Unlike Marisol, who had not lived through the Revolution, Beatriz knew that it was important to stay put, to be patient and prepared for the inevitable sea change that, however slowly, was on its way, for the day when professionals would once again be paid their worth (instead of the measly twelve dollars per month she earned as an engineer) and the world of negocios would be a thing of the past. Beatriz tried to share this wisdom with Marisol. She encouraged her to return to her painting, to pursue it professionally by applying to El Instituto Superior de Artes, but Marisol would have none of it.
“I’m young, mimi,” she protested. “I don’t want to spend my life sitting around, waiting for change.”
Instead of El ISA, Marisol applied for el bombo, the Cuban lottery that gave one hundred and twenty thousand Cubans permission to move ninety miles north to La Yuma each year. And then Marisol waited, biding her time by befriending visiting foreign boys who, blinded by her beauty, did whatever she asked of them. To their surprise, it never involved a ring.
Marisol wanted out, she was quick to tell people, but she wanted it on her own terms, not on the arm of a man she didn’t like much to begin with. The foreign boys were good for their fula, however, and Marisol didn’t turn down any of their offers to take her out for fancy meals or buy her presents, all of which she handed over to her mother. Since the departure and deaths of the rest of her family and the passage of her moody seventeenth year, Marisol had transformed into a dutiful daughter. Like a cat with its proud catch of a mangled bird, Marisol brought her greasy-haired Italians and beer-bellied German men back to the house to bestow Beatriz with groceries like cheese and eggs and fresh fatty cuts of pork that she never could have afforded on her engineer’s salary. And then, with an airy goodbye kiss, Marisol would shoo her surprised suitors out the door.
Five years after she’d applied for el bombo, Marisol’s number had finally come up. Now it had been three years since she’d moved to Miami, and six weeks since Beatriz had last heard from her, the longest they had ever gone without communicating. Usually, Marisol called for a fifteen-minute check-in on the first Sunday of each month, and also, at some point each month, Beatriz received a letter with twenty-five or fifty dollars sent via a visitor Marisol had met in Miami. But this month there had been no phone call, and without Internet or even a way to dial the U.S. directly, Beatriz had been unable to contact Marisol on her own. She’d tried calling collect a few times, but Marisol was never there — she worked odd hours, a different schedule each week at an all-night restaurant whose name Beatriz couldn’t remember.
People tried to reassure her that everything was all right. It was just the distractions of Marisol’s new life, they would say. It was just la Coca-Cola del olvido.
Beatriz had suffered through so many secondhand stories of good-kid-turned-selfish-capitalist-pig that she’d wanted to scream. Each time, she’d shaken her head and recounted how, through all Marisol’s travails of the past three years, she had always managed to call, to send some small amount of money home to help out.
But this is how it is with la Coca-Cola del olvido, Beatriz’s friends had told her, as though this were not just an expression but the name of some unpredictable, incurable disease. It happens without warning, they said.
To occupy her mind and time, and to make up for her absent allowance this month, Beatriz had taken the remaining twenty-five dollars of Marisol’s last remittance and, through an extensive network of friends who could acquire the objects at their workplaces, had invested in some sharp scissors, a small plastic squirter, bottles of rubbing alcohol and hydrogen peroxide, some shaving cream and aftershave, a pair of shiny metal tweezers, a nail clipper, three bottles of nail polish (red, purple, and pink) and some nail polish remover, a file, a fine-toothed comb, and a pack of six razors. She’d practiced on a friend next door, and then she’d begun her black market beautician tour where, by shaving one face each night and performing one eyebrow pluck for just eight pesos each, she could earn twice as much as she made each month at her engineering job, which she felt obliged to keep so as to not provoke suspicion. And, of course, to maintain her professional status for when the next revolution came, after which, she was certain, Marisol would return.
Beatriz’s second stop tonight was at a solar, a step down from a ciudadela. Here, most of the one-room houses did not have bathrooms, and several were without kitchens. Through a narrow doorway with no door, Beatriz stepped into the courtyard of the former mansion, now a cement floor covered with little puddles of water. The only light inside the solar came in the form of a thin orange glow from beneath the individual families’ doors. The courtyard walls were cracked, and Beatriz could hear cockroaches scurrying in the shadows near where a shirtless man stood stirring some pot over a communal stove. A corner shack served as a bathroom, minus the toilet paper and light-bulb, which each occupant supplied for herself.
This stop was not actually prearranged, but Beatriz felt the need to find an extra customer to make up for Marilys asking her to come back next week. Her postponement of the eyebrow pluck was unusual. Habaneros were a proud people; they might be suffering through their third night of pollo al bloqueo (chicken meat the first night, rice and fried chicken skin the second, chicken-bone soup the third), but look askew at an Habanera’s fingernails and she would find the money for a manicure.
If she must, Beatriz decided, she would use this tactic to convince Rita, whose gray hair she had bleached a platinum-blond ten days ago, that she needed a haircut.
Rita lived on the second floor of the solar, and as Beatriz used the banister to feel her way up the unlit staircase, she stumbled on a chipped step and felt her knee slam into the cold, hard marble. Her beautician bag slipped from her shoulder and tumbled back down the steps. By the time she regained her balance and retrieved her goods, her hands were trembling and her knee throbbing. She arrived at Rita’s door out of breath and with her heart beating so loudly she was sure it could suffice for a knock.
Rita opened the door a crack and then, once she recognized Beatriz, a crack more, flooding the corridor with light. In her long white nightgown, she looked like an aging angel.
“I almost killed myself on your steps just now,” Beatriz said, going for the sympathy sale. “I came up to ask if you’d like a haircut tonight.”
“Oh my!” Rita said. “You didn’t bring your flashlight?”
“Battery’s dead,” Beatriz replied.
“Mine too,” Rita said, nodding. Timidly, she patted at her short and, in this light, neon-blond hair. “Well, I guess I could use a trim tonight. I’d invite you in,” she added, hesitating, “but my husband’s in his underwear. We’ve just finished watching the telenovela.”
“He can sit in the bedroom. It shouldn’t take me that long,” Beatriz said, surprising herself with her assertiveness.
“Oh, all right,” Rita conceded. “You hear that, Ernesto?” She stepped back as a fleshy white figure with droopy boxers darted into the bedroom, separated from the main room by a thin sheet suspended from the ceiling.
In the living room, Rita settled into a rocking chair, and Beatriz used two clothespins to attach a worn white pillowcase to her upper back. She squirted water in Rita’s hair and handed her a tiny broken slab of mirror to inspect the process.
“Still no word from Marisol?” Rita asked as her friend began cutting.
Beatriz shook her head into the mirror, her reflection smudged and distorted. “And your son, how is he?” she asked. Rita’s son, a musician who had requested political asylum while touring in Mexico two years ago, now lived in New Jersey.