But life right now. Daniel brought home less some weeks than others, and they always lived on the precipice of hunger, of falling ill with no money for a doctor or a hospital. Daniel had to hand over half his already scanty earnings to some guy with Yanqui connections. And she knew the stories about the firing squads and the disappearances and the young girls who’d been whisked from their beds in the night because they caught the President’s eye.
As stories of the military’s defeats circled more and more, Dolores began to see. She began to see, in whatever lay on the other side of the regime, something akin to her own do-over. If the rebels in the mountains succeeded, if her husband left and died a hero, if she woke up a new woman in a new country. She might dare to seek a future, any future, that wasn’t this.
As it happened, Daniel did leave to the mountains after a skirmish with Batista’s men depleted the ranks of guerrilleros and Fidel once more put out a call over Radio Rebelde. But before he did, Dolores came closer to death than she ever had before, even with her ribs broken, with her mouth pouring blood and her tooth in her hand, even closer than that.
Two months after Daniel killed a man for the first time, he looked for something, who knows what. He’d ducked under the bed and seen the curious slash in the mattress. And when he found the wad of money, when he dug his hand into the exposed spring coils and came out with a fistful of cash, he grabbed a sobbing Carmen and Elena by their hair, threw them into the bedroom they shared. Then he took Dolores by the neck as she washed dishes at the sink. He took her by the neck with one hand and with the other ripped off her dress and left her in her slip. He dragged her through the door.
He beat her as he usually did, except this time he did it right outside their house, where Dolores stood crouching and shivering, horrified that a neighbor might pass at any minute and witness her shame, her C-section-scarred belly and quivering thighs. When he was done pummeling her at the door, when he’d drawn a bloody gash across her cheek and punched her eye shut, he grabbed her by the hair and threw her back into the house, to the bedroom. Then he pulled his machete from behind the bed and held it over her.
She was aware, from movies and such, that some people saw their lives flash before them at the moment of death. But that didn’t happen to her. She didn’t see a montage: Dolores as a giggling child in her own mother’s arms; Dolores wiggling up palm trees to knock down coconuts; Dolores afraid and exhilarated when a handsome man came looking for her; Dolores and a bloody, beautiful Carmen; Dolores nursing Elena as her mother lay dying. None of that happened.
Dolores didn’t see. She felt: a roaring beast in her gut, salivating, frothing for another chance to open her mouth and form a word, any word. The beast found ferocity in her she’d never again recover. She apologized, of course. Sobbed and begged and pleaded and summoned her daughters’ names in the hope of reaching the humanity in Daniel. But he swung. He swung and her hands sprang and she grabbed the handle with such strength, with such rage, that the machete halted inches from her face. Inexplicable. A Hollywood-worthy ending. She felt like Marilyn Monroe. A Cuban Marilyn Monroe in underwear with one eye swollen shut and smears of her own blood, who knew from where anymore, soaking her slip.
It was enough to stop Daniel: miracle. He crumbled to the floor, panting, then threw the machete across the room. “You fucking puta. You’re lucky I didn’t slit your throat.”
She was Marilyn Monroe, and she had never felt more certain she could survive without Daniel.
And then Daniel left for the mountains again.
But this time, she listened to Radio Rebelde every day he was gone. She listened for any sign of defeat, that bombs would rain over the tropics. That Daniel would walk into a campo town thinking he’d meet sympathizers but then—gunshot to the face. That a snake the size of a palm trunk would slither into his tent, crush his neck in the night. Her money gone. He’d taken the cash from the mattress. But she didn’t care. If she’d learned one thing from that beast in her, that beast that had absorbed death so she could live, it was this: She would survive. No matter what.
When news of Batista’s defeat reached Dolores, she sat at her sewing machine, mending trousers for some wealthy city people, a job she’d secured via her underground typewriter-ladies circle. Circle of saviors. She wept before the silk dresses and pleated pants, waiting for Carmen to arrive home from school. Wept as Elena tugged at her hem and said, “Mamá café. Mamá café.”
