The Radical Element

  It boiled down to this: Susana didn’t want to be the good Cuban girl the ladies imagined for their sons. She had been raised right here in Corona. She’d grown up on Romper Room, not Olga y Tony.

  Iris dabbed her upper lip with a napkin and took the tray from Susana’s sweaty hands to keep it safe. It was her nicest one, bought after months of saving green stamps at the A&P.

  “You’re flushed, Susana. Let’s open more windows, mi vida,” she said. “Lift the ones in your bedroom to get a cross breeze.” She turned to the ladies. “Remember those delicious breezes back home?”

  Relief washed over Susana as she left them behind and retreated to the back room. She threw open one of the windows and sat at the edge of her carefully made bed. For now, this space was still hers, right down to the Twiggy poster her mother didn’t like (“¡Ay qué flaca! Es puro hueso!”), and the transistor radio that her father had won in the holiday grab bag last year at work.

  She lay back and stared at the cracks in the ceiling as the ladies’ voices lifted and fell in the other room. The quilted satin spread that her mother had given her for her fifteenth birthday felt luxurious beneath her, but the plastic doll that sat wide-eyed against her pillows had to go. Iris had brought it home from work last week.

  “Remember the doll collection Abuela had for you in Cuba?” she had asked, fluffing the toy’s skirt as she placed it on the bed. “The pretty ones with the porcelain faces?” Then, quietly: “Who knows where they ended up?”

  Maybe with a little girl who actually likes dolls, Susana had wanted to say. But she knew it wasn’t the dolls Iris was really wondering about. It was all their belongings. The milicianos had taken meticulous inventory of their home’s contents when they had applied for exit visas. Nothing was theirs after that. Dolls, curtains, beds, rocking chairs, spoons. It was all to become property of la revolución.

  Susana kicked the doll to the floor and closed her heavy eyes in the heat. It wasn’t long before she was dreaming.

  V.

  Papi’s friend Luis, who has hairy knuckles,

  zigzags through traffic.

  The capital is hours away, so they have had to leave quickly,

  her favorite playerita still drying on the line.

  Rushed good-byes, tears, and now

  a hard suitcase bangs against Susana’s knees in the backseat.

  Later she thinks about her dress, stiff and bleached in the sun,

  as she lies wedged between Mami and Papi in a stranger’s bed.

  Luis sleeps outside in the car.

  “What if someone shoots him out there?” Mami whispers to Papi.

  But he doesn’t reply.

  Susana woke with a start in the quiet apartment. The bedspread beneath her was damp with sweat, and the sky outside was darkening. Had she slept all afternoon?

  She crossed the room to open the second window. They almost never opened this one due to the building rules, which Iris followed to the letter. (You never knew who was watching you.) Nothing was permitted on the fire escape. No plants or grocery carts or drying laundry, even if your apartment had small closets.

  Certainly no people.

  But that was precisely what Susana found when she finally cracked the dried paint and opened the sash with a shotgun bang.

  A blond woman not much older than Susana stood on the other end of the escape way, right outside the window of the apartment next door. She turned at the sound and smiled.

  “Hello.”

  A shocked giggle rose to Susana’s lips as it always did when she was nervous — a habit she had tried for years to break, especially at funerals. Her eyes flitted below, in case the super was lurking.

  The girl’s paisley minidress ballooned in the breeze, but if she was concerned about the old men in the courtyard looking up her dress (as they certainly were), she didn’t show it.

  Then Susana’s eyes fell on the girl’s white patent-leather boots. They reached all the way up over her knees and seemed to glitter in the waning sunlight.

  “This heat’s a bitch, but I love them,” said the girl, as if reading Susana’s mind.

  Susana couldn’t speak. Her mind raced for something to say, but her natural shyness thickened her tongue.

  “Are you the new neighbor?” she finally managed to ask.

  “Just got here today.” She tucked a long strand of hair behind her ear and grinned.

