Read Online Dreaming in Cuban by Cristina Garcia - Free Book Online Page B

form,” he asked me. He looked like the real Vincent Price, too, with the same widow’s peak and goatee. Mom must have told him about my paintings. But what could I say? That my mother is driving me crazy? That I miss my grandmother and wish I’d never left Cuba? That I want to be a famous artist someday? That a paintbrush is better than a gun so why doesn’t everybody just leave me alone? Painting is its own language, I wanted to tell him. Translations just confuse it, dilute it, like words going from Spanish to English. I envy my mother her Spanish curses sometimes. They make my English collapse in a heap.
    Dr. Price told Mom that we should start some mother-and-daughter activities, that I was starved for a female primate, or something like that, so she enrolled us in a flamenco class in a studio over Carnegie Hall. Our teacher, Mercedes Garcia, was a bosomy woman with jackhammer feet who taught us how to drop our heels in time to her claps and castanets. Our first lesson was all stamping, first as a group then individually across the floor. What a thunder we made! Mercedes singled me out—“A proud chest, yes! See how she carries herself?
Perfecto! Así, así!”
Mom watched me closely. I could read in her face that we wouldn’t return.
    The light refracts through the stained-glass windows into long fans of blue. Why do they always have to ruin places like this with religion? I think about the king-sized crucifix nailed to the front of my old principal’s desk. Christ’s wounds were painted in Day-Glo colors—the gash on his side where the nuns told us the last of his bodily fluids poured out; the beads of blood staining his forehead; the wounds where his hands and feet hung from spikes. The nuns knew from grief all right. I still remember how in third grade Sister Mary Joseph told Francine Zenowitz that her baby brother was going to limbo because her parentsdidn’t baptize him before he died. Francine cried like a baby herself, with her face all screwed up. That day I stopped praying (before I stopped praying altogether) for the souls in purgatory and devoted all my Hail Marys to the kids in limbo, even though I knew it probably wouldn’t do them any good.
    I still don’t know what I’m supposed to do next. All I could think of the whole way down to Florida was getting here. Now that I’m here, and sitting in a church of all places, I haven’t got a clue. My mind whirs this way and that, weighing the alternatives, then grinds to a halt under the strain.
    The shops along the Miracle Mile look incredibly old-fashioned. It’s like all the mannequins have been modeled after astronauts’ wives. Who could ever have thought a beehive was attractive? I imagine these men sitting in fashion control centers around the world thinking of new ways to torture women, new ways to make them wince twenty years from now when they look at old photographs of themselves. I had a friend in grammar school whose mother wore hot pants and white vinyl go-go boots just like Nancy Sinatra. I mean, who was she trying to impress?
    It’s getting late. The sky looks like a big bruise of purples and oranges. It’s funny how when the land is so flat, and the buildings so low, the sky seems to take over everything, announcing itself in a way you can’t ignore. In New York, the sky gets too much competition.
    All the streets in Coral Gables have Spanish names—Segovia, Ponce de Leon, Alhambra—as if they’d been expecting all the Cubans who would eventually live here. I read somewhere that the area started off as just another Florida land scheme. Now it’s one of the ritzy neighborhoods of Miami, with huge Spanish colonial houses and avenues of shade trees. I suppose if enough people believe in the hype, anything is possible.
    There are lights on in every room of my cousin’s house, and several of my uncles’ junky cars are in the driveway. I make myway along the south wall of the house, past a clump of banana trees, still green with