Cuba 15 Page 8

  “No?”

  I’d thought they were the point.

  “Sí,” Abuela said, the faraway light still glowing softly in her eyes. “Not those things. Was the momento after the waltz, when Papi and I make el paseo together. He says to me, ‘Guadalupe Inez, m’ija, I am always here for you. If ever you have hard times, remember today and know that your papá is here to give you strength.’ ” She shook her head, her long hair falling about her shoulders. “I never forget this.”

  “And your dad . . .”

  “He die in Coo-ba. Is a long time ago. But always he is with me.” She flashed a true grin. “Was a great domino player, Papi. ¡El mejor! I think I inherit some-sing from him.”

  I smiled. “I know you did!”

  She sighed low and long.

  After a pause, she said, “Violeta, óyeme. I have una idea for today. Is a beeg day, many people.”

  Abuelo was to re-create Padrino’s pig roast, only on a smaller scale involving a marinated fresh ham and the Weber. Everyone my grandparents knew from the city would show up for that.

  “My idea is this: to put a table for to sign up the ehsponsors for your quince party. We can put right by the front door, ¿no? You can sit there con un sign: ‘Violeta Paz, La Quinceañera.’ ”

  I put my mug down. “Trying to get me off the domino tables, Abuela? Very sneaky.”

  She gave me a light cocotazo—a domino knock to the noggin. “¡Ay, Dios, esta muchacha . . . !” Then she grinned again. I liked her lips this color. “So, how do you think?”

  Hmmm. A reception table might be just the vantage point I needed. I’d see everyone who came in or went out, and I could plumb them for humor. It just might be worth a giggle. “Not bad, Abuela. Should I wear my dress?”

  “¡Ay, no, chica!”

  “Just kidding, just kidding. A sign’s a good idea, though. I’ll go make one after breakfast.”

  Abuela smiled, and the wrinkles seemed to fall from her robe and under her eyes at the same time. “Gracias pa’ el café,” she said.

  All our card tables were in use, but Mom’s African-violet table had wheels and was just about the right height. I made my sign and went downstairs to get the plant stand. Mom’s seven pots of African violets greeted me from the tiled floor beneath the purple-blue grow light—and the table was gone. But a telltale trail of tiny pink droplets led back up the steps.

  Further investigation drew me out the front door to the open garage, where I found the plant stand parked, a tackle box full of dimes open on top, and my brother in his Cubs hat behind it. At his feet sat a bushel basket of golf balls and a pile of plastic kitchen bags. Propped against the table, a huge poster in Mark’s handwriting announced: SALE—GOLF BALLS, 1 BUCK.

  “God, Vi,” Mark said, scowling, “d’you know how long it took me to get these clean? I could’ve killed you.”

  “You’re selling these?”

  “Sure, I’ve made six bucks already.”

  It wasn’t even ten o’clock on a Sunday morning. Yet here came another group of customers, stopping their cars by the refrigerator-box sign in our driveway: QUALITY USED GOLF BALLS. I grimaced and went back into the house.

  A little later Mom gave me an old tin TV tray with a faded picture of a deer on it and told me to set it up out back, and take Chucho with me. He was eating the frills off the party toothpicks.

  I chose a spot under the maple tree, midway between the domino tables and the barbecue grill, and staked Chucho next to me. He went into a little snit fit in the grass, rolling and snuffling; then he stretched, yawned, and gave a little squeak at the end. I scratched him under his pointy chin. “I have got to do some math homework, boy,” I told him, pulling out a notebook, and he immediately curled up at my feet and went to sleep. My sentiments exactly.

  The hard-core players, Marianao included, began to arrive around noon, and more guests trickled in throughout the day. The baby-blue sky and Abuelo’s coals burning down in the grill lured most people out back for a while. Many of them carried old bread bags full of golf balls. But my TV-tray business was booming too. As was Dad’s Best of Buddy Guy on the stereo.

  Buddy tweaked his guitar hard in the background as a cousin a few years older than me approached my quince stand.

  “Eva, long time no see!” At least I remembered her name.

  Eva had come straight from Mass at St. Ignacio’s. She wore a navy blue tie-back dress, stockings, heels, and pearl earrings and carried a clutch purse. She wrote her family down for the party flowers.

