Chapter Twenty-One
Palisades, New York
2019
“I’ve decided to stay in San Juan a little longer than usual this summer.” Daisy had carefully planned the moment to reveal this information, waiting until Mom was in the driver’s seat of her car and the vehicle was in motion. This would be Daisy’s sixth year in a row spending July and August in San Juan, her sixth summer of wanting to stay there forever.
“What? But that’s…” Mom glanced at Daisy, her face puzzled. “Surprising.”
Daisy took a deep breath and nodded.
“You really think your freshman year of college is the right time for that? Wouldn’t you rather come back early, make sure you’re ready for move-in day?”
Daisy waited a beat before answering, took a moment to steel herself. “I talked to Tío Benny, and they don’t mind me staying longer.”
“ Tío Benny?” Mom said. “Why are you saying tío all of a sudden?”
The irritation was predictable, but Daisy was confused by its target. She’d expected Mom to be laser-focused on the academics of this argument.
“What are you talking about?” Daisy said.
“He is Uncle Benny,” Mom corrected her. “Since when do you call him Tío Benny?”
“Oh, I don’t know.” Daisy shook her head. “Since forever?”
Hadn’t they always called him Tío Benny? It was true that Mom tended to call him “your uncle Benny,” and it was also true that, when Daisy thought of him, she didn’t think the word tío in Spanish. Benny was her uncle when she was speaking English. But he was definitely Tío Benny in both languages. She hadn’t been trying to make a statement.
“Anyway, you can’t say Uncle Ben anymore,” Carlos piped up. “He’s canceled.”
Mom flipped her blinker on as she pulled up to a red light. They were heading to the mall to buy a dress for Daisy’s graduation, even though Daisy wanted to find something at Salvation Army instead. She’d decided not to fight Mom on the dress because in the wisdom of choosing her battles, Daisy had selected this one instead.
“Anyway, he said I can help out with some of his properties until I find a real job,” Daisy said.
“Oh,” Mom said. “His Airbnbs, you mean.”
“Well, sure,” Daisy said, not sure why calling them Airbnbs was such a downgrade from properties , but feeling it nonetheless.
“Okay then,” Mom said. “Huh.”
“The woman who usually works with him is having a baby, so he needs extra help for a few months. Maybe longer.” Daisy said this part very quickly, like a combatant who might lower her shield just long enough to strike a blow at her opponent before retreating again.
Mom glanced over at Daisy, and then with some effort, pulled her eyes back to the road. She was quiet for another beat while the new information settled in.
“But your first semester at Stony Brook starts in September,” Mom finally said. “Move-in day is August twenty-second. How are you going to attend college on Long Island if you’re working in Puerto Rico for a few months ?”
“Well, that’s the thing,” Daisy said. “I thought it would be good to take a gap year.”
“Wow!” Carlos said.
“Like hell it would!” Mom said.
“Listen, it’s fine,” Daisy said. “I’m still going to go to college.”
“Damn right you are,” Mom said. “After I worked my butt off all these years to pay for it, and spent a small fortune on your SAT tutor. Not to mention all the hours of applications, essays, financial aid packets. You better believe you’re going to college!”
“I will, Mom, that’s what I’m saying!” Daisy said. “The provost will hold my place for a year, I already talked to them. I can start next fall instead.”
“You talked to the provost,” Mom said.
“Yes.”
“Before talking to the lady who’s actually paying for the college.”
“Well, I just wanted to have all the facts lined up before I brought it to you.”
Mom did an alarming thing then, which she only ever did when she was so furious she couldn’t speak. She clamped her lips together and puffed air out through her nose like a bull.
“The provost said this is actually becoming really common,” Daisy said. “A lot of kids need to decompress after their senior year of high school and all the stress, so they take some time off. They do it all the time in Europe.”
“This is not Europe!” Mom yelled. “This is Long Island!”
Mom pressed her lips back together while she sped up to pass an eighteen wheeler, and Daisy hoped there hadn’t been a fatal flaw in her planning. Mom wasn’t known for judicious driving at the best of times.
“Take it easy, Ruth,” Carlos said from the back seat. “I’m too handsome to die.”
“And you discussed all this with Benny, too, before talking to me?” Mom said. “I’m the last person on your list?”
