Chapter FORTY-SIX
As much solace as beautiful María took in her verses, the source of her greatest pride in those years was Teresita, about whom she bragged to anyone who would listen. (“Oh, but if only your abuelos could have known—and your papito, Ignacio, whose brains flow in your blood—oh, they would be so happy!”) Teresita had always been one of those cubanitas who, with an exile’s passion, excelled in every subject in school, science being her greatest interest. She was helped by a very high IQ—a measurement that meant little to María. That she had decided to study medicine, all on scholarships, had surely to do with the way María had raised her. When it came to matters of health, a day never passed during Teresita’s early adolescence that María did not find herself worrying that her daughter might come down with the same symptoms of epilepsy that had taken her tía, at so young an age, from this world. Teresita had grown up hearing her mother, at the public health clinics, asking the doctors who examined her if there were special tests for that disease. Nothing came of them—she was always a healthy girl—but any time Teresita suffered from a fever and exhibited the slightest trembling, María, taken back to Pinar del Río and the sufferings of her sister, inevitably rushed her off to the nearest hospital. Early on, epilepsia was a word that Teresita had learned through her mother’s wistful stories about her aunt, may God bless her soul, just so that she would know something of her own past; and it was the first disease that Teresita, in high school, with a burgeoning interest in the sciences, looked up in the library encyclopedia.
And so, it can perhaps be said that Teresita’s interest in pediatric medicine came first to pass because of María.
OF COURSE, MOTHER AND DAUGHTER SPOKE ON THE TELEPHONE at least a few times a week, whenever Teresita’s taxing schedule as an intern in New York, with a specialization in pediatric oncology at the Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center, allowed her the time.
“Have you met anyone?” María inevitably asked.
“No, I’m too busy, Mama. If you knew my hours, you’d understand.”
“But there’s no one there you like?”
Teresita sighed. “No, Mama, not yet.”
It was something María always asked her, and it always made Teresita want to get off the phone, or say, “Mama, can’t you just accept who I am?” But she knew that María would simply have thought, Oh, but she’s just become too americana. Still, their conversations jostled along pleasantly, and dutifully, Teresita filling her mother in on the routines of the week, and María occasionally reciting her latest verses over the phone, never once failing to let her daughter know how much she missed her. In fact, though Teresita often sighed during their conversations, she felt the same way. María, after all, had been everything to her, the fount of what she thought of as her “little Cuban-centric world.”
Always too pensive for her own good, and one of those demure and ever obedient cubanita daughters who always seemed to recede into the shadows of the kitchen when María had friends over and things became lively, Teresita, with her 160-something IQ, had, over the years, grown more attached to abstract notions than to the practicalities—and pleasures—of daily existence. In high school, when thrown in with a crowd of rowdy cubanita adolescents who mainly talked about one guapo boy or another, and fretted about whether their asses were too big or their halter tops were sexy enough, Teresita thought them frivolous. Among those friends she was known as somewhat of a wallflower, and so straitlaced that they would chide her with this taunt: “Hey, loosen up, Teresita! Do you think we’re back in the Cuba of our abuelos?” She went to high school dances, but never with any man-killing intentions and, to María’s chagrin, never bothering with makeup. A budding feminist, Teresita refused to wear the clinging, short-skirted dresses of her classmates. Competing on her high school swim team well enough to have once won a bronze medal in a regional meet, she always wore an old-fashioned one-piece suit which the coach claimed, aside from her tendency to suddenly put on weight, slowed her up.
And when María, off in her own world, spent the evening playing old Cuban records on their phonograph, often that Mambo Kings tune over and over again, Teresita, having a little cassette player, listened to the kind of music that would have made her friends gag. A high school music appreciation class, run by a progressive fellow, had “turned her on” to both Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven, and jazz. Not that she didn’t like Cuban music, but, having been raised on it, she had come to prefer just about anything else. And yes, she had been taught to dance Latin style by her mother, but there was something about the way her mother pushed her—“Be sexier, move your hips more!”—that put her off. Sweating in her leotard, Teresita would tell her, “Come on, Mama, you know that I’m not you!” And María, shaking her head, would say, “Oh, but I’m just trying to help you, chica.” Teresita knew this, but María worked her so hard sometimes, she couldn’t help but wonder if her mother was trying to put her through the paces of a professional dancer in Havana, 1947. (Well, she’d heard her mother talking about those days often enough, of a nightclub life, both sleazy and glamorous, to know that it surely wasn’t easy for her to have navigated that predatory world. And she’d feel grateful that she had been spared all the difficulties María, as she often reminded her, had endured. Yet, when she’d look at herself in the floor-to-ceiling studio mirror, Teresita, neither as beautiful nor as long-legged as her mother must surely have been at her age, just wanted to run out of that place and head home, to her room and the companionship of books.)
