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.
“If being a single woman made you gay,” Olga would say, “then make me Grand Marshall of the Pride Parade.”
This would inevitably inspire laughter, because everyone knew that Olga had always been a world-class hetero sucia, a rotating cast of boys and men trailing her since she had first begun to develop. Certainly, her aunt had never brought another woman around the family, minus her friend Lisa, who Lola had known so long, Olga retained no memory of even meeting her. Mabel had lobbied the rest of the cousins hard that Lisa was not Lola’s friend at all, but instead her lover, to which Olga retorted that people can and do have friends. “Not the Ortizes!” the rest of her cousins had replied. To a certain extent, this was true. Richie had three kids with ChaCha, two more with Ana. JoJo and Rita had Mabel, Isabel, and Tony. Everybody’s kids then had kids, except for Olga and Mabel. What room was there for friends when there was so much family around?