“I’ll revere whoever I like.” Papa sounds churlish and smug. Nothing like I imagine his noble, proud father sounded.
Trembling, Mamá walks over to him. “How dare you,” she says, and Papa’s hand springs out and strikes her across the face. The force sends her to her knees.
It is a slap to put her in her place, just like how she slaps us. We’ve seen Papa hit her before, but this time it’s different. Something irreparable is happening, a tear in the seam of our family, a moment that will lead to Mamá getting on a plane with me nine years later, my parents’ prideful, stubborn beliefs destroying an already-fragile marriage.
After being struck, Mamá stays bent over on our Persian rug. Mercedes stops wailing and shoves her fingers in her mouth, snot running over her hand. Bebo begins to sob, and Manuel kicks him under the table. I feel numb with confusion. Across from me Oneila hangs her head. This is all her fault, I think. She should never have asked that stupid question in the first place.
I slip from my chair and go to Mamá, pressing my hand into her fleshy thigh. The touch rouses her, and she stands up, snapping her skirt into place and swinging a pointed finger between us. “You remember this day,” she says. “You remember this day when your papa betrayed us.”
“Maria,” Papa says in an exasperated voice that he might use on one of us. She is being a silly girl, his tone says, an unreasonable woman.
Mamá ignores him. Since I am the nearest, she snatches my hand and says, “Come,” and I mimic her prideful stride into the kitchen where she picks up a plantain, lays it on the cutting board and chops the top off with one swift blow of the knife, like she’s beheading it. “I’ve seen Aayla fry these. It can’t be too hard. From now on this will be breakfast. Peel,” she snaps, handing me the plantain.
* * *
Not long after, Papa moved to Havana. In the beginning, he came home every weekend, then every other weekend. Mamá doesn’t speak of it, but we all know he’s gone to work for Batista. His brown military jacket gives him away. He makes a performance of removing it, hanging it on a hanger, front facing forward so the pressed lapels and polished buttons decorating the shoulders can be seen. He brushes it down with the flat of his hand, adjusts it just so and then hooks it on the wall by the door like a painting to be admired. It is a putrid brown and in no way goes with our blue-and-white tiled entryway. Neither do his boots, which he places under his jacket, the laces looped and tucked into the tops, the brown leather hard and shiny, boots and coat waiting at attention.
I figure, now that Papa is working, we’ll have our servants back, at the very least Farah, but nothing changes other than Mamá telling us over dinner one night that she is going to work as a seamstress for the rich ladies in town. “As a wealthy young girl, I was at least taught to sew, if not cook.” She forces a smile.
We would all prefer the latter. Since Oneila has taken up the cooking, every meal consists of beans, picadillo and boiled yucca. I am sorry I hated Aayla so much. I’d take a hand-slapping from her any day for a slice of her coconut cake.
I don’t like Mamá going to work. It’s bad enough losing my soft-footed, gentle Farah and having to be bossed by Oneila—the authority on all things since her newfound adultness—but Mamá’s absence makes me ache with missing. Every morning I stand on the front step and watch her stride away in her best dress, hips swaying, her wide-brimmed hat tilted at a daring angle. When I ask why she wears her finest clothes to work she says, “To show these women I know what fashion is,” but I know she’s too proud to dress in anything less. How they are still rich and we are poor I will never understand.
Home is torture without her. Oneila makes us sit at the table until midday doing arithmetic and grammar. Even worse is the afternoon when she releases my brothers to the outdoors and lets them romp under a canopy of leafy trees, while Danita and I are forced to embroider and crochet in the dark kitchen. Whenever Oneila is out of the room, I sneak under the table and play paper dolls with Mercedes. Danita threatens to tell, but she never does. My brothers come to supper bright-eyed, with scratches on their arms and red soil under their fingernails. Danita and I only have neat stitches to show for our time, and there is never a speck under our nails; Oneila makes sure of that.
