By: Karen Alea Speak loudly when asking questions, whisper when giving responses. Part your hair on the side like they do. She fell into Nashville. That is what she has told people for over five months. What they want to know is if Maria defected in the back room of Miami International Airport, was swept by swells onto Islamadora beach, or married a thick Canadian mortgage broker. But "arrived" churns in her brain and sets off synapses and ganglions and more than a few nerves and translates "fell." Nine hours a day, six days a week are spent washing hair and sweeping, the job procured by her bachelor uncle in exchange for refitting gutters on the salon owner's mid-eighties Cape Cod. If her uncle had not been cajoled by loud, drink-buying rough hands into moving up here with roofing crews after the hailstorms of the late nineties, Maria would have gone through the vein of immigrant assimilation in Miami, the only city in America worth a Havanan resettling. Whoever takes you in you serve, night and day. And you call the lady of the house aunty, always aunty. She could see her mother light up a cigarette and hold it between two ragged fingers that looked like the Ceiba tree branches that littered their front walk. And you wake up early on Sundays and go to church. Everyone goes to church there. Cover your head too. Maria continues to sweep the debris of Americans off the salon floor, her own hair coming out of the band, its darkness obscuring her face like a curtain. She thinks of her mother who is doing the same job of sweeping at the tourist hotel on Calle Obispo. "Maria. Tired?" asks Stacy, the older hairdresser, quiet and mournful in both clothes and face, but followed by a throng of disciples of highlights and frosts. Stacy puts her hand to her own sallow cheek and closes her eyes in pantomime, "Tired?" "Oh, yes. Yes, tired," Maria replies and smiles. Body language is universal English comes later, first is waves and head nods and teeth. "You're doing well," Stacy tells her and hands her thirteen dollars worth of bills. Maria's days are spent sweeping and sticking her smooth cigarillo fingers into the tightly kinked hair of old women and the long tresses of unaffected youth, repeating, "I not speak English much," before smiling (to assure gratuity) and rinsing the suds down the drain. In-between washes she stands against the back wall, painted with a mural of large white heads, red lips and hair flowing towards the walls and floorboards. There are six chairs that rotate hairdressers at different times of the day and week. Maria is like the heads on the wall, always present and unchallenged. She stands with them and then ducks in between the hairdressers to assemble the hair they just cut and brush it gracefully into a dustpan letting it fall like leaves into the receptacle. Her walnut eyes spot fairies out the front window, the girls from the dance studio adjacent release into vans and cars. Maria holds her broom like a vertical barre, her feet unconsciously stance in first position. Freedom is pastel colors, she thinks. Candy-pink leotards, white-froth tights, lavender ribbons, sequined bodices wrapped around eight year olds who will never posses the rib exposed figures of true ballerinas. Some faces are sprinkled with glitter, earrings dangly like wind chimes. They skip and skid out to the parking lot, hands grasped around bags airbrushed with ballet slippers and pirouetting bears. The other hand steadfast on palm-sized bags of candy or crackers. Maria feels the nostalgic pull of her temples, the tight bun that her mother manipulated and held captive with three pins and some dark yarn that blended into her hair, making the upsweep seem like one carved piece of mahogany. Maria's mother, Patrice, worked like thousands of other Cuban parents to lasso some undictated future for their children. Long hours cleaning at La Florida hotel. Patrice would come home and tutor Maria and a few neighbor girls in the French she learned as a child (á tout á l'heure, vous avez autre chose) and embroidery techniques (birds nest, satin stitch), both she knew would not benefit them as much as technology (quasar, DOS), or English (cat got your tongue?, double negative). She gave them what she had. At four Maria entered a world of ballet on the top floor of Madame Melendez's house near the Prado, the most respected private teacher in Havana. Maria never knew what favors or promises had passed between the two women for Maria to be able to afford the lessons, but she knew that her mother would ransom herself for Maria's betterment. Maria's balance began to be repaid at eight years of age, in the gracefulness of the dance, her footwork impressing even the caustic Madame. At fourteen she earned a place in the Royal Ballet, an elite ensemble meeting in a edifice, cold in January and steamy in July where reverence matched religion. Gran Teatro. A magnificent building cosseted by angles on all four turrets. Maria arrived each Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday in mended tights and black leotard, a cloned delicate chess piece just like the others, and toiled her body into graceful contortions and euphoric pain. Now, she watches other girls, some older like she, leave the Fascinatin' Rhythm studio next door, laughing and pulling at each other. If she presses her head against the sheetrock of the small laundry room in back of the salon she can hear the music from the stereo. An adagio, a piece from Carmen, The Firebird or Petrushka seeps through and then is run over by a pop song that Maria has seen on her uncle's TV late at night. At dusk her uncle pulls up to the back alley as she sits