Flor was matching toys to invisible little personalities, her mind and hands busy. It took concentration. We moved up and down the aisles at a steady pace, Flor deftly plucking toys from the shelves and dropping them into either of the two Macy’s shopping bags I was carrying—some store detective might have had an astounded secret eye on us, but of course Flor was going to pay. A big rubber spider. The wrapper said that if you pressed the spider’s belly it would light up with glow-in-the-dark colors, so she did, and the spider did.
“You would have liked this, mijito,” she said, smiling at me with her eyes as she dropped it into a bag. I would have? “Remember,” she said, her gaze drawing another quick line along the shelves, “when we used to walk to Woolworth’s and I’d buy you some little toy like that? Or a bag of penny candy?”
I was five, six, and she’d had no one else other than herself to spend her Guatemala-scale salary on (it became an “allowance” later). The walk to Namoset Square used to seem like such a long and meandering excursion out of reality, though it was a walk an adult could do in twenty minutes: out of Codrioli Road, past the cemetery, and then the march all the way up Nassawan Avenue, through the shade of the town’s oldest trees, past many big, white, black-shuttered houses bearing Historical Society plaques, past the private horse farm and the turnoff to the Girl Scout camp on the wooded side of Sarah Hancock Pond, where Flor spent two bewildered weeks during her second summer with us, when my father enrolled her there so that she could have the chance to meet American girls her own age, which of course she couldn’t at school; that was where she made friends with Ingrid Klohse, whose family had just moved to Namoset from West Germany, and who was just as ostracized at that camp as Flor.
When we reached the square we’d buy a toy at Woolworth’s and then snack at the food counter, or sit with ice-cream cones on a bench on the common in front of the Town Hall, where teenagers parked their motorcycles and souped-up cars while they lounged around in the grass by the drinking fountain or strutted their big stupid mouths, some of them stealing brazen looks at the suddenly timid and unprecedentedly brown girl sitting there in one of the funny dresses my mother used to pick out for her at Calvert’s or Filene’s Basement, taking little rabbit licks around the edges of her slowly twirled ice-cream cone, which was how an elderly French Espíritu Santo nun had taught her was the ladylike way to do it.
“I remember the first time I ever managed to drink down a whole large Coke at Woolworth’s,” I said. “Remember? I’d been trying for ages. And when we got home you announced it. And Mom said that wasn’t the kind of goal and achievement I should be proud of, and Dad said it was a great achievement, and they had a big fight about it.”
Flor widened her eyes, and with cheerfully mock servility said, “Oh! Doña Mirabel, disculpe!”
One question that occasionally occurred to me but never when Flor was actually right there to answer was how did she know, or how and when was it decided, that she could stop calling my mother “Doña”? She called my father Ira, always, because he wasn’t having any of the Don thing right from the start, and eventually she just started calling my mother Mirabel. Though she never addressed my mother in the familiar tú, not to mention the even more familiar vos, when they spoke in Spanish—a “custom” that evaded my father’s egalitarian and monolingual ear.
“Who I’m having lunch with the day after tomorrow in Boston by the way,” said Flor. “The agenda, I’ll bet anything, is you, Rogerio, Rogito, Roger-oger. What the heck, it’ll be great to see her. We’re meeting at that little place on Newbury Street, where else, that those two Hungarian Gaborish crones own.”
“Why am I the agenda?”
“Because you’re so much fun to talk about.”
“... I make more money than Dad used to, you know. Well, maybe not if you figure in cost of living and everything. The same, anyway.”
“Yeah, but you’re a laborer, practically a servant.”
“—A G.I. Joe doll?”
“Cómo no, five G.I. Joe dolls. There has been a change in policy.” She was dropping boxed G.I. Joes into the bags one by one. “They’re just leetle meeleetary toys. They can pull off their arms and legs and melt their heads over the stoves, I don’t care. No, seriously. It is an armed country, is it not? A society of soldiers and guns. So what’s the point of trying to keep it from them after all? I don’t know, maybe it’ll help.”
It had previously been Flor’s policy not to have war toys in the orphanage, for the obvious reason that so many of the orphans there had been so severely traumatized that just the sight of military trucks passing in the street could make them break out in tears, wails, hives. And stopped at any ordinary military checkpoint when they were, say, driving in the orphanage van on an outing to the beach, there were always at least a few orphans who’d start shrieking, “Don’t kill me! Don’t kill me!” and try to hide on the floor between the seats, spreading their panic to the others. Flor, driving, would try to roll her eyes in mock my-kids-are-such-comedians exasperation and smile winningly at the soldiers and hope they’d just let her pass without spending half an hour in the infernal coastal heat fumbling moronically over her passport and papers and a riled-up van’s worth of orphans’ identification cards. She had to laugh telling that story. But in the next moment, one that I imagined matched the moment when, driving off from the checkpoint, she returned her gaze to the heat-hazed highway, her expression became very quiet and her eyes shimmered over with what seemed a liquid spreading of her black pupils. With a toss of her head and a few blinks it went away.
