Soledad: A Novel

by Angie Cruz

For my mother

When I close my eyes and see bloody orange, I want to squish myself inside a tangerine and sleep among the seeds.

I remember the way the sunset dropped into the sea at home in Dominican Republic. It’s the only place I can remember outside of my apartment in Washington Heights, before Manolo, before I became a mother to Soledad. I want to let myself die and live in dreams.

It’s always like that: just when I think I don’t give a shit about what my family thinks, they find a way to drag me back home.

Gorda expects a fight from me. She tells people that I was born con la pata caliente, feet burning to be anywhere but here.

The tourists, the white folks, the kind of people who are too scared to go uptown, get off the train, leaving me behind. Once the train takes off from 59th Street there’s no stopping it. Next stop is Harlem and then Spanish Harlem and then finally Washington Heights.

When I first moved downtown and people where I work asked me where I was from, I used to say the Upper West Side, vaguely.

I said it for so long that even I forgot that to most people Washington Heights is not even considered Manhattan. It’s more like the Bronx.

When I told her I was from the Upper West Side, she cringed and looked at me pityingly. How can you stand it up there? she asked horrified. It’s like gringolandia.

I wasn’t sure what she meant by that exactly, I just knew it was bad. It felt worse than being called a blanquita back home: a sellout, a wannabe white girl.

I know I should turn back while I still can, before anyone in my family sees me, but when potbellied, sockless men and pubescent homeboys call me mami, as if I’ll give them the time of day if they stare at me long enough, I know I must keep moving forward.

I’m twenty years old. Twenty years old is old enough to live away from home. Apparently not old enough for my aunt Gorda, who’s almost forty and still lives with my grandmother, and Victor, who is about to hit thirty and won’t leave my grandmother’s pampering ways unless someone marries him and takes her place.

I tried to tell Gorda that Europe couldn’t wait. But she went on this trip about how I’ve forgotten the importance of familia.

That’s some language for a pretty girl. As if I care about what he thinks. That’s the problem with the guys around here. He thinks because he spends his life in the gym and gets dimples when he smiles that I’m going to listen to anything he has to say.

One day I thought I had my own room, the next I day I was sharing my room with three little cousins who belong to Tío So-and-so who just arrived from some campo I hadn’t heard of.

But Gorda told me that’s all changed. Once I left the hood my mother closed house, only letting Flaca visit every once in a while. Not having access to my mother’s apartment drove Gorda and my grandmother crazy.

The words run through my head like a mantra. I came too late. My mother is dead. Get out of my way.

I walk down the long dark hallway past the closets and bathroom; past my uncle Victor’s diploma from refrigeration school, which he never used; a cracked mirror (Gorda believes it’s one of the reasons her husband, Raful, left her); a Ziplocked bag filled with Holy Water, to counteract the broken mirror; my grandmother’s collection of quinceañera dolls, (she regrettably never celebrated her fifteenth birthday); my grandfather’s walker and a year’s supply of adult diapers that the government sent to us compliments of Medicaid.

I thought I was switched at birth, hoping my real mother would one day appear at the door to take me away. I held on to the fact that I don’t look like my mother.

My mother has the kind of face that when she smiles it makes you want to cry. A lifetime of misery, Gorda calls it.

My grandmother, says it’s because my mother, was born on the wrong side of things. Came out feet first, that child. But I know it has everything to do with my father.

Before my father came into my mother’s life, I imagine her to be more like me, with a desire to see the world, to try new things. Maybe if she had never met my father she would have been the kind of mother who would have understood why I...

For years we lived safely in our rituals. I never confronted her and no matter how our days went we went around each other like repelling magnets.

Drink it, she said again. She poured another glass of water and another. The glasses stood next to each other like soldiers on a front line. I wouldn’t drink from them.

My mother got up and lost herself in the living room closet. I wanted the closet to swallow my mother, lock her up into oblivion.

