From "Havana and Other Missing Fathers"

From Havana and Other Missing Fathers Miami International Airport, 1988 I’m twenty. He’s seventy-three. I don’t have a photo of my father, but I’m certain I’ll recognize him. I’ve spent the bulk of the trip to Miami reveling in my newfound identity of traveler, so when my flight makes a bumpy landing and comes to a screeching halt at the airport in early January 1988, I’m surprised to find myself frozen in my seat, unable to gather my things and disembark. Coat sleeves dangle from the overhead bins and brush my face as sleepy passengers snap to attention and begin filing out around me. I peer into the mirror of my tortoiseshell compact, examining my face in circular fragments—a short, deep scar just outside the corner of my left eye, a tawny-colored mole on my nose. I angle the mirror like a periscope and stare hard into its glassy eye, willing myself leagues beneath this plane’s metal gut. I’m not a traveler. I’m a girl from Missouri with a ticket to meet my father for the first time, and I’m terrified. Only one picture of my father existed. My mother named it “Jerry” and declared him deceased. The black-and-white, wallet-sized photograph inspired wildly divergent eulogies: he was patient and kind; he was cold and self-centered. My father was a psychiatrist, an internist, an ophthalmologist. He was “foreign.” He emigrated to Florida, Kentucky, or Baltimore from the Philippines, from Cuba, from some faraway island. The only consistent feature was the dancing. In all the stories, my mother was buoyed from rumba to cha-cha-cha. It swept her from her parents’ oppressive house on Denmark Street to clubs with names such as the Iroquois Room or the Louisville Belle. 1 I start down the wide gangway. For the first time since I began this journey at 6:00 a.m., it occurs to me that I don’t know what my father looks like. My mother and I hefted concrete blocks into the trunk to leverage her Cutlass Sierra against the icy highway and slogged two hours and forty-five minutes to the closest airport, just north of Kansas City. She left, so I waited alone three hours for my flight. I had plenty of time to think of practicalities, but instead submerged myself in the anonymity of the airport. The imagined destinations of the travelers eclipsed any real thoughts of the implications my trip might have. Now, as I watch family members flag each other down or stand in clusters, punctuating their conversations with spontaneous embraces and kisses, I wonder how he will find me. He might have copied one digit in the flight number incorrectly. Perhaps he’s standing on the other side of the airport, craning his neck to get a glimpse of any young woman disembarking alone. Before these thoughts can lead to either a practical plan of action or pure panic, I see my father and his wife staring at me. They’re several yards away, and I set out in their direction without openly acknowledging them, just in case I’m wrong. My father stands immobile and silent. His short, stout wife radiates black hair tinted a deep burgundy henna. She talks rapidly, her hands fluttering around him like a pair of nervous birds. She rifles through her purse for something, then turns to brush imaginary lint from my father’s gray plaid sports jacket. He’s unexpectedly tall. His skin’s my color, fair with an olive tone, and his round, watery, hazel eyes stare back at mine, registering the similarity. I hold out my hand. The wife starts snapping photos. She barks out instructions to him in Spanish, and he shuffles closer to me. I still have that picture. There’s no other way of saying it: he looks terrified. 2 Spanish has fourteen verb tenses, English has six. My father and I speak in only one—the present. “You travel fine?” he inquires, rocking forward just a little on the word “fine.” “Yes, thank you,” I smile politely, just as I’ve been trained to do when an elderly person asks me a question. We wade into the present tense, intoning questions and answers, inflecting simple declarative statements, and preparing to join the chaotic chorus of airport reunions, crashing and careening around us. Today has been my first time on a plane, my first landing and arrival. I see a family of Hasidic Jews and think they are Amish. I see Cubans for the first time, and feel startled and embarrassed to realize there are more of them than just one fair-skinned man buttoned into a wallet-sized photo. Spanish floods the loudspeaker and springs from the mouths of