“Mirabel says that you were born to happiness, that it’s your one true gift,” said Flor, sitting at one end of the long bar where I worked, leaning towards me with a teasing smile, both her hands wrapped around the scotch on the rocks I’d poured her. She’d flown to Boston that morning and lunched with my mother on Newbury Street, sharing tea and dessert with the two sisters from Hungary who own the place and had become my mother’s friendly accomplices in Empire of Beautiful Nostalgia maintenance. And in the evening she’d dined at Durgin-Park with my father and Judge Herbert, who gave them his season tickets to the Celtics for the night. From Boston Garden she’d gone directly to Logan Airport, and it wasn’t even midnight when I’d suddenly heard the diffuse murmur of a slow night scattered by her happily pitched “Cabrón!” and, looking up from behind the bar, where I’d been washing glasses with my head down, saw her standing there with her hands in the pockets of her leather jacket and her shoulders lifted up, her eyes giddy with amusement—she was really getting some kick out of seeing me at work for the first time. Though I’d been tending bar at the Regina Bar & Grill on Houston Street for more than two years, she’d never come in while I was on before.
“I thought my one true gift was the triple jump,” I said.
She laughed and rubbed her eyes. “Well, that too, Roger. But a lot of good it’s doing you now.”
I smirked and, moving off down the bar to pour some drinks, shuffled my feet in a miniature version of that marginal track and field event, also known as the hop, step, and jump. To my customers it must have looked as if I was just doing a little dance in place. They couldn’t have known that the first time I’d ever swung my legs into that motion has to count as one of the two or three pivotal moments of my life, which I might as well tell about now: It happened one early spring day when I was in the tenth grade, at a preseason track meet at the Perkins School for the Blind when the coach of our League Champ team tossed me into the triple jump along with all the other kids who weren’t supposed to be particularly good at anything. I’d only come out for track to please my father a little bit and to avoid feeling pressured to take an after-school job and to fill in some of the emptiness of not having Flor living at home anymore, since that was the year she was a freshman at Wellesley, only to find myself spending afternoons feeling like an anonymous ghost condemned to spend eternity running laps and wind sprints, appalled at the meaningless drudgery of it all.
Of course one of the many adjustments made that day at the Perkins School for the Blind, along with running the sprints down lanes divided by waist-high wires, which both the sightless and the seeing had to keep one hand on as they ran, was that the triple jump was performed from a standing position. Basketball players tend to excel at this event, having long, springy legs that are easily accustomed to the three synchronized leaps from all those bounding, airborne lay-ups, but I was a spas at basketball. So I stood off to the side watching our varsity jumpers warm up, absorbing the footwork, and having no presentiments at all that these would be the last moments of an adolescence so muddled by routine failure that even Flor, visiting on weekends, had fallen into the habit of excessive flattery if I so much as mowed the lawn without being asked twice.
I ended up beating everybody, even the blind, undefeated, number-one seed, who had long, hairless antelope legs and special jumping cleats with thick rubberized soles, and who couldn’t believe it. But who could? Coach took me aside, had me execute a triple jump with a running start in the grass. At the end of it I fell flat on my back on the hard ground, but I’d gone far, and was astonished at the natural combination of rhythm and power my legs had just shown me. I came back grinning foolishly, and Coach just nodded once in his curt, ant-headed way and said, “Well, Roger, we’re a triple jumper.” And he spent the next three years feeling vaguely infuriated by my inexplicable talent and utterly lackadaisical training regimens.
I spent the next hour or so in a lonely trance, aware of the alarmed looks of curiosity and acknowledgment I was getting from the team’s significant athletes, the looks of dispossessed envy and excruciated wonder from my former comrades in dinky anonymity, while I shivered in my sweats more from excitement than from the cold, watching the garrulous blind shot-putter whose eyes were grotesque webs of skin from a shotgun having exploded in his hands while he was bird hunting with his cousins in Texas years before; the pounding legs of the grunting blind sprinters, their eyes like hard-boiled eggs in the furious strain of their races; an extraordinarily pretty blind girl in neat blazer and plaid skirt, her perfect rich girl’s cheeks flushed as she cheered the blind runners on, jumping up and down and clapping her hands with the starter’s gun, and then smilingly asking everyone, “Who won? Who won?” with her fists pressed together under her chin and her thrilled breath puffing in the cold air.
The final event that afternoon, with dusk approaching and a light March snow falling, was the tandem distance run, and I hooked arms with the still incredulous blind boy whose undefeated reign I’d ended to run a mile and a half through the winding, wooded drives and grassy glades of that school that resembled an Ivy League campus in every way but for the absence of bicycles. I despised distance running and so did my new blind friend, who was telling me all about the triple jump and world record holders as we panted along on our prize legs, going as haughtily slowly as possible, until only twinned shot-putters lumbering along like fat drunken sailors on shore leave were near us.
“You obviously have a gift, Roger,” said the blind boy.
