by Ana Menéndez
Máximo looked at him, then at the table. He put down a three and a five. He looked again; the boy was gone. The family had moved on.
The tour groups arrived later that afternoon. First the white buses with the happy blue letters WELCOME TO LITTLE HAVANA. Next, the fat women in white shorts, their knees lost in an abstraction of flesh. Máximo tried to concentrate on the game. The worst part was how the other men acted out for them. Dominos are supposed to be a quiet game. And now there they were shouting at each other and gesturing. A few of the men had even brought cigars, and they dangled now, unlit, from their mouths.
“You see, Raúl,” Máximo said. “You see how we’re a spectacle?” He felt like an animal and wanted to growl and cast about behind the metal fence.
Raúl shrugged. “Doesn’t bother me.”
“A goddamn spectacle. A collection of old bones,” Máximo said.
The other men looked up at Máximo.
“Hey, speak for yourself, cabrón,” Antonio said.
Raúl shrugged again.
Máximo rubbed his knuckles and began to shuffle the pieces. It was hot, and the sun was setting in his eyes, backlighting the car exhaust like a veil before him. He rubbed his temple, feeling the skin move over the bone. He pressed the inside corners of his eyes, then drew his hand back over the pieces.
“Hey, you okay there?” Antonio said.
An open trolley pulled up and parked on the curb. A young man with blond hair, perhaps in his thirties, stood up in the front, holding a microphone. He wore a guayabera. Máximo looked away.
“This here is Domino Park,” came the amplified voice in English, then Spanish. “No one under fifty-five allowed, folks. But we can sure watch them play.”
Máximo heard shutters click, then convinced himself he couldn’t have heard, not from where he was.
“Most of these men are Cuban and they’re keeping alive the tradition of their homeland,” the amplified voice continued, echoing against the back wall of the park. “You see, in Cuba, it was very common to retire to a game of dominos after a good meal. It was a way to bond and build community. Folks, you here are seeing a slice of the past. A simpler time of good friendships and unhurried days.”
Maybe it was the sun. The men later noted that he seemed odd. The tics. Rubbing his bones.
First Máximo muttered to himself. He shuffled automatically. When the feedback on the microphone pierced through Domino Park, he could no longer sit where he was, accept things as they were. It was a moment that had long been missing from his life.
He stood and made a fist at the trolley.
“Mierda!” he shouted. “Mierda! That’s the biggest bullshit I’ve ever heard.”
He made a lunge at the fence. Carlos jumped up and restrained him. Raúl led him back to his seat.
The man of the amplified voice cleared his throat. The people on the trolley looked at him and back at Máximo; perhaps they thought this was part of the show.
“Well.” The man chuckled. “There you have it, folks.”
Lucinda ran over, but the other men waved her off. She began to protest about rules and propriety. The park had a reputation to uphold.
It was Antonio who spoke.
“Leave the man alone,” he said.
Máximo looked at him. His head was pounding. Antonio met his gaze briefly, then looked to Lucinda.
“Some men don’t like to be stared at is all,” he said. “It won’t happen again.”
She shifted her weight, but remained where she was, watching.
“What are you waiting for?” Antonio said, turning now to Máximo, who had lowered his head into the white backs of the dominos. “Let’s play.”
That night Máximo was too tired to sit at the pine table. He didn’t even prepare dinner. He slept, and in his dreams he was a green and yellow fish swimming in warm waters, gliding through the coral, the only fish in the sea and he was happy. But the light changed and the sea darkened suddenly and he was rising through it, afraid of breaking the surface, afraid of the pinhole sun on the other side, afraid of drowning in the blue vault of sky.
“Let me finish the story of Juanito the little dog.”
No one said anything.
“Is that okay? I’m okay. I just remembered it. Can I finish it?”
The men nodded, but still did not speak.
