My heart sank. Trouble was brewing in the big house. It had already landed on Gladys, and there was no use hiding, for sooner or later, it would fall on me too. I rose and lay the doll on the cushion of the chair, ignoring its cry of “Mama.”
At the door of the study I paused, overcome as always by the high shelves packed with books like a library and the dark wood of the walls and jalousies. My mother was pacing up and down the room, as if neither direction would do, and smoking steadily. My father sat at the edge of his recliner, his hands drooped over the armrests, his head bowed. On the small smoking table beside the stand of pipes, I caught sight of the mechanical bank, swaddled in an apron. I took a step into the room. But no one noticed me. “It was a present,” I blurted out. My mother stopped in her tracks and looked at me absently.
“I gave it to her,” confessed.
My father looked up at me, then exchanged a glance with my mother.
“Next time your father brings you a gift—” my mother began to scold, but Papi cut her off.
“We’re just going to have to get better presents, Mami,” he said, winking at me. “I don’t see the dancing dolls being left out in the rain or given away to the maid!”
My heart soared at the thought of a better surprise than any that had come before. What could it be? I looked about the room expansively for ideas, anything, anything. My gaze fell on the bank.
My mother put out her cigarette with little, nervous jabs. “I guess I better go explain to the others.” She sighed and brushed past me. The door slammed shut behind her. A rack of pipes jiggled and rattled. A whole wall of jalousies collapsed open.
Out in the driveway Mario had pulled the car up to the en-trance. He went inside the house and a little later came out carrying a cardboard box and several sacks he placed in the back seat. Gladys followed, a kerchief on her head to keep her church hairdo in place, dabbing at her eyes with another kerchief. She climbed in beside her bags, and with a blinding flash from the chrome Mario polished all day long, the car disappeared down the driveway, past the guard at the gate, to the world.
“Papi,” I cried, turning around. “Don’t make Gladys go away, please.”
My father reached out and pulled me towards his lap. His eyes were dull as if they’d been colored in brown and smudged. “We can’t trust her—” he began, but then he seemed to think better of explaining it that way. “It was Gladys who asked to leave, you know. … She’ll get a job in no time. Maybe even end up in New York.” But the glum look on his face did not convince me. He gazed past me, out the window. The distant sound of a car engine died into a hum.
His glance fell on the little bank. He smiled and reached in his pocket, withdrawing pennies. “Give her a spin,” he said.
I was not in the mood for play. But my father seemed sad too, and it was up to me to cheer him up. I picked up a penny from his hand, stood it in its slot and pulled the knob as far as it would go. The coin dropped with a clink to the bank below. The lever jammed and would not slide back in its groove. The little figure rose, her arms swiveled. Then she stopped, stuck, halfway up, halfway down.
The Drum
Yoyo
It was a drum Mamita brought back from a trip to New York, a magnificent drum, its sides bright red, criss-crossed by gold wire held down by gold button heads, its top and bottom white. It had a broad blue strap with a pad for putting around your neck, the flat top facing up, for it was a drumroller’s drum. Mamita presented me with it, slipping the strap over my head, lifting the top up. “Ah,” I sighed, for in the hollow at the center, two drumsticks were stored. She took them out, tapped the top down, and handed me the drum-sticks. Though her palm had given the first tap, she would not rob me of the thunder of the first wicked drumstick drumroll.
Barra-bam, barra-bam, barra-barra-barra BAM!
“Ah”—my grandmother rolled her eyes—“another Beethoven!”
“What do you say to your grandmother?” Mami asked proudly.
“Barrabarrabarrabarrabarrabarra BOOM! BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!”
“Yoyo!” my mother cried out, and I stopped drumming abruptly so that she yelled out into the suddenly silent room, “THAT’S QUITE ENOUGH!”
“Laura!” my grandmother said, scowling at her daughter. “Why are you yelling at the child?”
“Mamita,” I said nicely, “thank you.”
“Thank you is bare, put butter on my bread,” my mother snapped.
