by Achy Obejas
“Are you . . . are you okay . . . ?” I asked breathlessly. I was hanging upside down.
The car was on its back, and suddenly Native Son, Orlando, and American Dreams slipped from under the seats, which were now above our heads, and tumbled to the ceiling below us. They were in Saran Wrap, encased like monarch chrysalides.
“Oh god . . . Kimberle . . .” I started to weep.
She shook her head, sprinkling a bloody constellation on the windshield. I reached over and undid her seat belt, which caused her body to drop with a thud. She tried to help me with mine but it was stuck.
“Let me crawl out and come around,” she said, her mouth a mess of red. Her fingers felt around for teeth, for pieces of tongue.
I watched as she kicked out the glass on her window, picked each shard from the frame, and slowly pulled herself through. My head throbbed and I closed my eyes. I could hear the crunch of Kimberle’s steps on the snow, the exertion in her breathing. I heard her gasp and choke and then a rustling by my window.
“Don’t look,” she said, her voice cracking as she reached in to cover my eyes with her ensanguined hands. “Don’t look.”
But it was too late: there, above her shoulder, was this year’s seasonal kill, waxy and white but for the purple areolas and the meat of her sex. She was ordinary, familiar, and the glass of her eyes captured a portrait of Kimberle and me.
Translated from the original Spanish by the author.
Exile
He will get down on his knees.
He will bend his legs and approach us face to face on the deck of the ship. For a moment, it might look like he’s going to squat but he doesn’t, he just kneels like a penitent, leans back a little, then catches himself and straightens up again. Like davening, but not quite.
This is the myth we tell: about our father as a younger man, kneeling on the deck of a ship, whispering to us about civic society, about Lincoln and the First Amendment.
Actually, that’s not true. He would never have talked about the First Amendment. He would have more likely mentioned democracy—or freedom. That’s the word he liked the most.
* * *
We keep this secret: The iron hissing on the dining room table, the towels moist, our mother’s hair splayed on the cloth, her chin just off the edge. A black thread of smoke.
And this one: the champagne bottle a brutal club in her hand, the champagne an arch like a morning star.
But not these: The bar on US 12 with sawdust on the floor. The bar at the mall that stayed open past the shopping center’s closing hours. The bar downtown where the high school teachers held their book club discussions and gossiped and flirted and gave each other strategic rides home that were acted out as spontaneous.
* * *
We wanted to be Jews.
We wanted to be Polish or German. We would have settled for Danish.
A boy with relatives in Copenhagen explained to us that all blue-eyed people on earth are related to a single ancestor whose genes mutated between six and ten thousand years ago.
We explained that where we come from the greatest achievement is to leave.
* * *
Most of us held clerical, semiskilled, and service jobs, our median income well below the national norm. We preferred to think we were lawyers, doctors, teachers, paramedics, industry giants, the president of Coca-Cola, unbelievably popular and successful pop stars, and media titans. We cared for our grandparents, our cousins, our aunts and uncles, for the offspring of the friends who didn’t make it over, for our own kids when they refused to leave home. We had nuclear households plus one, sometimes two.
* * *
We curled into a ball, all of us, in the backseat of that Pontiac. We did not want to look, to hear the altercation outside, by the gas pump. We prayed no one would notice us, our pink flesh, our red lips; we prayed no one would ask for the words we could not form with our stiff fingers, force like a cough from our bruised mouths.
* * *
When a cousin refused breakfast—a fried egg, a slab of grilled ham, and greasy toast—we witnessed an uncle push her chair closer to the table. She was wearing flannel and had a rash. Hours later, he piled lunch next to the fried egg, ham, and toast: a hill of rice, a smear of spicy ground beef. She swung her legs, meaty little limbs tolling away the hours. In late afternoon, a glass of milk, a banana. For dinner came a cut of liver, onions browned in its juice, a bowl of Neapolitan ice cream with three bulging scoops.
He was making a point.
