Emily Goldberg Learns to Salsa (2 page)

“Who
are
these people?” he continues, taking another drag.

“Our family,” I say. Which makes me laugh, for some reason.

He shrugs. “It's weird.”

I agree, but
weird
does not even begin to cover it. “Sunday feels very far away.”

Sunday is when we leave. Between now and then, who knows? Other than the funeral, which is tomorrow, I have no idea what we're going to do. Besides, I have an entire life waiting for me back in Westchester. Friends. Plans. Boys. Or rather, one boy.

Now it's Max's turn to nod. “Did you talk to Noah?”

“Of course,” I say, choosing not to get into it. Noah is the boy in question. My boyfriend. I would not have skipped the country—the continental United States, that is—without letting him know. But I'd rather not replay our conversation just now.

“I thought you didn't have much contact with them,”
he'd said.

It was the understatement of the century. We've been in Puerto Rico for a cool twelve hours and the most contact I've had with anyone other than my father, my mother, or Max was five minutes ago, when I brushed past a blond girl who looked vaguely my age as Max and I hightailed it out of the funeral home.

I look out to the street in front of the funeral home. This is not the Puerto Rico of getaway brochures. The blacktop is patchy and crumbling in places, as though there were plans to repave that haven't been seen through. Scraggly weeds dot the road on either side. Across the street is a strip mall. I count one pizza place, two taquerias, and a 7-Eleven. A stop sign on the corner has been sprayed with graffiti. The first taqueria, the one with the bolder, brighter sign, is boarded up. They will not be opening this afternoon.

“Can I bum one of those?”

I turn my head to find the blond girl from inside. She is looking at my brother questioningly. He fumbles for a moment, awkward, then reaches into his pocket for her. She lights her own cigarette and sucks at it greedily.

Now she looks at me.

“You don't smoke?” she asks.

I shake my head. “Never have.” This is not exactly true. I tried it once at a party, erupted into a hugely embarrassing choking fit, and have not touched cigarettes since. But the finer points of my experiments with controlled substances are no one's business but my own, right?

She levels me with a steady gaze. “Good girl,” she says, taking a slow drag. She makes this sound like she's talking about more than just smoking. Like she's maybe insulting me. I shoot her my best non-expression.

“You're Gloria's kids,” she says. This is not a question.

“Uh-huh,” Max says. He's cool as a cucumber, too cool for school, way too cool for his older sister, who is starting to feel like something out of the
Twilight Zone
. Is this jet lag, a time difference thing? I check my watch: no dice. We're on regular old EST.

“I'm Lucy. Domingo. You know, Rosa's daughter,” she says. She extends a hand, presumably for us to shake, and we do, in slow, slightly suspicious succession. She jerks her head toward the funeral home. “What do you think of the wake?” she asks.

“It's a party,” Max says lightly. I know he feels as out of place as I do, but still—he's not at all intimidated by Lucy, not at all intimidated by this landscape. I am wildly, fitfully jealous. I haven't said three words since we stepped off the plane. I keep arranging and rearranging words in my head, but they sound ten different kinds of wrong, so I bite them back.

Even when Rosa, Lucy's mother, I now learn, approached me inside, I choked. She hugged me like we weren't two strangers who had met only moments before. She threw her arms around me like we were family. What could I say to that?

“It's the first you've been to, right?” she continues.

“Uh-huh.” I shrug. “The first wake.”

“Is it different than a Jewish funeral?”

She over-enunciates the word
Jewish
. It comes out like two totally separate words tacked together with some sort of verbal Scotch tape. I imagine myself imitating that pronunciation to Isabelle and Adrienne when I get back, then squash the plan on the grounds of it being evil and gossipy.

Max casually tosses his cigarette to the pavement and stomps it out with his heel. “Well, yeah. We don't do the open casket,” he said. “This is like something you see on TV.”

A flash of anger flickers across her face. I'm immediately defensive—
You asked, didn't you?
But then I think back to how I reacted when my father first told me my grandmother was dead, how upset I was, before I realized just who, exactly, he meant.

“We haven't, um, been to any wakes,” I jump in, hoping to diffuse the situation.

