Cuba 15 Read online

  The horror.

  How could I tell my own grandmother that I hated dresses, wouldn’t be caught dead onstage, and didn’t even think of myself as Cuban? I had green eyes and practically blond hair, for God’s sake—the same coloring as my Polish American mother.

  “Okay, Abuela,” I murmured instead.

  From the hallway came the singular veep-veep! of acetate on acetate. My mom, Diane Shavlovsky Paz, zipped into view.

  “Did I hear someone mention a party?” Mom wore a teal, white, and fuchsia “running” suit top decorated with asymmetrical, eye-bruising graphics, and a pair of pale yellow sweatpants outlined with silver piping. Huge clip-on gold hoops hung from her ears; they swung in aftershock for a full thirty seconds after she sat down across from us, in the white wicker armchair with the red velvet upholstery. She propped her gold open-toed sandals up on the kidney-shaped glass coffee table.

  Our house is decorated in Spanish Colonial meets Early Thrift Shop, and so, it seemed, was my mother today. She doesn’t always look this good. “Fashion is not my long suit,” she’ll often say, followed by a pregnant pause while she waits for me to get the pun.

  “Your hair looks nice, Mom,” I said, trying to divert her attention.

  “Thanks, Vi. Now, have you set a date yet?”

  “A date?” Great. This was beginning to sound like a wedding. And, as I mentioned, my love life lay at an all-time low. They’d have to get me one of those mail-order husbands. Or, if he were coming from Cuba, I guessed you’d call him a sail-order husband. Because of the raft deal.

  Abuela doesn’t like talking about the rafters. So I didn’t tell my joke, though Mom would have loved it.

  “Sí,” said Abuela, nodding, “we must make the date for the rental of the hall.” She murmured something in Spanish to Mom, who is fluent; I only caught ella and especial. Then I felt a small yet strong lightning-flash shoot between them, and through the charged air whistling past, I heard Mom say the word. In English. And I knew I was finished.

  “Planning!” said Mom. “It’s all in the planning. We pick the date and work backwards from there.” She should know; Mom has planned umpteen grand openings for a restaurant that has yet to make it off the drawing board.

  “Wh-what’s to plan?” I asked nervously. “Invite a couple friends, set up a few folding chairs, and bam!”

  “I give you ‘bam’!” retorted Abuela. “The quinceañero requires muchos planes—for the invitations, for the fittings, for to choose the band . . .”

  “And planning,” my mother, in her mismatched ensemble, reminded us, “is my long suit.”

  There was no arguing that point. Planning was my mother’s great hobby. The thing she had trouble with, according to the vocabulary word I looked up because I missed it on the English pretest, was fruition. So maybe this shindig would never really happen. It was practically my only hope.

  Abuela had opened her electronic notebook. “The last weekend in May,” she said, scrolling through her computerized calendar, “would be perfecto.”

  Mom reached under a cushion and pulled out our family calendar, the new one from St. Edna’s Church that showed a picture of a different local celebrity receiving Communion for each month of the year. From behind her ear, she produced a thick black marker that advertised BUSTER’S MEATS.

  Where had those come from? If I didn’t know better, I’d have thought Mom and Abuela had been plotting this ambush for quite some time. Abuela is especially canny that way. But Mom wouldn’t do that to me. She knows I feel like a dork in dresses. When I vowed on eighth-grade graduation day never again to be hemmed in by a skirt, Mom agreed. “Everyone’s got to develop their own style,” she said. So I was sure she’d understand.

  She raised an eyebrow at Abuela. “Saturday?”

  “Domingo es tradicional.”

  “Sunday it is!” Mom flipped through the calendar months to May. Beneath the profile of a well-known professional football coach sticking his pink and gray tongue out to receive the Host, in the next-to-last square on the page, she wrote in indelible black ink: VIOLET’S QUINCE PARTY.

  So much for Mom’s unwavering support.

  A nervous chuckle rose up in me, but I refused to let it out. It rattled around inside for a minute, then died. This quince business was no laughing matter.

