Sweet Mary Read online

  “Dare ya to take your shorts off and climb that tree,” she’d say.

  “Fine.”

  I’d peel off my gym shorts and clamber up the curved trunk until I reached the top. With one hand, I’d swat at the coconuts until one of them came loose and tumbled to the ground. Then, while Gina rolled on the grass, laughing wildly, I’d stop for a minute to catch the view from up top: the fruit trees and random clutter, the non sequitur of items on clotheslines, the frayed divisions of backyard fences unable to contain the ruckus of Cuban-exile factory-class families.

  So this was a tree, not a stripper’s pole. This is what I told myself that day as I tucked the hem of my skirt between my thighs to prevent a peep show and I tightened my legs around the pole. I slid my way up to the top and when I got there, I could see the cowboy was no longer laughing. No, he looked like he was about to have a patatún, as my mother would say. I pushed off with my hands, slowly arching my back, until I was upside down. The room actually looked better that way, like a giant cherry-topped sundae. I slowly curled myself back up, wrapped my arms around the pole, and leaped off, landing nicely on my feet. I adjusted my skirt, slipped on my sandals, and casually walked back to the astounded cowboy.

  I leaned down toward the bed.

  “Let’s make a deal, you and me,” I said.

  “You name it,” he came back.

  “If you go to that pole and do what I just did…”

  “Yeah, what?”

  “You don’t have to buy this place.”

  The cowboy looked at me, bewildered, for a long moment. Then I heard him utter the words that would pole-vault me into a new tax bracket:

  “I’ll take it,” he said. “I’ll take it, Sweet Mary.”

  TWO

  WHEN I GOT back to the office, I found Gina in her usual afternoon spot—the second-floor terrace. She sat hunched over a patio table, reading the paper, sipping on a café cubano and smoking her three o’clock cigarette, that particular hint of street beneath her Dolce suit.

  “I found myself a bachelor,” she said, eyes fixed on the newspaper. “Retired plastic surgeon, avid yachtsman, wine collector. Waterfront mansion. Ski loft in Aspen. Not too shabby.”

  She scrawled a big red star on the newspaper with her Sharpie.

  “Except he’s a hundred and two years old,” I said, taking a seat next to her. I could see she had red-marked several prospects already.

  “No, he’s eighty-seven,” she came back.

  “Ex-wife, kids?”

  “Just a nephew.”

  “We know what that means.”

  “Quick sale, baby.”

  Gina’s ambitions never ceased to amaze me. She’s my oldest friend, the most loyal person I know, but she will stop at nothing to make a sale. I know I’m not one to talk after my gymnastics display at Glades Terrace. But, trust me, if it had been Gina, she would have given the cowboy a real heart attack. She’s got a thing about rich men—preferably dead rich men. Which is why she brings the obituary section along on her cigarette breaks. And when she’s done with that, she devours the local news pages for any sign of available, sellable property. Big tennis star dumps his wife? Gina Torres is on the case. Corrupt doctor busted for Medicare fraud and headed to Foreclosure Land? Gina somehow finagles the listing. If this dead plastic surgeon was as alone in the world as the wealthy, gay astrologer Gina had zeroed in on a few weeks earlier, I could guarantee that we’d be rummaging through the poor guy’s china cabinet before too long.

  “How much you want to bet the nephew’s selling the old man’s wine collection?” she said. “At bargain basement prices.”

  “There are rap songs about women like you,” I said.

  “Business is business, ma,” she said. “Sometimes, business requires a girl to blur the lines just a bit. Catch me?”

  Gina jammed her cigarette butt into the empty demitasse. She gave a little swagger, like she always does when she thinks she’s made some ballsy pronouncement, uttered the perfect female bumper-sticker line, nailed it. I love it when she does this because it makes it all the more satisfying to knock her off her throne.

  “Yeah,” I said, waving my cell phone. “By the way, Mario’s on line three.”

  Gina shot a sly look my way.

  “You’re a bitch on wheels, you know that? Mario?” she said. “Who the hell’s talking about Mario?”