airport workers and travelers. The swallowed r’s and dropped s’s dip into anonymity then bubble up around me like the family I just watched descend upon a young man sporting a buzz cut and slinging a large canvas duffle bag over his shoulder. We walk from the gate past a man holding a cardboard sign that reads “Royal Caribbean Here.” That’s how I’ve carried my “Cubanness” up until now—like a stark cardboard sign, a piece of information my mother conveyed with little explanation when I was sixteen. But now my father is a few steps ahead of me and his wife farther ahead. I follow him through the Miami International Airport, thinking the tag fluttering on my bag is a good omen. Stepping into a wall of humid night air, hanging on to the broken syllables of my father’s English, I feel like I’m on my way. I feel almost close to something. 3 Papi By the second day of that first visit in January 1988, I’m calling José “Father,” or more precisely, “Papi.” Did I step outside, hear some kid yelling after his father, and follow suit, chirping “Papi” like a life-sized parrot? Did I ask my father’s wife, Zoraida, the Spanish word and did she reply with the Cuban informal, relegating me to the status of a little girl rather than a young woman visiting her father for the first time? I don’t know, but somehow I emerge from that first night of sleep, face scrubbed, stomach rumbling, and a cheerful “ Buenos días, Papi” flying from my lips without a trace of irony. Zoraida and my father stop in mid-conversation. A tall breakfast bar separates the kitchen from the open dining area where an enormous china cabinet sits behind an imposing dining table, plastic azaleas bristling at its center. For the rest of my visit, my father and I will eat all our meals at the breakfast bar while Zoraida cooks, cleans, serves, and pops morsels of food into her mouth from the other side. My father asks me how I slept, and I reply politely that I slept just fine. He pauses to formulate a question. “You want cornflake?” “Yes, thank you,” I reply, my words setting Zoraida into action. Her movements burst with energy. She vigorously shakes the cornflakes from their box, briskly slices a huge ripe banana, and pours whole milk into the bowl with the limber wrist of a bartender. In Miami, even a bowl of cornflakes tastes like dessert. I begin to discover cognates—such words as banana, cereal, and coffee that sound alike in English and Spanish, and have the same general meaning. 4 Zoraida pours thick, dark Cuban espresso into a white ceramic cup, adds steamed whole milk, and presents me with my first Cuban café con leche. “Wow,” I report to my father and Zoraida, who are both watching me. They smile and nod at each other knowingly. “Do you normally eat cornflakes for breakfast?” I ask them. “No,” Zoraida says, scrubbing the spotless counter vigorously. “We buy for you,” my father adds. I thank him even though I’ve probably eaten cornflakes only a handful of times in my entire life. My father goes to the pantry and gingerly pulls a macaroon from a plastic container. I love macaroons too, and he offers me one. He narrates his past in a choppy present tense: “I work as psychiatrist twelve years in Baltimore State Hospital, Maryland.” Even after twelve years, Maryland, on my father’s tongue, remains “Mary”-land. Zoraida drops her dish towel on the counter, rubs her hands briskly over her upper arms as if she’s shivering, and exclaims, “Cold!” My father charges his words with all the declarative force the present tense has to offer, as if he’s giving dictation for a very important speech. I tilt my head and strain to catch every word. This first morning, everything feels present tense. Zoraida meticulously dusts the figurines in her china cabinet, burrowing the corner of her cotton cloth into the fold of every porcelain petticoat and collar. My father takes another macaroon from the tall, narrow cupboard in the kitchen, holds it aloft like he’s proposing a toast, and eats it in two bites. A rim of sunlight glows from the Florida room around the corner. I take a sip of my coffee and decide there’s nothing more present tense than café con leche. The thick, bitter espresso whipped into a frothy, sugary haze and folded into steamed whole 5 milk momentarily pins the innate desire for sweet and bitter directly to the center of my being. Planted firmly on tall bamboo stools, my father and I are even sitting in the present tense.

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