Chapter Seventeen
San Juan, Puerto Rico
2014
Daisy had just turned thirteen the first time Tío Benny and Tía Pamela called to ask if their niece could spend the whole summer with them in San Juan. Daisy and her mom took the call on speakerphone.
“It would be great for Stefani to have her cousin here for the whole summer,” Benny said to Mom.
“They’re such a good age for it,” Pamela said. “And the boys are so busy at this age, they’re hardly around anymore.”
Stefani had three older brothers who were all close in age, and then there was a five-year gap before she was born. Two of the boys were in college, and the youngest was heading to the fire academy in Miami right after his high school graduation, so their house was emptying.
“Please, Titi Ruth!” Stefani said. “I need the company or I’ll cry all summer!”
“Can I, Mom?” Daisy asked.
Benny reminded Mom of their own teenage summers returning to San Juan with their mother. Back to their grandparents and friends, day trips hiking up waterfalls in El Yunque with Lola, playing cards with Mamamía on the patio while Papamío marinated steaks. Long afternoons filled with golden laughter and the tangy aroma of meat sizzling on a grill. It was during one such summer, when Mom was thirteen herself, that she and Benny realized how much earlier and more suddenly the sun set in Puerto Rico than it did in St. Louis. At night they took a blanket to the rooftop and, lying on their backs on either side of their mother, they counted the stars in the inky black sky, pointing out the constellations they knew. Tío Benny was good at remembering and reminding. Mom couldn’t think of a reason to say no.
On the last day of June, Daisy flew alone to San Juan, where Benny and her cousin Stefani were waiting for her in the arrivals hall. That first night, and every night afterward, Daisy stayed up late with Stefani baking cookies, watching scary movies, and only emerging from Stefani’s bedroom around noon so they could drag themselves to the beach or go window-shopping in El Viejo San Juan. Sometimes they’d split a Coke, sitting on the old stone wall by the pier and watching the tourists disembark from their cruise ships for their few hours in the city. The girls would pass the Coke between them, scanning the crowds and picking out the boys they’d like to kiss. Texan, Nuyorican, Canadian, it didn’t matter. When it came to imaginary kisses, the girls did not discriminate. On weekends they went fishing with Benny or shopping with Pamela. They passed lazy afternoons reading Suzanne Collins books side by side and then swapping, and then talking about the scandals they contained while lying on the sand without opening their eyes.
An odd thing happened to Daisy that summer: often, when the two girls left the house, Daisy discovered she’d forgotten her phone. The fourth time it happened, Daisy began to feel the liberation of it, as if she’d broken a watery surface and emerged into the freshness of deep breath. How unexpectedly good it felt, to be separated from her phone. She decided to turn that feeling into an experiment. She talked it over with Mom first, who was reluctantly agreeable. Then she powered the phone off and stowed it in the bottom interior pocket of the suitcase she wouldn’t open again until late August. When Mom wanted to get in touch with her, she called Benny or Pamela or the house phone, and someone would pass the receiver over to Daisy. Soon the absence felt normal, and Daisy felt new.
“You should try it,” she said to Stefani as they were locking the door behind them one afternoon to venture out on their bikes. “Being out of touch is incredible.”
Stefani paused with her key in the lock and gave Daisy a dubious look, so Daisy nudged her.
“Stefani,” she said, as she began to enumerate the miracle across her fingertips. “In the last two weeks, I haven’t heard of a single influencer using the n-word, no mudslides or wildfires or natural disasters of any kind. If there have been horrific train derailments with hundreds dead, I know nothing about them. And do you know what happened to me yesterday?” Stefani was staring at her like she was an alien. “When we went into the museum?” Daisy paused for dramatic effect. “I did not make an escape plan.”
“You what?” Stefani removed her hand from the key and planted it on her hip.
“An escape plan?” Daisy said.
“What are you talking about?”
“Like, every time I go into a public place, I look around to find the emergency exits and I make sure to locate the best hiding places in case there’s a mass shooting.”
