Stepdog (18 page)

“I feel like the mistress,” I told Jim every time he left me.

Even when the New York City Office of Emergency Management issued hazardous travel advisories for rain, snow, sleet, and locusts, Jim braved the mile-long walk or bike ride from the train station in Montclair to the house. He put himself in harm's way for this dog. He couldn't find sitters to feed Eddie in the morning. And if the entrance to the house was not shoveled, forget it—the sitters wouldn't come anyway, even if bribed with money and Godiva chocolates.

Such are the joys of dog ownership.

New York weather complicated everyone's lives, even the dog's. Eddie wasn't used to this East Coast hell in the summer, which made him lethargic. On the worst days, Jim had to leave the air conditioner on in the living room while we were at work.

Our first winter in Montclair, Eddie snapped back to his old self once temperatures started cooling. When it snowed, he didn't seem to mind. His nose could still detect smells. But the first time it got really cold, in the twenties, he cut his own walk short. He pulled on the leash toward the house mere minutes after I took him out. Jim gave walking another try and Eddie resorted to civil disobedience—he played dead and Jim had to carry him back to the house. He shivered indoors and came looking for extra warmth by sitting at my feet. I placed my hand on his head and it was vibrating. The heater was on, but he was freezing.

For the first time in a blue moon, I went shopping for the dog. I got him a green nylon coat with black reflective stripes, lined with fleece inside, on sale for eleven dollars. With the new orange collar Jim recently got him, he looked as well coordinated as Ralph Lauren's blue heeler. At the pet shop's checkout counter I had ignored booties for $39.99. Eddie was likely to hate them and bite them off the second after I put them on. But when I strapped the coat on him, he didn't fight it.

“Maybe we can wrap plastic around his paws and tie it with a rubber band as a test,” I told Jim.

“He'd be embarrassed when he runs into his friends. He may be bullied.”

“Well, I'm not spending forty dollars unless I'm sure he won't pull them off again.”

After weeks of cold temperatures, Jim and I were looking forward to our annual escape to Puerto Rico for New Year's Eve. We kenneled Eddie and headed for the airport right after work on a Friday night. I called Mami as we waited at the gate, but she didn't pick up. This had become typical. My mom had reached the age of memory trouble and unexplainable quirks. Her new thing was to unplug anything pluggable “to prevent fires.” She had started losing short-term memory in her seventies, but, in her eighties now, she was still able to take care of herself and function normally enough to give me laughs and make me mad in equal parts. The only way to reach her lately was to call my sister so she could hand her cell phone over to our mother.

So I called my sister and went through the drill.

“Mami, you have to take the cordless phone with you wherever you are in the house. I've called and called, but you never answer it.”

“What? But I haven't been out. When did you call?”

“Just now. And Tuesday, and Thursday.”

“At what time?”

“At different times, Mami. You just don't hear it because you have it in the bedroom behind a closed door and you're watching television in another room. Or maybe it's unplugged.”

“But I haven't been out. Let me check if there's a tone.”

“No, Mami. Forget it. Just take it with you wherever you are.”

“But I've been in the house and no one has called.”

Ooooooooooooooommmmm.

I cut our conversation short as Jim and I boarded the plane.

“See you soon, Mamita,” I said. I just wanted to hear her voice, just in case. I'd never completely lost my fear of flying. But it was a short hop to the island from New York, about four hours. Soon enough, Jim was looking at my hair with a grin.

“We must be close,” he said.

It was an old joke. We were about to land in humid San Juan and my straight winter tresses had already started curling upward as we approached the airport. By touchdown, the top of my head was a forest of frizz. We never needed the pilot to tell us we were on our final descent. When I began to look like Big Orphan Annie, it was time to put all electronics away. Growing up in tropical weather, this was the bane of my young life—every day was a bad hair day. On this trip, my carry-on contained bobby pins for the dubi-dubi—the trick of wrapping your hair around the crown of your head and pinning it tightly for a few hours to straighten the waves and curls. I also carried plenty of clips, barrettes, headbands, and elastic bands for further taming. It was all in vain.

