We Came All the Way from Cuba So You Could Dress Like This?

by Achy Obejas

  My father’s funeral will be simple but well-attended, closed casket at my request, but with a moment reserved for those who want a last look. My mother will stay in the room while the box is pried open (I’ll be in the lobby smoking a cigarette, a habit I despised in my father but which I’ll pick up at his funeral) and tell me later she stared at the cross above the casket, never registering my father’s talcumed and perfumed body beneath it.

  I couldn’t leave, it wouldn’t have looked right, she’ll say. But thank god I’m going blind.

  Then a minister who we do not know will come and read from the Bible and my mother will reach around my waist and hold onto me as we listen to him say, When all these things come upon you, the blessing and the curse...and you call them to mind among all the nations where the Lord your God has driven you, and return to the Lord your God, you and your children, and obey his voice...with all your heart and with all your soul; then the Lord your God will return your fortunes, and have compassion upon you, and he will gather you again from all the peoples where the Lord your God has scattered you.

  There will be a storm during my father’s burial, which means it will end quickly. My mother and several relatives will go back to her house, where a TV will blare from the bedroom filled with bored teenage cousins, the women will talk about how to make picadillo with low-fat ground turkey instead of the traditional beef and ham, and the men will sit outside in the yard, drinking beer or small cups of Cuban coffee, and talk about my father’s love of Cuba, and how unfortunate it is that he died just as Eastern Europe is breaking free, and Fidel is surely about to fall.

  Three days later, after taking my mother to the movies and the mall, church and the local Social Security office, I’ll be standing at the front gate with my bags, yelling at the cab driver that I’m coming, when my mother will ask me to wait a minute and run back into the house, emerging minutes later with a box for me that won’t fit in any of my bags.

  A few things, she’ll say, a few things that belong to you that I’ve been meaning to give you for years and now, well, they’re yours.

  I’ll shake the box, which will emit only a muffled sound, and thank her for whatever it is, hug her and kiss her and tell her I’ll call her as soon as I get home. She’ll put her chicken bone arms around my neck, kiss the skin there all the way to my shoulders, and get choked up, which will break my heart.

  Sleepy and tired in the cab to the airport, I’ll lean my head against the window and stare out at the lanky palm trees, their brown and green leaves waving good-bye to me through the still coming drizzle. Everything will be damp, and I’ll be hot and stuffy, listening to car horns detonating on every side of me. I’ll close my eyes, stare at the blackness, and try to imagine something of yearning and hope, but I’ll fall asleep instead, waking only when the driver tells me we’ve arrived, and that he’ll get my bags from the trunk, his hand outstretched for the tip as if it were a condition for the return of my things.

  When I get home to Uptown I’ll forget all about my mother’s box until one day many months later when my memory’s fuzzy enough to let me be curious. I’ll break it open to find grade school report cards, family pictures of the three of us in Cuba, a love letter to her from my father (in which he talks about wanting to kiss the tender mole by her mouth), Xeroxes of my birth certificate, copies of our requests for political asylum, and my faded blue-ink Cuban passport (expiration date: June 1965), all wrapped up in my old green sweater.

  When I call my mother—embarrassed about taking so long to unpack her box, overwhelmed by the treasures within it—her answering machine will pick up and, in a bilingual message, give out her beeper number in case of emergency.

  A week after my father’s death, my mother will buy a computer with a Braille keyboard and a speaker, start learning how to use it at the community center down the block, and be busy investing in mutual funds at a profit within six months.

  But this is all a long way off, of course. Right now, we’re in a small hotel room with a kitchenette that U.S. taxpayers have provided for us.

  My mother, whose eyes are dark and sunken, sits at a little table eating one of the Royal Castle hamburgers the fat Hungarian lady bought for us. My father munches on another, napkins spread under his hands. Their heads are tilted toward the window which faces an alley. To the far south edge, it offers a view of Biscayne Boulevard and a magically colored thread of night traffic. The air is salty and familiar, the moon brilliant hanging in the sky.

  I’m in bed, under sheets that feel heavy with humidity and the smell of cleaning agents. The plastic doll the Catholic volunteer gave me sits on my pillow.

  Then my father reaches across the table to my mother and says, We made it, we really made it.

  And my mother runs her fingers through his hair and nods, and they both start crying, quietly but heartily, holding and stroking each other as if they are all they have.

  And then there’s a noise—a screech out in the alley followed by what sounds like a hyena’s laughter—and my father leaps up and looks out the window, then starts laughing, too.

  Oh my god, come here, look at this, he beckons to my mother, who jumps up and goes to him, positioning herself right under the crook of his arm. Can you believe that, he says.

  Only in America, echoes my mother.

  And as I lie here wondering about the spectacle outside the window and the new world that awaits us on this and every night of the rest of our lives, even I know we’ve already come a long way. What none of us can measure yet is how much of the voyage is already behind us.

  About the Author

  ACHY OBEJAS is a widely published poet, fiction writer, and journalist. Her poetry has been published in Conditions, Revista Chicano-Riquena, and Beloit Poetry Journal, among others. In 1986, she received an NEA fellowship in poetry. Her stories have been published in magazines such as Antigonish Review, Phoebe, and Third Woman, and in numerous anthologies, includ-ing Discontents (Amethyst), West Side Stories (Chicago Stoop), and Girlfriend Number One (Cleis). She writes a weekly column for the Chicago Tribune and is a regular contributor to High Performance, Chicago Reader, and Windy City Times, among other publications. In 1989, she received a Peter Lisagor Award for political reporting from Sigma Delta Chi/Society for Professional Journalists, for her coverage of the Chicago mayoral elections.

  Copyright ©1994 by Achy Obejas

  All rights reserved. Except for brief passages quoted in newspaper, magazine, radio or television reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying or recording, or by information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the Publisher.

  Published in the United States by Cleis Press Inc., P.O. Box 8933, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania 15221, and P.O. Box 14684, San Francisco, California 94114.

  “Wrecks” appears in Girlfriend Number One (Cleis Press), edited by Robin Stevens.

  “Above All, A Family Man” appears, in slightly different form, in ACM 26 (Fall 1993).

  “Man Oh Man” was adapted for the stage in 1990 by Zebra Crossing Theater, Chicago.

  “The Spouse” appears, in slightly different form, in Discontents (Amethyst), edited by Dennis Cooper.

  “We Came All the Way from Cuba So You Could Dress Like This?” appears in Michigan Quarterly Review/Puentes a Cuba, Vol. II (September 1994).

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Obejas, Achy, 1956-

  We came all the way from Cuba so you could dress like this? / by Achy Obejas.

  p. cm.

  eISBN : 978-1-573-44699-0

  1. Cuban American women—Fiction. 2. Lesbians—United

  States—Fiction.

  PS3565.P34W4 1994

  813’.54—dc20

  94-18194

  CIP