All day I wait for Mamá, pouncing on her the moment she walks through the door and dragging her to the wireless where Rita de Cuba comes on at six o’clock sharp. Danita and I press our hands to our hearts and shimmy around the room singing “El Manisero” at the top of our lungs. Mamá gives us her full attention, sitting on the edge of her seat with her head tilted in concentration. Oneila’s bland dinner, the boys’ impatient appetites, Mercedes’s whining...all wait while we sing.
* * *
Now, three years after the rebellion, I’ve had my first public appearance in a nightclub, and next week I will sing on Radio Havana Cuba.
Holding tight to Mamá’s hand as we hurry through the streets, my shoes grating away at my heels, I ask, “Why didn’t Danita sing with me tonight?”
“You both auditioned, and they chose you.” Mamá pulls me down a narrow street where a sky-blue car waits to take us home.
“Will she sing with me at the radio station?”
“No.”
I am sorry about this but not very sorry. “When do I get to go to America?”
“What makes you think you get to go to America?”
“You said when I grew.”
“I said I would consider it.” Mamá nods to the driver as he opens the door for us. “Gracias, Señor.” She climbs into the back and adjusts her skirt over her knees.
I slide in next to her. My skirt bunches beneath me, and the leather seat sticks to the backs of my legs, but I am too tired to adjust anything. I lay my head on Mamá’s shoulder. She slips the ribbon from my hair and shakes out my ponytail, running her fingers over the sore spot on my scalp where the hair has been pulled tight. The car bumps down the road, the engine like the steady moan of a large animal. Slowly the city lights fade, and a fat moon appears over the dense, lush fields.
I sleep all thirty-six miles from Havana to Guanajay. Mamá shakes me awake as the car stops in front of our house, leaning over to open the door and scooting me out with her hip. I stand sleepily in the dirt street as she pays the driver. The air is rich with the scent of night-blooming jasmine.
The driver pulls away, and Mamá snaps the remainder of her money back into her purse. “What little money you made tonight isn’t enough to cover half the ride. You are a lucky girl. Don’t forget that.”
I don’t feel lucky. Mosquitoes bite my arms, and my heels hurt so much I want to throw my pretty new shoes into the road.
“Let’s get you to bed.” Mamá guides me toward the house. The front balcony sags like an overstuffed belly, and the blue trim crumbles around the tall, narrow windows. The windows are all dark. Oneila has put everyone to bed. I hope Danita isn’t too sorry I went without her.
“When, Mamá?” I ask.
She shakes her head, turning the key in the lock. “You are a spoiled child,” she sighs. “Fifteen. We will go to America when you are fifteen.”
In her voice, I hear that she decided this long ago.
Chapter Three
* * *
Los Angeles, 1958
Boxed Up
Mother,
For most of my childhood, I know little of your life in Cuba. It belongs to a time of siblings, a father, war and poverty. You and I are of a different time.
I am as American as towheaded, pasty-faced Sandy Plummer who lives next door. I eat hamburgers from Whistle ’n’ Pig, watch The Ed Sullivan Show and wear Mary Janes with white bibbed plaid dresses. You wear chiffon and lipstick, are on your third husband and sing and dance on Hollywood’s big screen. There are no siblings or father for me, just Grandmother Maria who bosses us both and your new husband who I don’t like and will never call Dad.
In August there is a drought. The ground beneath our feet cracks and splits with thirst. The wind blows hot and tumbleweeds roll. Dirt crumbles down the Hollywood Hills, turning roads and once-shiny cars the color of sand. Convertible tops remain closed, and windshield wipers battle dust instead of rain.
Sucked dry, the city holds its breath.
I hold mine, too, but for different reasons. Winter rain and boarding school are a package deal. I’d take the heat and dry air in Los Angeles forever if it meant summer wouldn’t end and I didn’t have to go back to Villa Cabrini Academy.
At twelve years old, my anger is already taking root. Angry girls are not good girls—this much I have been taught—which makes me certain that I am to blame for what happens.
It is midmorning on Saturday when the telephone rings. I am in the kitchen stirring ice cubes into my lemonade when you scurry from the living room to snatch it up. Our home is a one-story bungalow with a living room you step down into from the kitchen. An open doorway separates the two spaces, which means anything said in one room is heard in the other.