  She threw her head back, amused that I’d whip out our code word on such an unworthy occasion. I usually reserved it for girls’ nights when Gina’s wild side hijacked her most ladylike intentions. “Mario’s on three” is all I have to say. And, like magic, my girl stops dancing on the tabletop.

  Mario Alvarez, pharmaceutical company exec, is the macho prick who is Gina’s fiancé. He’s on her like the paparazzi on a pseudo-celeb. He doesn’t let her take a step without the barrage of questions, the innuendo, the color commentary. He snoops on her, reads her e-mail and text messages, digs through her gym bag. And the worst part of the repressive scenario? His captive couldn’t care less about his oppressive ways. Gina just shrugs it off as the peculiarities of a man in love. I don’t get it. I don’t understand why a smart, hot girl like Gina would dumb herself down at the mere touch of a man, this man. Every ounce of intelligence and independence drains from her being and she morphs into one of those fembot chicas on Spanish TV with acting chops to match the skimpy outfits they wore on their themed bikini calendars.

  “Speaking of Mah-rio,” Gina said, because she just couldn’t resist the segue opportunity, “he did the sweetest thing last night.”

  “I thought he was on a business trip.”

  “He is. He called the minute his flight landed in Brazil to ask if I had gotten home okay from the gym. Isn’t that sweet?”

  “You’ve been getting home okay for twenty years—how is that sweet?”

  “Don’t be harsh—”

  “And let’s say you didn’t get home okay last night. What the hell was he going to do about it… in Brazil? ”

  “That’s cold, ma.”

  “I tell you. Watch out for guys like Mario,” I said. “They’re all about the empty gesture. I know this from experience.”

  “You just forgot what it’s like to be in love,” said Gina.

  “Guess so.”

  Gina folded her newspaper and got up. She tossed an arm around my shoulders and squeezed hard.

  “Come on, moneybags, we’ve got a celebration to go to,” she said.

  “For what?”

  “For you.”

  That’s Gina, Mouth of the South. I had barely wiped the Everglades muck off my heels and she had told the entire office about the big Glades Terrace sale.

  We went downstairs and joined the Grand Realty crew in the boss’s office. Like the rest of our boutique firm, Ida Miller’s office was more like a large parlor appointed with antiques, orchids, and botanical prints. Its Old Florida elegance reflected Ida’s personal style. A Southern belle in her early sixties, she had distinguished herself among her overdesirous peers with her gracious, disarming way. That’s not to say she was demure. No, Ida Miller may have been a warm, generous woman, but she was as plucky as they come. She was the woman who missed an important business meeting when she found her husband’s beloved chocolate lab, Sadie, nearly passed out atop her own vomit one morning last year, an odd-shaped bulge protruding from the side of her belly. Ida, in her favorite pink crepe suit, scooped the dog up, gently placed her on the cream leather seat of her Lexus, and rushed her to the veterinarian’s office. There, she waited while the vet performed emergency surgery to remove a foreign object from Sadie’s bowels. When he was done, the stern-faced veterinarian summoned Ida into the surgical room to show her what he had retrieved.

  “You really need to be more careful about what you leave in a dog’s reach,” said the doctor, holding up the mangled remains of a red lace bra, size 36DD. “Just a couple more hours and the poor girl might have been dead.”

  Ida’s eyes narrowed on the
bra. No amount of dog slime could erase its original color, a ghastly shade of pickled-egg red, a shade she’d never wear on a bra she’d never own, a bra three cup sizes larger than any in her collection of neutral-toned, damask brassieres. It was a bra better suited for a younger woman in need of attention, a giggly, gum-smacking tart like her husband’s new “apprentice.” Ida silently calculated how many times in the past week her husband had telephoned to ask if she would be going home for lunch, knowing full well she rarely, if ever, went home for lunch—three times he had called.

  “Dead is right, Doctor,” Ida said.

  With that, she paid the $5,245 bill with her husband’s platinum card and, later that day, informed him she was leaving him—and taking Sadie.

  It was Ida who introduced me to the Gary Zarkan Method, the power sales techniques that made her the most successful woman in the business year after year. But here’s why I went to work for her: At the end of the day, Ida was a lady, and I had a good feeling about her. I could trust her.