So she was a solitary sort. Whereas other cubanitas of her age would look back at the drudgery of their high school studies and prefer to remember their various novios—even Teresita noticed how some of those boys swaggered along the halls with erections bunched up in the fronts of their tight jeans—she, in those years, had only one sort of boyfriend, another brainy cubano exilio, whom she had met in a chemistry lab. Rolando wasn’t bad looking—in fact, at first glance, he was handsome enough, with Elvis sideburns and expressive brows and eyes—but his face was a mess of luridly green, white-topped pimples, which prevented him from thinking he could ever look good. He blamed these outbreaks on the constant pressures that his demanding parents put on him to excel in school. (This she almost envied; María hardly ever bothered to ask Teresita about her studíes.) Nevertheless, it was his general melancholy—shades of María—and his self-effacing ways, that touched Teresita’s heart, and while they never became a couple, meeting here and there in the malls, where they’d find a secluded spot to furtively kiss, she owed her first sexual experience to him. This took place in the bedroom of her house one afternoon while María was off at her dance studio: his trembling hands slipping inside her blouse and caressing the plumpness of her breasts, her nipples (shades of María) shooting up and hardening at his touch, and then, as good as losing her virginity, Teresita let him ease his fingers into her panties, where, feeling him fooling around, she came. In kind, to put it in the most unscientific language, in the midst of a longish kiss, she jerked him off. But that was about all. They went out for a while until Rolando, confusing that afternoon’s frolic with love, not only took to calling her every day but began to behave so mawkishly around her at school that Teresita, finding him bothersome and too much of a distraction from her studies, just had to cut him loose.
She’d finally had a regular novio in college, at least for a time, a pre-med student of mixed Argentine and Lebanese descent, named Tomás, who, breaking the sacred seal of her virginity, could not get enough of her, his favorite part of Teresita’s body lying between her legs, the taste of which he swore intoxicated him. Altogether, their romance seemed to others an instance of cerebral love between two of the best pre-med students in their school. How could it have been otherwise? For Tomás also happened to possess a handsomeness that turned many a female head, and some might have wondered how she, of an ordinary cubanita prettiness, had managed to snag him. (She wondered as well.)
One evening, after they’d been together for about five months, Teresita brought Tomás home to María, on whom his striking looks and intelligence made a wonderful impression. So wonderful that for weeks afterwards, María pestered her daughter about having Tomás in again for dinner. On that second occasion, it startled Teresita to find that María had abandoned her usual blouse and tight evening slacks for an even tighter hip-swallowing red dress with a slit skirt, of such décolletage, that Tomás, during the course of their meal of arroz con pollo, could not avoid taking in the alluring shapeliness of María’s breasts. And she embarrassed Teresita further with her constant compliments of him. “Oh, but how it makes me happy to see my daughter with a fellow as nice looking as you!” and, “Surely, if you don’t want to become a doctor, you can become a movie actor!” Such remarks, abetted by a few cocktails, and María’s later insistence that she show him the steps of a dance called the “mozambique” on their living room floor, left Teresita so peeved afterwards that she resolved never to bring him back there again.
It didn’t matter. A few months later, for reasons Teresita could not comprehend, Tomás began to make himself scarce. Perhaps someone else had entered the picture—she didn’t know—but, in any event, Tomás gradually disappeared from her life. And while Teresita never once mentioned her disappointment to anyone, she began to think that María, whose questions about that “wonderful boy” began to drop away, already knew. If so, María, being María, kept it under her hat—perhaps out of fear of saying the wrong thing to her daughter. And while Teresita, for all her pride, would have loved to have lain her head on María’s lap and cry her eyes out, she never did; and not from any animosity, but simply because, when it came to such moments, they just weren’t that way with each other at all.
And now, an image of Teresita, having taken a shower and drying herself off with a towel in the bedroom mirror of her lowly Fort Washington flat, on West 188th, in a neighborhood of Hasidic Jews, Holocaust survivors, and junkies. What did she see? A young woman, of thirty or so, and about five feet two in height, with cinnamon skin, sometimes a little too chubby in places—she kept her belly sucked in—but nice, a great mane of dark hair falling over her shoulders, a woman with shapely hips and pendulous breasts, their nipples like berries, and a flourish of curling black pubic hair in the shape of a spade between her legs. And her face? Stepping closer to the mirror, in her ordinary prettiness, she could see that her almond eyes were her best feature; but when she tilted her head up at a certain angle, and her cheekbones glowed and the slope of her face elongated, she thought that she looked just like her mother, María.
