Emily Goldberg Learns to Salsa (10 page)

Ricky half snorts, half chuckles. “
Sí
, you could say that.” He pauses, shifts the tray of sodas again. The damp cardboard bisects a dark pattern across the center of his T-shirt. “But not as tough as you think. You should cut her a break.”

I shoot him a look. “Trust me, I'm trying.” He looks disappointed, and instantly I feel bad. “But I'll try harder.”

It's not just for Ricky that I say this, I realize. It's a pact that I make with myself too. I have to try harder with Lucy or the next few weeks will be a nightmare. My intentions are totally noble. I just hope that I'm able to live up to them.

 

When we return to our spot on the beach, Lucy is lying on her towel, on her back with one arm flung protectively over her eyes. She is wearing her headphones, and a tinny techno beat blasts from the earbuds. It sounds as loud as if I were wearing the headphones myself. That can't be good for her. Rafael's back is turned to her; he's hunched over a Game Boy and seems totally engrossed. Pia, Ramona, and Teresa continue in the tradition of overcompensating for the butter-thick tension that blankets the air.

“Ooh!” Pia leaps up and squeals as though her Diet Sprite is the best gift she's ever gotten, hands down. It's cute, though forced. She downs half of it in one gulp.

Teresa has read the article about her doppelganger starlet; we spend the next half hour or so discussing upcoming movies that we're dying to see. Puerto Rico is behind us on releases, but not by much. I score some extra points by revealing carefully plotted spoilers for some of the bigger impending blockbusters. Ricky is impressed to learn that I've seen some honest-to-God movie stars in Manhattan; I think it's pretty cool myself but remind him that having dinner at the table next to Tom Cruise is not
exactly
the same thing as having dinner
with
Tom Cruise. It's nice, though, to feel glamorous. Back home, Izzy has a Jude Law sighting that trumps my own. Of course.

When the alarm on my sports watch sounds, I'm startled. It's five. We've been at the beach all afternoon. It's been ages since I've given any thought to sunscreen. Not good. But nothing to do about it now.

I nudge Lucy gingerly, unsure whether or not she's asleep. There's no reply, and there's no subtle way to handle this since her music is still blasting full force. I prod her slightly less gingerly. She removes her arm from across her eyes and slowly peels her eyelids open, peering at me suspiciously.
“¿Qué?”

“It's five,” I say apologetically, pointing to the face of my watch as if she required proof of this fact.

She shrugs, clearly unimpressed with my ability to tell time.

“We have to pick up Ana and Pilar from their playdate,” I say.

We promised Rosa. Dora has a music lesson, but the other girls need transport. One condition of our afternoon off was that we come back in time to get them before dinner. Around here there are always conditions.

This seems to register. She grabs at her shorts, shimmies into them, shrugs on a tank top, twists her hair into a bun. “Are you guys ready?” she asks her friends, all of whom readily agree. Rafael looks reluctant to power off the Game Boy, but after a pointed beat, he does. He zips it into a protective case lovingly.

Ricky shoulders my bag, holds out my sweatshirt for me to slip into. The gesture smacks of boyfriendliness. Yet it doesn't feel totally wrong.

Interesting. And also slightly unsettling. I make a note to revisit this line of thought later, when I've had some time to recover from the sun. Right now I'm definitely a little bit woozy. I do let him carry the bag, though. It's the type of gesture that generally eluded Noah when we were in a group, and I'll be honest, it's kind of nice. Ricky laughs, a quick, easy laugh, and I feel self-conscious, worried that my semi-inappropriate thoughts are etched across my face. “What?”

He shakes his head. “It's just funny.”

I glare at him teasingly. “What's funny?”

“That you would be the one to remember when it's time to go home.”

I can't help but crack a smile. “You know me,” I say. “I love a good routine.”

“Vámonos,”
Lucy says, breaking into the moment. “We're going to be late.”

We won't, of course, because as Ricky pointed out, I got us going. But I decide not to say as much, just for now. For now I just bite my lip to keep from grinning too widely.

