Cuba 15 (9 page)

At this particular moment, around the corner of the house strolled two uninvited visitors in blue suits and shiny shoes: Lincolnville’s finest.

The cops.

The grim-faced man and woman surveyed the scene, taking in the blaring music, howling dog, reeling guests, and gambling tables—not to mention the smoking, burnt lump in the beer cooler and my grandfather, dripping, beside it—and shook their heads.

Abuelo straightened up, smoothed his soot-smudged party shirt.

Somebody killed the stereo.

Abuelo cleared his throat and said hoarsely, “Officers, I can ’splain. I can ’splain everything.”

An hour later, my family and I sat in somber silence at the fake-marble kitchen table over two bags of White Castles and the leftover fruit punch. The cops had broken up the party, sending everyone home with a warning, and told Mark he couldn’t sell golf balls anymore without a peddler’s license. Abuela and Abuelo appeared suitably chastised over the ruckus; Mark, hunched over in the Death Throne, just pouted.

Although it was kind of embarrassing getting busted by the police (our neighbors had come out to watch the red and blue lights twirl around and see Mark pack up his golf ball stand), all in all I thought it had been a successful way to end a party. Everybody went home wanting more, there was a ton of leftovers, and I had just witnessed the most bizarre spectacle of my fifteen years on Earth.

And so I found my Original Comedy material.

14

I plunged into my script. I mean, you can’t make up stuff like Sunday’s grand-slam ending to the domino party. And, as Abuelo had said good-naturedly afterward, if you can’t laugh at yourself, who can you laugh at? All I had to do now was write down what happened . . . and then get up in front of a bunch of strangers and act it out, over and over again.

The horror.

Speech team was supposed to prep me for my big entrance into the world of women in front of God and my long-lost relatives. But what kind of logic was this: Getting up onstage in front of a strange audience supposedly makes getting up onstage in front of a strange audience less terrifying. That’s like saying that sticking your hand in a blender will make it so much easier the next time around.

Still, I wasn’t about to quit. Like those Janus masks, I’d always had a love/hate relationship with performing. That first step is a doozy. But once you make it over the fear hump, it’s smooth sailing.

Mr. Soloman had said a good way to get started was to come up with three points that tied together, building a beginning, middle, and end.

That was easy; I started with Mark’s golf balls, moved on to Marianao’s domino game, and finished with Abuelo’s
pièce de résistance,
the blackened roast. Then I read it out loud to see how long it was.

By dinnertime, I had it up to five minutes. Still short, but good enough for a first draft. The premise was that the cops show up at Abuelo’s party and throw me in jail with my family, a fate worse than death. I’d lay it on Mr. Soloman on Tuesday.

Monday afternoon, with the weather just right for September, Janell, Leda, and I sat in different corners of Janell’s bedroom, reading. Sometimes we did that, hung out in the same room, not talking, just reading; together, but not together. I’d gone deep into Le Guin’s Earthsea, myself; Janell was off playing Chicago P.I. with V. I. Warshawski, and who knew what trip Leda was on. She had burrowed into the beanbag chair over by the stairs, while Janell lay stretched out on the amazingly thick alpaca rug by her bed and I took the window seat.

I loved sitting in a window seat, loved holding a book on my lap there; it felt so Jane Eyre. The bay window and adjacent French doors let in golden-brown afternoon light, dappled by a birch’s mellowing leaves. A fresh-cut grass scent seeped into the room behind the clicking of the push mower as Janell’s mom worked outside in the yard.

Janell’s bedroom ran the whole width of the back of her house and opened out onto the deck. When her dad and mom divorced, Janell and her mother converted their den into the most fabulous bedroom in the world. They’d designed different zones for sleeping, studying, and dance workouts, each painted a different tasteful color—eggplant, mustard, kale green.

