4 NOVEMBER 1960 Miami, Florida, U.S.A.
Victoria lifted her head from the seat of the hard wooden chair at the sound of Papi waking up. Not for the first time, she’d been kicked out of the bed she shared with Inés and Mami. Literally kicked out, with the bruises on her back to prove it. The last time she’d felt so sore was when her pony, Diogenes, had ducked under a tree branch that knocked her clear off the saddle and into tropical bushes.
The Palm View Hotel only had one palm tree on the property, which had barely survived the last hurricane, and the view was that of the Dixie Highway. That wouldn’t have mattered if the rest of the room were comfortable. But it wasn’t. There was nothing comfortable about sleeping seated on the threadbare carpet with her head resting on a chair, because the carpet itself reeked of body odors and cigarettes and was stained with grime. At least with her head on the chair, she didn’t have to worry about cockroaches crawling over her face. She hoped.
Her neck and shoulders cracked as she stood. Now, with Papi awake, Nestico had the entire second bed all to himself. The lucky duck. Even though he was only eight and the smallest of them, it wasn’t proper for him to share a bed with his sisters.
Ni una noche más, Victoria swore to herself. She couldn’t live like this for another night.
She knocked quietly on the bathroom door. “Papi, can we talk while you get ready for work?”
Instead of responding, Papi opened the door. He stood in front of the mirror, face lathered with soap, in his undershirt, calzoncillos, and garters holding up his socks.
Victoria took a deep breath. The speech she had rehearsed after Inés’s latest warrior reenactment grew fuzzy now that she was fully conscious. She wasn’t used to talking to her father about money. Back home, men provided for the family while women raised the family. The one time she’d asked why Jackie received an allowance and she and Inés didn’t, Papi’s response had been that she didn’t need her own money because he would buy her whatever she wanted.
Except that in Cuba money had never been an issue. She didn’t think he could now afford to provide her with anything she wanted.
Still, she had to ask. “Do you have an idea how much longer we’re staying in Miami?”
Papi scraped the side of his face with a razor blade. “You know it depends on the results of the U.S. election. Each candidate has his own agenda, and nothing will change until one is elected.”
“Which is next week,” Victoria added. It was all the newspapers talked about.
“Yes.” Papi tapped the razor against the sink before continuing, “And then it depends on how quickly the elected candidate can set a plan in motion to get el desgraciado de Fidel out of power.” Scrape, tap. “Once that’s done, it’s a matter of contacting the airline and booking a flight for five. Our tickets have an open return date.”
Victoria remembered her relatives’ complaints from the night she and Jackie had eavesdropped outside the library at la finca. “But with every other Cuban desperate to return home, all the flights will be booked solid, like they were to come here.”
Papi held his blade in midair while he stared at her, clearly surprised that she, her mother’s daughter and a niñita at that, knew and cared about politics and current events. Well, it was her island and family they had left behind, so of course she cared!
“So, realistically,” she continued, “it might be another month or so before we’re back en casa.” Though she had figured this out while half-asleep, it pulled at her heart to say it out loud. It was only supposed to be a few weeks. That was what Papi had sworn. And not just him—every other Cuban in Miami seemed to think so. Ya pronto regresaremos, the static voice of the hotel radio regularly promised as well. Unas semanas más, a few more weeks.
But even a few more weeks were a few weeks too long for their situation to remain the same.
She pressed on. “If that’s the case, we can’t stay in this hotel any longer. It’s like a prison here—we’re all going medio locos. Mami only lets us leave the room when the maid comes to clean, and even then, it’s only to walk around the hotel.”
Papi grumbled. “We all have to make sacrifices. Do you think I like working fifty hours a week on minimum wage?” He grabbed a towel to pat his face dry. Though he was now clean-shaven, his eyes drooped with tiredness. Two days after they’d arrived, Papi had landed a job as a construction worker, even though he had a university degree as a structural engineer. It paid una miseria, only $1.05 an hour, but he hadn’t found anything else, and their five-dollars-per-person allowance had barely lasted until his first payday.
Victoria didn’t know what was a bargain or what was a rip-off when it came to apartments, but she was good at math and gathering information. From reading the newspaper, she’d figured out that renting a place to live would still be cheaper than staying at the Palm View.
Before she could argue her point, Papi continued, “But it would be nice to eat food that came from a kitchen instead of a tin can. And I’ve seen you sleeping with your head on the chair. If I buy a newspaper, maybe we can find something over the weekend.”
Victoria grinned, gesturing toward the table in the dark room. “The maid gives me the discarded papers every day. I’ve already gone through yesterday’s classifieds and circled the good ones.”
Again Papi stared at her in wonder. It hadn’t been that hard. Well, sort of. She didn’t like words spelled incorrectly, and she wasn’t like Jackie, who liked figuring out secret codes and hidden messages, but she’d had nothing else to do but decipher what “1bd 1ba unfrn yr les adlts 68” meant in the classified section. It helped that not all the ads were as stingy with their character count.
