Chapter Twenty
Palisades, New York
2019
Rafaela told no one when she started to forget things, not even herself. She had always been a relatively private person, but this was different because it wasn’t secrecy that drove the concealment but terror first, and then, a close second, the forgetfulness itself. She didn’t tell her children because, in fact, she forgot that she was forgetting.
In the beginning it was only individual words, and it only happened when she was very exhausted or stressed out. She would look at a chair for a full minute and think, “Dammit, it’s the thing you sit in! What is it called?” before the word would finally come back to her: silla . And then sometimes another full minute before she could retrieve it in English. The next thing to slip were her tasks. She would drive to the mall, park her car in the same lot where she always parked, walk inside, all the way through Macy’s and out into the mall, on a mission toward a specific destination… and then her steps would slow beneath her. And she would stop, one thumb tucked beneath her purse strap, her keys still dangling from her hand. She’d stare down at the floor, eyes clicking through the spatial files in her brain where she stored her tasks. And she would come up empty. No recollection whatsoever of why she was here or what she was meant to do. She might go to the food court and order a salad, and then midway through her meal: A new dress for Carlos’s big show! That was it! But increasingly often, the forgotten task would not reveal itself until she returned home and discovered the empty toilet paper roll or the remnants of the broken bowl in the garbage. Sometimes, the forgetfulness moved in the other direction and presented as hypervigilance. She gave herself no credit for having already completed a task, so she would perform the task several more times, and then before she knew it, four additional copies of Oprah’s latest book club pick would arrive in the mail. She’d pretend she’d ordered copies for Ruth and the kids as well, a family book club.
Rafaela told herself it was probably normal, everyone was forgetful at her age. She was seventy-two years old, and she’d probably squeezed a hundred years of living into those decades. She told herself it was because her life had not been linear or ordinary, she’d jumped countries and cities and states, crossed languages and cultures, populated the community of her brain with people from so many different places and backgrounds. There was also that long stretch of years when she was miserably sad almost every day, surely that must’ve had an impact. How could one human experience contain all that? It would be different if she’d stayed rich her whole life, she reasoned, if she’d married one of the boys she was supposed to marry. It would be different, she was sure, if she were still Puerto Rican.
Rafaela started writing things down the moment she thought of them. She kept a red spiral notebook full of things-to-do, which was very helpful as long as she remembered to consult it, and then to cross things off when they were completed. She suspected that Benny had noticed her slipping, because her son noticed everything, even though he was all the way down in San Juan. They spoke nearly every day by phone, just checking in, and FaceTimed at least once a week. Benny had always been attentive and patient, but recently Rafaela couldn’t help noticing an irritability that crept into his voice when he said, “Yes, Mama, you already mentioned the new dental hygienist. Twice!” She found herself not answering his calls quite as often, whether to elude her own worry or just to duck Benny’s exasperation, she couldn’t say. Whatever the case, she knew Ruth and Benny were swapping notes about her because, within weeks of each other, they both started mentioning that now might be a good time to sell the condo and move in with one of them. It was a seller’s market, they said. It annoyed her because she was forgetful, not stupid. She was perfectly capable of sniffing out their collusion.
When her kids brought up the idea of moving, Rafaela made the requisite forestalling noises because she knew they expected her to put up a fight, and she never did like to be too easy. But in truth, she’d had enough of solitude, and was ready to trade into the next phase. She liked the idea of eating dinner every night with her grandkids. That was the reason. Not the other thing.
“You know, the weather is great down here, Ma, and we’ve got plenty of room,” Benny said over FaceTime.
Two of Benny’s four kids had already graduated from college, and the third was a firefighter in Miami. Only the baby, Stefani, was still at home, and soon she too would go off to college in Florida on a softball scholarship. Their house would be empty. Plus, Rafaela liked Benny’s wife, who was warm and funny and a great cook. She certainly loved the weather in San Juan. But Rafaela couldn’t get past feeling like a guest when she visited them. She couldn’t imagine sprawling out on their living room couch, watching television in her nightgown, her hair pinned into its weekly rollers.
“I’ll think about it,” she said, even though she had no intention of thinking about it.
She already knew she’d move in with Ruth and the kids, who lived nearby and had plenty of space. She had lived with them years ago when the kids were little, after Thomas died, so they already knew her rhythms and private eccentricities. Rafaela felt easy in their home. But she would make Ruth work for it, of course.
“I’ve decided to fix up the guest cottage, Mama,” Ruth announced one Sunday evening over dinner on her back deck. “I’ve been meaning to do it for years, and I’m going to document it for The Widow’s Kitchen .”