by herself. These nights, the few moments between Lana locking the door and her uncle unlocking the passenger one, she feels removed. Fall in Habana consists of an occasional cool breeze, a whip of air that makes them say, winter is here and they cover their chests with their arms. Here the cold is a slap rather than a caress and Maria realizes what autumn really is. The air is heavy with plans for winter and fog seeps out of the trees onto the road, leaving haunting shadows at the edges of the curb. Once they pull up to her uncle's apartment, there is not strength left to sit on his small porch on the second floor and look out towards Dickson Avenue and up towards that sky. Eat fruit after work to wash out the tiredness. At her uncle's apartment, she takes a shower in the limitless warm water that at first mesmerized her and now has descended to only pleasure. She puts on her uncle's old shirt, wraps herself in a blanket that suffices as a robe, and sits as heavily onto the sofa as her 110-pound frame allows. Her uncle sits beside her, his two-job scent of tar and dishwater replacing old smells that used to signify home. They are only fifteen years apart. She never knew him in Cuba and now they interact as friends, anchors. Each day he tells her how much happier he is now that she is here. He is her father's brother. She has no one to compare his facial features to but herself, for she never met her father. A poet, a playwright, one who was born with the disease to find truth and thus jailed for it, starved due to an "oversight," buried in a field that cannot even grow sugarcane. Her father's brother, childhood playmate, confidante, boyhood echo, looks her in the eyes and gives her an envelope with the hands that had not touched an instrument of labor until he "fell" into the United States a decade ago. The white envelope is stubbornly wedged inside another. The postage shows the route has gone through Mexico and Texas, then Florida. She tears at the letter; a cut leaves a stain on the edge of the paper. She unfolds it quickly and her uncle looks at her profile as her lips move quickly down the paper. "Eh," he asks impatiently. "No. No, she didn't get it." She stares at the paper and places her finger in-between her teeth and tastes the thin blood. The lottery. Here it merely means money, in Cuba it means that you can travel. You can leave the island briefly to visit dying relatives, inherit their money, and bring it back to fill in the gaps of the economy that's holes are larger than the Caribbean. Patrice had signed up early, before Maria left, just to make it look like she was naďve of her rebellious daughter's plan. The small cement home on Calle Apodaca housed too many people. Maria was the youngest and needed to let the others breathe. Her mother decided it was Maria who needed to breathe and so the girl was released from the bedroom that held a thin mattress and her mother. The living room had rollout mats for her grandparents. A small saint's candle burned without result on the lone table hinged together with recycled nails. Plastic lawn furniture acted as living room furniture and a record player made love to Lecuona late into the night. Neighbors were only inches away through the walls and each meal was accompanied by a mock game of musical chairs or pulling in extra ones from the Rocca's two doors down. Maria's body was always touching-a wall, a bed, a person. Her arms could not stretch left to right without embracing a doorjamb, the stove, her grandmother in her long flowered gown that filled the home with swaying still life. Do not waste your time making friends; make family. "What is the date?" her uncle asks. They both look at the front of the envelope and see that it was mailed over a month and a half ago. "It's old," her uncle says. "That's good. A lot may have happened since then." Her uncle places a firm hand on her leg and lifts himself up and off to his bedroom. Maria leans back and looks at the ceiling. In the morning, Maria wakes early. She cannot wait any more. This new life has moved too quickly; she feels she cannot hold on. A girl needs her mother. She opens the closet that squeaks and wiggles on its rusted track and looks at the three items hanging there like the thieves and the messiah. She reaches for the one in the middle, the one with a tag still hanging. Maria's uncle had bought it the week she arrived. A splurge, he said with a smile. It was thin and appropriate for the summertime, the season it was purchased. Below the knees, white with ecru and pale yellow flowers. A strap of a belt tied around the waist and four buttons that lay shyly at the top. Maria smoothes her hand over the dress and pulls it from its hanger, puts the tag in her teeth and snatches it away. She owns no pantyhose, but has some sandals purchased from the Dollar Tree. She goes to the tiny kitchen and opens drawers until she finds the set of napkins her uncle received for Christmas from his employer at the roofing company. She lays one over her head and tucks her hair behind her ears. Don't forget. They forgot us. Like a rope, they said they would get there and grab it and pull us towards them, but there is no pulling. They forget in their big houses and movie star lives. They grow fat and leave the rope on the ground like a broken rosary. |
