Cuba 15 Page 3

  Oh ho, no more sevens or fives in his hand already? My turn. I slapped the double-five piece at the end of the chain to form a T.

  Dad had to knock again. “You have to write what yourself? Jokes?”

  I nodded, laying down a tile. “My speech coach says I’m funny.”

  Dad sighed in relief and played a double. He took a happy puff from his cigar, pulled up a green and white striped sock, and fiddled with his cigar-wrapper ring. “But you come from a perfectly normal American household. What do you have to be funny about?”

  “That’s what I said.” I kept a straight face, then hit him with a killer four-five, laying it off his double four slowly, to rub in the humiliation.

  Dad took a domino from the spare pile, dropped it on its face, and spun it on its pinhead. He was getting nervous. But he played a low number from his hand.

  “So, where will you get your material from?” he asked as I played off his blank. He scowled and knocked hard, once, passing.

  Leda’s invitation had given me an idea. “I thought maybe I could do something on a Cuban theme, but I’m not sure what. Could you help me?”

  “There is nothing funny about Cuba,” Dad said curtly.

  “Oh, there must be something,” I insisted.

  “Sure,” Dad exhaled, “if you think dictatorship is funny.” He was still upset about having to pass. “Now are you going to play, Violeta?” he demanded.

  I paused for effect, drew my weapon, and smacked the domino board with a nine-five, motioning for Dad to place it for me, since I couldn’t quite reach the end of the chain in his corner. I donned Abuelo’s innocent look. “Can you at least play off your double?”

  He couldn’t. I played my final two pieces and went out.

  Dad knocked his dominoes faceup for me to see, shaking his head in disgust, and reached for a dime. I knew that, inside, he was marking this loss in his memory book of lifetime wins and losses. I smiled.

  “There’s nothing funny about this,” Dad said grumpily just as Mom came out to the porch, carrying our toy poodle, Chucho, and the family calendar. “I quit. Will you put the dominoes away?”

  “Aw, Dad, you didn’t give me any ideas for my speech yet. And we only played one game.”

  “Maybe your mother has some ideas for the ehspeech. But this game is over.” He swept his dimes up from the corner of the domino board. “Unless . . .” He jingled his change at Mom. “Diane?”

  Mom set Chucho down on the floor, where he immediately found Abuelo’s discarded cigar wrapper and ate it. “I’ll play,” Mom said.

  Dad gave her his handful of change, ground his cigar out in the ashtray, and retreated into the house.

  Except for the extra legs and tail, Chucho looks exactly like a little old man who took a bath in superglue and rolled around on a hairdresser’s floor. Dad inherited the dog from Madrina, his godmother, who had owned him as long as anyone could remember. Nobody knows Chucho’s true age or agrees on what color he is for sure. He blends right in on the back porch.

  As dogs go, he is more like a goat, which is why Abuelo calls him cabrito and Abuela puts her shoes up in the closet when she takes them off at our house. Chucho will eat anything, especially bits of things that look like they’ve been thrown away. Dad often wonders if Madrina ever fed the poor animal, but then I remind him that Chucho seems to be in the peak of health and, apparently, at least a century old. Whatever he’s been eating, it agrees with him.

  “Mom,” I said as she settled with her calendar into Dad’s old plaid overstuffed armchair, “Chucho just ate Abuelo’s cigar band.”

  “Roughage,” Mom replied, already turning the last game’s pieces facedown and beginning to shuffle them. Chucho climbed up in Mom’s lap and began gnawing on the family calendar. With any luck, he’d eat May.

  We began another game.

  “Mom,” I said, hoping she was just distracted enough, “do I really have to go through with this quince party? I mean, is there any way we can just tell Abuela thanks, but no thanks?”

  Unlike Dad, Mom will talk and pay attention to you while playing dominoes. She says it’s because she’s Polish and doesn’t have the domino gene.

  She looked at me, hurt, obviously not distracted enough. I could see foundations weaken and columns collapse in her mind as her plans were shaken. “You—you don’t want to have the party?”

  “No, no,” I reassured her, “it’s not that I don’t want the party. . . . It’s just not the kind of party kids have.”

  Mom let this sink in but didn’t comprehend. “That’s not what your abuela says.”