And then in the afternoon, to the city again. How the plaza came alive that day, rumblings and murmurings, singing peanut vendor, nannies with smiles on their faces patting little blond heads, Carmen and Elena making wishes over fountain coins that weren’t theirs. Dead? Alive? Surely dead. For days, she waited for the postman with a letter announcing her widowhood or perhaps a compañero from the mountains with a beret in his hand over his heart … I’m so sorry to inform you of this, comrade …
Instead, Daniel showed again. Came through the door at dawn on a Wednesday before Dolores was up, when it was still dark outside. Walked right into their bedroom and kissed her atop the head.
“We won,” he said to her. “Get up and get the cafetera going. Did you hear Fidel himself is coming to the city? Perhaps today, even.”
She had no words. All Dolores could do as she lit the gas and placed the rusted metal contraption over the fire was think of the machete she’d purchased when Daniel left, tucked under the big guava bush behind their house. She’d sharpened it herself. She’d practiced the blow that could bring a fat sugarcane stalk thudding to the ground.
The girls ran to Daniel’s side when they woke, hugged him tight, chattered away.
“Today we’ll celebrate,” Dolores said to them. “You can stay home from school, Carmen.”
“Why?” Carmen looked up from her father’s shoulder, where she’d burrowed her head.
“Things are going to be better now.”
“What things?”
“All things, darling.”
She needed a plan. The coffee bubbled, filled the kitchen with the heavy, burnt scent of dark roast. It rose like chimney smoke through the barrel, hot and fragrant. She poured three little cups. She needed Carmen bright awake in case they had to run at any minute. Dolores shaky, sticky, in the kitchen, bending over the stove. A shiver up her spine.
Little cups before Daniel and Carmen. She drank her own in a sip.
“Me too?” Carmen asked.
“Yes, cariño. Celebrate with a little cafecito.”
She knew Daniel would never let her leave. He’d hunt her down; he’d find her. He’d said as much. She was most afraid for Carmen and Elena. If she left them. If she took them.
“What are you making?” Daniel slipped a cigar from the pocket of his shirt and lit it over the stove fire.
Dolores pushed open a window. “Tostadas. What else could I afford?” He ignored her remark. She cut slices of bread as Carmen peppered Daniel with questions.
“Why was work so many days?
“Where do you sleep or do you just work for days and days?
“How come you didn’t even come home for lunch?
“What did you eat?”
“Café café café,” Elena said, toddling on the ground.
“Both of you—quiet.” Dolores slathered butter on a piece of bread. Outside, the chickens, causing commotion.
She would wait until night. Whatever she was going to do, she would have to do it at night. She toasted the bread on a pan, flattened it with a foil-wrapped brick, and pictured her own head crushed beneath that weight.
“I’m going out to look for a paper,” Daniel said.
“But your bread?”
“When I get back, you can make me another one. I can’t sit around. I’m too excited.”
Relief. A few minutes to herself. Maybe even an hour if he stopped along the way to chat up neighbors and townspeople. The sun was out. The town would be buzzing.
As it was, Daniel took even longer. She paced and then clean
ed to ward off her anxiety and then paced some more and then cleaned some more. She wondered what Daniel had felt when he killed a man for the first time and if it’d happened from afar, with a gun, or if he’d faced the man whose life he took, if Daniel had looked him in the eyes. And after? Did Daniel feel powerful? He’d decided a fate. That’s all it was, killing a man, squeezing the time line a little. Who knew if that man Daniel had killed would have died anyway, struck by a car in a year or contracting an awful disease. Perhaps Daniel had spared him a worse fate.
Daniel left for three hours, and the whole time Dolores was sure Carmen and Elena wondered why their mother kept saying she loved them, why their mother wouldn’t stop hugging them.
Dolores said they should celebrate. Daniel even gave her cash who knows from where to buy a whole pig from a neighbor, and they slaughtered it, made a hole in the ground, and left it to roast all day. The pig had screamed as Daniel slit its throat, and all Dolores could think was Marilyn Monroe Marilyn Monroe.