  “Susana!” Iris’s voice startled her from the other side of her bedroom door. “Are you feeling better? What was that noise?”

  “I take it that’s you? Susana?” said the girl.

  Iris knocked louder and opened the door. “You were feverish, so I let you sleep.”

  Susana dropped her curtains over the window just in time as her mother stepped into the room. She climbed back into bed, her heart racing, as Iris handed her two aspirins and poured the chamomile tea. She drank down the lukewarm brew, annoyed; she hadn’t had a chance to even ask the girl’s name.

  VI.

  All that week, Susana found herself checking the windows as she did her homework, but she didn’t see the girl in the boots again. Finally, on Friday, as she was waiting on the stoop for the postman, she realized he might be able to help satisfy her curiosity.

  “It’s a real roaster out here,” he said as he pushed his cart inside the vestibule. He wore shorts, dark knee socks, and a pith helmet to guard against the sun. His face was shiny with perspiration. “Hope it breaks soon.”

  Susana followed him inside. “Anything for us today?” She stood as close to his pushcart as she dared so that she could get a good look at the letters. It wasn’t that unusual for Susana — or any of the Riveros — to be eager to see what had arrived. Over the years, the mail carriers had seen her mother rip open onionskin envelopes right there in the lobby.

  “I don’t see any airmail today, Miss Rivero,” the mailman said gently. “Sorry.” He turned his master key and pulled open the brass plate covering all the mail slots.

  Susana shrugged. “Next time, then.”

  But she watched carefully as he sorted the letters into the right spaces. Was she becoming a North American version of Fela the Spy? It was a troubling thought, but at least she wasn’t searching for contraband food or taking bribes to keep quiet about it.

  Just then came a stroke of good luck: the mailman finally deposited a letter for the tenant next door. It was addressed to Linda Turner.

  Aware that she was reading over his shoulder, he held out a stack of the Riveros’ bills and frowned. “These are for you,” he said pointedly.

  Susana blushed as she accepted them. “Thanks.”

  She climbed up the stairs, satisfied. Now at least she had a name for her next-door neighbor.

  Linda. She rolled the name on her tongue in Spanish, dragging out the e to say the word. Leen-dah. How wonderful, she thought, to have a name like Pretty.

  A week later, even better information came her way. Susana was home for Columbus Day while her parents worked. She was on the way to the cellar, a basket of her father’s undershirts perched on her hip, when she heard footsteps from below. Linda Turner was climbing up the steps with a bearded guy in tow. Susana nearly swooned when they came into full view. The visitor was shaggy and handsome, and he held Linda’s hand. Susana pressed herself against the wall as they edged past.

  “Hey, kid,” Linda said, pausing. “Susi, right?”

  “Hello,” Susana replied softly, not correcting her. She coughed to mask her nervous giggle as the couple climbed past her. She didn’t move until she heard Linda’s door click shut behind them.

  Susana loaded the dirty shirts into the machine, her imagination filling with ideas about the couple’s risqué romance somewhere above.

  She pushed the button marked Hot. Some girls, she decided, had all the luck.

  VII.

  “Where are her parents, even an aunt or a cousin?” Iris asked. Susana and her parents were standing at the cash register at Wilkins. They were opening a lay
away account for a vibrating recliner Iris had seen in the display window.

  Word about Linda Turner had spread through the building in the usual way: at the bus stop, on the stoop, in the laundry room. Iris wasn’t too pleased about this type of girl-next-door. She didn’t call her Linda. She called her esa — that one. Esa was a rule-breaker in every way. She was inconsiderate for leaving her things in the dryer after her time was up. Their shared fire escape was now cluttered with plants. What if there was a fire? They’d all burn to death thanks to that selfish girl! And more ominously, the smell of incense wafted in the hall outside her door. It was a known fact, Iris said, that drug addicts tried to mask the smell of marijuana with incense.

