Querida Gabriella:
I spoke with you today on the phone.
“Me traes un regalo?”
That was the mantra. Regalo, regalo, regalo. Your main concern is the gift. Missing me is not part of the equation (so, don’t give me a guilt trip twenty years from now!).
You seem perfectly happy.
Papi is “bien.”
Connie, your nanny, is “bien.”
School is “bien.”
When I asked you if you missed me, you said, “No!”
Of course you don’t. You have fifty people doting on you!
But I miss you, sweetness.
Things are different here without you. Because of you. I am in another hemisphere. In another world. Ah! I’m drunk. Can you tell? I don’t even know what I’m saying anymore.
The thing is, your grandmother insisted I go to this party. It was being held at one of the haciendas I’m photographing. But do you know how long it’s been since I’ve been to a party here in Colombia? Five years. Five years! The time I’ve been married to your father.
Ay, Gabriella. I haven’t been home in five years.
Why did I let that happen?
It feels strange now. Not everything. My house is the same. My room is the same. I even wear the same pajamas I did when I was fifteen!
But going to parties just makes me a little nervous. It was supposed to be a fiesta bailable, a dancing party, with a big band and all that. That implies sitting at a table and, well, not dancing because I don’t have a date and your dad isn’t here to ask me out (which wouldn’t make a difference since he can’t dance salsa anyway).
But I digress.
It was a beautiful house. And they had lit it up with torches, lining the entrance and all around the garden. I could have kicked myself for not taking the camera.
But Mami said it clashed with the dress—“It will look bulky, you can’t take a backpack, why, oh why, must you always make an effort to look as bad and dowdy as you possibly can,” blah, blah—and I suppose she had a point.
It was a beautiful dress. Lilac silk, very clingy. I bought it at a vintage boutique in Melrose. Mami thought it was awful, of course.
“It’s—exotic,” she said doubtfully. Yeah. I call it that, too. It came with a long, long scarf. Kind of Isadora Duncanish. I love that scarf. I felt very Hollywood in it.
And there I was at this beautiful party, sitting at this beautiful table with orchid centerpieces that matched my dress, looking at this utterly romantic courtyard, with the dance floor illuminated by torches that cast just the right golden glow on the dancers.
Alone.
Papi took me out for a couple of mercy dances. He likes how I dance. He taught me.
“Keep your back straight,” he would tell me, “your chin high. You never, ever look down.” And I never do. I follow his hand. The lightest pulse on the small of my back can make my waist turn, my hips swivel, my legs crisscross or glide. My American friends never got this, the concept of following a man on the dance floor.
“It’s so submissive, Helena,” my friend Angie always says, and she even has the temerity to insist that you can actually dance salsa and lead the guy.
But I love to follow and my papi taught me well. If there’s something even Mami can’t dispute, it’s that no one follows like me. “Like a feather, ni se siente,” my boyfriend Jorge used to say.
But Papi likes dancing with Mami better, and they make such a beautiful couple. He’s so tall, so stately. And she’s so tiny. Very Coco Chanel. Not exotic. With that perfectly coifed hair. Sometimes she slips her right hand from his, like now, and just holds it up shoulder height as she dances, like a doll in a jewel box, and she smiles with her eyes closed.
And you know how it is, people start dancing, and in the beginning, they try not to leave you alone at the table, but then it’s just too tempting. They want to dance. Even Elisa, my best friend, left me eventually to dance with her boyfriend du jour, leaving me at the table, feeling like a bona fide wallflower. There’s a phrase for that here: “Comer pavo,” which literally means eating turkey, and please don’t ask me to explain what eating turkey could possibly have to do with not being able to dance.
Jeez. I hadn’t comer pavo since the sixth grade. I played with the orchid. With the matches. With the candle. I was mortified.
Do you remember how it was in high school? When you prayed for the night to end and someone to take you home? When you felt so soundly out of place. Was it your dress? Your hair? What happened between the time when you last checked in the mirror and went out feeling confidently beautiful and now, when your increasing desperation leads you to eat the fruitcake in an effort to look occupied? Well, of course, you don’t remember—you’re just a baby! But someday you’ll understand.
I now felt grotesque in my purple dress with its outlandish scarf, and when Papi took me out for a second mercy dance, I felt it trail down my back with the gracefulness of a clumsy, thick woolen scarf. Not Isadora Duncan–like at all.
He cut in before we got to the dance floor.
“Doctor Gómez. I’ll trade your daughter for my mother.”
We laughed.
And, of course, who could resist such an overture? We traded.
I knew him. From way back when. But he’d never given me the time of day. Never looked at me twice, as far as I could remember. I had looked but never expected anything back. Girls like me—then—never got looks from guys like him. Guys like my brother, who played polo and wore khaki pants and dated girls with long, straight hair, who used makeup in the mornings.
Tonight, he was looking at me like I was one of those girls. I no longer craved guys like him. Guys who have become men with small aristocratic guts, too proper, too well kept, too boring.
But tonight, he was different.
Different from himself. And different from Marcus, who is tall and athletic and so beautiful and easygoing.
He wasn’t much taller than me, and I felt his breath rising and falling against my cheek, warm with just a trace of the last smoked cigarette, his cheeks lending just a whiff of expensive cologne. He smelled authoritative, like Cali, like farmland. He smelled like a man who knows what he wants and gets it.
Maybe it was the way he held me when we danced. His hand so tight, so rightfully firm on the small of my back, making my feet go forward and backward, so effortlessly I really did feel like a feather, and my Isadora Duncan scarf once again felt like it was made out of silk as it whirled around and around us as we turned in the courtyard under the torches and the sky.