Emily Goldberg Learns to Salsa (5 page)

Pilar mans a steaming pot of something or other at the stove top while Dora dries wet silverware from the dish rack and lays it out on the table, spaced into individual place settings. Ana is slicing up a loaf of bread. Lucy raises her eyebrows at me and pours water into glasses. There is a routine in place here, and I get the distinct feeling it's Not Okay to be outside on one's cell when others are preparing for dinner.

Not that anybody told me so.

I pick up the plates and set them out in between Dora's forks and knives. Quickly I count the number of settings in my head. “José's eating with us?” I guess.

José isn't here, hasn't been here all day.

Lucy shrugs. “
No sé
. Maybe.”

My stack of plates distributed, I lean back against the counter. I don't want to be underfoot, but sitting down feels like the wrong thing right now. “Is there anything else I can do?”

Rosa whirls around from the sink, where she's rinsing vegetables. “There's always something else to do,” she says. She shakes her head at me, and I feel useless. “Come here.”

She reaches up over her head into a cabinet and pulls out a wooden cutting board.
“Para la ensalada,”
she says, and slides the board, some red peppers, and a knife down the counter at me.

I dig into one of the peppers, overcome with a powerful craving for Chinese. Is this my mother's idea of therapy? Forced labor?

“This is how we do things here,” Rosa says, breaking into my thoughts with frightening insight. “I don't know what it is like in your house, but here, my girls help me. And while you are here, you are one of my girls too. So you will help. You'll be a good Puerto Rican girl before you know it.”

Lucy snorts. Loudly.

Rosa either doesn't hear Lucy or—more likely—chooses to ignore her. I wish beyond measure that my mother were here, in the room right now, to hear Rosa predict my future as a “good Puerto Rican girl.” The words don't exactly have a feminist ring to them. I surprise myself by laughing out loud.

Rosa sees me laughing, chuckles. “You think that's funny,
mami
?” she asks. “Okay,
sí
, so you're not exactly a
puertorriqueña
. But you can't deny what's inside.”

“She's a
nuyorican
,” Dora shrieks, a crazy grin on her little face. “Like you said the other day.”

“That's true,
m'ija
,” Rosa agrees. She finally puts down her wet dish towel, regards me. “A
nuyorican
and, as I say, one of my girls.”

I can live with that
, I think,
for six weeks
.

Then I see it—the look on her face that says that we're done with the warm and fuzzy part of the talk and on to something a little more hard-core.

“And Emilia, Esperanza, whatever we will call you for while you're here—”

I blink. Can't she just call me Emily? Do I need to be
renamed
?

“—I must tell you that my girls know my house rules.”

I have a sinking feeling that the house rules are, shall we say, extensive. “Well, shoot. Let me have them,” I say, then immediately worry that she thinks I'm being flippant.

“We all help to keep this house running,” Rosa says. “That includes cooking, cleaning, and watching over the younger girls.”

Pitching in at meals seems perfectly reasonable, seeing as how I essentially ousted Lucy from her room.

Cleaning? Well, we have a housekeeper back home who comes once a week, but it's not like I don't know how to run the spin cycle on the washing machine. Mostly.

“Sure,” I say. “Of course.”

“School is finished now, but the girls are taking summer study courses through our church.”

Bible camp? Yikes. I mean, the only time my family goes to synagogue is the high holidays. And, I suppose, at my bat mitzvah. But that was, like, five years ago.

“Okay,” I say, not sure how this affects me.

“Lucy will be at work most days. The girls would normally walk
a las tiendas
—to the mall—after camp to meet her and she would walk them home. But this is better. This way you can walk them home.”

This probably means that I'm not exactly free to do as I please during the days. And that I will need to get a map of the city.

“Unless your mother is around. You two can work that out together. I think she is going to rent a car.”

Big sigh of relief. A car, aka freedom: check.

“On weeknights we eat at seven. The girls know this. I prepare the food in the mornings so that when they get home, they can begin the cooking.”

