Bird of Paradise

by Raquel Cepeda

  The times Ercilia does feign interest in me, she speaks as if I’m in another room even when I’m sitting next to her.

  “Eduardo, the girl is getting big,” she almost whispers. Ercilia never refers to me by name.

  Papi nods in agreement. “It’s the tennis. Have you seen all her medals and trophies?”

  Ercilia strains to form a smile.

  End of conversation.

  Ercilia looks like she may have been gorgeous once upon a time. Her face is shaped like an oval, with perfectly proportioned eyebrows and lids that slant down like mine, covering part of her large, deep-set chocolate-brown eyes. Her thick wavy locks, now cut short like her son’s, must have looked luscious back in the day. Her nose, neither wide nor narrow, is in harmony with her fleshy lips. Papi’s father must have loved kissing them back in the day, before they deflated and settled into a frown.

  I’ve never given Papi’s father a thought until now, when I try to imagine Ercilia locked in a passionate embrace with a man. I’ve never seen a photo of him. I’ve never been curious about whether he was as handsome as Ercilia or as tall and lanky as his son. I bet they were like any other Dominican family, with members spanning from the bluest black to the lightest beige, despite Papi trying to front like he is different from virtually everybody else on the island. The only thing that makes my family stand out is how disconnected and fucked up they were to themselves and each other. I can’t imagine I would recognize myself in Papi’s father if I saw him on the street. What I do see is that Papi suffers from something I learned about in school: low self-esteem, a profound sadness that switches into fits of rage faster than I can make Ms. Pac-Man swallow power pellets. The low self-esteem and sadness come from Ercilia. I’m curious from whom Papi inherited his short, violent temper.

  * * *

  Where Ercilia is more religious than Pope John Paul II, Papi isn’t at all. He makes me to go to church with his and Mami’s old friends Miguel and Clara and their spoiled-ass daughter, Carmencita, only because they pressure him to let their pastor work his magic for the salvation of my soul. Otherwise, I don’t think Papi believes in or cares much for God. He falls asleep in the pews just like I do on the rare occasion when he meets us at Clara’s church, snoring right through the homily and the passing of the money tray. My holy-rolling Sundays—spent playing Truth or Dare with the boys and flashing our prepubescent tetas, pussies, and tiny dicks in Carmencita’s pink bedroom after church—are short-lived.

  Like Papi, I’m not so sure God exists. He—I’m told God is a He—never visits me. I’ve seen spirits in my dreams ever since I was a little girl living with Mami on Seaman Avenue, but they looked more like indias, with long black hair, like a young Ercilia and her daughter, Perla. I used to have a recurring dream before moving in with Papi and Alice. In it, Woody Woodpecker uses his beak to poke holes in my face. When I feel like I can’t survive another peck, a very tall africana with tight curly hair, dressed like a Spanish dama, sweeps me to safety by shooing the bird away with one hand and hiding me under her huge skirt with the other. When Woody flies away, she holds me tightly against her tetas. The dama’s cleavage holds magic that heals the wounds on my face.

  I never dream of being saved by any of the blond men portrayed on the stained-glass windows at St. Thaddeus. Those gods, I’m convinced, don’t know the language of the people begging for their divine intervention.

  Toward the end of Ercilia’s visit, we take a walk in the park after dinner. I straggle way behind, trying my best not to be seen with them. In the distance, I can see the group of tennis players Papi embarrassed me in front of sitting on a bench by the courts. Papi walks by them without saying a word. Alice and Ercilia are holding hands and trailing behind him.

  “What are you doing with dose lou’sy Dominicans,” Papi hissed at me last week, although at least one of the players was South American.

  “I just finished playing tennis,” I said, at once nervous and hopeful that the men would jump Papi and beat him at least as badly as he had hit me.

  “Let’s go play now!” he screamed.

  “Eduardo, excuse me, she played all afternoon with us, Rachel is—” Jose said, but Papi cut him off like he did everybody.

  “Get up, I say,” Papi demanded.

