Telemundo

In high school, I used to go to my best friend Susu’s house and watch “Cristina” on a tiny TV next to the parakeet cage in her bedroom. Cristina was the latin diaspora’s version of Oprah-- an exiled, Cuban, bottle-blonde with a sugary voice that could turn stern if the occasion demanded. She was the benevolent-but-tough older cousin that every woman needed to teach her how to handle “Mothers in Law from Hell,” how to cook “Fat-Free Flan and Other Guiltless Pleasures” and how to answer the question “Is He Cheating?”


Susu’s Spanish was better than mine because her father was born in Panama, but after watching so many hours of Donohue and Sally Jesse Raphael, I could follow the general gist of things. Cristina was fairer than my mother. She favored two-piece business suits in tropical colors and chunky necklaces that matched her lipstick. Her sensationalism was always saturated in the pretense of self-help. “Today on ‘Cristina,’” she would say, staring at the camera as if it were a long-lost sister, “teen pregnancy disasters: tips for saving our daughters.”

Back then, “Cristina” was a somewhat kitschy and exotic escape from my white-bread existence. The Mexican Telenovela stars that she often interviewed, with their over-plucked eyebrows and skin-tight blazers, seemed far away from the kind of woman I would become.

Ten years later, I studied Cristina and her guests for the key to being the perfect latina mujer—how much adobo to shake onto the chicken breasts, how not to char the arroz con gandules, the ideal method for folding boxer shorts. I tuned in every day, settling back into the couch and resting my hands on my expanding belly as I waited for Junior to finish the evening shift at the factory where he worked.

Sometimes, between “Cristina” and “En Rojo Vivo,” I would go to the bathroom and stare at myself in the mirror. My mother had recently decorated my father’s study with old pictures of his ancestors, and there was an 8 by 10 photo of my great grandmother, who grew up in Ireland and died in New York, in all her matriarchal glory. Her eyes, I noticed, were just like my father’s and mine: large and green with a slight bloodhound droopiness at the corners.

The baby liked to turn summersaults while I lounged on the couch. He had started kicking so hard that the skin of my stomach bulged with his extended foot. I kept thinking of the scene in “Alien” where the bloody spawn cracks out of that man’s chest, but Junior’s mother assured me that the kicking was normal. “If he’s anything like his father,” she said, “that will be the least of your worries.” I thought of the pictures I’d seen of Junior as a boy in Puerto Rico. His wooly hair, trimmed short at the sides, stood up from his head and his wide eyes stared dark and flat as mahogany tabletops.

Every night in the last months of my pregnancy I tuned in to a Mexican telenovela called “Betting on Love.” It was about a powerful gambling landowner’s attempt to tame a dark-haired woman who everyone in the town called the Black Philly because she was so beautiful and difficult to break. The eight o’clock hour was the highlight of my day

All of the leads in the show were light-skinned with narrow European noses. Occasionally a Mexican with indigenous features made an appearance as a maid or gardener. There was also a subplot involving an hechicera who looked like a Mayan princess and spent her time boiling herbs in a cauldron. Her assistant, a dark-skinned man with wooly hair whose accent gave him away as Caribbean, had large blue eyes that glowed eerily long after the set lights had dimmed.

When Max-Yamil was two, I moved out of the apartment. I didn’t have cable anymore, couldn’t watch Cristina or Jorge Ramos or Don Francisco on “Sábado Gigante.” I put my TV in the basement and began reading long Russian novels in the evenings.  I spent a lot of time scrubbing conditioning powder into the fibers of my new townhouse rugs to keep them crisp and white.
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After he realized I was gone for good, Junior signed himself up for child- support collection. “So I don’t get behind,” he told me. As we sat waiting outside the courtroom, a Cuban woman in a bright yellow two-piece suit introduced herself. “I’ll be your translator,” she said to Junior. “When we go into the courtroom, I’ll tell you everything that the judge says.”

I thought of the doctor’s appointments I’d gone to with Junior, sitting in the chair next to the examining table as he had me explain where it hurt or how long it had been since he’d slept. I thought of family dinners at my parent’s house—the things I’d chose to translate, and the things I’d left unsaid. I thought of the two of us sitting in my therapist’s office as I made myself translucent and parroted Junior’s words: “Lindsey just doesn’t understand me. I feel so alone.”

Most of all, I thought about the girl on the couch with the rounded belly bathed in blue Telemundo light. I thought of her stubbornness--the pots and pots of rice that came out soggy or charred every time. And I thought about the somersaulting baby inside of her, his wisps of wooly hair, his otherworldy, emerald-city eyes.

Black Cardigan

When I was nineteen, I spent a summer in New York City interning for Francis Ford Coppola’s magazine Zoetrope: All-story.  It mostly entailed trying to strike a dignified pose in hose and heels while draped across the office beanbag chair reading through the slush pile.   

I bought new clothes for the endeavor.  I ordered them from J-Crew which, at the time, seemed an appropriately classy cover-up for my provincial upstate pedigree.  It also meant I could avoid the department stores that brought back traumatizing memories of my mother pulling back the dressing room curtain to check my pants and skirts for roominess in the waist.  I did buy one thing in person: a black cardigan with vertical grooves and funky brown buttons that caught the light just-so.  The sweater fell past my hips and, when I fastened only the third button, made my boobs look bigger. 