  3

  The next afternoon, I gave my first presentation in Ms. Joyner’s speech class. It was the strangest thing: I couldn’t stand meeting anyone as myself, but I never minded performing as another character. As long as I wasn’t all alone onstage. Violet Paz, the great impostor. I just fuzzed everyone out by unfocusing my eyes, and, bingo! I was fine. Unfortunately, this doesn’t work when shaking hands with a stranger. It doesn’t work in speech performance either, as I would soon find out.

  Ms. Joyner had assigned a scene from The Importance of Being Earnest to me and my old friend Janell Kelly. We’d known each other since the first grade at St. Edna’s Elementary. The two of us had put together many a skit in eight years in the same classroom. Our most memorable collaboration was for a religion assignment in second grade, a song we wrote to the tune of “Hello, Dolly!” entitled “Hello, Yahweh!” It was lucky we had the lay teacher that year.

  This year, speech was the only class period Janell and I shared. Besides geometry and English, Janell was studying music (French horn), dance, and martial arts first semester— maybe prepping for a career in performance art. But she was performing rather badly now.

  “ ‘Cecily,’ ” Janell’s Gwendolen Fairfax warbled in a bad British accent, “ ‘mamma, whose views on education are remarkably strict, has brought me up to be extremely short-sighted; it is part of her system; so do you mind my looking at you through my glasses?’ ” She forgot to pantomime, playing Gwendolen’s sarcasm with the humorlessness of Queen Elizabeth with a bad tooth, and the pun was lost. Janell took deadpan far too seriously.

  While the class applauded with scorn, our teacher sat on the floor, writing on her clipboard. Willow thin, with medium-chocolate coloring and permed hair that hugs her head, Ms. Joyner is the bright bird in the drab nest that is Tri-Dist. The classroom walls in C wing are all painted a yellow so wan it puts you to sleep. Unless you’re in Ms. Joyner’s class. Today, she wore a billowy kind of jumpsuit with different-colored jewels and gems silk-screened all over it. Ms. Joyner is the only teacher I know who dresses better than her students, and that’s saying a lot.

  Janell’s and my presentation had been last, so people started filing out with the bell. We waited for the okay from Ms. Joyner, who had told everyone “Nice job” after their performance. But she still sat cross-legged up against a side wall, scribbling on her clipboard.

  We had just given each other the let’s-go shrug when Ms. Joyner spoke. “Not so fast, girls,” she said in her rich tenor, still writing. She underlined something real heavy, folded the bright pink sheet, and handed it to me with a smile. “I’d like you two to go see Mr. Axelrod in his office. He knows you’re coming.”

  Mr. Axelrod? The head of the speech department? Better known as The Ax? Janell and I stared at each other wide-eyed.

  “Now,” commanded Ms. Joyner, smile fading. She got up in one billowing motion and escorted us to the door.

  “Was the scene that rotten?” I whispered to Janell on our way down the hall.

  “I didn’t know you could get punished for bad acting,” she said. “Man, speech teachers are strict.” She lashed out with a tae-kwon-do kick, and I automatically fell back a length.

  As I dawdled and Janell whirled, a door opened and a cold shadow fell across the hall, stopping us dead in our tracks. A tall, well-built man with a craggy face and longish black hair pulled back in a ponytail blocked our path. He had on khaki Dockers and an old dark cable-knit sweater with pills on it, and those brown rubber-soled shoes that guy teachers wear. The tiniest sliver of a gold earring hung from one ear like a very expensive sickle.

  He stood, looking us over, one dark eyebrow cocked, for w
hat seemed like the rest of my life. The second hand on the hall clock shivered and froze. The slams of lockers and the chirps of birds outside died. Wordlessly, the man pointed a finger at Janell and me, then back at his office.

  The Ax. And he wanted us.

  Dutifully we marched in, and I handed him Ms. Joyner’s note. He glanced at it, motioned for us to remain standing.

  “Mr. Axelrod, I can explain—” Janell began. He stopped her with a half-raised palm and seated himself behind his desk. A large trophy and several smaller ones glistened in a glass case on the wall.

  “You,” he said to me.

  I stood stock-still as he absorbed my features—my fivefeet-two, hundred-pound-weakling frame, the shoulder-length dirty-blond hair I inherited from Mom that won’t hold a curl, the emerald green eyes that are my one and only best asset.

