Olga Dies Dreaming(84)
* * *
GIVEN HER STATE, Olga knew better than to say yes to the producer from Good Morning, Later suggesting she come in to do a live segment. She’d been waiting for the lab to contact her with her brother’s test results when they called. She hadn’t recognized the number and had reflexively picked up.
“The news has been so depressing lately,” the producer said, “we were thinking it would be great to do a nice, happy wedding segment. Weddings make people feel good. And, Good Morning is about the news, but at Good Morning, Later, we’re about making our viewers feel good, you know?”
“Right,” Olga said. “What’s the angle?” There was always an angle with these things—beat the heat, holiday weddings, June brides, do’s and don’ts.
“Well, Tammy’s recently engaged, so we were thinking we could do a ‘kickstart your planning’ thing with her. Sound good?”
It did not sound good. But it was easier to acquiesce than to explain why, so she just said yes.
“Okay, great. Someone on my team will get back to you with a call time and to run through your demo items, but we’re looking forward to seeing you on Wednesday morning.”
* * *
“THE IDEA OF going into a TV studio to get my hair pressed out and a mask of makeup happiness applied to my face feels beyond unappealing right now,” Olga called out to Matteo, who was finishing dinner in the kitchen while she stared at the ceiling in his music room. It was Tuesday night. Good Morning, Later shot in just a few hours.
Matteo had made pasta and he brought a bowl to her now.
“Why didn’t you ask ME-Gahn to do it for you?”
“Oh my God, I wish I could. I wish I could just give her the whole fucking business and never look back.”
“So, why don’t you?” he asked.
“Because,” Olga started, not sure of where to go with it. “Because I guess I don’t know how I would support myself? I don’t know what else I am even qualified to do.”
“You?” Matteo asked, genuinely incredulous. “You, girl, could do anything. You could easily go back to P.R.”
“Pero, Matteo, I wanna live in America!” she joked. “No, seriously, if I’m not going to do this, I’d like to do something meaningful.”
“Well,” Matteo said, “if your brother decides to run for reelection, you could run his campaign?” Olga had told Matteo about her brother. She knew she’d broken the circle, but she trusted him. She really did. And besides, after watching her cry for so many days, she was worried he was going to 5150 her if she didn’t at least attempt to explain herself.
“Matteo”—she threw a throw pillow at him—“I said I wanted to do something meaningful!”
They both laughed.
“It’s funny, when I was going away to college and my mother was all up in arms about losing me to the bourgeoisie, I couldn’t see any downside then, because I’d touched the holy grail. The Ivy League.”
“Society’s finish line!” Matteo chimed in.
“That’s the rub! It felt like a finish line to me, because I knew what it took to get there and survive it. But to everybody else? The kids whose parents and grandparents had gone there before them? This was just their starting line. To something bigger. Something I couldn’t even imagine. I feel like I’ve spent all of this time since then trying to figure out where I was supposed to be headed. What thing could I achieve that would make me feel … enough?”
Matteo put his bowl down and looked at her with all his attention.
“Olga,” Matteo said, “if you did nothing for the rest of your life of any note, you’d be more than enough.”
She felt unsure of how to receive such kindness, and unsure if she actually believed it to be true.
“Did I ever tell you that I was named after Olga Garriga? Brooklyn native, Puerto Rican nationalist, and political prisoner arrested for protesting Ley fifty-three.”
“Is that right?” Matteo asked.
“Yeah, my dad picked it. Wanted to make me ‘ambitious.’ But my mother worried that I would take after the Olga from Puerto Rican Obituary. That Olga was ashamed of her identity and died dreaming of money and being anything other than herself.”
Matteo raised his eyebrows. “Pi?ero?”
“Close. Pedro Pietri.”
Matteo got up and went to a section of his record collection. “Damn. I gotta admit I’m light on spoken word.”
“It’s okay. I mean, I know it by heart.”
“So,” Matteo said, cuddling her now, “recite it for me.”
And so she did. In its entirety. And Matteo gave her a standing ovation.
“Brava!”
Olga curtsied.
“But, ma, you realize the solution to Olga’s dilemma is in the poem?”
“Wait,” Olga asked, “how do you mean?”
“I mean, it’s a tale for you to learn from. It’s about not chasing an external ideal, not trying to fit someone else’s vision for you and instead building with the community of people who simply accept you as you are.”
“Somehow, I don’t think that’s what my mother got out of it.”