“Right,” Max says, waving his hand in front of his face impatiently. “Is this what they're all like?”

Now Lucy looks fully irritated. “I don't know. This is the first one I've been to,” she snaps.

The door to the building swings open and a compact woman with hair the color of orange juice peeks her head out. “Lucy! We need you in here! Someone has to help put out the empanadas!”

Lucy drops her cigarette in an instant, grinds her heel onto it surreptitiously.

Very smooth
, I think. I could learn something from a girl like this.

Maybe I could stand to learn something.

“Coming!” she calls back, sweet and bright. To us she says, “Nice to meet you.”

It's impossible to tell from her expression whether or not she means this, but I can guess. Before we can reply, she turns and rushes back into the funeral home.

I glare at Max.

“What?” he asks innocently.

“You pissed her off. That was insensitive.”

He holds his hands out, palms up, the picture of innocence. “Do you care?”

I open my mouth to reply but close it again swiftly. It's an interesting question. I don't know. And I'm not going back inside until I have to.

I'm in no mood to watch my father fidget nervously, and I'm not prepared to see my mother cry. Again. I'm not used to it and I can't handle it. And clearly Max and I have nothing to offer our long-lost relatives by way of comfort or understanding.

The sight of the casket, too, is disturbing. In part because it's the only time I've ever been up close and personal with a dead body, sure, but in part because there's a nagging feeling inside me, a sense of loss. And that confuses me entirely. How can you lose something you never had to begin with?

When Rosa hugged me, I felt awkward, of course. How could you not, smothered by a near stranger? But there were other emotions lingering beneath the surface too. Emotions that startled me. Her warmth was . . . comforting. But why did I need comfort for someone I'd never known? Lucy needed comfort way more than I did. She was the one whose
abuelita
had died. Which may have explained why her distrust and attitude felt warranted somehow.

I glance at the children in the corner. They have abandoned their toys and are now busy constructing some sort of sculpture over in the dirt heap. They're speaking rapid-fire Spanish that I can't make out from where I'm standing.

Three years of honors language classes and I'm useless at a distance of more than five feet. I briefly contemplate joining them over on the ground—I was a whiz at sand castles when I was younger—but remember I'm still wearing stockings. And even if I weren't, it's way too hot for that this afternoon.

So instead I gaze at them, continuing to appear utterly unconcerned.

S
aturday morning. I awake to a room that's thick with darkness. But I'm bright-eyed, and so it must be morning. My body clock is never wrong. I sit up, adjusting, and then it hits me.

Puerto Rico. I'm in Puerto Rico. We're staying on Isla Verde, which I know is a top resort beach. Isabelle and Adrienne were optimistic when they heard, helped me choose a super-skimpy bikini for the suitcase, something I can't believe I own and would certainly never wear. On the bed next to mine Max snores heavily. I'm surprised the noise didn't wake me sooner. I guess I was more tired than I realized.

I tiptoe out of bed and toward the window, peeking my head tentatively underneath the blackout curtain. I'm rewarded with a burst of sunlight so strong that I physically recoil. The ocean glitters. I glance toward the clock on my nightstand: 8:05. I'm not sure what the day's itinerary is, but I'm pretty sure nothing major is going to go down for at least another hour or two. And I am in Puerto Rico, after all.

What was it that Max said at the wake? “It's a party”?

I quietly make my way toward my suitcase, groping inside it in the dark. In a moment I've fished out a swim-suit—not the one that Ade and Izzy picked out, but something sportier, sturdier.

I could use something sturdy, I think. Today I'm feeling a bit insubstantial.

The vacation had been Izzy's idea, a six-week, cross-country spree. “Like
Thelma and Louise
. Except without the crime and the death,” she said.

Sometime around March, Izzy had hit on the idea of a road trip. Just the three of us, over the summer. A sort of graduation present to ourselves. We'd go cross-country in her SUV, which wasn't so environmentally conscious but was still the best shot we had at actually making it to sunny Cal. Adrienne shared her car with her younger sister, who would definitely not be okay with saying good-bye to her wheels all summer long. My own vehicle, a cute two-door, was not only too small for our purposes but too “previously owned” as well.
Not Thelma and Louise
material.