Olga Dies Dreaming(32)
The favors, Olga soon discovered, were quite the production, involving at least five aisles of the crafting store. The garden level of the house was a sizable space, with a front sitting room that opened into the dining room, and the kitchen in the back. Each and every corner was occupied by a relative tending to some aspect of customization and assemblage of the takeaway gifts for the end of the night. At the dining table, two of her cousins were covering the champagne bottle labels with stickers that had Mabel and Julio’s photo with the wedding date underneath. Next to them, Tía ChaCha, always very good with detail, sat with a pair of tweezers, her readers sliding down her nose, affixing rhinestones in artistic clusters around the bottle. These then would be boxed up and taken to the porch where, Olga now realized, Lourdes was put in charge of dressing the bottle necks with tulle ribbon bows. Once dressed, the bottles were taken to the living room, where Tío JoJo and one of Mabel’s nephews were placing them in clear gift boxes together with a single champagne flute, which, Olga realized upon closer examination, were also etched with Mabel and Julio’s names and wedding date.
Mabel had made her way downstairs, her wet hair dripping onto her Marc Anthony concert T-shirt. Like a general, she surveyed everyone’s work.
“Ricky,” she barked at one of their cousins, “that label don’t look straight to me.” She turned to Olga. “Let’s get you set up in the kitchen. You can help decorate the gift boxes.”
“Wait,” Olga said, laughing. “You’re adding something else to this?”
“Ya!” ChaCha interjected. “The box can’t be plain, Olga! What’s wrong with you?”
Mabel, ever eager to be persecuted and judged by her cousin, opined, “Well, Tía, maybe Olga’s rich vanilla brides like things more, you know, refined.”
“?Qué?” ChaCha called out, a bedazzled champagne bottle in her hand. “These bottles have hand-placed crystals on them! Who wouldn’t find that elegant?”
Tía ChaCha was their Tío Richie’s first wife and Mabel’s godmother, a role she took seriously enough to adopt all of Mabel’s enemies as her own. Olga being their favorite target. They, though, were in the minority. Whether their family worshiped them out of merit for their successes or pity for being parentless, if Olga walked on water it was only because Prieto had already parted the Red Sea. So now that Olga had called into question the style and taste of her cousin’s wedding favors, the entirety of the room grew quiet, awaiting Olga’s verdict.
Truth be told, Olga’s clients never gave out favors anymore, deeming them largely a waste, which was more a matter of mode than money. Since the recession, conscious that weddings were acts of conspicuous consumption, the wealthy had deemed the wedding favor an opportunity to offer an apology for inequity. The tchotchke replaced by “donation in lieu of favor” cards. Graciously announcing to guests that instead of buying a useless favor everyone knew would be chucked into the trash after the wedding, they had chosen to send that money to a charity, where it would benefit people who couldn’t even afford a wedding in the first place. In Olga’s family, however, these favors—any favors, really—would never be chucked in the trash. The guests at Mabel’s wedding would coo over the gift, chill and drink the cheap champagne, and take the flute out again on New Year’s Eve. Or, just as likely, place the entirety of the decorated package into a china cabinet, where it would be preserved and lovingly dusted, weekly, alongside the favors from all the cousins’ weddings that had come before it. Even Olga, with her fastidious nature, was highly superstitious of throwing away a favor from any family affair, and kept an under-the-bed box filled with crocheted bridal gown toilet paper roll covers, engraved miniature picture frames, and glass swans swimming on mirror ponds whose exact purpose she had never deduced, but of which she had three. She knew Mabel had likely agonized over selecting each label, crystal, and bow. With this in mind, Olga paused, looked around the room, and declared, “Of course, it’s elegant, Tía! I just didn’t want the packaging to take away from your work!” And everyone laughed and ChaCha, and even Mabel, smiled. New England tact, Olga thought to herself.
“Meanwhile, we can’t get any music on in this joint? I get why you’ve got us working, Mabel, but what kind of sweatshop are you running?”
In this way, with music blasting in the background, Olga sat at the kitchen table while her Titi Lola made arroz con habichuelas blancas—Olga’s favorite—and adorned 150 clear plastic boxes filled with bedazzled champagne splits and flutes with teal bows, onto which Ana, her Tío Richie’s current wife, then hot-glued a large rhinestone.
KING OF THE CASTLE
Olga stared at Tía Lola intently as she seasoned beans, boiled rice, chopped onions, and sliced avocado. While she cooked, Lola hummed along to the Daddy Yankee song playing on the stereo system and from across the kitchen Olga attempted to discern something of her aunt beyond her boundless capacity to love. Her mother’s baby sister had always bucked convention. In college, she had studied accounting and, once done with school, landed a good job, chopped off all her hair, and took an apartment forty blocks north in Park Slope. Lola then proceeded to stack cheddar in a way that enabled her to care for her mother as she aged, keep Olga and Prieto in fresh back-to-school clothes, and still go on one cruise a year. On Saturdays, Lola, who had been the family chef since she herself was a girl, came and cooked for whatever family showed up. On Sundays, in good weather, she rode with her Puerto Rican motorcycle club. She never married. What she did with her days and nights outside of that, none of them knew. The block had long whispered that Lola was a lesbian, and Olga hadn’t ruled that out, but she also wasn’t completely convinced.