The Prince of los Cocuyos: A Miami Childhood (4 page)

After two or three weeks, the family was getting bored of the chicken Abuela prepared almost every night for dinner: chicken and rice, chicken
milanesa, croquetas
made with chicken leftovers. “
Pollo
again! I’m going to start laying eggs!” Mamá complained at the dinner table one evening. “You’re living here for free, and all you buy is chicken, chicken, chicken,” she continued jabbing at her. Abuela could have returned to shopping at La Caridad, or La Sorpresita, or El Gallo de Oro, but I could tell she had taken a liking to the
americano
foods—and the bargain prices at Winn-Dixie. Regardless, she knew she had to change the dinner menu. “
Mi’jo,
get something besides
pollo
that I can make for dinner. Something different,” she requested for my next Winn-Dixie run.
I’ll get something really American,
I thought as I roamed the aisles considering Hamburger Helper, Rice-A-Roni, Manwiches. I decided on a family-size box of Kraft Macaroni & Cheese.

“
¿Queso con macaroni? Qué cosa—
I never thought of that,” Abuela marveled as she opened the box. “
Pero
where is the cheese?” she asked. “No, Abuela, you have to add milk and butter. This turns into cheese,” I explained, showing her the foil packet with the cheese powder. “
¿Qué?
First cheese in a can and now cheese in a bag.
Cómo inventan los americanos,
” she said. “We’ll make it tonight for dinner.” She set a pot boiling with the macaroni as per the instructions I translated. “Now we need one cup of
leche
and four
cucharadas
of
mantequilla,
” I continued. But Abuela had something more Cuban in mind: she asked me to bring her a can of tomato sauce, an onion, two chorizo sausages, and a green bell pepper. “But, Abuela, that’s not how you’re supposed to make it. What are you doing?” I protested. “
Ay, deja eso, mi’jo
. Those
americanos
with all their rules. I’ve never followed a recipe all my life,” she said proudly.

She minced and sautéed, added lard (instead of butter), then the cheese powder, a few sprinkles of garlic powder, half a teaspoon of Bijol, and violà—
Cubaroni
! That’s what Abuela called it when Mamá questioned the concoction with disdain at the dinner table. “
¿Qué carajo
is this?” She took a tiny taste from the tip of her fork and savored it a few seconds before pronouncing, “It’s much better than it looks. Good enough to eat.” She was noticeably impressed, but as usual unwilling to praise Abuela for anything, especially her cooking. “At least it’s not chicken,
gracias a Dios
. I was growing feathers already.” Mamá laughed. But the mix of flavors didn’t make sense to me. You had to be either Cuban or American; you couldn’t be both, I thought, watching the family dig into the Cubaroni until it was all gone, along with my wish for something
really
American for dinner, just once.

I had almost given up when November came around and my teacher, Mrs. Echevarría, handed out some ditto sheets to color for Thanksgiving. The pilgrims’ tall hats I colored black, the buckles on their shoes, gold; the Indians’ faces I lightly colored red; the cornucopias of squash and pumpkins, all kinds of oranges and yellows; the huge turkey, an amber-brown (a turkey, not a pork roast like my family always had for Thanksgiving). As we colored, Mrs. Echevarría narrated the story of the first Thanksgiving, enthusiastically acting it out as if she had been there: “. . . Then the chief of the Indians told Pilgrim John,
We make big feast for you,
and Pilgrim John said,
Yes, let us give thanks for our new friends and for this new land where we are free
.” My teacher seemed to understand Thanksgiving like a true American, even though she was Cuban also.
Maybe,
I thought,
if I convince Abuela to have a real Thanksgiving, she and the whole family will finally understand too
.

With new resolve and colored dittos in hand, I approached Abuela that night as she sat at the kitchen table sorting through receipts and making a tally of her expenses. “Abuela, do you know what Thanksgiving is really all about—what it
really
means?”
“¿Qué?”
she said without looking up from her notebook. “Thanksgiving,” I repeated. She looked up at me blankly, and I realized she couldn’t understand “Thanksgiving” in my properly pronounced English. So I blurted it out the way most Cubans pronounced it, as if it were the name of a saint: “San Giving, Abuela, San Giving.” “Oh,
el día de San Giving
. Yes, what?” she asked, and I began explaining: “It was because the Pilgrims and Indians became friends. The Pilgrims made a big dinner to celebrate and give thanks to God because they were in the land of the free and living in the United States.” “What are
pilgreems
? And those black
sombreros
?” she asked, looking over my dittos, “We didn’t wear those
en Cuba
.”

