A week later, I kept looking at the clock while Mom underwent tests at Sloan Kettering Hospital, one of the greatest cancer hospitals in the world. She was supposed to call me around noon.
By four o’clock and still no word from her, I was nervous. I started leaving messages at her apartment. Finally, she called, upbeat, revealing no signs of stress.
“Well,” she said, “they want to keep me overnight. My calcium levels are a little high. It’s no big deal. They’ll just put me on a drip.”
I didn’t know what that meant, but her composure calmed mine. My imagination didn’t run free; though scared, I remained positive. I was able to get back to work without too much distraction. At the end of my workday, I called her room to see if she wanted mindless magazines or something to bide her time in the hospital. My stepfather, Jim, picked up the phone.
“Hello.” His voice was heavy. Instinctively, it frightened me.
“Is Mom there?” I asked.
“Yes.”
I waited for him to say more, but he didn’t.
“Can I speak to her?”
“I think you need to get over here right away.”
My stomach ripped to my throat. “What’s wrong?”
“Just get over here.” He hung up.
I threw down the phone, shaking, and grabbed my purse. I left my computer on and papers piled on my desk. I hurried to the elevator and realized I needed money for the cab ride to the hospital. Chase Bank, at the other end of the long block, seemed far away. But as I bolted out the front door of the building, I reached the opposite corner in record time. The otherwise clean sidewalk was littered with bank receipts and I scrambled for my debit card, which was the only way to gain access to the door. Where is it? Where is it? Shit, shit, shit. I fumbled. I couldn’t find it, buried in my mess of a bag. Got it. I slid it in the slot and circled around to the first empty machine.
My mind was racing. I had to force myself to focus on the computer screen in front of me. Negative. My freaking bank account was negative twenty-three dollars. I was single in the city with magazine assistant pay and at that time I was not known for handling money well to begin with. My father, who was not only a bank CEO back then but was probably counting pennies in the womb, may have been disappointed, but not surprised.
Still, he would have said, “Mel? How much do you need to get you through to the next paycheck?”
In my independent state, I would have said I’d be fine and not to worry about it. And he would have quietly deposited a couple hundred dollars into my account. He has always taken care of me in his solid, discreet way.
Unable to call him (without a cell phone at the time—imagine that!), I ran back up to the office. Margaret. Where is she? I looked up and down the halls until I saw her in the middle of a roundabout gossip section in one of the associate editors’ offices during one of her rare breaks. Visibly out of sorts, I stood outside the cracked door and asked if I could borrow her for a minute.
“Of course,” she said and quickly came to my side. “What’s wrong, what’s wrong, Mellie?” she kept asking me as she followed me down the hall.
I lost it. I started to hyperventilate and couldn’t form words. She pulled me into Tina’s vacant office, shut the door, and sat in the chair. I was kneeling on the floor, like a child in mid-prayer, my head in her lap, sobbing. I couldn’t breathe.
“What is it? What is it?” She was begging me for an answer. “Your job?” I shook my head no. “A guy?” No again. “Are you sick?” No. “Your family?” Yes, this time. “Oh, God, Mellie. What happened?”
I burst out, “My mom. She has cancer.”
It was what I hadn’t been willing to admit to myself before. She didn’t just have cancerous cells, ready to be zapped away in some fantasy game of Star Wars. This was a potentially fatal disease. At twenty-four, it was way too much for me to swallow.
I don’t even know what Margaret said after that, but I remember that she was petting my hair and crying. I explained my money situation and she said, “Of course, of course,” and left for a moment. She returned with fifty dollars in her hand in case I needed to get Mom flowers or magazines or anything else. She always thinks of things like that. I pulled myself together, enough to get on the elevator anyway. I managed to get a cab to the hospital, unaware that it would be a ride that would become all too familiar.
