Cuba 15 Page 7

  “Or all three at once?”

  “If you so choose.”

  “So how do I make them care?”

  He nodded at the monitor.

  Another boy in a suit and tie began his routine from his seat. When the coach said “Begin,” he hesitated a moment, then jumped up from his chair with a loud baby cry and ran to the stage like someone was chasing him.

  Once at his mark, he looked both ways and sighed with relief. “If you have a brother or sister—or just know someone who does—be on the lookout.” Again, he checked both ways. “Be on the lookout for Superbaby: faster than a speeding tricycle . . . stronger than the family dog . . . able to leap tall playpens in a single bound . . . it’s Superbaby!”

  The routine had both Mr. Soloman and me cracking up by the end. Superbaby did terrible things to bedrooms, computers, Walkmans. Mark was eleven and still like that. I could totally relate.

  “Got you right here”—Mr. Soloman mimed a punch to his gut—“didn’t it?”

  I nodded.

  “Why?”

  I shrugged.

  “Two words.” Mr. Soloman squinted and leaned over conspiratorially. “Universal humor,” he said, settling back. “Everybody has experienced a willful baby—or knows someone who has. That’s what you’re going for. That common denominator.”

  I particularly liked this boy’s style. “What about that entrance, screaming and running?” I said.

  “Never mind that for now,” my coach said. “You have an instinct for performing or you wouldn’t be here. That will take care of itself. In O.C., writing comes first, theater comes second.”

  He got up and began putting videos in boxes. “I’m giving you until next Tuesday to come up with a draft. It doesn’t have to be complete, but at least get a concept on paper.”

  “Like what kind of concept?”

  He wagged a finger at me. “Original comedy. Not your speech coach’s idea of a joke.”

  I pouted.

  “Ah, ah, chin up. Give it a try. You’ll be surprised what you come up with.”

  “That’s what I’m afraid of,” I said, sticking the information sheets he’d given me into my folder.

  “Fear can be funny,” Mr. Soloman insisted. “Make me laugh.”

  “I’ll try.”

  “If you don’t, I’ll just get the hook.”

  Or The Ax, I thought. He’d probably be glad to get rid of me. “Okay, okay. See you next Tuesday, Mr. Soloman.”

  12

  I figured I’d spend the rest of the school week waiting for ideas to hit, then write the speech on the weekend. The fact sheet said I had to fill eight minutes, tops. No “inappropriate” subject matter. No swearing.

  It would never make an HBO special, but I was sure I could come up with something better than that sea ostrich sketch. I kept my ears peeled for comedy all week. On Wednesday, my piano teacher’s dog started howling during my lesson, which was funny, just not funny enough to laugh about for eight minutes.

  Thursday, I dropped by the Rise & Walk to see Mom after school. Somebody had donated six naked mannequins for the tax write-off, and Mom had to dress them before she could sell them; it was a church basement, after all, and naked doesn’t belong in church. Unfortunately, naked was probably “inappropriate” for speech team too, or that would’ve been a hoot. I was laughing so hard by the time Mom put together an ensemble for Mannequin Number Three (ski parka, fishnet stockings, wing tips, and sombrero) that I had to go home.

  Nothing was funny about Friday. From the moment I woke up, Abuela and Abuelo loaded me down with chores, preparations for the big domino party that would start at sundown. They ran the games on island time.

  “Ay, Violeta, por favor load the dishehwasher for me,” Abuela begged as I was trying to get out the door to the bus. She had been up long before Mark and me, starting a batch of congrís and stirring up pastry for the homemade éclairs. I couldn’t complain when the eats were this good.

  That afternoon, I helped Abuelo find an extension cord and move the stereo out to the porch. He pawed excitedly through a large CD case that he’d brought with him from Miami. “Mira, Violeta, Fifty Years of Tito Puente. This one is my favorite. ¿Cómo se dice disc jockey en inglés?”

  “In English? It’s disc jockey, Abuelo.”

  “Ah, the same. ¡Yo soy el rey de los Disc Jockeys!”

  I kissed the top of his bald head. “You are king of the disc jockeys, Abuelo.” My Spanish was really improving, thanks to those cognates.

