Tag: newlyweds

Temptations

1 November 2025 / Editor

Fiction by Fabiana Elisa Martínez

I never told you about the onion soup. How I craved it and how I came to abhor it. You asked about my aversion to white towels. This story is less sinister, though. I was never again able to approach a table displaying that dish since that late September in 1940, when ironically that was the only meal I would have, even if the crew had served it for breakfast. At first, I attributed the inexplicable craving to my permanent state of surprise and elation, to the waves of adrenaline swaying in my heart just as I recreated and foresaw the intrepid, ardent nights your grandfather and I were waving under the changing sky. The new constellations prying through our second-class porthole were not the only elements transitioning during our trip. The breeze had also dropped its autumn cloak once we passed the Canary Islands, and even its salty flavor preannounced the spring I would meet in Buenos Aires.

But my craving for onion soup did not respond to the changing parade of hours as we moved steadily into southwestern waters, and I detached myself from Lisbon, as Sarita’s polka-dotted handkerchief, waving her newlywed friend goodbye, faded in my memory. This was not the typical Portuguese onion broth that my grandmother used to prepare to enhance the flavor of our meager chickens in the Alentejo. This was a French dish your grandfather described to me with every atom of elegance and bad accent he could produce. I don’t remember it well. A brownish, thick, and sweet concoction, crowned by a golden piece of fried bread drowning in the golden magma of melting cheese. I wonder if my obsession with the soup sprouted when your grandfather decided to stop talking to me in my language and resort to Spanish so I would be ready for my new life. I sensed a change beyond the salty air.

Anyway, after the two first weeks of waves, wet recliners on a crowded deck, and late dinners in the second-class dining salon, I only wanted to have onion soup. None of the other delicacies tempted my appetite: the roasted meats, the yellow beets, the abundant selections of chocolate cakes and bonbons that were always sliced and tried before by the silent first-class travelers. That third week of my honeymoon, the boat took revenge on my happiness, and a stubborn sickness pushed away the new bride’s effusiveness. The tides in my heart were replaced by a whirlpool of vertigo that only the caramelized onions in the soup seemed to appease.

“Come on! We are wasting the music,” your grandfather would say pulling my arm while I resisted, anchored to my chair, and regarded the musicians with a hooded apologetic look. “I cannot dance, all is moving under my feet, darling,” I muttered every time, covering my mouth with a white napkin preluding an inelegant accident. I marked my muffled words with inappropriate hiccups more proper of the inferior classes sleeping already in the belly of the boat. Your grandfather always thought that a rumba, a cha-cha, or a tango never danced was a waste, an irretrievable killed opportunity. Perhaps due to my sickness or because of his metropolitan nature, he did not hesitate to ask any other available young lady. His young Portuguese wife could not understand the urgency of a handsome gentleman who knew how to play the keyboard of women’s spines better than all the Cole Porters they might be in love with.

The sea continued to rock us, the sky, the carefree dancing partners of your grandfather, and my uneasiness until we approached the new city. I had been told that it would look like a mix of Paris and New York inside a kaleidoscope. I had created in my mind a golem-like landscape with parts of big metropolises that I did not know. As tempted as I was, I tried to spare the image I fathomed of any lacy sections of Lisbon. But the sky got dark and darker, and when I was able to climb to the deck under the call of multiple sirens, I just saw a black, pervasive cloud of smog, factory chimneys, and an immense port. The countless accents of the arriving immigrants seemed to leave their print on a carpet of soot.

I craved one last time the sweetness of the onion soup, as a melancholic smile followed my vision that onions can also make you cry when you think about them. My husband was showing the profile of his city to his dance companion from the previous night, a Dutch beauty who did not understand a word he said but looked at him with the same awe that I felt when, only two months ago, he had rescued me from a broken shoe at the entrance of the café A Brasileira.

Our boat, my crib of love and dizziness, docked at three o’clock on a grey Friday afternoon. By then, I knew that the black cloud was an omen, that your grandfather was a spoiled soul in disguise, and that the real vessel had always been inside me. I was rocking your mother and half of your soul, my child, in her. All maternal grandmothers cuddle half of their granddaughters in their bellies like Russian dolls marching in a revolution of cells. I followed all the wrong temptations, and I am happy I did. You come from a sea of insane love, a broken map of constellations, and the breeze of an unknown hemisphere. You come from me.

