“Ash moved to Menlo Park to launch a boutique venture capital fund focused on investing in consumer product seed-stage start-ups with founders of color ...”
Ash hastily glances my way a few times, but then he averts his eyes. Does he not recognize me? Maybe not from twenty years ago, but certainly from last month, when we were reintroduced by his grandmother. When his gaze sweeps over the front row, he dodges locking eyes with me. His avoidance is obvious since I’m the only student parked smack-dab in his sight line. Just like at baggage claim, Ash seems bothered that he has to look down from the raised social dais and acknowledge someone like me.
“After successful exits with several companies, Ash has continued to ...”
Now he’s moved to resting his chin on his knuckles and is subtly pointing his index finger at me, while continuing to ensure his eyes don’t meet mine. Is this his offensive attempt to address me and wave? Did Mrs. Eisenberg fail to teach her grandson the simple courtesy of eye contact? Seems like something she wouldn’t let slip. Nor would his academic supervisors, though I don’t remember him coming across as particularly warm at UCLA. I give Ash a slow chin lift and half smile to let him know the recognition is mutual and to mock his ill-mannered salutation. Ash points at me more aggressively, then looks down at his shirt.
I’m confused. Maybe I’ve misinterpreted his notice of me, so I look down too. And then I see what Ash has been pointing to. And why he’s reticent to make eye contact. During my sprint across campus, the strap of my crossbody bag must have pulled Zwena’s borrowed, deep V-neck shirt completely under my left boob, leaving my sunshine-yellow bra on full display for the entire panel—but most directly Ash Eisenberg—to see. While I thought Ash was finally responding to me, albeit rudely, he was really trying to warn me that I was putting my best breast forward and publicly humiliating myself in front of America’s wealthiest entrepreneurs and one professor who will be determining my first grade in years.
I lift my bag up so fast to cover my chest that I knock my travel coffee mug over, its contents sputtering out as the cup rolls under thepanel table. Libby Starr swiftly stops the mug with her red patent stilettos, picks it up, and shoots me a sympathetic look that I interpret as,Hey, girlfriend, I got you, there’s nothing worse than a spilled cup of coffee on a crappy day.
Oh yes, there is,I think to myself as Ash shifts rigidly in his seat, looking everywhere but right at me, desperate to act like my boobs and I are not there.
SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 16
“Abuelita, they fit!” Lou squeals, securing the buckle of my mom’s nude strappy high-heeled sandal onto her right foot. As she kicks her leg out to admire her borrowed footwear, a wad of bloodied tissue stuck to her ankle from a novice shaving accident drops on the carpet. Wrapped in a towel, Coco sneers in disgust as she steps over it, perpetually annoyed at her sister’s sloppiness in contrast to her vigilance to detail. Neither of the girls bends over to pick it up, leaving me to do the dirty work of mothering.
“Mi corazón, I tried to give these gorgeous shoes to your mother, but of course she didn’t want them.” Gloria clucks in disappointment, straightening her silk blouse before handing the second heel over to Lou. I wrap my oversize cardigan tight around my torso to hide the ancient UCLA T-shirt underneath. Frayed at the neck from washing, it’s the one indulgence I allowed myself at the campus bookstore freshman year. In my life, I’ve never seen my mother in a T-shirt.
When I started back working full-time at the airport, I reached out to my brothers and informed them that I was officially passing the baton I had long held taking care of Gloria on to them. As a single navy pilot and a carefree data analyst, my siblings were now capable co-kings of the family.
My brothers accepted the responsibility without pushback, which I appreciated. That was until their first move to build a nest egg for Gloria was to sell her two-bedroom home in Potrero Hill and their second was to relocate our mom into an apartment a few miles away from my house in East Palo Alto. Their reasoning was having her practically next door would make it easier for me to look after her. My mother saw it as an opportunity to parent Lou and Coco right alongside me until Simon returned. A possibility she insisted I stay open to given her constant distress over what we would do without Simon and his salary. It stung with a terrible familiarity to what we would do without my father and his paycheck several years back.
“So, mija, how’s that new class you started?” my mom asks offhandedly, keeping her eyes on Lou. Before I can even decide if I want to share Thursday night’s debacle with the Arroyo girl crew, my mother jumps back in with what really interests her.
“They’re perfect on you!” Gloria reaches out a hand to help Lou stand and walk our dingy beige carpet, diverting my sharing session, which is just fine with me. I notice Lou is a little too practiced at the heel-to-toe strut it takes to balance on a set of Pixy Stix. Have these two been working the hallway catwalk when I’m not around? Regardless, I make a note to hunt for a rug cleaning coupon when the next value packet comes in the mail.
