CHAPTER 2

MY COUSIN CARIDAD AND HER HUSBAND are fighting about whether she should buy a new car or not. , My cousin, who’s round and sweet and smokes too many cigarettes, feels it’s her right to get a new car, since her father (Tío Pepe) died and left her money that was totally unplanned for, so why not? But Jimmy, my cousin-in-law of sorts, says no, they don’t need a new car. According to him, their old one (a beat up Ford Escort) is fine, and they have plenty of other debts to pay before buying something that luxurious. Besides, he sneers, where the hell does Caridad think she’s going to go without him anyway?

Caridad says she doesn’t want to buy a luxury car, just one of those little Geo Metros. She tells him they get fifty miles to the gallon and fit in little itty bitty parking spaces. “They’re like baby Porsches and cost just eight thousand dollars. Come on, Jimmy,” she whines, “it’ll make me feel better about Papi dying.”

But Jimmy, who’s tired from work (he’s still wearing his gray janitor uniform from the hospital) and has been leaning against the kitchen sink, comes right up to Caridad as she sucks on her cigarette and, with his thumb and index finger, flicks the burning ash right off the tip. Caridad winces and I watch the tiny fireball hit the floor and smolder.

“No, and that’s final,” Jimmy says, then leaves the room. He practically swings his hips on the way out, he thinks he’s that cool.

The whole time, I just sit at the kitchen table, playing with the edge of the plastic placemat, which says Cuba and has a map of the island, a picture of the flag, and a bouquet of palm trees. On the placemat Cuba looks like a giant brown turd; the flag’s colors have faded so that the triangle appears pink. I’m not about to say anything because, while I love my cousin very much, I know damn well she’s truth-proof in love with Jimmy and totally immune to reason.

“It’s my fucking money,” Caridad whispers fiercely. “Papi left it to me to do whatever the hell I want with it and if I want to buy a car, I can do that, don’t you think so, Juani?”

What I really want to say is. If it’s your money, why do you have to ask him permission anyway? But we aren’t having a conversation—that’s between her and Jimmy—my job here is to listen. So I just roll the corner of the placemat in my fingers and watch her light another cigarette. She’s leaning against the sink now, just like Jimmy did a minute ago. She’s vibrating too. When she sees what I’m doing to the placemat, she bends over and swats my hand as if I’m some snot-nosed kid.

“Hey,” I protest, then slap down the curled corner of the placemat. “That hurt,” I say. There’s a big red mark across my knuckles.

But, as expected, Caridad isn’t really paying attention to me. She says, “Who does he think he is anyway, huh?”

“I don’t know,” I mutter.

My ambivalence isn’t because I think that, as her husband, Jimmy has any right to tell her what to do. We both know from experience that you just don’t mess with Jimmy, because his temper’s wild. But—and I hate to give him credit for anything because I’ve always thought he’s a bastard—he does have a point: Living on just one salary in their overwhelmed, overstuffed one-bedroom apartment above our family’s laundromat, they really do have other bills to pay.

“He can’t just tell me what to do like that,” she says, smoke curling from her nostrils like a ram’s horns.

But we both know he can, and does.

One time, Jimmy absolutely forbade Caridad to hang out with me and my friends, or just with me, even though I’m family. He said no wife of his was going to be seen all over town with a gaggle of lesbians; what kind of man would people think he was if his wife was always hanging with tortilleras?

For the longest time, it’s true that Caridad used to hang out with me and my friends, most of whom are lesbians. This was no secret to the family, or the neighborhood, probably. But it wasn’t as if anyone ever got confused and thought Caridad was gay. She has always preferred, and enjoyed, her power with men: on top and on the bottom. She likes the dangers that come with men too, especially certain Latino men—that they might not show up for a date, or that they’ll be mean, or hurt her. It’s not that she likes getting beat up (nobody ever hit her before Jimmy, no matter how often any of her boyfriends threatened to)—in fact, she hates it—but she relishes the role she gets to play in bringing down her bad boys. She likes making strong men weak, not through humiliation or cruelty, but with her hands and mouth and the way she tosses her hair away from her face, winking and laughing.

She has told me plenty of times how, after making Jimmy come, she just loves to look at him, all wet and red and shrunken, as helpless and beautiful as a newborn baby. “I just think, ‘I did that? Did I really do that?’ and I can’t believe it,” she says, “I just can’t believe it.”

Strangely enough, it’s exactly this kind of thing which made it easier for her to hang out with my friends and me than with straight girls. With us, there was no competition; we just didn’t care. When she told her stories, we laughed and asked questions; sometimes we were incredulous, convinced we’d never put up with what she puts up with and we’d roll our eyes so she couldn’t see; sometimes we’d get grossed out; other times we’d slap her shoulder and tell her how right on she was. But mostly, hers was another world. We loved her and celebrated her, but we didn’t want her—and there was a certain freedom for her in that too.