  “Well, she’s from Miami,” I said, as if it were Mars.

  Mom still looked unconvinced.

  “Look,” I said, starting to feel desperate, “it’s just not right for me. I mean, when’s the last time I wore a dress?”

  She surveyed her domino hand and laid a piece down. “There was that nice corduroy jumper I brought you from the shop,” she suggested.

  “That was fourth grade, Mom! And who would we even invite? I don’t have enough cousins to fill a rental hall.” Mom’s family lives back East, in Pennsylvania, and we visited them; they never came to Chicago. And we didn’t see much of Dad’s relatives in the old neighborhood after Abuela and Abuelo left. Changing shifts at the pharmacy all the time made it hard for Dad to find two hours to drive out there and back, much less see anyone in between.

  “There are friends . . . ,” Mom said, probably meaning her old bowling-league buddies and the members of Mark’s scout troop. As for my friends, I pretty much have hung out with Janell and Leda since my next-door neighbor moved away. “And won’t it be great to see your cousins from the old neighborhood again?” she said.

  I shrugged. We moved from the city to the house on Woodtree Lane when I was a baby. There wasn’t a whole lot of old times’ sake involved for me here.

  “Mom,” I said more insistently. “Look. I do not want to go out onstage, all dressed up, in front of people I hardly know, and talk about . . . about . . . being a woman.” I looked her in the eye. “Would you?”

  She thought about it for a second, then broke into a broad smile. “Why, I think that would be lovely. It’s very nice of your grandmother to offer. Don’t worry, we’ll make sure you have a good time.”

  My heart sank. “I’m not wearing any pink dress,” I said, sulking, as my grandmother came through the sliding door from the house. Chucho jumped off Mom’s lap and walked a few rings around Abuela’s stockinged ankles, making her pull her skirt close. She seated herself primly on the rickety old couch.

  “Oye, Lupita,” Mom said to her, “let’s plan the dress shopping trip. We’ll all three make a day of it!”

  What a picnic that would be. I knocked on my turn and changed the subject. “Mom, Dad said you might be able to help me with this speech I have to write. I’m thinking of joining the speech team.”

  She nodded. “That sounds like a good idea. Some public speaking might be just the trick to get you onstage. What do you need to know?”

  I gulped. “We’re supposed to come up with an original theme, something no one else will think of. So I thought of doing some jokes about Cuba. You never hear much about Cuba.”

  Abuela sat up a little straighter and looked pained.

  “How about dominoes?” Mom said. “The way your father plays is sometimes humorous.”

  I smirked and shook my head.

  She won the hand by going out, and I handed her my dime.

  “How about you, Abuela? Any ideas?”

  “Me?” Abuela busily arranged her skirt. “No. Yo no sé,” she demurred.

  “Come on, Abuela,” I said. “Help me. Tell me something about Cuba.”

  “Mmmm,” she murmured, dipping her head, “this really is no interesante . . .”

  “Come on, tell me something you remember from when you were growing up. It doesn’t have to be funny. Please.”

  “Ah, pues, okay.” A faint smile traced her lips. “Since y
ou ask.”

  Her eyes glassed over, out to sea. “Was this lee-tle club, El Habano, eh? This place is my favorite. Todo el mundo would go in the summer each day for to ehswim, to eat lunch, to play the domino or cards. Sometimes would be a dance in the big ballroom. . . . Ay, the ballroom.” Her voice grew stronger. “Con cielos altos, and many fountains, and the lights that hang . . . beautiful marble everywhere, and the ehspanish tiles on the floor. Elegante, ” she sighed. “Was a place sin problemas. Was our place.”

  Watching her, I saw it too. Saw how important it must have been to her.

  “Pero, this Coo-ba is gone. Muerta,” she said bitterly, the color draining from her cheeks.

  The Communist revolution had taken all that away a long time ago. Abuela and Abuelo had been forced to leave the country. Whatever plans they’d had for themselves, just out of college, and for Dad, who was a baby, evaporated. They’d had to make a new life in the U.S., and then Luz came into the picture, and they’d moved up north to find work. They could never go back to what they’d had, I realized. All this resided in the diamond-edged look in Abuela’s eye.