“Well, no. We didn’t discuss the details,” Daisy said. “Just, again, trying to line things up before…” She trailed off, because it was true that she had talked to Benny first. And the provost second. And Mom third.
“Well, I’m going to give my brother a piece of my mind,” Mom said.
“Mom, don’t. I’m grateful to Benny.” She could at least opt out of the tío/uncle portion of this fight. “You know I’ve always wanted to move to San Juan, or at least stay longer than just a summer break. This is my chance to finally do that, to try it out for real. It’s a great opportunity.”
“A great opportunity,” Mom repeated.
“Yes.”
“Which part, exactly?”
“I mean. All of it?”
Mom took the exit ramp for the mall.
“Puerto Rico is a mess right now, Daisy. It has never recovered from the storm. You know that. You’ve seen it.”
Since 2017, “the storm” always referred to María, never mind that there had been a dozen terrible storms since.
“The only people moving to Puerto Rico right now are bitcoin crypto-monsters,” Mom said.
“Colonizers,” Carlos agreed.
“Everyone else with a brain is getting out,” Mom went on.
“Oh my God, Mom, that’s so offensive!” Daisy said.
Carlos cracked his knuckles behind them.
“It’s not offensive, Daisy, it’s a fact! It’s one thing to go down there and visit, but to live, really? Why would you climb aboard a sinking ship?”
Daisy felt a buzzing in her solar plexus, something deeply troubling in her mother’s words, but it was slippery. She couldn’t pin it down. Mom pulled the car to a stop beneath another red light.
“I mean, a sinking ship, though?” Daisy said. “If you were paying more attention, you’d know the real problem is rich, tax-dodging mainlanders coming in and gentrifying the place. Pushing locals into service jobs and out of their homes.”
Mom ignored this. “So your plan is what?” she said. “Instead of going to college, you’re just going to up and move countries?” She said this like it was the most absurd thing she’d ever heard.
Daisy looked out the window at the ugly highway they’d just exited, with its Jersey barriers and its eight lanes of sluggish traffic.
“Yeah, I am,” she said. “Lots of people move from one place to another, it’s not a ridiculous thing to do. Grandma did it. You did it.”
“Good grief, Daisy, that’s not the same thing!” Mom’s voice was almost frantic with anger.
Daisy heard her brother lock his phone screen in the back seat; TikTok could no longer distract him from the dumpster fire igniting up front. Ever since his name change in middle school, Carlos had made a meaningful effort to earn and honor the culture of his moniker, but after Hurricane María, when the whole world watched the United States president toss paper towels at the devastated citizens, Carlos experienced an uptick in rage that accelerated his learning. Now, at the age of fifteen, he was a fully politicized Boricua, and even though he didn’t speak Spanish, he knew more about the history and politics of the island than Daisy did. Daisy could feel him stiffening in the back seat while their mother talked.
“When people leave Puerto Rico these days, they do it because they don’t have a choice, Daisy. They can’t get good paying work, as you just said. They can’t afford to buy a house or raise a family, as you just said. They’re being pushed out.” She did not say by people like you , but Daisy felt the sentiment blooming like a time lapse of algae across a stagnant pond. “When my mother did it, she didn’t have a choice either, by the way.” The light turned green and Mom turned onto the ring road around the mall. “She was married, and my father made the decision to move back to Missouri for work and for our education. And I know this might seem impossible for you kids to understand nowadays, but at that time, the woman didn’t have much choice. The husband made the money, so he made the decisions.”
“All right, but what about you then?” Daisy asked.
“What about me? I was a kid when we left Puerto Rico. I didn’t have a choice either.”
“I’m talking about when you moved thousands of miles away to go to college,” Daisy said. “You didn’t technically move to a new country, but the East Coast is a whole different culture from where you grew up, right? You were exactly my age when you took off and left Missouri behind forever. You don’t even go back to visit! You always make Grandpa and Trisha come here.”
“They like coming here!”
“That’s not the point! And anyway, Tío Benny did a big move, too, at my age.”
“Uncle Benny.”
“Oh my God, Mom!”
There was so much frustration in this car it was like a fourth passenger, strapped into the back seat with its earbuds turned up too loud. The conversation was going even worse than Daisy had feared.
“And anyway, what Benny and I did was not the same,” Mom continued. “I moved to the East Coast to go to college, to get my education, to better myself, just like my dad wanted when he brought us here. I did not move to some poor Caribbean island to fix people’s broken-down junkers.”