Fabiana Elisa Martínez authored the short story collections 12 Random Words and Conquered by Fog, and the grammar book Spanish 360 with Fabiana. Other stories have been published in Rigorous Magazine, The Closed Eye Open, Ponder Review, The Halcyone, Hindsight Magazine, Libretto Magazine, and the anthology Writers of Tomorrow.

Hell’s Kitchen

1 March 2024 / Editor

Nonfiction by Leslie Lisbona

We were in my father’s car on Sixth Avenue driving uptown towards Central Park, or maybe we were on Third Avenue approaching the 59^th Street Bridge, when my father said, “Don’t marry him. I’ll take care of you.” After a long silence I said, “But Dad, I love him.”

My mother had died a few months before, and it was just my father and I in the house in Queens where I had grown up. I worried about him. I knew it was too soon to leave him alone. Val was living in New Jersey at the time. My father put his arm around Val’s shoulder and convinced him to move in with us. “After the wedding, you can look for an apartment together,” he said.

Val moved in three months before our wedding. We slept in separate rooms. He called my dad Mr. Lisbona.

We got married on a beautiful day in April. I invited my mom’s friend Beatrice to attend.

On my wedding day, my father said, “Can you stay with me a little longer?” When Val agreed, I thought he was so understanding; he was so nice about it. But then I noticed how well he got along with my father. They sat in the living room watching TV together and laughing at the same jokes. Val walked around on Sunday mornings in pajamas while my dad made coffee for them both, and on Sunday afternoons the two of them went food shopping on 108^th Street. If something needed fixing, Val was eager to do it. He started calling my father Leon. When I suggested a neighborhood that might be good for us to live in, Val didn’t show any interest. My father said, “Stay here and save some money,” and Val smiled conspiratorially.

We lived eight months as newlyweds in my father’s house.

Toward the end of that stretch, Beatrice came for an overnight visit. I noticed how happy my dad was, and then I spied them. It was just a moment, through a slice of door: She was on the bed, he was in his bathrobe; he leaned over her. I caught my breath and recoiled. I slinked down the stairs and hurried out of the house. I walked to the subway and felt the urge to squeeze my eyes shut, trying to unsee the image of my father and Beatrice that kept fluttering to my mind. By the time I got to the train platform, I realized that this was my chance to leave. The moment had presented itself like a gift.

Without telling Val, I found us an apartment on my lunchbreak. The one-bedroom was walking distance from my office building on Sixth Avenue. That evening, after kicking off my boots, I gathered Val and my father at the round table in the kitchen and announced that Val and I were moving. Val said, “We can never afford it,” and my father said, “A two-year lease?” and I said to Val, “We have five days to pack.” My father lit up a cigarette and inhaled deeply.

A week later we took a few boxes of clothes and two rolled-up Persian rugs to the twentieth floor of 301 West 53^rd Street in Hell’s Kitchen. I liked the name of my new neighborhood. That first night, Val was working across the river in New Jersey. I was alone.

The apartment was bare. Our wedding presents, still in their unopened boxes, were scattered in our empty living room. Our only piece of furniture was our too-hard bed, which we had bought that day without thinking it through.

I lay in the bed and looked out the large plate-glass window to see the time and temperature flash atop a taller building. I listened to a bouncer arguing loudly with a patron at the back entrance of the Roseland Ballroom. I heard the trucks rumbling up 8^th Avenue and the horse and carriages ambling towards the stables. I wished Val were there on my first night away from home. Somehow, despite all the city sounds, I fell asleep.

One hour before I needed to wake up the next morning, my dad called, a pattern he took years to break. We chatted until I was sufficiently awake.

I put my feet on the Persian rug. I pulled out from a box something to wear to work. I walked two short blocks to my office and never wanted to set foot on the subway again.

In the evening, Val and I went to Central Park, walked to 9^th Avenue, and ate in a little restaurant. On the way home we stopped at Tower Records, our fingers interlocked. Val loved the spartan apartment and declared that we didn’t need any furniture. “Where will we eat?” I said. “In our hard bed,” he said, and we both laughed.

I loved him so much, and I was so happy.

A year later I was pregnant with Aaron, and my father remarried a woman who wasn’t Beatrice.

Leslie Lisbona recently had several pieces published in Synchronized Chaos, Dorothy Parker’s Ashes, The Bluebird Word, The Jewish Literary Journal, miniskirt magazine, Yalobusha Review, Tangled Locks, Koukash Review, Metonym Journal, and Smoky Blue Literary. She is the child of immigrants from Beirut, Lebanon, and grew up in Queens, NY. Read Leslie’s earlier essay Taboule in The Bluebird Word.

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