What club? Who is them? I wanted to ask her these questions but started with: Where’d you hear that?
She opened her mouth and looked at me, then my mom, then said to her, What is she, the CIA?
This is when it would’ve made sense for my mom to introduce us, to say, This is my daughter Lizet (or better yet: My daughter, Lizet, the one I told you about, the one away at college in New York, remember?). That Mami hadn’t told me who this woman was made me think I maybe wasn’t really there, but it also made me feel like a regular, like the woman and I already knew each other—of course we did!—from all the previous rallies. That couldn’t be true, but maybe she knew about me—well enough that my mom didn’t feel compelled to refresh her memory. Maybe she was my mother’s more preoccupied version of Rafael: You must be the smart one. I waited for some hint of this, needing to believe that Leidy was wrong just to keep walking. I tried to believe this woman already knew who I was as my mom laughed and said, Myra, you’re too much.
Then Mami smiled at me, too, so I tried to remember if I’d met Myra at Thanksgiving, passed her on our way back to the apartment or seen her lingering outside the building next door. Myra screamed out some other woman’s name and waved her over—another Ariel T-shirt, this one with a huge Cuban flag, the star replaced by Ariel’s face. The new woman rubbed her arms and bent toward my mom, then Myra, then me, planting a kiss in the air by my cheek, the third in the line of automatic greetings.
Mami had warned me not to come for her but for Ariel, and by then I saw why: she was not my mom here. She was Lourdes who made T-shirts, Lourdes who had friends I’d never met. She laughed at something the new woman said—a big laugh, one that seemed careful to match the ones around her. She reached forward and tugged the edge of this woman’s T-shirt to stretch it out and said, Oh, I really like this one—sounding years younger to me, a girl-voice almost, trying and hoping to fit in. Leidy’s freak-out must’ve been about this. She must’ve seen Mami against this new backdrop and wondered, Who the hell are you trying to be? But I recognized the rise in pitch as something else: the effort—the strain—of being a new version of yourself, a strain I knew. I held my spot by Mami in the little circle of talking women, convinced they knew by then that this friend of theirs, their Lourdes, was my mom—it never felt more obvious to me.
And as more and more people arrived, I felt how easy it must’ve been for Mami, finally surrounded by something that seemed like love—or at the very least a shared sense of purpose—because I felt it too, standing in the street, the whole crowd shifting to allow cars to pass, each of us waving at the drivers. No one was hysterical: people laughed, found friends in the crowd, perked each other up by offering each other café in tiny plastic cups. The Ariel T-shirts, the flags—all of it was just a uniform that said, I belong here. I yanked my Ariel shirt from the belt loop and slipped it over my head, smoothing the wrinkles I’d made in it as best I could. It hung to my knees, so—bad as I knew it would look—I tucked the shirt into my shorts: I didn’t want the news portraying me as the weirdo Cuban protester refusing to wear pants.
A man near the front of the crowd yelled that the house’s screen door was opening, but it was clearly still closed. No one came out, and I waited for my mom—who’d craned her neck between her friends’ heads to see Ariel’s house—to turn back around. I waited for her to see me in the shirt and to smile, to recognize me. The door stayed closed—no sign of anything. I waited for her to see how the shirt hung on me, to see that I understood what she was doing. I tugged at the shirt, made sure its message was clear. I waited and I waited.