  “Walk,” he said, waving me across the tiny room. “You too,” he said to Janell.

  It was easily the clumsiest walk I’d taken in weeks, months, years—since I’d tripped over my graduation robe and smacked into Father Leone while receiving my eighth-grade diploma. I tried to force my tennis shoes into a straight line as Janell shifted into her dancer’s glide, passing me on her way back to where we’d started. Incredible. We were dressed alike in T-shirts and jeans, but Janell had suddenly become Ginger Rogers versus my Lucille Ball.

  “You,” said Mr. Axelrod to me again, boring into my eyes this time, “are funny.”

  I wasn’t that funny.

  “You,” he grunted at Janell, “are not.”

  This was not news.

  A light like a camera-flash passed over his face—a vague try at a smile—and was gone. “Ms. Joyner recommended you girls. We need a few live bodies to round out our speech team this year.” It wasn’t a question.

  “You,” he pointed at me. “Original Comedy. Write your name on the sign-up sheet outside.”

  I dared to open my mouth. “Original what?”

  The Ax lobotomized me with a look. “Comedy,” he said, not laughing. “Your event. And you.” He locked eyes with Janell. “Dramatic Interp. No! Wait!”

  We did.

  “What do you know about poetry?” he asked her.

  “Nothing,” she replied.

  “That’s your event. Verse Reading,” he said, ending the interview. “Sign up outside. Team meeting’s Saturday at two. Be there.”

  Saturday was the day of Leda’s fund-raiser. I’d have to cancel. I tried calling her as soon as I got home from school, but her line was busy. The Lundquists don’t believe in call-waiting.

  When I finally got through, Leda said, “I was just trying to call you, dude! Too cosmic. Look, Paz, I’ve got to cancel out on Saturday. I mean, you can still go by yourself if you want—”

  “Wait a minute,” I said. “I can’t go either. Me and Janell got in some kind of trouble during speech today, and we have to show up at this meeting—”

  “Saturday at two o’clock!” she finished for me. “You’re joining the team too?”

  “What?”

  “Speech team, Paz. Do I have to spell it out for you?”

  “But your parents never let you join after-school clubs. On account of the weekend warrior thing. What the heck’s going on?”

  “Got lucky, I guess. I gave that animal-rights speech in class this morning?” Leda took Intro Speech another period. “Well, Ms. Joyner says I’m a natural for Original Oratory.”

  “So, did you have to talk to The Ax?”

  “Yeah, met him. He’s extremely cool. That earring?”

  I shivered, remembering it. “It looked sharp, for one thing. He could probably cut your heart out with it,” I said. “Why do you think they call him The Ax? And why are Beth and Niles letting you do this?”

  Leda’s voice clouded with paranoia; one of her parents must have been hovering nearby. “Paz,” she said low, “this is the greatest: If I write orations on the Causes, the units say they’ll pay me for every speech tournament.” Speech team. Leda’s parental units had found another outlet for their message.

  Leda sighed. “If I never have to go to another telephone-tree potluck, it’ll be too soon.”

  “Well,” I said ruefully, “I probably wouldn’t have met any hunky Cuban guys this weekend anyway. I hate meeting strangers.”

  “Then how’re you ever going to meet any new guys?” Leda made my allergy to strangers sound like a mortal sin.

  “Maybe there’ll be some cute ones on the speech team,” I said halfheartedly. I didn’t tell her what Mr. Axelrod had said about my looking funny. While funny may be a bonus-plus in comedy acting, it is not necessarily the attraction that the greater Chicagoland population of guys is looking for. Otherwise, why hadn’t they found me yet?

  4

  I heard the click-clack-click of dominoes and smelled the cigar smoke before I found Dad and Abuelo relaxing on the screened-in back porch. Afternoon sun shone on them. Beads of sweat blossomed in neat rows across their brows, undisturbed by the overhead fan. I sat down on our old refrigerator-sized what-color-is-it-anymore couch with the wobbly leg and balanced a Coke can on the wiggly arm. Our old furniture bands together out here like a neighboring tribe; that’s why I like the porch. Familiar. Lived in.

