Kingdom of the Young

by Edie Meidav

  You can imagine with what caught breath the next morning I leaned out of the window above the snack bar, where a loveseat may have witnessed some of Yuzniel’s recent actions.

  Did I love or hate him most during the moment I watched my boy totter with head lowered across the street and up the ramp to where the hotel guards nodded and let him pass through the glass doors? Who knows. I do know that the wind had never fluttered the hotel flags so beautifully and for the first time the palm trees looked splayed out, desperate for love. If I were a pop singer I could sing a story about the trees and flags, the guards and the letter that must have burnt a hole in Yuzniel’s hands. I watched, sure that he and I could right everything, just the same way he had made good of the deck of cards he’d been dealt, his country, family, career, prison. He would figure this one out. On the other side, we would laugh together the way we had when we rode our high school wall.

  I could hold it all in my hand, that little bird of what I saw we could have. Even if for some reason we hadn’t had kids yet, the way most people did, maybe because of chemical water we drank as kids during the era in which you could light flames from the tap, I was not giving up hope. Our children would get Z names, Zuzu and Zamila and Zajuan, our new snack bar would boom, and we’d keep good stray kids off the street the way our parents had not.

  Well, about half an hour later, my cousin came limping out of the hotel. Because of the mood swings among our Havana maintenance crews, only two weeks earlier the apartment above had crumbled into his and one of his legs worked slower than I remembered. From my upstairs window I tried reading the situation but could not and ran down the stairs. Of course who was coming upstairs but the one boy I had ever dreamed about, the one I still could not help seeing as a saint, the buddha of the Vedado as everyone called him, Yuzniel who didn’t need much, who could grant others happiness?

  Yanet, he said, softly, brushing my shoulders, and I might have realized the apelike message meant by this. Despite knowing he had lied to me, I could not understand what in the end turned out to be as much apology as a goodbye.

  I do find myself unable to throw away the letter he left at the hotel. Because what trashcan is big enough to contain it?

  Let it be known my dealings have been just as honest as the revolution. I have done nothing but what the system asked of me. As for the women in my life, the heart wants what it does. I cannot blame it for wanting a solicitous youth who might have been mine if unfortunate circumstances had not stolen a few years. Judge me but look in your own mirror and can you condemn?

  I ask: Would you denounce such a man, or do you start with our leader or that slut? I see her in the hall smiling crocodile teeth, pregnant belly rounding her rainbow shirt, the curve of all we could have had if our great reforms had not thrown my boy in prison. And what this means is I lost the flower of my youth to a boy from Generation Y and all I got was some pay-off money, but as we were taught: never give up hope, venceremos siempre, and some better story could round my bend soon, especially since it happens I am next in line to be asked to come to Orlando by an uncle. And who can say the day I step off our beautiful isle will not be the exact day that the man to cause us such suffering will finally go to hell?

  KNAVES

  QUINCEAÑERA

  Get out of this donut store where I’m the one responsible for dropping the dough into the vat of hot oil at five in the morning, making donuts and their holes and go all the way back to the night where nothing happened. Still you would come up with your hands empty. People like chalking up blame. When they do, I laugh. How could it all be my doing? This story really happened but that doesn’t make it my fault.

  First Monday of third grade, Lili arrived at our school. I spotted her older sister walking the halls but it took till Thursday for me to realize their connection, lined up for the bus looking carved by different knives.

  Seeing Lili, you’d think she was round and cute like one of those dolls in an ad with too much echo that makes you know some welfare mom will buy it on sale, Lili’s hair long, straight, and so shiny it could make you want to take a scissors to it, while her sister even in fifth grade had big hulking shoulders and a face that might as well have been pared jagged by one of our rusty blades in wood shop. Plus the nose on that face, like my mother said about people, the nose on that face—to me that nose was identical to the Indian statue outside our village cigar store, the one so exciting to our vandals the storeowner had to drag it inside every night.