“He is just off the boat from Cuba. He is walking down Brickell Avenue. And he is trying to steady himself, see, because he still has his sea legs and all the buildings are so tall they are making him dizzy. He doesn’t know what to expect. He’s maybe a little afraid. And he’s thinking about a pretty little dog he knew once and he’s wondering where she is now and he wishes he were back home.”
He paused to take a breath. Raúl cleared his throat. The men looked at one another, then at Máximo. But his eyes were on the blur of dominos before him. He felt a stillness around him, a shadow move past the fence, but he didn’t look up.
“He’s not a depressive kind of dog, though. Don’t get me wrong. He’s very feisty. And when he sees an elegant white poodle striding toward him, he forgets all his worries and exclaims, ‘O Madre de Dios, si cocinas como caminas …’”
The men let out a small laugh. Máximo continued.
’“Si cocinas como caminas …’” Juanito says, but the white poodle interrupts and says, ‘I beg your pardon? This is America—kindly speak English.’ So Juanito pauses for a moment to consider and says in his broken English, ‘Mamita, you are one hot doggie, yes? I would like to take you to movies and fancy dinners.’”
“One hot doggie, yes?” Carlos repeated, then laughed. “You’re killing me.” The other men smiled, warming to the story as before.
“So Juanito says, ‘I would like to marry you, my love, and have gorgeous puppies with you and live in a castle.’ Well, all this time the white poodle has her snout in the air. She looks at Juanito and says, ‘Do you have any idea who you’re talking to? I am a refined breed of considerable class and you are nothing but a short, insignificant mutt.’ Juanito is stunned for a moment, but he rallies for the final shot. He’s a proud dog, you see, and he’s afraid of his pain. ‘Pardon me, your highness,’ Juanito the mangy dog says. ‘Here in America, I may be a short, insignificant mutt, but in Cuba I was a German shepherd.”
Máximo turned so the men would not see his tears. The afternoon traffic crawled eastward. One horn blasted, then another. He remembered holding his daughters days after their birth, thinking how fragile and vulnerable lay his bond to the future. For weeks, he carried them on pillows, like jeweled china. Then the blank spaces in his life lay before him. Now he stood with the gulf at his back, their ribbony youth aflutter in the past. And what had he salvaged from the years? Already, he was forgetting Rosa’s face, the precise shade of her eyes.
Carlos cleared his throat and moved his hand as if to touch him, then held back. He cleared his throat again.
“He was a good dog,” Carlos said and pressed his lips together.
Antonio began to laugh, then fell silent with the rest. Máximo started shuffling, then stopped. The shadow of the banyan tree worked a kaleidoscope over the dominos. When the wind eased, Máximo tilted his head to listen. He heard something stir behind him, someone leaning heavily on the fence. He could almost feel the breath. His heart quickened.
“Tell them to go away,” Máximo said. “Tell them, no pictures.”
Hurricane Stories
I know a man who likes the seashore after a storm. Late summer afternoons, after the rain, we sit on the sand and watch the last of the heavy clouds blow out over the ocean. He points out shapes in the clouds and I tell him stories I hope will make him remember me.
One afternoon the thick wind in the dunes reminds me of another time. I see him sitting apart from me, tracing his finger in the sand, and I feel a story welling in me. I begin to tell him about the hurricane of 1972.
I tell him how all that summer the rain had come down hard. My father stared at the sky a
nd said the clouds had turned bad. The days started hot and ended in a tangle of trees. Even the animals knew something was coming. But I was a girl and the summer was long and glorious and the wind that blew before the rain in early morning swayed the boughs of the oak tree. Wedged between two branches, I swayed with it and dreamed the live oak was my house and this was the elegant drawing room and there rested the fine china that we left behind the night we left Havana for good.
I tell him how I ignored the first drops when they began to fall. I lingered after the shadows dulled into dark afternoon. And not until my mother opened the kitchen window to call for me did I climb down and go inside, imagining myself the hero, chased by lightning.
