My eyes are long rather than wide, meagrely lashed and slanted unhurriedly upwards at their corners. In my blood is a bright chain of transfusion; Spaniards, West Africans, indigenous Cubans, even the Turkos — the Cuban Lebanese. My shape is that of a slightly distorted heavy pear; slender, Chabella-like shoulders and a gently rising collarbone cast lines that soften and swell past a high waist to what Amy and I refer to as ‘loot in the boot’ — hips that escape spread fingerspans — then the line returns.
I prod my thigh and, standing on one leg, run my hand down my calf. I sink to the floor, sink to the middle of this slew of things that are supposed to tease out, bejewel, enhance, improve on what I have. I coat my hands with cocoa butter and slowly, slowly start to reconcile myself with my skin, inch by inch. I am scared to touch my stomach, not because it is tender, but because it has begun to swell beyond the point where it can be comfortably rubbed with one hand. If I cup it with both hands the bump might rise to the space I allow it.
When Amy Eleni calls I am fiddling, trying to adjust the V-neck of my black dress so that it falls away from my shoulders and skims the arms left bare by my sleeveless polo neck.
‘Hey, Maja. I’m coming to hear you sing tonight after all,’ she says.
‘Good. How’s Jenny?’
‘I don’t know; we broke up.’
‘Oh?’
‘That’s all you’re getting on the phone. What of Aaron?’
‘He’s. . tired a lot, and out a lot.’
‘Can I place the first bet on when he’s going to pack the trainee-doctor thing in?’
‘Come on, Amy Eleni.’
‘No, you come on. It’s not like he needs to work. His dad is like, ker-ching.’
Before I can object, she asks, ‘What’s tonight’s theme?’
‘Of make-up, or the café?’
‘Both —’
I tell her: make-up, purple; café, solitude.
‘Solitude?’
Amy Eleni teaches A-level English Language and Literature; she has nothing but murder in her heart for amateur poets. She keeps telling me that most of them don’t read anyone’s poetry but their own, and that’s why they always think they’re doing something new, and why it’s always so appallingly not. I keep telling her that the people in her class are seventeen and eighteen and that she should give them a break. I remind her of her own amateur poetry at seventeen and eighteen and am told ‘Shut up! My poetry was never amateur!’
I hold my tights up to the light. They are laddered after all, and I have to hang up and look for another pair. Mami slips into the room with good-luck kisses for me and an opalescent white gardenia on a coiled green stalk. Before I can thank her she starts jabbing at my polo neck:
‘What is this? Why are you wearing this? That’s such a lovely dress, and you’re spoiling it —’
I am just trying to protect my throat. Before I realise what I’m doing I have taken her hands and pushed them back at her hard, too hard; she stumbles and laughs, astonished. I catch myself and take the flower from her.
‘Chabella,’ I say, ‘I can’t wear this. .’
Mami throws up her hands. ‘Your brother chose it. I told him it was ugly.’
Tomás, a pencil behind his ear, comes to look at me. ‘What’s wrong with it? Billie Holiday used to wear one, didn’t she? I thought you liked her? Are you off her now?’
I try to put the corsage box back into Mami’s hand, but she skips away, giggling.
‘It’s just that, you know, she’s. . I can’t explain. She’s. . well, it’s just not right to wear her flower. And this is not a big-deal occasion. Even if it was a big-deal occasion, it still wouldn’t be right to wear her flower.’
Tomás rolls his eyes and withdraws. Mami stamps her foot. ‘Am I a bad mother?’ she demands.
‘Chabella.’
‘I said, am I a bad mother? Didn’t I always tell you how beautiful you are and what a good singer you are? Who is Billie Holiday, anyway?’
‘Mami! She’s —’
‘Yes, I know. Anyway, you’re better at singing than she is. She just growls. And you’re better looking, too, even if you spoil your dresses with strange tops. So put that flower on.’
I turn to the mirror and comb my hair into an upsweep so that I can clasp it, but Chabella dives at me with the gardenia and fixes it at the back of my head with a hairclip. She puts her hands on my shoulders, her face a little behind mine, and looks at us in the mirror. We smile.
‘When are you going to make up with Papi?’ I ask. I have to ask while her gaze is on me.
‘Is my altar back yet?’ she asks. It is not a rhetorical question; she is not being stubborn, she looks so hopeful. And that’s worse. I close my eyes because I had not expected to be taken by this feeling of steam, angry like a new player in a game where someone has suddenly changed the rules.
The wood-panelled café is low-lit and arranged like a fifties speakeasy, with tables ranged in concentric circles around a makeshift stage with a microphone stand. Chabella’s pretty hair is driven back with minuscule black pins so that it tickles her shoulders from high up, like a long feather. She clasps her hands and looks around, enraptured.
‘They’ll have a spotlight on you, and you’ll look like a princess, except for that purple lipstick,’ she tells me.
Having blown Amy Eleni kisses and pointed out to Chabella those seats that I consider safe for her to sit in, I am the last of our band to arrive in the box room behind the café. Michael is there, tense as ever, waiting with one arm curled around his propped-up saxophone, drinking water in tight swallows that don’t even wet his lips. When he sees me, he nods and smiles, but I know he’s only pleased to see me because now we can start our sound check. Maxwell, dreadlocks swaying in the rush of their own weight, body bumps me, and Sophie, our tall, prettily spoken cellist, gracefully offers her cheek to be kissed. She is from Senegal, and she is, just as Maxwell (who has been trying to ask her out for six months) says, sexy like chocolate.
When we go out to warm up on the stage I am happier than I thought I’d be, my foot tapping as Maxwell’s taps, but it’s always that way when I allow the song to come to me without question. Maxwell’s face is serene as he drums, never airless, never strained. He beats time for himself and Sophie — and for Michael, who sways as his fingers ride his saxophone’s polished stops. They are letting me take my own time, letting me fall in after them, but they know that I’m with them.
Really it’s Michael’s band; he cares most, he’s the one who calls for all-day rehearsals, he’s the one who helps us to understand where we’ve gone wrong when we fail to move together. I joined the band mainly because, after graduating, everyone became anxious that I should find something to do. Papi handed me weekly sheaves of job listings and told me to ‘start my life’. Tomás said, ‘It’s cool that you’re home, but you’re disturbing my growth.’ I kept beating him at Nintendo; he didn’t like it, I knew. Chabella found me a post as an assistant librarian — one of her friends ran the local library. That roused me in a way that Papi and Tomás had been unable to. I screamed at Mami, ‘A books job! Chabella, are you mad?’
Amy Eleni came by with some cassettes for me; Billie Holiday and Sarah Vaughan. With no real interest in the answer, I asked her how her teacher training was going. With no real interest in answering, Amy Eleni shrugged and said, ‘It’s going.’ I wanted to defer the future indefinitely, and I sort of wished that Amy Eleni would too. But I listened to the cassettes. And I started singing in a way that I hadn’t before, a kind of singing that made Mami and Tomás say, ‘Waaah, didn’t know you could do that!’ though Papi said nothing.