Daisy gasped. Mom took a sharp breath too, but did not amend herself. They all knew Mom was capable of being mean when she was hurt, but she adored Benny. They’d never heard her talk about him like that before, not ever.
“Jesus, Mom,” Carlos said. “It wasn’t just some random island. It was Puerto Rico. It was home.”
Carlos didn’t even mention the broken-down junkers . They sailed right past that scornful mess, because there was too much at issue here to address all of it. Daisy shook her head and returned to the conversation she intended to have, changing tactics once again. With tremendous restraint, she ignored her mother’s comments and corralled her voice.
“Anyway, I’m never going to be totally fluent unless I do the total immersion thing,” she said. “When Stefani’s gone—”
“To college ,” Mom said.
“When Stefani’s gone, I won’t be able to rely on her. I’ll have to speak Spanish.”
Except to tell Daisy that declaring a language major was a waste of time, that the technology was improving every day and would eventually do all the work for them, Mom never talked about the Spanish language. She never spoke Spanish with Grandma, wouldn’t speak Spanish with Daisy or her brothers, and she’d never admit it to anyone, but they all knew that Mom had almost entirely lost her native tongue. Daisy was already more fluent in Spanish than her mother would ever be again. Mom pretended not to care. She pretended she’d chosen to jettison her language, that she preferred to devote her finite brain-space to more important things. In any case, whether Mom admitted it or not, Daisy knew this was a wound, and she should’ve been more careful. Already, a dart of tension quivered along her mother’s jaw.
“Anyway, it’s only for a year, Mom. It’s not a big deal,” she said. “You can come visit me. It’ll be fun!”
“More fun than this?” Carlos asked.
They both ignored him. Mom was still snagged on the previous point, and her voice had grown bitter.
“So you think you’re going to get language immersion in Puerto Rico?” she said. “You’re, what, you’re going to go down there and become fluent in Spanish by talking to a bunch of vacationers who are renting your uncle’s Airbnbs?”
Daisy shook her head but did not respond because they were past the point in this argument where they might achieve constructive dialogue, and had entered the part where they’d only say regrettable things. This was pointless. She was shutting it down.
“So you’re going to hang around your uncle’s gentrifying tourist traps on the beach,” Mom continued. “In Condado and Isla Verde, where ninety-five percent of the people speak English. Good luck becoming fluent in Puerto Rico, Daisy. You’d be better off moving to Haverstraw and working in a kitchen. That’s where you’ll learn real Spanish.”
Daisy winced, unable to extricate herself as she’d hoped, and the situation now desperate enough that she was willing to resort to technology for assistance. She texted her brother in the back seat. WTF do I say here??? Help.
Three dots appeared on her screen and then the bubble of Carlos’s response. She cray. Abandon ship.
“You know, speaking Spanish won’t make you Puerto Rican,” Mom said now, breaking out the meaningful weaponry. “There’s a little more to it than listening to Bad Bunny and eating mofongo.”
You got that booty too, though. Carlos was quick with the texts from the back seat, but then out loud he added, “I prefer Residente myself. Bad Bunny’s good, but he gets too much airplay.”
Daisy cut his rumination short. “I don’t need to become Puerto Rican, Mom. I am Puerto Rican!”
“Oh, really.” Mom gripped the steering wheel, and Daisy could feel the emotion radiating off her.
This was also the moment that Carlos could no longer contain his irritation to pithy wisecracks. “You know, Ruth,” he said. “Just because you drank the self-loathing-flavored Kool-Aid in Missouri doesn’t mean you should expect us to drink it too.”
Daisy turned in her seat just long enough to bug her eyes at him. You aren’t helping!
“I am not self-loathing!” Mom’s voice had grown to a loud warp, and she sat forward in her seat.
“Well, you ain’t exactly proud,” Carlos muttered.
“How dare you!” Mom yelled.
Carlos shook his head and stared out the window.
“You have no idea what you’re talking about,” Mom said, and then she glanced in the rearview mirror. “Both of you are obsessed with all this identity nonsense. And then what about the Irish part? You’re more than half Irish, and you never even talk about that.”
Daisy hated when Mom made a good point. Why was that, anyway, that they were so disconnected from their Irish side? “Maybe because Dad’s gone,” she said.