* * *
We listen, enraptured, to the moon landing on a radio in Loomis Park in Miami Beach. We are aware there are 227 kinds of birds in the Grand Canyon, only twenty-six fish. We admire public art. We are citizens and we vote, not for a particular party, but for, and against, ideas. We know the Gettysburg Address and its admonitions to us, the living.
* * *
A man named Walter Poenisch once made the same trip we did, only he swam it. He rotated his body along its long axis with every arm stroke, so that the shoulder of the recovering arm was always higher than the shoulder of the other arm, the one that pushed and pulled.
This way, there will always be less need to turn to breathe. When one shoulder is out of the water, it reduces drag; when it falls, it aids the arm catching the water; when the other shoulder rises, it will help the arm at the other end of the push to leave the water.
When we heard about the trip, at first we thought Walter Poenisch had done it in reverse, from here to there. Then we read that it wasn’t ninety miles but 129, that he took necessary breaks for medical purposes, and that it took him thirty-four hours, protected in a shark cage.
The Sound Catalog
The radiator hissing.
Dulce considered the radiator’s thin, moist emission, the mist like when ironing a linen shirt. She turned over on the bed, burying her good ear between her head and the pillow. She liked the feel of the sheets, clean and crisp. She liked the sound of that radiator, even when it was muffled and what she was really listening to was the memory of it. She’d never seen such a thing in Cuba, never heard its song, never touched it before. Her hand had been drawn to it when she and her Cuban ex-lover moved into their first apartment, their fourth day in the US, their third in Chicago. Even now, she could still hear her flesh sizzle. She felt the memory of that too, when she reached over to her night table for the little box. She flipped it open, plucked out a creamy pink hearing aid, and poked it in her right ear, then the other in her left. Each time, her fingertips pulsed as the aids trilled awake.
* * *
The mob shouting as one, the crowd rallied to a frenzy.
This is the story they told, she and her Cuban ex-lover, about their lives back on the island: That they were hiding from the neighbors, the windows shuttered, lights off. They had decided to skip the rally, to avoid the marathon at the plaza. Her Cuban ex-lover’s father sat in a rocking chair, listening to a banned radio station through earphones. Her Cuban ex-lover’s mother sat in her own rocker across from him, reading a detective novel with a pocket flashlight. Dulce remembered the chairs squeaking, the occasional static and the crackling of pages. And she and her Cuban ex-lover—a sweet, round girl she’d known and loved forever—in the bedroom across from them, the door closed and latched. She had a distinct memory of the click, of the wooden door groaning when she tugged at it.
This was all routine: the father with his radio, the mother reading by clandestine light, the door resisting. It had all happened before: the silent kisses, the silent unzipping, the silent lowering of her mouth, the silent touch of tongue on belly and tongue on thigh and tongue on clit. Dulce was so burrowed in silence, so deep in the sea, that she could feel tissues dissolving, nerves misfiring. The room spun and she laughed, and then the room spun a bit more and her tongue lost its place and she looked up and her Cuban ex-lover, sitting spread-eagled and wide-eyed, poked Dulce’s shoulder so she’d turn around. And there, at the threshold of the door, her Cuban ex-lover’s fat
her, eyes lowered to something he was brushing from his shirt, closed the bedroom doors blown open, while behind him the wind bellowed through the open window in the living room and her Cuban ex-lover’s mother struggled with the shutters. Dulce had missed the thunder that drove the thousands from the plaza, the window clattering open, the boom of the bedroom door exploding into tongue on clit and belly and thigh; she hadn’t heard the scrambling of feet, the rocker falling over, the flashlight tumbling to the ground and cracking its glass eye.
They gathered themselves and walked out of the bedroom as if there had been no storm, and nodded and stared at the broken flashlight and then talked in low tones about spare parts and answered in girlish voices her Cuban ex-lover’s father’s invitation to rice pudding in the kitchen.
* * *
The teapot whistling, not much differently than the radiator hissing.