That’s why when Jimmy said Caridad couldn’t hang with us anymore, we really missed her, especially because she’s one hell of a dancer. Since she’s one of the older cousins, she actually learned to dance in Cuba, where they play the really authentic music—not just Celia Cruz, but Beny Moré, Arsenio Rodriguez, Celeste Mendoza and Los Van Van too—so she got assigned to teach all of us younger cousins how to dance. Patricia’s the oldest of all, but she was born in New York, which we joke is the reason she can’t dance worth a damn.

Caridad taught us the mambo, the cha-cha-cha, the rumba, even the tango. She tutored us in the movement of our hips, how to close our eyes and toss our heads back as if we were in ecstasy and the music had completely invaded us. Since then, most of us have figured out how to really get in the groove with the rhythms, so we don’t have to think about looking suave anymore.

Of course, in order to teach the boys how to lead—like my brother Pucho, who’s a real flat-foot—Caridad had to learn how to lead herself. This is a unique talent—a girl who knows how to move another girl with just one touch to her lower back, one little glide off her hip, a graceful tug here and there. (Gina, a lover I’m still aching over, dances likes that.) In a lesbian bar, this is a big deal. We loved Caridad—we used to fight among ourselves to see who’d get to dance with her, which she just ate up.

But after Jimmy prohibited her from hanging out with us, we’d see her cigarette at the window just as we drove off on Friday and Saturday nights, a firefly trapped in a mason jar. She’d watch us, all sad and angry with Jimmy, and he’d look out, stupid and satisfied. He’d get a big kick out of screaming at us, “Hey, have a good time tortilla-makers! Suck some pussy for me!”

Then Caridad would yell at him and they’d get in a fight. He’d win by slapping her, or sometimes just threatening to. He has this way of holding his hand stiff, like a karate chop, and checking it up almost to his chin and across his chest, as if only his desire can keep that backhand from snapping.

Another time, Jimmy tried to ban me completely from their house but he wasn’t very successful. Pucho, who’s considerably bigger than him, heard about the ban and went up to see him. I don’t know what they said to each other because my brother does not raise his voice. Pucho’s one of those quiet types, the kind that carry knives with which they casually pick at their cuticles, like they’re just having a chat and there’s nothing wrong in the whole world. Pucho and Jimmy just stood on the stairs up to Jimmy and Caridad’s apartment, two black figures with their heads close together. Their shadows fell across a pair of mangy neighborhood cats lapping from a bowl of fresh milk that Caridad puts out (along with expensive all-natural tuna) under the stairs every night.

So the compromise—although nobody says there was a compromise, but we all know anyway—was that I wouldn’t spend too much time with Caridad alone, just the two of us. It was ridiculous, of course, because she’s my cousin; there’s never been any mystery.

Caridad told me that she once asked Jimmy qué carajo his problem was with me. It was a rhetorical question because she thought he was going to say that it was my being queer, since that’s what he’d always said, even the first time I met him and he felt like he had to sit and talk all night about “which one of us has gotten more pussy in our short lifetime.” It was the kind of thing only a heterosexual man would consider, and probably only a barrio boy at that.

I’ve never told Caridad this but that first time she left us alone in the living room at her parents’ house, those twenty minutes it took her to get dressed and get her make-up on, Jimmy just sat there on the couch and stared at me, his legs wide open, his hand rubbing his dick until it was practically jumping out of his pants.

“You ever want one of these?” he asked me. He rested his head on the back of the couch, his cheeks all flushed. His penis pushed at his loose dress pants as if trying to erect a tent. “Not inside you, but like, one of your own?”

I’m tall, kind of big-boned and flat-chested—tomboyish too—and I’ve got my father’s jawline, so I could see how, in his ignorance, he’d gotten confused. Still, I really should have been ticked off, or maybe scared. Jimmy isn’t too big—kind of short really, with a smooth, hairless chest—but he’s strong. Yet, when he talked to me like that, instead of telling him what a dumb question that was, or how homophobic and insecure he sounded, I just laughed and told him no, that I didn’t need one of those.

“I get what I want; know what I mean?” I said to him, all cocky. He smiled from under hooded eyes, then took his hand from his crotch and sighed.

We were quiet like that for a minute or so, him with his eyes closed just letting the tent slowly collapse, me watching intently. It was like a stand-off: dangerous, yes, but also just plain exhilarating. I went home that night and got off a dozen or so times just playing that scene over and over in my head.

So even though he was totally out of line, sitting there rubbing his cock, I couldn’t very well tell Caridad about that without also telling her, one way or another, how it’d affected me. She’s my cousin, she would have known; I figured, better let sleeping dogs lie. Besides, it would have just confused matters, because she’s used to me being a lesbian (and she has very definite ideas about what that means) and she probably would have felt that she had to be jealous, which would have been all wrong.

When she asked Jimmy what his problem was with me—now that they were already married and he had her totally under his thumb—he said, totally serious, “Juani’s just like me, we’re two of a kind.”

“What do you mean she’s just like you?” Caridad asked him, incredulous.

So he told her, “She’d do anything.”

“Like come on to her own cousin, is that what you think?” Caridad asked.