  Later I learned the sister’s name was Ros, pronounced as if it should have been spelled Rose. If a letter went missing in the spelling of her name, she more than made up for it with her shoulders, meaty like a teenager’s, two brown chicken fingers flat out her plain tank top where you could already see bra straps sticking out. Lining up for bus 31, ready to go home, I looked over at 30, trying to understand how the two sisters could be linked. This part I remember exactly, wearing my denim overall dress, shoved behind Emma, not listening to whatever she was saying about how Ella had a crush on Nolan and made him blush and how Tommy was always trying to stomp on her feet. Lili was the first girl I had ever seen who didn’t know how to speak English and even if my mom liked calling me a smart aleck, I knew nothing about what it would be like to be that girl standing with her older sister.

  Lili spent most of that first week in the front of the class sitting up straight as if Miss Connor could just hit some commando button to electrocute a student’s seat. Later I learned number 30 went where no other bus did, tumbling on a dirt road at least a mile all the way up to some land owned by our main farmstand, the Portarella place. Lili’s house anyway was in nothing you’d call a neighborhood, just one more trailer plopped among a clump of others strung with Christmas lights and chicken wire, all with tiny gardens out front and crooked trellises meant for cucumbers and violets, nothing hiding how temporary it all was, because even with all the electrical wire running around, you could tell it would take only a half day for that kind of home to be hitched up for somewhere else.

  The first time I saw her place from the outside I thought it looked fun, like Lili would know as much as the workers who came each year to run shooting galleries and rides at the county fair, people who spent the week smoking outside trailers, spitting tobacco and jokes.

  My mom always used to say I had a photographic memory. It would get me in trouble if my mouth didn’t first, according to her, but I wasn’t the one who called Lili a wetback. Emmett learned stuff from his older brother and taught us. Even if the same brother bullied Emmett till his eyes were purple, at least Emmett got phrases we all benefited from at some point and so back in second grade we knew to call certain boys four-eyes or retard, dork or faggot, just a sampling of Emmett’s goods.

  So when Emmett started calling Lili a wetback on her first day with us, when she barely spoke a word, it took us a while to understand. For a long time after, Lili kept reminding me how I stood up for her and how even on that first day she knew it would be me. Usually I never did anything like this but I did, I told Emmett to stop saying wetback because it made him sound special-ed, but then Dalton who really was special-ed said it just meant Lili was Mexican as a taco.

  That part also wasn’t true. An hour later, Miss Connor wanted to tell us more about Lili—no Y, she kept saying, as if to remind herself, Lili with two Is, isn’t that interesting, class?—and kept saying Lili is from Gua-tay-ma-la, the name of her country. She made us all write the name down. Guataymala.

  I turned around and made a face at Emmett and Dalton. See? I mouthed. Not Mexico!

  So that was the first time I got in trouble because of Lili.

  Because Miss Connor thought I was talking up in class, she grounded me on a chair sitting outside. I sat there, kicking my heels against the wall just loudly enough that someone inside might hear a code of protest while also thinking Guataymala could be a good name for a horse, one I would maybe one day have, like Sherry who took riding lessons, and I would sit tall on my horse and
kick it to go faster.

  That was Lili’s first day with us, but on each of the next days, Lili relaxed a little, showing up with her shiny hair, sitting up straight, wearing the same too-fancy dress maybe three days in a row and then only one other. But she always smelled clean like she’d been scrubbed with Ivory soap, a fact I knew because her last name, Rodriguez, was just before mine, Rogers, and so I now waited to go out for recess standing behind her. And because things can be so random, or you can’t predict how life goes, you could say that without the order of the alphabet, Lili and I wouldn’t have gotten to be friends.

  Once I leaned a little close just to inhale the goodness of her hair. I remember thinking as soon as she spoke more, maybe I would invite her over to play line tag one afternoon in the grass behind my house, the way I used to do with Emma. Because even in the beginning, every now and then Lili gave this shy smile which made me think she already knew English and was just pretending not to understand.

