Feels weird having them in my home. To be honest, I’m not sure what to do with them now that I have them.
7:46 p.m. (Krish)
I do. You’re going to use them.
I was fifteen when my father turned forty and started surfing again, a beloved boyhood pastime he picked up when visiting his uncle who lived near Playa Jobos. We teased my dad relentlessly that surfing was a young man’s fun, but his mornings at Ocean Beach brought him so much joy my mother told us to support his harmless midlife diversion. As Simon inched near the same significant age, my mother reminded me that a wife’s job is to be patient and charitable when her husband feels the need to redefine his manhood.
Simon and I met the summer before David and Gabriel entered their senior year in high school. I was twenty-three, lonely, and spending all my waking hours working to support our family. Simon was the older and (I thought) wiser man at twenty-nine. After a couple of years living back at home, working for transportation services at SFO at night and brewing expensive lattes for exhausted technology gruntsby day, I finally had something that was all my own—Simon, my best 6:00-a.m.-extra-large-drip-coffee-with-a-splash-of-soy-milk customer.
Simon grew up in a conservative Catholic family that lived in a 1950s time warp where children were to be seen and not heard. Wound tight from existing on a diet of devout Catholicism and an intense job he hated as an associate at a prominent investment bank, it was no surprise that Simon loved the chaos of our rambunctious, overly affectionate Puerto Rican family. We talked loudly over one another and over the background soundtracks of Tito Puente and Willie Colón. Something fragrant was inevitably cooking on the stove, and given what had happened to my dad, it was impossible to leave a room—let alone leave the house—without my mother grabbing our faces with both hands and planting a big kiss on our foreheads like we might never return. Even Simon. The more madness that filled our tiny Potrero Hill two-bedroom bungalow, the more deeply Simon fell in love with me, and though I cared for him, too, what I saw most in Simon was a future filled with security.
Next to the morning my father died, the day we put David on the bus to go to Naval Station Great Lakes in Illinois for boot camp was the other worst day of my life. All David had ever wanted to do was fly planes off aircraft carriers, and I was ecstatic to see him dream big and then to see his dream begin. It was a worst day because I was sick with a stomach bug and couldn’t go with my family to the bus station. For four years I had financed David’s every meal, and now I couldn’t even hug him goodbye and risk him getting sick before basic training started. Simon went in my place, not because I asked him to, but because he had earnestly taken to his role as David and Gabriel’s surrogate older brother.
For several weeks Simon moped around after David was off to the navy, and again when Gabriel left on a full-ride academic scholarship to the University of Michigan. I, on the other hand, recuperated and rejoiced in plotting my first step in getting my own life back on track. While returning to UCLA was not in the cards with my mom at looseends and Simon now a central part of my life, attending classes within an hour’s drive of our home certainly was.
When my “flu” continued to rage, Simon ran home, practically yanked his grandmother’s ring off his mother’s finger, and proposed within an hour of my third pregnancy test. I said yes, because I knew Simon was over the moon about me and my family and I, like my mother, seemed destined to marry the first man I had dated. Even though I didn’t have my college degree, Simon’s high-paying job could financially support our growing family, and after a lifetime of the Arroyos scraping by, this was a bonus I did not take for granted.
With help from Simon’s displeased but duty-bound parents, we bought a small ranch-style starter house on the wrong side of Highway 101 in East Palo Alto, south of San Francisco. Simon was able to cut his time in the office down so he could be home to help with the constant feeding, bathing, and never-ending bedtime routine of what turned out to be our willful twin daughters, no doubt compliments of my family genetics. Then he would return to his computer, banging out emails and fiddling with spreadsheets while I tried to exercise my mind by reading a book, only to end up passing out until the midnight wake-up call from our girls.
By the time Coco and Lou skipped off to Saint Anne for a full day of kindergarten, six years had flown by, erasing our twenties and thirties. Simon and I were a well-oiled parenting machine. With a little more time on our hands, I suggested Simon pick up a hobby. The man had done nothing but work and take care of us for over half a decade. And I was once again ready to dust off my old journals full of half-hatched product ideas and get down to the business of tending to my brain. I was determined not to become my mother, who had relied upon my father for every aspect of her life. I knew I could balance being a good mother to Lou and Coco while pursuing my intellectual interests, my mind and ambition needing more than lunch packing and carpooling.
Given his level of office stress, I suggested Simon give yoga a try. Since our pregnancy-before-matrimony blunder, Simon had growndisillusioned with Catholicism, so I thought yoga would fill his searching spiritual side while lowering his cortisol. My mom had seen a few too many late-night infomercials of Lycra-clad women hawking foam rollers and was worried Simon’s eyes and other body parts might wander in a mat-lined studio. I assured my mother that Simon was most likely going to yoga to simply enjoy a nap disguised as savasana. Looking back, I should have listened to my mother and suggested a running club.
As the girls spent more time in extracurricular activities, so did Simon. Hatha, Vinyasa, Ashtanga, and Kundalini yoga classes to be specific. Nightly, Simon would roll through our front door glistening in sweat and spiritual awakening, while I fumed at his missing a fourth family dinner in a row. Simon claimed I needed to “do the work” on myself to discover my divine higher calling. I countered I was trying with my statistics course at San Jose State, but unless Shiva was going to show up on our doorstep to babysit, Simon’s obsession with yoga had to stop so that I could restart myself yet again. Someone had to give in, and I was tired of it being me.