When Jim and I visited Puerto Rico, we took time to both see family and vacation all around the island. We stayed in cute B&Bs or
paradors
in places like El Yunque's rain forest; Rincón, a surfers' hot spot on the island's west; and Vieques, a beach paradise off the coast of Puerto Rico where the United States Navy used to stage live-fire and bombing training exercises. My idea of bliss was to sit by the water with a book and a piña colada; Jim's was to be out in the water catching and releasing (also known as harassing) tarpon. But we always timed our annual visits to the main event: New Year's Eve. It was the biggest party of the year and it was a family affair. Older kids could go do whatever they wanted after midnight, but for the countdown you needed your loved ones with you. That meant parents and kids celebrated the new year together, mostly at house parties. Within my huge extended family on my mom's side—three brothers and seven sisters multiplied by children and grandchildren—New Year's Eve had been hosted at some relative's home or our own house in rotation. The bar was stocked with rum, whiskey, and homemade
coquito
, the rum-spiked coconut eggnog. The potluck food includes the traditional
pasteles
,
arroz con gandules
,
pernil
, and
guineitos en escabeche
, a fat-and-carb fest of plantain pies, rice with pigeon peas, pork shoulder, and green plantains in a vinegary marinade.

After that, only more sugar with our alcohol would do:
arroz con dulce
(coconut rice pudding),
tembleque
(a coconut gelatin that shakes like Jell-O), and guava paste with cheese. But nothing got eaten until we formed a circle to scream “
Diez! Nueve! Ocho! Siete! Seis! Cinco! Cuatro! Tres! Dos! Uno!
Happy New Year!” In the ensuing kissing and hugging, an aunt or two would peel off to sit by the radio and cry listening to the traditional
El Brindis del Bohemio
, a Mexican poem about a man's New Year's toast to his absent mother. Tears wiped off and dried, the buffet dinner would follow and the party would continue until two or three in the morning or until the last drunk stumbled out.

The party had shrunk considerably by the time Jim met me and joined in. The family had sustained departures—usually to the afterlife or Miami. In time, my extended family became even more so, scattered farther north and west in the States, in places like Atlanta, Dallas, and Corpus Christi. For this year's celebration, it was just Mami, my sister and nephews, and a friend or two and their families. My closest cousin, Ednita, was with her daughter in Orlando and other cousins were otherwise occupied, so we stayed home. We gathered on Mari's terrace upstairs. My sister cooked the traditional foods, and Jim and I took care of the liquor and refreshments.

But while there was plenty to eat and drink as the party got under way at nine p.m., no one was dancing. My sister and a girlfriend sat on the terrace chatting, the kids were running in and out with loads of firecrackers to set off on the street, and only my mom and I were trying to get into the spirit, with Jim pitching in as our salsa partner every other song with a frown. Jim was appalled that kids of all ages were handling fireworks on the street with little adult supervision. The kids were fine. It was the adults I worried about. It was common around the island for guns to go off at midnight. Even though they were pointed up, New Year's Day was a day of reckoning—revelers woke up hung over and bracing themselves for the news and the toll of people killed or injured by stray bullets.

But tonight Mami and I danced and danced to salsa and merengue music from the rocking party playing out on one of the island's television channels, oblivious to the deafening noise from the sky. My mom was just shy of her eighty-fourth birthday but she had a strong grip as she held me and a sure step when we separated to break it down. She was a little thin, and had diabetes and a touch of dementia, but her body still responded to the percussion of our African roots. When the song was jamming, she did a little jump and let out an “Ehee!” I laughed and wished with all my heart that dancing was the last thing to go for me too.

A few days later, Jim and I were on our way to pick up my mother to go to Costco when my sister called me to say that our mom had fallen in the bathroom. She was bent down, toweling off her legs, and when she straightened up she lost her balance and fell backward. My sister, who was always with her when she showered these days, caught her, but not before my mother hit her back hard against the tiled wall.