Coño maldita niña! Why won’t you drink it? Why won’t you take a glass of water from me, Soledad?

She must’ve known I was leaving. The glasses howled like hungry dogs as my sweaty hands caressed the rims. One by one I smoothed my fingertips over the water-filled glasses and they started to sing, drowning out my mother’s scream.

Drink the maldita water, she begged. A glass of water, that’s all, Soledad. Can’t you see, I’m trying to do something nice for you? When are you going to forgive me? When?

She swept the glasses off the table with her arms, flinging them up into the air. I hunched over and covered my eyes. Glass ricocheted off my ears. I

As I felt drops of water fling over my hair, I had to remind myself that I was an artist, lucky to be selected from thousands of artists to attend Cooper Union. She continued screaming and I covered my ears.

I had taken off the gold hoops my mother gave me when I was born and placed them on the kitchen table.

Don’t you turn your back on me, my mother screamed, using all the air in her lungs. Watch me, I said. That day I planned never to return.

They remind me of my crowded paintings; no matter how big I stretch the canvas, I never have enough room for all my ideas. My art teacher says I have an interesting relationship to clutter.

My family is like clutter in many ways. They gather in piles, hard to get rid of no matter how much I try.

She’s lighting candles around my mother, whose hipbones push from inside her dress. The blue candles are to keep you close to home, the yellow to drive away the sadness, the purple are so you’ll never forget and the white are so you’ll sleep in peace.

The way my family stares at me, so happy to see me, as if this wasn’t some kind of tragedy, is horrifying. They think my coming back is going to help her.

What did you do? I walked into Olivia’s room and all the saints had their back to her. San Miguel wasn’t watching over her? Gorda asks.

Olivia’s clock was blinking eleven, eleven. As if to record the moment it all happened. And today is the eleventh. And Olivia’s birthday is 11/11 and it was at eleven that Soledad walked into this house after being gone for twenty-two months, and half of that is eleven, she says, and narrows her eyes.

Leaving my mother’s welfare up to my sixty-five-year-old grandmother, whose head is in the campo and whose heart is in love with Americanisms, is crazy.

My grandmother is split between ideas, countries, her dreams and what’s real.

. . . and we live on 164th Street and if you add those three numbers you get eleven, my grandmother continues while Gorda nods, ...

No matter how strong I feel away from them, strong enough to talk back, get angry, even kick some ass if I have to, when I’m around them I acquiesce and lose all my power.

We’ve been doing some thinking and decided that you shouldn’t stay in your mother’s apartment alone. When did you have time to think? I just arrived.

Why she still wears corsets at her age is a mystery. Maybe after wearing them for so long she needs them to hold herself together. Or maybe she still has gusto. Womanly desires.

Look Soledad, I’m not blaming you for leaving, but your mother has been very lonely and we think it pushed her to live in her dreams.

Look at her, does she look like she’s in a coma to you? She’s heavy with so many thoughts. My poor daughter, every day, filled with hours with no one to look after, not a man, not a child. I truly think that algo le pasa las mujeres cuando le dan demasiado tiempo para pensar.

Maybe I should just go back home, Gorda. Obviously you and Abuela have everything under control. What home? This is your home. The only home you will ever have.

Gorda passes incense over my mother’s body, ignoring the fact that my mother doesn’t believe in the power of a cleansing. My mother believes in X rays, prescriptions, things that come out of a pharmacy. But that’s not going to stop Gorda from breaking into my mother’s apartment and getting rid of what Gorda calls the frustrated energy that’s eating away at my mother’s spirit.

Soledad, there’s nothing worse than a man who doesn’t get what he wants, my mother said this every time my father, Manolo, slept on the living room couch, or when he spent nights away from the apartment. She said it when she was beat up, when she had to go to the hospital with broken bones.

So give him what he wants, I begged her when I was too young to understand. More than I already do? No más. Do it for me? I’m fighting for you, mi’jita.