  The guests started to arrive as salmony-colored clouds arched toward sunset, netting the sky. Mom and I were standing door duty.

  “¡Hola! Diane. ¿Qué pasa?”

  “Welcome, it’s been ages!” They volleyed hugs and kisses, shot them my way.

  “¡Qué linda! Violet. How you’ve grown!” Lies, but good ones.

  “Where is Lupita? Y Teodoro?”

  Abuela was manning the kitchen, Abuelo was asleep. Yes, asleep. Guests would come and go all weekend, and somebody had to take the late hosting shift.

  We sent everyone past the buffet in the living room, where many lingered, and on out to the porch, where Dad was holding court in his domino kingdom. You could hear “The Sky Is Crying” or “Baby Please Don’t Go” blasting from the porch and Chucho barking up a fuss from behind my bedroom door, where he’d been safely stashed. The house smelled of garlicky frijoles negros and frying plátanos— green plantain chips, the kind I liked; they’d be salty-sweet and too hot to eat, but in no time they would disappear, leaving just an oil-spotted paper towel and spilled salt on the plate.

  The little kids who’d come ran through the house like their hair was on fire, and my brother, Mark, suddenly five years old again, ran after them. It was beyond me how Abuelo could nap. I cruised through the living room and over to the designated drivers’ table for one of Abuelo’s nonalcoholic concoctions, Piña No-Nada, a piña colada whose secret ingredient was a shot of cold café. If I started drinking these now, I’d be wide awake for driver’s ed by summer school.

  I hung a left at the hallway and proceeded toward the players’ porch. Thankfully, the smoking section—two card tables sporting ashtrays and beer mugs full of Corona y Coronas—had been moved outside.

  “¡Hola! Violeta.” A grown cousin, Marianao, grabbed me in a hug, exhaling cigar smoke in my ear. Apparently she hadn’t read the NO FUMAR signs. Marianao wore a skintight pink and green floral print dress, low in the neck and high in the skirt, and her dark hair was pinned up in an elaborate ’do. The cigar added a bizarre twist to her costume, but at least it was in character.

  “Marianao, long time no see,” I said, squeezing back. I smoothly guided her out the screen door into the tikitorched yard, where she squealed at another long-lost somebody. Like I said, we hadn’t seen much of these folks from the old neighborhood since Abuela and Abuelo flew south. They were an exotic foreign species to me.

  Mark, in his ball cap and shorts as usual, ran around the corner of the house, followed by a chain of yelling kids dressed in Sunday clothes. “Vi, Mom says come to the kitchen right now!” he called over the noise, and kept on going. They zigzagged between tables, guests, and tiki torches, miraculously hitting none of them, and disappeared around the other side of the house.

  The whole weekend was like that, like stepping onto a carousel ride gone berserk. Friday night, I fell asleep to the alternate clacking of dominoes and Tito Puente’s timbales. The only time I could get a dime in edgewise on one of the packed porch tables was when I woke up in the middle of the night to use the bathroom and found Abuelo and two friends still playing. The stereo had been switched low, and an empty, grease-dotted plátanos plate sat on the floor beside them. I picked it up and ran a wet finger around it, finishing off the last of the salt.

  The men signaled me to throw in a dime, and a new game began.

  “This is the life, eh, Teo?” asked one of Abuelo’s friends. “This remind me of las fiestas navideñas back in Cuba.”

/>   Abuelo nodded. He wore his party shirt, a pastel pink, yellow, and blue striped guayabera, over his usual dark trousers. “Sí, claro que sí. Padrino use to hang las hamacas in the ehstables, para las siestas.”

  “Like a sleepover, Abuelo?”

  He grinned an ocean of teeth at me in my baby-doll pajamas and sweater. “Sí, como un Sleep Over. People would come and go for many days, and Padrino would roast the lechón in the big pit, and there were cards and dominoes, never stopping.”

  The four of us at the table sighed.

  “Those were the days,” Abuelo said.

  Chucho needed a run on Saturday morning after being penned up in my room most of the night before. The hot spell had left town overnight; outside, in my shorts and gym T-shirt, I felt that crisp September bite that said, “Adiós, summer!”