  Before lunch every day, an aide came to take her out of class and lead her to some room where the Chinese boy Matthew and a Greek kid named Spyro got to have English lessons and lollipops, too, from what I saw. By Eastertime, Lili could say Easter and bunny and eggs as good as any of us, not a lot of words but enough. We’d also become friends. Not best friends, because for me being best friends meant you get to go to someone’s house and eat chips without asking, you can flop down on the sofa and people ignore you like you’re part of the family. I used to have that with Suzanne before her dad lost his job at the discount warehouse across the river and they had to move away in second grade. Lucky or not, Lili appeared during a lull. Before she came, and even for some time after, I was okay without a real best friend.

  Even if it took my waiting till fifth grade to get to come over to her house, we were casual best friends. That meant we looked for each other at recess, we jumped rope or played line tag. And at the bus stop, I didn’t care how her sister Ros always threw me a worried look when I said goodbye. As my dad used to say before he left, I had bigger fish to fry. By April, against us kids’ advice, ignoring even that I’d banded my two kid brothers together to beg her different, there my mom was at home again, pregnant with a fifth kid.

  She didn’t care, she just went ahead and did stuff like this with whatever man she was seeing. The man’s thing, the woman’s—I knew about it all from what Emmett told us but who wants to think about their mom that way who mostly was just a person who came home sweat-stained and forgetting her hairnet was still on. She had started dropping hints about the manager from her job at the deli in the grocery store which meant when things got bad we got to pay with coupons and usually no one saw. My mom had her own issues, I could tell by how she started smoking again, telling me to go after school to the neighbor’s, and also saying that once the baby showed up, I would think she was cute. So Ros giving me a weird look meant nothing until the day after my third kid brother was born when I was just hanging out in the neighbor’s yard twirling the little thingamajig sign that shows a picture of a dog going poop and says CURB YOURSELF, the one still there. When the sisters came by, Lili tugged her sister over toward me and in her broken way told me they were walking to town.

  By yourself?

  The sister’s English was worse than Lili’s, but she nodded and said they were going to buy milk. Meel-ka. They didn’t have anyone to drive them.

  The neighbor wasn’t watching so I made a choice and decided to go with them.

  You do that? Go?

  I shrugged, because it was not like I’d ever escaped before, but my homework was done and I had eaten the baloney-and-cheese sandwich the neighbor made. No one would notice.

  Just for a bit, I said, the way my mom said whenever she walked out our door.

  That day we had such an adventure. I don’t want to go into it but it turned out I liked Ros too, because when she finally smiled, her whole cigar-store face became almost as bright as Lili’s. I say almost because there was something sad about her and usually I didn’t like sad kids especially if I couldn’t tell where the sadness came from, and maybe I have it too now, since last year a man I hooked up with happened to say that the first time he saw me in the bar two towns down he could tell I had been neglected by my mother. Damaged goods? I said. I knew what I was getting into, he said. This was when we were first getting to know each other and ever since we broke up it’s easy to remember how sweet the time was before my damage showed up to ruin it all or whatever. Twice he brought me bouquets. Once he said: I like the way you act like everything is such a big adventure. I only get now that he was some guy up from the city on a contract who saw me as some small-town hick with some convenient mounds to hump. At the time I thought, adventure, he likes my freshness, maybe he could even be the one, the guy. And he must have mistaken me for a different kind of person just because I happened to be carrying a yoga mat when we met. It wasn’t even mine. But that’s a whole nother story.

  To stick to the point, after my first adventure with Lili and Ros that June day involving free ice cream and sneaking back in to our respective homes with no consequence, I knew I was in their family. Even if it took two more years before they let me come visit what they called home which was their tiny packed trailer.

  People still like to tease me and say I was the one closest to Lili and I messed up her life but let them talk. I don’t care what they think. Maybe next year I’ll finally leave the donut shop, get out of here and go to the city. I’m pushing toward thirty and still think it’s funny how of all the locals I always end up knowing city people more than anybody else does, because I meet them in our one café in town, the new place with the four-dollar crescent rolls. Maybe I’ll go to a modeling or television agency because even if people say I have buckteeth, they can’t help their small minds. Teeth you can fix. It’s the other stuff that’s harder, as I know from my whole history with my back.

