Bird of Paradise

by Raquel Cepeda

  In only a few hours, the sky has changed colors. Santo Domingo’s sky makes her waters turn shades of the brightest blue. The sky in New York City is a sad mixture of rust brown and slate. The airport, the streets, the park, the people—those from the islands included—eventually lose the luster on their skin, like Mami did. I notice the golden brown is already leaving my own hands and face, escaping out the cracked window.

  Cars behind and on either side of us are honking at Papi; drivers are pouting, and a few throw their middle fingers up in his direction.

  “Come on, fuckin’ drive, buddy, would ya?” a driver screams at Papi. He makes a funny motion with his hand under his chin, as if he’s scratching it, followed by what I think is a bad word in another language: “BAFANGUL!”

  Papi ignores him, keeping his eyes fixed straight ahead.

  “Eduardo, please. I think you have to drive a little faster, what? You’re going to get a ticket,” Alice says from the passenger seat.

  “Come on, dah’ling. Let me drive!”

  We inch onward, driving so slowly I think I may be able to walk faster to wherever it is we’re going. The whole world is passing us by, yelling all kinds of “fuck yous” and throwing gestures of what feels like fukú in different languages. Papi glances back at me through the rearview mirror. I smile at him. He doesn’t smile back.

  “Come on, mothafuckyou,” we hear from time to time on the expressway.

  “Eduardo, please,” Alice says.

  “Dah’ling, keep your mou’se shut. I’m driving,” Papi says.

  A lot of time goes by before we arrive on a street I’ve seen before. We are on Seaman Avenue. Mami’s building is on the corner. I can see our old window facing the front. Papi lives two buildings over, down the block. It’s the same building Mami helped him move into years earlier, after she caught him in bed with a guitar-strumming Puerto Rican church lady. After Papi and Alice got married, they decided to live here over her place on the Upper East Side because he wanted to stay in walking distance from the tennis courts and his favorite Cuban-Chinese restaurant on Dyckman Street.

  We walk up the stairs to the place where Mami left Papi for good before we split to San Francisco. He unlocks the door to an apartment that looks a lot smaller than I remembered it. Dark wooden floors are covered with dusty rugs. The walls are sad, loaded down by kitsch and official-looking plaques that make the place look more like a doctor’s office than a home.

  From the instant I walk across the threshold into Papi’s apartment, cramped with tennis equipment and furniture meant for a much larger place, I start to feel disoriented and dizzy. Mama would not believe that a woman lived here. There is no room for me, no spot where I can extend my hands without knocking something over.

  Papi’s building is on a block where a lot of white people still live. The white people are super-friendly to each other, clustering in small groups in front of the building. They keep mostly to themselves.

  Our building is like a barrio within a barrio, full of its own bochinche. I heard that the little quiet man with the DA haircut down the hall from us—he’s been described as being Dominican, Cuban, Puerto Rican, and sometimes Mexican—was recently abandoned by his wife because he had violated their son in a nasty way. There’s a morena around the corner who I think helps solve other people’s problems, a social worker. She looks like Michael Jackson, only darker, with a wide nose and a dry Jheri curl. There are a few enormous neighbors in the building who move like the fishing boats on Samana Bay, slowly and deliberately. One looks exactly like Raj and Dee’s mom, Mabel, from What’s Happening!!, a show I loved watching on Eddy Street. I can hear her breathing heavy as she steers herself toward the mailbox, her door, and up Seaman Avenue. And when she speaks to her daughter, Mini-Mabel, or says hello to us, her words are slow and rhythmic. It takes nothing for beads of sweat to surface around her shiny hairline, even during the winter months.

  There’s a man in the apartment directly across from us that looks like a real-life Fat Albert who doesn’t like to walk. Each and every night he returns home from work in his boat of a car and waits for hours in front of the building for a parking space to free up. Sometimes he reads the paper and eats fried chicken legs to pass the time. He is a patient man.

  There’s a middle-aged white couple downstairs who are shaped like matching cantaloupes. A man older than Jesus who used to be the super and his elderly sister live upstairs; they always look sad. I heard they are Jewish.