“What the hell, Daisy?”
Daisy paused again. “You don’t do that?”
Stefani shook her head, momentarily speechless.
“Oh,” Daisy said. “Well, maybe I won’t do it anymore either, now that I’m not staring at a feed filled with horrific gun violence every day.”
They were both quiet then, before Stefani twisted her key in the lock, swung open the door, and tossed her phone on the bookshelf just inside the door.
“Let’s see how this goes,” she said, closing and locking the door behind them again.
Tía Pamela was waiting for them when they got back that evening with a “Where the hell have you been without that phone?” which prompted a protracted discussion about what the phone was actually supposed to be for, and why Pamela paid the bill every month, and the future parameters around Stefani taking the phone with her whenever they left the house.
“It was my fault,” Daisy said. “I told her to leave it.”
Pamela stood up from the table.
“I’m glad you girls aren’t on your screens all the time, don’t get me wrong,” Pamela said. “But let’s aim for a happy medium.”
The next day they rolled Yahtzee dice in a box top at dusk on the beach and took turns recording their scores, passing the single pencil between them. Stefani left the phone zipped into the side pocket of her beach bag. After Stefani annihilated Daisy at dice, they pulled out their picnic of bananas, bread, and cheese.
“I love the food here,” Daisy said.
“What, you don’t get bananas in New York?” Stefani teased. “No cheese in the Big Apple?”
“Not this meal specifically,” Daisy said, chewing. “Though this is some extremely delicious cheese. I just mean the food in general, Puerto Rican food.”
Stefani sighed. She was leaning back on her elbows, looking out across her toes at the darkening surf. “I dunno. I wish we could eat out more. There are so many great restaurants here I want you to try, but my mom cooks practically every night.”
“Yeah, you’re so lucky!” Daisy shook her head. “She’s such a great cook.”
“Your mom is a great cook,” Stefani countered. “She always makes different things. We have the same stuff all the time, every week.”
“Well.” Daisy took a bite of her banana and shrugged. “Your lazy ass could cook, then.”
Stefani shoved her, and Daisy fell halfway over in her effort to save the banana from the sand. “I’m just saying, pasta and stuff like that is easy. Your mom is making incredible home-cooked meals from scratch all the time.”
Stefani sat up and clapped the sand from her hands. “Your mom never makes Puerto Rican food?”
Daisy shook her head. “Not really. I mean, not often.”
Stefani was rummaging in the tote bag to see what else she could find.
“You know, Grandma is a terrible cook,” Daisy said. “Like, really bad.”
“Oh, I’ve heard the stories.” Stefani laughed, pulling out a heel of bread and pressing a square of cold cheese into it.
“Yeah, so my mom only knows how to make a few Puerto Rican dishes because Grandma never taught her. I guess the ingredients were hard to find in Missouri when she was younger, and Grandma didn’t like to cook anyway. So Mom only learned a couple dishes from Lola before she died. Whatever other Puerto Rican recipes she makes, which is hardly ever, she finds them on Pinterest. Who knows if they’re even authentic?”
Daisy watched her cousin rip the bread with her teeth.
“I’ll tell you how I really feel,” Daisy said.
“How do you really feel?” Stefani squinted at her, chewing.
“I feel that your mother’s cooking has made me understand the injustice of our grandmother’s disinclination for cooking and the subsequent scarcity of Puerto Rican recipes in my mother’s culinary repertoire.”
“Good heavens!” Stefani said, and brought a hand to her chest.
Daisy nodded. “It is a solemn business.”
But Stefani laughed. “So I take it all back then.” She popped the last morsel of bread into her mouth. “About wanting to eat out more. Maybe we should learn how to cook instead. I mean. In between lying on the beach and reading and napping and talking about boys and playing games. Whenever we’re not doing those things, we could ask my mom. Maybe she’d teach us some family recipes.”
“Yes!” Daisy said, sitting up on her knees.
“I’m so smart,” Stefani said.
Daisy stood and flung her towel out into the wind, shaking the sand toward the ocean.
