The O. Henry Prize Stories 2011 (16 page)

Move to what you learn is nicknamed the Great White North. Tell yourself, this is America! This is the heartland! Appreciate how everyone is so
nice
, but claim Hialeah fiercely since it’s all people ask you about anyway. They’ve never seen hair so curly, so dark. You have never felt more Cuban in your life, mainly because for the first time, you are consistently being identified as
Mexican or something
. This thrills you until the beginning-of-semester party for your grad program: you are the only person in attendance who is not white, and you’re the only one under five foot seven. You stand alone by an unlit floor lamp, holding a glass of cheap red wine. You wish that Iota brother were around to protect you; he was very big; people were scared he would eat them; he had
PURO LATINO
tattooed across his shoulders in Olde English lettering. Chug the wine and decide that everyone in the world is a poser except maybe your parents. You think,
What does that even mean—poser?
Don’t admit that you are somewhat drunk. Have another glass of wine and slip Spanish words into your sentences to see if anyone asks you about them. Consider yourself very charming and the most attractive female in your year, by far—you are
exotic
. Let one of the third-year students drive you home after he says he doesn’t think you’re okay to take a bus. Tell him, What, puta, you think I never rode no bus in Miami? Shit, I grew up on the bus. Do not tell him it was a private bus your parents paid twenty dollars a week for you to ride, along with other neighborhood kids, because they thought the public school bus was too dangerous—
they
had actually grown up on the buses you’re now claiming. Your dad told you stories about bus fights, so you feel
you can wing it as the third-year clicks your seat belt on for you and says, That’s fascinating—what does
puta
mean?

Spend the rest of that summer and early fall marveling at the lightning storms that you’re sure are the only flashy thing about the Midwest. Take three months to figure out that the wailing sounds you sometimes hear in the air are not in your head—they are tornado sirens.

As the days grow shorter, sneak into tanning salons to maintain what you call your natural color. Justify this to yourself as healthy. You need more vitamin D than these Viking people, you have no choice. Relax when the fake sun actually does make you brown, rather than the Play-Doh orange beaming off your students—you have genuine African roots! You knew it all along! Do not think about how, just like all the other salon patrons, you reek of drying paint and burned hair every time you emerge from that ultraviolet casket.

Date the third-year because he finds you
fascinating
and asks you all sorts of questions about growing up in el barrio, and you like to talk anyway. More important, he has a car, and you need groceries, and this city is much colder than your college home—you don’t plan on walking anywhere. And you are lonely. Once the weather turns brutal and your heating bill hits triple digits, start sleeping with him for warmth. When he confesses that the growth you’d felt between his legs is actually a third testicle, you’ll both be silent for several seconds, then he will growl, It doesn’t actually
function
. He will grimace and grind his very square teeth as if you’d just called him Tri-Balls, even though you only said it in your head. When he turns away from you on the bed and covers his moon-white legs, think that you could love this gloomy, deformed person; maybe he has always felt the loneliness sitting on you since you left home, except for him, it’s because of an extra-heavy nut sack. Lean toward him and tell him you don’t
care—say it softly, of course—say that you would have liked some warning, but that otherwise it’s just another fact about him. Do not use the word
exotic
to describe his special scrotum. You’ve learned since moving here that that word is used to push people into some separate, freakish category.

Break up with him when, after a department happy hour, you learn from another third-year that he’s recently changed his dissertation topic to something concerning the Cuban American community in Miami. He did this a month ago—
Didn’t he tell you?
On the walk to the car, accuse him of using you for research purposes.

—Maybe I did, he says, But that isn’t
why
I dated you, it was a
bonus
.

Tell him that being Cuban is no more a bonus than, say, a third nut. Turn on your heel and walk home in single-digit weather while he follows you in his car and yelps from the lowered window, Can’t we talk about this? Call your mother after cursing him out in front of your apartment building for half an hour while he just stood there, observing.

—Oh please, she says, her voice far away, Like anyone would want to read about Hialeah.

