Yaqui Delgado Wants to Kick Your Ass (2 page)

I was in Lila’s living room, watching our soap opera, when we heard the crash. It sounded like a
whoosh
followed by a truckload of china breaking. The front door even shook a little. Then came Ma’s screams.

“¡Dios mío! ¿Qué es esto?
Help!”

Lila grabbed the old plunger handle she keeps in case of burglars, and we headed out the door. Sure enough, there was Ma, standing in a cloud of genie smoke, knee-deep in rubble where the five lobby steps had crumbled right under her feet. Covered in all that marble dust, she looked like a Greek statue of herself, only furious, the way you’d picture Medusa. Her hands were shaking; the veins in her neck were ropes. Even after we dug her out and got her upstairs, I could tell she wanted blood.

“¡Sin vergüenza!
We can’t live like animals! We’re decent,” she shouted into the heating pipe. It ran down the stack of apartments, all the way to the super’s place near the laundry room. She smacked a frying pan again and again against the metal to make sure he heard her over the hum of the dryers. Hearing Ma wasn’t going to be a problem, of course. The whole building was probably listening in on her
escándalo
through the pipes; maybe even the whole block could hear. That tells you how mad she was, because if there’s one thing Ma hates, it’s looking low. The worst thing you can be is a
chusma
. She thinks we get a bad rap as Latinos, which she’s always trying to undo by being extra quiet and polite all the time.

“Calm yourself, Clara.” Lila adjusted the flame under the teakettle and opened up the cupboard to look for honey. “You want a heart attack?”

“I don’t want to calm down!” Ma’s face was nearly purple.

“What if someone calls the cops on us?” I asked, trying to help. What’s more
chusma
than
that
, right? It got Ma’s attention.

She gave the pipes one more smack before tossing the frying pan aside. Then she flopped into a kitchen chair, exhausted. She tilted her head back and closed her eyes to send a prayer to
el Señor
, though who knows if he still listens to her. It’s been fifteen years since she’s gone to church. When she opened her eyes again, it was like the irises had been drained of their color and all that was left was steely silver. Her voice was low.

“No, I don’t want a heart attack, Lila. And, no, I don’t want cops. What I
want
is to move. The Ortegas are lucky they got out when they did.” The Ortegas are Mitzi’s parents. They moved to Long Island in May to get away from the “bad element” in our neighborhood.

Oh, no
, I thought. Not this again. Ma is always threatening to move when she’s upset about something — but it’s never anywhere reasonable, like Maspeth or Ridgewood. It’s always Hialeah or Miami, or should I say,
Me-ah-me
, aka Cuba with food. Sometimes she goes so far as to make us start packing. Once she got so annoyed about the icy walkway out front that she brought home boxes from work and announced that we were leaving for Florida. Luckily, we’re the only Cubans in the United States who don’t have relatives there, so we wouldn’t have had anywhere to stay. Lila found her a good pair of rubber-soled boots on sale instead, and we stayed put.

I had to think fast.

“Mitzi says Long Island isn’t so great. The people are snobs.” It’s a lie. I talked to her last week. She likes it fine, even with the all-girl Catholic high school that came with the deal. “Why don’t we just sue the super?” Even this seemed easier than packing up the apartment in boxes — and Ma likes court shows. “Who knows? We could get rich if you’re hurt. Do you have a limp? Are you traumatized?”

Ma gave me an exasperated look and turned back to Lila.

“I’m serious. It’s not just talk like the other times. And if you don’t believe me, look.”

She got up, opened the cupboard, and reached for an old El Pico coffee can from the top shelf. When she opened it, I gasped. Inside was a drug-dealer-size wad of bills.

“Ma!” I said. “Did you rob a bank?”

“Don’t be fresh. I’ve been saving,” she continued. “And now it’s finally time. Lila, get me the phone number for Mr. Wu.”

Lila stared at the money and didn’t say a word. Mr. Wu is her old boyfriend — a Chinese guy who grew up in Uruguay — but he’s also the owner of Happiness Home Realty, the biggest real-estate agency in this part of Queens.

Ma meant business.

So, Lila set the whole thing up, just like Ma wanted. All she had to promise was a dinner with Mr. Wu, and he said, “
¿Cómo no, linda?
I’ll be happy to show your friend what I got.” Like I said, no man can resist Lila.