“Where are you going?” Stefani asked.
“Home! To learn how to cook!”
“Right this second?” Stefani tried to coax some irritation into her voice, but she was already rolling up to her feet, gathering her own sandy towel into the bag.
“I’m starving!” Daisy said.
So Tía Pamela agreed to teach them one recipe a week, Saturday afternoons. Every Friday, Pamela gave them a shopping list and some money, and the two girls hauled the ingredients home in a wheeled cart. With Pamela’s guidance and varying degrees of success, they learned to make, first, sofrito, and then: arroz con gandules, alcapurrias, pernil, mofongo, tostones, ropa vieja, and pasteles.
On their second-to-last Sunday together, Daisy and Stefani spent all day alone in the kitchen, wearing aprons and hairnets they thought were funny. They reserved the irony for their outfits, though. The food was serious. When the meal was finally ready and all the house smelled of savory meat and the tang of salt, the girls plated everything on the dining room table with cloth napkins and two tapered candles. Benny and Pamela were astonished. The girls studied the grown-ups while they tried everything, eager to determine whether or not the praise was genuine. It was.
Daisy dug her fork into the mofongo mountain on her plate and took her time curating the perfect bite, with just enough meat and just enough plantain. The textures were sublime.
“We are goooood cooks,” Stefani said with her mouth full.
“You got that right!” Benny said.
The experience of being there that summer had changed Daisy, engendered in her a more elastic sense of the world around her and her place in it.
The week before Daisy had to go back to New York, she and Stefani went to buy pads just on the off chance one of them might have their period soon (an eventuality they were both expecting to happen any day now). Next door to the pharmacy, they discovered a little thrift store that Stefani had never visited.
“But it’s so cute!” It was Daisy who paused outside, the bulky, lightweight bag dangling from the crook of her elbow.
She looked at their reflections in the window, and then hooked her cousin’s arm and pushed open the door. There was the familiar scent, or perhaps the familiar conglomeration of scents that, when combined, became their own uniquely recognizable aroma, the same in every thrift shop the world over. It was dust and old leather and a heavy accumulation of memories, and it made the air inside the shop feel positively sticky with nostalgia, a swirling of particles in a sunbeam. Daisy filled up with the scent. There were typewriters and umbrellas and obsolete computer accessories and a pair of ceramic swan figurines. A propped-open hardback suitcase contained a whole collection of prescription eyeglasses. In the children’s aisle, Daisy found a funky rainbow tank top and a pair of Thomas the Tank Engine pajamas that would definitely fit her. The women’s clothing was even better.
“Sick, right?” Stefani said, as she squeezed past the rows of overstuffed hangers and arrived at Daisy’s elbow. “Look at this Michael Kors handbag. Eleven dollars!”
“That’s hot.” Daisy pulled out a shirt made from a sheer, delicate material. It was a button-down with pointy collars, and a print of wild horses in a desert landscape.
“Um.” Stefani looked dubiously at the shirt. “That particular shirt might be here because it’s an abomination, though?”
Daisy shook her head at her cousin. “Stefani, I’m surprised at you. Where’s your sense of adventure?”
Stefani lifted one sleeve, squinting at the blurry print. “Is that an Indian?” she asked. “Daisy, are these, like, cowboys and Indians?”
Daisy snatched at the sleeve and peered closer.
“It’s just a guy riding a horse,” she said.
“In a feathered headdress.” Stefani pointed at an impossibly blurry figure woven into the fabric.
Daisy didn’t see it.
“But I mean… feathered headdresses do exist, though. Is it wrong to celebrate their existence?”
“Daisy, that shirt is a hate crime,” Stefani said.
Daisy felt very sad. But she put it back.
“Look at this one!” It was a cropped T-shirt that said PLEASE DON’T SQUEEZE THE CHARMIN and its price tag said two dollars.
“I don’t get it,” Stefani said.
Daisy added it to her purchase pile.