“Thank you very much,” I buttered. And then, I brought down an apocalyptic, apoplectic, joy-to-the-great-world drum-roll that made Mamita throw her head back and laugh her loud, girlish laugh. My mother plugged a finger in each ear like Hans at the dike, a great flood of scolding about to come out of her mouth, which I held back by drumroll until she snatched the sticks out of my hands and said she would keep them until I was responsible enough to play my drum like an adult. I forgot all the promises I had made—before being given the drum—to improve my character and wailed. I wanted them back. I wanted them back. Mamita intervened, and the sticks were put back into the hollow of the drum, and another promise extracted from me that I would not play the drum inside the house but only out in the yard.
My grandmother pulled me towards her. She had once been, so Mami said, the most beautiful woman in the country. We called her Mamita, “little mother,” because she was smaller than Mami, with the delicate face of a girl, brown doe eyes and white wavy hair in a bun that sometimes fell down her back in a braid. She looked like a girl who had had a terrible fright that had turned her hair white.
“That drum is from a magic store” she said, consoling me.
“Oh?” my mother said casually, wanting to rejoin the conversation. “Where did you get it?”
“Schwarz,” Mamita said. “F.A.O. Schwarz.” And she promised that one day soon, very soon, if I behaved myself and didn’t drive my mother insane with my drum and drank my milk down to the bottom of the glass and brushed up and down instead of across and didn’t get into things like lipsticks and perfumes and then pretended as I walked through the house reeking of Paris with a je-ne-sais-pas look on my face that I did not know what could have happened to the little bottle with a bow tie, she, my favorite grandmother, would take me from the Island to the United States on an airplane to see Schwarz and the snow. And at this, I could not help myself, but having tipped the lid up and kidnapped the drumsticks, I gave a modest, tippy-tap, well-behaved drumroll that made Mamita wink and Mami smile and both agree that in the last five minutes I had indeed grown up to responsible drumming.
Ba-bam, ba-bam, I tapped about the yard all day. That was just like my mother to let me have a drum and then forbid me to drum it, ba-bam, ba-bam, in any significantly inspired way. And how could I judge significance in a drum unless at least one grownup clapped her hands over her ears? And how could I judge inspiration unless there was noise in it, drumming from my ten flexed toes, from my skinny legs that would someday improve themselves, drumming from the hips I swayed when I was womanish, and up, up the rib cage, where the heart sat like a crimson drum itself among ivory drumsticks, and then the drumming rose like wings, making my shoulders shrug, my arms lift, my wrists flick, and down came the drumsticks, BOOM, BOOM, Barra-ba, BOOM!
“Yolanda Altagracia, you forget yourself,” came my mother’s curtsy-when-you-say-hello voice, her puree-of-peas voice. “We have a fine yard that lots of other children would give their right arms to play in.”
And so it was that for a whole day, I marched in front of the hibiscus and saluted the bougainvillea and drummed until the mockingbirds were ready to fly off to the United States of America in the middle of December. All that week and the next and the next and the next, I drummed up and down, up and down, up and down the yard. Then, with the terrible luck of such toys, I lost one drumstick. And then, our crazy aunt, Tia Isa, who was unhappily married to an American and always on the point of divorcing and who, therefore, never looked where she was going, plopped herself down on my second drumstick and sn
apped it in two and glued it with glue that would, she promised, hold a house together. But I never believed glue could hold drumsticks together, however good it was on china cups and porcelain shepherdesses and all such grownup truck that was always finding its shattering way to the floor in my presence. And so it was that in less than a month’s time, I had a drum but no drumsticks. Mamita and Mami and Tia Isa, not understanding that drumsticks are the only kind of drum-sticks that will do on a drum, suggested pencils or the handles of wooden spoons used for making cake batter. I tried them all, but the sound was not the same, and the joy went out of drumming. I took to wearing the strap across my chest, the drum riding my hips like a desperado’s revolver.
