Tomorrow They Will Kiss (20 page)

She followed me to the kitchen and stood in the doorway, which seemed too narrow to contain her.

“I’m starting a little business,” she said.

I was glad that I had my back to her, or she would have seen the expression on my face.

“Oh, how nice for you, Graciela,” I said. But I thought, She is crazy! This woman had lawn furniture in her living room because
real furniture was beyond her means. No store would give her credit, and she thinks she can start a business? Everyone knew
that Ernesto ditched her and the kids as soon as they got to the States; shipped her to New Jersey while he stayed in Miami.
We heard that in Miami she had stayed with Ernesto’s cousins only a few weeks and had made their lives miserable. That she
tried to turn Ernesto against his own family. As far as I was concerned, Ernesto was a saint, he should have had a monument
raised in his honor. After what she put him through, he brought her here. He saved her from a life of darkness and disgrace.
Because Palmagria does not forget or forgive. Forever she would have been Graciela the Whore, or Tarros. But she can be ungrateful
and selfish. We heard that in Miami she would not lift a finger to help around the house. That Ernesto’s cousins, who already
had their hands full with the old man and his cancer, could not wait to get her out of their apartment.

I’m willing to wager that Graciela noticed not one bit. She just sails through life on her own winds. And the winds were blowing
full force that night she came to see me.

“And what kind of business is this?” I asked her as I walked past her with my little cup of café, the frozen smile on my face
starting to melt.

I wished Imperio was there with me, because I knew that when I told her she was not going to believe what happened next.

Instead of answering, Graciela ran out to the hallway and returned with a huge plastic bag that she plopped down on the floor.
She was breathing hard. Her heart must have been going a mile a minute. She dug into the bag and retrieved what looked to
me like a big fur rug, and she lifted it over her head. It hung on her like a Mexican poncho. Then she dug into the bag some
more and pulled out a hat made out of the same sort of furry rug material, and she put it on and stood there looking like
El Doctor Chivago.

“You know I’m taking fashion design classes,” she said with a serious face, a face made out of cement. “At the junior college.”

Her eyes danced on mine as she waited for my reaction.

“I thought it was just that one course,” I said. “I thought you were concentrating on learning English.”

At that moment I wanted to cry and I wanted to slap her. I forced myself to remain calm. I could sort of understand that she
needed to learn English, even if it meant that her children stayed at home unsupervised for hours on end. But this frivolous
undertaking was much too much.

“My English will take time,” she said. “Now I’m concentrating on design and cut. That way I can start earning extra money
right away.”

I don’t know if she saw the look on my face. I was trying to control my expressions, but it was useless and exhausting. All
I could think was,
WHAT?

I took a moment, trying to think of the best way to advise her. I mean, she wasn’t thinking clearly.

Not that she ever had.

A person doesn’t just become a fashion designer after a few classes at a junior college in New Jersey. This much I knew, and
it was depressing that this wasn’t obvious to her. It would be one thing if she was designing, say, pretty dresses or something
practical. That I could almost understand. I could almost forgive that effort, that sacrifice.

But this?

This is why she leaves the boys alone at night? I could have strangled her right then and there.

“Graciela,” I said, the tiny coffee cup feeling heavy in my hand. “If you need to make a little extra money, why not start
doing our nails again, like you used to?”

She stared at me for a long time.

“No, I don’t do that anymore.”

Imagínate! I was offering her not just my hands, not just a way to make money, but forgiveness. I was telling her I was willing
to put the past behind, to forget the vulgar way she had behaved in Palmagria, the ugly shadow she had cast on my reputation,
and on all of her friends. Imagínate, she showed no interest in that. Not one bit. I had to sit down after she left. She really
knocked the life out of me with that one. I wanted to be helpful, not unkind, but as I explained to her, “Yes, New Jersey
winters are very cold, but I cannot walk around looking like that in that thing.”

I said it as gently as I could, but of course it was not the reaction she wanted. She wanted me to throw that thing on and
go parading up and down Bergenline Avenue as if I was a trendsetting mannequin. She frowned at me for a moment, then nodded
her head.