“That sounds wonderful!” Rafaela said.
“I can do it as a before-and-after series,” Ruth said. “Turn the cottage into a showcase, and then when it’s done I might be able to do seasonal features. Holidays, things like that.”
Rafaela nodded. Even though nothing about social media made sense to her, she knew it was Ruth’s career and she’d learned to pretend it was normal.
“You want more wine, Grandma?” Carlos was always offering her more wine because he thought it was funny when she got tipsy. She thought it was funny, too, so she said yes.
“Why don’t you pour yourself a glass, too, nene!”
“Mama!” Ruth said. “He’s only fifteen!”
“And a half,” he said. “Just a sip, Mom? Poor Grandma shouldn’t have to drink alone.”
“It’s not very festive to drink alone, Ruth,” Rafaela said.
“Go on,” Ruth said, waving a hand in her son’s direction. “But just a sip!”
Carlos was already out of his chair. “You want one, Daisy?”
Daisy was going to decline anyway, but Ruth beat her to it.
“Who’s going to drive Grandma home if you guys are all drinking? I’m not doing the dishes and the driving!”
Rafaela didn’t drive after dark anymore, so they all took turns.
“I’ll drive her home, Mom.” Poor Daisy was always the responsible one, and she was a good driver, but Rafaela didn’t care for that patchouli smell of her car. It made her throat feel itchy.
Rafaela put her hand on her granddaughter’s arm and leaned in. “Have the wine, dear,” she whispered, “I’ll sleep in Vic’s room tonight.”
Now that Vic was away at college, it was easy for Rafa to stay over and crash in his room whenever she liked.
“Oh good!” Ruth smiled. “I’m glad you’re staying!”
“Daisy will have some wine!” Rafaela called through the sliding glass door Carlos had left open behind him. She could feel the blast of air-conditioning against her legs.
“Well, this is good timing, Mama,” Ruth started. “Because I’ve been thinking.”
“That’s a dangerous habit!” Carlos called from the kitchen.
They all groaned. It was Papamío’s favorite joke. It had never been funny, and then it became so timeworn that it was funny, and then eventually that wore off as well, and yet, it was still impossible for anyone in their family to confess they’d been thinking , without someone making the customary interruption. Carlos returned with three fresh wine glasses and the bottle tucked under his arm. He scooted the door closed with his backside and set the empties down in front of his mother and sister, but he topped up Grandma first.
“None for me tonight,” Ruth said, pushing the empty glass back from her plate.
“Why, are you pregnant?” Carlos said.
“Gross!” Daisy said.
Ruth swatted her daughter with her napkin. “What’s gross about that?”
Carlos and Rafaela snickered together.
“I still have work to do after dinner, and I need to be fresh,” Ruth explained.
“I’m also not pregnant, in case anyone was wondering,” Rafaela said.
“Same,” Carlos said.
They all looked at Daisy, who said nothing. She sipped delicately from her wineglass.
Ruth cleared her throat and deliberated momentarily before jumping right in with her abrupt change of subject. “So, Mama. I’d like to feature you in this new series I’m planning.”
“Me?” Rafaela said.
Daisy made a displeased face, but then checked herself.
“Sure, like old times. Like back when we first started,” Ruth said.
Rafaela scooted her glass toward Carlos. “More wine!” she barked.
Carlos laughed.
“I’m serious, Mama, it could be really great. I have a whole plan.”
“Oh. She has a plan.” Rafaela raised her eyebrows at her grandkids.
Ruth ignored her. “We’d start with all the before shots, show how dated and underutilized the cottage is.”
Rafaela could see that her daughter was keeping one eye on Carlos, whose “sip” was a solid three-quarters of a wineglass for himself and an even larger pour for his sister, but Ruth ignored the infraction. They all knew what teenagers got up to, and having a glass of wine next to your grandmother at dinner was the least of it.
“So we’d document the whole construction process,” Ruth continued. “And you wouldn’t have to come in until the very end of the project.”
Ruth pushed her plate aside and leaned forward in her chair, elbows on the table. Rafaela’s daughter wasn’t aware that she was giving herself away. Her posture, her attentiveness, her refusal of the wine, and most damning, the fact that she’d left her phone inside for the duration of this meal—taken as a whole, that evidence belied her efforts to make this conversation seem casual and spontaneous.
“I know you’ve been thinking about selling your condo—”
“ You’ve been thinking about me selling my condo.” Rafaela played the role of recalcitrant aging parent very well. There was no question where Carlos had gotten his penchant for acting.
