by Ana Menéndez
“The truth?”
“About the seas joining. I don’t see how that could happen.”
I stop to think. “I never thought about it,” I say. “It seemed real the way he told it. Why couldn’t it be?”
“I just don’t think it’s possible.”
I remember something else my father used to say: It could be true and never have happened. But he wouldn’t understand. This man who is like a straight line, an idea without interruption. I’m afraid if I stop talking, if I say something that makes his eyes narrow, that his love will disappear back into the folds of all those stories he hasn’t told me.
I look away. “We only come here after storms,” I say.
“What are you saying?”
“Nothing. I’m just noticing.”
Every day, I feel him slipping in ever-widening arcs from me. When he returns, when I see in his eyes that things are like before, I know that the next time he will go farther, take longer to come back. I keep talking and think I could talk forever.
I woke that morning, a Monday, to my parents’ whispering in the room next to mine. I couldn’t tell the time. Because of the plywood on the windows, the house was in perpetual deep night. The hall light lit up the crack under my door like a fluorescent tube. I had dreamt of a house full of cousins. Seen big sky. Coconuts raining down. Waves that climbed higher and higher, joining the seas over Florida, leaving everything flat and beautiful and clean.
The branches of a laurel rubbed against the plywood at my window. The wind raced its own whistle through the space between the wood and the glass. I was thinking of the hurricane stories I would tell my friends at school in September. You wouldn’t believe the noise. Like the world splitting open. But then, they’d have stories of their own. It would be all we talked about.
My mother opened my door, flooding the room with light.
“Your father’s making omelets.”
I skipped out of bed and into the bright hallway.
Usually, we ate breakfast quietly, respecting everyone’s waking-up time and watching as the sun slowly lit up the kitchen. But that day the kitchen light glowed against the plywood-darkened windows. And the weatherman’s voice came to us from the next room as we ate, making it sound as if the house were full of people.
My father called work after breakfast to say he wouldn’t be going in and that everyone else should go home after lunch.
“Oh no, now what am I going to do all day?” my father teased.
“We’ll pop some popcorn,” I said, jumping up and down.
“Now? But we just ate breakfast!”
My father looked at my mother, who shrugged.
“Let’s pop some popcorn!” he said.
The sun has almost gone down and the wind off the ocean is cool now. He holds my hand on the sand.
“Strange,” he says.
“What?”
“Popcorn. Like a movie.”
“Well, what would you have done?” And I don’t know why I’m angry about it.
He leans back and looks at me. I wait a whole minute before I speak again. I want to make him afraid the way I am afraid.
We sat all morning in front of the television eating popcorn and listening to the weatherman talk about barometric pressure and ocean currents. His voice was smooth and calm and his arms moved over the white swirl on the map and over Miami in long fluid circles. We didn’t understand everything he meant to say, but that voice was like a dream. And the house was a little cave, shut out from the street. I thought the world could come apart outside and it wouldn’t matter.
I ask him now if he’s ever felt like that.
“Like what?” he says.
“Safe, even if you’re not.”
He says he’s never thought of it.
We were standing in the kitchen, watching my mother make tuna sandwiches.
“Tomorrow we’ll have to get up early and check the gas mains,” my father said. He turned to me. “Maybe you can help me clean up outside. There will be branches and trash all over.”
“I hope we have electricity,” my mother said.
“We might not,” my father said.
“The TV said to fill the bathtub with water,” I said.
“Good idea,” my father said. “Why don’t you be in charge of that.”
I smiled.
My father began to sing in his clear voice.
Yo soy un hombre sincero, de donde crece la palma …
He stopped singing and said suddenly, “The roads might be flooded. We might have to inflate your raft.” He winked at me. “You know, it will keep raining for a couple of days,” he said. “The thunderstorms come after. Sometimes tornadoes.”
“What if the roof leaks?” my mother said.
“We’ll have to check it first thing,” he said. “Then we’ll just take some chewing gum …”
He looked at my mother, who couldn’t resist a small smile.
My father turned off the television and as we ate our sandwiches, we talked more about what we would do to prepare. We’d put flashlights in both rooms, for when the power went out. My mother said she would put the milk in the freezer so it would stay fresh and cold no matter what.
We sat and talked and then we were silent, having planned for everything. My mother read a magazine. My father turned a page in his book. I noticed the house was very quiet. Not just inside, but outside. There wasn’t the usual sound of cars. And the space between the plywood and the glass was silent. I could no longer hear the branches.
“The storm should be getting close,” my father said. We sat and waited. The day was almost over when I put down the book I was reading.
“Tell me again the story of the hurricane,” I said. “Tell me about the flying coconuts.”
My father looked up and smiled.
“Let’s go check the plywood again and I’ll tell you how we got the water out of my father’s Ford.”
My father looked at my mother.
“You two go,” she said.
