by Rita Indiana
All the while, I’m growing really fast and I hear the neighbors say Mami must be spending a fortune on my shoes alone. Since I’m growing so fast, the swimsuit’s really tight and makes me turn purple, same with the diving mask, the water wings, and the swim fins. First come the ulcers, then the pustules. The swimsuit disappears amidst my bruises, same with the diving mask, the water wings, and the swim fins. The rice pudding, champola, and everything else begin to rot and fruit flies and ants make castles out of the pumpkins. They bring a priest to reason with me. Certain punishments can be luxurious, the priest says as he sticks his finger in the stinky champola and brings it to his mouth.
I don’t rock anymore. The smell of Lycra and blood is marvelous. Sometimes they turn on the TV so I can entertain myself, so I’ll forget, but I close my eyes, which are so dry they have to put cotton balls and ice on them.
Don’t despair, that’s all Mami can say. And I imagine (I’m totally blind now) how my toys are getting old, how ivy and moss are crawling up the walls of my Playmobil fort. But I keep waiting.
And then one day, deep in my ears, I start to hear a little music. At first I thought it was crickets and grasshoppers, the little creatures in my ulcers, or those albino tadpoles, gouramis and tilapias that live in the melted champola, all singing to me, but it was the phone ringing. It’s Papi, who’s just around the corner.
Then, another day, one of Papi’s girlfriends called to say Papi was sick.
And another day, a friend of Papi’s called, that Papi had been taken to jail.
And another day, an aunt of Papi’s, that Papi had been found dead.
And another day, Papi’s sister, that Papi wasn’t dead, no way.
And another day it was the operator saying Papi was on the other end and it was a long-distance call.
But I didn’t want to, I couldn’t, get up. Mami talked to him and told him everything was fine, we were all fine, that I was doing fine in school, that I was exactly like him.
That night a woman came through the window when we were all sleeping and told me she was very hungry and then, one by one, she ate all the desserts, the sour and bloated milk, the phlegmy rice pudding, the shriveled flan, the rusted sugar flowers, the frosted cotton. She even ate the tadpoles, gouramis, and tilapias, then licked the plates, the glasses, and the bowls until they sparkled even as she took them to the kitchen, where she washed them again and again while singing a little song. I took the feeding tube out myself and got up, limping, until I reached the remote control. It was already dawn, and I hadn’t realized so much time had passed that they were talking in English on TV. So now, instead of Our Father, there was instead One two little three little Indians, four little five little six little Indians, seven little eight little nine little Indians, ten little Indian boys and girls. Later, with my head under the pillow, I try to imagine where exactly “just around the corner” Papi might be, and where this corner could be, and what it must take to get around it.
It must require a very big car. Or maybe many cars, one in front of the other.
Then Papi calls and asks, Who do you wanna live with, your dad or your mom? So I say:
car
bicycle
plane
wheel
boat
boot
blue
candy
book
walkie-talkie
run
ball
basketball
Then we started getting cards that said Merry Christmas, Happy Birthday, Happy New Year, Good Luck, Happy Easter, Happy Birthday, It’s a Boy!, It’s a Girl!, It’s a Down Syndrome Martian!, and so on. Cards with clocks, Santa Clauses, elves, hearts, elephants, four-leaf clovers, dinosaurs, trumpets, chimneys, snow, and sometimes little girls, little angels with writing next to them that says, It’s You! Cards signed by Papi and one of his girlfriends and one of my new little siblings.
When I don’t get cards, I get dolls. Rag dolls, plastic dolls, ceramic dolls. Pierrots, dancers, babies, dolls that drink and shit, dolls that move their teeth, seven black dolls with Afros, blue-eyed dolls that cry when you pull their hair, but also some bald newborns.