  Most of the people on my new block look down or straight ahead and avoid making eye contact. The only exceptions are Fat Albert and his wife, Michael Jackson, Mabel, and Mini-Mabel.

  I hear people walking their dogs outside complaining about there being too many Dominicans and other Spanish-speaking people flooding this side of the block. They already made a mess of the building directly across the street from Mami’s old place by playing dominoes and music through the night, and talking too loudly for the sensitive ears of the block’s white settlers. These new people are invading the area like they do the trains, walls, and parks when night falls. Every morning they leave evidence in the form of elaborate murals that stretch ten feet high and more across, painted on the concrete barricade wrapped around large sections of the park’s baseball field.

  “They chu’d take all of dose Dominicans and kill ’em,” Papi says one day to Alice when she comes home from work. She gets home too late from the hospital to cook dinner. On the weekends she tries to make food but can only boil potatoes and eggs. I’d rather swallow spoonfuls of rotten spinach than eat the herring she likes straight from the jar with näkkileipä, a sour flat bread from her country.

  We meet her where we usually do, in front of the shack in the park. From there we walk down to Broadway to eat dinner at the Golden Rule, a Greek diner, or its bland alternative, Capitol.

  “Eduardo, please,” she says.

  “Papi, but aren’t we Dominican?” I ask, tugging at the hem of his polo shirt.

  I am confused. Papi wants Mama, Antonio, Paloma, his own relatives killed just because they are Dominican? And Papi’s skin looks like dark butter when it snows and only if the sun doesn’t come out for weeks—but white? Papi looks more like Aladdin than he does the Jewish man upstairs.

  “But we don’t look anything like the man upstairs. Your mother is very brown, a trigueña, and—”

  “Shut your mou’se,” he snaps back, looking at me like I’m one of the Dominicans he wants killed.

  “Eduardo, please,” Alice says. She always says “Eduardo, please” and little else.

  “If they kill all the Dominicans, what will happen to you and—”

  “I say to shut your mou’se,” he says in my ear so that only I can hear him.

  My body feels heavy inside. My eyes are weighted down with water, but I am afraid to cry. Papi is beginning to scare me even more than Papito used to.

  We walk down Isham Street in silence. Papi is angry. Alice is still frowning and apparently annoyed with him because she doesn’t utter a word during the walk over to the diner. I try to forget what Papi said by pretending I’m Blondie, singing to my fans in that crazy-cool “Rapture” video.

  I’m hungry for a pizza burger deluxe and hoping for a cookie with chocolate sprinkles from the bakery next door afterward. Mostly, I want everything to be okay when we get home.

  * * *

  It only takes a few weeks for Papi to bring Alice and me to the tennis courts. He gives me a wooden racket and says playing tennis will boost my appetite and help me bulk up so I can look less scrawny. Papi walks over to one side of the rectangle, and we stand on the other, close to the service line. Playing tennis is fun until I miss the ball too many times despite his instruction.

  “Come on, I say follow tru, follow through,” he yells from the other side of the court. I’m not sure what that means.

  “I’m trying, Papi. I’m trying. Please don’t get so mad,” I yell across the court.

  “Eduardo, please,” Alic
e says. I look over at her. If she says “please” one more time, I just may punch her in the face.

  Papi is flushed and has completely lost his patience. “Less get out o’ here,” he screams over at us. The guys on the basketball courts to our left are looking at us, so are some of the other tennis players on the courts.

  Alice and I trail Papi as he races up Seaman Avenue back to our apartment. My hands are shaking as I think about what I could have done to piss him off this badly. When we arrive at Papi and Alice’s gloomy place, I feel like I should find somewhere to hide, but I have no privacy, just a bed where I imagine a couch should go in the dark living room. I sit down on the bed, going over the minutes we were playing tennis, trying to figure out where things went wrong. Alice follows Papi into their bedroom, where he begins screaming something about me.

  “She is going to be on welfare like her mother, a na’thing.”

  “Eduardo, please. She just moved here, she isn’t even—”

  “If she can’t lissen to simple instructions, I guess she is as lousy as her moth’a.”