  I didn’t say goodbye to the guys and followed Papi to the courts in the back.

  “I’m going to fix you with this when we get home,” he said, pointing at his racket. Fuck Papi, I thought every time he threatened me. The notion of returning the favor one day became my motivation to live, to survive. Every beating, I thought, brought me a step closer to freedom.

  “But I was just doing what you told me to do. You know, it was that creepy pervert Mike Cohen who told me my stomach looked soft like Madonna’s and that he wanted to stroke it, not these—”

  “Shut your mou’se! Go run around the park.”

  Exhausted, I walked over to Diamond One. The tennis players looked away just like our neighbors did on the mornings when they heard me screaming for Papi to stop pummeling me.

  Now the same guys are staring at Ercilia as she walks by, hand in hand with Alice. I imagine they’re thinking what I’m thinking. Ercilia’s whiteness is a figment of Papi’s imagination.

  * * *

  The closer I am to finishing my bid at St. Thaddeus, the more I feel like I’m living in a pressure cooker fueled by hate. I hate Papi. He hates me. I hate my teachers. They hate me. I hate Mami. She has long since forgotten I exist. I hate being called a “spic bitch” by white kids on my way back from school as much as I hate being called a “wannabe white girl” by Latino kids for playing tennis and living west of Broadway.

  We all may have made the trip from the islands and live together here, but we are crazy divided. Once folks make enough loot to fill their apartamentos with more black-lacquer bedroom furniture and porcelain tigers than the next person, their attitudes get icy. It now takes something remarkable like a crack giveaway or the discovery of a dead body in the alley to bring people together. However, nothing does it better than the miracle of Jesus making an appearance on somebody’s window. And He does drop in from time to time. The apparition of His head, always in a crown of thorns, surfaces in the form of a misty outline on some poor disciple’s window facing the street. The word spreads even faster than bad news.

  “Ay, Jesús e’tá aquí,” Jesus is here, someone screams, sounding the alarm.

  “Jesús is here to warn us!” an old woman says.

  “No, Jesús is here to save us,” another church lady says.

  “It doesn’t matter why He came but that He’s here. ¡Qué bendición!” says another voice in a growing crowd.

  As soon as I hear Jesus is in town, I run down to Post Avenue and find a spot toward the back of the large crowd to see Him for myself. A group of revelers in the front row are on their knees with fingers twined in prayer. They are reciting the Lord’s Prayer: “Padre nuestro, que estás en el cielo. Santificado sea tu nombre. Venga tu reino . . .” Others are on the side, pointing up at the window and crying. With a piece of John’s fried chicken in hand, I try hard to focus my gaze in a way that will enable me to see what so many believers do, but I fail miserably.

  * * *

  I’ve been training one hour before class at an armory in Harlem and several hours after school at the park for a while now. By the time school starts, I’m too drained to care what’s happening around me. I can hardly make out the brick lining of the building’s exterior or the nondescript tile floor adding to the sad institutional feel of the joint.

  My eighth-grade teacher, Sister Catherine, is a young androgynous woman with the prudish demeanor of a person three times her age. One morning she calls me over to her desk to read a note she’s written to me. “Are you high, Rachel?” it starts. “Your eyes are always so red.” Sister C. smiles nervously at me.

  I feel as if someone has punched me in the chest. Like our school’s namesake, who never answers my pleas for help, this bitch doe
sn’t care to understand me. There are people in my class who are flying high, but I’m not one of them. I’ve seen a couple of girls come out of the bathroom stalls with white powder covering the tip of their noses, snorting and laughing as they wash their faces in the sink next to me.

  I lean over and scribble something below her note, smiling. “I don’t know a crack dealer named Peter,” referencing the pusher in Boogie Down Productions’ “9mm Goes Bang” and “I’m more interested in what happened that brought you to this place, Sister C. Why do you always look so sad?”

  Sister C.’s face flushes with anger. I keep smiling at her as she slouches into her chair, frowning. “Go to the principal’s office right now,” she whispers, pointing at the classroom door with her bony index finger.