Short of jumping from the moving car, I threw too much money at the driver and ran inside to take the elevator to the twelfth floor. Mom was waiting to get into a private room, but because she needed immediate attention, she shared a room with another woman. A curtain was pulled around the side of the bed and I saw Jim, his eyes bloodshot, sitting in the corner chair. He looked at me with no sense of recognition. I came around the white veil to my mom, who was hooked up to an IV. She looked so small and feeble in that bed.
Her wide eyes met mine. Their vagueness clashed with my intense stare.
“Hi,” I said and kissed her on the cheek. “What’s going on?” I asked, trying to be patient while dying inside.
“Did you tell her yet?” Jim asked, as if he had just realized I was in the room.
She shook her head no.
He simply got up and walked out.
She reached her hand out and took mine. “It’s bad.”
Mom became foggy right in front of me when she spoke. She was a dream of some sort, not my mother.
“They’ve found a large tumor. It’s in my liver”—and she started to draw a picture on her torso—“that comes up near my heart.” I didn’t understand. My mind sharpened. Complete tunnel vision. Details in the room and around her bed turned into simple shapes—squares and circles and a configuration of dots that had no meaning to me, like hieroglyphics.
I had no idea what she was telling me. Children look to their parents for answers, and I was a little girl again, searching for guidance.
Her voice picked up, positive in tone: “They have the best doctors here. They have medical teams looking at my CAT scans.”
She explained that there wasn’t any real treatment for her type of cancer, which was advanced at that point. As I understood it later, because at that time I couldn’t absorb technical information, the doctors told her it was inoperable because the cancer had crawled up her aorta. Surgery would have killed her, as she would lose too much blood in the process.
As I attempted to take in what she was telling me, her voice started to fade, descending into a monotone, like she was rattling off a monologue she used to practice for her beloved theater auditions. That’s when she said she had a couple of years left to be with me, my brother, and Jim …
… a couple of years left. What the fuck was she talking about?
Tears were in her eyes when Jim walked back into the room. He sat down in the wooden school chair. I could feel his weight, the weight of the room, the weight of the tumor, the weight of my chest, and the bearing of my mother’s sadness.
I said that I didn’t understand. She told me that sometimes bad things happen to good people. She didn’t know why, but that was outrageously unacceptable to me. We weren’t in Bible school. This wasn’t some lesson for the day. This was my mother, sick. I couldn’t be as carefree and forgiving as that.
The nurses came in. That was my cue to come up for air. I asked Mom if she wanted anything. She told me raspberry sorbet would be nice. Great, I thought. Get me out, get me out.
Chapter 5
Who’s Afraid of Uncle Sam?
Cradled in the low-slung bed in Cuba, I watched as the sun lowered, casting dark shadows across our room as I thought about my mom and our similarities. Beyond our love of the arts and sometimes ridiculous sense of humor, our physical traits were almost one for one. My mouth, nose, eyes, snakelike eyebrows, and cheekbones mimick hers to an almost exact degree, as do many of my gestures.
Her good friend, Leslie, described her as a mix between Marilyn Monroe and Diane Keaton. Highly appropriate, only I favored the Keaton side as a tomboy growi
ng up.
I wanted to sit with her and talk like we used to. My eyes watered. Cynthia spoke and cut my thoughts in half. I squeegeed the excess tears back as far as I could so they wouldn’t run over.
“What are we doing here?” she said, looking at me.
I shook my head slightly. “I really have no idea.”
We both laughed as I wiped the corners of my eyes with the side of my hand.
Cynthia and I had become good friends in 1998 during our final college semester in Madrid while in the same study abroad program via my undergraduate degree at University of Georgia and hers at a college in Massachusetts. Daytime hours were spent wandering sites like Museo Nacional del Prado and the Royal Palace as I enviously studied her Spanish-speaking abilities, heightened after summers spent in Guatemala and Belize. In the wee early-morning hours we hobbled on high heels to Puerto del Sol, Madrid’s central square, and shared Spain’s magnificent fried doughnut-like creations, churros con chocolate, and coffee after full nights of dancing, red-faced and tipsy from hours of salsa and Spanish rock ’n’ roll.