  But the domino board, atop an ancient folding card table, looked shiny new as usual. The ever-present cigar smoke has tinted the whole thing a mellow tobacco color, and every so often Dad gives it another coat of varnish. Dominoes littered the board, festive sandwiches of red and white, locked together with a gold pin at their centers. Black dots pocked their white faces, counting off in orderly patterns. These were no ordinary game pieces. Calling dominoes a game in our house is a joke.

  Abuelo smashed the double-one tile onto the board. “¡Tan!” he whooped, beating the table with both palms, conga-style. “No ones, eh?” My grandfather, wiry, thin, and darker than Dad, is absolutely bald, and not because it’s in style. He always wears the same thing: a boxy guayabera shirt, white today, with roses embroidered on the pockets, and the kind of thin dark pants that old people call trousers. Slippers at home, dress shoes when he goes out. Abuelo solved his fashion crisis long ago.

  He waved his arms at my father. “You knock, then I knock, ¡tan-tan! como Tito Puente.” Neither of them had any ones in their hand to play.

  Resolutely, Dad knocked twice, passing.

  Abuelo cracked his knuckles down. “I win, for once, ¡Dios mío! ”

  Dad exposed his remaining pieces to reveal several blanks, a low score. He reached over and spread out Abuelo’s hand: twenty-six points. Dad just sat there, arms crossed in a yellow long-sleeved velour shirt, sweating and looking smugly across the table at his father.

  Abuelo returned his gaze innocently. “¿Qué?” As if he couldn’t add.

  “Dame el dinero, Papito,” Dad said. “Pay up!”

  With lips tight, Abuelo opened a small leather coin purse, plucked a dime from it, and tossed it onto Dad’s side of the table. Quite a few dimes were stacked there, next to a cracked ashtray that said FONTAINEBLEAU HOTEL—MIAMI on it.

  “Se acabó,” muttered Abuelo. “I quit!” He winked at me and revealed the landscape of a grin he’d been hiding. He didn’t really mind losing. “A menos que . . . eh, Violeta? Do you want to take my place?”

  The game never stopped as long as another sucker came along.

  “Sure, Abuelo,” I said. “How’re you feeling today?”

  “Mucho mejor,” he said, stubbing out what was left of his cigar and handing me his coin purse. “¡Pero, this humedad! It will kill me!” He fluffed his shirt up and down to get some air down the neck. Then he stepped back into the air-conditioned house.

  A heat wave in September, and not even Indian summer yet. This didn’t bode well for an early ski season.

  “How was school today, Violeta?” Dad asked. I could barely hear him as we mixed the dominoes with our hands, the roar finally subsiding into distinct clicks as the tiles collided one last time, then came to r
est.

  “Good, I guess. I’m joining the speech team.” I chose my ten pieces carefully from the blind pile, setting them upright horizontally. There are two schools on this; I prefer the low profile.

  Dad stood his ten on end vertically. Maybe because he’s so tall. Dad is six-two, with slightly olive skin that always looks tan, and black hair that’s eroding in one small spot on top of his head. Besides the totally wrong shirt for a hot day, he wore polyester pants in a sickly watermelon color, leaving a good six inches of his ankles exposed. Green and white striped socks ran into his brand-new white bowling shoes with tassels on them, which he was breaking in by wearing around the house. I noticed he had fitted his cigar band around one finger as a ring. “Double nine!” he called. Highest double goes first.

  I shook my head.

  “Double eight!”

  Still nothing.

  “Double siete!” He ignored me and slapped down the double-seven piece.

  I picked out the seven-five, one of two sevens in my hand.

  “Ehspeech, you say?” Dad remarked in a Spanglish accent. He must have been sitting out here with Abuelo for a long time. “There’s a team for this?” He laid a piece down.

  “Well, you’ve heard of debate, right, Dad? Tri-Dist doesn’t have debate, but we do have these individual events that compete.”

  He nodded impatiently, waiting for my move. We each laid down a piece.

  “Some events are like reading parts from a play, or reciting a famous speech. I’m doing Original Comedy; I’ll have to write it myself.” I looked at my hand, trying to decide, then went for the five-two.

  Dad winced and knocked sharply on the domino board, passing.