I sang to Amy Eleni. She didn’t say ‘Waaah’, but she came back with a bunch of ads put out by instrumental groups who wanted singers. I auditioned for Michael’s because his ad was the shortest and the least demanding. He wanted someone to do standards, no particular look or age, and he’d added ‘No divas’.
Michael didn’t seem impressed at any point during the audition, but I thought maybe he’d taken me on because he did an internal ‘Waaah’ at my voice. When we were better friends he told me I was the only one who’d showed up for his auditions. He said, ‘I suppose I offended all the divas.’
Standing discreetly near the back, the café’s owner watches us with her fingers in her mouth — her eyes are boiling-water blue and she looks as if she might snap if she’s not hearing good sounds. But I’m not ready to try my voice yet; we just test the microphones for static, and I follow the pieced strands of song that Maxwell and Sophie and Michael carelessly let swirl.
Amy Eleni, now contemplatively smoking a cigarette in a silvered holder, has seized Mami and they’re both sitting behind glasses of Bacardi and Coke
(Mami smiles a small and unforgiving smile if I ever refer to the mixture as a ‘Cuba Libre’)
their backs are to the other seats, which are filling with sprawled legs and talk. They’re sitting at the table that falls directly under my gaze. Amy Eleni is wearing purple-tinted shades. Chabella waves and smiles at me; I shake my head sorrowfully at Chabella because this is not one of the tables I told her she could sit at. Amy Eleni is wearing a black hat identical to mine over her smooth, shiny blonde bob. She is swathed from top to toe in black. She is wearing red stilettos, and jiggling her feet with impatience under the table.
I am certain that Amy Eleni’s students fear her. It’s not just that her expression constantly suggests that she’s about to say something extremely harsh. She wears mirrored sunglasses indoors as often as she can get away with it, walks with her shoulders, and snaps her fingers when things aren’t happening fast enough for her. But she doesn’t look like a woman at all; she has all the angular, callous, radiant and uncompromising beauty of a girl who has only just grown into her body and barely has an understanding of what has happened. Her eyes are bright and keen and worrying.
When we were seventeen, she told me that she was gay. I was nonplussed; I kept expecting her to say ‘jokes’. I thought she hadn’t had boyfriends and never confessed to crushes because she had yet to meet a boy brave enough to take her on. I asked her if she was sure, because I hadn’t noticed any struggle inside her, any extra-special looks levelled at girls, or any of the things that lesbians were supposed to do. Amy Eleni was resolutely non-tactile — in our school, friendship was intricately tied in with touch; girls pinged each other’s bra straps and poked each other’s bellies and crowed ‘puppy fat!’, and flicked their skinnier friends in the taut bands between their ribs. That was affection. Amy Eleni dispensed winks and air-kisses. That was distance.
I pointed out Amy Eleni’s no-touching thing as one of the factors that made her not gay. She winced, laughed. ‘It just means that I don’t feel like running around grabbing people. It just means I’m sane,’ she said.
When I told Chabella, she left her wooden spoon in the stew she was stirring, closed her eyes tight and asked me in a near whisper, ‘Are you gay as well?’
‘I don’t think so, Chabella.’
‘All right, because don’t think I don’t know that you’ve been kissing as many boys as you can.’
I half-heartedly denied that, but Mami waved me off.
‘I am very sorry to hear that Amy Eleni is gay. Her life will be harder than yours, you know.’
Chabella gave me a topsy-turvy stone amulet on a piece of clean rope and told me to give it to Amy Eleni. I did, and Amy Eleni said, coldly, ‘What is this, something to make me straight?’
I told her no. That wasn’t Mami’s style.
‘You’re not going to ask me who my first crush was?’ Amy Eleni asked me. She was playing with Chabella’s amulet. I hastily said, ‘No, no.’ Amy Eleni looked at me then, with a soft, auroral reproach that made my heart flip over and made me ashamed of myself and my arrogance and made me want to promise her something that I couldn’t and made me think that I’d gone down in her estimation — all these things at once.
Mami had not always liked Amy Eleni; when she became the second girl after Dominique that I bothered to bring home for dinner, Mami was tense that entire first evening. The table was quiet whenever Amy Eleni lifted her fork to her mouth, and Chabella leant forward a little, as if she wanted to snatch the food out of Amy Eleni’s jaws, as if she didn’t think Amy Eleni should ever know what a good Cuban stew tasted like. Amy Eleni suspected as much, and to me she seemed more polite than I had ever seen her. Throughout the meal she said ‘Delicious’ in varying tones and volumes. With a grin that admitted that she would listen but not understand, Amy Eleni asked Papi about his work, and she told Tomás all that she could remember about the glory days of WWF wrestling. But when Amy Eleni went home, Chabella stopped me as I was going to bed and said sorrowfully, ‘You’ll learn that the white girl is never your friend. She works to a different system. She only pretends to understand.’
I said, ‘And what about Brigitte?’
Mami said, ‘Brigitte was my teacher. You know that.’
The café is full now; shadow-spotted faces encircle me. I close my eyes, and my Cuba comes, and the band is with me and then it lets me go and I am free.
One morning Mami came downstairs wrapped in nothing but a cloth of preternatural white, with strands of her hair swimming around her face, strands of her hair tied with little flags of white cloth. Strips of soft skin showed here and there, where the cloth gaped and made mouths around her shoulder blades, parted in protest at being trussed so tight around her breasts. Because she was pregnant with Tomás, Tomás became part of the outfit too: it was he that made the cloth coast out in front of her and around her; it was he that made the white flow. Papi got up and ran, actually ran, for a camera. Chabella watched him go, and as Papi passed her he caught her hand and twirled her like a giggling top.
Me, I looked up from my Saturday-morning cartoons and I gaped. I was eight; if I had been older I would have been able to admire Mami. I would have been able to apprehend Mami’s white sheet thing as a ‘look’, the way people assess high-fashion catwalks and shut down their instinct to free so they don’t feel any more how terrifying and elemental the shapes and colours are, the fact that people are walking around with cones on their heads and jewellery like chainmail, rouged violently right up to their foreheads, looking like the devil.
Anyway, my Mami looked wild, wilder than animals. She was not made to live in a house or even on the plains, but in the atmosphere. Chabella turned off the TV; I didn’t object.
‘I used to take classes in folk dance,’ she said, slipping a cassette into the sound system. She rewound it, took it out, fiddled with it, turned it over.
‘Your Abuelo Damason used to complain because they were expensive. But then the dance classes stopped with the Revolution because they were un-Cuban; they were too African. And it’s true; I suppose El Jefe was right to be nervous that something was going on with Santeria. Something is going on. Those West Africans brought another country in with them, a whole other country in their heads. After dance classes stopped, you could only get to see people dance out apataki if you knew the roots people, the ones who didn’t have any money, like dockworkers. They wouldn’t teach me anything. Maybe they knew something about me that I didn’t. It is hard to learn how to be black when people don’t let you.’