INSIDE/OUT
After my parents divorced, my mother packed away her extensive salsa
collection and swore off men forever. My father had represented her
second failed marriage, and she was convinced another bad
relationship would either kill her or land her in jail for murder.
Her decision to remain single for the rest of her life bothered me
not one bit while I was still living at home. But after I moved out,
I began to worry about her being in that big house all alone.
"Mom, you should really think about getting married again," I
started pestering her whenever we got together. "A lot of good men
would jump at the chance. You're a beautiful woman."
"Yeah, I don't need you to tell me that," she'd reply.
And she really didn't. Over the course of her life, my mother must
have received a dozen marriage proposals from men smitten by her
looks and her humor, and totally bowled over by her cooking. She was
arguably at her most popular when she was managing a big restaurant
in Huntington Park. Men from all walks of life would stop by and her
eat her Puerto Rican rice and tamales, then ask her out at the first
opportunity. All of them walked away disappointed.
"Forget about it," she would say when I asked her why she rejected
even the notion of dating. "Men are just children, and I've got
enough headaches with my own."
The years passed and my mother spent them either alone or sharing
a place with my brother Luis. Her looks gradually changed from
strikingly attractive to beautifully dignified, and her cooking just
got better and better. You'd have thought her suitors would
eventually have gotten the message, but they never did.
"Ah, hello, may I speak to Dolores, please?"
"Ma! George is on the phone!"
"Ay, that old man never gives up! Hello, George. No, I'm sorry,
George, I've got too much to do around the house. You need to stop
calling me, George."
She's a heartbreaker, my mom.
Among the passing parade of my mother's admirers was a handsome
machinist named Rolando. He and my mother met a few years after she
divorced my dad, when they were both working at a bottling plant in
Vernon. Had Rolando gotten his sleeve caught in one of the plant's
conveyor belts and been stuffed headfirst into a bottle, it would not
have affected him as profoundly as when he first laid eyes on my
mother.
Rolando was a handsome and good-natured man, full of life and
relentlessly optimistic. Of all the men who courted her after she
swore off men, he came closest to causing her to break her vow.
