Bird of Paradise

by Raquel Cepeda

  Watching Number One play like Chris Evert in a Steffi Graf world, I’m floored to see how little it takes to get a full ride to a division one school. What’s even more confusing is that Number One and I aren’t allowed to play practice matches against each other like the boys are. One afternoon when I think our coach won’t show his face, I challenge her to a match.

  After winning fairly easily, I’m beckoned to the sideline and chastised by the coach, who showed up after all. “You have a bad attitude, Cepeda.”

  “But we were just playing,” I say. “This isn’t a tournament.”

  “I need you to sit out for a few,” he says. His blue eyes are cold and angry. “What did I tell you about playing her?”

  The coach doesn’t scold his star tennis player, especially not in front of his homeboy, her dad, who drops by often and unannounced.

  When we hit the road, I learn a whole new lesson about team camaraderie and humor. On an off day, one of the girls relaxing by the pool calls a few of us over to share a joke her mom just told her on the phone.

  “My mom is so funny,” she says to us. “Okay, check this out—”

  “Yeah, okay, I’m game,” I say.

  “So we just bought a new dishwasher.” She pauses. “His name is Juan.”

  She starts laughing. The other girls chuckle, except Number One and me.

  “You don’t think that’s funny?” she asks, still laughing.

  “Um, what exactly did that joke mean?”

  “Dude, she’s Hispanic,” says Number One. “That was kind of a stupid joke.”

  “How was I supposed to know what she was?” says the jester. “And I was talking about Mexicans—she doesn’t look like one of them.”

  “Your mom taught you that?” I ask. “Does she keep Juan shackled all day to your dishwasher and then to a tree at night?” I laugh. “What’s wrong, massa?”

  The jester bolts up and retreats to our room without a word. A couple of the other girls follow.

  “Fuck them,” Number One says. “Let’s go for a drink. I’ll use my fake ID. They never ask us white girls to prove anything, so it was easy-breezy to get the DMV to issue me one.” We laugh all the way to the bar down the block.

  Back at the room, I notice that all of the jester’s jewelry has been cleared from the dresser. An alpha female, she encourages some of the other girls to do the same. Most of them avoid eye contact with me for the rest of the trip, including the only other person of color on our team, one of the few Black-American guys on campus to pledge a white fraternity.

  When we arrive back on campus, Number One confides that some of the girls have been complaining about not feeling safe around me.

  I start skipping tennis practice on a regular basis, spending more time with my college soulmate, a country boy named Chris, from a small town outside of Pittsburgh I’ve never heard of called Washington.

  Chris and I met at the pool hall, where I stood checking him out so hard, he couldn’t help but notice despite the sophomore, junior, and senior women standing around him, cracking stupid jokes and vying for his attention. I found his tight curls irresistible and his freckles unusual. I began counting the flecks one by one until I made him uncomfortable enough to walk over to the pillar I was leaning against with Jane.

  “Where are you from?” he asked.

  “New York City.”

  “Ahhh, a city slicker,” he said with an accent that wasn’t quite urban or country. “Are you Native-American?”

  “Negative. The Spanish cowboys killed our Indians, bro,” I said.

  “Are you Puerto Rican? I met one on campus once. Or are you mixed?”

  “I’m dominiyorkian.”

  He’s never heard of the place. “Is that in the Bronx? I’m part Blackfoot Indian, part soul-broth’a,” he said.

  “That’s a mighty fine mix,” I flirted back. We sat in front of the steps outside the hall talking until the sun came up the following morning.

  From that morning on, we spent almost every night together, mostly talking about where we came from: two different planets in the same orbit. At some point, I’m not sure exactly when, we fell in love.

  * * *

  Chris lives almost at the top of a steep hill in a two-story frat house on Chesterfield Road, minutes away from campus and closer to my new dorm at Lothrop Hall.