Do not yell at your mother for missing the point.

Change advisers several times until you find the one who does not refer to you as
the Mexican one
and does not ask you how your research applies to
regular
communities. Sit in biweekly off-campus meetings with your fellow Latinas, each of them made paler by the Great White North’s conquest over their once-stubborn pigment. They face the same issues in their departments—the problem, you’re learning, is system-wide. Write strongly worded joint letters to be sent at the end of the term. Think,
Is this really happening? I am part of this group?
Look at the dark greenish circles hanging under their eyes, the curly frizz poking out from their pulled-back hair and think,
Why did I think I had a choice?

…

Call home less often. There is nothing good to report.

—Why can’t you just
shut up
about being Cuban, your mother says after asking if you’re still causing trouble for yourself. No one would even notice if you flat-ironed your hair and stopped talking.

Put your head down and plow through the years you have left there because you know you will graduate: the department can’t wait for you to be gone. You snuck into the main office (someone had sent out an e-mail saying there was free pizza in the staff fridge) and while your mouth worked on a cold slice of pepperoni, you heard the program coordinator yak into her phone that they couldn’t wait to get rid of the troublemaker.

—I don’t know, she says seconds later. Probably about spics, that’s her only angle.

You sneak back out of the office and spit the pepperoni out in a hallway trash can because you’re afraid of choking—you can’t stop laughing. You have not heard the word
spic
used in the past decade. Your parents were
spics
. Spics is so seventies. They would not believe someone just called you that. Crack up because even the Midwest’s slurs are way behind the East Coast’s. Rename the computer file of your dissertation draft “Spictacular.” Make yourself laugh every time you open it.

Embrace your obvious masochism. Make it your personal mission to educate the middle of the country about Latinos by living there just a little longer. But you have to move—you can’t work in a department that your protests helped to officially document as Currently Inhospitable to Blacks and Latinos, even if it is friendly to disabled people and people with three testicles.

Decide to stay in the rural Midwest partly for political reasons: you have done what no one in your family has ever done—you have voted in a state other than Florida. And you cannot stand Hialeah’s politics. You monitored their poll results via the Internet.
Days before the election, you received a mass e-mail from Myra urging you to vote for the candidate whose books you turn upside down when you see them in stores. Start to worry you have communist leanings—wonder if that’s really so bad. Keep this to yourself; you do not want to hear the story of your grandfather eating grasshoppers while in a Cuban prison, not again.

Get an adjunct position at a junior college in southern Wisconsin, where you teach a class called the Sociology of Communities. You have seventy-six students and, unlike your previous overly polite ones, these have opinions. Several of them are from Chicago and recognize your accent for what it actually is—not Spanish, but Urban. Let this give you hope. Their questions about Miami are about the beach, or if you’d been there during a particular hurricane, or if you’ve ever been to the birthplace of a particular rapper. Smile and nod, answer them after class—keep them focused on the reading.

At home, listen to and delete the week’s messages from your mother. She is miserable because you have abandoned her, she says. You could have been raped and dismembered, your appendages strewn about Wisconsin and Illinois, and she would have no way of knowing.

—You would call if you’d been dismembered, right? the recording says.

It has only been eight days since you last spoke to her.

The last message you do not delete. She is vague and says she needs to tell you something important. She is crying. You call back, forgetting about the time difference—it is eleven-thirty in Hialeah.

Ask, What’s wrong?

—Can I tell her? she asks your father. He says, I don’t care.

—Tell me what?

Tuck your feet under you on your couch and rub your eyes with your free hand.

—Your cousin Barbarita, she says, Barbarita has a brain tumor.

Say, What, and then, Is this a fucking joke?

Take your hand away from your eyes and stick your thumbnail in your mouth. Gnaw on it. Barbarita is eleven years older than you. She taught you how to spit and how to roller-skate. You cannot remember the last time you talked to her, but that is normal—you live far away. Then it comes to you. Eight months ago, at Nochebuena, last time you were home.