  I manage to stand up and walk to the bathroom, though my knees feel like giving out. I hook the door shut and splash cold water on my eyes so I won’t look like I’m crying. I sit on the toilet lid, cupping my face with my hands, and start to sob. Papi storms out of his bedroom, kicks the bathroom door in, and stands there with his eyes wide open, scowling at me. I can hear my heart pounding so fast that I start feeling faint. If I could hide in the little space between the back of the toilet and the wall, I gladly would.

  “Eduardo, please,” Alice says in the background. Papi doesn’t reply. He just stands there panting like an exhausted dog, glaring at me like he hates me more than Lady did Jean. I can’t move.

  “Please don’t kill me,” I plead, almost under my breath.

  “Stap—cryin’,” Papi howls.

  “Eduardo, please,” Alice says, now standing behind him.

  Papi marches away from the bathroom, then stomps across the living room and out the door.

  I walk over to the bed and lie down, crying for Mama and Papa.

  When he comes back a couple of hours later, Papi decides I am going to play tennis every day after school. He will make a champion out of me whether I like it or not.

  * * *

  I’m enrolled in a Catholic grammar school called St. Thaddeus, located near the Dyckman Houses. I learn that Thaddeus is the patron saint of desperate cases and lost causes, which is appropriate, considering our surroundings.

  I like it much better than I did Mahatma Gandhi in Santo Domingo. The adults there were very mean, smacking our knuckles with rulers for nothing. I guess our familias were fooled by the peaceful image of the skinny bald man in round glasses, draped in white fabric, that greeted them each morning they dropped us off at school.

  The best thing about St. Thaddeus is the journey there. The colorfully painted trains I pass every morning on my way to school rock my world. The IRT number 1 is the only line on the island to have elevated station stops. The trains are like moving canvases, almost always completely covered with letters and characters in bright colors from tip-top to bottom. They are more engaging to me than school, where I’m an average and mostly ignored student.

  The bright purples, greens, pinks, blues, and yellows are a welcome contrast to their pewter backdrop and are more interesting than the dull pocked walls at school. I’ve heard the grown-ups sitting on the park benches by the tennis courts say that the last couple of mayors paid millions of billions of dollars to erase it. Mayor Koch is promising to get rid of it forever and the people who do it, too. The people on our block believe the tagging and the murals are making people fight, bringing gangs into the neighborhood. It irritates the city and many adults that these vandals—graffiti writers—are catching so much fame in newspapers and on television and even in the movies. I didn’t realize it until I saw on TV that there are a lot of white boys getting up, too. Papi ignores me when I ask him if he wants to see all of them rounded up and killed now that white boys, maybe even Jewish ones, are painting the trains.

  It’s mostly teenagers who are doing it, from all over the city. They write their names and sometimes add their street numbers to their aliases. For the adults at the MTA, the writing and art plastered on the trains and walls are a public nuisance. To me, it’s the shit.

  * * *

  Almost every morning I’m greeted by an old lady at the entrance of St. Thaddeus named Sister Frances, who glows like an angel. I’m not sure she’s even a nun, because she doesn’t wear a habit. Sister Frances looks like a mummy wrapped in skin, almost as skinny as Gandhi and even brighter than Alice. She uses both hands to drop pieces of mint and other candy into our palms every morning and afternoon without fail.

  In the beginning, I feel out of place at school. My English is somewhat funny, a bit broken. I’ll say something backward, like “Juice is what I want, please” instead of “I want juice, please” to the lunch ladies.

  At first everybody laughs and calls me “ass backwards” at several points throughout the day: attendance, lunch, recess, after school, and any time I open my mouth.

  “Yo, Rachel, you are ass backwards,” says Josefa or any number of Marias or Joselitos.

  “Yo, my name is Raquel,” I insist.

  “Na, it ain’t, you hick. Why do they say Rachel when they call your name during attendance every morning then?”

  “My papi—”

  “Where you come from?”

  “I was born here, but I was staying with my abuelos in D.R. for—”

  “Yo, you ain’t Dominican. That lady that looks like Sister Frances—she yo’ mother?”

  “Hell, no. She Papi’s wife.”

  “Are you rich? I heard you live where them rich white folks live, by the good side of the park.”

