Flight to Freedom (9 page)

When Abuela María asked Ileana why she has been late all this week, Ileana said she is helping with props and painting scenery for a spring play at
school. I am sure she is lying. I think Abuela is suspicious, too, because she narrowed her eyes at Ileana and reminded her that the devil knows more for being old than for being a devil. Ileana should be careful.

Every afternoon just before the sun sets, Ana Mari and I take Abuelo Tony for a walk. He's as slow as a snail but he needs to exercise, so we try to be patient. Along the way he tells us the names of the trees, flowers, and bushes we see, so now I know all about the ixoras, royal poincianas, gumbo-limbos, banyans, impatiens, jacarandas, and floss-silk trees. He said that when he was young, he wanted to work with plants, but his parents made him study medicine because his father was a country doctor. He liked medicine, but now that he is old, he wishes he had paid attention to his dreams. He asked if we were interested in a particular subject in school. Neither Ana Mari nor I have any favorites, though I think I am good in mathematics. Follow your heart, he told us, because that will make you happier.

I did not mess up any of my lines during the performance in English class. Not once. But I did feel my face getting red when I spoke in front of all my classmates. I wish Mami and Papi could have seen me.

Jane showed me a letter from her grandparents. They again invited me on their summer car trip when they tour the state of Florida. I told Papi about it again, but he waved me away. “We'll be back in Havana by summer,” he said. I turned to Mami, but she refused to even consider it. I think I will have to work very hard to convince them. But I must! It would be so exciting to visit different cities and see the rest of this state.

Something big is going on in the world because Abuelo and Abuela are glued to the radio. They listen to a show in Spanish called
La Voz del Pueblo,
“The Voice of the People.” Ileana explained to me that horrible things are happening in the war in Vietnam.
Tommy and some older boys who are in the local university want to plan a march to protest the war. She wants to join Tommy and wave placards just like the college students we see on TV. Ileana is really asking for trouble now.

Trouble found us. More tomorrow.

It was bound to happen. Mami caught us sneaking back into the house. She was waiting for us in the living room, smoking a cigarette. I have never ever seen her smoke. She must have been horribly nervous. As soon as we walked in, she flicked on the lights and stubbed the cigarette in an ashtray. I thought I was going to faint when I saw her face. She yanked me by the hair into her bedroom and went back to the living room to scream at Ileana. The racket woke up Ana Mari, who, as usual, began to cry. When Mami had finished hollering, she made us sit in the kitchen and tell her where we were and what we had done. Ileana
went first, and she swore that she was the one responsible for taking me. She insisted I not be punished. That was nice of her. Truth is, I went because I wanted to, even though I had been reminding myself these past days that going to those parties would only bring us grief. Part of me knew the danger, but another part of me liked the attention from the boys—as long as I didn't tell them I was in eighth grade! Mami told Ileana she should be ashamed of herself for leading me down the wrong path, and she made us promise we would not try anything like this again. She said she won't tell Papi. “If he finds out, it would be like a knife through his heart,” she explained. Thank goodness he was away for the weekend on one of his training missions. Dealing with him would have been twice as difficult.

She still punished us. I cannot talk on the phone for a week. Neither can Ileana, and she must also stop seeing Tommy on the sly. I hope this will not ruin my chances to take the car trip with Jane and her grandparents. Now I don't dare bring it up until Mami calms down.

“You come from a good family,” she told my sister. “You are not a tramp or a nobody. You cannot meet
men anywhere they want to and at any time. If a young man wants to court you, he must do so the correct way.”

She then lectured us about a girl's virtue being the most important quality she can give her husband.
Los americanos,
she said, give virtue away as if it were no big deal.

We received two letters from Pepito today. One was dated in August, a few days after we had left, and it was older than the one we got before Christmas. I don't understand why this one took so long to get to us. The second letter was dated in December. They were both short, and his handwriting was very difficult to make out. In the first letter, he writes about how he is building strong muscles because he is getting lots of physical exercise. He has also made new friends and is playing second base and batting third in the lineup. (We don't know what baseball team this could be, but Papi figures it might be from Pepito's own platoon.) He asks Ileana to save him any magazine stories about Elvis Presley and the Beatles. He
sounds just like Pepito. But in the second letter, a whole section is blacked out in pen. Papi said that is what the Cuban government censors do if a letter writer reveals something that makes the government look bad. I wonder what that could be. Maybe something awful has happened to Pepito. Maybe they are feeding him food with worms and making him do horrible things. The other parts of the letter we can read fine, but he doesn't sound as upbeat as in the one from August. He writes that he misses us and is sorry that he will not see us for a long time. “I fear that Ana Mari will forget what my face looks like.” That's what he wrote. “I will not forget her or her laughter. Does she still laugh like a hyena?” (Ana Mari did not like this part of the letter, but what Pepito writes is true. She does have a funny laugh.)

As I listened to the letter being read aloud, I felt my eyes grow hot. I looked over at Mami, but she was not crying. She was staring straight ahead with a hard face, her chin jutting out. The rest of the night she was very absentminded. She even burned the chicken in the oven, and we had to pull the toasty skin off and eat the rest because we can't afford to throw food away. The chicken was hard and rubbery.

A group of teenage boys threw eggs at Alina's firstfloor apartment. They scared her grandparents, mother, and little brother half to death. “Go back where you came from!” they shouted. And they also screamed, “Spics!”

Alina has no idea who these boys might be. She is certain they do not live in her apartment building. The incident upset her mother tremendously. She and her grandmother had to clean the egg goo that came through the window screen, and it stained the sofa.

