Cristina Baldor '07

They Say That Every Year

     If you were to walk into the Beautiful Leidy Salon on the corner of 12th and Okeechobee, the first thing you’d see would be the Virgin of Charity on an altar above the cash register. The second thing you’d see would be a group of ten dyed heads inspecting you. When Alicia walked in for the first time she had balsera written all over her. Fresh off the boat, no matter that she’d come via an Airbus and a win in the visa lottery. She wore a t-shirt that somebody had turned in five empty packs of Virginia Slims for –“You’ve come a long way baby”– and acid washed jeans that a teenager had grown out of ten years ago. Both hung as though from wire hangers on Alicia’s bony shoulders and hips. The middle-aged sisters who owned Beautiful Leidy, Blanca and Caridad, directed Alicia to the Beauty Schools of America and gave her a job clearing the shop of discarded hair.

     Just a month after Alicia had watched her own beautician’s license tacked up at the entrance with the rest, she stood staring through the vertical blinds of the front glass wall debating whether or not to enter the shop. Blanca had a circle of ladies really dying in there, turning periodically to talk at every corner of the room. Bent at the knees and waving her hands like a basketball player on defense, Blanca turned her red face to the ceiling and cackled, anticipating her own punch line. Alicia anticipated it as well, hoping the laughter would mask the jingle the door made when it opened and prevent them from noticing that she was both late and accompanied. Her daughter had thrown up buttered bread and café con leche on her new used saddle shoes at the door to the preschool. The receptionist wouldn’t let her in because all the kids were spreading a stomach virus back and forth to each other. Sofia didn’t have this stomach virus, Alicia insisted. The broken A/C in the car had forced Sofia to breathe in all of Hialeah’s ninety degree July morning truck exhaust and made her carsick. Alicia hadn’t put up a fight because she had just convinced them to let Sofia stay despite a deliberate slowness picking up English and several potty training catastrophes. Outside the shop, Alicia decided she’d waited long enough and crouched until her eyes met her four-year-old’s.

     She spoke in Spanish, because that was still the only thing either of them spoke. “Say hello to everyone like a lady. Don’t ignore them like last time and act like a brat.”

     Sofia avoided her mother’s glare and nodded.

     “And if you need to go to the bathroom?”

     “I tell you.”

     They entered the shop during the moment of anticipatory silence for the end of the story, throwing off Blanca's usually perfect timing.

     “And who she’s left the old man for… es una tipa! A woman! She’s with a woman! I swear to God I heard it from Frankie!” Blanca emphasized the point by pulling her blonde hair at the brown roots and screeching.

     The room exploded. One of the other manicurists collected mascara-stained tears in a cotton ball. Sofia bent over to grab her belly and laugh along with them. Alicia smirked at her daughter and tried her best at a nonchalant walk to her workstation.

     “So what’s so funny, Sofia? Tell me,” said Alicia. Sofia blushed, realizing she didn’t know. Blanca answered by pointing through the window to the Beautiful Lady Salon across the street. Just a few months earlier, Blanca and Caridad had walked out of it with three scissors, two razors, three round brushes, two combs, one hair dryer, two manicurists, twenty-four bottles of nail polish, and all their clients. Alicia had heard all about the dictatorial couple that they escaped months earlier. Apparently the wife had found her own beautiful lady.

     “But who cares about that? Look who’s here!” Blanca fingered Sofia’s impossible brown curls sympathetically. Sofia said hello like a lady because she liked the way her hair looked in the shop’s wall to wall mirror when it was straight. Blanca cupped Sofia’s ample cheeks in her hands. “And why aren't you in school, señorita?”

     “I threw up and Miss Noris wouldn't let me!”

     “That Miss Noris should know better than to make Mami bring you to work! I'm going to have to start paying you.”

     Alicia stopped arranging her tools to look at Blanca with eyes upturned and lips pouting, desperately trying to mimic the expression that always got Sofia out of trouble. She said, “Ay Blanquita, I called the lady that stays with Daniel but her car broke down and she couldn’t pick her up and if we didn’t have time to drop her off because if Jose Luis is late one more time they aren’t going to give him the job anymore and you know you can’t bring a little girl to a construction site and it’s just so hot outside…”

     Blanca cut her off with a hand motion like television producers use when they want someone to wrap it up. “I got it. I got it. Don’t worry. Caridad’s not even coming in today.”

