After the Hurricane(26)
Gloria’s luncheonette is a small place just south of Elena’s father’s house, on Calle Tanca. By foot, for there is no other way to get there, it is less than ten minutes from where Elena sits and drinks coffee, to Gloria’s, but Elena’s feet are leaden, and besides, she takes the long way around, tripling the distance for no reason at all, rehearsing what she will say, how she will apologize for not seeing Gloria in years, how she will cover up the sticky shame of her family, her father, as best as possible.
She walks beyond Tanca. Her brain is aching with her own bitterness, with the anger she keeps pushing down, and she’s going to need another round. She stops. If she keeps walking, she will circle the city, over and over again, until Gloria closes for the day, until Elena has avoided her by default for a second day in a row. Insanity, she knows, is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result. She turns back, and sees the luncheonette, its sign proudly telling customers to Come get fat at Gloria’s, and she walks toward it.
The place is a little greasy spoon, a residential apartment that Gloria has converted, quite illegally, into her kitchen, where she seats one or two customers, but mostly packs them lunch. The menu, hanging on the side of the door, is a lie. Gloria cooks whatever it is she wants to cook that day, two, maybe three options, and you can take them or leave them. They are always excellent, always better than whatever you might have wanted to order, anyway, and the islanders have learned by now to trust her taste.
Elena stands in the doorway, the smell of this grease so well-known to her that she feels tears forming in her eyes. Grease is grease, but this grease is chicken fat and garlic and cilantro and canola oil and onion skins, this grease is one she never smells in New York or Philadelphia or anywhere else but here. It makes her feel like a child again, the way her parents would bring her here and her grandfather’s wife would cook dish after dish soaked in these flavors. Elena would eat and eat while her father drank nervously with his father, and her mother counted down the minutes until they could leave. Puerto Rico was like paradise to her, then.
“We not open yet!” a voice, warm, with a West Indian accent undimmed by years in Puerto Rico, calls out from the back—a lie, the doors are wide open, the lights are on. Elena sees a plump shape moving and then Gloria enters her field of vision. Soft, toffee-brown skin stretches over a small full figure, a modern Venus of Villendorf, with slicked-back kinky hair, shining with oil, whose red-rimmed brown eyes squint, then widen, when they see Elena, taking her in. Elena is suddenly self-conscious. Has she changed? Everyone does, of course, but is it bad? Elena doesn’t think, tries not to think, thinks constantly, about her appearance and what the world sees when it looks at her, both from an aesthetic perspective, am I passable, decently sized, hiding it if I’m not, how do my face, hair, stomach, arms, eyebrows, knees look today? and also from an identity perspective, do I seem empathetic, reasonable, permeable, professional, knowledgeable, valuable, weak, cool? These question buzz through Elena’s mind when she meets prospective tenants, or talks to contractors, or buys a cup of coffee. Elena once tried to describe just a piece of this to Daniel and he laughed at her, declaring it must be exhausting inside her head. Elena did not know that other people were not exhausted by themselves until that moment.
“Elenita! Can’t be you. Girl, it’s you?” Gloria breathes, her hand at her heart, and then reaches out for Elena. Elena nods, bashfully, as Gloria pulls her in for a hug, warm, panting from the exertion of moving from the kitchen out into the dining area. Elena, who is short, towers over Gloria, and as she embraces her she bends her head down to dig it into Gloria’s shoulder, smelling coconut oil and that grease and more onions on top of that and oregano, and culantro, which is not cilantro, but something totally different, a long spiky leaf she has never seen anywhere but here. She breathes deep.
“Look at you!” Gloria exclaims. Elena tries to smile.
“How are you, Gloria? Are you well?” Two small frail questions to encompass all that has happened in ten years, all that has happened in the last few terrible months. But Gloria nods, smiling, as kind as ever, as philosophical as can be. Gloria is like the oil she cooks with, everything slides off her. Elena has never seen her truly worried, or upset, or perhaps Gloria just does not express those things the way other people do. As long as Elena has known her she has delivered all information in the same calm rich voice, from the death of a loved one to the weather report.
“A little bit of heart problems, but I’m doing good. My daughter brings me medicine from Louisiana when she comes with my grandbaby. You know about Maria?” Gloria asks, sitting Elena down in a plastic chair and taking a seat herself, her legs sticking out like a doll’s. Elena nods, and Gloria proceeds to tell her the saga of the storm as she lived it, the days without power, the whoop that went up when the generators started kicking back in in San Juan; the people she knows who were on other islands, other parts of Puerto Rico; the pain, the deep acts of kindness, the stupid acts of evil. Gloria tells the story without drama, heat, or excitement, and there is something strangely soothing about how even she is, how all things are equal in her eyes.
“It’s been real hard. But they came with these boats, I got a free physical. They tell me I gotta lose weight. Now, who gonna trust a skinny chef, you tell me?” Gloria concludes, panting from her monologue, her eyes indignant, her first real spark of emotion coming from the insult. Elena smiles and nods.