“You’re right, it might be too high fashion for you,” she said. With that little insult—don’t think I didn’t get it, don’t
think I didn’t grasp it—with that little insult she let me know that she considered me too much of a peasant to ever understand
her. She thinks herself so sophisticated, Graciela. She said not another word and neither did I. Without any hurry, she took
off her furry creations and packed them back into the plastic bag. Her movements were much slower than when she arrived. She
took forever to leave, carefully folding her furry things, turning the plastic bag this way and that, all the while avoiding
my eyes.

As Imperio said when I told her the whole story, “Por Dios, Caridad, why are you surprised? Graciela’s always been selfish.
And soon she will be selfish in two languages.”

Her English was a constant source of embarrassment for me. Imagínate, she was taking classes three nights a week, and after
a few months considered herself an expert. At work I overheard her laughing and talking to the Americanos during a break,
and I just cringed. I mean, without abandoning my family at night to take lessons, I probably knew as much English as she
did, but I dared not speak it. Especially in front of the Americanos. The way Graciela mangled their language, I was surprised
those people didn’t just laugh in her face. She talked to everyone, black and white, even the Puerto Ricans, who would have
cut off their tongues rather than say two words in Spanish to us.

She became particularly friendly with a black woman named Cloretta Johnson. Cloretta was not only fat, she was tall too. Tall
and fat, a giant of a woman.

One day we arrived for work and were standing in line to punch our cards, and there was Cloretta in front of us, a mountain
of cheap fur. She was wearing not just Graciela’s poncho, but the hat as well. Imperio and I pinched each other to keep from
bursting out in hysterics. We were choking.

Graciela, who had been standing behind us, jumped ahead, and she and Cloretta started admiring each other. Cloretta made turns
like a model, and all the others, even the men, came up to them saying ridiculous things like “gorgeous” and “preciosa.”

Imperio and I just punched our cards as fast as we could and ran to the ladies’ room, where we almost cried from laughing.
I got a pain in my stomach from laughing so hard.

“Qué ridículo,” Imperio said.

“Poor Cloretta,” I said. “And nobody will tell her the truth.”

But who could? Who dared? We didn’t know what we were going to do about Graciela. Other than the time we spent together in
the van, we really tried to keep our distance. But I must confess, I did enjoy discussing the telenovelas with her. Thank
God we had that in common, or the drive to work would have been torture, because you really couldn’t count on Raquel or Berta
for stimulating conversation.

It was right around that time that poor Berta started dropping things at work. First her legs stopped functioning properly,
then her hands. What next? At least she wasn’t falling down in a faint anymore. But something was going on. Even Mr. O’Reilly
noticed. He asked her into his office and had a talk with her. She was slowing down production and she had called in sick
way too many times. Even when she was there she did half the work all the others did. Dolls went by her on the conveyor and
arrived at the other end missing an arm or a leg. So we had to run to the end, past the stares of the blacks and the Puerto
Rican girls, rescue Berta’s dolls, and fix them.

“Berta, you better shove new batteries up your ass,” Imperio told her. “You have to wake up or you’re going to get yourself
and the rest of us fired.”

Berta just looked back with that long- suffering look she liked to give you. Every single day we sat in the van with the motor
idling while we waited for her to slowly make her way to us. And then of course she went directly to the front seat.

“It’s bad enough,” Imperio said, “that we have to spend eight hours in that place. I don’t want to spend an extra fifteen
minutes, unpaid, sitting in the parking lot waiting for you.”

In spite of Imperio’s harsh words, I knew that she cared deeply for Berta. It was always Imperio who was there whenever Berta
had to go into the hospital. And it was happening more and more frequently. Imperio got Mario to pick Berta up each and every
time she was released. And it was no easy task, what with the wheelchair and the bags. But Imperio also knew that if she was
soft with Berta, she would not take her health seriously. So she said what she said, and her words set Graciela off.

Graciela rushed to defend her. Graciela La Santa.