  * * *

  I usually fall asleep during religion class and lectures with buzz words like “Thanksgiving,” “Christopher Columbus,” or anything involving missionaries. I hear words like “primitive,” “savage,” and “extinct” used interchangeably to describe almost everyone we learn about who isn’t of European descent or a sellout. The “savages” our teachers talk about usually look like most of my classmates and me.

  More often than not, I’m thrown out of class if I challenge Columbus or the Catholic dogma they feed us. We aren’t encouraged to think for ourselves and ask questions. We are expected to accept what they teach us as infallible truths.

  “But isn’t it messed up to force another group of people to believe what you do and make them slaves if they don’t give in?” I ask one day.

  “It isn’t the same. The missionaries were moved by their love of God and the Blessed Sacrament.”

  “But it’s wrong to go to someone’s house and force them to hand it over to you, learn the language, and love your God, isn’t it?”

  “That’s enough! Go downstairs to the principal’s office, you’re disrupting the class!”

  I survive the remainder of my time at St. Thaddeus by fantasizing that I’m no longer there. I stop asking questions. Sometimes I spend time in the gym practicing my footwork with Martin and David. During lunch, I pretend that I’m on deadline to write battle rhymes for Roxanne Shanté, Sha-Rock, and MC Lyte. In my spiral notebook, I scribble rhymes and words that I think sound nice from other songs and English class.

  I come across a discarded copy of The Autobiography of Malcolm X: As Told to Alex Haley at school. I decide to read it because of the fine redheaded man gracing the book’s cover.

  * * *

  I’m forgetting everyone in Santo Domingo. It’s been years since I’ve spoken to Mama and Papa. In New York City, I’m creating my own identity, one in which hip-hop culture, now in full effect, is at the core.

  The beatings continue.

  “Please, Papi, stop. Please,” I scream as loudly as I can.

  Alice now retreats into the bedroom, closing the door, so I can see the reflection of him kicking, throwing, and punching me in the mirror fixed to the door.

  I hear someone knocking on the front door. I know it’s the police, I can hear static and voices coming from a cop radio. Papi shoots me a warning with a raised eyebrow as he collects himself and walks toward to the door. “You don’t want to go live with that lousy mother of yours and become a maid and babysitter for all her children, do you?” he asks me. We recently found out that Rocío gave birth to two more daughters.

  The last time I spoke to her was some months ago when Papi threatened to throw me out the window after I lost a tennis match. He dialed her phone number as Alice stood by frowning in silence, and then he began pleading into the receiver for Mami to come to New York City and pick me up before he ripped me apart.

  “Please pick me up,” I said, not expecting her to, “or he’s really going to do it this time.”

  “I told you when you left me for him that you would go to hell, Raquel,” she said, her voice almost too soothing for the situation. “You have to learn how to listen to your mom.”

  The next day, to my surprise, Rocío showed up with a tall trigueño who I assumed was her latest boyfriend or husband, dripping with gold like a jodedor by her side, to rescue me. I hardly recognized her aside from her thick wavy locks and curves galore. Rocío’s expression looked as if she’d been living hard; her face was weathered by experience. I didn’t see the glint of intellectual curiosity in her eyes anymore. This guy looked like he was half a step above the last one.

  Something always happened to prevent me from leaving with her. Besides, Mami didn’t put much of a fight. She stood quietly watching the drama unfold in front of her, not saying much to Papi or Alice. Papi would start to panic and change his mind. He’d beg me to stay, and I did. I always do.

  Papi opens the door. “Can I help you gentlemen?” he asks the cops.

  “We’re getting reports again about possible domestic disturbance at this residence. We need to come in and ask you and your daughter some questions.”

  I’m sitting on a chair, my legs are shaking from side to side out of fear that if I tell the truth, I’ll have to go babysit Rocío’s kids. If I lie, I’ll have to stay here with two people I’ve grown to fucking loathe with the same intensity I’ve learned to love this city. This is where I was born, and I’m not prepared to leave.