Tasteful, in fact, sums up Janell Kelly, and her mother, Alicia Pennpierson, a slender, dark-haired woman with an alluring cat purr of a Southern accent. I’ve known both of them most of my life. Alike enough to be mistaken for sisters, my friend and her mom are my idols. But I’d never tell them that.

It was hard to switch from saying “Mrs. Kelly” to “Ms. Pennpierson” after the divorce, but easier than trying to talk to Janell about any of it. That happened in seventh grade, and Janell is just now beginning to mention her dad and stuff. Other than that, she always seems more together, more sophisticated and focused, than always-at-loose-ends Violet Paz. I guess that’s why we get along so well.

The other tough switch came after I met Leda, whose appeal, I admit, has to grow on some people. Luckily, Janell let it grow, not like a well-tended rosebush, granted— Janell at first merely tolerated Leda—but more like a moss. Gradually, though, the two arose from the swamp of their indifference. And now we were three.

“Aau-he-hem.”
Leda cleared her throat and thrashed on the beanbag chair for a new position. “Kelly. Paz. Will you listen to this?”

Janell and I looked up from our reading and mentally high-fived each other from across the room. Leda is usually the one to break the silence.

“Guys, I have got to go to Paris immediately!” She stabbed a finger at her open book.

“I thought you planned to go with Willie after graduation,” I said.

“I broke up with that idiot. He showed up at the last PETA meeting in a leather jacket. No, no, I’m going to Paris on my own, as soon as possible. Did you know you can take dogs into bistros there?”

“But you don’t have a dog,” Janell pointed out.

Leda’s eyes burned blue intensity. “I know, but it’s the
idea
of it—dogs in a restaurant? That just goes to show how cool the French are.”

I thought of Chucho being left to graze happily on the floor at White Castle. “And,” I said, laughing, “you’d appreciate your food a whole lot more.”

“Or at least be more protective of it,” said Janell, smiling.

Leda, still serious, went on. “Then there’s the whole eat-or-be-eaten aspect. You know, little Fifi looking on as
le
maestro
gloms down a rack of lamb.”

“There but for the grace of God go I.” Janell nodded.

“HA!”
I borrowed Mom’s laugh. “By the way, Leed, you’re mixing your French and Spanish again.”

The reading mood was broken.

“Let’s go get something to eat,” Janell said.

Janell’s virginal refrigerator in the chaste white kitchen always holds a huge bowl of fruit salad and little more, unless her mom is cooking one of her fabulous fried-chicken dinners. We made waffle cones of frozen yogurt with the fruit on top.

Leda took a bite first and pursed her lips. “Fruit tastes weird with—what flavor is this?”

Janell picked up the frozen yogurt container. “It says vanilla, but . . .” Hesitantly, she peeled back the lid. “Uh-oh.”

We looked at her.

“You’d better not eat any more of that,” she told Leda.

I examined my softening cone. The yogurt had black specks in it, but sometimes real vanilla looks like that.

Leda froze her jaw, trying not to swallow. “Well, what is it?” she demanded through the food.

Janell twisted a foot behind her. “Um, it’s bacon grease,” she mumbled. “Mom uses it for frying—keeps it in the freezer . . .”

Leda’s eyes said it all.

She bolted from the white dinette to the sink, bent, and let it fly. A lot more than the bite of ice cream was recycled.

Janell and I just stood there, cones melting. Then we simultaneously got grossed out and threw them in the white enameled sink. Janell turned on the garbage disposal. Ever the tactful one, I started to belly laugh. Normally-in-check Janell watched Leda hanging over the sink and busted out too.

Upon which Leda gasped a breath and shouted, “Get me a glass of water!”

Janell, laughing now in mime and resembling my mother in one of her aftershocks, found a glass in one of the white windowed cabinets and got Leda some water from the tap. Leda gulped and spit, gulped and spit, till the water was gone. Then she just kept spitting into the sink.

“I . . . can’t . . . believe . . . you!” she said in bursts between spits.

“I’m sorry, Leed,” Janell tried.