Because the tornado that is my mother’s feminine ways is presently taking up all the air in this small bedroom, and no one other than me really cares about StubHub’s growth into the world’s largest ticket marketplace, I fall mute. This leads Lou to believe I’m going to let her out of the house in those ankle-breakers for the eighth grade Valentine’s Day dance. And she can go ahead and believe that for about thirty more minutes, until Abuela leaves to lead Saturday-night salsa at the Senior Connection. Thursdays my mom volunteers her afternoons painting the nails of the female residents who no longer have a steady hand or the dexterity to paint their own. That’s also when she gets the scuttle about who cheated at canasta the night before. Fridays she offers a free washand set at the industrial sink in the arts and crafts studio for her regulars who are committed to looking nice for the few men without walkers who can still float across the dance floor on Saturday night. My mother imagines herself to be Rita Moreno’s much younger sister, and she lives for turning the women at the Senior Connection intoWest Side Storyextras once a week. Stereotypical of her, but true. Given her expertise in all beauty-related arenas, Gloria loves her time at the center because she has made herself indispensable to the female residents, not to mention she laps up the compliments tossed her way by men of a certain age who still fancy themselves able to handle a much younger girlfriend.
As the flurry of preparations for the dance continue, I’m reminded that Saint Anne does not subscribe to the progressive Catholic leanings of Pope Francis. The school prefers its social philosophies archaic, and its traditions unchanged. Among the faculty and more conservative parents, I’ve already got a big scarlet letterAforabandonedon my chest, so I don’t need Jesus falling off his cross when he gets a peek at Lou strutting into the school gym like a streetwalker. While I don’t agree with the obsequious message of the school’s motto, Women for Others, the math and science departments are some of the best on the peninsula, and we are not getting kicked out on a dress code technicality.
Lou and my mother have been planning a first-dance outfit for ages. In eighth grade, Saint Anne girls and the Trinity School boys across town gather in February and once again in May to iron out awkward pubescent social interactions after nine years of single-sex education and before they enter the high school hormonal melting pot. Coco has gone along with the preparation because she knows it brings her sister and grandmother joy and that I couldn’t care less. She’s been playing family peacekeeper since the day she uttered her first word,okay. But I know Coco, she is me, and I’m pretty sure she’d rather be charting the phases of the moon than prepping for an embarrassing evening warming the gym bleachers. In opposition, her sister will spin the hundreds of hours I paid for ballet lessons into moves she picked up streamingDance Momswhile I was working.
“You aren’t going to take the girls to their first dance dressed like that, are you?” Gloria asks, standing to fish her compact out of her purse and reapply.These girls are lucky I brushed my teeth. Not always a guarantee when I have the day off.
Lou’s neck snaps my way, as if realizing for the first time that her mother will be delivering her to this evening’s festivities. Giving me a judgmental once-over, she whines, horrified, “Mom! Abuelita’s right, I’ll die if you wear that to drop us off at the dance! What if someone sees you?”
“Someone will see me, I’m driving. But I don’t think the Trinity boys will be checking me out,” I joke, trying to lighten the vain mood in the bedroom.
“Ugh!” Lou cringes at my inability to disappear.
“The other mothers will see you,” my own mother answers, an expert at maneuvering the ugly side of female-on-female judgment. “Or, if we’re lucky, a single dad.” Growing up, my family witnessed our Potrero neighborhood morph from guys guzzling forty-ouncers in the park to hipsters swilling their iced lattes alfresco. Since my father died, Gloria has been keenly aware that while she didn’t have money or her own credit rating, she did have her looks—and so did I. Since I returned from UCLA to a Bay Area booming with millionaires, my mom has hoped to profit off our beauty. She is still holding on to faith that if Simon is never to return, I will altar up to another husband before she has one toned leg in the grave. For Gloria, on this matter, financial security trumps the Catholic church’s stance on divorce.
“I’m just saying, a swipe of lipstick and a brush of mascara on those long eyelashes you inherited from me wouldn’t kill you.” God bless my mother for believing I own mascara.
Without looking up from her book, Coco chimes in to nobody in particular, “Might not kill you, Mom, but cosmetic testing kills thousands of caged rabbits every year.”
“Where do you hear such things?” Her grandmother waves away Coco’s nonsense like PETA has no business coming between her and her lashes.
Still in her towel, Coco has curled herself around her latest sci-fi novel. Unlike Lou, who has her finger on the pulse of what Trinity boys her Saint Anne friends are crushing on—we get the download every night at dinner—Coco prefers to do her dating research devouring the social rituals of galactic creatures. She’ll get to real-life human interactions in her own time. With a finger saving the place in her book, Coco briefly glances up and pleads, “Do I even hafta go to this dance?”
“No,” I insist.
“Yes,” my mother voices at the same time, as if Coco is crazy to not want to go.
“Mom,”I snap, exasperated. “Coco can skip a middle school dance if she wants. It’s not a big deal.”
“It’s a party, who doesn’t want to go to a party?” Mom affirms as Coco and I share a quick understanding glance. “Plus, Toni, this is good practice for the girls’ quinceañeras. Lots to do to get ready, and it’s never too early to start.” I bite my lower lip.I will not roll my eyes.Tonight is not the night for us to go to blows over an outdated, centuries-old tradition that marks the female entrance into womanhood, a.k.a. marriage material.