She got him drunk. Glass of rum after glass of rum. Some with Coca-Cola, bright and popping in the glass. Some pure, dark rum with an ice cube, frothy fire down the throat. She feared he’d grow angry as he drank more; it happened enough. But he was too elated from the victory that few even knew about yet, unless they were also glued to the radio. Jolly and red faced into the evening, swinging the girls in circles and promising them dolls and gifts.
Carmen and Elena delighted as well. Their mother doting on them, unable to let go; their father merry and generous, offering the world.
“Daddy, I love you!” Carmen shouted as Daniel hoisted her in the air and Beny Moré’s trombone shrieked.
“I love you, mi linda!” Daniel spun her and spun her.
Dolores made her move after she put the girls to bed. They’d complained, of course, asked to keep the party going. Carmen most of all. But Dolores told the girls they’d get their promised dollhouse if only they said their prayers and shut their eyes. Then Dolores dressed in her most formfitting wiggle dress and dabbed perfume on her neck. She painted her lips red.
Daniel at the table with another glass of Cuba Libre before him, already piss-drunk, slurring the words to “Dolor y Perdón” with his head down. Yo no supe comprender tu cariño, / vida mía, cariñito.
Fulgencio Batista was in the Dominican Republic, where he had fled in a plane in the night with over $700 million in cash and fine art. As Dolores waltzed toward Daniel, President Rafael Trujillo was welcoming the fellow dictator into his palace, probably consoling him. Perhaps they, too, shared a bottle of rum. And Dolores was guiding Daniel by the hand and he was wobbling and slurring. She was laying him on the couch.
“You look so good, mami,” he slurred. Daniel held an arm toward Dolores and brought her down on top of him. He kissed her neck. She sighed and moaned. She had planned to do whatever it took, to bear it, to hope Daniel had sex with her and then immediately fell asleep, as he so often did. But she didn’t have to go that far. He kissed her neck, and then turned his head, eyes fluttering, and drifted into easy, drunken sleep. He started to snore.
Dolores waited a few minutes to be sure he wasn’t going to wake. Then she eased away from Daniel’s body and gently kicked off her high heels. Barefoot, she tiptoed out the back door and shut it behind her. She had to feel her way through the dirt and shrubs in near perfect darkness. In the middle of July, even the nights were made of an engulfing, wet heat. She could feel herself damp under the tight linen of her red dress and could feel the spongey dirt give way beneath her. She found the machete. Hesitated only a moment before grabbing its handle.
Funny how the mind protects us. Dolores can remember nothing of what happened after that and has only imagined scenarios. She must have tiptoed back into the house. She must have shut the door behind her. How did she creep up to Daniel as he snored? Was she behind the sofa or before him? She must have stabbed him dozens of times, there was so much blood. So much blood could only have come from slash after slash into Daniel’s chest and stomach, slash after slash after slash.
What she does remember: Daniel waking at some point and screaming. How she feared the girls would hear and wake or a neighbor in the distance would catch hold of the desperate shouts and come running, phone the police. (Were there police? Who was in charge, now that the rebels had defeated Batista?) But Daniel had been unable to stop Dolores in his drunken stupor; his screams had quieted quickly. All that was left then was Dolores breathing hard with a blood-streaked machete in her hand, was Daniel still as the moon, covered in sticky wounds, and soaking red deep into the couch.
Dolores waited even later—it must have been two in the morning. And panting and sweating and heaving, she pushed that whole couch out the back door and into the little plot behind the house. Few people could see into the back of Dolores and Daniel’s home. The nearest neighbor was a mile away, and she couldn’t make out the house past the thick bushes and palm trees. She took the coals they’d used to roast the pig and spread the same gasoline over their stony surface. She assembled wooden planks she’d saved to make a pit. She lit that whole couch and her unmoving husband on fire and watched them blaze into the sky, into the night. She watched the flames pop and crackle like a million gathered fireflies. There were no stars that she could see, but the flames were enough. As if a moon had descended into her own backyard. She could hardly believe what she had done.