  Chucho felt it too. He skittered down the blacktop toward the street like a pup, until we reached the spot on the sidewalk in front of the Vespuccis’ house where old Mrs. Vespucci tossed stale bread for the birds. Sparrows and robins squawked in all directions as Chucho found an almost-whole kaiser roll and chunked it down in one lump, like a python.

  I scooped him up in my arms before Mrs. V. could spot us through the oversized slats of her skeletal venetian blinds and yell through the screen door. “Cabrito,” I scolded Chucho, releasing him a few paces later and jogging off down Woodtree.

  We got back and went to the kitchen for a drink, where I found Mom in high gear; today was Abuela’s day to play. Ovals of kielbasa sausage were lined up on the counter, at the ready. Mom checked on some steaming cabbage, stirred a tomato sauce, and drained a pan of browned ground beef, practically at once. I licked my finger and stuck it in a plate of powdered sugar left over from making kolachke cookies. This was better than Christmas. Maybe I’d get a chance to win some simoleons today too.

  “Mom, can I have a few bucks for dimes?”

  She threw me a harried look from a sinkful of suds and dirty pots. “How about an even exchange?”

  “But I just walked the dog!” I sighed. “Oh, all right.” I washed a few pans, and Mom let me lick the brownie bowl and told me to take some singles from her purse.

  “Thanks, Mom!”

  I put Chucho outside on his tether and hunted down my brother. He sat in the garage surrounded by patio furniture, sorting through a huge box of old golf balls he’d found.

  “Mark! I need you to watch Chucho today. Make sure none of the little kids lets him off the leash.”

  He dropped a fluorescent yellow ball into a bucket of soapy water as if I weren’t there.

  “Okay?” I prompted.

  Mark set aside two balls with gashes in them and dropped a scuffed Titleist in the water bucket, saying nothing.

  “Okay?” I said again, giving his Cubs hat brim a tweak.

  “Hey!” he yelped. “Why can’t you watch out for Chucho? I’m busy.”

  “I just took him for a walk, he’s not my responsibility.”

  He bared his gums at me. “Oh yes he is too. You’re the one having the keent-sy party. You’re the one who has to be responsible.”

  I opened my mouth to deny it, and my brother jumped up and ran away, leaving his golf balls soaking.

  What a baby. I stamped my foot and had turned to leave when a box on a shelf over the washer and dryer caught my eye: RIT. It was a box of red dye Mom had used to make a Santa suit out of a pair of pajamas several years ago. Could dye go bad?

  I took out a handful of tabs and dropped them in Mark’s golf ball water. Then I went out to the playing porch to look for some trouble.

  In between siestas that afternoon, I lost my shirt to my grandmother. No matter the configuration of players at the table, Abuela and I battled neck and neck, and she rallied to win at the last minute. I was beginning to think she carried around a double-blank tile in the pocket of her silver gaucho skirt or its matching jacket.

  “Lo siento, Violeta, pero I win again!” she sang cheerfully from pimiento-colored lips, reaching for the pot as the other players commiserated with me, one game after another. Still, I kept coming back for more.

  After my dinner break, I had to cadge some more dimes off Dad, who was running the change exchange. He wore one of those canvas coin pouches the volunteers used at the Lincolnville Petunia Festival every year. Blue plaid pants and penny loafers stuck out below the pouch, and above, he’d tucked in his favorite sunshine-yellow long-sleeved shirt with the monkeys on it. Dad roamed the porch, in his element: A guest would hand him a five, and he’d count out fifty dimes like he was filling a prescription. You knew he’d never make a mistake.

  Unfortunately, he knew exactly how many doses he’d already given me. “That’s it for tonight, chiquitica,” he said sternly, doling out five measly coins. “Your friend is here, by the way.”

  “Leda?”

  He nodded toward the backyard.

  She’d made it. “Hey, Leed!” I called, finding her at one of the smoking tables outside.

  She waved for quiet. “Shhh, Paz. I’m concentrating.”

  Leda, my cousin Marianao, and a heavyset man with a shirt just like Abuelo’s all bent over a long domino chain, each player with two pieces left to go.