  I moved in right next to Jane on the thirteenth floor. Finally, I had my own space, my own piece of real estate to do as I pleased. My slice of heaven—a decent-sized sixteen-by-eight room with my very own sink—used to be a nurse’s residence, but the building feels more like a converted hospital with spirits roaming the halls. I sense that someone died in my room. There is one spot, right above the wooden headboard, that is always freezing even on days when the heat is pumping steam into my room. I’m not scared of it as much as I’m intrigued by what makes this thing linger.

  At night when I can’t sleep I reach for the cold with my right arm, piercing through it with my fingers and then my hand. “Why are you here?” I whisper. “Do you know Casimiro?” I ask. “Are you one of those guides he told me about? And if you are, what the fuck am I doing here?”

  I close my eyes and try to clear my mind. I focus on listening for anything close to a response from the invisible cloud hovering above me. I hear nothing, I never do, but somehow the thing makes me feel protected. Outside these walls, I don’t feel so safe.

  * * *

  I can always tell when Egypt crosses the border from his backwoods in Ohio into ours. I’m transported back to Rocío’s golden cage every time he does. Tonight, through the flimsy wall separating our dorm rooms, I hear the familiar sounds of him fucking, then beating, then fucking, then beating Jane.

  I can hear her begging him to stop. “Please, Egypt, please stop.”

  SMACK! Then she screams.

  I run out of my room in an oversize T-shirt and sweatpants. I don’t care whom I wake up when I bang on her door, yelling, “Jane, are you okay, girl? You want to sleep in my room?”

  Jane cracks the door open. Her face is flushed and streaked with tears trickling over streaks of dry salt underneath. “Everything is fine,” she says. “We’re just playing.”

  “It sounds like he’s fucking you up,” I say.

  “You don’t understand,” she says, almost whispering. “He loves me.”

  “You don’t find it weird that he comes only after dark?” I ask. “Or that most of his songs are either about how the white man is the devil or his African queens?”

  “That’s just for show,” Jane says. “He doesn’t believe in that stuff.”

  She closes the door in my face. I feel helpless, not understanding what she sees in a broke-ass unemployed wannabe rapper who creeps to her room after dark when everyone else is asleep. I can’t help her anymore. I begin to spend less time in my room and more on Chesterfield Road with Chris.

  * * *

  Chris has neighbors down the road who seem to hate people of color, especially those who look racially ambiguous or mixed. They stare ominously at anyone who makes them think and challenge their notions of what race here in Wonder Bread country should look like.

  Weather permitting, they sit on their porch and glare at me from the moment I appear at the base of the hill, walk as fast as I can past them, and continue on to Chris’s house. As I race up his front steps I turn around and can still see them wrestling to figure me out. They don’t care that Chris is gawking back at them.

  “Fuck ’em,” he says to me, “they’re just looking for a fight.”

  “They look crazy sinister,” I say.

  “You think that’s bad?” he says. “You should see how these crackers act back home in Washington.”

  “The baddest white boys in my hood—even the Albanians over on Kingsbridge—have nothing on these guys,” I say. “Their hate is on a whole other level.”

  Some months later, I’m on my way to Chris’s for a party. The same guys and their friends are drinking beer on the fro
nt porch. I can’t tell them apart because they all have shaved heads. One of them is smiling at me. They stop talking when I’m within earshot, and for the first time, one of the guys, the one smiling, says something directly to me.

  “Hey you, brown sugar, I wonder what your pussy tastes like,” he says.

  “Fuck you,” I yell back.

  “Yes, please,” he says. “I’d love to fuck your brains out.” He pauses. “Literally fuck your brains out. Get it, bitch?”

  By the time I reach Chris’s house, I’m out of breath and shaking. Nobody notices. People are hanging out on the front porch. A number of guys from the basketball and football teams are grinding with sorority chicks to Luke’s “I Wanna Rock.” Chris’s frat brothers are screaming “Face down / Ass up” so loudly that he can’t hear what I’m trying to tell him. My distress makes it apparent that I have something serious on my mind that cannot wait.

  “Are you pregnant?” He chuckles. “Why are you looking at me like that, city slicker?”

  “No, asshole,” I say, recounting what just happened down the road.

