Cuba 15 (3 page)

4

I heard the click-clack-click of dominoes and smelled the cigar smoke before I found Dad and Abuelo relaxing on the screened-in back porch. Afternoon sun shone on them. Beads of sweat blossomed in neat rows across their brows, undisturbed by the overhead fan. I sat down on our old refrigerator-sized what-color-is-it-anymore couch with the wobbly leg and balanced a Coke can on the wiggly arm. Our old furniture bands together out here like a neighboring tribe; that’s why I like the porch. Familiar. Lived in.

But the domino board, atop an ancient folding card table, looked shiny new as usual. The ever-present cigar smoke has tinted the whole thing a mellow tobacco color, and every so often Dad gives it another coat of varnish. Dominoes littered the board, festive sandwiches of red and white, locked together with a gold pin at their centers. Black dots pocked their white faces, counting off in orderly patterns. These were no ordinary game pieces. Calling dominoes a game in our house is a joke.

Abuelo smashed the double-one tile onto the board.
“¡Tan!”
he whooped, beating the table with both palms, conga-style. “No ones, eh?” My grandfather, wiry, thin, and darker than Dad, is absolutely bald, and not because it’s in style. He always wears the same thing: a boxy
guayabera
shirt, white today, with roses embroidered on the pockets, and the kind of thin dark pants that old people call trousers. Slippers at home, dress shoes when he goes out. Abuelo solved his fashion crisis long ago.

He waved his arms at my father. “You knock, then I knock,
¡tan-tan! como
Tito Puente.” Neither of them had any ones in their hand to play.

Resolutely, Dad knocked twice, passing.

Abuelo cracked his knuckles down. “I win, for once,
¡Dios mío!
”

Dad exposed his remaining pieces to reveal several blanks, a low score. He reached over and spread out Abuelo’s hand: twenty-six points. Dad just sat there, arms crossed in a yellow long-sleeved velour shirt, sweating and looking smugly across the table at his father.

Abuelo returned his gaze innocently.
“¿Qué?”
As if he couldn’t add.

“Dame el dinero,
Papito,”
Dad said. “Pay up!”

With lips tight, Abuelo opened a small leather coin purse, plucked a dime from it, and tossed it onto Dad’s side of the table. Quite a few dimes were stacked there, next to a cracked ashtray that said FONTAINEBLEAU HOTEL—MIAMI on it.

“Se acabó,”
muttered Abuelo. “I quit!” He winked at me and revealed the landscape of a grin he’d been hiding. He didn’t really mind losing. “
A
menos que . . . eh,
Violeta? Do you want to take my place?”

The game never stopped as long as another sucker came along.

“Sure, Abuelo,” I said. “How’re you feeling today?”

“Mucho mejor,”
he said, stubbing out what was left of his cigar and handing me his coin purse. “
¡Pero,
this
humedad!
It will kill me!” He fluffed his shirt up and down to get some air down the neck. Then he stepped back into the air-conditioned house.

A heat wave in September, and not even Indian summer yet. This didn’t bode well for an early ski season.

“How was school today, Violeta?” Dad asked. I could barely hear him as we mixed the dominoes with our hands, the roar finally subsiding into distinct clicks as the tiles collided one last time, then came to rest.

“Good, I guess. I’m joining the speech team.” I chose my ten pieces carefully from the blind pile, setting them upright horizontally. There are two schools on this; I prefer the low profile.

Dad stood his ten on end vertically. Maybe because he’s so tall. Dad is six-two, with slightly olive skin that always looks tan, and black hair that’s eroding in one small spot on top of his head. Besides the totally wrong shirt for a hot day, he wore polyester pants in a sickly watermelon color, leaving a good six inches of his ankles exposed. Green and white striped socks ran into his brand-new white bowling shoes with tassels on them, which he was breaking in by wearing around the house. I noticed he had fitted his cigar band around one finger as a ring. “Double nine!” he called. Highest double goes first.

I shook my head.

“Double eight!”

Still nothing.

“Double
siete
!” He ignored me and slapped down the double-seven piece.

I picked out the seven-five, one of two sevens in my hand.