  Mom asked smoothly, “Don’t you and Teo belong to a new club, down in Mamita’s neighborhood?” My grandparents moved back to Miami several years ago to be near Abuela’s mother, who doesn’t travel.

  Abuela’s face softened, but the hard look didn’t leave her eye. “Is no the same,” she said.

  I guessed it wouldn’t be. Maybe Dad was right. Maybe there is nothing funny about Cuba.

  I gave up. “I’ve got homework,” I said, reaching for the domino box. “Are you finished with these?”

  Mom eyed Abuela, who shook her head and got up from the couch. Her color was returning. Only one thing could take my grandmother’s mind off her troubles. A nice, friendly game of cutthroat.

  “Juego,” Abuela said, the corners of her mouth turning up. “I play now.”

  5

  Friday was a day off from school, so Abuela and Mom had me invite Janell and Leda dress shopping downtown with us. My two best friends had agreed to be damas de honor, part of my honor court.

  “Whoever heard of a sweet fifteen party?” Janell said when I brought it up at lunch one day.

  “It’s Cuban,” I groaned. “Tradition with a capital ‘T.’ ”

  “I think it’s excruciatingly cool,” said Leda. “Mom wants me to have a ritual too. If I ever get my period.” Leda, a year younger than Janell and me, had skipped eighth grade, or whatever they’d called it at her progressive school, and started as a freshman at Tri-Dist last term. Like Janell and me, Leda had begged her parents to let her attend public high school. We had been three grade-school fish looking for a bigger pond.

  By those standards, Tri-District High was a Great Lake, or a small sea: over five thousand students and faculty, known for a championship girls’ basketball team, the TriJets; a losing football team, the Tridents; and our principal, Doc Waller, former Western B-movie costar and current record holder for growing Illinois’s largest beet.

  But even though I’d made some new friends over the past year, I still didn’t know twenty-eight people I would ask to be in the court of such a strange personal event as this quince thing. Mom had found me a book through the Internet called Quinceañero for the Gringo Dummy, which explained all the elements of the traditional quince party. I scanned the first few paragraphs before tossing it in a corner of the kitchen. Basically, the quince is a show that opens with an entrance ceremony by the honor court, fourteen girls and fourteen guys, each couple representing a year, plus the fifteen-year-old herself, who has to give the first dance to her father. There’s a cake, and music, and speech time—a lot like a wedding; I know, because I went to Janell’s sister’s reception.

  We had to go shopping for dress ideas for me and the court members. So far, there were just the two of them. “Do I get to bring Willie?” Leda asked. Willie was her sometimes boyfriend who lived on the South Side, whom she’d met one weekend at a fur-awareness demonstration.

  “Then who would I bring?” Janell wanted to know. My friend since the first grade was not into dating, though I do remember her having a thing for Janet Conklin’s brother back in 4-H. She says she has other pursuits right now, and we leave it at that.

  “We’re not doing escorts,” I broke in. “Just like we’re not doing a limousine arrival or a court of fourteen. You can bend some of the rules, according to Abuela.” This had come as a relief to me, but it still wouldn’t save me from the dreaded long dress. About that, she’d been adamant. I looked at Janell. “I wouldn’t want to embarrass you. I’m the one being embarrassed that day.”

  Mom doesn’t like driving in downtown Chicago, so we picked up Janell and Leda, locked the car at the C&NW station, and took the train to the Loop. I wore my favorite outfit, a suedelike tunic and loose pants in a very Septemberish rust color. I couldn’t find my sandals before we left, so I had to wear red sneakers.

  The others wore dresses; Leda and Janell must have tried on some formal wear in recent memory and knew the drill. When I first came out to the car, Mom and Abuela looked at each other and said something in Spanish; then Mom told me to go back inside and change into a skirt.

  “You wear what you’re going to try on,” she said.

  I muttered about not having anything but my old St. Edna’s uniforms, so Abuela said, “Do you want borrow some-sing of mine, Violeta?”

  Double the horror.

  Go out in public in my grandmother’s clothes? That’d be like turning instantly old. I shuddered. “Let’s just go,” I said, getting in the car. I couldn’t see what earthly difference changing would make. “We’ll miss the train.”

