Free one hot summer by carolina garcia aguilera Page B

life issues while negotiating Miami traffic—and drove the long block up to my parents’ house. None of the kids lived at home anymore. My brother Sergio and I were both married. My oldest brother Emiliano—Micky—was still a bachelor at forty and lived in an apartment on Brickell Avenue. But my parents had never moved into a smaller place, and they kept our rooms decorated as though we were still living there. Going upstairs was like walking into a time warp, a sort of museum to our childhood.
    As I turned off the motor and got out of the car, I realized that if I were still single and living at home, then there would be no ethical problem with Luther picking me up for a date. The only issue would be explaining to Mamá and Papa that I was dating an American.

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    Mamá greeted me with a smile on her face when she looked up and saw me come into the living room. Then she looked all around me.
    “Where’s Marti?” she asked.
    “I didn’t bring him,” I blurted out, dutifully kissing her proffered cheek. “He stayed at home.”
    My mother stiffened, her smile vanished. “Why? Is he sick?” She stepped away from me, looking me over as though searching for lies.
    I tried not to shrink away from those laserlike eyes. I was a grown woman of thirty-five, but my mother could still make me feel like a child who had committed some grave infraction. She made me feel guilty for thoughts that had yet to pop into my mind.
    My mother used to tell me about one of our ancestors in Cuba at the turn of the century. His father whipped him ten strokes with a belt every morning before breakfast. He hadn’t done anything wrong yet, the father explained, but he would slip up at some point during the day. Best to get the punishment out of the way early was the rationale. I still thought about that.
    My mother and I were exactly the same height, so she was able to stare right into my eyes. It was the perfect angle to make me feel like she was inspecting my soul. My friends’ mothers’ eyesight had worsened with age, but not Mamá’s; if anything, it had gotten sharper. I shouldn’t have been surprised.
    She wasn’t conventionally beautiful, or even very pretty, but Mercedes Santos was a stylish woman who knew how to make herself look attractive. She was sixty-eight, but carried herself like a much younger woman. Even taking into account her three face-lifts, the liposuctions, the standing appointments for Botox injections, and various nips and tucks, her youthful appearance was due more to her iron will than to surgical intervention. My mother was one of the early adherents to the “my body, my temple” philosophy.
    I suppose it would be hard to look too shabby in her designer clothes and beautiful jewelry, not to mention the massages, facials, weekly hair appointments, and personal training sessions. But Mamá took full advantage of all these things. She was a poster child for the battle against the ravages of aging.
    Needless to say, I was my mother’s worst nightmare. She had tried, I had to give her full credit, but vanity about my looks has never been high on my list of preoccupations. I was no bag lady, and I was no stranger to the cosmetics counter and hairdressing salons, but I never defined my identity by how I looked. My mother thinks I’ve turned out to be a tough American broad, a militant for equality who lets her looks go as a political statement. It’s just one of many things she fails to understand about me.
    Besides, I was no frump. I was even a member of the elite Saks Fifth Avenue First Club, open only to individuals who spent a sufficiently ridiculous amount of money in the store. I worshipped at the altar of the Saks shoe department, and had toyed around with the idea of stipulating in my will that my wake should be held there, with my body displayed amid the pumps and high heels. Hey, compared to alcoholism, smoking, and drug addiction, a little shopping fetish was nothing.
    Great, I thought. One