Later, when I was in New York, she visited from Boston and we hit Manhattan’s throwback disco ball parties in gold lame and faux fur, but when my mom became sick, Cynthia stayed in especially close touch, calling frequently. She was the first person I reached out to after seeing Buena Vista Social Club in that Manhattan movie theater. A solid dancer and lover of all things Latino, I knew she’d be my only friend up for going to Cuba with me. Her Cancun-born boyfriend offered the help of his mother, a travel agent who set us up with visas and hotels. The original trip was set for January 2001 while my mother was ill, but not critical. But when it became evident my mother wouldn’t live much beyond the New Year, we held off until May, a full four months after my mom had died.
Travel to Cuba was initially intended as an off-path adventure, but morphed into something far more powerful for me, a motherless girl, by spring. It had become an escape, a desperately needed break from life without Mom and a failed career that was just beginning to take off in New York.
“Do you want to shower first?” Cynthia asked.
“No, you go ahead.”
Cyn pulled herself out of bed and I dozed while she bathed.
She emerged with just a sliver of a towel wrapped and tucked around her, and attempted to untangle open-air taxi hair. I left her to it and lifted myself from the sandpit. The bathroom was puny and well-used, but clean.
The water didn’t get very hot, but the coolness felt good. Black streams fell from my hair and body. As I stepped out to reach for my handkerchief towel, I looked in the mirror. My face was heavy—not in size, but the weight of internal baggage was clearly evident.
We dressed and headed out to eat. The first place we went lost all power, so we left. The next place didn’t have any gas and only served cold fries and some mystery meat. Starving, we took it, handpicking the fries alone.
Luis was going to be at the hotel soon so we hurriedly paid with the American dollar, which had become legal tender next to the Cuban peso in 1993 after the fall of the Soviet Union. During what was called the Período Especial or Special Period, Cuba was hit with a devastating economic depression in the early to mid-’90s after the loss of its European backer and was forced to open its doors to tourists and investors from the rest of the world.
The dollar became the primary currency, but technically, via the US embargo, it shouldn’t have been. President Clinton largely ignored what was going on in Cuba and President Bush did until 2004, when he lashed out at Swiss banks funneling the cash transactions.
As Americans we weren’t allowed to pull money from US-based bank accounts or carry traveler’s checks and therefore had to carry an uncomfortable amount of cash on us. I ended up stashing wads in and around body parts for fear of it being stolen from our room.
We scurried back to the hotel’s lobby and for the first time, I noticed a series of posters behind glass encasings. One flashed Uncle Sam growling and clawed, across a body of water from a Cuban soldier, a gun in hand, who shouted, “Señores Imperialistas! No Les Tenemos Absolutamente Ningun Miedo!”
Loosely translated: Mr. Imperialists: We have absolutely no fear!
I knew it was all propaganda, stemming from Kennedy’s mess at the Bay of Pigs, in which 1,200 of the 1,400 Cuban exiles who launched the attack were imprisoned for twenty months. Bobby Kennedy, who was attorney general at the time, did his best to make amends, pleading with American pharmaceutical and baby food manufacturers to make contributions and finally, he was able to do so, loading Castro with fifty-three million dollars worth of goods in exchange for US prisoners.
But President Kennedy took the hit hard and launched Operation Mongoose, a plan to take down Castro’s government and the Cuban economy, in retaliation. There were mentions of a possible assassination.
Maybe I should have taken the cartoons personally, as an American in a hotel run by a government in my face, but I knew to let it go. This was pure politics, government to government, and at that time, politics was far from interesting to me.
“There’s Luis,” Cynthia said, and nodded to the front door.
I turned around and there he was in an immaculately ironed European fit white shirt against his dark brown skin. He picked up the lobby phone and called our room. Like schoolgirls, we giggled and let him dial and then hang up after what must have been a good ten rings.
“Luis,” we called together and waved as he turned toward us. He smiled.
We both received a customary kiss on the cheek before following him out. His eyes met mine briefly before I headed out the door to the Cocotaxi without looking at him again.
