Her solid body is beautiful to me.
I glanced at my reflection in the mirror over the dresser. Heat buzzed through the open window, and a cloud of gnats settled over the glass as I practiced my smile. Earlier that day, Mamá told me that if I sang well tonight she’d hang the mirror in my room, a room I share with my sisters, but the mirror would be all mine. It is large, rectangular, the frame intricately carved of a pale wood like the kind that washes up on the beach. We still have expensive furniture from the time before. A house filled with beautiful things despite the peeling exterior and shriveled gardens.
Before we lost everything, Mamá’s plan was to send Danita and me to the Peyrellade Conservatory to study music. Now we can hardly afford the weekly lessons with Señorita Morales, a skinny woman with fallen cheeks and a chin that wobbles when she demonstrates our scales. Danita and I marvel that a voice so beautiful can come from a woman so ugly.
It’s hard to tell if I’ll turn out beautiful. Mamá is pretty, but I don’t look or move like her. I am small for my age and skinny as a twig. Mamá says this will change when I become a woman, which is a relief.
On stage in the nightclub, I try to imagine myself as full-bodied and sturdy as Mamá. The brass instruments of the band vibrate in my belly, and the drums pulse under my feet where new shoes pinch my toes. My sisters didn’t get new shoes. Neither did Mamá. I should feel badly about this, but I don’t. They are the loveliest shoes I’ve ever owned: white patent leather with brass buckles and tiny heels that tip me forward when I walk.
I finish the song, holding my final note in the air like a dazzling object as the instruments halt, and silence fills the room. There is a moment of unbearable stillness before the audience erupts into applause. Dizzy with excitement, I curtsy and smile, the thrill of attention hot and satisfying.
The applause quickly fades, and I disappear into the tumult of voices, clinking glassware and large bodies that rise up around me. A hand lands on my shoulder, and the cigarette pinched between its fingers sends smoke spiraling into my nostrils. I try not to cough. “Look at you, kid. Boy, can you sing.” A man grins down at me from a mouth filled with shiny, white teeth. I recognize him as one of the drummers. He wears a starched shirt as white as his teeth with billowing sleeves and gold cuff links shaped like cigars. His dark hair is swept up off his forehead, and a line of sweat glistens along his hairline. Even at nine years old, I understand he is wonderful to look at.
Mamá appears in a rustle of fabric and a scent of jasmine, her perfume momentarily overpowering the cigarette smoke. She latches her arm around my shoulder, pulls me from under the man’s hand and clamps me to her side, my cheek bumping her breast. Held there, I feel small and ridiculous.
The man flourishes a bow. “Señorita, your daughter is a gem. A pure gem! That voice!” He winks at me, and my cheeks grow hot. “Has she done any recordings?”
“Not yet.” Mamá’s voice sounds curt, defensive.
The man’s grin only widens. “What are you waiting for? You can’t hide talent like that. I have a band in Miami. She should come and record with us in America.”
Squashed against my mother, I feel her intake of air sucked into her lungs and the slight expanse of her chest. America is all she needs to hear.
“Desi Arnaz.” The man proffers a hand, and my mom takes it, releasing me. The heat and strength of her body moves away from me as the wealthy woman she once was returns to her shoulders.
“Juana Maria Antonia Santurio y Canto Rodriguez.” She smiles a rare, flirtatious smile. “But, you may call me Señorita Rodriguez.”
“It is an honor to meet you, Señorita Rodriguez.” He holds her hand, a playful glint under the rapt, seductive look in his eye. A cat with a mouse. It is the same look I saw Miguel Santo give Yolanda Farrar in El veneno de un beso, the only film I’ve ever seen. “What do you say?” Mr. Arnaz says this to Mamá but winks at me as if we are in on something together. “You want to bring this little gal to Miami, make her a star?”
I expect an immediate refusal, but Mamá remains silent, her wide cheeks flushed. The air becomes electric with possibility. Am I to go to America? I curl my toes against the tight leather of my shoes and pitch forward, excitement and fear pressing into my throat.
“She’s too young,” Mamá says, regretfully, as if my age is a sorry fact of life utterly out of her control.
Mr. Arnaz shrugs. “She’ll grow.”
Mamá squeezes my shoulder so hard it hurts. “And when she does, we will consider your offer.”
Mr. Arnaz clicks his tongue and cocks his hand at me like a gun, saying casually, as if I am refusing him a dance instead of my future, “Well, then, we’ll be seeing you, kid.”
He turns, claps his arm around a man in a shirt with wide, ruffled sleeves and bellows to the bartender for a rum on ice with extra mint and two limes, the two punctuated in the air with two fingers.
The din of the room, the sharp smell I have already learned to recognize as alcohol and the choke of cigar smoke make me light-headed as I watch my luck slip away on the back of that white shirt drifting into the crowd.
Mamá tugs me through the throng of bodies and out onto the cobblestone street. It is late, and the street is steamy and smells of gasoline. Boisterous voices spill from open doorways that illuminate the pavement like patchwork.
“You’re a sweet-looking one,” a woman whistles from an open patio, swaying slightly, her arm latched around another woman’s shoulder. They wear dresses that are much too small, and I am sorry to think they’ve grown out of them and can’t afford new ones.
Mamá pulls me along so fast the backs of my stiff shoes begin rubbing the skin off my heels.
“Why didn’t Papa come?” I ask. He might have let me go to America. We need money. Danita and I could make money in America. Everyone in America is rich, at least that’s what I’ve heard Mamá say. If we don’t go soon, I’ll end up in a too-small dress with my knees exposed, like those poor women on the patio. “Why, Mamá?” I press.
“He’s a busy man,” she answers sharply, and since we’ve hardly seen Papa after losing our land nearly three years ago, I think this must be true.
* * *
It changed overnight. One day Papa was living at home overseeing the plantation, the cutting and transporting of our fields of henequen to the mill to be crushed and made into rope, and the next day the peasants took over and Papa moved to Havana.
I woke that morning with Danita standing over my bed, shaking my shoulder. “Hurry, get up, something’s happening.” Danita is only a year older than me but bosses me as if she were as big as our sister Oneila, who is eighteen years old and has a right to boss me.