  “I was behaving badly, Officer,” I say.

  “Are you sure?” asks one of the two cops standing over me. “You don’t have to be afraid to tell us the truth.”

  “Yes, I’m sure. I-I-I’m just being lazy and dramatic,” I say.

  Papi walks over and smiles at me and then at the officers.

  “Okay. Have a good day, sir,” a cop says to Papi.

  They leave.

  * * *

  When Public Enemy releases It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back, it ignites me, gives me life. I feel free to express myself, using their seething vocabulary and attitude to articulate what I’m feeling. Something about the music and lyrics speaks to my anxiety. It compels me to question everything I’m being taught at the Catholic high school I’m attending in Yonkers.

  Public Enemy’s message makes more sense to me than the gospel of obedience and servitude I learn at school. It’s like Chuck D is directly speaking to me. “The enemy could be their friend, guardian . . .”

  I feel like a hypocrite for letting my enemy, Papi, hit me. I’m going to fight back one day. “You not putting enough spin on your forehand,” he screamed at me last time during practice. “Come on—your backhand is flat—use your slice. WAIT until we get home, you—” Papi’s threats reverberated from one court to the next, intensifying with each slap of his thigh and stomp of his foot until he morphed into an overgrown toddler throwing a tantrum.

  * * *

  I’m hanging out with a couple of my girls, drinking nasty warm Olde English malt liquor and playing with Lupe’s baby on Sherman Street after school. Caridad is a Cuban and Puerto Rican beauty with skin like a cinnamon stick and the temper of a rabid Chihuahua. She has huge brown eyes like that of a deer and these fly-ass freckles on her chiseled face that draw attention away from her fucked-up teeth. Caridad has gotten thrown out of school more times than anyone I know because she just can’t let shit slide. I wished I were more like her.

  “You’re an African queen,” I say to her, passing Lupe the forty-ounce bottle.

  “Listen, you’re cool, even though you’re a little fuckin’ weird, Rachel,” she says, “but listen, if you call me a nigga one more time, I’m going to have to fuck you up.”

  “But Caridad, I ain’t trying to call you out your name. I just think we have a lot in common with—”

  “You’re light-skinned. You don’t understand shit but that uppity-ass shit you play in the park.”

  “We’re all still women of color regardless of our complexions,” I try to reason with her. “Sis, I wasn’t trying to disrespect—”

  Lupe chimes in, “Just don’t say that shit, okay? Rachel, she don’t like it.”

  “But Lupe, don’t you sort
of date that Black rapper with the light eyes or something like that?” I ask. “You have knowledge of self, you understand I wasn’t trying to—”

  “Drop. It,” says Caridad, now visibly irritated. Lupe breaks the tension by stepping between us and handing me the bottle to swig from. I pass it to Caridad as a peace offering, hoping she won’t use it to crack my head open.

  I decide to stop fighting a losing battle uptown.

  Soon I become a walking contradiction. I begin to call any Black and Latino girl I meet at my high school “sister,” even if I despise them and they me.

  “I can’t understand why you like all that Black shit,” Susana says to me one morning on the bus ride to school.

  “What do you mean ‘Black shit’? Hip-hop is our shit, too.”

  “Na, freestyle is our shit,” she says.

  “Shannon is Black, so is Joyce Sims. What the fuck are you talking about, sis? That half-Italian blood is making you loopy.”

  “You just hate anything white, don’t you?”

  “What, are you—Wait, I like Jared from Bailey, and isn’t he like Albanian and German or something?”

  “Come on, girl, you like him because he dances like he’s Black and he sort of looks like RAMO from Beat Street,” she says.

  I look out the window at the nondescript streets we’re driving through in Yonkers, ignoring Susana for the rest of the ride. I resist the urge to fuck her up. I look over at Socorro, the only Dominican girl living on Sherman Avenue who wears her hair teased big like the Italian girls at school, and I try to guess what she’ll say at lunch today.