  Chris doesn’t respond. The music stops abruptly. He picks up a loose brick on the kitchen floor and runs out of the house. Almost everyone follows.

  “You got something to say?” he yells down the road.

  “Yeah, boy we sure do,” someone yells back.

  “Then why don’t you come up here and say it, cracker?”

  Minutes later, the guys run up and into Chris and his frat brothers like a pack of hungry wolves. “Fuck that nigger up,” I hear one of the white boys yell to another.

  Chris starts pounding some guy with the brick while another jumps on his back.

  I run into the house and come out charging with a broomstick, swinging it in every direction until one of Chris’s frat brothers drags me back into the house.

  Eventually, cops arrive on the scene. They admonish the guys for starting trouble. It’s a miracle that Chris wasn’t badly hurt. He can barely stand, his legs are trembling with anger, and his heart is pounding out of his chest. After the boys in blue drive away, Chris picks up the brick and stands in the middle of the street, staring down the road.

  Nothing changes on Chesterfield Road except that the bald guys do not speak to me so much as throw daggers with their eyes, piercing my breasts and ass every time I walk by their house. I don’t tell Chris.

  Not long after the fight on Chesterfield Road, Chris and I start growing apart.

  It doesn’t take long before I fall into a serious depression in the Pitts. It’s as if I’m wearing a wet bathrobe over my clothes—the extra weight is making me miserable. I miss New York City. I miss eating dinner for breakfast at Maria’s place and the classic salsa blaring out of Blackie’s window.

  I move off campus and survive off of school loans while interning at an urban music radio station. I hate school. My English professor spends more class time looking at my tetas than anything else. I don’t know exactly when, but I unofficially drop out of school, spending hours repeating my ABCs as clearly as I can because I’m promised an on-air gig if I manage to lose my “New York Puerto Rican or something” accent.

  I lie down, and looking out my window ask the universe for a sign that it’s time for me to go back home. I don’t want to lose my accent. I don’t want to become someone else.

  * * *

  I doze off and wake up in a dream. I’m riding in the passenger seat of Chris’s navy blue Volkswagen Rabbit. We are in front of his swanky new apartment building in an upper-middle-class section of the Pitts. Chris pulls up to the building and double-parks. He has a surprise for me.

  “I gotta go upstairs, city slicker, to pick up these tickets for a comedy show I’m going to take you to,” he says. “I’ll be right back.” He pecks me on the lips and disappears upstairs.

  “Hurry up, please,” I say. “I still love you.”

  Chris doesn’t hear my muffled voice.

  A black SUV drives by slowly until it stops in front of Chris’s Rabbit. The passenger window goes down. Eventually, all of the windows are down and two machine guns start spraying bullets in my direction. Bullets fly through the windows, my face, my hands. My brain oozes out of my head like water out of a fountain.

  I am stunned awake by the buzzer. It’s Chris’s frat brother Martin, the one who recently graduated from weed to crack. He’s looking for Chris.

  “It’s five o’clock in the morning,” I yell into the intercom.

  “I need to speak to Chris,” he yells back. “NOW.”

  “He isn’t here.”

  “Then I’ll wait until he shows up.”

  Not long after I page him, Chris finds Martin pacing back and forth like a basehead in front of my building. My dream compels me to act. I start packing what I can fit into the suitcases I brought here and leave everything else behind. Something will happen to me if I stay here. I’m sure of it. I catch the next Greyhound to New York City, back to 512 Isham.

  CHAPTER NINE

  There’s No Other Place . . .

  I am not at a crossroads;

  to choose

  is to go wrong.

  —OCTAVIO PAZ

  “¿QUE TÚ HACE AQUÍ, MI HIJA?” DOÑA AMPARO ASKS ME. “DOES Maria know you’re back?” No, she doesn’t. I’ve been sitting here for about an hour, inhaling the floral smell of detergent and fabric softener floating out of the new Laundromat on the corner. Doña Amparo places her groceries on the ground and sits next to me on the steps, taking out two Coronas. We sit in silence, sipping the cold beer and watching people walk by.