“Or maybe because we’ve never been there,” Carlos said. “We don’t know that much about it.”
“Or maybe because it’s unpopular to be white all of a sudden, so you’re not interested in that part of your heritage?” Mom said.
“Wow,” Daisy said. “That is unkind!”
“But not untrue,” Mom said.
“How are we supposed to feel about it when we don’t even have any family left over there?”
“Do we?” Carlos asked.
“No.” Mom shook her head.
“But anyway, it’s not an obsession and it’s not nonsense, Mom,” Daisy said softly. “I wish you wouldn’t say things like that. It’s perfectly legitimate and normal for us to be interested in our family’s heritage. It’s weird that you’re so dismissive about it.”
“I’m dismissive because it doesn’t make sense,” Mom said. “Why you kids try so hard to be from somewhere you’re not actually from. Just be from here. This is where you’re from.” Mom pointed one finger into the steering wheel, as if insisting that Daisy and Carlos were from precisely that place.
“So our heritage means nothing,” Carlos said. “Just because you decided, for whatever mysterious reason that is definitely not self-loathing, that you didn’t want to be Puerto Rican anymore, we’re all supposed to pretend we’re not Puerto Rican?”
“You’re not Puerto Rican! There’s no pretending!” Mom jabbed at the radio button to turn it on and then immediately turned it back off. “It’s not a special category, Carlos. People from Puerto Rico are exactly the same as people from anywhere else in the United States. Black, white, mixed-race, Asian.”
Daisy’s eyes got huge, but her mouth stayed shut.
“Anywhere else in the United States?!” Carlos made a windy bark of frustration. “Are you serious, Ruth? In the United States? ”
Mom sniffed. “Technically.”
“Actually, technically—”
“The bottom line is, I’m your mother,” Mom cut him off and returned to Daisy. “So whether you like it or not, it’s my job to take an interest in your future, and to advise against your inclination to make boneheaded decisions.”
Daisy’s phone buzzed against her thigh, and she pulled it halfway out to read her brother’s text: REWD.
“Exactly, you’re our mother!” Daisy clenched her fingers together, hoping to give her anger a place to go that was not her voice. “And whether you like it or not, Mom , you are Puerto Rican. Spending ten years in Missouri did not cure you of that condition. You didn’t become a white Midwesterner just because you lived there for a while. So I hate to break it to you, but that means your kids are also Puerto Rican.”
Mom shook her head. “I’m half Puerto Rican,” she corrected. “And it means no such thing.”
Daisy literally pressed her palm against her forehead, but did not respond.
“Anyway, if you want to abandon your education to go become a beach bum on a tropical island, I guess I can’t stop you. But don’t expect me to hold my tongue while you make stupid choices. And don’t expect me to hold on to that college fund forever either.”
The phone buzzed again. SO REWD!
Mom swung into a space and put the car in park, but didn’t turn it off. Daisy hoped they could leave the conversation here, pick it up again later with more composure. The idea that they might now walk into the mall together and find a dress they could agree on seemed ludicrous.
“I don’t think I’ll ever understand you kids.” Mom crossed her arms in front of her.
Buzz. Understatement.
“All this romantic nonsense about Puerto Rico, Puerto Rico.” There was a crack in Mom’s voice, maybe a softening, but she cleared it out of her throat and continued. “You know, things were never so great in Puerto Rico.”
In the heartbeat that followed this contention, Daisy swelled with guilt. Not only because of the way she and Carlos ganged up on their mother in these conversations and steamrolled her emotions, but also because it was true that they couldn’t understand Mom’s experiences, what made her feel this way. What had it been like for her growing up in Puerto Rico with a white father, and then in St. Louis with a Puerto Rican mother? Maybe she felt adrift or unsettled in herself, Daisy thought. She wished her mom would open up to them instead of this.
“Do you even remember it?” Daisy asked.
The wrong question.
“Of course I remember it!” A new fury colored Mom’s cheeks.
Daisy had been trying to reach for something soft in her mother, a place where Mom would pause. And then answer the question for real. With consideration. Did she remember living in Puerto Rico? She was six when they left.
What did she remember? What did she remember?
