Adventures of a Salsa Goddess (15 page)

Coyote Brain Dead

“You sound like you’re jogging. Where are you?” my mother asked me.

“My apartment,” I answered, although I thought this should be fairly obvious to her since she’s the one who called me at my home number.

“Then why are you breathing like you’re running a marathon?” she asked.

Talking with my mother was not just emotionally challenging, but a physical event as well—for both of us. She’d called me with her new toy, a cellular phone that she used to contact me only while she’s driving, fitting her calls in between her Women’s Club board meetings, an afternoon at the spa, or another black-tie cocktail reception given in honor of one of her friends’ husbands who’d done something a little out of the ordinary like inventing a mechanical brain or cloning Albert Einstein. I could just picture her, totally in her element, motoring along in her black Lincoln town car, her hands-free headset over her short black bob, wearing one of her favorite designers, St. John or Miu Miu. And while she drove, I paced in whatever space I was in like a caged lion.

I hadn’t spoken with her since our usual third Saturday of the month luncheon one week before I’d left New York. I was still reeling from that two-hour meal, when my mother had pulled her usual emotional outburst when I’d told her about my assignment.

“You’re getting married!” she’d exclaimed. “Oh, thank goodness! I’ve been praying for this for twenty years!”

Tears had welled up in her hazel eyes as she’d grabbed the napkin off her lap, shook it out with a flourish, waved it up and down like a flag, and buried her face in it. Little kitten mews emerged from behind the white cloth, alternating with short bursts of full-blown blubbering. I had felt all of the customers in our section at Tavern on the Green sneaking glances in our direction, and pretended to be absorbed by the extensive wine list, resisting the impulse to shout, “Don’t look at me! I’m not the one having a breakdown! I can’t control her!”

After several minutes of this, the maitre d’ had glided to my side and bent over to my right ear.

“Is everything all right,
Madame?” he’d asked me in a low velvety voice imbued with faux concern.

At his words, my mother had whipped the napkin away from her face and emerged looking fresh as a daisy. She was the only woman
I knew who could cry and never get the broken blood vessels and hooded puffy lizard eyes.

“My eldest daughter is fin
ally getting married,” she’d announced, making it sound as though she’d personally arranged the marriage herself after scouring the ends of the earth in a decades-long search to find a man willing to have her daughter’s hand in matrimony.

“Calm down, Mother. You haven’t met him yet. I haven’t met him yet,” I’d recalled telling her, which was about as effective as telling a volcano to stop erupting in mid-flow.

“Well, you wouldn’t need to go trotting off to a frozen wasteland like Minneapolis to scrounge up a husband if you weren’t so picky,” she’d told me.

My mother worshiped the institution of marriage and couldn’t fathom how one of her offspring hadn’t yet managed to snag a live one. Of course, she’d never had to struggle. She and my dad had had a storybook love affair, meeting at nineteen and marrying at twenty-one with eighteen wonderful years together until my father’s untimely death.

“So what does my future son-in-law do for a living?” my mother demanded from her cell phone, bringing me back to the present.

During my entire adulthood, I’d done my best to keep my mother in the dark about my love life. The reason for this was simple mental self-preservation. Any inkling that I had the slightest romantic prospect in my life, and my mother would set up camp inside the nearest Vera Wang salon and begin shoving Wedgwood china patterns in my face.

Of course she’d known about my engagement to David, whom she’d met a half dozen times in the three years we were together. She’d known the salient—to her mind—facts that he’d graduated with an M.B.A. from Yale, was a partner at Ernst & Young, and most important of all, that his family had money. I’d magnanimously divulged the date of our wedding to her a full ten months in advance, but should’ve waited to tell her until the weekend before, like I’d really wanted to, since seven months later it was over. But hey, live and learn.

But never before had my mother been privy to accounts of my fledgling dates that were too raw and tender to predict which way they might go. That is until now, when she could read about my romantic exploits in a national magazine.