Alina's mother now makes sure the windows are closed at all times, which turns the inside of the apartment into a furnace. The family must go around in their underwear and sit in front of the fans to keep cool. Alina says it is impossible to concentrate on homework. She dreams of moving to New York or to Chicago because she has read that it snows there a lot and that no one is ever hot. I feel sorry for Alina, but I do not know what to do.

Mami still works at the shoe factory and Tía Carmen at that laundry place, but now they have new night jobs. Abuela helps them. They are sewing pearls and sequins on sweaters and are paid by the piece. A man delivers the sweaters in one big box, and the sequins and pearls in another. He is a friend of Efraín's boss at the craft store, and he allows them to work from home, which is why they took the job. At first Papi didn't want Mami to do it because it would mean more time away from us girls, but she assured him that she would work only after dinner and after we had finished our homework.

Mami and Papi fight often. We can hear them from our bedroom sometimes. They fight about the usual things—Mami working, Papi training with the military, Mami spending too much money, Papi not planning ahead. Maybe it is normal for husbands and wives to fight. I sure hope it doesn't mean anything more than that, though. A divorce always makes the children miss one of the parents. Look what has happened to Alina and Jane.

I really miss using the phone. At the end of the school day I have so much to tell Jane that I feel I'm bursting with news. But then I've got to hold it all night until I see her in homeroom the next morning. I should have known we would eventually get caught.

Ileana has been very quiet this week. I wonder if she has talked to Tommy about our punishment.

Two more days until I can use the phone again.

Papi got hurt during one of his military training exercises. It wasn't serious, but he came home early this weekend, with a swollen ankle. Tío Pablo told him he had to stay off his feet as much as possible for the next few days. Mami is furious.

I'm glad he came home, though. This afternoon, he and I ate this brown spread—
los americanos
call it peanut butter—on soda crackers from the Cuban bakery and laughed about the way it stuck to the roofs of our mouths. “Silly, silly girl,” he called me, and gave me a big hug.

Today when we were helping Abuelo Tony exercise, he asked Ana Mari and me what we remembered about Cuba. I told him about my school and the tile on the kitchen counter and the narrow cobblestone streets in Old Havana and the white sand on the beach of Santa María del Mar and the buttery taste of the Panque Jamaica cupcakes, and the two cane-back rocking chairs on our porch and the wrought-iron front gate that creaked and my pink chenille bedspread and the tall, tall palms on the winding road to my uncle's farm and the
guarapo
juice we would drink in the little bodega the next block over. Actually, we remembered a lot.

“I hope you will always remember your homeland in that way,” he told us. His voice sounded funny, like he was about to cry. Then Ana Mari reminded Abuelo that Papi said we might be back home by summer because the people in the island no longer want a bad government and they are tired of not having enough to eat and having to wait in line for everything, including toilet paper. So Abuelo opened his mouth to say something, but he seemed to change his mind. He just motioned for us to keep walking. Later we stopped
by a tree with yellow flowers and he asked us its name. “Christmas candle tree,” I shouted immediately. Abuelo clapped his hands. Then he told us the name in Latin, but I have already forgotten.

I have been thinking about what Abuelo said about never forgetting your homeland. Sometimes I worry that I will, because I close my eyes and there are faces and places, even decorations in our house, that I cannot remember in detail. It makes me worry about whether or not I have a home. And I mean
home,
not
house.
I have a house in Cuba, in my neighborhood of La Víbora, but I also have a house here. Which one is really home?

I asked Ileana this after dinner tonight, and she looked at me as if I had just landed in a spaceship. Then she sat close to me on the old pea-green sofa and hugged me. I don't know whatever for, because she hasn't done that in a long, long time. She didn't say anything, just patted me on the back. But finally she spoke, and the more I think about her words, the more I realize she is right. She told me that home is where the heart is. It is where your loved ones are and where you feel comfortable hanging around in your pajamas with curlers in your hair. Well then, that
means I have a home here and a home across the ocean there, always there.

I did not forget you. I was just too busy to write. Between homework, cleaning the house, and helping Abuelo to exercise, all my time seems taken up. Then to add to all this, Mami and Tía Carmen got a new order for embroidered sweaters. The man from the factory was so happy with their work that he brought over double the amount from the first time. This means that Mami and Tía Carmen have asked us to help by organizing the sequins and pearls in a special way that makes it easier to sew them on the sweaters. Ileana and I also help pin the design patterns on the front. Ileana said that if she can do this for free, then she should get a job for money at the Grand Union as a checkout girl. Mami said she was much too young, though now she is seventeen, the same age Efraín was when he began working at the Tandy craft store. Boys are different, Tía Carmen and Mami said at the same time. Not in this country, Ileana told them right back.

Papi got a raise. He was moved to the purchasing department in the hospital, too, where he has more work. For dinner he took us to a hamburger place on Northwest Seventh Street called Burger Castle. It has a giant lighted statue of a man with a crown on his head. We ate hamburgers, french fries, and milkshakes. What a splurge!

Efraín has found a job for Ileana at the craft store where he works. Now she wants me to help convince Mami and Papi to allow her to do this. I think this is a wonderful opportunity because if Efraín can work, so should Ileana. But my parents will never listen to that reasoning. I am sure they will come up with some excuse. Why do I know this? Because when I talked to Mami about the car trip this summer, she told me she would have to discuss it with Papi. Well I know what he is going to say.

I hate to say this, but I was right. Papi refused to allow Ileana to work with Efraín. He said she was much too young and inexperienced, especially if she planned to work in a city full of wolves. That's just how he said it. What wolves? She would be working with Efraín and his boss and the boss's wife. We have already met them, and they are very nice. They have been good to Efraín, too. I can only imagine what Papi will tell me when I bring up the subject of Jane's grandparents' trip again.