Olga Dies Dreaming(52)
There were so few minority students that they clustered together and, in the face of such white cultural dominance, attempted to “out-’hood” each other by any means necessary. She couldn’t tell if it was a performance for her benefit—because in those days saying you were from Brooklyn had an edge to it—or if it was just generalized identity exploration, but here too, she met with a kind of duplicity. The girl who made a show of dating a member of the Crips turned out to have been a Jack and Jill kid whose parents owned ten McDonaldses. The guy who told a story about his best friend “doing a bid” for dealing—a story Olga immediately recognized as paraphrase of Nas’s “One Love”—was an alumnus of Phillips Andover, a place Olga had never even heard of until she got to campus. When Olga asked him about it, he got in her face saying, “You don’t know my life! I did Prep for Prep!” One weekend, Mabel, curious what it was like to go away to school, came up to visit. She loved the campus and the bookstore, and even came to a sociology lecture—the subject that day was infidelity—and was riveted. But when Olga took her to an off-campus house party the BSU was sponsoring she took one look around and declared, “These people are mad corny. Let’s bounce.” Olga felt validated. They ended up at a hip-hop club downtown where Mabel commanded attention, as per usual, on the dance floor. It was ironic how close she and Mabel were during her college years, given the physical miles and the cost of long-distance calls, but for Olga, feeling lost amid all the posturing, Mabel’s authenticity was a touchstone.
Her brother had loved his Greek experience so much that Olga briefly considered pledging—there was a chapter of his sister sorority on campus—but their first recruiting event was a screening of a film about the Young Lords and Olga decided she’d been indoctrinated enough in this area and bailed. After not finding her place with the students of color, Olga took to hanging out with the international kids. She found it ironic, then, that the minority students branded her a “sellout to the community” because of this. What she wanted to say, but didn’t, was that she’d already sacrificed more for the “community” than they could possibly understand. She brushed it off. Olga liked the international students. They were the only other people who seemed to find the place as alien as she did. Olga found it refreshing that those who were rich were unapologetically so: driving luxury cars, putting up oil paintings in dorm rooms, hiring personal chefs to cook elaborate birthday dinners filled with wine and arguments about film and literature. This, Olga felt, was what you were supposed to do with money. The friendships were never particularly deep, but they helped to pass the time, and they expanded her world.
When college was over, Olga again struggled to find her way. She floated between Mabel’s world and the Eurotrash dinner parties—now being held in Manhattan pied-à-terres—enjoying both, but never feeling like she fully belonged in either place. Mabel, having stayed in Brooklyn, had a vast network of friendships and club hookups from school and work that she afforded to her cousin. It helped Mabel too, Olga realized. Having a cousin who was “artsy” and “cool” offered her a differentiation point, though, in those days, Mabel’s body was so banging that she differentiated herself well enough on her own.
She was, in fact, out with Mabel when she met Reggie King and for any number of reasons, Mabel was a fan. First, Mabel had always been a big freestyle head, so she was already an admirer of his work, but also Reggie’s flash was very much Mabel’s style. And Mabel’s sense of humor was right up Reggie’s alley. Plus, Mabel loved the VIP access that Olga’s relationship granted her by extension; the night that they all met, Mabel ended up going home with one of the hype men from Mobb Deep. When Olga broke things off with Reggie, Mabel was furious. She was as mad as if she had been Reggie’s cousin. Her anger irritated Olga, who felt she was encouraging her to stay with Reggie to keep her own VIP status, which made Mabel curse her out, screaming about how a pendeja like Olga didn’t deserve happiness. And although, with Abuelita’s intervention, they eventually squashed their beef, it wasn’t ever really the same after that.
There were moments of closeness, here and there. When Prieto married. When Lourdes was born. When their grandmother died. But generally speaking, when Olga lost Reggie, she also lost Mabel. She wished she could call her cousin now, but things had been too weird for too long at this point to trust her with such sensitive information about her brother. Days like today made her feel so lonely.
She picked up her phone and texted Matteo.
* * *
PRIETO DROPPED HER off at a bar where she said she was “meeting a friend.”
“Olga,” he said through the window, with a weary smile. “You don’t have any friends.”
“I know. It’s why I hate when we fight.”
“At the end of the day, it’s your house.”
She walked around to his side and leaned in. “At the end of the day, it’s the family house, but I wouldn’t have offered it if he didn’t need it, Prieto.”
He put his hand on the top of her head.
“I don’t know who you’ve got more of, Abuelita or Mami,” he said, and drove away.
STOOPS
Olga teetered into a bodega and picked up a six-pack of beer, desperate to get out of her uncomfortable heels. A white girl, she thought, would just walk barefoot the half block to Matteo’s house. She had seen them, the girls, barefoot on the filthy sidewalks. Her grandmother would roll in her grave. He had wanted to meet at a bar, but she had texted that after the day she had she really didn’t want to talk to anyone, not even a bartender. She realized, after she hit send, that implied that she didn’t consider him “anyone,” but she was too weary to overthink it.