LITMIR.BIZ

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      “I don’t like that,” Angel said, and wagged his thick finger at her. His hands were tinged blue, red, and purple from the ink he used to stamp parking passes all day. He left rainbow fingerprints on the bathroom walls at home.

      “But Papi,” Daysy said.

      “No way, mi’jita,” Magda Elena jumped in. “You can bet I never had a boyfriend at your age. But I did have a neighbor in Cuba who had a boyfriend when she was young. And you know how boys are. They promise and promise until they get what they want. Then, pum! No promises. This girl stayed out with her noviecito late one night. Two weeks later, a baby was on the way. And babies bring only heartache. Her son died before he knew how to walk. It’s better not to have babies at all.” Magda Elena looked away and began pushing back the cuticle of her thumbnail.

      Daysy had not heard this one before. Usually, Magda Elena’s stories seemed more fantastical, more grotesque. Daysy’s mother claimed to have known all the poor, unfortunate souls in Cuba, the ones who had not listened to their parents. There was the boy at the zoo who didn’t listen when his mother said, “Don’t you know your head weighs more than the rest of your body?” as he hung his pendulous skull over the wall of the alligator exhibit. Then, pum! The kid fell over and was eaten. And there was the girl who watched television during a lightning storm. The storm blew up the set and shards of glass flew into her eyes and blinded her. Best of all was the girl who didn’t tie up her long hair when riding a roller coaster. The hair was, of course, entangled in the ride’s monstrous gears and her head came clean off. It was no wonder that Daysy had a sustained fear of amusement parks, of lightning, of heights, of dark places, of green food, of portraits of Jesus, of cats, of rocking chairs, of kissing a boy for too long. The list grew with each passing year, each place or thing attached through the strands of memory and imagination to a nameless child who gave up his life for the benefit of giving Daysy a lesson to learn. But Magda Elena had told this last story so quietly, without meeting Daysy’s eyes at all. And the final bit, about it’s being better not to have children at all, stung Daysy.

      “So what was her name?” Daysy asked.

      Magda Elena perked up then and Daysy thought that her mother, suddenly, sat so tall that it was as if she’d shaken off a heavy coat. “Ay, I forget. But who cares now? I’m the only one who remembers her.”

      There was silence for a moment, and Daysy knew that her mother was still constructing an argument in her head. Daysy understood her mother’s methods. Magda Elena knew when to press on, when to back out of a discussion, and when to go in for the kill. Daysy recognized the way her mother lifted her chin when she was about to make a final pronouncement. She braced herself for the final thrust. “Mira, niña, names are important,” Magda Elena began. “Let me say it in English so you understand. You name a person and you choose a path for her. And you are named after your abuela, Margarita. She was a good woman who died in church. Margarita was her name. Margarita. Daysy. Same flower. Different language. You have a lot to live up to, señorita. ¿Me oyes?”

      “Daisy is spelled with an i,” Daysy mumbled, rolled her eyes.

      “You think I didn’t study English in school? Besides, in Cuba, it’s spelled with a y.”

      “No, it isn’t. You just made that up!”

      “Fine. Your new name is Margarita,” Magda Elena said, and rolled her r’s loud and long. Daysy cringed dramatically. “Ay, ya,” Magda Elena said at last, and swatted her hand, as if brushing away a gnat.

      Daysy chanced a look at her father, who sat very still, his eyes back on the television. Magda Elena took his hand and rubbed his knuckles until his fingers loosened and intertwined themselves with hers.

      “And let me tell you something else,” Magda Elena began, pointing a long finger at Daysy, but Angel silenced her with a booming “¡Ya, coño!” that vibrated in the room. It was a shout so loud, and so unlike him, that the curse lingered in Daysy’s head, far more frightening than any of Magda Elena’s reprimands could be. He’d released Magda Elena’s hand with a movement so swift it reminded Daysy of a whip, and Magda Elena’s face registered the motion as if, indeed, she’d been struck by an invisible lash.

      “Mi vida,” she said softly, trying to calm him, but Angel would not offer his hand again.

      “We are watching something important, and you two are talking nonsense! How many cousins, aunts, uncles, friends, my own mother, coño, did we say goodbye to and haven’t seen in ten years? Cuéntame, how many?” Angel said, but this time, he let her take his hand, and he rubbed his thumb roughly against hers, as if he were rubbing out a spot, pushing the loose skin up and down.

      “Too many,” Magda Elena whispered, then coughed a little. Angel’s breathing slowed and his eyes shone. Daysy hated it when her father became agitated. He was usually so calm, as if he were fixed in some kind of meditation even as he spoke and worked, but when it came to Cuban politics, he changed. The timbre of his voice would magnify, his hands would become more animated, and his eyes would take on a glossy sheen, his bad eye darting to the left, as if in anticipation of an enemy coming up to surprise him.

      “He wasn’t always this way,” Magda Elena would sometimes whisper to Daysy in the middle of one of Angel’s rants about political prisoners, communists, or Fidel Castro. “I was the hot-headed one about these things years ago.”

      Daysy once asked why they were so different, why her mother and father had switched roles, but Magda Elena became serious, and her face contorted as if she would cry. “Because I think that once you lose everything, there’s no reason to fight anymore, while your father thinks that it is all the more reason to wage war. I refuse to fight about something I can’t change,” Magda Elena had said, and Daysy remembered that now as she watched her mother calming her father down. Angel looked as if he’d just been in a boxing match. His face was red and his left hand was in a fist. Magda Elena watched Angel the way a mother watches a misbehaving child, with both frustration and love.

      Daysy left the living room then, gathered her pajamas, and started running a bath. Lightning filled the small bathroom, and with each burst of light, the name Belén came to Daysy’s mind. Names are important, her mother had said. So, Daysy whispered it, rolled her tongue around the letters, and even wrote out the name on the foggy bathroom mirror. Belén del Pozo. The name conjured up a mud-splattered stone fount of ancient days, the soft-shoe shuffle of donkey hooves and sandals on dirt paths, the muted groaning of a woman in labor. “God, I’m stupid,” Daysy said aloud, and erased the name with the heel of her hand. Thunder shook the glass doors surrounding the bathtub, and soon enough, Daysy heard Magda Elena’s frantic knocking at the door.

      “Get out of the tub,” she was shouting. “I knew a girl in Cuba who was electrocuted while taking a bath during a thunderstorm…”

      Daysy remembered someone punching a hole through the edge of a turtle’s shell and looping a leash through the little opening. She remembered crying as she watched the turtle open its mouth wide, in agony she imagined, and her cries filled the emptiness within the turtle’s sharp mouth, the pointy beak. Daysy remembered a tiny red rocking chair in a foreign backyard, recalled rocking back and forth with such violence that she tumbled backward, and could still smell the bright orange iodine her mother put on her elbow scratches. She thought she could recall the feeling of her grandmother holding her so tightly that Angel pulled her away by force, and she dreamed of the buttons on her dress tearing in her grandmother’s hands. “No, no me la lleves,” yelling over and over again. Watery vomit over the edge of a boat she remembered, too. And there, beneath the riotous color of all the other images, was a chubby little hand, perhaps her own, and a gold bracelet with a name on it she couldn’t make out.

      These were her thoughts as she changed into pajamas in the bathroom, her mother knocking on the door to hurry her the whole time. Daysy had been repeating the name Belén over and over again as she brushed her teeth, slipped off her jeans, combed her hair. It certainly was the kind of crazy name her mother seemed to like, but that was all the evidence

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