Dulce had given up coffee, because of the caffeine. She’d thought it would be difficult after a lifetime of coffee: café con leche every morning of her life, the leche part not always real but the coffee, for the most part, had been real enough. Back in Cuba, sometimes her mother or her Cuban ex-lover would crush peas to stretch the coffee to fill the coffeemaker that would hiss like the radiator she didn’t know yet and not so much like the teapot she’d since adopted in its stead. Café con leche and peas.
Later it turned out the best part of the café con leche was the peas. The peas had fiber, so much Vitamin A and C, while the coffee upped stress, digestive discomfort, and constriction of the blood vessels in her inner ears. Dulce drank herbal teas now, blends her non-Cuban lover had devised—caffeine-free and surprisingly flavorful. Sometimes there’d be homemade chai (It’s a different kind of caffeine, her non-Cuban lover had said), and sometimes, too, there’d be dinner recipes with peas that never failed to surprise her: pea and mint pesto, buttered peas and wilted lettuce, peas deglazed in white wine, herbed pea soup, sweetbreads with pea foam. She didn’t miss the coffee, she didn’t miss the gravelly sound of the grinder forcing the peas and coffee beans together. She swatted the memory of her café con leche away.
Dulce stirred and sipped her tea and padded into her beauty shop. She loved that she could hear the soft squeak of her snow boots on the linoleum accompanied by a slight electronic echo in her ears. It was snowing outside, which meant she was wearing layers of scarves that would brush her ears during the day, the noise like hurricane winds.
* * *
The drone of the television in the background.
In Cuba, the TV was always on somewhere; indeed, two or three or four TVs would layer the sound of the one or two legal channels over the one or two or three illegal channels inevitably playing in her neighbors’ houses. The soundtracks would duel in the courtyard and on the street, compete with the growling of old auto engines and the banter coming from the same neighbors whose TVs were on, ignored, their volume a comfort rather than a necessity. They all half heard and half read lips and eyebrows, the angle of shoulders, and the ways fingers pointed in the air.
Her Cuban ex-lover was part of the symphony and the drama. Her voice had a high pitch, an ascension nearly into falsetto. And Dulce had loved and hated it—hated the sound, considered it tasteless and extravagant, but loved that she knew what it meant: unbearable excitement, for good or bad. Her Cuban ex-lover’s hands fluttered like a bird flying against the wind.
The last years they lived in Cuba, her Cuban ex-lover was always up in those high registers: because there were no limes in all of Havana, because a man had groped her on the bus, because a friend got a visa and now there was a farewell party, because that same friend’s absence meant she’d get a promotion at work that would bring more responsibility than she wanted, because a French bakery they couldn’t afford had opened off La Rampa, because can you believe it, Dulcita, Wanda has joined the Ladies in White and is going all over the city with those people.
Dulce had seen them, of course: the women parading in silence, protesting the imprisonment of their men—husbands and sons and brothers and partners. In those years, the women weren’t beaten and dragged into buses. Instead, the authorities simply pretended they didn’t exist, which extended permission to everyone else to do the same. Dulce and her Cuban ex-lover would turn their heads as the women came up their street, focus on the TV visible through someone’s open door, and pretend to lose themselves in whatever soap opera was airing. No one would make eye contact or talk—it was as if life was a silent film that had slipped into slow motion and only returned to its normal pace when the women had passed.
It was later that her Cuban ex-lover began to look up, to nod at the women. And later still when that nod transformed from the barely perceptible to the very pronounced. At night, Dulce would turn up the volume of their own TV so the neighbors and the mics embedded in the walls wouldn’t pick up and then she’d whisper, What are you doing? Are you crazy?
Because Dulce didn’t want any trouble: Her father and older brother had long ago rowed an inner tube to Miami and claimed both her and her mother via family reunification, but in their first five years in the US her father and brother (who’d become a meth addict, unbeknownst to her then) had only been able to save enough to get her mother out of Cuba and to Chicago (where her brother was in treatment, also unbeknownst to her then). She didn’t want anything to be used as an excuse to keep her from going when the time came and that plane ticket and visa were in hand.