  Susana felt annoyed on Linda’s behalf. “She’s just a college student, Mamá. She carries books all the time. Haven’t you noticed?” It was true. Susana had spied Linda waiting for the bus at the corner stop, a book bag slung over her shoulder.

  “College students,” her father muttered darkly as he signed the layaway form.

  Susana fell silent as the old grievance filled the space. The university where her father had once been a beloved professor had been shuttered to stop student activists, among them Iris’s younger brother, Eduardo.

  But when the campus reopened under Fidel a few years later, the purge of antirevolutionaries was under way and her father found himself out of favor.

  “What kind of worm turns his back on his country?” Eduardo demanded when he found out that Iris and her husband had applied for exit visas.

  It wasn’t long after that the once “esteemed Dr. Rivero” was relieved of his post.

  Whenever Susana’s father told the story, he called the incident an ax that had cleaved their family in half.

  “She’s harmless,” Susana insisted.

  But Iris was still spitting tacks. “But indecent! Living alone and inviting men to see you at all hours? And those boots . . . ¿Viste? She looks like a . . .”

  Susana’s cheeks blazed as her mother’s voice trailed off into unspoken accusation. She adored Linda’s boots, their shine, the color, the way they made the girl look so carefree. Susana had even window-shopped downtown, hoping to find a pair exactly like them in one of the shoe stores. There was something almost magical about those boots that her mother would never understand. Maybe they were enchanted, Susana thought, although she was sure Iris would say cursed, like the tannis root from Rosemary’s Baby.

  And yet.

  Susana locked her bathroom door the next day and stood before the full-length mirror. Still in her school uniform, she rolled down the waistband of her plaid skirt. With two fistfuls of her father’s minty shaving cream, she covered her legs, just over her knees. If she squinted, they looked like boots. She stood on her toes, pursed her lips, and jutted out her hip like . . . a go-go dancer. If only her hair were blond, she could look like Linda or even better: like Goldie Hawn from that show Laugh-In on TV.

  It was thrilling to look so untethered from her parents’ judgments and fears, so scandalous and, well, American. So far from revolutions, and family axes, la lucha y el desespero.

  “I’m out of shaving cream again,” her father complained at dinner. Now he would have to use the Ivory soap, which gave him neck rashes. “I think they’re cheating and not filling the cans up at the factory.”

  Susana pushed her rice and beans around the plate to cover the ladies in their hoopskirts. Susi, she thought, her calves still tingling. Susi Go-Go.

  VIII.

  The big news didn’t come in a letter. Instead, a pimply courier delivered it by telegram on a quiet Wednesday afternoon.

  Susana was busy doing her homework in the living room while her mother plodded through her English lessons aloud. She had been reading the practice dialogue from the book.

  How do you do? It is a pleasure to meet you, Sylvia.

  The pleasure is all mine.

  Susana’s father answered the door and rushed in a few seconds later, waving the note from Western Union. “Iris! They were assigned a flight! They’ll arrive at JFK on Friday!”

  “Who?” Susana asked.

  “¡Tus abuelos!”

  “¿Qué dices?” Iris shot out of her seat and ran to him. “This Friday? How can that be?”

  “That’s what it says. Look!”

  Iris pored over the telegram and then pressed it to her chest, thanking Dios y la Virgen for the news.

  Susana tried to will herself to be happy. Her own flesh-and-blood grandparents would finally be able to reunite with them after all this time. They’d be a family, and the holidays would include grandparents at the head of the table, the way they should.

  But the walls of the kitchen still felt as if they were closing around her, and weariness and shame crept up her spine. There would be more late-night pencil-and-paper budgets worked out at the kitchen table. Their only television would be tuned to el canal en español instead of her favorite shows in English. She’d be called on to translate at social services, at the doctor’s office, at the checkout line of the supermarket. And, of course, these strangers would expect the little girl she had been, the one who loved coconut ice cream and dolls.

