“Come on, sis,” Lou joins in, putting out her hand. “I’ll make sure we have fun tonight.” Always the one to concede, a reluctant Coco takes Lou’s hand to pull herself up off the bed and join her sister’s grooming efforts.
“Before you get dressed, use plenty of cocoa butter on those legs if you can find it. Ashy is not classy,” Gloria instructs, still miffed from last summer, when both girls got terrible sunburns because they refused to apply the sunscreen I begged them to use before heading to the rec park pool. Due to her lack of empathy for how difficult it is to make a teenager do something they don’t want to do, Gloria was sure that their skin peeling off in sheets was a result of my neglect.
“Cream is in the top drawer where we always keep it,” I direct, owning my passive-aggressive response. Truth be told, we have vats of my homemade lotion stashed all over the house. I wouldn’t be surprisedif we are still working our way through it all when Coco and Lou leave for college, not a flaky skin patch among us.
When I was three and my parents moved to California, they knew they were leaving their culture behind, first in Puerto Rico, then in the Bronx. What did take my mom by total surprise after their brief stint in New York was how few Black people there were in San Francisco by comparison. Growing up, when I would complain to my dad that Mom was always nagging us to lotion up, only go outside in clean clothes, watch our language in public, not get too dark from the sun, Dad tried to explain it was not because she cared about the wrong things, it was because she cared about the right thing, keeping us safe. She claimed she couldn’t get a read on how this place felt about Black people when there were so few of us in her new community. In the Bronx my parents were part of the mix, but in San Francisco my mother felt like our mixed family stuck out. She preferred to keep us safe the only way she knew how, our flawless appearance.
The Catholic church we joined in San Francisco’s Mission neighborhood was almost all Mexican and Mexican-American parishioners, and people assumed we were, too, until we opened our mouths and revealed our Puerto Rican accents, or when my mother shimmied into the pew next to me and my dad. Our Spanish did not sound like theirs, and my mother—and eventually my darker younger brothers—did not look like the congregation. Still Mom persisted ingratiating our family into the Mission-Dolores parish because in her mind, this was the closest we were going to get to “home.” We attended every confirmation and wedding we were invited to, and in the Catholic religion, that’s a lot. I spent more time in a dress, oiled up, smiling politely and offering “peace be with you” to parish members than I care to recall. For me, the only good that came out of it was sidling up to the moms at baptisms and christenings and handing out my homemade babysitting services business cards. For my mother, it was the acceptance into a community that would protect her, protect us, regardless of the color of our skin.All these years later, she still believes hydrated skin and nice clothes will shield her family.
“Come on, girls—put some care into it,” Gloria presses. “Lou, you still need to rub it in more on the backs of your knees. If you sit down like that, the lotion will get all over your dress, and then where will you be?”
Noting that Gloria’s observation about my lotion mirrors Mrs. Eisenberg’s, I lean over to rub it in myself. I put a little more muscle into handling Lou’s legs to help my latest creation blend into her café au lait skin.F me.This stuff didn’t rub into Ms. Eisenberg’s skin, and it’s not blending into Lou’s either. While the girls are at the dance, I’m going to play with the water-to-oil ratio.
Under her grandmother’s critical gaze, dress on, Coco grabs her Converse platform high-tops and begins lacing them up. I see my mother’s mouth drop open at the sight of high-tops, and she looks to me, expecting I will say something. In her day there was no such thing as pairing a party dress with gym shoes, but I know which mountains to climb up and die on with teenage girls and this is not one of them. I think Coco being strong-armed into going to the dance by her grandmother and sister is more than enough fourteen-year-old harassment for one night.
“Mami, don’t you need to leave for the senior center? I’m sure the ladies have their dancing shoes on and are ready to go,” I cut in to distract my mom before she can comment on Coco’s fashion choices.
Gloria checks her watch. “Oh, you’re right, I do have to go. Time flies when you’re getting ready for a night out,” Mom singsongs before planting a massive red lipstick kiss on Coco’s and Lou’s foreheads. “Walk me to the door, Toni,” she instructs in that maternal voice that insists I have no choice in the matter. Following my mom out of the girls’ bedroom, I turn around and silently overenunciate to Lou,Take those heels off, now!
“Promise me, Toni, you won’t go out of this house in that outfit. I know all the young women your age are wearing sweatpants everywhere these days, but I am here to tell you they do nothing for your figure.” I know thatfigureis code forprospects.
“It’s called activewear,” I interject, as if proper terminology will make an ounce of difference. Gloria slides her jaw back and forth as if she’s tasting the term like a rich-bodied cabernet.
“Imagine you run into a successful man on the street, and there you would be wearing that,” my mom says, emphasizing her words with a circle of her index finger suspiciously around my pelvis.Activewearwill not be added to Gloria’s vocabulary because she truly believes in Hollywood meet-cutes. In her imagination, the sidewalks are teeming with well-to-do men looking for well-dressed women.
