The next morning, while I finished a second helping of pancakes and my Grandpa Pepín finished a second cup of espresso, Grandpa said, “You don’t want to go pick up your Daddy at the airport, right?”
Grandma Jacinta agreed that I didn’t. “He wants to watch the ball game,” she said.
My mother seemed surprised. “You don’t want to come to the airport?”
“I do,” I said. In fact no one had asked me. When my grandparents wanted me to feel a certain way, they simply ascribed their desires to me and then graciously agreed to accommodate themselves.
“That’s nice,” Jacinta said. “But your Daddy will come here. Right from the airport. You won’t miss him.”
Pepín said, “Your Yankees are on The Game of the Week. You don’t want to miss them.”
“I’ll make you biftec palomillo and plátanos” Grandma said. “Oh!” she cried and went to her refrigerator. We were eating at a round yellow Formica table in the kitchen. She never sat down, however. She was continually on her feet, feeding herself from a plate on the counter while she brewed more espresso or grilled another pancake. This time she hunched over, peering into the refrigerator; she did something inside it, probably testing the firmness of her vanilla pudding with the tip of her pinky. “Yes. The natilla is almost ready. You can have natilla for dessert.”
“But not the biftec for lunch. I’ll go get you a Cuban sandwich,” Grandpa said eagerly to me as if the problem of keeping me at home was that Jacinta’s bribes of food weren’t sufficiently tantalizing. “You like the Cuban sandwich — they press it flat.” He held an invisible iron in his hand and ran it over something. “You like the Cuban sandwich, right Mickey Mantle?”
“No, no. He wants the biftec palomillo.” Grandma had moved beside me. She stroked my forehead, lifting up my bangs. The palm of her hand felt cool. “The Cuban sandwich is so greasy.”
“I’m going to get some, woman!” Pepín stood up and waved his arm. “Frankie is going to be hungry from the plane and he loves the Cuban sandwich.”
Of course it was my grandfather who truly adored the Cuban sandwich. This delicacy consisted of nothing extraordinary to my boy’s palate, merely glazed ham, a slice of fresh pork, cheese, and sliced pickles in a light Cuban bread that was then flattened and heated by the final step in its creation: smashing it in a hot press.
“If Rafael wants to come, he can come. His Daddy’ll be thrilled to see him waiting at the airport.” That was my mother talking. She wasn’t eating and she had refused a second cup of espresso. She smoked a Marlboro with the openly indulgent pleasure that people used to display before cigarettes became a symbol of moral turpitude and death. Above her head, illuminated by the bright Florida sun beaming through a window over the sink, the smoke swirled into a brilliant yellow cloud.
Grandpa appeared in the cloud. He leaned over and whispered in my mother’s ear.
“Shh, shh …” Jacinta created white noise to cover Pepín’s talk with a mischievous smile. She made no attempt to disguise her desire to keep their conversation a secret from me. She also moved to block my sight of Mom and Grandpa.
“Oh,” I heard my mother say loudly over Grandma’s sound barrier. There was dismay in her tone. “You think so?” she added with a tremble in her voice.
“I don’t wanna go,” I called out, to interrupt their heavy-handed conspiracy to keep me at home. I was sensitive to their feelings, although I didn’t understand what worried them. I still don’t know for certain why they didn’t want me to go to the airport; presumably, they thought there was danger because of the crank calls to the Miami radio stations. “I wanna watch the game,” I said, which after all was partly true. I had never managed to last for an entire nine innings, but I liked to try.
“I told you,” Grandmother said. She resumed lifting my bangs off my forehead, soothing me with the cool compress of her approval.
Mom and Pepín left early to go to the airport. In fact they departed before my father’s plane took off in Miami. This was a tradition of the Neruda family — always at the airport two hours ahead of time.
The Game of the Week wasn’t due to begin for another hour. I took a pink rubber ball and my baseball glove outside. Pepín and Jacinta’s home was a two-bedroom one-story clapboard house with a patch of lawn stretching no more than seven or eight feet forward and hardly any wider than the structure. Only a child would consider it a lawn at all. Their street had duplicates of my grandparents’ house up and down the block. It was paved, of course, and they were off a busy avenue, but there was hardly any traffic. Therefore I was allowed — not without many warnings — to stand in the middle of the street and throw my rubber ball against the three concrete steps leading up to their porch.
This was another example of my grandmother’s indulgence of me. She kept precise and immaculate care of her house. Nothing was allowed to be soiled for more than an hour. Dishes were done immediately. Dirty clothing was washed by hand daily and hung on the line in the backyard — a space no more generous than the front. Her kitchen floors were swept after every meal or any invasion in force. They were mopped at least once a day and waxed once a week. The living room, which had a green carpet, was vacuumed every day although it was used only when company came over. And the company mostly stayed outside on the wraparound porch, furnished with many wicker chairs and rockers. (The porch was the true social room of the house, overflowing during the humid nights with friends, brothers, sisters, nieces, nephews.) It would be difficult to overstate my grandmother’s obsession with cleanliness and order. For her to allow me to throw a ball at the front of her masterpiece, when a mistake might tear the screen door or break either her bedroom or living room windows, when relatively accurate throws might hit the front edge of the porch floorboards and smudge or chip its gray paint, was a remarkable act of generosity.
I doubt I appreciated it at the time. But I enjoyed my game. Pitching the ball against the steps helped relieve the tedium of having to spend so much time without a playmate my own age. Although a cousin only a year older than I lived nearby, he attended a day camp or had other activities (Little League and Boy Scouts on the weekend, for example) and thus I had to amuse myself.
The previous summer I had invented a solitary version of stoop ball, a city game. In New York, my friends and I stood beside the street curb and threw a rubber ball against its edge hoping the ricochet would send the ball beyond an opponent attempting to catch it. Landmarks were chosen to establish whether the thrower had hit a single, double, triple, or home run. Being alone I couldn’t play that game, but the three steps to my grandparents’ house suggested something else. I stood in the middle of the street and aimed at them. If I hit the flat of the steps, producing a dribbling grounder, I considered that a called strike. If I missed the steps altogether, I considered it a ball. If I hit the edge of the step, which resulted in hard grounders, line drives, or fly balls, I considered that the hitter had put the pitch in play. I would try to field these “hits.”
That day I decided to turn this game into a full-fledged World Series. I got the idea as I emerged from the shadow of the porch and felt the insistent Florida sun on my face. I sneezed at the pinching scent of the flowering bushes Grandpa had planted around the edges of the house. The aftermath of the sneeze seemed to inspire the notion: I would enact the Yankees against the Dodgers in the World Series. I would assume the roles of both Whitey Ford and Sandy Koufax. Never mind that they were lefties and I threw right-handed. I was thrilled. I felt sure that whatever happened with my rubber ball and the steps would be an accurate prediction of the coming 1960 finale.