On Daisy’s last night in San Juan, they took two collapsible camp chairs out to the backyard and set up a Parcheesi board on a folding table between them. When Stefani deposited her dice into the little cardboard tube, Daisy felt like it was her heart rattling around in there, making that understated racket. Stefani held it in her fist and shook it tenderly. There was a huge catalog now, between them, of shared songs and handclaps and jokes and stories, not to mention family recipes. They’d built new ideas and memories into each other’s minds, and they had done all that without exchanging a single text message.
“This has been the best summer of my life by a mile,” Daisy said, and there was a tight feeling in her throat. “I wish my mom had moved back here, like your dad did. I wish my brothers and I had grown up here with you guys, in Puerto Rico.”
Stefani glanced up at her cousin and tried for bravado. “Are you kidding me? You live in New York! It’s the greatest city in the world.”
“Um, we live in Palisades,” Daisy corrected, shaking her dice. “From where, on a clear day in winter, we can see the greatest city in the world. Downriver. In the cold, gray distance.”
“Still.” Stefani cast her dice across the board.
Daisy set down her shaker.
“I guess we’ll have to start texting when I’m gone,” she said. “Return to the land of technology.”
Her cousin sighed heavily, counting out loud while she moved her yellow pawn around the board.
“Yeah,” Stefani said. “We can talk on the phone.”
“We can talk on the old-fashioned telephone machine,” Daisy said.
“We can fax each other.”
“Morse code.”
“Carrier pigeons.”
They laughed, and Daisy learned that sad laughter lands differently in the atmosphere than the regular kind.
When she opened her suitcase that evening and drew her phone out to charge it before the journey home, she worried briefly that she’d fall back into old habits as soon as she returned to New York. She weighed the small heft of that device in her hand, and when she plugged it in and powered it on, she knew immediately that this had not been just a temporary time-out. It was a permanent choice she was making. Without hesitation, she pressed her thumb against the apps until they began to wobble and, one at a time, she deleted each of them. Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat. Gone.
“Seriously?” Stefani said, peering over her shoulder. “You’re going cold turkey?”
Daisy nodded. “I do not miss it one bit,” she said. “I’m happier without it. Anyway, lots of kids our age are becoming, like, vegan or vegetarian, right?” She shrugged. “This is just like that.”
“Opting out,” Stefani said.
“Exactly. Unsubscribing.”
“But, Daisy,” Stefani said, falling back on the bed. “You know half those kids who declare themselves vegan on the first day of school are eating cheeseburgers by October.”
Daisy set her phone on the nightstand with its little umbilical cord trailing down to the outlet beside her bed.
“Not me,” she said. “I mean, I know my limitations, which is why I would never in a million years give up cheeseburgers.” She tucked one hand behind her head. “But I want this phone-free life forever.”
Stefani tucked one hand beneath her own head, too, and rolled over to face her cousin.
“Daisy Hayes,” she said. “You are truly awake.”
Eight weeks. That’s how long it took Daisy to grow up, never mind that her period would not show up until October. When she arrived in San Juan at the beginning of that summer, she’d been an anxious, small-voiced child. She’d been a kid like all others, glued to her phone, almost entirely defined by a constant thread of worry she didn’t even know existed. That worry was so continual, Daisy had failed to notice the way it sat heavy in her stomach in a fluttering pit. She hadn’t known it was possible to evict that sinking, frenetic feeling. She hadn’t known that the rod of tension usually bulleting down the back of her neck didn’t have to be there, until it was gone.
Her first week back in New York, she tracked down a heavy, old rotary phone at the Salvation Army.
“This thing work?” she asked the lady behind the counter.
“Bring it over, we can plug it in and check.”
The shop lady’s hair was short and gray, and she wore a no-nonsense apron. Daisy appreciated this woman. The phone made a satisfying jangle when Daisy plonked it on the counter because it had actual bells inside. The lady turned and pulled the cord from the base of her modern, cordless landline. Then she clicked it into the little slot at the back of the rotary phone. Daisy lifted the receiver and smiled at the sound of the dial tone.