Instead of revealing that not wearing sweatpants out of the house is actually one of my New Year’s resolutions, I concede and choose to agree with her. “Okay, Mami, I’ll change before I drive the girls over to Saint Anne, promise.”
“That’s all I ask,” she requests, brushing a wisp of hair out of my eyes. I move past my mother to open the front door, but instead of following me, she steps over to the chest of drawers where I stash my purse and picks up one of the five bags of brown powder sitting by my keys.
“Is this what I think it is?” Gloria asks doubtfully, examining a bag and the sticker that designates it’s a product of Puerto Rico. “Where did you get it?”
“I don’t know what you think it is. I don’t really know what it is. David sent it to me last time he was visiting Tía Fernanda. Learned about it from a woman he,ehrm, met.”
Ignoring my reference to David’s promiscuity, my mother claps her hands together with genuine glee. “Then it is what I think it is! I haven’t seen this stuff since your father and I left Las Marías. My mami and my tías swore by its magical powers.”
“For what?”
Checking her hair in the mirror and then setting down the bag to head out the door, my mother lands her third and final kiss of the night on my forehead. “For nourishing their skin, of course,” she replies, her hand lingering on my cheek as if I’ve asked the most obvious question in the world.
SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 17
Last night, instead of reworking the lotion viscosity issue like I promised myself I would, I made the mistake of being sucked into the Nuyorican classic filmI Like It Like That. After vacuuming the living room, I was lost to this edgy tale and the comfort of my couch until it was time to pick the girls up from the dance.
It’s now 7:00 a.m. on Sunday as I quietly grab my purse, my keys, a notebook, and the family laptop and tiptoe out of the house. I know the girls will most likely sleep late. Lou and Coco are exhausted from the buzz of their first dance, which Coco reported—before she and Lou devolved into a fit of laughter over their midnight bowls of cookie dough ice cream—was not as awful as she had predicted. I’m pretty sure those laughs were about a night of first slow dances, but they weren’t giving it up to Mom.
Searching for a much-needed quiet atmosphere for inspiration paired with a strong drip, I head to the Cracked Cup, valued for its proximity to Stanford and all the brain power that place radiates. Just knowing that this early on a Sunday morning I can settle in at one of the two-tops in the window and look toward the line of trees that flanks Palm Drive leading to the university’s Oval gives my motivation a boost. I’m ready to research rare oils like blue tansy, chamomile, jojoba, and lemongrass to tweak my lotion’s viscosity rather than falling back ona shea butter base that Black women have sworn by for generations. I want my product to be unique.
Throwing open the door to my de facto office, I’m taken aback by the coffeehouse hum already buzzing inside. My favorite tables are occupied, and the line is a good eight people deep with a slug of a seventeen-year-old boy taking orders.Who are all these people getting coffee so early, and why are they in my space?These are most definitely not students. The rabble is more a mix of middle-aged men on gravel bikes and pre-Pilates Gen Xers getting after their cores. Itching to dive into my research following last night’s wasted opportunity, I step out of line to assess the coffee queue progress and take note that Mr. Peach Fuzz is working the iPad with a single digit.
I’m going to be standing in line awhile, so I pull out my phone to swipe through the pictures and review the bios of the panelists from my Thursday class and check if the lecture has been posted yet. After giving Ash a full view of my yellow-clad cinnamon tit, I avoided looking at him the rest of the session, and he reciprocated by once again turning in his seat and pretending I didn’t exist. I barely heard what anyone had to say, mortification plugging my ears, so I need to relisten to the lecture from the privacy of my own earbuds. Before I focus on the SurveyMonkey the class has been asked to fill out about the value of the panel, I’m resolved to answer from a place of knowledge and critical thinking, not humiliation. Obviously, I will be giving Libby Starr an A+ for rescuing my to-go mug.
“I hope you’ll go easy on me. I haven’t done many of those things in quite a while,” a scratchy morning voice offers from behind my left shoulder. I hug my phone to my chest, hiding it from the peeper. Who could be so creepy impolite as to read over someone’s shoulder? “I’m used to leading the class, not being the subject of it.”
I turn around and find myself face-to-face with Tiger Woods. Well, not the real Tiger Woods, but a total wannabe. No grown man’s pants should be starched that stiff, nor cream colored. And the caramel leather golf shoes and belt are a bit too matchy-matchy for my taste, but I’ll giveAsh Eisenberg credit for wearing a robin’s-egg-blue sweater that pops against his chocolate skin. I notice him fiddling in his pocket with what I can only hope is a fistful of golf tees.
“Uh ... rude. Shouldn’t you be reading theWall Street Journal, not straining to see my phone?” I snap, pointing out his breach of a commonly practiced social norm when standing in line.
“There’s no Sunday edition. TheWSJis only Monday through Saturday,” is the elitist response I get.He’s on an acronym basis with his newspaper? ¡Qué pendejo!