  “The first million is like the first olive out of the jar,” she told me as she pinned a gold TOP SELLER emblem on the collar of my blouse that day. “After that, they tumble right out.”

  “Thanks, Ida,” I replied, humbled, as the room swelled in applause.

  I glanced around at my coworkers, a nattily dressed bunch, and caught sight of sad-sack Brian’s empty desk, his wedding picture still propped in one corner, next to his favorite mug. WORLD’S BEST REALTOR, it read.

  Thirty minutes later, Gina and I were sitting side by side at Nail Fever Deluxe, sipping on mango sours. While a nail tech polished my toes in Pistol-Packin’ Red—hey, I had earned it—I let Gina do what she did best: inflict her happiness on the world.

  “What would go better with a yellow diamond engagement ring—coral or hot pink?” she asked the young Korean nail tech before answering her own question: “Coral, I think. Go with the coral.”

  “But you don’t have a yellow diamond engagement ring,” I said.

  “Yet,” said Gina.

  She tossed back the rest of her mango sour. She held up her empty glass and signaled to the nail tech to go fetch her another.

  “We need a girls’ night out tonight,” she said.

  “No, I need a hot bath.”

  “But I’m single tonight,” Gina said. “In fact, I’m single for a whole month.”

  “Exactly. We can do it another night.”

  “Come on.”

  “Can’t. Gotta go pick up Max,” I told her.

  “I thought Dickhead had him tonight.”

  “No, he’s at my folks’ house.”

  “Ladies and gentlemen,” she said, offering her trademark roll of the air drums, “The Addams Family of Hialeah.”

  I hate to say this, but Gina’s description of my folks is not too far off. Lilia and Herminio Guevara make a feisty pair. Don’t get me wrong. I would throw myself into a fire for them, but the truth is they drive me to the brink. I’ve often wondered if I was adopted, snatched from the arms of some unsuspecting woman, a perfectly sane, law-abiding woman, on a normal street in Miami circa 1976. Maybe I wasn’t meant to live my life as Mary Guevara. Maybe I was meant to live it as Alicia Fernandez, some random little girl whose parents never haggled down the meter reader, never gave her presents with the plastic security tags still attached, never tried to pass off drunk Uncle Lazaro as Santa Claus. Such a child never had to explain to her friends why her Santa never brought any real presents to her house. He brought things like dead pigs and he sang slurred tangos, never Christmas carols, while her mom egged him on with shots of Johnnie Walker Red.

  It’s not easy being the daughter of Lilia Guevara, queen of labyrinths and double standards. She wants to be the boss but never shoulders the blame. But my biggest peeve about my mother was the fact that during my marriage she always sided with my ex. Tony could do no wrong in her eyes. It didn’t matter that he was an arrogant, overbearing tool who just wanted a trophy wife. He was rich. He was French. He sang Aznavour. That was enough for her.

  That night as I drove to her house, I imagined my mother was exactly where she was every night, watching the evening soap. There was probably some forlorn farm girl on-screen, posed against a stately chateau in some unspecified Latin American country, sobbing about the baby that was taken from her by the evil governess. I bet my mother was crying, too. But not for the farm girl. She was crying because that stately chateau might have been her own destiny if not for her spineless husband and inopportune offspring. I exaggerate, but you get the point.

  While the telenovela plays, she ignores everything—Max, the dirty dishes, even the relentless hollering that comes from the next room.

  “Ma!” it goes. “Ma! ”

  She doesn’t respond to anyone or anything, not until the stroke of nine o’clock. That means my father is in charge of watching Max, and that involves a whole other can of peas. Daddy likes to show Max his prizefighter photo albums, flipping through his treasured portraits and saying things like, “That was Bartolo, best fighter I ever had. Undefeated. He had the power of Joe Louis and the speed of Kid Gavilan.”

  The unfortunate thing is he’s not talking about a champion boxer. He’s talking about a gamecock. Think barrel-chested rooster with a Brazilian wax. Daddy’s eyes well up each time he cracks open those albums, and seven-year-old Max has to console him:

  “Don’t cry again, Grandpa,” Max tells him. “Maybe he flew back to Cuba.”