When we got to the house my mom was in pain but nothing seemed broken. We all thought she just needed some Advil and rest. Jim was leaving for New York the next day and when they said good-bye as she lay in bed my mom held his hand and told him in English: “I love you, Jim.” The next day, she complained about excruciating pain so we took her to the emergency room, where they didn't find anything broken but sent her home with ultra-strong painkillers.

“Make sure she drinks a lot of water,” the doctors told us.

Somehow, Mami began a steady deterioration that within days led her back to the hospital and, finally, renal failure. My sister and I didn't leave her bedside. We took turns covering her with kisses, telling her we loved her over and over, sitting by her side with our heads buried on her chest, feeling her heart. We put earphones on her so she could listen to salsa music on an iPod as her breathing became more labored. A nurse warned us not to talk about her condition within earshot.

“They can hear everything,” she said.

We knew Mami could hear us and feel us because she waited for my sister and me to fall asleep next to her in a cot, and only then did she take her last breath.

Losing my mother so abruptly, exactly fourteen days after we'd danced, felt like she was killed in a car accident or some act of violence. I didn't think I had experienced real suffering until that day—not when my father died, not when my dear childhood friend and dance partner, Junior, died in his thirties after a long illness, not when a younger cousin was stabbed to death by her boyfriend, not when her brother, who was my age, later died of abdominal cancer. I didn't know what to do with myself. Whatever faith I had, it failed me. Where did you go, Mami?
¿Dónde estás?
Where are you? I tried to change the subject in my head so I wasn't pulled into a black hole of despair.

Regrets provided a huge distraction. I should have phoned my mother more. Our conversations had gotten shorter over time as she was losing her memory. She asked the same questions over and over and I usually began my good-byes after she'd asked me for the fifth time, “And how are things over there?” She could no longer catch me up about the neighbors or remember what my nephews were up to. She wasn't able to share the latest shenanigans of local politicians or island celebrity gossip. I had been losing Mami in dribs and drabs. But she had not forgotten she was my mother. I still asked for her advice and she still listened to my whining about work or life with great interest. She was still the person who loved me the most, and she was the person I loved the most.

Dinorah Pérez de Navarro—mother, grandmother, wife, feminist, shopper par excellence, half of Las Chicas Marshall with her chum and
comadre
Josefina,
muchacha
,
salsera
, Rosita the riveter, my role model, my mommy—thank you for everything. The luck was all mine.

The emptiness Mami left behind was so overwhelming that I spent days hugging the walls whenever I thought of her absence. But I still had Jim, who didn't leave me alone one moment and who gave a lovely eulogy. And I still had my sister, who was stoic in her grief. I was grateful for all my cousins and relatives, and for my mom's girlfriends and the friends who gathered around us on a damp afternoon to watch my sister and I plant a silver buttonwood tree with Dinorah's ashes in her beloved garden.

Back in the States, I wasn't angry even if I felt the doctors could have done better. And I didn't feel sorry for myself, even when I was officially an orphan now. I eventually accepted my mom's death just as I became resigned to the aging going on all around me. Even the Lipsters, my circle of accomplished, ball-busting girlfriends, were talking about face-lifts. Like me, my friends were getting old, not just older. I didn't remember when exactly dinner conversations started veering to the latest weird shit that was happening to us, but our health was now a common topic.

My friends Michael and Leslie had a bad case of acid reflux. My friend Hector first battled some mandibular problem called TMJ, then was diagnosed with very treatable but still baffling tonsil cancer. My girlfriend Susan was hobbling around in major pain with sciatica. But my friend Robert won. We went to the Joyce Theater to see the flamenco dancer Soledad Barrio and over wine afterward he told me that he was having these strange coughing fits. The diagnosis: his tongue was too far back in his mouth. No kidding. Robert just learned this in his sixties.

“He told me my tongue is too far back,” Robert said of the doctor, “and that there's nothing anyone can do about it.” The news screamed for a second opinion, but the next doctor concurred—he told Robert the first doctor was reputable and he agreed with the diagnosis. Robert loaded up on sugarless cough drops and that was that.