“Eighty a month is all I can afford.” Papi started buttoning a dry guayabera, which Inés washed every night when Papi came home covered in sawdust, dirt, and sweat. Inés was good at laundry; Mamalara had insisted she learn how to remove stains and odors when she was younger in hopes she’d stop wetting the bed. It had worked. “Three bedrooms ideally, two in a pinch. Furnished if possible and no year lease.”
“And that they allow children,” Victoria added. “Several say adults only.”
Another thing Victoria had encountered were ads that specifically mentioned “white only.” The prejudice of some people. Everyone’s money spent the same.
“We’ll look at places this afternoon, then. I get paid today,” Papi said as he headed out of the bathroom to finish getting dressed.
“One more thing,” Victoria whispered as she noticed Mami stir in the bed. “Can I have money for a stamp? They sell them at the front desk. I’ve been writing Jackie a letter every day, but I haven’t sent any of them. She’s probably thinking they’ve been sent via China.”
Papi sighed at the expense and fished into his pocket to pull out a dime. “Wait until this afternoon and hopefully we can include our new address.”
And with that, he was out the hotel door before the sun rose.
Victoria borrowed Papi’s pillow and placed it on the hard seat. She’d done her job, just as Papi had asked her, back when he worried he wouldn’t be allowed to leave Cuba with them. Maybe she could get some sleep now that she knew she could help take care of her family.
Papi came home midafternoon with a borrowed car and sandwiches from a Jewish deli. Back home, Mami never ate food de la calle, convinced she’d be poisoned if she didn’t personally know the chef. But with no cook, much less a kitchen, in the hotel, and with very little money, they’d been living on what Papi called “war food”—powdered milk, saltines, corned beef, canned beans, and the occasional overripe banana. For water, Mami insisted on running the tap in the bathroom until steam came out to kill off potential parasites.
The smell of freshly baked bread stuffed with tender beef, mustard, lettuce, and tomato made all their mouths water. The sharpness of the mustard burned Victoria’s tongue, but she was too hungry for real food to pass up the sandwich.
“I don’t think these are safe to eat,” Mami said, sniffing the sandwich on a paper plate as if to detect poison.
“Of course it’s safe,” Papi said, already halfway through his sandwich. “The man behind the counter washed his hands before assembling them.”
Victoria turned her own sandwich around in her hand, peeling back the paper to have a better look. A sandwich was only a construction of things already made. If they could buy the bread and cured meat, she could make them sandwiches even without a kitchen (and without the mustard). That would definitely beat their war-food diet, and it had to be cheaper than paying someone to assemble the sandwiches for them. Maybe once they found a place to live, Papi could take them to a grocery store.
After driving the borrowed car to several “no good” (according to Mami) places, they came to a two-story, L-shaped, freshly painted, mango-colored apartment building.
“Good afternoon,” Victoria said as they approached an older woman holding open the white wrought-iron gate at the front. “Are you Mrs. Greenwald?”
“Yes, welcome.” She stepped out into the sunlight, revealing herself to be a tall lady with a blond wig that appeared to be regularly styled at a salon. “Do you all speak English?”
“Of course,” Mami said in her hoity-toity tone. “We are educated.”
“No, I don’t speak English at all,” Nestico said flawlessly from having attended the elite English-language school in Cuba.
“Compórtate bien.” Victoria nudged him in the ribs. If she had to spend another night with her head on the seat of a chair, she’d send him to the floor and have the whole bed to herself. “Please excuse my brother, Mrs. Greenwald. He has a lot of energy.”
“My boy had the same smart mouth at his age. Grew out of it, thank goodness,” Mrs. Greenwald said, leading them through the floor-to-ceiling gate and into the open-air entry. Post boxes stood to one side, with stairs going up on the other. In front was a courtyard with spiny bushes and other tropical plants surrounding a swimming pool. It looked like paradise after two weeks of staring at the Dixie Highway.
They followed Mrs. Greenwald up the stairs to where all the apartments overlooked the courtyard and the residents’ parking area. A black-and-white tuxedo cat greeted them from the neighboring window. Victoria gave it a quiet meow back.
“This place used to be my boy’s. It was great having him next door.” Mrs. Greenwald led them to the end unit. “But alas, he and the missus have moved the family to New York for work. His lease isn’t up, so that’s why we’re looking for someone to sublet until the end of the year.”
“If we need more time, can we rent it directly from the landlord?” Papi asked in a low voice.
“I imagine so,” Mrs. Greenwald said.
Victoria bit her lip. More time than the end of the year? She’d thought she’d been generous this morning when mentioning it could take more than a month before they returned home.
From the door, they got the full cramped view of the whole apartment—a narrow kitchen, a four-person table, a couch against the wall, and the two open doors to the bedrooms.
“There’s no private bathroom?” Mami gasped, clearly horrified by the idea of having to share a communal toilet with the rest of the building’s tenants. “I’m afraid that does not work for us.”