Her smile was met by a drooly look of disbelief from our friend. “I’m a vegetarian, Kelly!”

Janell forced her lips into a straight line. “It’s terrible for you, I know,” she said. “But it was an accident.”

“I don’t ‘accidentally’ eat meat!”

“Fat,” I corrected.

“Meat! Fat! I don’t care! How could you do this to me?” She cast eyes on Janell, blinking a furious SOS.

“It
was
an accident. . . . ,” I said, as surprised as Janell at Leda’s wrath.

Leda spit into the sink once more. “Well, it won’t happen again. I can’t even be around you two!” She wiped her mouth on her shirtsleeve and stomped out the front door.

One
dama
down, I thought, one to go.

15

Ganell and I were surprised to see Leda wave us over in Room C206 the next afternoon at our speech team meeting. We exchanged wary glances but went and sat next to her.

“Hey, dudes, what’s up? Ready to face our impending speech tournament doom?”

I hesitated. “What about yesterday?”

“Yeah, about never wanting to see us again?” Janell added.

Leda shrugged. “Oh, that. I channeled it. I can’t help it if you guys are pathetic.”

I sighed, knowing that no matter what she said, she’d never forgive us for that one.

She pulled out her ratty purple notebook covered with stick-figure doodles and opened it. “See? I channeled the bad energy into my Oratory routine. ‘Plows, Not Cows,’ I call it. I went home and wrote the whole thing in about half an hour. I showed it to The Ax at lunch today, and he loved it.”

“Then I guess you should thank us,” Janell said dryly.

We hadn’t finalized our routines yet. “Mine’s not done,” I said to Leda. “Maybe you should piss
me
off.”

Janell slapped me a wry five.

I looked around but didn’t see Clarence Williams anywhere. Ms. Joyner, resplendent in a flowing batik robe, manhandled the crowd into submission as usual and got started. We were prepping for our first tournament, the following Saturday at Taylor Park.

Ms. Joyner described the timetable: two preliminary rounds, plus a final, then the awards ceremony. “You should have all received the rules for your events from your coaches, so you already know that you have to be on time for your rounds, or the team loses points with your disqualification. Even though these are individual events, a team trophy is at stake too. Please make it a habit to wear a watch. You have a little over a week to prepare.” She looked up at the booth. “Are you ready, Rick?”

“Ten-four.” The Ax’s voice cut through the sound system like piano wire. “Let’s see what kind of blood we’ve got this year.”

Ms. Joyner called everybody center stage one by one, according to event. Janell sailed away first, along with another sharply dressed girl named Cherise, to represent Verse Reading. I saw Gina from my gym class with the Dramatic Interpretation group, which included Zeno Clark and his duet partner, Trish Lazlo, the favorites. Competitors in Humorous Interpretation, Oratorical Declamation, Radio Speaking, and Prose Reading filed down to the stage. When Extemporaneous Speaking was called, Clarence still hadn’t shown up.

Leda was the lone Original Oratory candidate, and I shared Original Comedy with Vera Campbell, a junior who sometimes sold the school newspaper; the rest of the team members I’d either met at the first meeting or never seen before in my life. It’s a big school.

“Okay, gang,” Ms. Joyner said, surveying us all. “We’re a team now. You can sit down.”

As we filtered back to our seats, she delivered final instructions. “Clean, neat clothing is a must! Do not talk during your round. Do not ask the judges for your ranks; you’ll get critique sheets later. Do not ask the judges how you did,” she said with a smile. “You’ll do fine.”

“And above all,”
the tech mike boomed, its operator sounding not unlike the great and powerful Oz, “
no
yelling during the awards ceremony. Whether we win, or whether we lose.”

A few wails rose. The guy in front of me argued, “But everyone at Brighton South went
nuts
at State last year!”

“Those are the Tri-Dist rules,” Mr. Axelrod hushed into the microphone, as though issuing a prayer.