  The flash of horror in Daddy’s eyes forces the kid to backtrack.

  “Or maybe he went to live with his mom.”

  Daddy used to be a pig farmer in Cuba until Castro came and took the family’s only possession, a small plot of land on the northeastern tip of the island. This was the thanks he got after he supported the rebels, giving them food and supplies and even a couple of horses for their treks into the mountains. He and my mother fled to Miami, where they fell into the exile trance of factory jobs and weekend nostalgia.

  About ten years ago, Daddy suffered an accident at the aluminum factory where he worked twelve-hour days as a machine operator. The rolling mill he was on, a rumbling monster of a machine that cranks out three thousand feet of aluminum foil per minute, hit a snag and threw him off. Daddy hit the floor, shattered his hip, and sprained his lumbar vertebrae, forcing him to retire and endure years of physical therapy. At seventy years of age, he has little material proof of his thirty-plus years in a factory, just a small, boxy house on a blue-collar street in Hialeah. But he still has dreams. They tell him what numbers to play.

  Daddy has a wonderful heart but not much backbone. He’s scared of life, and he’s scared of his wife. He’s even scared of his best friend. Then again, his best friend is a guy nicknamed Puddle Morales. (That’s Puddle as in “Puddle of Blood,” if you’re translating from the Cuban vernacular.) Back in Cuba, they used to play ball together, chase the ladies, and bet on gamecocks. But here, Daddy hides in the bathroom whenever he catches sight of Puddle’s limousine. Frankly, I don’t blame him. I never liked the guy.

  I pulled into the driveway to find Daddy and Max poking around the garage, scavenging for something. Daddy’s garage is a Sanford and Son reprise of machine parts, busted radios, long-discarded appliances. I stepped into the clutter just as Daddy found what he was looking for: a boy’s bicycle.

  “Nice, huh?” he said, rolling the bike toward Max. “For you.”

  “Rock on, Herman!” Max said.

  He high-fived his grandfather as if this bike, the one with the flat tire and the faded comic book stickers and the peeling nameplate that read BILLY, was the bike of his dreams. Max stooped down to read the nameplate.

  “Grandpa, who’s Billy?”

  Daddy didn’t answer him. Instead, he drew me aside with a troubled gesture.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked.

  “The two hundred dollars I owe you…”

  “Don’t worry about it.”

  “I want to pay you back, but I c
an’t right now. It’s your mother’s fault again,” he said. “I had a dream last night that I caught her in bed with another man. Father Lorenzo.”

  “Mami?”

  “So this morning I played number fifty-eight. Adultery. And number seventy-eight. Bishop. And I lost all the money.”

  Daddy was heartsick about this, I could tell.

  “Go on inside—she wants to see you,” he said with a smirk. “Sometimes I wish she would leave me already.”

  “Not before the cruise, Daddy.”

  “Even in my dreams she brings bad luck,” he said.

  I suspected there was something wrong in the House of Guevara when I entered through the kitchen door and found the stack of aluminum take-out containers on the stove. The label taped on top read ARROZ CON POLLO. That was the first hint. Arroz con pollo is my mother’s specialty. She’d never be caught dead with the take-out variety.

  “You’re not cooking these days?” I called out to the living room, where I expected my mother to be, as she was every night, fanning herself against the heat, her backside stuck to a green pleather recliner. I could hear her favorite telenovela was playing on the tube, but when I poked my head into the living room, I saw her chair was empty. That was the second hint.

  “Over here!” she hollered from one of the back rooms of the house. I followed her voice, an earthy mezzo-soprano-of-the-barrio voice, to the bedroom she shares with Daddy, an immaculately kept room anchored by a large, framed image of the Virgin of Charity suspended over a collection of Lladró figurines—a Spanish maiden, a ballerina, a girl in a pink dress, a pair of young lovers, and an angel playing the flute—arranged upon a sturdy walnut bedroom ensemble purchased the year before I was born and polished daily ever since. My mother stood at the edge of the bed, staring into a large, open suitcase.

  “You’re not cooking these days?” I said again.