  “Muchas gracias, Eva. That’s awful generous.”

  “I didn’t make my quince when I was fifteen,” she said ruefully. “My sister Cristina’s wedding broke the bank that year. I think Mami and Papi are feeling guilty.”

  “Guilty’s as good as generous,” I said.

  She leaned over to exchange air kisses before saying good-bye.

  The blues on the stereo switched to salsa, and Abuelo brought the pork roast out to the grill. The yard had filled with relatives and friends, and, I suspected, a few of Mark’s customers who’d hung around for a freebie. Cigar plumes from the domino tables mingled with briquette smoke, forming a mushroom cloud that drifted slowly toward the Vespucci yard. A gang of little kids played a dangerous, high-speed game of horseshoes on one corner of the lawn, all shrieking at once. Someone turned up the music.

  I jogged around the house, past Mark wrestling a golf ball from a stubborn cousin, and through the front door. Harsh laughter rattled from the kitchen. I walked in to find one of Dad’s relatives wearing the toaster cozy on his head and singing into a spatula in a booming voice, in Spanish.

  “HA!” yelled my mother, followed by three imaginary beats. She dropped her garlic press on the counter and fell into line behind him. Abuela’s sister, Tía Sara, took a swig from a pitcher she was stirring and grabbed Mom by the hips, chanting, “Cha-cha-cha, cha-cha- cha.”

  I might have missed the punch line, but this looked like fun! I latched on behind Mom, and we snaked out of the kitchen and past the buffet, picking up Dad’s friend Rudi, Eva’s mom and dad, and a bewildered-looking stranger carrying a bag of golf balls, and we all congaed down the hallway to the back porch.

  Our cries were swallowed by trumpets and drumbeats and a singer’s voice; then we pushed through the porch and out to the backyard. Marianao shimmied over in a tight black minidress. “Cha-cha-cha, cha-cha- cha!” repeated Tía Sara as more joined the line.

  Abuelo, manning the Weber, saw us coming and started clacking his barbecue tongs like castanets. Unable to resist, he tossed his squirt bottle to an innocent bystander and joined the dance.

  “Cha-cha-cha, cha-cha-cha!” we cried, chugging around the house. I motioned to Mark out front, but he crossed his arms and pointed to his inventory. Dad’s cousin at the head of the line spun into a tight spiral, which made everybody dizzy, then whipped us back out into a straight line and around the corner of the house. A siren down the street mingled with blazing conga drums from the stereo as we returned to the backyard, to the sight of—flames on the grill.

  The roast was on fire.

  I’ve never seen Abuelo move so fast. He catapulted past the horseshoe players, grabbed a two-pronged fork from the grill, and speared the roast in one motion. The marinade on the meat burned merrily as Abuelo hopped in a circle, swearing in Spanish and trying not to trip over Chucho’s taut leash. Inside, someone cranked the music even louder.

  Chucho began to howl. One of the little kids yelled “Fire! Fire!” until the rest took it up. Some of the grown-ups chimed in, half of them howling, as Abuelo whipped the flaming meat into a bonfire by dancing madly through the backyard. He ran for the metal tub of ice full of Old Style and Cokes. Then, looking for all the world like the Cuban Statue of Liberty, he raised the burning roast high, swearing, and with a great hissing and steaming, he doused the thing in the ice.

  At this particular moment, around the corner of the house strolled two uninvited visitors in blue suits and s
hiny shoes: Lincolnville’s finest.

  The cops.

  The grim-faced man and woman surveyed the scene, taking in the blaring music, howling dog, reeling guests, and gambling tables—not to mention the smoking, burnt lump in the beer cooler and my grandfather, dripping, beside it—and shook their heads.

  Abuelo straightened up, smoothed his soot-smudged party shirt.

  Somebody killed the stereo.

  Abuelo cleared his throat and said hoarsely, “Officers, I can ’splain. I can ’splain everything.”

  An hour later, my family and I sat in somber silence at the fake-marble kitchen table over two bags of White Castles and the leftover fruit punch. The cops had broken up the party, sending everyone home with a warning, and told Mark he couldn’t sell golf balls anymore without a peddler’s license. Abuela and Abuelo appeared suitably chastised over the ruckus; Mark, hunched over in the Death Throne, just pouted.