Ruth folded her hands. “Well, we’ve been thinking about you selling your condo then.”
Rafaela sniffed, sipping from her glass. “Okay.”
“So… what if we featured your condo too? We could show how beautiful it is, your immaculate taste, those spectacular views of the river—I bet it would bring in a ton of interest from prospective buyers.”
Rafaela made a noncommittal humming noise while Ruth flattened her hands against the table in a way that signaled whatever she was about to say next would be the crux of the whole conversation.
“And then in the end, we could do a big changeover reveal… of your new home,” Ruth said.
Carlos was seated between them, swiveling his head back and forth like a cartoon character. He gripped the bulb of the wineglass with both hands. “Grandma’s going to come live with us?” he said. “In the guesthouse?”
Ruth pressed her lips together nervously. “If she wants to. Do you want to, Mama?”
They all turned to stare at her. Rafaela stared back.
“Let me think about it,” she said.
“Here’s to Grandma thinking about it!” Carlos raised his glass, and they all clinked. “Ooh, we’re going to drink so much wine together, Grandma!”
They both caught a fit of the giggles then, while Ruth rolled her eyes and Daisy stood up to clear the table. In the end, Rafaela agreed to the cottage, but not to the inane, invasive chronicling of her life, because no one wanted to see an old lady’s condo, or an old lady’s moving van, or an old lady’s reaction to some tastefully chosen soft furnishings with pops of color, no matter how devoted Ruth’s legions of followers seemed to be. But then she forgot she’d declined, so when Ruth asked again, suddenly there she was, grinning like an idiot on camera, Ruth and Rafaela standing shoulder-to-shoulder on the pool deck pavers in Ruth’s side yard with Daisy and Carlos nearby.
Ruth instructed Rafaela not to look yet, but had stopped short of blindfolding her only because Rafaela had refused. Behind them, the Japanese maples ruffled lightly in the breeze. In the video they would watch later, Ruth’s eyes would connect directly with the camera, but Rafaela couldn’t quite locate the lens, so she appeared to be disoriented, gazing slightly off camera throughout.
“It’s finally here, the big day! Ready, Mama?”
Rafaela nodded. “Ready.”
“Just a reminder for you viewers at home before we go inside, here’s what the place looked like before. This is the exterior” [PAUSE] “and this is what the interior looked like just four months ago.” [PAUSE]
Her daughter had been doing this kind of thing for years, but Rafaela would never get used to hearing her talk like this.
“Where am I looking?” Rafaela asked. “I don’t see the pictures.”
“No, Mama, this is just audio for the B-roll we’re going to add later.”
“Oh.”
[PAUSE]
“Okay, so here we go, Mama! Three, two, one!”
The background behind them slid past the glowing pool as Ruth maneuvered herself and Rafaela to a different angle, still focusing on Rafaela’s face, her mouth gaping, her hands flying up to her two cheeks in a gesture of astonishment. It was late afternoon and the light was soft, golden.
“Ay, oh my God, Ruth,” Rafaela gasped. Her eyes were wet.
And now there was Carlos in the background of the shot, recording with his own camera to get a different angle. There were the backs of their heads, and just a few feet beyond them, Rafaela’s new home: a trio of symmetrical arches cut into thick, creamy stucco. Two broad steps leading up to the entrance matched the red clay on the Spanish-tiled roof. A miniature balcony of wrought iron embraced a half-story window cut high beneath the roofline. Two giant flowerpots had been placed beside the steps and planted with braided hibiscus flaunting their canary-yellow blossoms. There was Rafaela’s rocking chair on the porch, a throw blanket draped over its arm. Beside it, the woven basket with her crosswords, her pencil and glasses waiting.
“Oh,” she said quietly. “This was not what I expected.”
A tiny replica of her home on calle Américo Salas, remarkable in its likeness. Remarkable.
“How?” she said, but did not finish the question.
It didn’t make sense here, among the Craftsmans and Victorians, the modern farmhouse architecture of the lower Hudson River Valley, this stately and graceful little home.
It was a drug. A curative.
A time machine.
It teemed with her happiest memories, this small, new place. It was confusing, impossible. In a life filled with loss, so much had been restored to her.
“You like it, Mama?”
Rafaela blinked her wet eyes. “It’s perfect,” she whispered, her lips trembling.
Inside, there was red tile underfoot, accents of wrought iron. Handles, hardware, railings. Warm marble on the kitchen countertops. An overstuffed white sofa, an oak table, a black bookcase with all her favorites, a mahogany sideboard littered with picture frames. Memories, all in black and white.