The morning is thin and white like her dress, the sun not having time to burn off the night mist. Trees come into view one by one from behind the vapor curtain and the foliage has passed their reds and yellows and has settled on brown. Small twirls of wind pluck leaves from two or three branches at a time, sending them falling like tickets. Christ the Savior Assembly of God church stands like a sword at the end of Dickson Avenue. She passes it each day and, although her mother had brought her through the remembrances of catechism, the Catholic Church was a half hour drive away and Maria doesn't want to pull her uncle from his one day of sleep and television to take her. Miracles fell upon people who needed them, she heard her mother say when their neighbor Francisco had come to tell Patrice his plan of escaping the island. Maria soon learned the words "serendipitous" and "intervention," words her mother spouted the weeks prior to her daughter's journey with Francisco. Maria only wants something small--the wind blowing a play ball out of the trees or a stoplight slowing down a reckless driver. The front building of the church has a large door, the spire. The front lawn is small and manicured and props up a sign that changes messages each week. Today it claims, "Eternity is longer than you think." She enters the door. There are pews to each side and she realizes that although it is only 8:45, she is late. A man in a blue suit and barely any hair pops up from the back pew and offers her a pamphlet and a tobacco stained smile. He then points her to a seat a few pews up and she bends down low, wondering if she need genuflect, decides against it and sits down. The choir sings and the people shuffle a silver dish from person to person for the tithe. She places down her purse and opens the pamphlet the man gave her. She can read only a small word or two, but sees the one word she has come here for, "miracle." She had looked it up late last night in her dictionary. "Milagros"= "Miracle." The pastor moves forward shooting lightning platitudes from his red-lipped mouth. The people amen and laugh. Maria does the same. Her fingers thumb the pages of the pamphlet, waiting for something, for a feeling or word. She remembers her priest in Habana, Father Rubio, who waved a stick above her when her tonsils were filling her throat. She still needed to go to the clinic and have them removed, but the minute he stood over her, spewing the hidden words of Santeria, she felt a cooling in her throat. She swallowed without pain for a half hour, bingeing on everything she had shunned for two days. The fever receded and she stood up and did not ache. That is what she looks for now. Maria suspects the plan for her to leave Cuba did not originate with her father's imprisoning, dying. It was always present as the ocean is, even to those who can't swim. At least once every person stops to see the water-the vastness, the deep, the hidden--and their eye twitches and their heart moves. They realize it is the center of everything. She was taught about America from her grandparents and mother who heard stories under the streetlights and in bodegas. The attainable, the attainable. Yes. It was not until Maria was in her teens that she heard her mother's saddened words, she would go alone. Patrice would stay to protect her parents until she could escape also. On her fifteenth birthday, Maria was thrown a small Quinceanera, not as lavish as her mother could have done with the resources of friends who worked in hotels and had access to decorations, cakes, and large rooms. Her mother began to direct her in the plan--no new friends for Maria, no broadening of her acquaintances. This life would get smaller and smaller until no one would notice she, Maria had gone. Her cousin Sofia brought a young man who was her cousin on the other side. Rolando was thin and well mannered. His first approach to Maria was with birthday wishes. She felt the hand of her mother on her shoulder, the restraint of any emotion towards anyone who would enter her mind and interfere with her mother's plan of flight. Say yes to the third man who asks you out. The first is taken with your beauty, the second wants to acquire you as a possession; the third equates loyalty with love. This is the man for you. Rolando made himself visible after that, outside her school, down her street at the café bar, along the Paseo where she would walk home from the Gran Teatro. But the hand on her shoulder was always present and now at night she thinks of him escaping to America, visiting her future house that is not the huge wasteful ones they see in pictures, but elaborate enough to make the dream of escape worth it. Now tucked in the white walls of Christ the Savior, the crowd is also white. Maria recognizes some women's coifed styles from the salon, but cannot remember their tips enough to categorize their virtue. Children are scattered along the pews with coloring books on their laps. They unconsciously absorb the beliefs that they will shun in their twenties and return to during their first divorces. Piano, guitars and bass, drums and a misplaced flute stomp out crescendos of modern hymns. One woman stands in soloist position. Her outfit of a businesswoman, her shoes white and shoddy as her bulky hair wobbles in rhythm to her soprano yearnings, her jeweled wrist reaching towards the ceiling. Maria does not know the words, but follows the music as it becomes somber and then rallies. The congregation becomes excited. There is a sudden release in not knowing what they are saying. A blonde woman in her fifties bangs a tambourine against her hand. The group stands now, clapping. A man drops down on his knees, eyes pressed together in past regret. The exuberance is not a surprise to Maria who has been to Santeria gatherings since she was a child, watching possessed Cubans with chicken blood on their foreheads dance until they fell to the floor, slipping on the sweat of redemption. When four or five