Actually, in those days when Teresita lived in New York and her mother kept asking, “Is there someone?” there had been an American fellow, a certain Derek Harrison, whom Teresita had met at the hospital during her second year as an intern. They’d had an affair that lasted about six months, their passions enflamed, in part, by their exposure to patients who were dying. It was as if one atmosphere fed the other. With AIDS just coming to light, when Teresita and Derek, a fellow intern, stole some moments between rounds, they’d slip into a vacant operating room to ravish each other at three in the morning, and once—the sort of thing that made even Teresita smile—standing up in a janitors’ closet, she had hitched her skirt over her belly, her panties down, her body writhing, her papaya damp and hungrily drawing him in.
It was wonderful and exciting while it lasted, but Teresa, in her na?veté, confused this fellow’s desire to escape the more funereal side of their profession with affection. She’d almost told María about it as a blossoming kind of love, but before she could, he had started to grow more distant, detached, in fact, and while they had continued to fool around for a while, the boiling heat of their mutual infatuation reduced to a simmer and then cooled to a tepid broth. By then, while doing what he could to avoid her, this sinverguenza Derek finally confessed that he, from a very good WASP family in Philadelphia, happened to be engaged. If there had been any time when Teresita wished a man to hell, it was then.
But, as with Tomás, she never told María about her broken heart. What would her mother have said to console her anyway?
INDEED, ONCE TERESITA RETURNED TO MIAMI, IN ’87, TO BEGIN her post at the children’s hospital, a decision which made María very happy, they resumed a life as mother and daughter (along with Omar, the cat) that, compared with many another Cuban household in Miami, bubbling over with aunts and cousins, uncles and abuelos, was muy callado—quiet. Teresita’s position at the hospital took up a lot of her time; she’d come home exhausted, often finishing up patient reports in her bedroom before joining her mother in the living room. On the weekends, however, María and her daughter were nearly inseparable. They liked to eat lunch at one of those outdoor cafés along South Beach—now jammed with tourists and hustling young people. Amazed by how much things had changed—for the worse in some ways, with all the noise, traffic, and tacky souvenir shops—even she, no prude, never quite got used to seeing, as they’d stroll along the beach, the European women who wore only bikini bottoms playing volleyball or dancing to rap music from boom boxes in the sand. (Yes, Miami was a long way from Havana, 1949.) Sometimes they’d go to an art fair, or church bazaar, or to an afternoon outdoor concert with some friends, but mainly they kept to themselves. And while she was ever grateful for the fact that they had each other, with each passing week María became more distressed to see her only daughter staying at home on Saturday nights when most unmarried women her age were at least trying to find a novio if not a husband.
(Oh, but María’s lectures, while the poor young woman was just trying to mind her own business: lectures about broken hearts and the loneliness of solitude, the stupidity of today’s juventud, squandering their opportunities for life and love, especially the ones who got too many American cucarachas in their heads!)
To please María, Teresa dipped into the crowded, overwrought Miami club scene, singles nights at different venues, and while she occasionally went out on the dates that her mother had cajoled from friends, Teresita had yet to meet anyone, Cuban or not, she thought compatible. (“So what was wrong with that one?” María inevitably asked.) Her mother’s continual urgings, it should be said, occasionally got on Teresita’s nerves, becoming, at a certain point, something Teresita just didn’t want to hear about.
But they had their good times: paid well, living cheaply, Teresita was able to take beautiful María to Italy on a vacation. To Rome, to Florence and Venice, then Naples and Sorrento and back. Her mother loved not only the way Italian men regarded women but the gruff yet kindly vendors in the markets with whom, as during her stay in the Bronx, she could speak Spanish and always be understood. She dissolved in the sunsets, daydreamed in the wisteria-rich gardens, and, touring the ruins of Pompeii, wondered why people bothered to preserve such old things. Roma, in particular, with its self-contained and lively neighborhoods, so reminded María of Havana that she felt completely at home. And she liked the way men gave her daughter the most interested looks, following her every move down the street. “You see,” she’d say, “they know how to appreciate you,” Teresita simply nodding.
What most surprised María, however, was how she felt after that two-week sojourn when they arrived back in Miami. She couldn’t wait to get home, not just to Omar, whom she had left with her next-door neighbor Annabella, but to the city itself, and the familiarity of her neighborhood and house. She’d feel the same when they made their other trips, now and then: to a medical convention in Los Angeles, to a seaside resort along the coast of South Carolina, and to Washington, D.C., where that elegant lady and her daughter acted like happy tourists.
Then back, as always, to the usual routines of their days.