     Right when the words left Blanca’s mouth, her sister interrupted her day off. Caridad flung open the shop’s door and sent the bells on the hinge clanging against metal and glass.

     “He died! He”s died! He’s dead!” she said.

     Alicia, and everyone else for that matter, knew exactly who she was talking about, as the Greater Miami area finds itself in a state of perpetual preparation for the death of only one person. The one person for which a pronoun is more than enough description, or in instances when more specifics are needed, just a That Bastard or a first name that no Cuban child will ever be named again-Fidel. An older client poked her curlers out from under the helmet of a stationary dryer and attempted murder on any hopeful looks in the room.

     “They say that every year. Tell me one thing-what difference would it make if it were true?”

No one answered. They noticed for the first time that the muted television in the corner was playing old stock footage of Fidel giving a speech. The manicurist nearest it balanced her pumps on the padded seat of her chair to raise the volume. The staff abandoned clients with feet soaking and polish missing on most of their nails, half a head covered in layers of aluminum foil. No one noticed. They stood and wandered closer to the screen, as though proximity to Univision would make it real. Alicia felt a tug at her shorts and let Sofia's hands lead her to the bathroom while she craned her neck to keep the anchorman’s image in her eyes and his voice in her ears.

     In the twenty four years of her life before Hialeah, Alicia had never met someone who wasn’t Cuban, and with the exception of a few Yankee immigration officials, that fact remained true even after leaving Holguin. People who knew had told her that Hialeah was just like home, except that there was food and money for someone willing to work. She wouldn’t even have to learn English. Alicia found it short on breathing room and nearly devoid of the color green, as though the people had turned to cement and strip malls as a permanent solution to cutting the grass. When Fidel died, Alicia was just beginning to understand how it worked. One day, someone would let go of their always overbooked manicurist and try out the new girl. She just had to make them stay somehow. Alicia waited, rearranging the full bottles of polish at her table to that the labels faced front, and then from tallest to shortest, and then in a rainbow of shades from dark to light, prostitute red to the color of nude stockings.

     The staff had convinced Blanca and Caridad that having a television installed would be a good investment. The clients would no doubt hate to miss their afternoon novelas. Or so they imagined, it wasn’t like they watched that sort of thing. The compromise was an eighteen inch screen high in one corner permanently on Univision and on mute, which allowed Alicia to hone her lip reading skills. When she couldn’t make out the dialogue she invented her own, and the few times when she was able to watch with sound she grew disappointed, preferring her own version of events. Examining the yellow highlights Blanca had given her as a graduation present, Alicia rotated idly on the office chair at her would-be workstation. Caridad's husband had taken the wheels off to make a dolly, and the chair’s aluminum base scraped against the tiles as Alicia tilted towards one of the mirror walls to practice eyebrow waxing techniques on herself. In an attempt to make herself look useful she still swept the hair from between Blanca and Caridad’s feet and slipped between the manicurists’ stations and plastic supply carts to fetch whatever the other ladies needed. Feeling mostly useless, she watched as clients rushed over to their manicurists and started half-hour monologues, reviewing the week of intrigue that had passed since last they met. There’s a look that says, “Oh, I have such a good story I’m going to explode if I don’t tell somebody that won’t tell somebody.”

     Alicia thought they never greeted the hairstylists with such anticipation. Those conversations always succumbed to nervous glances at falling pieces of hair, the overpowering roar of the blow dryer and overblown compliments soothing burnt earlobes. The manicurists were psychologist and psychic and sister. Alicia didn’t know how to be any of those things, or even how to get along herself without them. They didn’t teach that at Beauty Schools of America. She had a lot to learn. At first Alicia let her clients talk without interruption. She needed to concentrate. Nail polish remover, lotion, soak, cuticle cutter, nail file, clear base coat, color deliberation, color application, topcoat, repeat. She thought the hands that performed these tasks a poor advertisement of her skills, with bare nails and peeling skin showing the aftermath of daily acetone attacks. The clients called her Flaca when her name escaped them, while patting their rolls of fat and telling her how lucky she was to have grown up used to dieting. They asked the usual questions, indulging a desire to hear one of those dramatic escape legends the new arrivals are always telling. When did you come? How? Where? How long did you have to wait? Weren’t you afraid? Who did you know here? Who did you leave there?