I tell him how I sat by the window through the storms that summer, watching the rain. He says he understands. But he grew up with snow in the winter and fir trees against gray skies. I had Florida. The smell of electricity. Asphalt cooling in wisps of steam. Raindrops that blow sidelong in the wind. Not everyone knows what these things mean. I watch him and think, Was it always this way between us?
Word of a hurricane in the far Atlantic finally came in early August. All those long weeks, the rain had been trying to tell us. It was the only way the summer could have ended.
The hurricane had a name, a woman’s name—they were all women then—but I’ve forgotten it. We saw her first as a white swirl on a newspaper map, a square the size of a playing card in the left-hand corner of the weather page. A small headline said, Storm Threatens Islands. The following day, the map had moved to the front page. The white swirl was painted larger now and this time Miami was marked with a star, not two inches from the storm.
“Were you afraid?” he asks.
I stop and look at him. His eyes are fixed on the clouds, which almost touch the horizon now. The wind blows his hair onto his face.
I think, What do you know of fear?
I say, “I thought it was exciting.”
I tell him the storm had seemed so close, explain that when you are twelve the lines on a map seem irrefutable. I say I still believed you could take a running jump off Key West and land in Havana. It sounds true. What am I trying to tell him? Day after day, I burden my flat Florida childhood with meaning as he sits on the sand and waits for night to swallow the pictures in the clouds. We still don’t tell each other everything.
I don’t know if he would understand that those summer days when the storm was a painted whirl with a woman’s name, the sky had been an unbelievable blue. That the wind stopped blowing in the mornings and the rain ceased. Would he believe me if I talked of luminescent days when every green leaf seemed to stop its wild summer thrashing as if to wait with the rest of us?
I consider his question. Then I tell him how those mornings, I laid the paper flat on the kitchen table and traced the storm with my fingers. We hung a map on the refrigerator door and plotted her path. I dreamt of Miami and its little star on the map.
Two days before the storm, the sky clouded. My father folded the lawn chairs and piled them over the lawn mower in the utility room. In the shadow of the black clouds, my father cut back the branches of his orange trees. He scanned the yard for rusted cans, forgotten toys. I heard him whistling as he pushed his foot along the tall grass at the foot of the fence. Our nextdoor neighbor walked across his yard and gestured toward my father’s pruning shears. They talked across the fence. I hadn’t seen Mr. Hanson since two summers ago. From the Florida room, I watched my father pointing with his chin, Mr. Hanson with both thumbs hooked into the belt loops of his jeans. Our neighbor laughed and my father patted him on the shoulder. My father handed him the shears, then jumped the fence. For an hour, they walked around his yard, my father pointing, our neighbor cutting. Through the open windows, when he got close enough to the fence, I could hear my father whistling the same song over and over again.
“What was he whistling?”
I still remember. Astor Piazzolla. Verano Porteño.
“Astor Piazzolla,” he says. “I saw him once. Did I ever tell you? The summer I spent in Argentina.”
I imagine him in an old city, cobblestones and wine, the sky gray and tight, and I wonder how many stories he keeps.
“You spent a summer in Argentina?”
He shrugs and I can see by the way he’s bent his eyebrows that he is remembering something or someone. I think he is not like someone I know; he is a dream in reverse.
In the afternoon, my mother asked if I wanted to go with her to Publix. We circled the parking lot three times, looking for a space. Once, my mother leaned long and hard on the horn. When she turned her head to look behind her, I saw her biting her lower lip, as she did when she was worried or was trying not to smile. We parked, finally, at the far end of the shopping mall, in front of a health food store I had never noticed before.
The last time I had seen so many people in the supermarket was on Christmas Eve. All fourteen registers were open and the lines at each stretched into the food aisles. I can still remember the clang of all those registers, people shouting across shopping carts that overflowed with cans.
“The Sterno! Ask if they sell Sterno!”
Children ran around the store, unattended. Women in hair rollers pushed carts. Men in flip-flops flung cans of beans, any beans, into their baskets.