“Robert and I have only gone out a few times, Mother. I barely know him,” I said, trying to sound like I didn’t really like him so that we could change the subject.

But, as I knew she would, my mother pressed for details. I thought about telling her what a nice guy Robert was, about his
intelligence and his quirky sense of humor. But I knew this would be pointless. Sighing, I rattled off the kind of facts I’d give if I were a soldier captured behind enemy lines.

“Hmm. University of Chicago law school,” she mused. “I suppose if you’re going to end up with a husband from the Midwest, that’s a fairly good school. But of course Harvard or Yale would be far preferable.”

“His business is very successful.”

“How much does he make?” she asked, in her usual blazingly direct fashion.

“I usually wait until date number four to ask for a copy of their financial portfolios and Swiss bank account numbers.”

“Hmm. I’ll have to ask Martha how much her nephew makes at the recruiting agency he owns.”

Martha, my mother’s bridge partner and best friend, was the Martha Smith of the so vastly rich Smiths, that their servants had servants. The family owned a vast worldwide network of, for lack of a better word, stuff—oil companies, food companies, and strangely enough, dozens of miniature golf courses because their son Skip had taken a liking to this plebian pastime when he was ten, giving it up a year later for yachting or snooker or whatever super-rich kids did.

“You said he had his own law firm before that, as a solo practitioner? Well, I can’t imagine he hasn’t at least doubled or tripled his income. Thank God for that,” she added.

My mother was well enough off financially, due to life insurance policies my father had taken out when Susan and I were kids. After he died, she’d never had to work again. But she wasn’t even close to the same category as the Martha Smiths of the world, and had had to slowly ingratiate her way into their circle by hovering around the edges of their vast wealth until, finally, her years of effort had paid off and they’d let her join their club as an honorary member. If there was one thing my mother excelled at, it was being enchanting. That woman could make a pair of swans swoon—when it suited her.

I quickened my pace and could see the beginnings of a circular mashed area forming in the powder blue carpeting, like a mini running track.

“I’ve been in touch with Sally from your office about the details for the wedding,” my mother continued. “It seems as though your magazine is only willing to pay for seventy-five guests.”

She always referred to
Tres Chic
as “your magazine,” as if saying the name would give too much credence to my chosen profession. My mother refused to acknowledge that her daughter had to work for a living instead of being a wife and stay-at-home mother, which was, in her eyes, the only acceptable place for a woman. Not barefoot and pregnant mind you, but well-heeled and pregnant.

“I think it’s too early to be focusing on details like this,” I said.

“Nonsense, Samantha,” she persisted. “Your wedding is just six months away.”

“Just because it’s scheduled doesn’t mean it’s going to happen.”

“Seventy-five is completely unacceptable,” she continued as if talking to herself, which I believe she was doing most of the time. “I’m just starting to put the list together. It looks as though we won’t do with less than four hundred. Probably more like five hundred.”

Then without warning, I did something that I hadn’t done in probably thirty years in the presence of my mother’s eyes or ears: I started crying. Not the noble, silent tears streaming down my face type of crying that I might have been able to hide. This was a cathartic-tidal-wave-wiping-out-the-village-my-life-is-over racking sobs that involuntarily burst out of me like a stream of obscenities from a Tourette’s sufferer. I was so confused after last night’s dinner with Javier that I’d barely slept.

My crying fit went on until I sensed, rather than heard, silence on the other end of the line. For some reason this calmed me, and I was able to sputter down to a small whimper and then silence.

“Samantha,” she said in a gentle voice that I hadn’t heard since I was a child, “I had eighteen years with your father. They were the best years of my life. I want you to know the happiness I felt, and I know you will if you just keep trying.”