heads bounce above the others, Maria tucks her bag under the pew and follows the wandering crowd towards the front so that she can see the dancing. It is more of a hopping and gallop, disregarding the four-four rhythms, but Maria feels open, cooled by the wind that whisks off the dancing bodies. The pastor stands in the middle and the singing woman backs up in line with the other singers. The soloist improvises trills and "bless you, Lords", punctuated with "Halleluiahs" and "set us free". For the first time since she had fallen on Nashville, on America, Maria closes her eyes and begins to dance. It is not the dancing that the people of the congregation do, it is the dance of Alicia Alonso and Lorna Feijoo. Dancing that, offered to the Lord, should move her ahead of the pack when he sprinkles the miracles down from his pouch. Pirouettes and arabesques. Some move back to give her room. Her arms reach like palm fronds in delicate circles above her head as she does sissonne and piques. The music grows faster and louder as the congregation watches the miracle of movement. Maria pulls her dress above her knees, high on her brown thigh so that she can do ronde de jambe en l'air. Her thin dress clings to her small breasts, her muscular middle. She had discarded her shoes under the front pew. She spins and lets her leg reach towards the sky in attitude. She links together movements from MidSummer's Night and Coppélia, letting her body be led by the energy of the flute. A hand lies on her shoulder and for a split second it is the remembered touch of her mother. She turns to see a kind, yet strained, face of the woman with the tambourine, the music suddenly clipped into a more traditional repetitive chorus as people make their way back to their seats. The lady directs Maria towards a door to the side of the pulpit. The freedom will be at once wonderful and strange. His eyes will not be upon you, but no mother will be there to guide you either. She is escorted barefoot into a back room that holds tables covered in plates topped with foil and clear wraps hiding fried chicken, potato salad and brownies. Maria sits down and faces the woman. The woman addresses Maria and she has to wait until the woman takes a breath before Maria can tell her she does not speak English much. The woman looks surprised and then relieved, holds up a finger and walks out of the room. Maria looks around the large room. Banners are hanging on all four walls proclaiming words in shouts and gold ribbon. The woman returns with a short man, a Bible under his arm and smooth dark skin. He introduces himself as Ernesto and tells Maria he is Mexican. He greets her and moves aside, but Maria knows he wants to talk to her more. He translates for the woman. She is the pastor's wife. They both exchange looks and Maria can see that it is a liberation to have a translator, neither of them talking directly to her. The bi-lingual monologue grows more emblazoned and ends with the message that a woman of Maria's kind is not welcome around the church and their children. Maria does not counter. She sits confounded. She does not know whether to protest or chuckle or fight the tides and go back home where the rules are known. You must earn trust. They must see your eyes. That is where trust comes out of, where it is born. No looking to the ground. The pastor's wife and Ernesto sit there and chat, looking intermittently at their sparkling watches. The man finally bows half-committed toward Maria and leaves. The woman stays with Maria, placing her hand on the young woman's in a sign of forced compassion. When there is movement in the halls signifying the end of the service, the woman stands and motions for Maria to follow. They enter the emptying sanctuary. She is handed her shoes and directed towards the back where she left her purse. The woman is behind her when she rises from reaching under the pew and the woman points towards the front door. When the large door closes, Maria rests alone on the front step and pulls back on her sandals she bought from the dollar store. She straightens her hair that is still wrapped in a napkin and stands. The front of the church is deserted and most of the people are in the dining hall chewing on dried biscuits and judgment. She heads towards Dickson Avenue. The sun has still not succeeded in defeating the clouds and the sky is divided into two warriors of blue and gray. A deep voice calls from behind her. The man with the stained teeth, who handed her the pamphlet, catches up to her. He touches her arm and when she faces him he tells her she dances beautifully and she wonders if he is the miracle. She smiles and places her hand on his shoulder and follows him to his car. Get up early, go to bed early. Success is decided when the sun is up and God can see clearly. In the morning Maria bends down to brush gray and brown hairs into the dustpan, leaving sprigs of the fluff sprinkled across the floor. Stacy has complimented her on the neatness of her bun and as she raises from the wastebasket she trips over an electric cord that one of the girls has rigged in order to bring the boom box closer to the stations. Pulling herself up from her fall she looks up toward the window just in time to see a young face, hands pressed against the pane, looking in at her. The girl is small, from one of the ballet classes that meet in the mornings for the youngest of dancers. Her hair is pinned back at the top, the rest flowing down her back like wet sand. Her leotard is periwinkle, her tights pink. "Kelsey, Kelsey," she hears the girl's mother yell from out of grabbing reach. "Take your hands off that glass. It's filthy." |