All of the travel books I’d read before going to Cuba mentioned that tourists should pay for dinner or drinks, or both, for their guides. I had extra cash set aside in my purse, but Luis never asked, and insisted that we didn’t pay for him at all. Instead, he sat as we took to the dance floor of a cavernous bar that played salsa and Madonna’s “Holiday.”
“Whole-eee-day,” the Cubans sang out loud.
Salsa re-emerged and Cyn drifted back next to Luis while I jumped into the mix, losing myself next to Cubans who expressed themselves in such fluid waves that I couldn’t compare it to anything else I had experienced. Their top halves defied their lower counterparts; the energy was intoxicating.
From left court, in choreographed structure, two young peacocks, tall and treacherously sexy, strutted onto the dance floor across from me, pairing themselves with two older men in the same sort of handcrafted, leather shoes I saw across Spain and our side trip to Italy.
Italians, I guessed, based on their shoes. The men petrified on the spot as the women pressed their long torsos into their backs and laced their hands under their arms and through to their chests. I couldn’t put the puzzle together. How could these girls, no more than eighteen or nineteen and genuinely beautiful, crawl on middle-aged, bloated-bellied men?
Luis pointed out that they were prostitutes. I’m always slow to accept those real-life kinds of things.
At some point, Luis had to leave, but said he would send someone to pick us up, if we could give him a time. Promptly at 3:00 a.m., a colleague of his arrived to take us home. That night I slept like the dead. It was the first time I had slept through in one solid stroke—no nightmares, no flashbacks, no fear—in nearly a year, since Mom’s diagnosis. Just blackness in all its beauty.
Chapter 6
Maria Victoria and the Casa Particular
The next morning we were ravenous. Soy and granola bars from home filled in the breakfast gap, but we needed a real meal.
In Cynthia’s travel book was a listing for a casa particular, or private home near our hotel. For about five to ten bucks each, we could have a home-cooked meal.
In Cuba, street signs aren’t easy to come by. Instead of clear, eye-level markers, the signs often are monogrammed into corner angles of buildings or on cement triangles, raised only a few inches off the ground. We foll
owed the alphabetized streets until we reached H. As Cynthia noted, it’s a city for Cubans, not tourists. But, as we found, Cubans were approachable and gave amicable directions.
At the casa particular, we found the doorbell hanging from its hinge and a locked front door. In a few minutes, an older woman with a kind face walked up the small set of stairs into the building. Cynthia asked if we were at Maria Victoria’s house.
She smiled, replied yes, and motioned for us to follow her.
We were to go up one flight of stairs and then left until we reached the end of the hallway. We thanked her, ascended a dark, musty spiral stairwell, and both began to laugh hysterically at the lengths to which we were going to find good food. Cynthia took a picture of me for posterity.
On the second floor, there were no numbers on the row of doors. At the last one, Cyn shrugged and knocked. A friendly, cheerful woman greeted us, as though she had been expecting us.
“Is this Maria Victoria’s?” asked Cynthia.
“Si, mi vida,” the woman replied. This literally translates to “Yes, my life,” and it’s an affectionate way Cubans often speak, as if you are the most important person in their lives. And, on occasion, you just might be.
Cynthia had the address flagged in her travel book, which was tucked under her arm, and she pulled it out to show to the woman, as if to validate why we were standing in her doorway.
“We would like to eat here, if possible,” Cynthia said to her in Spanish.
“Entra, entra,” said the woman, waving her hands for us to go in. I felt uncertain, but we headed inside anyway.
This was Maria Victoria and we stood in the parlor of her one-level apartment with a balcony overlooking the street. She explained that she would have to go and buy the food and prepare a meal for the following day.
The only jobs available to Cubans at that time were provided by the government, and workers were paid a stipend of 240 Cuban pesos, roughly equivalent to ten US dollars a month, though the cost of living did not match their resources. Doctors, lawyers, and military generals would make the same wages as the woman who hands out toilet paper at the airport bathroom or Luis as our driver and guide.
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