 

When we get home, Marisa is sitting on the front steps of her house. She's holding a coloring book but not actually coloring in it, more sort of staring off into space and humming a top-forty tune to herself. Do they have TRL in Puerto Rico? She jumps up when she sees us. She hugs Lucy, whose maternal instincts kick in as she squeezes Marisa back. I guess it's from all of those years as de facto caretaker. Max and I are nothing like Lucy and her sisters. I can't remember the last time we hugged each other.

Marisa doesn't hug me. Rather, once she's disengaged from her embrace with Lucy, she looks me up and down. “You got tan,” she says.

“Yup.” I nod.

“You look like you had a good day.”

For a moment she looks like she's considering hugging me. I stiffen. The moment passes.

And she's right, of course. Just as usual. It was a pretty good day.

 

After dinner I'm surprised to find a voice mail from Noah on my phone. When did he call? How did I miss it? It kills me that my reception is so iffy here. It's not like I can camp out on my bed sitting stock-still, just waiting for the phone to ring. I mean, I
could
, but that would be lame.

They found a cybercafé? I'd know all that? Noah is assuming that they e-mailed me, of course. Which maybe they did. But Rosa doesn't have the Internet in her house.

It looks like I'm going to have to search out my very own cybercafé if I want to communicate with my friends this summer. I frown at my cell phone.

“Ooh, was that your
boyfriend
?” Dora leaps out at me from behind the bathroom door, wrapped in a towel and wet hair clinging damply to her shoulders.

I jump back, then recover. She's giggling maniacally, delirious with hysteria at the thought of me having a romance.

Yeah, yeah, my failing long-distance relationship is a big old laff riot. “Yes,” I admit. “It was.”

“What did he say? That he wants to
kiss
you?” She shrieks at her own cleverness and dashes down the hall to her bedroom before I have a chance to answer.

I wish that was what he said.

“Dora! Put on your pajamas before Mamá gets upset!” It's Lucy, shouting forcefully from inside their overcrowded room. I hear a
thump thump thump
that may or may not be Dora bouncing on top of her bed. For her sake, I hope she's not. Max was never like this; I have no idea how Lucy copes. The worst he ever did was keep me up all night plucking angsty notes on his guitar.

My brother, the tortured soul.

“Are you going to call Rafael?” Dora croons, warming to her favored subject of the evening. Her voice reverberates even through the closed door. “Are you going to call and tell him that you want to
kiss
him?”

More muffled shouting and ambient noise. Then, “
Mira
, if you don't get off the bed, you're not going to dinner at Eva's tomorrow!”

That seems to do the trick. Silence. Then the door swings open again, and Dora pads back to the bathroom. “I have to brush my teeth,” she explains as she passes me. She looks thoughtful. “Lucy doesn't want to talk about Rafael tonight.” She lowers her voice to a whisper. “I think they had a fight.”

She scampers away before I have a chance to respond, but the thing is, I think she's right. And I have no idea what, if anything, to do about it.

 

The last thing that I want to do is confront Lucy about her argument with Rafael. I kind of like my head and prefer to have it actually attached to my body. But . . .

I guess I know what it's like to be unsure about your feelings for someone. I certainly have no idea what's going on with my boyfriend. And the truth of the matter is that if I had to guess, I would say that Lucy is much more attached to Rafael than I am to Noah.

Just a hunch, seeing as how it's becoming clear to me that most of my feelings for Noah are more about the idea of Noah than Noah himself. I mean, seeing as how we've yet to have an actual conversation since I got here.

I knock on Lucy's bedroom door, let myself in without waiting for an answer. She's braiding Ana's hair. “Come in,” she snaps, peeved at my intrusion.

“Hi,” I say, feeling awkward, like my arms are four times too long for my body. “Are you . . . okay?” I'm not sure what I even mean by this, but I can't think of another way to pose the question.

“I'm fine.” She shrugs. “What do you care?”

