The arrogance in his voice disgusts me, the anger I’d been tamping down with drugs is now rising in my throat. For all his meditating and chanting and seeking enlightenment, Bret is a prick. I am twenty years old, you are dead, and there’s no one to tell me what to do anymore. You are not here to laugh it away, or tell me to chin up, to silence me or put me in a mental institution or stick me in a boarding school. “Fuck you, Bret!” I shout. “Pull over. I want to get out.”
“Fuck me?” He speeds up, swerves the car near the shoulder of the road, gravel and dirt hitting my window and ricocheting off the glass like buckshot.
I suck in my breath and grip the door handle. “Don’t do that!”
“Do what? This?” He swerves again, and all I see, for a moment, is empty, black space.
What I should do is calm him down, convince him I’m sorry and that I won’t break up with him. Stop the car, and we’ll talk about it, I should say, but a part of me wants him to do something drastic. To pull the trigger for me.
We are crossing Bixby Bridge. The fog has receded, and I can see all the way down to the dark strip of beach where the waves crash and foam like a giant frothing at the mouth. I know, in that split second right before Bret takes us over the edge, that he’s going to do it. It’s not the plunge into water I’d imagined on the patio at Nepenthe. I am not sailing peacefully off the cliff with my arms out but trapped in a metal box that jerks to the right so abruptly my head smacks the window. I expect free fall, silence, stillness, but the air is sharp and compact and splintered with glass.
And then you are in my arms, your face flushed, your dark hair limp on your wet forehead, vomit ringing the corners of your mouth. “Help me,” I plead, even though you are the one dying. “Don’t go,” I cry. “I need you.” But I have already hit bottom, and the world has gone quiet.
Chapter Two
* * *
Birth and Revolution
Daughter,
I am right here, Nina. I have not gone anywhere. I see you in the newness of your adulthood, and I will see you after, when you’ve come into the full force of yourself. I will watch you struggle to work the memory of my life into your own, to try and resolve our ending.
I did not set out to hurt you. When you were born, I gazed into the gray-blue of your infant eyes, touched your softly wrinkled forehead, your miniature nose and lips with a swell of longing. I wanted to wrap you back into myself, to protect you from any future that might harm your unworn heart.
It is June 14, 1946. I am eighteen years old. Newly married—hurriedly married. I have been in New York City for less than three years.
It was not the smell or noise or pace that stunned me when I first arrived here but the lack of color. New Yorkers, it seems, are too busy to paint their walls. They abandon brick and stone and cement to their natural pigment, fill their streets with black cars, their sidewalks with black coats, hats and umbrellas. They dress in gray and brown, and a drab arrangement of squares called plaid. I miss skirts that sweep up the blue of the sea and the yellow of the poui trees, fabric that holds the curve of a woman rather than boxing her in.
“Only turquoise and pink for you,” I whisper, easing your arm from the tightly wrapped blanket and peeling your fist open. Your fingers latch around mine, quick as a crab, and from the foot of the bed your abuela smiles.
“Mi hermosa nieta,” Mamá says, moving closer and running a finger over your forehead. There is no hum or singsong to her voice, her tone and smile a practical one. You are not what Mamá wants, but now that you are here, she’ll love you with the same efficiency she loves all of her family.
From the twelfth story of St. Joseph’s Hospital, I can see the East River, a flat wash of gray running into a tower of metallic skyscrapers that shoot upward into a colorless sky. Puffs of black smoke rise from the ferryboats like bad omens. It is a city drawn of charcoal and pen. I want to dip a brush into the pink of your blanket and the gray-blue of your eyes and fill your world with the colors of Cuba, the colors of home. Because I cannot do that, I press you to my breast and sing:
Take me home to Cuba,
Cuba, where you’ll sing to me
Cuba, where my heart lies free
And the handsome fellas, wait to tell us
Of their love
Where the sea shines blue.
And green.
Cuba where I’ll stay
I am nine years old when I first sing in a Havana nightclub to a room of satin dresses, shiny suits and slick pomaded hair where the effort of all that luster is dulled under a veil of smoke. Women prop their arms on round tables, the lamps tinting their white gloves orange, while men lean back in chairs as they sip iced drinks and suck cigars whose ends glow like click beetles. Last week, my sister Danita and I caught seventeen click beetles. Our jar was as bright as a lantern, and we marched around the house announcing our success at the top of our lungs, putting our eldest sister out of sorts as she was rocking our baby sister to sleep.
Tonight is the first time I am singing without Danita, but it will not be the last.
I cup the microphone with both hands and sway my hips from side to side with all the energy my small pelvic bones can muster. I wink and grin, the bemused adult faces laughing at a little girl pretending to be a woman. I play it up, jutting out a hip, cocking a shoulder and tilting my chin in mock seduction. There is a cheer and a whistle, and I raise my eyes to the back of the room where potted palms spread their wide green leaves against the wall. That’s where Mamá stands watching, her arms crossed over the front of her brown polkadot dress. From her expression I can’t tell whether she is pleased or annoyed.
Earlier that afternoon I watched her pull her dress from the back of her closet and shake it from its hanger. “After six babies this beauty still fits.” She smiled, shimmying her hips, her silk slip rustling like paper around her knees. “Never let the babies go to your waist. Men won’t look at you if there’s not enough there, and they won’t look at you if there’s too much.” She tucked an authoritative finger under my chin and lifted my face. Her dark eyes, deep set above her smooth cheeks, sober and resolute, as if it all came down to the size of my waist. “What do we say?”
“A perfect balance.” I swung my hips. My starched white skirt did not rustle but moved as one unit. A doll on a pedestal.
Mamá kissed her fingertips, flinging the kiss into the air. “Perfecto, mi hija.” Draping her dress over one arm, she tightened the purple ribbon holding up my ponytail. “Not too much swing. Not too much voice. Just enough to draw them in and make them want more.” With a final yank to my hair, she shook out her dress and stepped into it, her movements labored, her arms maneuvering their way into the puffed sleeves, thick and round as the drainpipes sticking out of the dirt by the side of our house. Reaching around, she buttoned the back and secured the narrow belt around her well-proportioned waist.