The Noise of Infinite Longing by Luisita Lopez Torregrosa

on weekends, packed with cars parked between the trees, fender to fender. Multitudes of children, loose from their mothers, raced in packs to the edge of the water, carrying inflated rubber tubes. Family parties gathered around the concrete tables on the beach grounds, slicing chunks of roasted pig, the charred pig skin dripping fat. Music came from everywhere, from the car radios tuned up to mambos and merengues, from the old men in straw hats

    with string guitars and maracas who strolled down the beach.
    Mother sat in the shade of palms, on a towel spread on the sand, one hand shielding her face from the sun, the other holding a maga- zine or a newspaper. She rarely came into the water, and when she did, in her dove-white Esther Williams swimsuit, she would jump high with every cresting wave, laughing, holding on to us, her turban twisted tight around her pinned-up hair. Somehow not a drop of water splashed on her face. She couldn’t swim and cared nothing for it. She didn’t walk far into the sea, but stopped just as the water inched above her thighs. She didn’t show fear, but she was afraid of the sea, afraid of what she didn’t know.
    Those days at the beach were for us, not for her. For us, she sat bored through four or five hours of sand on her skin and sun on her legs. She would bring egg sandwiches she made at home and her potato salad, which was crunchy with cut-up apples. At the end of the afternoon, she would walk each of us to the public showers, see- ing that we stepped carefully around the shards of broken glass in the sand and the dirt that people left in the stalls. A few years later, she became a member of the Caribe Hilton Swim & Racquet Club, and she had us take swimming lessons. One day, while she sat in a loung- ing chair poolside, I climbed to the high board, and looking down to her, and to the water that seemed miles away, I dived headlong into the pool, shivering with terror, burning my skin and sinking toward the tiled bottom, knowing I would not make it to the surface, and when I finally did, she was standing in her belted white linen pants and espadrilles on the edge of the pool, applauding.
    Sundays together in Luquillo, or anywhere else, in El Yunque (father’s car huffing up the narrow mountain road to the peak of the rain forest, my father driving it at full throttle, one hand on the wheel, the other arm resting on the window) or at Las Croabas, the rocky

    coastline north of Fajardo, were like the family pictures mother glued to the pages of her photo albums, frozen moments a woman chooses to remember.

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    y father’s footsteps began and ended our day. My mother always got up with him, their conversation immediately insis-
    tent, discussions in bed that seemed filled with urgency. Then came the shuffling of feet and the familiar sounds of my mother in the kitchen. She was boiling water for her black coffee, warming the cereal for my brother.
    The first silver light of day filtered through my bedroom window, shining hard on my face through the mosquito net. Folding my sleep- ing rag, the same I had had for years, I climbed off the bed and, with Angeles in her swollen sleepy eyes, knocked on my parents’ bed- room door for the morning kiss.
    Water ran in the bathroom basin, the shower splattered on tile, and moments later my mother would come out in her robe and stand in front of her dresser, looking at her reflection in the mirror, lining her eyes, uncapping the tube of lipstick, screwing her earrings in pierced lobes, spraying perfume behind her ears, on the hollow of her neck. She dressed slowly, turning her breasts away from the mir- ror, strapping on her girdle, fastening her stockings to the garter belt. She pulled on the seams of her stockings until they were per- fectly straight, brown lines running up her slender calves. Coming out of the bedroom, she raised her face to my father’s, kissing him lightly on his closed lips, and he left for the day, banging shut the front door