“
Eh
speech, you say?” Dad remarked in a Spanglish accent. He must have been sitting out here with Abuelo for a long time. “There’s a team for this?” He laid a piece down.

“Well, you’ve heard of debate, right, Dad? Tri-Dist doesn’t have debate, but we do have these individual events that compete.”

He nodded impatiently, waiting for my move. We each laid down a piece.

“Some events are like reading parts from a play, or reciting a famous speech. I’m doing Original Comedy; I’ll have to write it myself.” I looked at my hand, trying to decide, then went for the five-two.

Dad winced and knocked sharply on the domino board, passing.

Oh ho, no more sevens or fives in his hand already? My turn. I slapped the double-five piece at the end of the chain to form a T.

Dad had to knock again. “You have to write what yourself? Jokes?”

I nodded, laying down a tile. “My speech coach says I’m funny.”

Dad sighed in relief and played a double. He took a happy puff from his cigar, pulled up a green and white striped sock, and fiddled with his cigar-wrapper ring. “But you come from a perfectly normal American household. What do you have to be funny about?”

“That’s what I said.” I kept a straight face, then hit him with a killer four-five, laying it off his double four slowly, to rub in the humiliation.

Dad took a domino from the spare pile, dropped it on its face, and spun it on its pinhead. He was getting nervous. But he played a low number from his hand.

“So, where will you get your material from?” he asked as I played off his blank. He scowled and knocked hard, once, passing.

Leda’s invitation had given me an idea. “I thought maybe I could do something on a Cuban theme, but I’m not sure what. Could you help me?”

“There is nothing funny about Cuba,” Dad said curtly.

“Oh, there must be something,” I insisted.

“Sure,” Dad exhaled, “if you think dictatorship is funny.” He was still upset about having to pass. “Now are you going to play, Violeta?” he demanded.

I paused for effect, drew my weapon, and smacked the domino board with a nine-five, motioning for Dad to place it for me, since I couldn’t quite reach the end of the chain in his corner. I donned Abuelo’s innocent look. “Can you at least play off your double?”

He couldn’t. I played my final two pieces and went out.

Dad knocked his dominoes faceup for me to see, shaking his head in disgust, and reached for a dime. I knew that, inside, he was marking this loss in his memory book of lifetime wins and losses. I smiled.

“There’s nothing funny about this,” Dad said grumpily just as Mom came out to the porch, carrying our toy poodle, Chucho, and the family calendar. “I quit. Will you put the dominoes away?”

“Aw, Dad, you didn’t give me any ideas for my speech yet. And we only played one game.”

“Maybe your mother has some ideas for the
eh
speech. But this game is over.” He swept his dimes up from the corner of the domino board. “Unless . . .” He jingled his change at Mom. “Diane?”

Mom set Chucho down on the floor, where he immediately found Abuelo’s discarded cigar wrapper and ate it. “I’ll play,” Mom said.

Dad gave her his handful of change, ground his cigar out in the ashtray, and retreated into the house.

Except for the extra legs and tail, Chucho looks exactly like a little old man who took a bath in superglue and rolled around on a hairdresser’s floor. Dad inherited the dog from Madrina, his godmother, who had owned him as long as anyone could remember. Nobody knows Chucho’s true age or agrees on what color he is for sure. He blends right in on the back porch.

As dogs go, he is more like a goat, which is why Abuelo calls him
cabrito
and Abuela puts her shoes up in the closet when she takes them off at our house. Chucho will eat anything, especially bits of things that look like they’ve been thrown away. Dad often wonders if Madrina ever fed the poor animal, but then I remind him that Chucho seems to be in the peak of health and, apparently, at least a century old. Whatever he’s been eating, it agrees with him.

“Mom,” I said as she settled with her calendar into Dad’s old plaid overstuffed armchair, “Chucho just ate Abuelo’s cigar band.”

“Roughage,” Mom replied, already turning the last game’s pieces facedown and beginning to shuffle them. Chucho climbed up in Mom’s lap and began gnawing on the family calendar. With any luck, he’d eat May.

We began another game.

“Mom,” I said, hoping she was just distracted enough, “do I really have to go through with this
quince
party? I mean, is there any way we can just tell Abuela thanks, but no thanks?”