  “Pobrecita,” her mother said when she saw the lost look on Susana’s face. “You’ve been overwhelmed with emotion.” She gave her daughter a squeeze and then ran off to the phone to see about buying Frida’s old twin bed for the kitchen.

  IX.

  Shoes that click and pinch her toes

  as she is hurried through the crowded airport.

  Mami’s hand sweats in hers as the man in the hat rechecks their papers.

  He motions and then

  picks through Mami’s teased hair, feels along the hem of Susana’s dress

  until she shrinks behind her father in shame.

  Later, she peers out the tiny window, listening to the noisy propellers as

  cotton clouds swallow their plane.

  Susana tossed and twisted in her sheets for hours that night before she finally sat up in bed.

  Down the hall, her father was snoring, as he always did after he drank. Her parents had toasted the good news of their family’s impending arrival with friends from el Club Cubano. They’d come home laughing, any worries numbed by rum and their eyes glassy with hope.

  Susana slipped out of bed and went to the window to see if the night air might clear away the dream. Why wouldn’t dreams leave her in peace? Why did they chase her into the past, alone and defenseless against memory? She pulled up the sash and leaned out the window to take a deep breath. The temperature had finally started to drop, and a chilly gust of air moved the curtains like spirits all around her.

  That’s when she saw them.

  Linda’s white go-go boots were on the other side of the fire escape, near the potted plants, drooping lifelessly to one side.

  Susana had no right to them. They weren’t hers. But she suddenly craved those boots more than anything she had ever wanted in her life. Before she could stop herself, she stepped onto the fire escape. Shaking, she forced herself not to look down at the street, four dizzying stories below. She crawled slowly across the metal expanse. What am I doing? she wondered. She despised heights. In all the years her family had lived here, she had never dared to venture out her window.

  When she reached Linda’s window, she peered inside like a burglar to make sure she wouldn’t be seen. There was no sign of her neighbor, and the bathroom door was closed. Susana lingered, taking in the studio. A television was tuned to a late show. A small dining table sat in one corner, and a large unmade bed was pushed up against the wall. Clothes were piled on the floor, some still in boxes.

  Susana pressed herself down until she was almost on her belly and crawled the rest of the way to the boots. When she reached them, she pulled them close, sniffing at the scent of leather and something like alcohol. Against her cheek, they were as soft as she had imagined. She slipped them over her bare feet carefully, pulling them on like a pair of silk stockings that hugged
her calves. When she was done, she stretched out her legs to admire them, wiggling her toes against the unfamiliar ruts of a stranger’s feet. She stood up slowly and looked down at herself. There, in the middle of the night, hair loose and wearing only her baby-doll pajamas, she felt dangerous and strong, like someone else entirely.

  “You look like Wonder Woman,” a voice said from behind her.

  Susana whipped around, startled, and nearly lost her balance. To her horror, Linda stood at her window, smoking and regarding her in amusement.

  Susana’s tongue became a brick; her face burned. She grabbed the edge of the fire escape to steady herself.

  “I’m sorry. I was just — ”

  “Stealing my boots.” Linda gripped her cigarette between her teeth and swung her legs — pale, unshaved — over the ledge to reach the fire escape.

  Would a girl like Linda get angry? Susana wondered. Shove me to the pavement below? She laced her fingers tightly around the metal banister just in case.

  She must have looked horrified, because Linda suddenly rolled her eyes. “Be cool,” she said. Then she took a deep breath of the night air and leaned against the building. “I broke a heel and glued it back, just so you know. They’re out here to dry.”

  Susana glanced down at her feet. The left boot had a light yellow line of goop at the seam. The funny smell, she realized, was like Duco cement from a model building kit.

  Linda took a long drag and flicked the ashes down below. “So what brings you to my patio in the middle of the night?”

  Susana struggled to loosen her tongue. “I couldn’t sleep.”

  “Oh. An insomniac.” Linda squinted one eye as she took another drag. “Maybe you’re feeling guilty. Are you a night thief or something?”