  Doña Amparo lives with her son, Moncho, and his wife, a morbidly obese reputed cokehead whose name is also Maria, on the third floor. Fat Maria and Moncho, a rail-thin man of average height, look like the number 10 when standing next to each other. It’s hilarious.

  Maria and I feel sorry for Doña Amparo, who moved to 512 from Santiago not long ago, kicking and screaming, after her husband died. The poor lady suffered from ataque de nervios brought on by the stressful move to the city and made worse by not being able to visit her old man’s grave at leisure. We hear that the elderly woman was prescribed a cocktail of uppers and downers for what was diagnosed by one of those gringo head doctors from the neighborhood clinic as manic depression. Soon enough, Doña Amparo became addicted to Xanax, meprobamate, and ethclorvynol. Her purse was like a portable pharmacy filled with pill bottles that her son and daughter-in-law dipped into every now and then. She should have stayed in the Dominican Republic. Here, Doña Amparo was reduced to a guinea pig with a muted personality and a swollen face.

  “I thought you were living in Pennsylvania,” Doña Amparo says, breaking the silence in the Spanish patois I missed hearing in Pittsburgh.

  “Yes, I was,” I say, “but it wasn’t for me.”

  Doña Amparo offers me another beer. “Angel is doing so well out there, I hear,” she says. “It’s too bad you two didn’t get back together.” Angel recently traded in a life in the Five Percent Nation for a career in the military and law enforcement. We rarely run into each other anymore.

  Like a hot knife through butter, Maria’s shrill voice cuts through the cacophony of taxicabs blasting bachata and screaming children playing tag. “Raquel, is that you?”

  “Sí, Maria, it’s me,” I yell back.

  “How long has you been downstairs?”

  “Just a couple hours, catching up and drinking a Corona with Doña Amparo.”

  “Ay, que bueno, you have great timing,” she screams, “el doctor may have found something in my seno. Come upstairs.”

  * * *

  There is something morose about Maria’s demeanor. She’s more melancholy now than when Casimiro left a couple years ago, spending more time in bed flipping through old issues of tabloid magazines and watching telenovelas instead of taking Tiffany for walks around the block and talking to her vecinos downstairs.

  Natalie later tells me that something happened to Maria when I left that may explain
why she’s been so detached. Fat Maria waited for all of us to be out of the building before wilding out on Maria. One day when she stepped out to buy Tiffany a fried chicken breast from John’s, Fat Maria defied all logic and almost flew down the stairs of 512 in her bata and chancletas. The corpulent woman chased Maria, an older woman less than half her size, down to the front of the building.

  “You’re after my man!” Fat Maria yelled.

  “¿De que tú hablas, estúpida?” Maria replied. “You’re crazier than you look if you think I’m after your borracho cokehead husband!”

  Fat Maria grabbed her elder’s thick auburn bob and began pouncing on her. She kicked, scratched, and bit whatever exposed flesh she could sink her teeth into. Maria wailed and screamed for someone, anyone, in the growing crowd to help her. Surely someone she fed over the years or made me translate for at the welfare office would step in to rescue her. Doña Amparo yelled at her daughter-in-law to stop, but the pleas fell on cocaine-fueled ears.

  Fat Maria tore the front of Maria’s button-down linen shirt almost completely off, dragging her across the pavement and kicking her frail body under a parked car.

  Only after Doña Amparo returned with Moncho, who was at the bodega around the corner playing the numbers, did the beating cease. Moncho broke through the crowd, screaming for his wild-eyed wife to stop. “¡Carajo gorda, what are you doing!” he screamed, jumping on her back. “Why didn’t anybody stop this?”

  Maria never told me about the incident. I don’t think she told anyone. I felt like I failed her for allowing a tecata like Fat Maria to treat her worse than a piece of garbage tossed into a landfill.

  * * *

  What Fat Maria did to Maria was horrible. It reminded me of what happened to the nice old white lady living on Tenth Avenue and 207th Street when I was still at St. Thaddeus.