The next day, the three of us were standing with Mr. Wu in front of a two-family house at the corner of Forty-fifth and Parsons Boulevard, not too far from our old place. A
FOR RENT
sign was taped inside the empty window on the second floor, Mr. Wu’s smiling picture overlooking the bus stop.

Mr. Wu was grinning at Lila stupidly as he fumbled for the keys to the apartment. It had been at least six months since Lila had called it quits with him, but I could tell he was hopeful, like all her old boyfriends are for a while afterward. I tried not to notice him practically drooling. Men just get weird around her, like the air gets electric and they go blind to everything except for her. Lila wears heels and sells Avon part-time, when she’s not doing
champú
at Salón Corazón. She’s nothing like Ma, who is Hanes brief three-packs and a worried face. Lila’s hair never shows roots, and when she walks by, it’s all Jean Naté and talcum that makes men want to cling to her tighter than her sweaters.

“Too bad she’s loose,” Ma says when she hears Lila’s pumps clicking down the stairs for a date in the city. I don’t think she means it — or if she does, it doesn’t stop her from loving Lila. I know because I can see the worry lines cutting deep between her eyebrows as we watch Lila through the blinds. Some nights I turn over and find the other side of the sofa bed empty and Ma still waiting at the window for Lila to come home.

Lila isn’t bad, though. She’s just alive in a way that Ma is too tired to remember. It’s like Lila can still hear the rhythm in a salsa on the radio and not just complain about the noise.

“
Bonito
, right?” Mr. Wu tried yet another key and jutted his chin at the rosebushes hanging over the chain-link fence. It had been a warm September, so they were still pushing up blooms. I nodded to be polite, but it didn’t make the place look any better to me. The house looked too quiet. It had no stoop for people to gather on. Nobody was playing out front. And it had those white scrolled bars on the window that scream,
Break-ins happen here!

Lila circled my waist.

“Only a block away from the school,” she whispered in my ear.

“That’s a selling point?” I asked.

“Okay, maybe not, but at least it’s a short walk.”

I could see Daniel Jones High clearly from the front door. The school takes up half a block and is painted the pale green of disinfectant. There are grates on the windows and blacktop with a long cement wall covered in drawings and neon tags:
Julius 174. 10-ass-itty. Slinky
. Art and barrio all mixed in.

“Here we are!” With a click and a bow, Mr. Wu finally threw open the door. “Utilities included, too,
señoras
.”

He stared at Lila’s butt the whole way up to the second floor.

Nothing deterred Ma. Not the ugly blue rug with the mysterious dark stain that I pointed out. Not the dead roaches turning to dust inside the cabinets. Not Mrs. Boika, a nasty Romanian lady downstairs who stared at us without even saying,
¿Hola, qué tal?
or anything. Not even when I asked her how we would move her scratched-up piano from our place to this. It’s an upright Steinway that hasn’t been tuned in all the years we’ve had it, but suddenly I was protective.

“It’s not like in the cartoons, you know, where movers lower it out a window,” I said. Ma ignored me — was she planning to leave it behind after all these years? I wondered — and said the new apartment was perfect. There was a bus stop right outside the door — and no loud neighbors or slobbering dogs to make a mess of things.

“Those were her exact words,” I told Mitzi on the phone. “‘It’s perfect.’” I was sitting on our fire escape later that day, miserable. In the summer, Mitzi and I used to paint our nails out here. Now I picked paint chips off the metal and dropped them over the edge.

“Maybe you’ll like it better,” she said. “You never know.”

“Be serious. I’m switching schools in September of sophomore year. The new place has barred windows. I won’t know anybody. How is that ‘perfect’?”

Silence.

“Are you still there?” I asked.

“Yeah, sorry. At least school just started, right? Anyway, I need to work on this stupid lab report for physics.”

I sighed. A five-alarm fire wouldn’t get between Mitzi and her homework. Her dad was a doctor in Honduras, even though here he only works in the lab at a clinic. He has plans for Mitzi to be a surgeon. She’ll probably like it, though. She’s the only kid I know who didn’t make naked Ken and Barbie kiss. Instead, she would amputate their limbs with blunt-edge scissors, their putty-colored little feet lined up on the front stoop.

“What time is it?” she said. Papers shuffled in the background. “
¡Ay!
I gotta go to practice.”

“Practice for what?” I asked.

“I’m playing badminton for school.”

“The game with the little net thing? That’s a
sport
?”

“Yeah, can you believe it? And I suck.”