Unlike Dad, Mom will talk and pay attention to you while playing dominoes. She says it’s because she’s Polish and doesn’t have the domino gene.

She looked at me, hurt, obviously not distracted enough. I could see foundations weaken and columns collapse in her mind as her plans were shaken. “You—you don’t want to have the party?”

“No, no,” I reassured her, “it’s not that I don’t
want
the party. . . . It’s just not the kind of party kids have.”

Mom let this sink in but didn’t comprehend. “That’s not what your
abuela
says.”

“Well, she’s from
Miami,
” I said, as if it were Mars.

Mom still looked unconvinced.

“Look,” I said, starting to feel desperate, “it’s just not right for me. I mean, when’s the last time I wore a dress?”

She surveyed her domino hand and laid a piece down. “There was that nice corduroy jumper I brought you from the shop,” she suggested.

“That was fourth grade, Mom! And who would we even invite? I don’t have enough cousins to fill a rental hall.” Mom’s family lives back East, in Pennsylvania, and we visited them; they never came to Chicago. And we didn’t see much of Dad’s relatives in the old neighborhood after Abuela and Abuelo left. Changing shifts at the pharmacy all the time made it hard for Dad to find two hours to drive out there and back, much less see anyone in between.

“There are friends . . . ,” Mom said, probably meaning her old bowling-league buddies and the members of Mark’s scout troop. As for my friends, I pretty much have hung out with Janell and Leda since my next-door neighbor moved away. “And won’t it be great to see your cousins from the old neighborhood again?” she said.

I shrugged. We moved from the city to the house on Woodtree Lane when I was a baby. There wasn’t a whole lot of old times’ sake involved for me here.

“Mom,” I said more insistently. “Look. I do not want to go out onstage, all dressed up, in front of people I hardly know, and talk about . . . about . . . being a woman.” I looked her in the eye. “Would you?”

She thought about it for a second, then broke into a broad smile. “Why, I think that would be
lovely
. It’s very nice of your grandmother to offer. Don’t worry, we’ll make sure you have a good time.”

My heart sank. “I’m not wearing any pink dress,” I said, sulking, as my grandmother came through the sliding door from the house. Chucho jumped off Mom’s lap and walked a few rings around Abuela’s stockinged ankles, making her pull her skirt close. She seated herself primly on the rickety old couch.

“
Oye,
Lupita,” Mom said to her, “let’s plan the dress shopping trip. We’ll all three make a day of it!”

What a picnic that would be. I knocked on my turn and changed the subject. “Mom, Dad said you might be able to help me with this speech I have to write. I’m thinking of joining the speech team.”

She nodded. “That sounds like a good idea. Some public speaking might be just the trick to get you onstage. What do you need to know?”

I gulped. “We’re supposed to come up with an original theme, something no one else will think of. So I thought of doing some jokes about Cuba. You never hear much about Cuba.”

Abuela sat up a little straighter and looked pained.

“How about dominoes?” Mom said. “The way your father plays is sometimes humorous.”

I smirked and shook my head.

She won the hand by going out, and I handed her my dime.

“How about you, Abuela? Any ideas?”

“Me?” Abuela busily arranged her skirt. “No.
Yo no sé,
” she demurred.

“Come on, Abuela,” I said. “Help me. Tell me something about Cuba.”

“Mmmm,” she murmured, dipping her head, “this really is no
interesante . . .
”

“Come on, tell me something you remember from when you were growing up. It doesn’t have to be funny. Please.”

“Ah,
pues,
okay.” A faint smile traced her lips. “Since you ask.”

Her eyes glassed over, out to sea. “Was this lee-tle club, El Habano,
eh
? This place is my favorite.
Todo el mundo
would go in the summer each day for to
eh
swim, to eat lunch, to play the domino or cards. Sometimes would be a dance in the big ballroom. . . .
Ay,
the ballroom.” Her voice grew stronger. “
Con
cielos altos,
and many fountains, and the lights that hang . . . beautiful marble everywhere, and the
eh
spanish tiles on the floor.
Elegante,
” she sighed. “Was a place
sin problemas
. Was our place.”