“Yeah,” he said, “maybe, depends on the circumstances.”

When Caridad reported all this to me I thought, Yeah, he would do that, that asshole.

On my way home from Caridad and Jimmy’s, where the argument about the new car is still going on although it’s quiet because Caridad’s smoking in the kitchen and Jimmy’s taking a shower, I stop downstairs at our family’s laundromat and play a couple of quick games of Lethal Enforcer.

The laundromat’s closed but I have keys and can let myself in anytime. I’m the assistant manager but since I got back from visiting my sister Nena in Miami, where she now works doing PR for an all-news Spanish-language radio station, I haven’t been hanging around here much.

As I step inside, I turn the lights on but make sure the sign outside that reads Wash-N-Dry Laundry/Lavanderia Wash-N-Dry stays dark. I’m not looking for customers at this time of night, just a little entertainment, a little distraction.

When Nena was the assistant manager, she thought it’d be a good marketing move to put in pinball and video machines because people got so bored all the time doing their laundry. It took some convincing, though, because my father—the official manager, although it’s always been Nena, our Tía Zenaida or me who has really known what was going on—thought the machines would attract gangbangers. But Nena’s attitude was that even gangbangers have to wash their clothes (she’s a real good capitalist, my sister) and then she figured out the real magnet for them wasn’t the games anyway, from which we eventually made tons of money, but the public pay phone, from which we never did pull much. So we got rid of the phone and put in a whole bank of games along the back wall.

After Nena moved away, I took over the laundromat and when it came time to re-evaluate the games, I got rid of Centipede, which she loved but I thought was so inane, all those little beads tumbling down the screen. I replaced it with Mortal Kombat, which is probably even more idiotic, and certainly bloodier, but so popular that the only time nobody’s jerking the controls and ripping heads off virtual bodies is when the laundromat’s closed. I kept Ms. Pac Man because, even though it’s sexist, I like the whole idea of eating a path through the maze. I also brought in The Simpsons and a vintage Fireball pinball machine with the spinning rubber disk in the middle (I once read somewhere that it was Hugh Hefner’s favorite machine at the Playboy Mansion, but it’s such a great game I try not to hold that against it) and, of course, Lethal Enforcer, which is vicious and which, I admit, I just love. It’s just a shoot-’em-up game: You get a gun and a screen full of bad guys and you try to kill them. That’s basically it, except that after I play, I always feel really loose, ready for anything.

I’m not doing too well tonight, though. My right arm’s a little numb and a line of dull pain circles my breast. I get past the screen with the bank robbery, but I miss all the bad guys in the Chinatown sequence. I try to duck, but I keep getting hit. I twist and turn, leaning into the screen, but to no avail. I’m using the pink pistol but just can’t get past Chinatown without being blown away. My wrist’s a little sore, as it sometimes gets, and my fingers are tingling so I finally give up and turn off the machine without even finishing my turn. I walk around a little bit, decide to get a Very Fine from the pop machine, toss on my jacket and go outside, where I’m greeted by a crisp and silvery night.

The fact is, I miss Gina.

As I lock the door, I see lights upstairs in Caridad and Jimmy’s apartment. It’s the overhead light, not a lamp. I hold the Very Fine against me with my arm and feel the cold come through to my breast. It feels good, like a balm. I turn the laundromat door key and walk over to pull the burglar gates together. Even the screeching and scratching against the sidewalk as I drag the gates and roll the chains into a big knot between them doesn’t drown out the noise from upstairs. I can’t quite make out what Jimmy and Caridad are saying, but they’re loud. Every now and then, there’s a thud or a crash, things falling and breaking. But after I finish locking up, I just walk away.

When I get home to my apartment just a few blocks away, the light’s blinking red on my answering machine. One, two calls. I hold my breath and hope maybe one of those calls is Gina saying she’s changed her mind, all is forgiven and she’s coming over. I press the review button, listen to the whirl of the tape, take off my jacket and walk over to the fridge, from which I grab a pear and bite into it. I crunch and crunch, listening to all the chewing inside my head, barely making out my messages. The first is from my cousin Patricia, nagging me about stuff I have to do if want to go to Cuba. The other’s a hang up. I decide it was Gina, wishing me sweet dreams (I let my breath out, surrendering). Then the phone rings in earnest and for a split second, I’m hopeful again.

“Hey… Juani…” But it’s Caridad, sniffling into the tape machine.

I pick up the receiver. “Hey…”

She coughs. “Anybody over?”

“No, I’m alone,” I say. Outside my window, a solitary car drives by. It’s well past midnight.

“So then, whatcha’ doing, huh?”

I shrug, as if she could see me. “Waiting for your call, I guess.”

She laughs a little, embarrassed. “You coming over?”

“If you want me to,” I say.

“Yeah…” (Sniffle, sniffle.)

“Is Jimmy gone?”

“Oh, yeah…” And she laughs again, a little bitter this time.

I put down the phone, take a last bite out of the pear and pitch the core, in the dark, bull’s-eye into the garbage under my old-fashioned kitchen sink.