Rafaela could touch those memories. She could smell them, bedrock. There was Mamamía in her emerald-green dress, Papamío in his tux. There was Benicio standing beside the Buick Roadmaster in his guayabera and slicked-back hair. Rafaela and Dolores standing on either side of Priti in their school uniforms on the front step in Miramar. Priti staring out with her dark green eyes, never opening her lips in photographs. The sisters again, wearing Bermuda shorts beside Candido, the sunshine rocketing down all around them, their mouths open wide with laughter, their fingers numb with cold, their shoes sloppy with melting snow.
“Are you okay, Mama?” Ruth had one arm around Rafaela’s shoulders.
Carlos was still filming nearby, but Daisy’s eyes were trained directly on Rafaela, intuiting her emotions, poised and ready to intercede. Steady. Rafaela could not speak. She waved a hand in front of her face.
“Come on, Mom.” Daisy stepped into the shot. “You too, Carlos—turn it off.”
Ruth did not post the video because Rafaela, with Daisy’s support, forbade her from doing so. Still, all of them were glad the video existed, even Daisy, and Rafaela most of all.
“You’re right, Mama,” Ruth said. “It’s too intimate.”
“But isn’t that exactly what people want?” Carlos asked. “That kind of intimacy? Like they’re getting a private look behind the curtain?”
“Don’t be gross, Carlos,” Daisy said. “We don’t need Mom’s whole throng of followers all up in Grandma’s private business.”
“I’m just saying. Grandma’s so adorable she could go viral.”
“I don’t want to be viral!”
“It doesn’t matter, I’m not going to post it!” Ruth brought an end to the discussion. “Some curtains should stay closed.”
And Rafaela loved her daughter all the more for knowing that crucial truth. So many people had forgotten.
The day the truck came to transfer Rafaela into her new life across the river, she did not lift a single box. She sat at her kitchen table drinking coffee while the movers packed and busied themselves all around her.
In the months after the move, Rafaela felt a marked improvement in her mental function. In fact, she was so lucid in her new home that she began to wonder if she had perhaps imagined or exaggerated her previous forgetfulness. She was stable and comfortable, and she began to think that the move itself had helped, that it had forced her to engage parts of her brain that had been rusty from abandon. In the old condo, she’d become complacent in her routine, but now, each day was full and new, and her mind hummed like a well-oiled machine.
And then the pandemic came, and obliterated any hope of spontaneity. The sharp relief of Rafaela’s life began to blur around the edges again, but still, she was able to feel grateful that she was here in this replica little home, separated by nothing more than a maple tree and a pool deck from her daughter and grandchildren. They formed a safe bubble so that no one was alone. At least twice a week Rafaela found herself thanking God out loud that she had chosen to move when she did, that she wasn’t stuck and isolated in her old condo across the river.
Still, as the days ground into an endless cycle of tedium, Rafaela felt the forgetfulness return. Not all at once, but in flashes. A zap and a tilt, and she wouldn’t be able to hold her mind upright. She’d forget, for a moment, how to make toast. She would dial Lola’s number, and then remember that her beloved sister had been dead for almost thirty years. The grief would return wholesale and unabated. These were vanishing days, vanishing days.
Rafaela began to catalog herself, forcing her way through her daily crossword even when she had to fudge a couple of entries. Or all the entries. Then she would pick up the picture frames from the sideboard one at a time and tell herself the stories they contained so she’d remember them: there was Mamamía’s green dress. There was Candido in the snow.
When she watched the home-reveal video Ruth had made over and over again, she was able to hold her gratitude. Everything felt clear. So it was during a moment like that, a rational, crystalline, satisfied moment, that Rafaela cracked open her laptop and decided, at last, to face this thing head on.
In her old age, Rafaela had begun to grow a realization that she’d behaved as a passenger through most of her life. Things had happened to her with some frequency, but seldom had she made an effort to take control of the wheel and drive the bus herself. Even the biggest decision of her life, her divorce, had felt like an inevitable mutual dissolution, galvanized by her financial windfall, rather than a dynamic resolution that she herself set in motion. But despite all that, it had been a spectacular life, so far, and she was not ready to cede her memories of it to a slow-rolling extinction. There were experimental drugs, she knew, and clinical trials and all kinds of mental exercises. Rafaela would arm herself. She would fight.