“I’ll take it,” she said.
She paid the woman seventeen dollars in cash, and carried the phone home in her backpack.
In her room, she had to hunt for the phone jack (behind her desk, it turned out—how convenient!) before plugging it in. Then she picked up her cell phone and dialed the house number, which she was surprised she could still remember, given that she hadn’t dialed it in at least two years. The noise of that old rotary phone announcing itself throughout the stillness of the house made Daisy’s skin wash with goosebumps. She jumped, and then waited for it to sound again before she picked it up. There was a soft, satisfying crackle on the line.
“What the fuck was that?” she heard her little brother yell from his room. He was almost eleven, and experimenting liberally with the word fuck whenever Mom wasn’t home. He was still Charlie then, not yet Carlos, but already entirely himself.
“Come look!” she said.
When he didn’t, she hung up the phone, picked it up again, and then dialed his cell phone number, which she had to look up on her own cell phone, because she’d never dialed it before.
“Come to my room,” she said when he picked up.
“I’m extremely busy picking out my first-day-of-school outfit,” he said.
“You have three more days for that. This will take thirty seconds.”
“Fine.”
She hung up. Her little brother appeared in her doorway a moment later, and then she had to contend with how unimpressed her brother was by her new purchase.
“But why, though?” he kept asking.
“Just feel it!”
He picked up the receiver, stuck his finger into one of the number holes, and spun the dial plate clockwise.
“Daisy, there’s a reason why nobody uses this technology anymore,” he said. “It would take me like ten minutes just to dial. Plus, who am I dialing? How am I supposed to remember anyone’s phone number?”
Daisy took the receiver from him and replaced it gingerly in its cradle, as if it were an actual baby.
“That’s what your brain is for,” she said.
Daisy made dinner that night, and as she doled arroz con gandules out of the pot and onto their plates, she told Mom that she didn’t need her cell phone anymore.
“You what?” Mom said.
“I’ll take it,” Vic said. “Hers is newer than mine.” He unfolded his napkin across his lap.
“She needs a cell phone,” Mom said, taking the plate from Daisy. “Thank you.”
“I don’t though, Mom,” Daisy said, sitting into her chair. “I bought myself a landline phone.”
“It’s like the triceratops of telephones,” her younger brother said. “Can I have Coke with my dinner?”
“Water or milk,” Mom said.
He frowned, but filled his glass with water and joined them at the table.
“You can’t take a landline with you to school, Daisy,” she said. “What if something happens? I need to be able to get in touch with you.”
They all knew what the something was that might happen, and there would be lockdown drills their first week back, in case they had been tempted to forget. Daisy nodded.
“Okay, Mom.”
After that, Daisy developed a kind of minimalist hybrid relationship with modern technology. She kept her cell phone charged, brought it with her to school, sometimes needed to use its camera to upload homework to her Google Classroom, but when she got home, she plugged it in beside the cabinet in the living room and forgot about it.
Three or four times a week, she called Stefani from the jangly, staticky rotary phone in her room. If she wasn’t doing homework, Daisy would drag the phone as far across her bedroom as its cord would allow, and then she’d stretch the receiver over to her bed where she’d lie down on her back with her head hanging over the edge and her feet up on the wall. In this posture, she talked to Stefani as if it were fully 1985.
“I’m definitely moving to Puerto Rico when I’m old enough,” she told her cousin, twisting the curly cord around her outstretched finger, unaware that she’d inherited this gesture from the universal teenage consciousness of Generation X.
“Don’t do it,” Stefani said. “You’ll get so fat if you live here.”
“Facts,” Daisy admitted. “I’ll have to take up running.”
“Or salad?” Stefani suggested.
“Definitely running.”
They both laughed.
“But seriously, next summer maybe I should come to New York instead,” Stefani said. “Before you go deciding our whole future, let’s weigh all the options.”
“Palisades is really not a viable option,” Daisy insisted.
“I’ll be the judge of that.”