  Although it was kind of embarrassing getting busted by the police (our neighbors had come out to watch the red and blue lights twirl around and see Mark pack up his golf ball stand), all in all I thought it had been a successful way to end a party. Everybody went home wanting more, there was a ton of leftovers, and I had just witnessed the most bizarre spectacle of my fifteen years on Earth.

  And so I found my Original Comedy material.

  14

  I plunged into my script. I mean, you can’t make up stuff like Sunday’s grand-slam ending to the domino party. And, as Abuelo had said good-naturedly afterward, if you can’t laugh at yourself, who can you laugh at? All I had to do now was write down what happened . . . and then get up in front of a bunch of strangers and act it out, over and over again.

  The horror.

  Speech team was supposed to prep me for my big entrance into the world of women in front of God and my long-lost relatives. But what kind of logic was this: Getting up onstage in front of a strange audience supposedly makes getting up onstage in front of a strange audience less terrifying. That’s like saying that sticking your hand in a blender will make it so much easier the next time around.

  Still, I wasn’t about to quit. Like those Janus masks, I’d always had a love/hate relationship with performing. That first step is a doozy. But once you make it over the fear hump, it’s smooth sailing.

  Mr. Soloman had said a good way to get started was to come up with three points that tied together, building a beginning, middle, and end.

  That was easy; I started with Mark’s golf balls, moved on to Marianao’s domino game, and finished with Abuelo’s pièce de résistance, the blackened roast. Then I read it out loud to see how long it was.

  By dinnertime, I had it up to five minutes. Still short, but good enough for a first draft. The premise was that the cops show up at Abuelo’s party and throw me in jail with my family, a fate worse than death. I’d lay it on Mr. Soloman on Tuesday.

  Monday afternoon, with the weather just right for September, Janell, Leda, and I sat in different corners of Janell’s bedroom, reading. Sometimes we did that, hung out in the same room, not talking, just reading; together, but not together. I’d gone deep into Le Guin’s Earthsea, myself; Janell was off playing Chicago P.I. with V. I. Warshawski, and who knew what trip Leda was on. She had burrowed into the beanbag chair over by the stairs, while Janell lay stretched out on the amazingly thick alpaca rug by her bed and I took the window seat.

  I loved sitting in a window seat, loved holding a book on my lap there; it felt so Jane Eyre. The bay window and adjacent French doors let in golden-brown afternoon light, dappled by a birch’s mellowing leaves. A fresh-cut grass scent seeped into the room behind the clicking of the push mower as Janell’s mom worked outside in the yard.

  Janell’s bedroom ran the whole width of the back of her house and opened out onto the deck. When her dad and mom divorced, Janell and her mother converted their den into the most fabulous bedroom in the world. They’d designed different zones for sleeping, studying, and dance workouts, each painted a different tasteful color—eggplant, mustard, kale green.

  Tasteful, in fact, sums up Janell Kelly, and her mother, Alicia Pennpierson, a slender, dark-haired woman with an alluring cat purr of a Southern accent. I’ve known both of them most of my life. Alike enough to be mistaken for sisters, my friend and her mom are my idols. But I’d never tell them that.

  It was hard to switch from saying “Mrs. Kelly” to “Ms. Pennpierson” after the divorce, but easier than trying to talk to Janell about any of it. That happened in seventh grade, and Janell is just now beginning to mention her dad and stuff. Other than that, she always seems more together, more sophisticated and focused, than always-at-loose-ends Violet Paz. I guess that’s why we get along so well.

  The other tough switch came after I met Leda, whose appeal, I admit, has to grow on some people. Luckily, Janell let it grow, not like a well-tended rosebush, granted— Janell at first merely tolerated Leda—but more like a moss. Gradually, though, the two arose from the swamp of their indifference. And now we were three.

  “Aau-he-hem.” Leda cleared her throat and thrashed on the beanbag chair for a new position. “Kelly. Paz. Will you listen to this?”

  Janell and I looked up from our reading and mentally high-fived each other from across the room. Leda is usually the one to break the silence.

  “Guys, I have got to go to Paris immediately!” She stabbed a finger at her open book.

  “I thought you planned to go with Willie after graduation,” I said.