None of this sounds terrible, especially with the wheels factored in. But she's not done.

“After dinner Pilar and Lucy can show you how to clean the kitchen. We mop every other day. Otherwise, the bugs.” She shudders. “We wash dishes immediately after we eat.”

“Laundry is
por los domingos
, on the Sundays, and
el mercado
is Saturday.
La tele
is only after dinner and only for an hour. Church is Sunday mornings, but you and your mother can decide if you would like to join us there.”

Church? Um . . .

“Curfew is eleven on weeknights, midnight on weekends.”

Curfew? Wait. What?

I haven't had a curfew in, well, ever. I just . . . come home when things are over. This is unbelievable.

Not that I have anywhere to go, but that could change. Right?

Mercifully the front door bursts open, putting an end to Rosa's Rules and Regulations for
Nuyorican
Living. José saunters into the kitchen.

“Hola, Mamá,”
he says, striding across the room and kissing Rosa on the cheek.

Rosa shrugs. She points to the pot that Pilar still dutifully stirs.
“Por favor.
Eat something.
Algo pequeño?”

He leans over, pulls the spoon away from Pilar, scoops up what I now see is a rice-and-bean concoction. “Mmmm.
Gracias
,” he says. He disappears toward his room. “Gonna grab my jacket.”

“Leave his plate in case he wants to eat something when he gets back,” Rosa says, to no one in particular. “And go call your mother. We're ready to eat, the rest of us.”

“I think she's reading in the bedroom,” Ana offers. “I'll get her.”

Ana calls my mother, and we settle at the table. Lucy serves the rice and beans and Pilar sets out the salad. After a moment of contented chewing—I totally heart complex carbohydrates—we hear the door slam again.
“¡Hasta luego!”

Apparently there are way different ground rules for Puerto Rican boys.

Lucy chases a black bean across her plate and onto her fork. She chews thoughtfully. If she's got an opinion about the state of the union in the household, she sure isn't sharing it.

But it's probably just as well.

Later, after dinner, Lucy washes dishes and I dry. I think of our dishwasher at home—which always seems to miraculously load and unload itself—and vow then and there never again to take it for granted.

But drying itself is quiet, automatic, Zen. I focus on the task and not on the fact that Lucy hasn't said one word more to me than is absolutely necessary.

I'm not sure exactly what she has against me. I mean, there's the whole being-kicked-out-of-her-room thing, but still. She's had a chip on her shoulder about me from moment one. And as teenage girls go, I'm a pretty inoffensive specimen. Forgettable? Maybe. That's the flip side of inoffensive. But it's better than the alternative. I have no idea what's up Lucy's butt.

Abruptly she turns the faucet off. The utter silence is deafening. I can hear myself swallow. “Done?”

She nods. “Do you want to go out?”

I'm so shocked, I think I actually physically recoil. “Um, what?”

“Tonight,” she says flatly. “Do you want to meet up with some of my friends?” The look on her face tells me exactly how thrilled she is at the prospect. “We're going to a café.”

Clearly Rosa put her up to this. It's the only explanation. And given how pissy Lucy's been with me since I got here, the whole idea sounds less than enticing.

Declining, however, is not an option.

“Sure.” I groan. I cough and try to muster some genuine enthusiasm. “Sure!”

“Great,” she says. She looks me up and down. My jeans are covered in wet splotches from where I leaned the dishes up against them as I dried. “I'm going to change.”

She pads off toward her bedroom, leaving me to ponder her subtle hint. As of this very moment, I have exactly two tank tops and a hot pink Juicy hoodie to my name. I will not exactly be knocking them dead at the local Starbucks. But that's okay. My expectations for this evening are appropriately low.

It's just self-preservation. I mean, six weeks? Under certain circumstances, six weeks could be a lifetime.

And this here, this little stint in the motherland, is starting to feel like some pretty certain circumstances to me.

W
here's the café?” I ask, patting the wet splotches on my jeans as if that will help them to dry more quickly.

