intensity of it all brought her to her feet—riveted, awestruck, before a TV screen, rapt by the sight of her Nestor climbing up that seventy-foot rope hand over hand, without using his legs… then carrying the man on the mast, with his legs!… while going hand over hand down a 100-foot jib line… electrifying the city.
As a matter of fact, his Magdalena was utterly unaware of this high-wattage hero’s triumph. The entire time she had her hands full with… the mother of all mother-and-daughters. This one was a real catfight. Magdalena had just announced that she was leaving home.
Her father had a ringside seat, an easy chair beside the couch in the living room of their casita, their little house, in Hialeah, barely two miles from the Camachos’ casita. Magdalena was standing up belligerently—her fists on her hips and her elbows winged out—as Mother and Daughter traded hisses and growls and eyetooth glowers. Mother was sitting forward on the couch with her elbows winged out—this seemed to be an instinctive stance of both combatants in their mother-and-daughters—and the heels of her hands pressed down on the front edge of the frame, a veritable feline, ready to spring, claw, rip guts out, eat livers whole, and bite heads off by sinking both sets of incisors into the soft centers of the temples. Her father, if Magdalena knew anything about it, was possessed by a fervent desire to evaporate. Too bad he had sunk so far down into the easy chair. He’d have to be an acrobat to slip away unnoticed. Their fights mortified him. They were so vulgar and common. Not that he had any great delusions of gentility. He had been a threshing-machine mechanic in Camagüey when he and his wife met. Both had grown up there. He had been a truck mechanic in Havana for five years when they left Cuba in the Mariel boatlift… and he was a truck mechanic in Miami now. Nevertheless he had his standards. He hated these goddamned mother-and-daughters… but he had long since given up trying to control his two cats.
Mother was thrusting at Daughter. “Isn’t it bad enough I have to tell people you’ve gone to work for a pornographic doctor? For three years I tell them you work for real doctors at a real hospital. Now I tell them you work for a fake doctor, a pornographic doctor, in some dirty little office?… and you moving away from home to go live with God only knows who in South Beach? You say it’s a blan-ca. You sure it’s not a blan-co?”
Daughter made just a flick of a glance at the five-foot-high baked-clay statue of Saint Lazarus up by the front door before parrying: “He’s not a pornographic doctor. He’s a psychiatrist, a very well known psychiatrist, and it just so happens that he treats people who are addicted to pornography. Don’t keep calling him a pornographic doctor! Don’t you know anything?”
“I know one thing,” riposted Mother. “I know you don’t care if you ruin your family’s name. There is only one reason girls move away from home. Everybody knows that.”
Magdalena rolled her eyes up into her cranium, extended her neck, leaned her head back, stiffened both arms straight down past her hips, and made an unngghhhhummmmmmmm sound in her throat. “Listen, you’re not in Camagüey any longer, Estrellita! In this country you don’t have to wait until you can marry yourself out of the house.” Gotcha… Gotcha… twice in the space of eight words. Her mother always told people she was from Havana, because the first thing every Cuban in Miami wanted to know was your family history in Cuba—history, of course, meaning social status. Being from Camagüey was synonymous with being a guajira, a hick. So Daughter managed to work Camagüey—gotcha—into practically every mother-and-daughter. Likewise, every now and then she liked to call her mother by her first name, Estrellita, instead of Mami—gotcha—for the sheer impudence of it. She liked to dwell upon the y sound of the double l. Es-tray-yeeeee-ta. That made it sound old-fashioned, Camagüey and a half.
“I’m twenty-four years old now, Estrellita, and I have a nursing degree—you were there, as I recall, when I got it—and I have a job and a career and—”
“Since when is nurse work for a pornographic doctor a career?” Mother loved the way that one made Daughter wince. “Who are you with all day?—perverts! You told me that yourself… perverts, perverts, perverts.”