And when it’s not dolls, it’s nannies, young peasants my size with hairy legs, hairy underarms, who go braless and pantyless, who smell like sour oranges and cuaba soap. Mami teaches them how to use a razor and gives them perfume, bras, pantyhose, old lipsticks, and they wear it all on Sundays, when Mami lets them go sit on the garden wall so they can talk to the watchmen and the nannies out in the world. Some of them are nice and tell me stories about drowning women and rolling cabbage heads that aren’t really cabbages but human heads. Some let me see the telenovelas and cover my eyes when they kiss on the telenovelas but I see it all anyway cuz they always leave a space between their fingers so I won’t miss it. Some show me their tits and, if they’re really nice, sometimes even more. Some bathe me with very cold water, saying it’s to make me strong. They wait until I have all my Playmobil stuff set up on the floor, ready for battle, the horses and tractors in their places, and then they come with a mop wet with Mistolín to wipe it all away. Almost always, in the end, Mami fires them. Cuz they’re thieves, or disgusting, lazy, shameless, meddling, too dark, mixed race, cheap, cuz they say they’re from San Cristóbal when they’re really from Elías Piña, cuz they stink, have bad breath, fuck watchmen, smoke menthols (whore cigs, not for decent girls), cuz their nipples get erect when people are around, cuz they talk back, use too much bleach, too much oregano, cuz their mother’s the biggest of all bitches, cuz they’re so damn gutsy, cuz they have such balls, cuz they use razors, perfumes, lipsticks, Mami’s new pantyhose.
Where have they gone? Goddammit.
And when it’s not the nannies, it’s the girlfriends themselves. The sharp little hairs of their recently shaved legs are like cacti on my face. They’ve made me hide in their pantyhose. So Mami won’t see me, so Papi’s other girlfriends won’t see me. They disguise themselves as female cops, as Mami’s college classmates, as waitstaff, as young girls on their way to the store wearing shorts and strapless blouses; one even dressed up as a kindergarten teacher and hurried off with me and my lunch box and my little backpack screaming, MA ME MI MO MU, PA PE PI PO PU, SA SE SI SO SU! until another one—this one disguised as Mami—cut her off screaming, TA TE TI TO TU, RA RE RI RO RU! and snatched me from her arms in one fell swoop (my lunch box opens in midair and everything pours out of it: the milk from the thermos, the cheese sticks, the hard-boiled egg). The teachers, the teachers’ friends, and the parents who come to pick up their children are left SPEECHLESS.
Now they kidnap me from my own home, right in front of Mami, but she doesn’t see a thing. They come at me on the TV, they talk to me on the radio with their pantyhose voices, with their pantyhose mouths, with their suits made of pantyhose, and they just pantyhose right in my face. They take me to their apartments, to their apartment hotels (which Papi pays for in advance), and they bathe me in their tubs filled with berry-scented bubbles. They make one of the servants, just one of them (who Papi pays for in advance), bring fried yucca with ketchup and a vanilla malt on a tray for me right to the tub. They let me paint my nails, they let me jump on the bed, they let me break the bed, they buy me a new bed every day just so I can break it (later they tell Papi he’s the one breaking them so he’ll continue to pay for them in advance). When I’m constipated, they smear me with Vaseline and pluck out the turds with the long red nails all my dad’s girlfriends have.
When it’s not the girlfriends, then it’s her Papi sends, the Cuban, with a document that says she’s the one, that Mami should pack my bag and hand me over, that I’m finally gonna be reunited with my father but Mami doesn’t trust it (given all those costume changes) and has Dr. Lerux (Dr. Lerux is very old) take a look at the document, but she still doesn’t trust it (given all that kidnapping) and she has Dr. Bisonó look over Dr. Lerux before he looks at the document, but Mami still doesn’t trust it (given how the world is) and ha
s Dr. Jiminían look over Dr. Bisonó and his entire genealogical tree before he looks over Dr. Lerux and so forth to infinity. Before I can take a plane to see Papi, a mob of doctors stick speculums into each other in our living room and the Cuban and I discuss whether or not I should take my little stuffed bee named Maya.
We finally leave. I’m very happy and Mami dries a tear as we go out on the tarmac. I’m wearing a yellow linen dress and the sun is splendid. Little Playmobil cars carry our bags, zigging left and zagging right, and when I get to the first step of the airstairs, I turn around and say good-bye, even though there’s no one and nothing on the tarmac, just yellow and white stripes, but I know Mami is waving her hand to say good-bye somewhere out there, surrounded by a coterie of doctors (all of them very old and really into examining each other) who pat her shoulder and tell her this is gonna be very good for both of us.