In those days we had a fine yard that lots of other children would have given their right arms to play in. Beyond the laundry room at the back of the house, the lawns rolled away, so smooth and closely mown, the ground itself seemed green rather than planted with grass. At the back of the property was a shed where the coal bins were kept for the laundry fires for boiling the white clothes, a shed known to be haunted. In those days it was an adventure to go into the coal shed and stare down the big barrels of coal bricks and breathe in coal dust; to then pluck up your courage and turn an empty barrel over, spilling the Devil out; to race all the way to the back of the house; to scramble up the back steps to the laundry room where one-eyed Pila would cock her head and say, “What? Is the Devil after you, child?”
That old laundry maid, Pila, was the strangest maid we had ever had, for it seemed everything that could go wrong with her had gone wrong. She had lost an eye, her left, let’s see, or was it her right? You never knew. The two eyes took turns staring fixedly at the sky. But what’s an eye? A little bit of jelly with a duplicate beside it. Who’d notice a missing eye in the face of her incredible skin. She had splashes of pinkish white all up and down her dark brown arms and legs. The face itself had been spared: it was uniformly brown, the brown skin so smooth that it looked as if it’d been ironed with a hot iron. Only around the eyes where the tip of the iron couldn’t get to were there wrinkles—from smiles. She was Haitian, though obviously, only half. The light-skinned Dominican maids feared her, for Haiti was synonymous with voodoo. She was a curiosity and I, a curious child, I, with the promise of snow in my heart and the wonder of the world seizing me with such fury at times that I had to touch forbidden china cups or throttle a little cousin or pet a dog’s head so strenously that he looked as if he were coming out of the birth canal, I wanted nothing more then to get a temporary injunction from politeness and have a good long stare at her speckled arms.
As I was saying, the coal shed was haunted. And it was Pila’s doing. There was a time—before Pila—when the coal shed was just a coal shed. But then Pila came, and in addition to five paper sacks of her things, she brought her story devils and story ghosts and her trances and her being mounted by spirits and her “I see a nimbus about your head, beware of water today!” All these spirits, she claimed, lived in the coal shed. And so it was that by the time of my drum, the coal shed was haunted. By the time of the drum, I should also add, Pila was gone. She had lasted a couple of months at the compound before disappearing one Sunday. The house was thrown into mathematical turmoil. The linens were counted. The clothes inventoried. The other maids and Mami put two and two together, and the sum was that now for almost two months we had been living with a thief!
“Pity for her,” my mother said, “she won’t get far with that skin.”
Sure enough, the next day she was picked up by the police. By then, having consulted her American education, my mother decided it would be cruel to press charges. The poor woman didn’t know any better. Let her and her ten shopping bags go. And she was gone, leaving behind a whole coal shed of devils and goblins, so that by the time of my missing drumsticks, to dare enter the coal shed was quite literally to be a daredevil.
The day I wandered into the coal shed looking for trouble I had the drum on my hip and two little dowels for drumsticks. Pila had been gone several weeks. In I went, pushing the door back so the hinges cried out, devils, their thumbs crushed, their pointed noses tweezed. I stood a moment in the doorway, blinded by the shaft of light that struck like a knife blade into the darkness. Slowly, I made out the barrels, eight or nine standing, a couple tipped over. I crunched coal bricks under-foot. I dared further. I stood at the end of the shaft of light, and then one toe braved the darkness. My heart was pounding. I leaned over the first upright barrel and peered in, half expecting to look down a long well into the Devil’s eye. Nothing but coal bricks at the half mark. In the next barrel, coal bricks at the quarter mark, then dregs of coal bricks. The new laundry maid, Nivea, was using them up inefficiently, without a system.
The last barrel was tucked behind the others. I looked down at a full barrel. Suddenly, there was a little stirring, a whimper, a little pink mouth opened in a yawn; so pink and moist was that mouth it seemed impossible in a coal barrel. The mouth closed, another one opened, a cry came out of it, “Meow.” Two or three mouths wailed in chorus, “Meow, meow.” Immediately, I singled out one who had four little white paws and a white spot between its ears, fully dressed, so it looked, as op-posed to the others who were careless and had lost their shoes and their caps. This one, a curiosity, was the one I intended for me.