  “Na. He works with teeth, he makes sure they are okay and makes fake ones sometimes. He told me he made one for the wife of that guy from the Beatles they shot by Central Park and—”

  “Why don’t you live with your mother—what the fuck, she dead or somethin’?”

  “Yeah, she is. Kind of—”

  “You the only one I know who has a dead moms. That shit is ill, yo.”

  It was easier to say that Mami was dead than try to explain that I wasn’t sure where she was. At some point, I cannot remember when exactly, I stop telling people my name is Raquel. I always loved my name, especially when I was referred to as Raquelita, un nombre de cariño, by people like Mama and Paloma, who knew me before now. Maybe, like Mami, I was paralyzed and unable to communicate that I had been somebody before my new masters took ownership of me. Maybe the name Rachel, as unremarkable as it sounds to me, suits me better now.

  * * *

  I turn nine, ten, and eleven with each unchanging day and night running into one another so fluidly, it feels like I’m doing hard time rather than living life. The donning of my butt-ugly blue and green plaid uniform skirt tells me it’s daytime. The tennis skirt and racket means it’s either stupid early, afternoon, or early evening. Stained silverware and cheap restaurant plates signal that it’s dinnertime. Papi’s strong arms shaking me and throwing me against a wall, or his tennis shoe digging into my back or wherever it lands, are how the day ends when I don’t live up to his standards on the court. When I do please him—I rarely do—shit is sweet.

  Speaking of which, what finally does change my routine is something brown and shitty. One day, I come back after tennis to find a used Steinway upright that Papi and Alice bought from the thrift store near Broadway and 204th Street sitting in my living room–makeshift bedroom. They must have gotten a great deal on it, I think, because that thing couldn’t possibly be used to decorate any other apartment in the city unless it’s a huge bathroom. The piano looks like a large pile of brown shit, as if it came from an elephant or some extinct creature that left large shits in its wake. Because every inch of our place is used for storage, the top of the piano immediately becomes cl
uttered with my first- and second-place tennis trophies and medals, photos, and other knickknacks. My bed is now parallel to the kitchen table. I practice piano every night for an hour after tennis and before I do homework, regardless of whether or not I’m exhausted. Sometimes before I start running through my scales, Papi interrupts to share story after story about his days as a nightclub singer and musical composer and arranger. “They loved me so much,” Papi says, sometimes breaking into sections of Schubert’s “Ave Maria” in Latin. “You will be a good piano player, too.”

  I take piano classes with Ms. Kaufman, a spinster with thinning wiry hair in the Bronx. Ms. Kaufman scares me because she looks like San Lázaro, with open wet sores covering her body from her forehead down to her feet. There’s a rumor that her body erupted when her mother died because she couldn’t take the pain of losing her. She had a nervous breakdown and quit being a fairly successful concert pianist, dedicating her life to teaching kids. I cannot imagine caring that much for anybody.

  Papi sits, as he often does, on my bed, watching me practice the piano. Alice is in the kitchen making instant coffee. I would rather be anywhere but in front of this shit-brown piano with Papi burning holes in my back with his savage eyes.

  My mind wanders, as it often does, to the park across the street from my school. I wish I were there right now, watching these guys—they call themselves b-boys—dancing on large pieces of linoleum thrown atop the concrete. The b-boys dress so fresh, in matching T-shirts, fitted Lee jeans, and fat laces. They spin on their backs and heads. They glide on their palms and uprock like Apache warriors. Watching them dance is like watching Bruce Lee fight himself in Enter the Dragon.

  The b-boys and b-girls catch fame, too, arguably more than some of the graffiti writers on the scene. They have def names like the writers and wear them in brass and silver on their belts: Doze, Crazy Legs, Frosty Freeze, Kuriaki. There’s a girl, Baby Love, I want to battle. Freeze is mad cute, and so is Kuriaki. Doze and he could be in Menudo, and that beautiful writer Mare139, too. Mare139 has the best chance to get into Menudo, with that silky hair of his. The rest of the writers look kind of like ducks. In my eyes, LEE is the only writer who’s an exception to the rule. It doesn’t matter what he looks like because he’s the most famous writer in New York City, even bigger than Menudo.