  “I broke up with that idiot. He showed up at the last PETA meeting in a leather jacket. No, no, I’m going to Paris on my own, as soon as possible. Did you know you can take dogs into bistros there?”

  “But you don’t have a dog,” Janell pointed out.

  Leda’s eyes burned blue intensity. “I know, but it’s the idea of it—dogs in a restaurant? That just goes to show how cool the French are.”

  I thought of Chucho being left to graze happily on the floor at White Castle. “And,” I said, laughing, “you’d appreciate your food a whole lot more.”

  “Or at least be more protective of it,” said Janell, smiling.

  Leda, still serious, went on. “Then there’s the whole eat-or-be-eaten aspect. You know, little Fifi looking on as le maestro gloms down a rack of lamb.”

  “There but for the grace of God go I.” Janell nodded.

  “HA!” I borrowed Mom’s laugh. “By the way, Leed, you’re mixing your French and Spanish again.”

  The reading mood was broken.

  “Let’s go get something to eat,” Janell said.

  Janell’s virginal refrigerator in the chaste white kitchen always holds a huge bowl of fruit salad and little more, unless her mom is cooking one of her fabulous fried-chicken dinners. We made waffle cones of frozen yogurt with the fruit on top.

  Leda took a bite first and pursed her lips. “Fruit tastes weird with—what flavor is this?”

  Janell picked up the frozen yogurt container. “It says vanilla, but . . .” Hesitantly, she peeled back the lid. “Uh-oh.”

  We looked at her.

  “You’d better not eat any more of that,” she told Leda.

  I examined my softening cone. The yogurt had black specks in it, but sometimes real vanilla looks like that.

  Leda froze her jaw, trying not to swallow. “Well, what is it?” she demanded through the food.

  Janell twisted a foot behind her. “Um, it’s bacon grease,” she mumbled. “Mom uses it for frying—keeps it in the freezer . . .”

  Leda’s eyes said it all.

  She bolted from the white dinette to the sink, bent, and let it fly. A lot more than the bite of ice cream was recycled.

  Janell and I just stood there, cones melting. Then we simultaneously got grossed out and threw them in the white enameled sink. Janell turned on the garbage disposal. Ever the tactful one, I started to belly laugh. Normally-in-check Janell watched Leda hanging over the sink and busted out too.

  Upon which Leda gasped a
breath and shouted, “Get me a glass of water!”

  Janell, laughing now in mime and resembling my mother in one of her aftershocks, found a glass in one of the white windowed cabinets and got Leda some water from the tap. Leda gulped and spit, gulped and spit, till the water was gone. Then she just kept spitting into the sink.

  “I . . . can’t . . . believe . . . you!” she said in bursts between spits.

  “I’m sorry, Leed,” Janell tried.

  Her smile was met by a drooly look of disbelief from our friend. “I’m a vegetarian, Kelly!”

  Janell forced her lips into a straight line. “It’s terrible for you, I know,” she said. “But it was an accident.”

  “I don’t ‘accidentally’ eat meat!”

  “Fat,” I corrected.

  “Meat! Fat! I don’t care! How could you do this to me?” She cast eyes on Janell, blinking a furious SOS.

  “It was an accident. . . . ,” I said, as surprised as Janell at Leda’s wrath.

  Leda spit into the sink once more. “Well, it won’t happen again. I can’t even be around you two!” She wiped her mouth on her shirtsleeve and stomped out the front door.

  One dama down, I thought, one to go.

  15

  Ganell and I were surprised to see Leda wave us over in Room C206 the next afternoon at our speech team meeting. We exchanged wary glances but went and sat next to her.

  “Hey, dudes, what’s up? Ready to face our impending speech tournament doom?”

  I hesitated. “What about yesterday?”

  “Yeah, about never wanting to see us again?” Janell added.

  Leda shrugged. “Oh, that. I channeled it. I can’t help it if you guys are pathetic.”

  I sighed, knowing that no matter what she said, she’d never forgive us for that one.

  She pulled out her ratty purple notebook covered with stick-figure doodles and opened it. “See? I channeled the bad energy into my Oratory routine. ‘Plows, Not Cows,’ I call it. I went home and wrote the whole thing in about half an hour. I showed it to The Ax at lunch today, and he loved it.”