“Well, I just meant that if you want to talk . . . about anything . . .”

“With you?” she asks, as though I am clinically insane. As though I've just suggested that she confide in the tiny colony of unicorns living in my belt buckle.

This is the most I've put myself out there in ages. And it hasn't exactly gone smoothly. What's the next step? Damned if I know. I open my mouth, think for a minute, close it again.

I leave the room without saying anything more.

O
n Sunday we all have dinner at Tía Eva's. I learn that this is a relatively frequent post-church activity: Lucy and her sisters head to a late-afternoon mass, then bring a dish of something or other over to their aunt's.

I've been to a mass once before, when Adrienne's grandfather died. I have no problems whatsoever being in church, though I'm never totally sure what to do when everyone else is kneeling. My favorite thing about the service is that it only lasts an hour or so. Anyone who has ever been to synagogue on Saturday morning knows that this is, by comparison, a breeze. If synagogue service lasted only an hour, heck, I'd go every weekend. Maybe.

Anyway, mass in Spanish is pretty, though the language is flowery and even harder than usual to understand. Dora, Pilar, and Ana all sing in the choir, and they are very cute standing up in front of the chapel. I've heard them practice around the house, but it's different with the full backing, the organ, the whole shebang. Lucy smiles at them appreciatively from beside me in the pews. Even José is here, freshly shaven and showered, scowling and detachment kept to a minimum. He's okay, I've decided, though he definitely marches to his own rhythm. Rosa plays the organ and beams at her girls. My mother chants the hymns quietly but surely to herself, making me wonder what else from her childhood she's retained but never shared.

We split up afterward, my mother, Rosa, and the girls in one car, José, Lucy, and me in the other. I almost can't believe he's coming with us to Eva's, but then I remember that he's friendly with her sons, Carlos and Juan.

Eva and her husband, Héctor, live in Bayamón, a large metro area just southwest of San Juan. It's a quick drive that José obviously knows well. The car ride is quiet. I stiffly balance a pot of rice on my knees that clanks dangerously every time we turn a corner.

“So, what did you think of church?” José says, teasing. I know he thinks being Jewish is something tantamount to being an alien.

I shrug. I don't get the way some people are all uncomfortable around religions other than their own. It's not as though just sitting in church calls my entire religious identity into question, after all. Or at least, it shouldn't. “It's not the first time I've been to mass.”

“You were there for Grandma's funeral,” Lucy says, and again—again—I want to protest that in fact, my grandmother's not dead.

And then I remember. And I can't believe it because, of course, I got it wrong. Again.

Eva and Héctor's house is big, bigger than Rosa's. It's also in a development, which I'm realizing is standard for most middle-class families. Héctor is “in business,” though I'm not really sure what that means. He used to work with Rosa's husband, before Rosa's husband died. This also is pretty common, the whole tight-knit family thing. Living together, working together.

I think of my father's family back in New York, grinning at each other through tightly clenched teeth and clutching at their highballs. The idea of them all working together is enough to make me snort with laughter.

I think about sharing this with my mother; she's in the kitchen, of course, hunched over a pot of something or other. I think she'd appreciate it, but maybe not right now.

There's melee here, but not quite at the level of the post-funeral chaos at Rosa's when we first arrived. Still, the house is clogged with people, and only a handful are faces that I recognize.

Carlos, Juan, and José immediately disappear into someone's bedroom to talk sports or whatever it is that teenage boys do behind closed doors (I honestly couldn't even guess). Dora, Ana, and Pilar head off to play computer games with three other little girls vaguely within their age bracket. I have no idea who these girls belong to. Amalia fusses in the living room, setting up a communal buffet. I stand awkwardly in the living room, shifting my weight from one leg to the other. I should be doing something helpful, but what? The kids don't need looking after. Amalia has got the table covered all on her own. The kitchen is overflowing with bodies. I suppose I could, um, vacuum or something, but that seems like more of a post-party, cleanup thing.