  One of the things we loved doing, Ros, Lili, and me, was modeling, pretending we were walking down a catwalk, using the stone walkway between my house and the neighbor’s. We’d walk down the runway and swivel our hips pretty convincingly. The neighbor didn’t mind, off watching television in her dark room off the kitchen, those boring soap operas where all they did was fight or kiss.

  If it was the kind of day where the sidewalk was sizzling, we’d turn on her hose and play water games and call it our wet t-shirt contest without really knowing what we meant.

  Sometimes I even invited the sisters over to have a cheese sandwich at the neighbor’s because it was fun to trespass and all the neighbor cared about was that she got paid when she delivered me to my mother at six every night.

  None of us lived the kind of life we saw on TV, which the sisters watched in Spanish at home as I later found out, but they also knew shows in English so we had that language in common. After I finally came to their trailer, I remember thinking Lili was as beautiful as one of those girls on their Spanish shows: one time, she was changing her shirt, facing her closet, the tiny one she shared with her sister, and for a second there was just her bare back and hair fallen to her waist over this sort of long gray house-skirt they wore, all of her pretty as Pocahontas. I don’t know if the closet moment was the only second I wanted to be her but it counted as one. She called everything cute and nice, including the bunny in our classroom she wouldn’t let go of when it was her turn to hold it, cradling it and singing rockabye, and then remembering to feed it hay even when it wasn’t her turn. Plus her voice was so gentle, I loved hearing it coming down the hall toward me, I would get lit up after talking to her. That much I remember for sure.

  So fast forward past all those elementary-school bunnies and our sidewalk modeling to eighth grade and the truth is that once we hit middle school me and Lili were no longer best friends, not the way we’d fallen into being around fourth grade or fifth when we’d sealed the deal. By eighth, Lili was speaking English good as any of us and was just one more in our pack. The truth is, I found it easier to hang around
Ella. I’d go over when Ella wasn’t at Brownies or in her 4-H Club, ballet class, or her violin lesson and we’d sneak into Ella’s mom’s dresses and parade around in front of her sisters and brothers and it felt good, like the kind of family I deserved, all of them reading one book together at night on their big unfake suede couch.

  And whenever I went to Lili and Ros’s trailer, which I still did, the only one of our group who knew where they lived, I would usually just see a bunch of frowning men in cowboy hats and jeans. Something about their bodies always looked too young for their heads and being around them made me also feel too hot and big. Too many people living in one small space, plus they always had different people coming in and out, some cousin who had just arrived or an aunt with a new baby. At Ella’s house, you’d feel you had more space to move and talk, because in any of her many nooks you could just wait out any awkward moment. But at Lili’s, we might as well have been in a bowling alley with balls smacking up against everything: two wrong inches to the left and you could become one of the pins.

  Sometimes I’d be with the sisters slumped on the couch watching some show when their dad came home, a small tight man with a curlicue moustache and weirdly German name, angry as he hung his cowboy hat up after whatever dirty hacking and hauling he’d been doing in the Portarella fields. When he saw us three, he’d just grunt, already opening his beer by the time he got to the tiny fridge where Lili’s mother always left him a plate of mushy tamales. He’d come throw his feet up on the card table and bark at someone to bring him something, a napkin or another drink, and we’d do all we could to scoot out. Mainly, at her house what I saw was this: two teenage girls, one bathroom, the mother and father, an aunt and her boyfriend and new baby, squeezed into a pellet of a trailer. The claustrophobia didn’t mean I stopped coming over, especially because I liked the cooking of the mom, Lucia, who looked tired but had the girls’ smile, and who barely half-listened when Lili told me how, back in their country, everyone around had been getting killed and Lucia and her husband had been just thirteen when they got across the border and to New York where they knew someone who had brought them up north to the Portarellas’ farm. The family being so restless I thought I understood: like them, I knew I was meant for better.