  Marianao had returned tonight, this time dressed in a white cotton halter dress with a slit skirt. Her blood-red lacquered nails fingered the two dominoes rhythmically. She and the other man had parked a couple of steaming Coronas in the ashtray, one of them smeared with red lipstick. Leda, in a T-shirt that said LOVE YOUR MOTHER over a photo of planet Earth, eyed the board shrewdly. She feinted with one piece, then went to the other, laying it quietly on the end of the chain.

  “Caramba,” growled Marianao, knocking.

  The man laid down a low number.

  “Caramba,” said Leda, in a damn good accent. She knocked.

  “Se acabó,” grumbled Marianao, knocking.

  But the man couldn’t play either, and they all ended up adding up their points. Leda won by two.

  Marianao reached for the mug on the table and handed Leda a cigar.

  13

  As Sunday dawned, I padded out to the porch in bare feet and pajamas, hoping to find a few forgotten dimes stuck in the edges of a domino board or under some chair cushions. I came across Abuelo asleep on the old couch, party shirt crumpled, snores escaping his lips like blasts of percussion. He was probably dreaming of the hammocks at Padrino’s farm in Cuba. I didn’t have the heart to wake him. And I refrained from going through his pockets.

  I got up early because today was C-Day: comedy day. The threat of a deadline might help; hadn’t Mr. Soloman said that fear could be funny? I decided that something funny was going to happen today if it killed me.

  I went around front to get the newspaper and discovered I wasn’t the first one up. Mark squatted in the driveway, hosing off a pile of pink golf balls. When I turned to retreat, he spied me.

  “You!” He turned the hose on me, but the stream wouldn’t reach.

  I stuck my fingers in my mouth, crossed my eyes, and did a little dance. “What’s wrong with your shirt, little brother?” I needled him, noticing the pink splotches and handprints on his white T-shirt.

  He picked up a handful of wet golf balls and threw them at me, and I fled.

  Abuela entered the kitchen while I was mixing up some frozen orange juice. She looked tired and had neglected to style her hair or iron her bathrobe before breakfast for a change. Her silver hair, creased from sleep, hung down to the middle of her back.

  “Sit down, Abuela,” I said, handing her a glass of juice. “I’ll make you some café.” I found the ancient stovetop espresso maker in the drainer and the Café Bustelo in the fridge. I measured the coffee and water and set the pot on the stove to boil.

  “All that winning really takes it out of you, doesn’t it, Abuela?” I teased.

  She flashed me a grin untouched by lipstick this morning. “The ween-ing, it is good,” she said. “I stay up till two-thirty anoche.” She closed her
eyes and took a long swallow of orange juice. “Ahh!” she sighed.

  We divided up the newspaper and read in silence for a while. Then the coffeemaker started to burp, and I pulled a demitasse and my poodle mug from the cupboard and poured us each a cup. I loaded mine down with milk and sugar and began sipping while Abuela performed her ritual: a single shot of café, two heaping teaspoons of sugar, and a pinch of salt for good luck—then down the hatch.

  “Ahh!” she sighed again.

  I figured her throat must look like the inside of a volcano, but it seemed to work for her.

  “I’m glad you’re having a good time, Abuela,” I said. “You know, Abuelo was saying this reminds him of the domino parties in Cuba on his godfather’s farm.”

  She puckered her lips together and nodded slowly. “For us, was the club.” The light came into her eyes again as she thought back. “We use to love to play domino at El Habano. I was known as a very good player.”

  “El Habano? That’s the place with the chandeliers and marble columns and stuff?”

  She nodded. “Sí. Is where I make my quince.”

  “Your quince?”

  Wow. I’d been that close to the information before? Abuela guarded her secrets like gold. I shook my head in aggravation and pressed my luck. “In a pink dress, Abuela?” I wanted to hear her say it.

  A brief smile crossed her lips. “In the pink dress,” she let herself recall. “Por supuesto, such a dress! And such a day. Was una fiesta grande, with the court of twenty-eight, and flores everywhere . . . And Papi . . . ay, so handsome in his white suit.”

  “And what about you?”

  “Me? I am como una princesa in a fairy book.” She paused. “But is no the dress and the flowers or the friends watching that are important to me.”