Did she remember walking to her grandparents’ apartment on Sunday afternoons, the globe of the sun lodged like a peg in the clean blue sky? Did she remember piraguas, palm trees, Papamío’s raspy laughter, tostones frying in oil? Did she remember the cabinet in the living room where they kept the hurricane lamps, the smell of the kerosene, the box of thick wooden matches, the swishing sound of wind through palm fronds? Or how good it felt to stand in the warm surf next to Benny, with the tinny sound of their father’s shortwave radio playing salsa music on the towel behind them? Or clambering up the roots of the banyan tree behind their house, finding the place where the two great limbs came together in a kind of hammock, where she could lean back and cross her legs and lie very still to watch the sparrows and spiders and frogs, a whole kingdom of animals beneath the sprawling canopy? Was it possible for her to remember a time when almost everyone in her world was Puerto Rican, free from foreign definitions of what that meant, when they didn’t have to prove anything about their humanity or qualifications to the non–Puerto Rican people in their midst? When they were uncompromised, uncompared, uninhibited, did her mother remember how it felt to be a person, just a person, without any qualifiers, how it felt to be a little girl named Ruth, living in a place she loved, with people she loved? Where community wasn’t a thing she had to seek out and create—or fail to create—as a footnote to a larger experience, but was, in fact, her entire beautiful, glowing, golden, sweet, heady bubble of a world? The sound of el coquí outside her nighttime window—surely she remembered that.
Daisy might never know.
“It’s okay if you don’t remember, Mama.”
Mom threw her head back against the headrest and ran her hands over her hair. “I said I remember!”
Buzz. She don’t remember.
“I just.” Mom’s voice grew quieter. “I don’t know why it’s all so important to you. It’s my childhood, not yours.”
Daisy held her tongue, and Mom turned to look at her.
“Why does it matter so much to you, where I grew up?” Mom’s voice was softer now, but the tempest was still there in her face. “I really do not understand.”
Daisy wasn’t sure how to explain it, but she wanted to try. Unfortunately, Carlos got there first.
“But it’s more than just where you grew up, Mom,” he said, unbuckling himself to lean between the seats. “It feels reductive when you say things like that.”
Daisy frowned at him because they both knew how much their mother hated words like reductive , and just when they had almost gotten out of this mess. Daisy pulled out her phone and surreptitiously texted: STOP. TALKING. OMG ULL PUSH HER OVER THE EDGE. She heard his phone ding, but Carlos ignored it.
“You talk as if who you are has nothing to do with who we are. Like we have no access to our own identity or ethnicity.”
Oh, this would not go well now, Daisy knew. How had they gotten so off the rails so quickly? The mall was only an eight-minute drive from home! This conversation had stopped being about her decision to take a gap year, or even about her decision to spend that year in San Juan. She leaned her head against the window.
“Good Lord,” Mom said, surprising no one, making herself louder than Carlos so she wouldn’t have to listen to him anymore. “Your ethnicity? Do I need to remind you that I’m white, for God’s sake? Look at me!” She held her arm out as evidence, but whatever proof might exist there was covered by long sleeves. “Look at yourself!” she said. “This is all so ridiculous, it’s so frustrating, so counterproductive!”
Carlos’s voice remained calm. The louder Mom got, the more carefully he measured his words. “Well, it certainly is unfortunate that we can never discuss it without you flying off the handle.”
“Carlos—” Daisy tried to interject, but he raised his voice to talk over her.
“Maybe if you were more open,” he said. “If you’d talk to us instead of getting all nasty every time it comes up, we might understand why it upsets you.”
Daisy loved her brother, but it was clear that his presence was actually the biggest flaw in her plan. Mom turned the car off, and reached across the center console to grab her purse from the floor by Daisy’s feet.
“I am done with this conversation,” Mom said.
She opened the door and climbed out, but Daisy and Carlos both knew that pronouncement usually indicated that Mom was almost but not quite done with the conversation. She typically employed that line as a way of indicating to the other party that she was about to have the last word. Indeed, she turned and ducked her head back into the car. She looked right at Daisy, ignoring Carlos completely, even though he’d been the one to push her to this point.
“If you are determined to waste your time in Puerto Rico learning Spanish or whatever, fine ,” she said. “Knock yourself out. Go to Puerto Rico, take your bikini, work on your tan. But don’t pretend you’re on some noble mission to reconnect with your roots, for the love of God. You’re no more Puerto Rican than you are Japanese!”