But I did not touch her or pet her or touch or pet any of the brothers and sisters. At that time, my natural lore was comprised of a few rules, all of which I confused so that when the situation presented itself, I knew there was something to be done, but I did not quite know what exactly. If it was lightning, I was either to stand under a tree or in an open field so the tree wouldn’t fall on me. If I found a nest of nightingale eggs or chicks, I was not to disturb it or the mother would abandon her roost and the chicks would die. But was it chickens or kittens? I wasn’t sure. Vaguely, too, I remembered a horror story about a mother cat being vicious and scratching out the eyes of someone who had threatened her babies. I did not want to find out the hard way the dos and don’ts of kittens. I needed, therefore, to question an adult who might know everything, and between lightning and chickens, I could slip in a question on kittens. But whom could I ask who would know about kittens? And whom could I ask who would be sure to know about kittens but would not suspect my secret? Mami in the house was bad on both counts; Mamita wouldn’t know anything about the out-doors, which she was allergic to, she claimed, which was why she had to go on shopping trips to New York, where, she said, the outdoors wasn’t really out doors, a riddle I promised myself someday to solve; Tia Isa was no good to ask either: she’d laugh her whooping laugh and scurry around and peep and meow, pretending to be a chicken and nightingale and kitten, all in one, until the whole extended family would guess what I was up to; and Pila, who knew about everything on this earth and out of it, Pila was, of course, gone.
Unsure of what to do but knowing if I stayed there debating my options, the mother cat might well come and blind me, I left the coal shack and lingered about the yard. In my exasperation, I lifted the lid of my drum and was about to take my dowels out and drum a racket louder than I had ever drummed, when I saw a man I had never seen, crossing our yard towards the orchard of wild orange trees that stretched beyond our fence. A dog accompanied him, or rather, the dog ran ahead, slowed, sniffed the ground, gave a bark, chased a butterfly, and in a dozen other ways, made the world safe for the man. The man was a dashing, handsome, storybook kind of man, dressed in jodhpurs and riding boots. He had a goatee and a mustache, which made me wonder if he weren’t the Devil, and a way of addressing the dog with affection and humor, which convinced me he wasn’t. He had not seen me and was passing not more than ten yards away when the dog twisted about, raised his nose, and curled one paw up. The man stopped and looked up at the sky. It was then I noticed he was carrying a gun on a shoulder strap, the barrel pointed up. The dog began to bark.
“There, there,” the man said, addressing the dog. “Where are your manners?” Then he turned to
me. The ends of his mustache lifted in a smile. “Good day, little miss. I hope Kashtanka did not frighten you?”
I eyed the man, his gun, the dog now poking his nose where dogs always poke their noses on a person. With a child’s instinct, I knew the man was safe, for occasionally, strangers my grandfather had met on his travels came for a visit and wandered over to our property. But I was uneasy that a dog was loose and there were kittens, seven mouthfuls, nearby in the shed.
The dog sniffed my drum. “I say,” the man said, “what have you got there?”
“It’s a drum,” I said, bringing it round from my hip to in front of me, “but I’ve lost the drumsticks.” And I lifted the top and tilted the drum so he could look in at the two dowels. “I’ve got to use those, and the sound is not the same.”
“It never is,” the man agreed, to his great credit. He crouched down beside his dog. His riding boots creaked.
“About drumsticks,” I said. And then, because I was sure I had found my man, I hurried my questions: “Can you play with a brand-new kitten or will the mother abandon it or blind you if she catches you and by when can you take a kitten from its mother to keep as a pet?”
“Well!” the man said, looking at me closely but with friendliness in his eyes. “About drumsticks, eh? Well, just as your drumsticks belong inside your drum, and dowels will not do, so a kitten belongs with its mother, and no one else will do.”
“But pets,” I protested, glancing at Kashtanka.