“You have your own bathroom. It’s accessed from either of the bedrooms.” Mrs. Greenwald pointed to the living-room wall in front of them.
They squeezed through a room with bunk beds, and Papi showed them how the bathroom doors were hidden in the walls and slid out. The bathroom itself was just big enough to house the toilet, a minuscule sink, and a narrow shower that would have you banging your elbows if you stuck them out while in there. They exited into the other bedroom, which wedged in a double bed and dresser, before returning to the rest of the apartment.
“Pero qué chiquito es,” Inés whispered.
Indeed. The apartment their cooks had shared in the servants’ quarters of their La Habana house had been bigger than this entire place.
“The landlord obviously converted a one-bedroom apartment into a two-bedroom,” Papi said in Spanish, running his hands over the dividing walls. “I can’t imagine it conforms to any building codes.”
All of that aside, it was the only one they’d seen that might work.
Victoria opened the cabinets in the kitchen to find the basic cooking needs—four plates, four cups, one pot, one pan, one cutting board.
“It’s a quiet building and we’re all nice,” Mrs. Greenwald said from the front door. “There’s a small market across the street, and good public schools in the area.”
“Oh, we’re not sending the children to school,” Mami said as she ran a bare finger on the window ledge. It came up clean. “We’re only here temporarily until we return to Cuba. But don’t worry, we will pay the full two months.”
Victoria tilted her head. With a nearby market, she could definitely make sandwiches. And school? Even if it was only for a few weeks, public school had to be better than staying en casa all day long.
“How far away are the schools?” Victoria asked.
Mrs. Greenwald smiled. “About an eight-minute walk to the elementary, with the junior high right next to that, and the senior high across the street.”
“That’s no good. Neighborhoods near public schools are teeming with hooligans,” Mami said, as if she somehow expected Mrs. Greenwald to solve the problem by moving the schools farther away.
Instead of arguing, Mrs. Greenwald shrugged. “I have a few other people coming to look at the apartment over the weekend. I’m sure one of them will take it.”
“Mami, por favor,” Victoria pleaded. “I’ve spent days searching. There’s nothing else. I don’t want to return to the hotel.”
“Apesta,” Inés agreed. The fact that even Inés had noticed the stench at the hotel emphasized how bad it was.
“There are no cockroaches here.” Leave it to Nestico to sound disappointed.
“We’ll take it,” Papi said, settling the matter. He pulled out his wallet from the front pocket of his guayabera. “How much is it?”
“One sixty. That’s November and December,” Mrs. Greenwald replied.
Victoria gulped. Papi had said he could only afford eighty dollars per month, which meant that was probably all he had at the moment. The classified ad in the newspaper hadn’t mentioned wanting all the money up front; otherwise she never would have included it on her list.
“I can only pay eighty today, but I’ll pay twenty dollars each week until the rest is covered,” Papi said.
Mrs. Greenwald shook her head. “My son was very clear to get the full amount before handing over the keys. Otherwise, it’s too easy to skip out without paying. Especially since you’re already planning to return to Cuba.”
“I have a reference letter from my employer.” Papi started pulling out a letter from his wallet, but again Mrs. Greenwald shook her head.
“Unless it says that your employer will cover any costs you don’t meet, that’s no good to me.”
“I beg your pardon, but you will rent us this apartment,” Mami said, her voice for once sounding stern despite the shrill tone. “My husband has a university degree in engineering but has had to settle for working in construction. We have no additional funds because that disgraceful Fidel Castro only allowed us to leave with five dollars apiece in our pockets. We are upstanding citizens forced into exile. If he says he will pay in installments, so he shall.”
Victoria’s mouth dropped open. Around her, the rest of her family wore similar expressions of shock. None of them had ever heard Mami stand up for herself and her family that way. Like Mamalara would have done.
Mrs. Greenwald’s head of artificial hair teetered from one side to the other. “I suppose if you’re paying eighty right now that does cover you for a month. But I will contact the police if I don’t see the next twenty in a week.”
“I get paid on Fridays; you can collect then,” Papi assured her.
“Let me fill out the contract.”
“And I’ll need a receipt,” Papi said.
“May we use the pool?” Nestico asked.
“Sure, honey, all residents can—” Mrs. Greenwald stopped short because Nestico let out a whoop of joy. Next thing they knew, he was running down the stairs to the pool and pulling off his shirt, shorts, and shoes before cannonballing into the blue water in his underwear.
“¡Niño!” Mami shrieked from the balcony. “Ernesto, go after him. He’ll drown.”
“He knows how to swim better than a fish,” Papi said, not looking up from the contract.
“I’ll watch him,” Victoria volunteered, and Inés followed her down the stairs. They removed their socks and shoes and sat at the pool edge with their feet in the cool water.
With a bit of imagination, she could pretend they were back on the finca, sitting by the pool, surrounded by fruit trees and a tropical jungle. She closed her eyes and could almost hear the swans and ducks on the laguna, just about smell the horses and saddle leather in the barn.
Just a little more time, and then they’d be back home.