“Imperio, would you talk to your own mother like that?” she asked.

Imperio just ignored her; she has the ability to make her point with silence. One of the many things about her that I admire.

Raquel said nothing. Esa es otra. She’s another one. Getting more nervous and skinnier and stranger every day. On a Monday
morning she got into the van and we were shocked at how much weight she’d lost over the weekend. She looked skeletal.

“Por Dios, Raquel, what do you eat?” Imperio asked her. “I think you’re sending all your money to Cuba and starving yourself.”

“Chá,” Raquel said. “I eat.” But we didn’t believe her. Her skin told the whole story. She was too thin, and her face was
covered with angry red pimples, and she stank, but she covered it with perfume. Imagínate! There was something wrong with
the van and gasoline fumes seeped in through cracks on the floor. That, mixed in with the ever- present smell of pork, and
then Raquel, with the stench of armpit and perfume! It was unacceptable.

“You ever hear of soap?” Imperio asked her. Raquel didn’t say anything. I started to use a little cough when she got in the
van just to let her know she was overdoing the scents, but she didn’t seem to notice. With Raquel you couldn’t be subtle.

“Roll down the windows,” Imperio always said as we approached Raquel’s apartment building in the morning. It had been a long
time since any of us had been invited to her apartment. We teased her about it.

“Raquel,” I said. “Ask us over for at least some water and crackers.”

But Raquel was as unsocial as they came. Other than at work, no one saw her. She rarely visited anyone, except on special
occasions. It was very un- Cuban, and naturally we were suspicious. The few times we had been to her apartment, she seemed
nervous and uncomfortable, as if she was hiding something.

Imperio said she suspected that Raquel had joined those militants in Alpha 66. That in her desperation to get her husband
out of Cuba she had become part of that crazy bunch that was always trying to overthrow Castro with no success.

“It wouldn’t surprise me one bit,” Imperio said. “If anybody is unnaturally attached to Cuba, it’s Raquel.”

“Alpha Sixty- six? Raquel?” I said. “I would find that very hard to believe. I mean, I know she lives and breathes her family
back in Cuba, but the militant type she is not, and she never pushes any pamphlets on us. You know how pamphlet- happy those
freedom fighters are.”

I knew only too well. They had already approached Salud, and I warned him, “You stay away from them. Did I come to this country
to watch you go back in a boat and die in some swamp like a dog?”

Raquel remained a mystery. What did a woman do every night and every weekend, alone, without a husband, just her and those
three little girls? Every day she interrupted our conversation with some new political report. We let her have her say so
we could get back to talking about the telenovelas.

“So now everybody in Cuba can read and write,” Raquel said one day. “But what’s the use if you are told what to read and what
to write? They’re going through all the libraries and removing books that they think send the wrong message. People pass to
one another tattered copies of books from authors we should be proud of instead of abusing, silencing, or deporting. Eventually
all books will vanish from the island. Journalists are going to jail all the time for daring to write the truth. What’s the
point of being a journalist if you can’t report what you see, what you live?”

“Let it go, Raquel,” Graciela told her with that fake compassionate voice of hers. “You’re making yourself too nervous. Why
don’t you come to my house for dinner tonight?”

“What are you going to serve?” Imperio asked. “One of those frozen dinners?”

“I’ll make her an ajiaco that will bring her back from the dead,” Graciela said, and the rest of us just went into shock.

Raquel never accepted Graciela’s offers, so every few days Graciela brought her a little jar of leftover food for her lunch.

Graciela left us no option. So every few days either I or Imperio brought a little something for Raquel.

“You better eat it,” Imperio would tell her, “or a strong wind is going to blow you into the river.”

Raquel said, “Chá,” as she took the food.

Graciela was changing in front of our very eyes. Imagínate, she was cooking. No more frozen dinners for those poor boys of
hers. It had tortured me no end to think of them picking through those frozen vegetables and cardboard chickens. She seemed
more mature, more responsible. Imperio and I exchanged looks, thinking, Who knows, maybe she will finally grow up.