“Thank you,” I said. I had the wondrously silly sensation of running along arm in arm with an angel, a lost best friend returned to earth. The wet snow turned his pale, translucent skin a glass-sheened pink. He ran with his eyes wide open, and I could easily imagine a snowflake landing on each eye and not melting, and felt half convinced that it had happened.
It’s no exaggeration to say that no one had ever suggested so adamantly that I was “gifted” before, but it couldn’t have been more true. The triple jump and nothing else ended up getting me into a decent and tradition-rich and not too academically demanding college in upstate New York that happened to be big on track; and during my high school jumping career provided me with several euphoric moments in the clutch that gave me a taste of heroic predestination completely unsupported by anything else, and certainly helped me to gain the confidence to have a girlfriend for a while; and even just the other day in Pastelería Hemmings filled me with a chilling sense of my own mortality or something like that, because I was reading every inch of an imported New York Times as has become my expensive and somewhat homesick habit, when in the obituary of a minor Albany politician I came across the line “in high school he excelled at the pole vault.” And I swear—well, it was a weird moment, that’s all.
But I didn’t go out for track in college, and there wasn’t a thing anybody could do about it because I was already in, and my grades were suddenly fine, and Abuelita was helping to pay my way. And this has guaranteed me at least the chance of going on to some estimable profession in life, which was why my mother had had that conversation with Flor in the Hungarian café and more like it with me, and why Flor was teasingly and playfully repeating it now.
So I’d moved down the bar, done my little dance, poured out a round of customers’ drinks, given change, selected a new tape for the stereo system and plugged it in, poured myself a bourbon, sipped it, stashed it under the counter, and gone back to Flor, where, not missing a beat, I said, “Born to happiness, huh?”—though I’d certainly heard that one before, my famous, happy-go-lucky, just wait around for something good to happen nature.
“It’s not such a terrible thing!” said Flor. “At least Mirabel has decided that really she should not worry so much about you since, you see, you will end up happy no matter what, Roger.”
“Well that’s good news.”
“Exactly,” said Flor. “And so Mirabel thinks that maybe you should own your own restaurant. That that’s a good profession for a happy man.”
“Sounds like you two had quite a lunch.”
“We four, you mean. Because Las Hermanas Húngaras say they would be glad to advise you. Old World Budapestilent goulash secrets? I don’t know, Rogerio, sounds moocho bwayno to me.”
“Can we please stop having this conversation? I mean I can’t stand it.”
She giggled, sipped her drink.
“How’s Dad?”
“He wants me to come back.”
“No kidding!”
“Still the same, still gets peesed if you talk about anything during the game except the game except he’s the one who changes the subject and then, ‘Oh Floor! You’re making me miss the game!’”
“. . . So it’s playing in Guatemala three days only. Zeffirelli’s La Traviata. A rare thing, right? Yes, opera, I am thinking, I remember what this is, so I snuck away for the afternoon show at the Cine Lux, one of those great old art deco—ish theaters we have downtown, cavernous, like an ocean liner, and wouldn’t you know it? The only ones there are this couple snuggling and one of those glue-sniffing street kids who’s probably been sitting there since yesterday. Well this is great, my own private theater just about—there are people who know me just as the lady who is always coming in late for Planet of the Bad News Muppets with twenty or so not always well-behaved orphans in tow. So the lights go down, the movie comes on, and there they are, evidently singing opera, you can see their mouths opening and all the gestures, but the sound is so low, it’s like when you hear music coming from someone else’s Walkman, you know? So I went back to the projection booth to complain and there’s the usual indito in there with his stocking cap pulled down over his ears, guess what he said?”
“What?” said Cathy Miller breathlessly—Cathy was a waitress I’d been seeing pretty regularly, and now that the kitchen was closed she’d come over to have some drinks and to talk to Flor, whom of course I’d told her plenty about.
“He said, ‘But, seño! It’s subtitled!’”
“Oh my God.” Cathy laughed. “It’s a sin.”
“It’s Guatemala. Isn’t that Guatemala, Roger?”
“That’s the nicer side,” I said.
“Yes,” said Cathy, primly folding her hands on the bar, her thin, pretty, doe-eyed face suddenly graver. “Roger tells me all about what you do down there. I ... I just can’t imagine it. I admire you so much.”
“Well, thanks,” said Flor. “It�
�s a living. But I know Roger likes to think I’m Mother Teresa.”
“Well not exactly.” Cathy laughed.
“Hey, Mother Teresa’s salt of the earth,” I said—but I felt the instant panic of Cathy’s being on the verge of inadvertently exposing something I suddenly felt extremely shy about.
“I don’t know a thing about politics,” said Cathy, who usually had an attractively fey way about her, working her tables like a balletic sleepwalker, but now she seemed reverted to the too eager pixie of her American heartland upbringing. “I know it shouldn’t be, but it’s all just so far from my thinking, and I feel so stupid sometimes when Roger tells me things and it’s like, What side are we on again? Oh yeah.”
“I can tell you one thing,” said Flor, pleasantly and matter-of-factly enough, “when it comes to Guatemalan politics you’re not missing a thing, believe me.”
The Long Night of White Chickens Page 12