Lucy signals, peers over her shoulder, and smoothly pulls the car into a minuscule parking spot. So she's an expert parallel parker on top of everything else? Fabulous. Not intimidating at all.

“Um, is that it?” I ask, deciding to assume that she hadn't heard me the first time rather than the other, more obvious alternative.

Lucy turns to me briefly as she kills the ignition. “No café,” she says shortly, stepping outside the car and slamming the door in her wake.

My mouth drops open in confusion. I close it, slide out of the passenger seat, and lock the door behind myself. Once I'm out, I notice that Lucy is buried inside the car again, digging in the backseat. She fishes out first one, then another open-toed, kitten-heeled silver sandal, which she quickly swaps for the sneakers she was wearing when she left the house. “There is no café,” she says. “It's a disco.”

“A disco?” I repeat, aware that I sound mildly challenged.

“A salsa club,” she says matter-of-factly. She gives a tug on her jeans, and suddenly they sit a full two inches lower on her hip, exposing killer abs. My eye catches on her naval, which sparkles with lavender glitter.

“No way could I get a real piercing, but this is cool,” she says, catching me ogling. She shrugs off her jean jacket and I have my first glimpse of her top, which is a tight white off-the-shoulder number. The jacket is crumpled into a ball and tossed onto the backseat as well, banished to the realm of the sneakers.

Lucy rummages in her small denim bag for a moment or two longer. “Yes,” she whispers triumphantly, opening her palm to reveal a fistful of silver. In go two dangly beaded earrings. She pulls the elastic out of her hair and now she's a vision in blond, a ringer for a pop princess, her hair tumbling down her shoulders in big shampoo-commercial waves.

“I really wish my jeans were dry,” I crack. But that's the least of it. If my outfit—jeans, flip-flops, and a tank top—was boring before, my unfavorable comparison to Lucy has knocked me down a few pegs further. For a moment I wonder if I should just throw a bag over my head and call it a night.

She glances at me and—is it possible?—manages the slightest of smiles. “You'll be fine.”

I allow myself a moment to feel slightly more at ease. “I mean, no one's really going to be looking at
you
.”

The moment is over.

“So, a salsa club?” I repeat.

This is terrible news. I don't dance. Like, for real don't dance. Not even beer commercial dancing—you know, when everyone's had a few cool frosty ones and then the girls decide to do the cheesy sexy hip shake while mouthing along to eighties music at the top of their lungs.

Yeah, not even that. I'm just way too self-conscious. The tragic irony is that I took ballet, tap, jazz, gymnastics—you name it—for years. But something about an actual freestyle dance floor performance suffuses me with dread. Thankfully Noah feels the same way. I get to seem all understanding, sitting with him on the sidelines during the big Britney-style finales at the school dances.

Ha. Lucy snorts. This seems to be a favored method of indicating her generally low opinion of me. “Yes, a salsa club. But they serve coffee if you really want some.”

“Give me a mocha or give me death,” I say weakly. “So, I take it Rosa doesn't know you go dancing?”

“I'm eighteen years old and my curfew is eleven thirty,” Lucy points out. “What do you think?”

Fair enough.

“Anyway, my friends and I, we have a system. Wednesday we say we're at the library. Thursday it's the café. Fridays and Saturdays we usually say we're going to the mall. It stays open later, so it's not, like, fishy or anything. As long as we're home in time, no one complains.”

“But it's Sunday,” I point out.

“Yeah,
mira
, this is the one place that's even open tonight,” she agrees. “You got lucky.”

Lucky
, I think wryly, following as Lucy tosses back her hair and marches down the sidewalk toward a point at the end of the street. She whips out a cell phone that I'm sure is both smaller and pinker than the one she used earlier, to field a phone call from her brother.
“Ay, mira, papi,
I'm with the
nuyorican;
we'll be there in a minute.
Cállate.”
She wiggles her hips and the jeans slide down again.