  Abuela and Abuelo were right, September is one of the finest times to be alive in Chicago. The five of us emerged from the busy Canal Street station and walked east toward Lake Michigan. The stripe of water on the horizon was a deep, dizzy blue—the white dots on top of it, sailboats, and the white dots above those, seagulls. Warm, steady wind blew in off the lakefront, and the locust trees in Grant Park clung tightly to slightly yellow-tinged leaves.

  We turned left, past a manic traffic cop, and followed Abuela up Michigan Avenue a couple of blocks to a bridal shop. CHEZ DOLL, read the discreet curlicue lettering on the window. We had to wait to be buzzed in through the front door.

  “Who would hijack a wedding dress?” I asked. Then my surroundings awed me into silence.

  The atmosphere inside was at once bustling and subdued. Mauve and gray walls met a silvery carpet as thick as the stacks of money the place must have been hauling in. Sales staff hurried to and fro beneath armloads of dresses. The well-turned-out clientele looked as though they’d gone shopping in order to shop here.

  Our group of five stuck out like dandelions in a rose garden: Mom, sporting a snazzy yellow and green checked dress; Janell, matching the decor in a gray leotard and maroon wraparound skirt; Leda, with the peasant look; and me in my pant outfit and sneakers. Abuela presented a sober impression, except for her makeup, in a navy pleated skirt and white ruffly blouse. She was dressed exactly like the store clerks.

  “Excuse me, ma’am. Do you have this in a size ten?” someone was already asking her.

  We found our own clerk (though the card she gave us said SALES DELEGATE), and she abandoned us at the bridesmaids’ section, a multicolored forest of satin, lace, and fibers unknown.

  “Isn’t this a little . . . formal?” I asked Abuela, pointing at a floor-length lacy, ruffly, pleaty thing in a honeydew shade.

  Mom gave a whistle at the price tag. “Isn’t it a little— expens-ivo?” she said, as though no one but us would understand Spanglish.

  Abuela threw surreptitious glances over both shoulders. “ Sssst! This is where we find el modelo for the dress! Then we have it copied by the dressmaker.”

  Mom gave her a sly nod.

  “Cool!” said Leda.

  “What are your colors?” Janell asked. “We’ll be here all day if you don’t narrow it dow
n.”

  “Purple, not pink,” I said, glancing at Mom. She and Abuela had given in to me on this one; we had decided last night.

  “Rosa,” pouted Abuela, “is the color tradicional in our familia. . . .”

  “It’ll be sort of a pinky purple,” Mom affirmed cheerily.

  “Fuchsia,” said Janell.

  “Magenta,” Leda added.

  “Purple,” I stressed. “It’s my favorite color. But the damas dresses can be any color that looks good with it.”

  Abuela took charge again. “We choose your vestido first.”

  A squeal went up at the other end of the showroom, where a bride-to-be stood on a platform in front of her friends, the clerks, and the other customers to model the gown she was trying on. “I am not doing that,” I stage-whispered fiercely in Mom’s direction, but she was already engrossed in a purple and white pin-striped number.

  I rolled my eyes at Leda. “Barney meets Wall Street,” I muttered, brushing past to another rack. A shiny violet-blue gown drew my eye, but it had a plunging neckline. I don’t even have a plunging neck.

  Abuela sensed my interest and shook her finger at me. “The chica always wears many buttons in front.” She fluttered her fingers in front of her chest to demonstrate.

  “Like this?” asked Leda, displaying a long, bubble-gum pink, pearly, lacy dress that seemingly buttoned up to the nostrils, the neck was so high. “Looks like bat wings, doesn’t it?” she said, pointing to the capelike collar.

  I didn’t see anything here that I might wear. My only criteria was: Would I, or would I not, bust out laughing when I saw my reflection in the mirror? Because if I couldn’t carry it off in front of myself, I didn’t see how I could get up in front of anyone else and dance the macarena with my dad. He swears that’s the only dance he knows.

  “I’ll just wait in the dressing room,” I sighed.

  Abuela gave an evil grin. “You go,” she said. “We bring. We bring.”

  The ugly truths one discovers about one’s body while trying on clothes are best kept a secret, such as the stark blue vein in my left shoulder that looks terrible against spaghetti straps. But modesty was impossible.