My mother, who never let us have sweets, turned in to the candy lane. She scooped up bars of chocolate, bags of M&M’s. But I didn’t say anything, afraid I’d wake up and find myself in the vegetable aisle, my mother reaching for another bag of broccoli, our lives going on as before.
“We have to be ready for anything,” my mother said. She winked at me like this was a secret, just for us.
He wants to know what else we bought that day. But I’ve forgotten. “You of all people should remember what you ate,” he says.
What does he mean by that? I turn to see him waiting for me. The fading daylight that was like the thin sleep before dreaming now seems muddy and sad. I watch him fold his hands and then he says he’s sorry, to go on, it’s okay.
The day before began with the kind of rain we usually got in winter. Skinny drops that fell close together. By lunchtime, the wind began to blow the rain. My father said he couldn’t wait any longer.
I helped him carry the lengths of plywood from the shed to the front of the house, holding the sheets over my head. My mother ran outside twice to say I was going to catch cold and couldn’t my father call Mr. Hanson to help. But I jumped up and down inside a puddle to show her I wasn’t afraid. My mother looked at the sky and then back at us.
“Marta said the television is predicting tomorrow night,” she said and closed the door. Two minutes later, she was back outside, wearing a black plastic raincoat.
“I couldn’t stay inside and watch you two working out here,” she said.
“Well, then, welcome to Castle Fortification Project Number One,” my father said, and my mother and I giggled.
Each window took half an hour. My father stood atop a ladder.
“Plywood,” he’d say. And my mother would hand him a sheet.
“Lug nuts.” And I’d pass him one of the silver screws from my pocket.
We had finished the front of the house when the rain stopped. The wind changed direction.
“Funny weather, isn’t it?” my father said. “Hurricanes are like that.”
He climbed off the ladder and turned to my mother.
“Do you remember the storm of ’37?”
“I don’t think so. We lived inland then.”
“Still, you’d have to remember.” He turned to me now. “Our family lived one street in from the beach, across from the park. I was only a few years younger than you are now. It was the end of the summer.
“That’s when the worst of them come, after the summer has heated the earth,” he said. “They didn’t have radar back then, so people had to be smarter, notice the smallest things. My mother had watched the birds roosting earlier and earlier every day. The wind was funny, as it is now.
And the day before we had received a telegram from the Dominican Republic, warning of high seas.”
My father moved the ladder to another window and climbed up. “Plywood. Thank you. All the cousins came to stay with us. They lived together in a white house on the beach. Lug nuts. Our house was big enough for everyone, but it probably wasn’t much safer.”
“Why’d they come then?” I asked.
“Well, I don’t know,” my father said. “I suppose no one wanted to be alone when the storm hit. It was all fun for us kids, of course. My father let us eat dinner that night on the floor of the living room. The table wasn’t big enough for everyone. Even Girasol, the cook, ate with us, crouched beside my father’s armchair.”
“Did the house stand?” my mother asked.
“Oh yes. But little else did. You know what you remember most about hurricanes?”
My father stepped off the ladder and joined us on the ground, wiping his hands on his jeans. “The noise, that’s what you remember. Really, you think about the wind and rain, but what stays with you is the noise. Louder and louder and the whole world seems like it’s going to split down the middle.”
“Your poor parents,” my mother said.
My father nodded. “They say the seas joined over Varadero. That’s how bad it was. In the morning, all you noticed was the sky. So much of it suddenly. Palm trees knocked to the floor. Coconuts like pebbles in the street. The sand had piled so high in front of the door that we couldn’t open it. We had to crawl through the kitchen window to get outside.”
It had started to rain again.
“They are terrible things, hurricanes,” my father said. “Nothing to play around with.”
We were quiet. My father began to whistle. The rain splashed steadily around us, marking soft dark ovals on the plywood. The sky had grown dark and seemed to have shifted closer to the ground. The wind swirled fallen leaves in circles around my feet.
“Do you think he was telling the truth?” he asks.