     “My mother,” Alicia said always, although in reality she had left everyone she’d ever met that wasn't dead or in Hialeah: her father, her two stepfathers, her sisters and half brothers, the stepbrother who she caught peeking at her through a hole in the wooden shower at their farmhouse in Holguin, and Sofia’s father, who had signed a paper that said Alicia and Jose Luis could take his daughter out of the country, a country that their own ten-month-old son would not remember.

     On the day that Fidel died, Alicia closed the bathroom door behind her and leaned back into it, dizzy in the fumes of fresh paint and the echo of the commotion outside. Sofia pulled her jean skirt up and her Care Bears panties down. She shuffled towards the toilet in the paper pedicure slippers Alicia had given her to use while her saddle shoes recovered from the morning’s incident.

     “Don’t even think about it! You know how many strangers come in here.” Alicia hoisted her by the armpits onto the vanity so that her bare bottom dangled above the sink. Outside, the television cut to commercial and induced a round of exclamations that drilled through the bathroom walls.

     Alicia rested her forehead on her daughter’s and rubbed their noses together. “Do you remember Abuela?”

     Sofia mused for a while and finally came up with an emphatic Sí! that jumped through her whole body and sent a stream perilously close to Alicia’s blouse. Until she saw her mother smiling Sofia held her own laughter. Alicia wouldn’t scold her today. It was a special occasion.

     “Of course you have to remember her! She’ll be mad if I tell her you don’t!”

     “No!” Sofia giggled and blushed, basking in her mother’s good humor for the first time in months. The discussion outside suddenly reached a more intense volume and startled them both. “Why are they yelling?” Sofia asked.

     “The man on the television says maybe we can go home soon.” Alicia helped Sofia down from the sink and splashed water onto her own flushed face. “So we can live with Abuela again.”

     Sofia returned her mother’s smile, and her mother knew she didn’t know what she was smiling about. Alicia checked her eyes in the mirror to make sure it didn’t look like they had tears in them. The ladies outside would laugh at her for being so naïve, she thought.

     At noon, Beautiful Leidy for the first time in its five-month history closed its doors to those afflicted with chipped polish and surfacing roots. No clients would have come anyway, and Blanca said they’d still get paid, that it was a special occasion. They drove together to the festivities already forming on 49th Street, and found the last empty space in the lot between Denny’s and Beauty Schools of America. Alicia saw that the new batch of future cosmetic professionals had taken to the streets during their lunch break, black frocks billowing in the wind. They looked like reject witches about to take flight with cigarette and Cuban flag in hand. Down Hialeah’s most vital six-lane artery, the crowd was ten and twenty deep on the sidewalks, with hundreds more crammed between the palms and palmettos on the median strip. As usual, the cars barely moved when the streetlights turned green, but those few unwillingly stuck in the traffic didn’t mind. They felt like celebrities, and besides, nobody could be mad about anything on a day like today.

     The air, already too humid to breathe, grew thicker with the thousands screaming their hot breath into the streets. Cuba Si Castro No Cuba Si Castro No. Makeshift banners on the backs of children’s poster board science projects wilted in the heat. Rebel messages folded in on themselves and ripped, but their makers thrust them to the rhythm of the chanting with the same vigor. Men who had never cooked in their lives carried giant iron skillets and beat them so hard that the metal spoons they used bent and snapped in half. Teenagers who had never seen Cuba waved to the crowd while hanging out the windows of passing cars. Women cried tears of joy as they spread confirming accounts according to their neighbor’s sister’s friend’s communist cousin who reportedly worked as a body guard for the government. Two men galloped in the street waving giant flags borrowed from Gus Machado Ford, like they were leading the triumphant of Hialeah into an Olympic stadium.