You cradle the lime-green receiver against your shoulder as you squirt lotion from a Jergens bottle that sits on the counter and rub it vigorously up your forearms. You are still wearing your pink silk bathrobe and feathered slippers which you stay in until noon on your days off. “Oh, you’re a doll. Of course we’ll be there,” you say, and I feel a flurry of excitement. You promised we’d spend the evening watching Maverick and eating orange sherbet, but I’d easily give up both for a night out. The last time you took me out we went to a charity ball at the Palladium, and I got to meet Lucille Ball.
I am picturing what glittering event you are taking me to when you hang up. “That was Uncle Duke inviting Alfonso and me to a cocktail party. I’m sorry, sweetheart, but I simply couldn’t turn him down.”
Under my palm, the perspiring glass feels slick and wet, the ice cubes already melted to slivers. The slightest motion would send it sailing off the counter, drown our feet in shattered glass and sweet lemonade. I look at you, meet your eyes. “Why do you still call him Uncle Duke? He’s not my uncle,” I say, hoping this will sting more than broken glass.
John Wayne became my uncle after you married his best friend, Grant. Now that you are married to Alfonso, a gorgeous, dark-haired juggler—gorgeous being your word, not mine—you have no right calling John my uncle or dining at his house with your new husband, for that matter.
Unfazed by my comment, you smile and wrap an arm around my shoulder. “He’ll always be your uncle, dearest. Now, don’t be glum. I promise to make it up to you tomorrow. We’ll stay up until midnight watching television and eating buckets of sherbet, just the two of us.”
I sink against you, melting under the scent of the orange-blossom skin cream you slathered over your arms. For the briefest moment, I let my head rest on the bridge of your shoulder before pushing you away. It isn’t fair that you can soften my anger when you are the cause of it. “Turn Mr. Wayne down. Tell him you already have plans.”
You cross your arms, looking sorry but unwavering. No one tells you what to do, other than Grandmother Maria. “That would be rude, now wouldn’t it, Nina?”
Catching hold of the tassel on the tie of your robe, I give it a childish tug, “He’d understand, and besides, he wouldn’t want you leaving me all alone.”
“Don’t be silly. You’re old enough to stay home alone, and even if you weren’t, your abuela is here.”
“She doesn’t count!”
From the next room Grandmother Maria shouts back, “Oh, I don’t, do I?”
“Nina,” you scold, “don’t hurt your abuela’s feelings.”
“She doesn’t have any!” I cry, my anger finding a target with my grandmother. Grandmother Maria is the ruler of the house and the cause of many bad things, namely boarding school, which she enforces. I know you’d never send me away to school if it wasn’t for her.
“Stop it, Nina. You’re being childish. Sometimes things come up that can’t be helped.”
“Why do you want to see Uncle Duke, anyway? He was Grant’s best friend, not Alfonso’s. He doesn’t even like Alfonso. He hasn’t come to see us once since you married him.”
Grant’s name strikes where I want. Your eyes slide away from mine, your smooth cheeks twitching as you press your lips together in an effort to keep whatever you’d like to say to yourself.
“Sorry, I didn’t mean it,” I say quickly, but you just shake your head and leave the kitchen, looking disappointed in me.
I would have felt genuinely sorry about bringing up Grant if it had changed your mind, but it doesn’t.
By the time dusk arrives, the sinking sun making everything glow hotter, I am waiting on the sofa for you to emerge in your shimmering evening attire and forgive me. The ceiling fan sends little hairs tickling across my forehead, and the mohair cushion prickles the backs of my bare calves. I should be wearing stockings with my skirt, but they’re too sweaty. I stare at the enormous painting over the stone fireplace—colorful geometric shapes floating on a white canvas—and imagine myself boxed up, a girl configured of precise angles and neat points. Fixed. Perfectly contained.