“And we have a reputation to uphold,” Ms. Joyner added, nodding. Tri-Dist had won State a few years before. “So be on the bus at seven-forty-five next Saturday, bring a lunch, and be ready to compete.” She shrugged at the booth. “Rick?”

“Just one more thing, ladies and gentlemen: Practice like crazy. And kick ass!”

Mr. Soloman liked my ideas for the speech; he told me to add a few minutes to it before our meeting the next Tuesday. So I headed for the source of my material. I went home.

For a going-away dinner that night, Abuela made
arroz
con pollo,
everyone’s favorite dish except Mark’s. At least there was
flan
for dessert. As I sat down next to my brother at the kitchen table, I saw the look on his face, a sort of Cro-Magnon glare that spelled “foul mood.” It had been his unhappy fate to take the last turn in the Death Throne, and he faced a steaming plate of chicken and yellow rice, which he hated. On top of that, the sorry Cubs had just slipped out of play-off contention. I was devastated myself. Mark wasn’t even wearing his hat.

“So that’s what color your hair is,” I said.

He ignored me and kept picking the little canned peas out of his rice. He had already made a pile of pimientos on one side of his plate.

Abuelo stirred in his soft chair and sighed. “
Bueno,
another year down the drain for
los
Cubs, no? I am happy to go home to my Marlins. They are going to win the World Series this year.”

Mark cut him a look and pushed some food around on his plate.

Dad thought to salve Mark’s wound with the old standby Cub-fan reply: “Well, Mark, there’s always next season, eh?”

Mark nodded numbly and rocked in his seat, trying to get some blood to flow to his butt.

We attacked our plates with varying degrees of gusto, and Abuela said it was time to talk about the guest list for my party.

“How about
my
party?” asked Mark.

“Your birthday isn’t until January,” Mom said.

“Sho?” Mark raged through a mouthful of chewed-up rice. He choked it down. “Her party’s not till May! Why is it always Violet, Violet, Violet?”

“Because you’re not mature enough to make your
quince,
” I said.

“Claro que sí,”
murmured Abuela.

While Mark sulked, we turned to the matter at hand. My sponsors had been mostly lined up and a budget set. We had decided on eighty guests, a number that seemed too few to fill a hall and too many to perform for.

“Can we invite Mrs. Lowenstein?” I asked, meaning my piano teacher. I’ve known her since I was four.

“I think we should invite the Caprizios,” Mom said, stabbing a fork with two peas stuck to it at Dad. “They asked us to that New Year’s party last year.”

“Wait a minute,” I said, “I don’t even know the Caprizios. And kids weren’t invited to that party.”

“
Eh
stop it,” Abuela cut in. “We
eh
start with the
familia
.”

I counted on my fingers. “You, Abuelo, Mom, Dad, Tía Luci, Mark—”

Mark spoke up. “I’m not going.”

Dad tilted his head and raised an eyebrow, as if considering the option himself.

“Forget it,” I snapped with a steely look, and Dad shrugged. Mark made a fist with his lips.

“Y Juan Pedro y Arnalda,” put in Abuelo.

“Y Sara y Roberto, y los Guerreros,” said Abuela.

Mom and Dad joined the litany in Spanish.

With a primeval scowl, Mark muttered, “Who cares about some dumb Cuban party?”

Dad heard him. “What did you say, young man?”

“I said, this Cuba stuff sucks!” Mark pushed his numb behind up from the Throne.

Everybody stopped talking.

Fuming, and using the umpire’s signal for player ejection, Dad ousted Mark from the room.

The Cubs loss
and
no dessert. I felt a pure sorrow for my brother at that moment and went out on a limb. “Dad, Mark shouldn’t have to come to the party if he doesn’t want to. You didn’t go when you were growing up.”

I could tell by Dad’s expression that it was the showers for me too. Before he could give the sign, I got up from my chair and said, “I know, Ump, I know. I’m outta here.” And, in solidarity, I left the field.