Rafaela had always loved games. Board games, playground games, video games. When she was little, she played backgammon with Papamío, Snakes and Ladders with Priti, hopscotch with Lola. Candido taught her dominoes. Mamamía would join them for the occasional game of Clue, but refused to play Monopoly on grounds that it celebrated the colonizers, a declaration that always made Papamío roll his eyes. In Trinidad, Rafaela resorted to solitaire, which was no less satisfying than the other games. She liked the snapping sound the cards made when she flicked them down on the table in their tidy little rows. Years later, when Benny had trouble learning English, it was Rafaela who suggested they start playing charades after dinner each evening. When it was Benny’s turn, he was able to be his bright and goofy self without the pressure of grammar.
“Giraffe!” Benny would shout while Peter loped around the living room. “Palm tree! Bicycle!”
The year she and Peter got divorced, when Benny was thirteen, Rafaela bought their first Atari Video Computer System for Christmas. By the time she upgraded him to the Atari 5200 a couple years later, they both knew the gift was as much for her as it was for him. They took turns, playing side by side on the old velvet couch in the den, their knees touching, Ruth munching popcorn and reading comic books in the nearby recliner while mother and son passed the joystick between them. They played all the typical games, of course, Centipede , Pac-Man , Space Invaders . Benny loved Donkey Kong , but Rafaela’s favorite was Q*bert . The colors, the rhythm, that cute little weirdo with his huge tubular nose. When it was Benny’s turn, he was all over the board willy-nilly, erratic, but Rafaela developed a pattern from which she never deviated unless she got trapped. There was something soothing in the repetition. She felt unstoppable.
So Rafaela was thrilled to discover that some doctors believed video games could help support cognitive function in elderly adults. It felt like a Saturday morning when she invited Vic over to help, but it could have been a Tuesday, because every day of 2020 after mid-March was exactly the same.
“I bought myself a Nintendo Switch,” Rafaela said to Vic, indicating the box on her coffee table. “I just need a little help setting it up.”
“Nintendo Switch!” Vic said. “Get it, Grandma!”
Rafaela did a little shimmy.
“What games did you get?” he asked.
Rafaela reached into the envelope and pulled out the colorful plastic casings one by one. “ Mario Kart , Super Smash Bros. Ultimate , and Assassin’s Creed .”
“Ooh, which Assassin’s Creed ?” Vic sat down on the couch to inspect her selections. “I haven’t played this one. Black Flag is off the chain, though. Graphics are sick.”
“Well, dear,” Rafaela said. “Your grandmother is nothing if not a sucker for some sick graphics.”
“Ha!”
Vic was already behind the television plugging things in.
“This thing can go online, too, right?” she asked.
“You want to go online, Grandma?” Vic asked.
“Yes!”
“You know you can just play against the computer, right? Or we can get more controllers and we can play against each other.”
Rafaela tried not to glare at her grandson. “You understand that I’ve been playing video games since before you were born, correct?”
Vic laughed. “I know, Grandma, I’m just making sure. Like, you don’t have to go online.”
Grandma spoke more slowly this time, to make sure he understood her. “I want. To go. Online.”
“Yes, ma’am!” He picked up the controller and started to set up her account. “I just need your email address.”
She moved closer to him and watched the screen in case of typos. “It’s [email protected].”
Vic laughed out loud again. “Of course it is.”
“Don’t you forget it.”
“You meeting a boyfriend online, Grandma?”
She hesitated, and then decided that her life was too short for such hesitations. “As a matter of fact, I am,” she said.
Vic was speechless in reply.
“An old friend,” she said. “He plays online, too, and we thought it would be fun to play together.”
“You are amazing,” Vic said.
Rafaela sighed. “I know.”
“I heard some of these games are supposed to be really good exercise for your brain, too,” Vic said.
“Yeah, I think I heard something about that.” She smiled.
“Okay, so what do you want your password to be?” Vic turned to her.
Rafaela spelled it out for him, indicating which letters to capitalize. “HotTamale47/Miramar.”
Vic shook his head. “Incredible.”
Rafaela got Vic to write down her username and password on the inside cover of her little red notebook, along with detailed instructions about how to get online and locate her friend using his username.
“But don’t forget about me!” Vic said. “I’m stuck at home too. You can invite me over here to play sometimes, right?”
“Sometimes,” she said. “And then other times I might want to sit here alone and play in my underwear!”
She kissed him on the cheek and then locked the door behind him when he left. Alone, Rafaela kicked off her shoes and curled up on the sofa with her new gaming controller in her hand. She was literally taking control, and if there was any part of her situation that was susceptible to will and determination, then Rafaela was going to win.
Start game.