her ears, in the echo of Mama saying jíbara. She didn’t know what that word meant exactly, couldn’t have guessed that years from now, righteous Puerto Ricans would reclaim and honor that word, fold it proudly into their sense of themselves. She only knew that tonight, when Mama used that word to describe Eddie’s family, there was a sour curl to it. Ruth recognized the stink.
Dad’s eyelids were open now, and Ruth was blinking furiously. For a moment she thought she’d be able to blink them away, but no. Her eyes were too full and wet, and one fat teardrop escaped down each cheek. Dad reached up and brushed them away with the back of his hand.
“Oh, sweetie,” he said.
He sat up and put his arm around her, pulled her against his chest, and kissed the top of her head.
“Listen,” Dad said softly. “This is important.”
Ruth curled into him, her ear against his chest. She could hear the voice of his heartbeat in there, and she believed it said Mama’s name. His voice was as soft as the lamplight.
“That girl Kathy?” he whispered.
“Yeah?” Ruth said.
“She’s an idiot.”