It seemed hopeless, but I insisted. “
Mira,
Abuela—
mira,
” I continued, pointing at the dittos again. “They had turkey on San Giving, not
carne puerco
and
plátanos
. We are
americanos
like them now in the United States. We have to eat like Americans, Abuela, or else they’ll send you back to Cuba.” “
Ay, mi’jo,
” she said with a laugh, “we’re not
americanos,
but no one is sending us back. We’ll go on our own, when that
hijo de puta
Castro is dead—and not one second before.” “But, Abuela, I don’t want to go back. I’m American. I want to have a real San Giving this year—like this,” I demanded, holding up the ditto. “You,
americano
? Ha—you’re
cubano,
even though you weren’t born in Cuba.” She chuckled. “And what is that food in those pictures? I never saw a chicken that big.” “That’s not a chicken, Abuela, it’s a turkey. Please—I’ll help you cook,” I pleaded, but she kept resisting. I had no choice but to resort to coercion: “
Bueno,
Abuela, maybe I shouldn’t go to
el Winn Deezee
anymore. If we aren’t going to be
americanos,
then why should we shop there?” She took a long pause and looked over the dittos again before replying, “
Bueno,
let me think about it.”

She slept on it for two days before making a decision: “Maybe you’re right,
mi’jo
. Maybe we’ll try San Giving how you say,” she conceded, with one condition: “But I will make
carne puerco
too, just in case.” It was settled. That Thanksgiving we would have turkey, as well as pork. I was ecstatic, but the pressure was on: I knew I wanted us all to have a real American Thanksgiving, but how? Abuela certainly didn’t know, and the dittos weren’t enough to go by. I didn’t know as much about Thanksgiving as I thought I did. I needed help. That week Mrs. Echevarría had us make turkeys out of paper plates and construction paper. Surely she would know how to prepare a real Thanksgiving dinner, I thought, and so I asked her all about it.
“Ay, no,”
she told me. “My husband’s mother does all the cooking for Thanksgiving. His mother is an
americana
—thank goodness. I can’t even boil an egg.” Great.

The next day at recess, I asked some of the American kids in class what they had for Thanksgiving. “Turkey—what else, dummy? With stuffing,” Jimmy Dawson told me. “What’s stuffing?” I asked. He burst out laughing, thinking I was kidding: “It’s the stuff you put in the turkey,” he tried to explain. “Oh, you mean like candy in a piñata?” I proposed. “No, no, dummy . . . with bread and celery and other stuff—that’s why they call it stuffing,” he tried to clarify. “Oh . . . okay.” I pretended to understand exactly what he meant.

Nancy Myers told me her mother always made pumpkin pie. “Pumpkin? Like in Halloween?” I asked, bewildered. Patrick Pilkington said his favorite dish was candied yams. “Candied? With marshmallows? Like hot chocolate? On yams?” I asked him. They each described the dishes as best they could, but when I asked them how to make them, they couldn’t explain. “I dunno,” Jimmy said and shrugged, “my grandmother makes everything.” Great.

Given all the fuss I had made the week before, Abuela knew something was amiss when I hadn’t mentioned anything else about Thanksgiving. “
Mi’jo, qué pasó
with San Giving?” she asked. “There’s only five days left. I have to start cooking, no?” “Abuela,” I whined, “I don’t know what to buy or how to make anything. What are we going to do?” “No worry, we can have pork and black beans like we always have—maybe some Cubaroni? That’s
americano
enough, no?” she said, genuinely trying to appease me. “I guess so, Abuela, but it’s not the same,” I said. “
Espera
a minute,” she said, and darted to her bedroom. She returned with that week’s Winn-Dixie flyer: “
Mira,
look—this will help,
mi’jo
.” It was a special flyer with pictures like the ones on my dittos and full of Thanksgiving Day items on sale, including turkeys and something called Stove Top Stuffing in a box, which immediately caught my attention. Could it be true? Could Thanksgiving dinner be as easy to make as instant mashed potatoes and macaroni and cheese? With the flyer as my guide, I made a list and Abuela calculated the cost to the penny: $27.35 plus tax; she gave me $30 and off I went on my bike to Winn-Dixie, hoping Thanksgiving would be as easy and tasty as Easy Cheese.