I lived in a closet-sized dorm room without air conditioning on the Upper West Side. At 5:30 every morning the traffic screeches and the breezeless humidity wafting though my open window woke me up, whereupon I would brew myself a cup of instant Folgers and watch a group of Falun Gong do their morning exercises in the courtyard below.            

The building was populated by Columbia undergraduates doing summer internships for Morgan Stanley or Goldman Sachs.  Girls were few and far between and we regarded each other with suspicion; I began applying concealer and a thin snake of eyeliner before walking down to the communal bathroom to brush my teeth.  The interns left the building one by one every morning in their freshly pressed shirts and incandescent ties.  They all looked the same to me except for DaeKwon, who was black and sported a fade so retro it looked hip. 

The first Saturday I’d encountered Justin in the kitchen wearing Nike athletic shorts, Adidas sandals and no shirt.  He was making himself a protein shake in a miniature blender.  His pecs were at my eye level, but I forced myself to look down.  “Cat got your tongue?” He asked.     

After that I stayed in my room reading Janet Frame and doing stomach crunches.  Except that corn-rowed Latrell Sprewell was leading my New York Knicks to their first post-Ewing NBA finals and listening to the games on the radio just wasn’t cutting it.  On the evening of elimination game five against the San Antonio Spurs, I began pulling outfits out of my closet.  This one was too formal.  That one made me look fat.  I finally settled on the black cardigan, third button fastened over a tank top, even though it was a solid eighty-five degrees out.

The interns were crowded together on the lounge couch, but they looked strange out of their suits, except for Justin whose shoulders bulged from under his tank top like two perfectly risen Pilsbury rolls.  DaeKwon was there too sitting stiff as a bookend on the edge of the couch.

“Dude,” Justin said, “I just can’t get behind the Knicks this year.  I mean Latrell Sprewell is a straight-up thug.  Choking his coach?  I can’t believe they gave him another NBA contract.”

DaeKwon stiffened even more and began to bite his thumbnail. 

“Now Allan Houston,” Justin said.  “There’s a cat I could get behind.”

“Allan Houston’s overrated.” I said.   

A smirk played across Justin’s face.  “Hey,” he said, looking at the guy next to him.  “A chick who thinks she knows sports.”

DaeKwon stood up and looked at me.  “Come on,” he said.  “I know somewhere else we can watch the game.”

He took me to a McDonalds in Harlem where we walked through the drive-thru and got super size orange drinks and a twenty piece box of chicken nuggets.  “Extra sweet-and-sour please,” DaeKwon said to the woman behind the window. 

“Sure hon,” she said.  She dropped some extra packets into the bag.  “Girl, ain’t you burning up in that sweater?”

Fifteen feet away a group of men stood with their faces pressed against a storefront window.  They roared as Sprewell slashed through the lane and dunked over Jaren Jackson’s outstretched arms.  “And the foul!” one of them yelled, pounding his palm against the glass.

The sweater survived another seven years until the night of my first real date with Mike.  When we got back to my house, Mike sat on the end of the bed as I slipped off the sweater and draped it over the bedside lampshade to dim the light.  I was afraid he’d see the pouch of wrinkled stretch marks around my belly button from when I was pregnant with Max-Yamil. 

Mike ran his hands up and down my bare arms.  He kissed my collar bone and curled his fingers around the bottom edge of my tank top.  “You look like a countess,” he said.  Behind us, a corner of the sweater that had fallen against the light bulb began to smolder and smoke.

Commencement

I bought my cap and gown today: $62.50 plus eighty nine cents on a Hershey bar in which I hoped to drown my impending dread. I am a thirty-year-old single mother graduating into the worst economy since the Great Depression with a Master’s degree in English.  Google will not be pounding on my door with a six-figure offer any time soon.

The lilacs blooming outside my kitchen window are indifferent to my predicament. Instead of hoarding boxes of discount pasta under the sink, they are spending their nutrients on a profligate display of color and scent.

The purple flowers always remind me of my first date with my boyfriend at Rochester’s annual Lilac Festival in mid May. “It wasn’t a date,” Mike still insists. “A stroller was involved.” He told me later that my habit making eye contact while changing lanes on the expressway terrified him. “I kept thinking, there is a two-year-old in the back seat. Why doesn’t she keep her eyes on the road?”

My son turned six last month, and I still like to watch him sleep. Sometimes, when I stare at him, I think about the great white page in front of me. The cursor blinks; Max-Yamil’s eyelashes flutter.

When I found out I was pregnant, I was a single, twenty-four-year-old college dropout living in a shoebox apartment and making minimum wage. I did not want to tell anyone, especially not my parents. But I did tell the baby’s father, and he told his.

Max-Yamil’s grandfather called me one afternoon from Puerto Rico. “My name is Israel,” he said in a crackly voice that made me feel calm. “You’re carrying my grandchild.”

Israel is in a hospital in San Juan now. He has congestive heart failure and his lungs are filling up with water. The white space in front of him is larger than any page. 

“Remember,” he told me that afternoon as I stared out the window at a flat, gray sky, “this is a blessing. This child is a blessing from God.”

I closed my eyes, took a deep breath and prepared myself to begin.