“What does this mean?” Mom asked suspiciously.
“Apiculture, Lourdes. I’ve got a nest out back. We’re going to grow our own honey, maybe supply all of Brooklyn.”
The bees lasted exactly one week. Mom wrapped herself in beach towels and released them all one afternoon when Dad and I were at the movies. They stung her arms and face so badly she could hardly open her eyes. Now she never goes to the back of the warehouse, which is better for us.
Dad has his workshop next to mine and tinkers with his projects there. His latest idea is a voice-command typewriter he says will do away with secretaries.
To get hold of us, Mom rings a huge bell that Dad found in the abandoned shipyard next door. When she’s upset, she pulls on the damn thing like the hunchback of Notre Dame.
Our house is on a cement plot near the East River. At night, especially in the summer when the sound carries, I hear the low whistles of the ships as they leave New York harbor. They travel south past the Wall Street skyscrapers, past Ellis Island and the Statue of Liberty, past Bayonne, New Jersey, and the Bay Ridge Channel and under the Verrazano Bridge. Then they make a left at Coney Island and head out to the Atlantic. When I hear those whistles, I want to go with them.
When Minnie wakes up, she says she knows she shouldn’t be telling me this, that I’m too young to hear it, but I swear I’m thirteen and that seems to satisfy her. She’s seventeen and a half. Minnie says she’s going down to Florida to see a doctor her boyfriend knows and get herself an abortion. She doesn’t have any children and she doesn’t want any either, she tells me. Her voice is flat and even and I hold her hand until she falls asleep again.
I think about how the New Guinea islanders didn’t connect sex with pregnancy. They believed that children float on logs in the heavens until the spirits of pregnant women claim them. I’m not too tired so I stay up reading the neon signs off the highway. The missing letters make for weird messages. There’s a Shell station missing the “S.”
-hell
Open 24 Hours
My favorite, though, is one, I swear it, in North Carolina that says Cock—s, with an electric martini minus the olive.
No matter how hard I try, though, I keep seeing the bloated face of that aging beauty queen bouncing off the lights into my father’s outstretched hands. I guess my parents don’t see all that much of each other anymore except when Mom rings for Dad. He always looks real worried, too. Dad used to help Mom in the bakery but she lost patience with him. As handy as he is for some things, he couldn’t get the hang of the pastry business, at least not the way my mother runs it.
These days, Mom goes through her employees like those damn pecan sticky buns she eats. Nobody ever lasts more than a day or two. She hires the real down-and-outs, immigrants from Russia or Pakistan, people who don’t speak any English, figuring she can get them cheap. Then she screams at them half the day because they don’t understand what she’s saying. Mom thinks they’re all out to steal from her so she rifles through their coats and shopping bags when they’re working. Like what are they going to steal? A butter cookie? A French bread? She told me to check someone’s purse once and I said no fucking way. She believes she’s doing them a favor by giving them a job and breaking them in to American life. Hell, if she’s the welcome wagon, they’d better hitch a ride with someone else.
I remember when we first came to New York. We lived in a hotel in Manhattan for five months while my parents waited for the revolution to fail or for the Americans to intervene in Cuba. My mother used to take me for walks in Central Park. Once, an agent from the Art Linkletter show stopped us at the Children’s Zoo and asked my mother if I could be on the show. But I didn’t speak English yet so he passed.
Mom used to dress me in a little maroon woolen coat with a black velveteen collar and cuffs. The air was different from Cuba’s. It had a cold, smoked smell that chilled my lungs. The skies looked newly washed, streaked with light. And the trees were different, too. They looked on fire. I’d run through great heaps of leaves just to hear them rustle like the palm trees during hurricanes in Cuba. But then I’d feel sad looking up at the bare branches and thinking about Abuela Celia. I wonder how my life would have been if I’d stayed with her.
I saw my grandfather, Abuela Celia’s husband, when he came to New York to get treated for his stomach cancer. They took him off the plane in a wheelchair. Abuelo Jorge’s face was dry and brittle like old parchment. He slept in my bed, which my mother fixed up with a new nubby beige bedspread, and I slept on a cot next to him. Mom bought him a black-and-white television and Abuelo watched the fights and the Spanish novelas on Channel 47. No matter how much my mother bathed him, he always smelled of burnt eggs and oranges.
My grandfather was so weak that he’d usually fall asleep by eight o’clock. I’d take his teeth out for him and put them in a glass of water fizzing with denture tablets. He’d whistle softly through his gums all night. Sometimes he’d have nightmares and box the air with his fists. “Come here, you good-for-nothing Spaniard!” he’d shout. “Come and fight like a man!” But then he’d settle down, muttering a few curses.
When Mom first started taking him for cobalt treatments I imagined sharp blue beams aimed at his stomach. A strange color for healing, I thought. Nothing we eat is blue, not blue blue like my grandfather’s eyes, so why didn’t the doctors change the color of those damn beams to green? We eat green, it’s healthy. If only they had changed those lights to green, I thought, a nice jade green, he’d have gotten better.
My grandfather told me once that I reminded him of Abuela Celia. I took that as a compliment. He used to write her letters every day, when he still had the strength, long letters in an old-fashioned script with flourishes and curlicues. You wouldn’t expect him to have such fine handwriting. They were romantic letters, too. He read one out loud to me. He called Abuela Celia his “dove in the desert.” Now he can’t write to her much. And he’s too proud to ask any of us to do it for him. Abuela Celia writes back to him every once in a while, but her letters are full of facts, about this meeting or that, nothing more. They make my grandfather sad.
Minnie rides as far as Jacksonville. I’m curious so I look out the window to see who’s come to pick her up. But by the time the bus pulls away she’s still waiting.
The scenery gets so dull in Florida that I finally fall asleep. I remember one dream. It’s midnight and there are people around me praying on the beach. I’m wearing a white dress and turban and I can hear the ocean nearby, only I can’t see it. I’m sitting on a chair, a kind of throne, with antlers fastened to the back. The people lift me up high and walk with me in a slow procession toward the sea. They’re chanting in a language I don’t understand. I don’t feel scared, though. I can see the stars and the moon and the black sky revolving overhead. I can see my grandmother’s face.
The House on Palmas Street
The late-afternoon downpour sends the students’ mothers scurrying under the coral tree in the yard of the Nikolai Lenin Elementary School. A lizard vibrates in the crook of the tree’s thickest branch. Celia stands alone in the rain in her leather pumps and jade housedress waiting for her twin granddaughters to return from their camping trip to the Isle of Pines. It seems to her that she has spent her entire life waiting for others, for something or other to happen. Waiting for her lover to return from Spain. Waiting for the summer rains to end. Waiting for her husband to leave on his business trips so she could play Debussy on the piano.