“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.”
* * *
OLGA WAS IN the greenroom waiting to be called in for her segment, hoping it would be over quickly. Monitors silently played the broadcast from the studio just down the hall. Olga could see that the anchors of Good Morning, two slightly more serious versions of the hosts of Good Morning, Later, were just wrapping up. The camera was focused on Nina, the perfectly coiffed female cohost.
Olga read the closed captioning. We leave you this morning with some of the absolutely heartbreaking images out of Puerto Rico, where exactly one week ago today, Hurricane Maria made landfall and completely decimated the island.
On the screen was a slideshow of anguish. Aerial shots of flattened homes, people wading through filthy water to gas stations, snaking lines of people waiting for food, shipping containers languishing in a port, doctors evacuating sick babies onto a helicopter, nurses working in hospital wards dark without power. The final image: children lapping up brown rainwater that they had collected in a pool.
Just devasting, Nina. The camera had cut now to John, her cohost, looking solemn. If you want to know how you can help the people of Puerto Rico, please visit goodmorning.com/maria. He paused for a split second, just long enough to replace his serious expression with a wide grin. And now, let’s toss it over to America’s favorite loony ladies of the morning!