I don’t want any trouble, Dulce would say, and the air would fill with all she couldn’t say: the confusion and guilt she felt since she hadn’t seen her father and brother in a decade and could barely remember them, because in the five years since her mother had gone she’d practically been adopted by her Cuban ex-lover’s family, yet she still felt an overwhelming obligation to go, no matter how happy she and her and her ex-lover were, hiding in her room on Sundays, later living together, setting up their own home in her family’s old apartment. I don’t want any trouble, Dulce would whisper into the noise meant to render the eavesdropping futile. But she would not say, I don’t want to talk about having to leave, about my chances of leaving, about all I will miss if I leave, just as much as I don’t want to talk about staying . . .
And her Cuban ex-lover—who may or may not have heard her through the cheering on the TV screen celebrating socialism’s rebirth in Hugo Chávez—winked at her as she passed by in a hush, dressed in a blinding white that left Dulce and her neighbors with their mouths agape.
* * *
A bell.
The ESL instructor tried to liven up the class by bringing in props to illustrate American expressions. One day it was a bell. Whenever you hear a bell ring, she said, anger turns on a swing. It made no sense to Dulce but she repeated it anyway: Anger turns on a swing.
Maybe, said her Cuban ex-lover when she told her about it at home, your teacher means that when the bell goes off, like in a boxing match, anger fuels the boxer’s punch, his swing.
Dulce was always impressed with her Cuban ex-lover’s efforts to make sense of the nonsensical. Except this still didn’t seem quite right: there was a tenderness that accompanied the instructor’s telling that didn’t go with the brutality of a boxer’s angry wallop. She wished her Cuban ex-lover was going to ESL classes with her, but she had refused. (Dulce would have asked her father or mother or brother to go, but their English was already too advanced for ESL classes.)
It’s boring! her Cuban ex-lover would exclaim, her voice up in the stratosphere, her hands a blur. I’m either going to learn English or I’m not, but I’m not going to waste hours of my life sitting there listening to crazy lines I’m never going to use like, Whenever you hear a bell ring, anger turns on a swing. When will I ever need to say that, huh?
Years later, it occurred to Dulce she’d never heard anyone say it either. She turned to her non-Cuban lover and asked when it might be appropriate.
Anger turns on a swing? her non-Cuban lover said.
Yes, whenever you hear a bell ring
. . .
An angel earns its wings!
What?
That’s the saying: Whenever you hear a bell ring, an angel earns its wings.
Dulce knew sometimes she missed things—like the wind that day blasting in her Cuban ex-lover’s family’s house, or the specials as enumerated by an indifferent waiter—but she attributed it more to her character than to any fault of her ears. She was, by nature or training, someone who’d found it best to not pay too much attention. And now—English wasn’t her language.
I hear fine in Spanish, she said, though she wondered if her affirmation didn’t sound more like a question.
I think, her non-Cuban lover said, that you compensate. And anyway, you only hear fine in Spanish when you’re talking to other Cubans. You don’t hear Mexicans or Guatemalans.
They speak so softly.
They move their mouths differently.
It’s just that Cubans are disoriented out of Cuba.
* * *
The zzzzzzz of the zippers.
Dulce figured that was why her Cuban ex-lover was so sour after the first few months off the island: she was disoriented. They’d been caught up in the excitement: the unlikelihood that they’d both gotten visas to the US at the same time, the reconciliation with her parents in Chicago, and the shock of their acceptance of her relationship with her Cuban ex-lover. It’s not that her family didn’t know—everyone knew, she and her Cuban ex-lover had been stuck on each other since grade school and sometime around sixth grade everyone understood they were a couple—but no one had ever talked about it before, not openly, not to Dulce’s face, not in any way she could hear and understand. But in Chicago, her parents told them they would need privacy and thus had rented them their own studio apartment. Her brother, who spoke in a flat voice now, told them about the county’s domestic partner registry, which would guarantee them a few rights. He seemed to know a lot about social services and gave them a contact number for a group of Latina lesbians that met once a month.