Now that I’m calmer and the plane has taken off and the Cuban has explained why I had to buckle my seat belt, I realize she’s the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen in my life. I hear a voice that says, The most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen in my life. Later she tells me I’m very pretty and I vomit all over her. A flight attendant came right away to clean up the mess. Just before leaving with the dirty rags she gave me a little bag in case the Cuban told me I was pretty again. Then the flight attendant winked at me, which is what Papi’s girlfriends do when they’re in disguise and they want me to know it’s them.
The Cuban, who has very soft hands with short nails painted the same light polish as Papi, puts her arm around me and now the silk of her blouse is the most delicious fabric that has ever touched me in my life. I lean my head on her chest and she caresses my hair and it’s then I feel we’re flying and I understand we are thousands upon thousands of feet from my rocker, my games, between my mom and me, and as I close my eyes somebody paints a smile on my face.
I’m shoved around and around and it’s the Cuban who’s shoving me. When I wake up, she’s dressed in camouflage, a green beret on her head. She has a cigar in her mouth and wears a fake beard and I wonder what she’s supposed to be disguised as now. The Cuban is threatening the flight attendant against the bathroom door, giving her little cuts with a sky-blue plastic knife. Later she makes her way through the cabin using a nail cutter. The passengers cooperate cuz they’ve all read in travel magazines how Cuban terrorists force planes to land in Cuba with the intention of picking up dissidents. So we cooperate, all very quietly. When the plane lands in Havana, I go up to the window and see how the Cuban, fixing her loose beard, helps some schoolgirls in Pioneer uniforms get down from a truck and go into the cargo hold, all of them very beautiful, all of them for Papi, which is really (never better expressed) something else.
When I wake up again, I’m in a room I don’t recognize. I get up and my feet are surprised by the carpeting. I go out to the hallway and the air smells of newness, of how things smell when they first come out of the box, like Barbies. I liven up and rub my eyes with my knuckles, then look for another door to open.
Maybe this is New York or Miami.
Maybe this is Papi’s house.
I opened a door and the only thing I could see on the bed with black sheets was a shoulder covered by strands of brown hair. I wanted to touch that shoulder and for the person to whom that shoulder belonged, who was naked and sleeping facedown next to my father, to turn around, without waking up too much, and kiss my mouth. I’ve never wanted anything so much in my life.
That shoulder covered by strawberry-scented hair was calling to me. I kept gazing at it from the door and then from the edge of my dad’s bed, and then I got so close I could almost touch the strands and the shoulder with my nose. But I could feel vomit pushing at my throat, which is why I left the room, and then my nausea immediately went away. In the living room I turned on the TV Papi had bought the day before, which was enormous. I stood next to the thing, pressing the channel button with my finger (my nail was dirty) but I wasn’t looking at the screen. When I finally focused, it was Jimmy Swaggart’s show, the same one I used to watch with my mom in the DR, in which people ditch their crutches and shout, Hallelujah! I like how people say hallelujah and now that there was no translation and Jimmy spoke only in English, the only thing I understood were the hallelujahs. I thought if I understood the hallelujahs it was cuz I understood English. So I thought: Hallelujah. And I said: Hallelujah. That’s when I felt María Cristina (my dad’s Cuban girlfriend), her arms surrounding me. She put her lips very close to my ear and asked, What are you doing, crazy girl?
Back then, I was really little, and I got even smaller so María Cristina could pick me up off the floor and kiss my neck, my cheek, my eyes, my belly, lifting up my Spiderman PJs.
I let it happen. I just let it happen.
Later, María Cristina and I turn on MTV and, since she knows more English than me, she teaches me the lyrics to the songs I like. There’s one I like a lot that goes like this, Let’s hear it for the boy, ah, let’s give the boy a hand, eh yeah, ehhh, yeah. It’s American music. American music. María Cristina and I dance and dance and dance, and now no one can take our MTV away from us, no one can take our MTV. Before we go out, María Cristina and I shower together and comb our hair together and she teaches me how to match my clothes, especially given all the clothes Papi bought us. She says I have to learn all this so no one will call me a hick like they did to her when she first got here. She arrived in a boat crammed with people. I imagine her about my size, wearing a white cheesecloth dress and staring at the sea. María Cristina. She tells me this story every night at bedtime. She comes in the room she and Papi have prepped for me, with two beds in case one of my friends stays the night, a yellow table between the two little beds and a light that shines orange on the pillows and sheets. She covers me with the blanket and lays down on her side next to me, a leg over me. I feel the weight of her leg and smell the strawberries in her hair and, in the dark, I use a finger to feel the thickness of one of her eyebrows.
