Hold Me Tight and Tango Me Home by Maria Finn

had rolled up her hair in large blue plastic curlers and wore a long kimono and her heavy, black-rimmed reading glasses. “Why are you home?” she asked. “You had a date.”
    “He didn’t show up,” I said, blowing my nose.
    “He stood you up?” she asked. Without pausing for a response, she said it again, as a statement this time, not a question. “He stood you up. That little son of a bitch.”
    She stormed into the kitchen, where my father was drinking beer and listening to the K.C. Royals game on the radio.
    I heard clattering.
    “You want to know what I’m doing with the meat cleaver?” she yelled. “I’m going over there and I’m gonna kill the bastard. Don’t tell me to calm down.”
    (My mother will totally deny the meat cleaver, and perhaps Ijust picture this now to make the story more dramatic. Besides, our cutlery and cooking utensils were usually so dull they wouldn’t draw blood. But I remember her as armed and dangerous.)
    She appeared in the hallway.
    “What’s his address?” she yelled at me, holding the cleaver up. “Tell me his address, ’cause I’m going over there and he’s gonna be sorry.”
    She stormed out the front door, her kimono flapping. She got in the station wagon and turned the key, but the engine wouldn’t start. She held down the gas pedal and kept cranking. A few curlers had fallen out, and coils of black hair fell around her face. She was so angry that her eyes were flickering behind the thick lenses of her reading glasses. The car started with a roar and she yelled, “Tell me his address.”
    “Please come back inside, Mom,” I said.
    Then I started laughing. “It’s okay, Mom,” I told her. “Please come back inside.”
    The car engine sputtered for a few moments, but she didn’t know which way to go, so she finally turned it off. We went back into the kitchen. My mother put the cleaver away, muttering the whole time, “He was never good enough for you.”
    My father was frying bacon. There’s nothing, he believed, that couldn’t be solved with a good night’s sleep or a bacon, lettuce, and tomato sandwich.
    “Who are the Royals playing?” I asked.
    “Milwaukee Brewers,” he said.
    He sliced tomatoes, washed lettuce, spread mayonnaise onbread (not evenly, but I was too depleted to point this out to him), and started layering everything. He cut one sandwich in half and placed it in front of me, and then made one for himself. We both sat and ate without speaking as we listened to the ball game on the radio.
    When I threw my husband out, my dad called.
    “Well, make sure you get plenty of sleep,” he said. “How’s your diet?”
    This infuriated me. I didn’t want food or sleep. I wanted my father to go kick my husband’s ass, but my dad’s not that kind of guy. He’s a laid-back, make-the-best-of-a-bad-situation sort of person. My mother didn’t get involved at all.
    “Tell him that he broke my heart as well,” she said.
    When I finally fessed up to the man who owned the local bodega, Mohammed, why my husband wasn’t coming in anymore, he was shocked.
    “Why would a man ever cheat on you?” he asked. “You are one in a hundred women — no, make that a thousand.”
    Tears started welling up in my eyes. People glanced at me as they bought their toilet paper and cigarettes and shook out change for a lightbulb or a mousetrap. Then they hurried away.
    “I don’t know why,” I said.
    “If I see him again, I’ll kill him with my bare hands,” Mohammed told me. He raised his fists into the air and then slammed them down on the counter.
    “Thank you,” I replied, and sniffed. “I’d appreciate that.”
    “You need some baklava,” he said, tucking a slice in some wax paper and pushing it toward me. “You’re getting too skinny.”
    In the tango crowd I was a beginner with no past, and that suited me fine. The
tangueros
had chosen to live the metaphor: the intrigues, romances, rejections, and slights were not real. I had no