The store was more crowded than I had ever seen it before. I roamed around for a while looking for stuffing, but it wasn’t listed on any of the signs above the aisles. I noticed a lady wearing culottes and a fancy pendant necklace just like Mrs. Brady from
The Brady Bunch
—surely she was American, I thought; surely she would know all about making a Thanksgiving meal. I worked up the nerve to ask her where I could find the stuffing, pointing to the picture of it on the flyer. “Well, how sweet. You’re helping your mother fix Thanksgiving dinner?” she asked as if I were three years old. “Yes,” I said, seizing the opportunity, “but I don’t know where to find anything.” “Oh, don’t worry, honey,” she continued, “just go to the end of aisle eight. They have everything you’ll need, pumpkin.” Did she call me
pumpkin
? Why? Or did she mean they had pumpkin pie there? I was confused. “Really? Even pumpkin pie?” I asked. “Oh, I don’t know, honey. I always buy the frozen ones. It’s so much easier than making one from scratch,” she offered. Frozen pumpkin pie? Could it be that easy?

Just as Mrs. Brady said, I found everything in the special Thanksgiving display at the end of aisle eight, including the Stove Top Stuffing. I read the instructions on the box:
Boil 1-½ cups water and ¼ cup margarine in a medium saucepan. Stir in contents of Stuffing Mix pouch; cover. Remove from heat. Let stand 5 minutes. Fluff with fork
. Just as I had hoped—easy as mashed potatoes. Abuela’s saying,
Cómo inventan los americanos,
rang truer than ever to me then. There were also cans of yams at the display, alongside bags of tiny marshmallows, just as Patrick Pilkington had told me. What he didn’t tell me (or didn’t know) was that the instructions for candied yams were right on the marshmallow bag:
Put mashed yams in casserole. Mix together margarine, cinnamon, brown sugar, and honey. Top with miniature marshmallows. Bake at 325 degrees until heated through and marshmallows are bubbly
. Even Abuela could make that once I translated for her. There were also cans of something called “Cranberry Jelly” piled up high.
Jelly in a can?
I wondered. None of the American kids had mentioned that, but I saw other customers tossing one or two cans into their carts. I followed suit, figuring it was important for something.

All I needed was the turkey.
Will Abuela know how to cook something that enormous?
I worried, staring at the case full of Butterballs. Sure, the turkeys on the dittos had looked big, but these were three, four, five times the size of a chicken. Would Abuela freak out? But I noticed the turkeys also had cooking instructions printed right on the wrapper. I read them over and discovered the turkey had a timer that would pop up when it was done—
¡cómo inventan los americanos!
The instructions also recommended three-quarters of a pound per person, so I started counting relatives and family friends who we considered relatives anyway, blood or no blood:
tío
Mauricio and my bratty cousins, Margot and Adolfo;
tías
Mirta, Ofelia, and Susana; my godparents;
tíos
Berto, Pepé, and Regino; the mechanic, Minervino, and his wife. Altogether, about twenty-something guests, I estimated, and figured I needed at least a twenty-pounder. There was no way I could carry it on my bike all the way home with the rest of the groceries. I’d have to come back just for the turkey.

Considering the number of guests, I went back to the display and got two more boxes of stuffing, six cans of yams, four bags of marshmallows, and three cans of cranberry jelly (whatever that was for), and then I picked up a frozen pumpkin pie like Mrs. Brady had suggested. Proud as a Pilgrim in 1621, I floated down the aisles with my loaded cart, ready for my first real Thanksgiving. When I got home, I set the bags down on the kitchen table and explained to Abuela that the turkey was too big and I needed to go back right away. “
Pero
how you going to carry it?” she asked, concerned. “Your Abuelo can’t take you—he’s at a baseball game with Caco. You’ll have to wait until
mañana
.” But I didn’t want to wait until the next day. What if they ran out of turkeys? I told Abuela I’d tie the turkey to the handlebars on my bike. She thought it over for a moment, then handed me a piece of twine from the kitchen drawer where she kept twist ties, matches, and birthday candles.

I hopped back on my bike, darted to Winn-Dixie, got my bird, and tied all twenty-one pounds of it across the breast onto my handlebars. But getting it home wasn’t as easy as I thought it would be. When I rode over the pothole in front of St. Brendan’s rectory like I always did for the heck of it, one of the knots slipped and the frozen turkey slid like a shuffleboard puck down the sidewalk and into the gutter before stopping inches away from the catch drain.
No problem,
I thought; it was frozen and sealed in plastic. I picked it up and tied it even tighter with a few extra knots. But while I was cutting through the Kmart parking lot, it fell again and skidded under an Oldsmobile sedan. I crouched down and tried to grab it, but it was just out of my arm’s reach. Finally I squirmed under the car on my belly and yanked it back, the turkey and me emerging grimy and blotched with oil.