María Cristina lets me crack eggs for a cake, but I don’t do it right, so she lets me try again. Three times. María Cristina lets me wear her sunglasses and chew ten pieces of gum at the same time. When we go to the supermarket, I get in the front part of the cart cuz I’m too big for the little rack. María Cristina pushes hard and jumps on the cart so the two of us roll down the aisle and stick our tongues out at the old woman in shorts with a walker who’s standing in front of the Quaker oatmeal section. We also stick our tongues out at the squatting Puerto Rican who puts price stickers on the sardines. Then we stared at another old woman talking to the ninety-nine-cent cans of powdered milk, for Christ’s sake. María Cristina takes my hand to cross the street and I don’t let go. In my mind, I don’t let go of the new words she’s taught me either.
And now to count to twenty.
All this happens on Saturdays and Sundays cuz the rest of the week there’s a babysitter who comes to pick lice off me. She’s not Cuban but Venezuelan, but she’s also Papi’s girlfriend. Papi told her I had a lot of lice, that I was covered, and that they had to go. The lice came home on my head. I got them at school, and even after they’d all died on every other kid’s head, they were still having a party on mine. The teachers had a blast killing them. It got me out of all kinds of homework: subtraction, addition, writing “my mom loves me” one hundred times. Thanks to those blessed lice, the teachers were quite entertained. One day, one teacher even brought a book in which she compared my lice (fat like little beans) with the ones in the book. Mine sprouted on my hair and skated on the curls. Then Mami said it might have been better if I’d had bad hair. She prayed my hair would turn bad, like on black people, so the lice would get tangled in an Afro and choke. I could hear them singing and dancing at all hours, drunk on my sweet blood, and I’d scratch myself with both hands. Sometimes I’d even ask my friends to please help me scratch.
That’s why they buzzed my hair off, like a boy’s.
And that’s why when we pla
y that we’re mom and dad, my friends want me to play dad.
And that’s why I climbed on top of Natasha under her bed.
(Same with Mónica and Sunyi and Renata and Jessy and Franchy and Zunilda and Ivecita.)
And that’s why Doña Victoria, Natasha’s grandmother, whipped her with a belt.
(And Paola and Lily and Sandrita and Gabi and Julia and Karina.)
That’s why Mami started dressing me only in dresses.
(And Verónica and Claudia and Laurita.)
And that’s why when I ran and fell, I scraped my legs and knees.
(And Katy and Daniela and Ana María.)
And that’s why I got two scabs on my knees.
(And Nicole and Charo and Carla Patricia.)
And that’s why Mami started dressing me only in pants.
(And Larissa and Fénix and Lisa and Consuelo and Aimée and Melissa.)
But the lice kept sucking my blood.
The babysitter is totally clear about this. She washes my hair with something Papi bought that itches more than the lice, and later she dries my hair with the blower on high so as to fry the lice. When she’s finished, she heats up a can of Chef Boyardee and my charred ears fall into my plate of spaghetti and meatballs.
In the afternoon, we go to the condo pool, which is full of kids of all sizes and colors who chase and push each other and climb on each other’s shoulders, all the while holding Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader action figures in their hands. I love to sit on the edge of the pool before going in and watching as folks who arrive dive in headfirst or roll up their bodies into cannonballs and splash water everywhere. Some dare to use the diving board, performing mortal leaps and then belly flop or fall on their backs. When they climb up the ladder from the water, they itch so much they twist their bodies like lizards. I scream at them: SÓBATE QUE NO HAY BENGUÉ. And somebody else falls on his face and I scream: SÓBATE QUE NO HAY BENGUÉ. They scream things back at me I don’t understand cuz, though some of them are younger than me, they already know more English than the devil.