While I was aware of Simon’s yoga fixation and wasted too much of my limited free time trying to figure out how to tether my enlightened husband back down to this world, I was blindsided by his secret gambling addiction, which stripped bare our family savings. That piece of information came to light days after Simon returned from a literal trip on ayahuasca guided by a world-renowned shaman living in a $4 million treehouse in Malibu. When I confronted him, Simon announced, in the tone of someone who believes they’re spiritually superior, that he discovered during his out-of-body experience that our relationship was “suffocating his growth.” He revealed that on his trip he had communed with his ancestors, who told him he needed to shed this life so he could move on, unencumbered, to something bigger. It was shitty advice from a long-dead great-grandfather.
With three sarongs, his favorite yoga mat, and a completed exit interview at his firm, Simon went off for an open-ended sojourn toIndia to discover his authentic self without a word of when he would return. As Simon headed off to Nirvana, he left me living in hell.
I then experienced an Arroyo legacy déjà vu. Here I was, a single mom with twins, no money, no college degree, no job, and no confidence to stand on my own. Even though Simon had done me wrong, if there’s one thing Gloria had taught me, it was to be forgiving of men and their single-mindedness. Shamefully, I left the door open for Simon to come back to me. I needed Simon to come back to me. He was all I had known of men and a stable life since my father had died.
From my early years working at the airport, I was still in touch with my friend Krish. With the lack of empathy of a perpetual bachelor, Krish informed me I needed to get on with my life and recommended the first step was to come back to transportation services. He shared that some of the old crew was still there and would love to see me, which I knew wasn’t true as I had flippantly treated my time working at SFO as a pit stop. As well, Krish wanted to introduce me to Zwena, his newest hookup for free airport food, so I could save a few bucks on my grocery bill.
When I resisted going backward, Krish reminded me that public people watching was the best way to make one feel better about one’s own problems. And that a lot of people are in jobs they don’t like or believe they are above doing, but self-pity does not put cash in the bank.
Dragging my heels, I finally agreed that temporarily returning to the airport might be good for my wallet and my mental health. It would only be until Simon returned home. I called my old boss at SFO transportation services hoping she would take me and my wounded ego back after a decade away.
7:55 p.m. (Krish)
You still there? You get what I’m saying? Keep those papers in a safe place.
I say“Um-hmm”out loud even though Krish is twenty-six miles away waiting on my response. Carefully, I tear open the manila envelope along its natural seam. As I pull out the document from my lawyer, I realize an earnest manhunt for Simon is the next logical step. I was sure Simon’s midlife U-turn would eventually straighten out and he would come back home. I excused his behavior with well-worn tropes about how we met so young, twins are a lot to handle, and investment banking has a high burnout rate. But resistant as I was, as the one-year mark of Simon’s departure passed and marched quickly toward two, I knew the time was coming soon to consider divorce proceedings so Lou, Coco, and I could stop living our life in limbo.
Aggressively riffling through the pages, I realize that what I thought would be elation feels more like anger. Anger that I might be giving Simon exactly what he wants, freedom to traipse around the world unencumbered, his only purpose being personal development. That while he will get to continue building the life he envisions for himself, I will remain at home attempting to shed the part of my heart that is still attached to having him here. With us. With me.
Putting the papers back, I reseal the envelope by pushing hard on the used packaging tape. Looking around my living room, I spy an old chemistry textbook sitting atop myDay in the Life of Puerto Ricocoffee table book on the shelf next to the TV. I slide the yellow legal-size envelope between the two books, allowing it to stick out just enough that Coco and Lou won’t notice, but I will know the envelope is there, a reminder that when I’m ready—if I’m ever ready—the next move is mine.
FEBRUARY
MONDAY, FEBRUARY 4
“I watch those airport smuggling shows on A&E, and this looks like dirty drugs to me,” Mrs. Eisenberg proclaims, examining the fat Ziploc bag of powder that looks more like ground cloves than cocaine.
“Shhhh!!”I hiss at Mrs. Eisenberg. Three things you do not want to be at the same time: brown-skinned, in an airport, accused of carrying drugs. And even if I were smuggling, Mrs. Eisenberg is the last person I would choose as my mule. She’ll give it up to anyone. I brought the bag to work to show Zwena. Given all the spices her mother sends her from home, maybe she knows what the powder is and has some use for it.
“Oh, calm down, Antonia,” Mrs. Eisenberg dismisses, waving away my concern like a woman who has no clue what it’s like to be racially profiled. Mrs. Eisenberg expertly opens up the bag and dips her pinkie finger inside for a sample. “Doesn’t taste like much, maybe a little bitter.” She also acts like a woman who has watched one too many documentaries on the Sinaloa drug cartel.
“You’re too much, El Chapo,” I laugh, pulling my cart up to a drinking fountain to fill Mrs. Eisenberg’s water bottle for her flight. She has a faded sticker on it that says, “It’s never bad enough to get bangs.” I find this decal hilarious because I’d bet Mrs. Eisenberg hasn’t changed her hairstyle in fifty years.