I stepped outside and was momentarily blinded by the brightness. I blinked and waited for my father to join me. A few thin white clouds floated west in a deepening blue sky. I looked again. A few thin white clouds floated west. The trees swayed back and forth, gently, as if hypnotized. The air smelled of grass and dirt and fresh cuttings. I looked up and down the street and saw that ours was the only house boarded up. Mr. Hanson’s house had tape on the windows. And the Cardellis had lowered their awnings. But my father was the only one who had gone through all the trouble with the plywood. I couldn’t bear to turn back and look at it now.
My father looked up at the sky, but didn’t say anything for a while. We both stood there outside the front door, looking out.
“Well,” my father said. “This is how they are sometimes. They seem to come out of nowhere.”
I looked up at him. I noticed for the first time the lines around his eyes, how his left one seemed to droop into a crevice. Above my father, the branches of the live oak played against each other and then were stilled. I looked at my father for a long time like that, his face framed by those branches and the blue sky beyond. At the top of the street, a boy was slowly riding his bicycle in circles. A car horn sounded far away. My father began to whistle.
I am quiet, thinking.
“So?” he says. “What happened?”
“What do you mean?”
“What happened that night?”
“Isn’t it obvious?” I say.
“It never hit?”
“Struck farther up the coast,” I say. I consider it for a moment and then add, “I lay in bed that night and couldn’t sleep.”
He is quiet.
“Do you suppose,” he says after a moment, “that your father’s stories were true?”
I lay in bed that night as a girl, thinking of big sky and coconuts raining down. I saw our house, hugging itself as if it were afraid of what the wind might bring. I heard my parents whispering a long time into the nigh
t. And then they were quiet and the wind outside was quiet. I was embarrassed for our house, standing there like that in the dark. I wanted to hug my father, tell him we were so lucky after all.
He leans back on the sand. And I think now, What stories are true? We awake and a lover is gone, has been going and now his body is gone too, and we are left in a clutch of stories. Why do we tell them?
“I used to think my father was a big man,” he says. “Do you know what I mean? I thought he would be the first man to never die.”
I nod.
“Then one night I saw him standing by the couch with a drink in his hand,” he says. “It was the same thing he did every night. But that night I noticed one of his shoes was off and his blue sock had a small hole above the ankle. His skin was showing through the hole. He had that drink in his hand and he was smiling and he didn’t know there was a hole in his sock and his skin was showing.”
It is dark now and the shore has receded back into the ocean. I think of his story and why he is telling it now. I don’t know his father. The moon is surrounded by a white halo, which means rain tomorrow, again.
“Something so small,” he says. “And the way you think about a person changes. And you don’t get it back.”
His voice grows soft, like an apology. It is nothing; the night is the same. But I know that very soon he will return to this shore without me, with only a thick wind in the dunes to remind him. He turns his head, a dark profile against the bright sea, and I want to memorize his silhouette. I wonder what he knows about me. I sit and watch and suddenly there is so much more I want to tell him. About waiting and the rain. About winds that blow storms back over the ocean. That my father was going to be a grand singer and my mother was beautiful. I want to tell him how our first year in Miami, my parents spoke only in gestures, all sound gone out of our lives like air. I want to keep talking through the night. I want to wake up with sand in my hair, all my memories spilling over him like a tide that returns again and again. I remember everything I ever wished for. That summer was thrilling. The wind and the rain. It was thrilling. I want to tell him.
The Perfect Fruit
Her husband planted the banana trees one afternoon while she was away, and for eight years the trees lay quietly in a far corner of the yard, pushing up through the soil pale green leaves that hardened and darkened in the sun.
At first Matilde had been angry. She stood by the kitchen sink and looked out the window at the first soft shoots and cursed Raúl’s recklessness. But each day after that she thought less and less about the trees until they passed into a deep part of memory that was almost like forgetting. Now Matilde stood at the sink thinking not about the ancient trees but about her son and the woman he was seeing. It was a Saturday in early March and the wind had begun to stir. It called through the cracks Matilde had left open in the windows to give the wind a voice; and she pretended it was her son’s.
She had seen the woman on only two occasions: first when Anselmo brought her to the Nochebuena gathering last Christmas and Matilde’s eyes had lingered on the woman’s liquid black hair, her narrow hips, the way the bones in her chest welled up like a washboard. Two months later, Matilde and Raúl met them at a Little Havana restaurant. This time the hair spilled over her shoulders and Matilde had to look away before a memory overtook her.
After he moved away, Anselmo still visited on his way home from work. He came alone and Matilde was grateful for that. Every Monday, she made a flan for her son, blending in a block of cream cheese to make it smooth and creamy the way he liked it when he was a child. They sat at the kitchen table with little cups of coffee and dripping slices of flan. Please eat, Matilde said the last time. You’re hardly eating. And as she watched him push the flan around the plate, she ran bits of his life through her mind: Anselmo skipping back and forth over a lawn sprinkler, Anselmo wobbling on new skates, reaching out suddenly to her.
She saw him as a little boy wearing the red baseball cap that his father had given him years before when she and Anselmo had joined him in Miami. The cap was faded and too small, but Anselmo wore it everywhere. One day he came home bareheaded, his face streaked and puffy with tears, and Matilde’s own eyes watered because she knew everything before he said it.