—It’s really bad. They know it’s cancer. We didn’t want to tell you.

Sigh deeply, sincerely. You expected something about your centenarian great-grandmother going in her whiskey-induced sleep. You expected your father having to cut back to one pound of beef a day because of his tired heart.

Ask, Mom, you okay? Assume her silence is due to more crying. Say, Mom?

—She’s been sick since February, she says.

Now you are silent. It is late August. You did not go back for your birthday this year—you had to find a job, and the market is grueling. Your mother had said she understood. Also, you adopted a rabbit in April (you’ve been a little lonely in Wisconsin), and your mother knows you don’t like leaving the poor thing alone for too long. Push your at-the-ready excuses out of the way and say, Why didn’t you tell me before?

She does not answer your question. Instead she says, You have to come home.

Tell her you will see when you can cancel class. There is a fall break coming up, you might be able to find a rabbit-sitter and get away for a week.

—No, I’m sorry I didn’t tell you before. I didn’t want you to worry. You couldn’t do anything from up there.

Wait until she stops crying into the phone. You feel terrible—your poor cousin. She needs to get out and see the world; she has never been farther north than Orlando. When she was a teenager, she’d bragged to you that one day, she’d move to New York City
and never come back. You think (but know better than to say), Maybe this is a blessing in disguise. When you see her, you will ignore the staples keeping her scalp closed over her skull. You will pretend to recognize your cousin through the disease and the bloated, hospital-gown-clad monster it’s created. You will call her Barbarino like you used to, and make jokes when no one else can. Just before you leave—visiting hours end, and you are just a visitor—you’ll lean in close to her face, so close your nose brushes the tiny hairs still clinging to her sideburns, and say, Tomorrow. Tomorrow I’m busting you out of here.

Your mother says, She died this morning. She went fast. The service is the day after tomorrow. Everyone else will be there, please come.

You are beyond outrage—you feel your neck burning hot. You skip right past your dead cousin and think,
I cannot believe these people. They have robbed me of my final hours with my cousin. They have robbed Barbarita of her escape
.

You will think about your reaction later, on the plane, when you try but fail to rewrite a list about the windows of your parents’ house in the margins of an in-flight magazine. But right now, you are still angry at being left out. Promise your mother you’ll be back in Hialeah in time and say nothing else. Hang up, and book an eight-hundred-dollar flight home after e-mailing your students that class is canceled until further notice.

Brush your teeth, put on flannel pajamas (even after all these winters, you are still always cold), tuck yourself in to bed. Try to make yourself cry. Pull out the ladybug-adorned to-do-list pad from the milk crate you still use as a nightstand and write down everything you know about your now-dead cousin.

Here’s what you remember: Barbarita loved papaya and making jokes about papaya. One time, before she even knew what it meant, she called her sister a papayona in front of everyone at a family pig roast. Her mother slapped her hard enough to lay her out on the cement patio. She did not cry, but she stormed inside
to her room and did not come out until she’d said the word
papayona
out loud and into her pillow two hundred times. Then she said it another hundred times in her head. She’d told you this story when your parents dragged you to visit Barbarita’s mom and her newly busted hip while you were home during one of your college breaks. Barbarita’s mother, from underneath several white blankets, said, I never understood why you even like that fruit. It tastes like a fart.

Barbarita moved back in with her parents for good after her mom fractured her hip. The family scandal became Barbarita’s special lady friend, with whom she’d been living the previous eight years. You remember the lady friend’s glittered fanny pack—it always seemed full of breath mints and rubber bands—how you’d guessed it did not come off even for a shower. Barbarita took you to Marlins games and let you drink stadium beer from the plastic bottle if you gave her the change in your pockets. She kept coins in a jar on her nightstand and called it her retirement fund. She made fun of you for opening a savings account when you turned sixteen and said you’d be better off stuffing the cash in a can and burying it in the backyard. She laughed and slapped her knee and said, No lie, I probably have ninety thousand dollars under my mom’s papaya tree.