     The sky looked like a balding man’s head, smooth and clear in the center with puffs of grey at the edges. The car subwoofers that no adolescent boy in the neighborhood could live without sent a wave of bass against Alicia’s chest. It was slowing down her heartbeat, she thought. Alicia pried a manic Sofia from the crowd and backed away from her dancing coworkers unnoticed. Sitting on the cement bumper in a parking space, she caught her breath and gave Sofia half the cheese and mayonnaise sandwich she’d packed in her purse. When they finished, Alicia rose to press one palm against her left ear and clutch the greasy payphone receiver against her right, trying to make out the babysitter’s voice telling her that Daniel was taking a nap. Alicia hung up and called another number to tell Jose Luis that she didn’t want to be there anymore.

     The parade started to lose steam around three in the afternoon. The voice in the back of everyone’s head about how they should get back to work grew louder as the songs and sayings got quieter. It was hot and everybody was tired, spent from so much overexcitement. The now black clouds closing in gave them an excuse to run for their cars. The downpour washed away all the noise, the trampled churros and the smell of celebratory tobaccos. Under the dripping awning of the Denny’s, Alicia waited for Jose Luis, using two fingers in Sofia’s straining collar to keep her from running through the puddles. A plastic flag floated along the curb towards the drain. It caught in the grates facing the wrong way, rippling as though it was on a flagpole and the wind had blown it backwards. Alicia thought she should save it but didn’t.

     Alicia buckled Sofia into the middle seat of Jose Luis’s pick up. For the first few minutes of their drive home, there was silence except for the sound of raindrops on the metal roof.

      Finally Alicia said, “The parade down El Prado in Havana. That’s the one I want to go to. This is nothing. This is crap.”

     The next morning Beautiful Leidy opened as usual, with their regular Wednesday crowd jingling through the door. Poised to deliver any breaking news, the television in the corner played at full volume. No one had dared put it on mute again. There had been no official announcements during the night, and the lack of confirmation brought on a wave of doubt.

     “It’s like the monster in the movie, everyone’s got to see the dead body before they feel safe,” said Caridad, dialing the numbers on her phone card. “You people can never just believe something good when it comes.”

     The more anxious among them had convinced Caridad to call her and Blanca’s younger sister, who worked as a nurse in the hospital in Havana. They waited, their expressions showing that the rest of their lives hinged on the outcome of this conversation. They waited although no one imagined that Fidel, with the vast resources available at his disposal, would be treated at a crowded city hospital with bloodstained sheets that no one had bothered to make clean. Alicia knew he wouldn’t have had to wait in line, like she did there after trying everything else to reduce Sofia’s fever, which had turned into an infection cooking her brain by the time the doctors saw her, which forced them to give her medicine that they said might cause learning disabilities, which then led to entering the lottery for visas.

     “So what have you heard?” Caridad asked her sister in Havana.

     The look on Caridad’s face said that for the second time that week she was one step ahead of Univision in hearing the news, but this time the words died in her mouth and the anchorman beat her to it.

     “Castro calls the reports of his death an invention of the media and radical exile groups. Tonight at five: Exclusive video of Havana residents celebrating the dictator’s health in the streets.”

     Alicia saw him, alive within the four walls of the television screen, holding a smaller version of himself on the front page of that day’s edition of the newspaper. A proof of life within a proof of life, like the endless reflections of herself in the shop’s dueling mirrors.

     Blanca walked to the television and jumped to slap the power button off. Alicia’s eyes met hers for an instant before returning to the black screen still humming in the corner.

     “You didn’t think it was real did you? They say that every year.” Blanca spoke only to Alicia, and the silence surrounding her words made it seem like shouting. It lent a note of authority to her words. The crisp, clean truth meticulously enunciated with no background noise. Of course it wasn’t true, how could anyone be so gullible, Blanca hadn’t bought it for a second, not even one.

     “Yo no me ilusiono,” Alicia said. Yes, she had learned long ago never ever to build her hopes up. Alicia turned back to her station, where an elderly lady with hair that matched her maroon slacks waited quietly with her hands dipped in water.