Not until morning, when all that was left was a pile of ash and Dolores looked down at her body covered in blood and soot and sweat and could have jumped into the fire herself. But what of Carmen and Elena then? She’d done what needed to be done. She’d had no choice. She would spread the word—of her hero husband, a martyr who died bravely in the mountains. When people would claim they’d seen him, she’d question their dates, play the confused grieving wife. She’d tell the girls their father had left again, one final battle; it wasn’t victory yet like he’d said. She’d stand at the road as the parade heralded Fidel Castro through the streets in a couple of days and she would weep, she would laugh and weep and wave, she would hold her girls in the air and tell them the time for crying was over. She would dance.
How was she to know that Carmen had stood at the back door that night? That she’d seen her father’s face slowly consumed by licking flames and tiptoed back into the house? In fifteen years, Carmen would board a plane to Miami, and Dolores would never see her again. She would think it was politics that had divided her from her firstborn daughter.
11
OTHER GIRL
Jeanette
Miami, 2006
The first time I see the woman, she is buying cold cream. What she wants, she says, is a moisturizer that doesn’t feel heavy, doesn’t sit on her skin like so much weight. I lay out her options: whipped argan oil, cold-pressed and refined; our new microbeading exfoliating lotion with gentle 7 percent alpha hydroxy; the bestselling hyaluronic-acid-plus-B-vitamins gel with all-day-stay technology, patent pending. Her red fingernails tap the counter as she slides a credit card with her other hand. She buys all of them.
I can’t take my eyes off her. She reminds me of my mother. I think this is what draws me to her, what makes it so I can’t take my eyes off her. I haven’t seen her, my mother, in a month. I have only one day off from the store each week, and I have to choose: spend my day off with her or with Mario. My mother doesn’t know about Mario. She only knows I have a job again. I haven’t lost it again.
The woman reminds me of my mother because she looks breakable. But also immaculate. Breakable and immaculate. I see her almost every single week, and she always shops during the day, like so many other women. She wears red-soled heels, carries snakeskin bags. Looks like she smells of Chanel No. 5—no, something even more expensive, that Jean Patou thousand-dollar bottle with ambergris from sperm whales and eight thousand jasmine flowers. I make ten dollars an hour, but the lexicon of wealth still roots in me. I can’t scrub my childhood off. You’re simply and unobtrusively classy, like a Celine b
ag, I say to her in a daydream.
The same day she buys cream from me, the woman tells me her name. I say Isabel is a beautiful name. I get the feeling that she doesn’t want to leave the counter; she lingers. Her skin is so bright and taut that it glistens. It is the skin of expensive facials, chemical peels. Things I do not seek at nineteen. You have beautiful skin, I say, because I do not know what else to say. My mother has the same skin, and I see her leaning into the mirror sometimes, running a finger over each cheek, examining her pores. She is fond of telling me that she, too, used to have skin like mine. That I ought to stay out of the sun. As if the sun is my problem. As if my problems don’t flourish under the glare of artificial light.
The other reason I haven’t seen my mother in a month is that I refuse to see my mother in her own home—once my own home—as long as my father is there. She doesn’t understand. He’s sick and I should see him, she says. He can’t even drink anymore, she says. But I don’t go home and she doesn’t come to my new home and so we always meet in some café or Cuban restaurant—and on most of my days off, I don’t want to go. So she just calls and says, Are you okay? And I say, I’m okay. And she says, Can I go see you? And I say I’m busy and she sighs a lot and then there is just so much silence on the phone that we hang up because neither of us can handle so much silence.
The same day of the face cream and the woman-like-my-mother, Mario nods off on the kitchen table, where he racks up a line and I eat dinner by myself because he isn’t hungry all night.
He has a new job: dispensary tech at a pain clinic. He’s been there a month, and for a month he’s been slipping Oxy pill by pill in his socks. Easier than anyone would think, he says. He sells them. He wants me to quit my job at the department store. He wants to take care of me, he says.
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