“And he held it over me like this,” Anselmo said, wiping his eyes with the back of his pudgy little hands. “And everyone laughed to see me jumping.” He had been trying to hold back his sobs, but let them come rapidly now like hiccups.
“Oh my angel!” Matilde cried and brought him to her chest. “It’s nothing at all. You’re a big boy. We’ll get you another hat.”
But as he started to quiet down, Matilde’s fury grew. She wanted to hurt this other child, this demon boy who’d bothered her son, and the idea frightened her. She took Anselmo and wiped his tears.
“It’s okay,” she said. “It’s okay, it’s okay.” And the more she repeated it, the more she believed it herself. “It’s okay, my angel. Here, Mami will make you some special cupcakes.”
When she poured the flour into a blue bowl and it rose like clouds of steam, she thought that was the most beautiful thing in the world.
As she watched Anselmo, grown and handsome and trying to hide his flan in pieces along the corner of his plate, Matilde thought of this new black-haired woman. She thinks she knows so much about Anselmo, the way she touches his shoulder and throws her head back for a kiss. Matilde wanted to laugh. It was almost pathetic, really. What could she ever know? The day Anselmo was born, Matilde had thought: There he is and there is not another like him in the world. Now this woman walks into the middle of his life as if she’s been there all along. Matilde began to smile, then caught a shadow across Anselmo’s face, as if she’d muttered something aloud.
“What’s the matter, angel?” she asked. And then, “You used to love my flan.”
“I still like your flan, Mami.”
She looked at him, noticed the way his cheekbones had come out, the way his sideburns emphasized the shadows on his face.
“You’ve lost at least fifteen pounds since you moved in with that woman.”
“Mami, please. Her name is Meegan.”
“You look like a hanger with a suit draped over it.”
Matilde felt bad afterward. She wanted to run after him, explain that the comment wasn’t meant for him. Wasn’t even meant for her. But Matilde didn’t know where to begin. Didn’t know how to explain that the second part of her life had begun to circle the first.
Anselmo didn’t call for four days. When Matilde picked up the phone and finally heard his voice, she thought she could spend the day listening to it like the low wind that called through the house. He mentioned dinner and an announcement and Matilde had said yes, yes, she would arrange everything.
Now Matilde stood by the kitchen sink thinking, An announcement? Why in my house? She stared out the window, running menus through her head. Pork? Beef? Matilde stopped. What was out in the yard? She pulled the blinds all the way up, distracted suddenly from her planning. Something yellow out there, amid the orderly, uniform green of the yard.
Matilde leaned closer to the glass. The wind tossed the tops of the lime trees west. Matilde turned her head, trying to see past the motion of green to focus on the yellow. Yes, something yellow growing. At this distance, it was barely the size of a grain of rice. A single yellow grain of rice. Matilde lowered the blinds. She turned off the lights in the kitchen and, feeling suddenly very tired, lay down on the couch in the family room.
Matilde was twenty-one and alone when Anselmo tore himself out of her two months before he was supposed to. Upset stomach, she had thought at first, all that food at the shower. Raúl was already in Miami. Her own visa was supposed to have arrived, but there was some other kind of national emergency. Toothpaste had disappeared from the shelves. In the streets, the parking meters still lay shattered where months before the crowd had passed through like one giant, ecstatic animal, devouring the past. Matilde had felt herself physically b
uoyed along by the momentum, her own thoughts riding the crest of something new and young. Now she walked among the shards of glass, afraid of the crackle under her feet. The streets were empty and silent and Matilde began to cry, gathering her skirt in a ball. She wandered for blocks, the tears flowing freely. The pain grew in her like a fist opening and she began to imagine herself as the last survivor of a cataclysm. She saw herself as from a great distance, a little speck among the ruined glass and metal that stretched for miles, over continents and oceans.
She woke to a white light that made her eyes water. She blinked away the darkness and when she opened her eyes again, she saw a skinny little eel baby, wrinkly skin draped over his bony arms.
Raúl and Matilde sat across from one another at the kitchen table, separated by her cookbooks.
“Did he say what it was?”
“An announcement.”
Matilde finished her toast and pushed the plate away. She opened Cocina al Minuto and turned to the section on pork.
“Yes, but what kind? Did he say?”
“No.”
“Did you ask?”
“Are you going to eat your breakfast?” Matilde asked. “I spent an hour preparing that tortilla.”
“You should have asked,” he said. “What if it’s serious?”
“If it were serious, we wouldn’t be celebrating with dinner. Don’t be dramatic.”
Raúl tilted his head to think about this.
“Eat those chorizos, don’t just separate them like that,” Matilde said. “The eggs don’t taste the same without fat.”
Matilde took a sip of her café con leche. Then she flipped another page in her cookbook.
“What are you making?” Raúl said through a mouthful.
“I don’t know yet.” She didn’t look up. “Stuffed pork, maybe.”
“Well, you know what it is, right?”
“What is?”