I plunked down onto the couch. I’d assumed I was past the age when I could be shocked by anything or anyone, especially my mother. I was wrong. On the few occasions I can remember my mother mentioning my father after he’d died, she’d only done so when the topic had become unavoidable. But she had also zeroed in on my deepest, darkest fear, that I’d be alone for the rest of my life. Could our first actual conversation in forty years be the start of a genuine mother-daughter relationship?

But the nanosecond had passed.

“Anyway, we’ll discuss the guest list next week,” she said airily. “I’ve got to run! It’s time for my volcanic clay Thai body scrub.”

* * *

And in the quest to find the perfect man in Milwaukee, it was time for me to make an utter fool out of myself. An hour later at high noon, I stood behind a volleyball net, barefoot and ankle deep in sand, on the shores of Lake Michigan. I was wearing a plunging V-neck one-piece swimsuit, and bouncing about—my boobs, not my body. I suppose I could have worn a sports bra like all the other women here. But that would’ve required me to acknowledge sand volleyball as an actual sport.

I’d warned Elaine when I saw the Over Thirty-Five Co-ed Singles Volleyball League on my schedule that I didn’t think this was a good idea since I’m allergic to organized sports.

It had all started in grade school when I was humiliated every single day of my life on the playground in the game of four square—a game in name only. Chamber of horrors wouldn’t come close to describing what I’d experienced. Lynette Harris, the most popular girl in grade school, was the queen of Square A. Square B was always occupied by her best friend, Tess, and Square C was reserved for her lesser subjects. But it was Square D where Lynette unleashed her own special brand of torment on the unpopular girls like me.

A typical day on the playground involved waiting in line to play as many times as I could during our thirty-minute recess. When I’d finally step onto the hallowed four-sided figure of Square D, Lynette or one of her minions would spike me out anywhere from two to thirty seconds later.
But every so often, like a cat playing with a half-dead mouse that it had every intention of killing, she’d let me advance to Square C, giving me the faintest ray of hope that I might move on to Square B and, dare I even think it, Square A? But the impossible dreams of Squares A and B eluded me throughout my grade school career.

Although six straight years of getting spiked out had scarred me for life, I harbored no ill will toward Lynette, who I liked to imagine had grown up to become one of the nation’s handful of female serial killers and was now on death row in Florida or Mississippi.

But that was all in the past, and at this very moment the volleyball was hurtling right at me. Usually this was when a man jumped in front of me, shoving me rudely out of the spot, which I’ve learned is called my “zone.” Normally this would piss me off. But since my natural inclination when the ball comes toward me is to scream, throw my arms up protectively over my face, and then crumple into a fetal position, none of which seems to assist in getting the ball over the net, it was fine with me if some guy wanted to plow into me like a punching bag and take over.

But it was now too late for anyone else to get it. I heard a chorus
of male and female voices cheering me on, “Hit it, hit it!” Closing my eyes tight, I clasped my hands together into a two-handed fist, and made a swinging motion upward. I heard a soft womp, opened my eyes and saw the ball bounce once at my feet and die.

I turned around to face my teammates. The woman behind me, a beefy, strapping mountain of a woman who frankly scared the hell out of me, mumbled a curse under her breath and glared at me.

People in nine-to-five office jobs might have envied me right then, I supposed. Getting paid for hanging out on a sunny beach playing volleyball sounded great in theory. But there were definite advantages to the office job—you bought your morning coffee, slumped into your cubicle, stared at your computer screen under the artificial glare of fluorescent lighting for eight hours, and then dragged yourself home, only to start all over again the next day. The only things to do battle with were secretary spread and the thought that one day you might wake up in a nursing home with nothing to show for your life. But on the whole, it seemed better than possibly getting strangled by my own teammate whose name I’m guessing was Brunhilda, a former member of the East German women’s weight-lifting team.

I whipped my head back to face the guy on the opposing team positioned opposite of me, who promptly leaned into the net and said in a low voice, “It would probably help if you didn’t close your eyes when you’re trying to hit the ball. Just relax, don’t try so hard.”