“So why are you doing it?”

“Why else? Mami wants me to make friends.”

This made us both laugh. Mitzi has always been kind of shy, her mother’s exact opposite. It got really bad when the boys in our class went insta-stupid over Mitzi’s boobs in elementary school. After that, it was me who had to tell the boys to shut their filthy mouths — and ask for the movie tickets and the explanation for the homework, too.

“You coming to Queens soon?” I didn’t want to say
I miss you
because she already knew that.

“The first weekend that I don’t have a game. Maybe we can go shopping for your birthday present.”

I couldn’t answer through the tight feeling in my throat.

“Look, Piddy, don’t worry. It’s going to be okay,” Mitzi said before we hung up. “Take it from me. You can’t do anything about moving, anyway, so try to make the best of it. Besides, people always like you. You’re going to kick butt.”

I was already missing Lila as the three of us packed up our old kitchen a week later. I was sitting at the piano bench, plucking at the stuck keys.

“
Ay
, Clara, tell this kid to stop with the sad face; she’s breaking my heart.” Lila taped newspaper around two plates and kissed my forehead. “Your
mami
’s right. You can’t stay here.” She wiped the lipstick off my skin with her handkerchief and tucked it back inside her bra. “The whole place is turning to dust.”

Ma looked up and frowned at me.

“Piddy, stop that racket and help us. And quit moping. You should be thankful.” She yanked tape over a box of pots. “The new apartment’s not far, and — did you see? — it even has a yard.”

I gave her a stony stare.

“That patch of dirt?”

“It has
roses
,” she said. “You can sit outside with a new friend from school and smell their perfume,” she continued. “That’s good for a young girl.”

“
Ay
, Ma . . .” I muttered.

“‘
Ay
, Ma,’ what?” she mimicked.

I sighed.

Ma is always inventing endless things that are “good for a young girl”— which means, specifically, me. Hemming pants. Washing out underwear by hand because “What decent woman puts her private things in a public washer?” Learning to fry chicken so it isn’t bloody near the bone. Speaking rudimentary French. Cross-stitching pillows — I kid you not — so I’ll know how to stitch my baby’s initials into its bibs someday. All sorts of pointless things that are supposed to improve me “for the future.”

Too bad I have other plans in mind.

Ma doesn’t know it, but I’m going to be a scientist. I want to work with animals, big ones like elephants, maybe even live halfway across the world. It’s weird, I know. The only elephants I’ve ever seen were in the zoo. But we have the National Geographic channel, so I know they’re smart and they can feel and hear things people can’t. They can keep a herd’s whole history — all the good and the bad they’ve ever seen — in their memory. If I told this to Ma, her screams would touch the sky.
“¿Elefantes?”
She’d nag about malaria and the smell of dung I’d never get out from under my nails. She’d ask me what kind of decent girl is interested in elephants. And so on.

It’s times like these I wish I were Lila’s daughter instead. Not that Ma doesn’t love me — or that Lila likes elephants. It’s just that Lila doesn’t
bother
me. She’s never had kids of her own, thank God, so she doesn’t have the slightest idea of what’s good for me. She doesn’t ask me if I’ve done my homework or where I’ve been. When Ma works late, we fill up on butter cookies for dinner and watch the good shows that Ma calls trash. If I were Lila’s kid, life might actually be fun.

“Forget smelling flowers,” Lila said. “A pretty girl like you? Boys will be sending you roses of your own!” Then she wiggled her eyebrows. “The good news is you’ll have your own room. Just think, now you’ll have
privacy
. Every sixteen-year-old girl needs that.”

“She’s not sixteen yet,” Ma muttered.

“A few weeks . . .” Lila said, winking.

I looked around at the packed boxes and felt my throat go dry. I already hated the new apartment and Daniel Jones High School. I hadn’t felt this bad since Mitzi’s moving van pulled away from our street.

But I held my tongue. Getting my own room
was
the only shining piece of good news in this whole thing. It meant I wouldn’t have to share a sofa bed with Ma, who snores and takes my covers. Still, the “pretty” part was ridiculous. I’ve never been one of the pretty girls. Mitzi’s the good-looking one, all curvy like a guitar. I’m tall and skinny. My eyes are wide set and the color of mud. Joey Halper says I look like a toad, presumably now one with a booty. Sometimes he croaks
ribbit
from his window when he sees me outside and wants to say hello.