“He’s well, I think,” Rita said. “Although I haven’t heard from him for a while either. Bueno, ya tú sabes.”
Beatriz nodded, grateful to Rita for not starting in with la Coca-Cola del olvido. Rita told her about a woman she knew who had been changing jobs a lot lately, provoking suspicions in the neighborhood. Rita became animated as she told the story, waving her arms and the mirror.
“Rita, stay still,” said Beatriz, clipping close to her ear.
A small white dog walked in from the balcony and started sniffing under Rita’s nightgown.
“Ay, Yochi, vete!” Rita kicked her legs at the dog.
Beatriz sighed and put her hands firmly on Rita’s head. She had a sudden, stinging flash of déjà vu, recalling how she used to take the same stance with Marisol when she was little and refused to sit still for her haircuts.
“Don’t cut too much,” Rita said as Beatriz trimmed a piece she had missed in the back.
“Don’t worry. It looks good,” Beatriz said, placing her hand gently on Rita’s neck. “And actually, if you’re satisfied, I think I’m done.”
Rita studied herself once more in the jagged mirror, smiling at what she saw. She handed Beatriz her pay at the door and then stood with it open, shedding light on her friend’s descent.
In Marisol’s last letter, she’d written that she had enrolled in English classes.
I’m getting tired of the politics in Miami, all the anger and constant rehashing of the past, she’d written. And I’ve decided that I want to leave, and that the first step to doing so is to improve my English.
Marisol went on to write that she had come up with a plan for her future. She wanted to move to New York and enroll in art school. She had recently started painting again, and she was going to submit some of her slides for a few scholarships for Latino students.
When I receive one, she’d written, I’m hoping that with some money I’ve been saving I can come home for a visit.
As much as Beatriz had wanted to tell someone, to tell everyone that her daughter would be back to see her, she had refrained, not wanting to jinx this good news by discussing it prematurely. She had decided to hold off on saying anything until a ticket had been purchased. She had decided to wait patiently until she received word from Marisol, not knowing at the time of the even greater patience that would soon be demanded of her.
As Beatriz made her way down Zulueta Street to what she hoped would be her final house of the night, the drizzle turned into a full-on downpour. The few unfortunate souls still in the street ran as if on fire, intent on getting home before the dilapidated balconies above them began falling, as they were known to do during hurricane season. A lone cyclist futilely spun the pedals of his clunky Chinese bike, his fenderless wheels spitting street slime all over his bare legs.
The sky echoed with the crash of thunder, and the eerie, almost human cry of cats mating emanated from behind an open dumpster.
Outside the house of her friend Fefé, who had requested a haircut tonight, Beatriz heard what sounded like foreign voices. Before she could get close enough to listen more carefully, a gust of wind blew open the front door, revealing a party gathered around a small color TV. There were grandmothers and babies, middle-aged men and children of all ages watching a cartoon family sit down for dinner. The curvaceously drawn mother whose hair was styled in a beehive was pointing her finger angrily and yelling in English at a beer-bellied man at the head of the table, while a baby sat in a high chair, sucking a pacifier.
Beatriz’s first thought was that Fefé’s sister, who lived in La Yuma, must have sent back this video of American TV. Her second, more wishful thought was that maybe there had been money padding the video package and, maybe, if Fefé was feeling generous tonight, she would offer her guests a round of haircuts on the house. Beatriz spotted a woman who could use a new bleach job, and there was a teenage girl who could certainly benefit from her pore-purifying treatment.
But at the moment, everyone was too mesmerized by the muñequitos to even notice Beatriz standing tentatively in the doorway. She cleared her throat, and said, “Oye! Y aquí, qué bolá?”
“Oh, Beatriz!” Fefé said when she turned around along with the rest of the party. “With all the excitement, I completely forgot about my haircut.”
Fefé motioned for Beatriz to come in, and the crowd parted to make space for her. To the side of the TV was a white, plate-shaped structure that Fefé pointed to proudly.
“It’s an antenna,” she told Beatriz. “My son in Spain sent me some money last week, and I bought it from this man on Concordia who sells them as his negocio. Now we can get every station they get in La Yuma. It’s amazing the variety, and the crazy things they watch there.”
“Like what?” Beatriz asked, glancing at the screen again. She couldn’t understand a word of what was being said. “Does anyone here speak English?”
Fefé looked around, perplexed, as if the thought had never occurred to her. They all shook their heads.
“There are a lot of programs in Spanish,” Fefé said. “I’ll give you a taste of the stations while you give me my haircut.”
Beatriz positioned herself behind Fefé, took out her pillowcase, and, as discretely as possible, wiped off Rita’s stray hairs. “How much?” she asked as she pulled back a ponytail of Fefé’s thick brown, shoulder-length hair.
Fefé put a hand on her neck, just an inch below her ears. “I saw a woman on one of these channels with her hair this length, and layered — make mine layered — and it looked very nice.”
While Beatriz pinned her hair, Fefé flipped through the stations. It was true what she’d said about what those Americanos watched. There was every type of program imaginable — telenovelas and comedies and scientific shows. There were, Fefé said, stations that ran movies all night, and ones that showed twenty-four-hour sports, the likes of which Beatriz had never seen before — people scaling sheer rock walls, suspended by a series of thin ropes and supported, it seemed, by nothing; people trying to balance on oval-shaped boards in the ocean as the waves beat them down; and people standing on still smaller boards with wheels and riding up and down treacherously sloped platforms. Why would anyone willingly put himself through this? Beatriz wondered.
On a Spanish-language station, there was a show without any actors, just real people, a panel of three women accusing their partners of having slept with the other women’s daughters or mothers. Things like this went on in Cuba, Beatriz knew, but why were all these people on TV, airing their dirty laundry for the world to see? And then, also in Spanish, there was a courtroom show where, in the two-minute clip Beatriz saw, two former friends were yelling at each other about a slippery spot on one’s driveway that had caused the other to fall and break her leg when she had stopped by for a visit.
Beatriz made a mental note to ask Marisol if she knew about this case, to remind her to clear all slippery things from her driveway. She felt strange thinking about this side of American life she had never known about before, and she felt disturbed by her inability to picture Marisol in this world.
In their first few conversations after Marisol had left, she had tried to tell Beatriz about all the differences in La Yuma, but it had been too much for Beatriz to comprehend, and soon their conversations had reverted to simpler and more universal topics, like the weather and the salaries at different jobs. They had talked a lot about money and, Beatriz now realized, most often their conversations had focused on the problems in Cuba. At some point, Marisol had stopped trying to explain her life in La Yuma.