My mother says that Abuela Celia’s had plenty of chances to leave Cuba but that she’s stubborn and got her head turned around by El Líder. Mom says “Communist” the way some people says “cancer,” low and fierce. She reads the newspapers page by page for leftist conspiracies, jams her finger against imagined evidence and says, “See. What did I tell you?” Last year when El Líder jailed a famous Cuban poet, she sneered at “those leftist intellectual hypocrites” for trying to free him. “They created those prisons, so now they should rot in them!” she shouted, not making much sense at all. “They’re dangerous subversives, red to the bone!” Mom’s views are strictly black-and-white. It’s how she survives.
My mother reads my diary, tracks it down under the mattress, or to the lining of my winter coat. She says it’s her responsibility to know my private thoughts, that I’ll understand when I have my own kids. That’s how she knows about me in the tub. I like to lie on my back and let the shower rain down on me full force. If I move my hips to just the right position, it feels great, like little explosions on a string. Now, whenever I’m in the bathroom, my mother knocks on the door like President Nixon’s here and needs to use the john. Meanwhile, I hear her jumping my father night after night until he begs her to leave him alone. You never would have guessed it by looking at her.
When Mom first found out about me in the tub, she beat me in the face and pulled my hair out in big clumps. She called me a desgraciada and ground her knuckles into my temples. Then she forced me to work in her bakery every day after school for twenty-five cents an hour. She leaves me nasty notes on the kitchen table reminding me to show up, or else. She thinks working with her will teach me responsibility, clear my head of filthy thoughts. Like I’ll get pure pushing her donuts around. It’s not like it’s done wonders for her, either. She’s as fat as a Macy’s Thanksgiving Day float from all the pecan sticky buns she eats. I’m convinced they’re doing something to her brain.
The bus ride down isn’t too bad. After New Jersey, it’s a straight shot down I-95. I’m sitting next to this skinny woman who got on in Richmond. Her name is Minnie French but she’s weirdly old-looking for a young person. Maybe it’s her name or the three shopping bags of food she’s got under her seat. Fried chicken, potato salad, ham sandwiches, chocolate cupcakes, even a jumbo can of peaches in heavy syrup. Minnie takes dainty bites of everything, chewing it fast like a squirrel. She offers me a chicken thigh but I’m not hungry. Minnie tells me she was born in Toledo, Ohio, the last of thirteen children, and that her mother died giving birth to her. The family split up and Minnie was raised by a grandmother who can quote the Bible chapter and verse and drives a beat-up Cadillac with a CB radio in it. Minnie says her grandma likes talking to other born-again motorists on her way to Chicago to visit relatives.
I tell her how back in Cuba the nannies used to think I was possessed. They rubbed me with blood and leaves when my mother wasn’t looking and rattled beads over my forehead. They called me brujita, little witch. I stared at them, tried to make them go away. I remember thinking, Okay, I’ll start with their hair, make it fall out strand by strand. They always left wearing kerchiefs to cover their bald patches.
I don’t really want to talk about my father but I end up telling Minnie how he used to take me horseback riding on our ranch, strapping me in his saddle with a leather seat belt he designed just for me. Dad’s family owned casinos in Cuba, and had one of the largest ranches on the island. There were beef cattle and dairy cows, horses, pigs, goats, and lambs. Dad fed them molasses to fatten them, and gave the chickens corn and sorghum until they laid vermilion eggs, rich with vitamins. He took me on an overnight inspection once. We camped out under a sapodilla tree and listened to the pygmy owls with their old women’s voices. My father knew I understood more than I could say. He told me stories about Cuba after Columbus came. He said that the Spaniards wiped out more Indians with smallpox than with muskets.
“Why don’t we read about this in history books?” I ask Minnie. “It’s always one damn battle after another. We only know about Charlemagne and Napoléon because they fought their way into posterity.” Minnie just shakes her head and looks out the window. She’s starting to fall asleep. Her head is lolling about on her shoulders and her mouth is half open.
If it were up to me, I’d record other things. Like the time there was a freak hailstorm in the Congo and the women took it as a sign that they should rule. Or the life stories of prostitutes in Bombay. Why don’t I know anything about them? Who chooses what we should know or what’s important? I know I have to decide these things for myself. Most of what I’ve learned that’s important I’ve learned on my own, or from my grandmother.
Abuela Celia and I write to each other sometimes, but mostly I hear her speaking to me at night just before I fall asleep. She tells me stories about her life and what the sea was like that day. She seems to know everything that’s happened to me and tells me not to mind my mother too much. Abuela Celia says she wants to see me again. She tells me she loves me.
My grandmother is the one who encouraged me to go to painting classes at Mitzi Kellner’s. She’s a lady down the block who used to hang out in Greenwich Village with the beatniks. Her house stinks of turpentine and urine from all her cats. She gave an art class Friday afternoons for the neighborhood kids. We started off doing blind contour drawings of our hands, then of lettuce leaves, gourds, anything wrinkly. Mitzi told us not to worry about copying objects exactly, that it was the strength of our lines that counted.
My paintings have been getting more and more abstract lately, violent-looking with clotted swirls of red. Mom thinks they’re morbid. Last year, she refused to let me accept the scholarship I won to art school in Manhattan. She said that artists are a bad element, a profligate bunch who shoot heroin. “I won’t allow it, Rufino!” she cried with her usual drama. “She’ll have to kill me first!” Not that the thought hadn’t crossed my mind. But Dad, in his unobtrusive way, finally persuaded her to let me go.
After I started art school last fall, Dad fixed up a studio for me in the back of the warehouse where we live. He bought the warehouse from the city for a hundred dollars when I was in third grade. It had lots of great junk in it until Mom made him move it out. There were a vintage subway turnstile and an antique telephone, the shell of a Bluebird radio, even the nose fin of a locomotive. Where my mother saw junk, Dad saw the clean lines of the machine age.
Dad tells me the place was built in the 1920s as temporary housing for out-of-town public-school teachers. Then it was a dormitory for soldiers during World War II, and later the Transit Authority used it for storage.
A cinder-block wall divides the warehouse in two. Mom wanted a real home up front, so Dad built a couple of bedrooms and a kitchen with a double sink. Mom bought love seats and lace doilies and hung up a tacky watercolor landscape she had brought with her from Cuba. She installed window boxes with geraniums.
My father likes to sift through street castoffs and industrial junk heaps for treasures. Like a proud tomcat showing off the spoils of his hunt, he leaves what he finds for my mother in the kitchen. Mostly she doesn’t appreciate it. Dad likes raising things, too. It’s in his blood from his days on the farm. Last summer he left a lone bee in a jar on the kitchen counter for my mother.