She slung her purse over her shoulder and slammed the door.
“Wow,” Daisy said. She felt her phone buzz.
Sayonara.
Daisy moved to San Juan. Vic drove her to the airport because Mom refused. But on the morning Daisy left, Mom did walk her out to the car and did give her a long hug in the driveway.
Nine months later, a global pandemic shut down the world, and Vic (from college) and Daisy (from Puerto Rico) both returned home to Palisades. Carlos was delighted to have them back, but to her credit, Mom gave no outward indication of gloating. She did not remark at all on the brevity of Daisy’s gap year. Instead, she stocked up on jigsaw puzzles and wine.
For three weeks, Daisy spent most of her days in bed. She rediscovered her cell phone, downloaded the most mind-numbing games she could find, opened a TikTok account, threw herself headlong down every available rabbit hole. She scrolled through years’ worth of posts on The Widow’s Kitchen , hearting and commenting on every single one. Daisy stopped exercising and showering. On the twenty-third day, when she found herself embroiled in a Twitter battle about whether or not masks were a government conspiracy, she sat up in bed, and shook herself out from beneath the covers. She stood up in her socks and dirty sweatpants. She walked downstairs as quickly as possible and trudged into her mother’s kitchen toward the sliding glass door behind the table. Mom looked up from her laptop and asked if she could fix Daisy something to eat.
“Sure, Mom,” Daisy said, sliding open the door.
She stepped one foot through the open door onto the mat outside and, while her mother watched from her seat at the counter, Daisy drew her arm all the way back and launched her cell phone out into the yard. It skidded across the pool pavers, leaving shards of itself behind.
“Daisy!” Mom stood up from her stool.
Daisy slid the glass door shut behind her.
Mom sat down again. “Are you okay?”
Daisy locked the sliding glass door with her thumb and sat down beside Mom at the counter. “I am now,” she said.
In September, Daisy couldn’t bring herself to start Zoom college, and Mom, having witnessed both Daisy’s plunge into, and resurrection from, zombieland, didn’t press her. Their argument of the previous year remained unresurrected, unresolved, and the tacit understanding between them was that Daisy would go to college when the world reopened. She would do it her own way, in the dimensional world. She was not a kid who could survive screen-schooling. In fact, she was no longer a kid at all.
Shortly after Zoom college started without her, an idea asserted itself with some measure of clarity in Daisy’s mind. Once it appeared there, it felt so inevitable, it was as though it had been there all along, and she’d merely cleaned the tarnish off it, shined it up, and stuck a price tag on it.
Secretly, she wrote a business plan (well, first she went online and ordered a reference book called How to Write a Business Plan ). Then she wrote a business plan. Next, she started researching neighborhoods, rents, clientele, similar businesses that had succeeded, similar businesses that had failed. She researched competition, supply chains, pricing, hidden expenses. Daisy worked on this project with all the love and devotion the girls in her seventh-grade Family and Consumer Sciences class had devoted to the project of planning their imaginary future weddings. (Daisy had gotten a C+ on hers, the only girl in her class to score below a B.) She used everything she learned way back then about poster boards and glue sticks, but brought an enthusiasm to this new project that the seventh-grade wedding assignment could never have inspired. In her pandemic bedroom, Daisy clipped images from magazines and newspapers to create mood boards. She filled a whole binder with her ideas, and finally, she came up with the name. When she felt ready, she called Stefani from her rotary phone.
“I’m going to open a shop,” she told her cousin.
“You what now.”
“A vintage clothing and curiosities shop.”
“During a global pandemic,” Stefani said.
“Well, no, probably after.”
Except for the static, the line was quiet.
“Hello?” Daisy said.
“Hi.”
“Did you hear me?”
“You’re going to open a vintage store.”
“Yes! For chic and diligent people who want to avoid the twin trans- gressions of overconsumption and overspending,” she read from her business plan. “Ultra high-end. Impeccably curated.”
“Of course,” Stefani said.
“In San Juan,” Daisy said.
“Well, yeah, obviously.”
“You wanna hear the name?”
“Hit me,” Stefani said.
“I’m gonna call it the Double Down.” Daisy held her hands out in front of her as if she could already see the name emblazoned across an awning.
A pause from Stefani, and then, “Girl, yes!” she said, whistling and cheering. She paused again. “But your mom is gonna freak.”