I think of Grant. The orange chair he died in is still here, pushed up to the floor-length window that looks out onto our teardrop swimming pool. The last time I saw him he was slumped in that chair with a bottle of alcohol between his knees, his eyes red and swollen. Grant was handsome once, in films and photographs, but by the time he married you he was old and puffy.
I should have known something was wrong that day. Despite the drinking, he always noticed me, even when I felt invisible, which made me love him. No matter how drunk he was, he always managed a smile or a wink, never failing to ask how I was faring with the wretched nuns at boarding school. “If I had my way,” he’d say, “you’d go to school down the street and be home for dinner. Between Grandmother Maria and that mother of yours—” an elbow nudge to my side “—don’t try and change those gals’ minds about anything. You know what I mean, darling?”
The day he died, he had no words for me. When I walked into the living room, he glanced up, but there was a flat, vacant look in his eyes, their clear blue turned watery as if he was fading from the inside. “Hi, Grant,” I said, but he didn’t answer, just dropped his gaze back into his lap. I remember how the light from the window poured over him, uncomfortably bright as I walked past him to my room, waiting for you to return with Christmas packages. Eventually, I heard your car pull up, the front door open and then a scream. I flew into the hallway only to be met by Grandmother Maria who was rushing toward me with her hands raised in the air. She pushed me back into my room crying, “Do not come out,” and slammed the door behind her. Terrified, I dropped to my stomach and pressed my face to the crack under the door. There was sobbing and hurrying feet, and then after what felt like a lifetime, a distant police siren that grew louder, roaring to a halt in front of our house. I ran to the window. People spilled from their doorways and gathered in the street, our quiet, Sherman Oaks neighborhood coming to life.
Not until two white-coated men appeared carrying a stretcher with a lumpy body covered in a sheet did I understand that someone was dead. I went sick with dread until I saw you walking down the path, Grandmother’s arm tight around your waist. I banged the glass. I wanted you to look up, to tell me what was going on. But you only clung to the side of the stretcher and climbed into the back of the ambulance without a backward glance.
It was Grandmother Maria who took me to a diner and told me over a bottle of Coca-Cola and a pastrami sandwich that Grant had died of a heart attack. I knew she was lying. Grant’s silence, the emptiness in his eyes, made sense to me now. You and Grandmother Maria like to believe the nuns keep me innocent, but the Catholic girls at my school know all about suicide. Last year, a girl hung herself in her dorm room. She was a sophomore, so
I didn’t know her, but rumor had it she wasn’t fully dead when they found her and she died later in the hospital.
On the couch in the living room, I peel my calves off the prickly upholstery, and tuck my feet underneath me. I cross my eyes so the geometric shapes on the canvas double and swim into each other. More boxes. More angles. How does one get to be a perfectly formed configuration of shapes? You are. A woman beautiful in her skin, utterly sure of herself. I know where all of your angles start and stop.
Or at least, I thought I did.
There is a slap to my knee, and I jump as Alfonso breaks into my reveries. He drops next to me stinking of spicy cologne, a tumbler in one hand. “What are you looking at?” He tilts his head, staring at the painting with mock concentration.
“Nothing.” One side of his blue gabardine pants presses into my foot, and I move to get up, but he puts a hand on my bare leg.
“Where are you going? Your mom will be out any minute. She asked me to keep you company.”
Alfonso is charming, black hair swept up Elvis-style, perpetually tan skin and brown eyes that do, actually, twinkle. He always looks as if he is just about to compliment you. I’m not sure why I don’t like him: he’s nice enough, just annoyingly glossy and confident. A stage guy, an entertainer. Maybe it’s because Grandmother Maria told me one night—when she was in a mood—that he married you for your money, which I suppose is true since he bought himself a shiny, yellow Cadillac with white leather seats and hasn’t booked a juggling gig in the two years since.
Looking at him now, I think I hate him just because he took Grant’s place.
“Cat got your tongue?” Alfonso shakes the last of his drink into his mouth, crunching ice between his teeth. He drinks the same stinky, dark stuff Grant used to, only he is never sloppy or sad.
Find Me in Havana Page 3