Rachel Kushner - Telex From Cuba

That first week after the Allains arrived in Preston, Curtis Junior and I rode our bikes out to the airstrip together. On our way back into town he asked if I wanted to eat with them. That was something different. They cooked outside and they ate outside. Grilled everything on a fifty-gallon drum that Rudy cut in half and welded onto a stand. We all sat together, both families and all of the kids, at two picnic tables pushed end to end. Adults, kids — everybody shouted. The babies cried, wearing nothing but diapers; the other kids in barely anything more, barefoot, standing up on the picnic benches so they could reach what they wanted off the table. At our house, dinner was a formal affair. Daddy insisted on it. Daddy wore a white duck suit, white tie. Mother was dressed nicely, her hair done up, a little rouge on her cheeks, perfume, though not much: Mother said you should only be able to detect a woman’s scent when you lean to embrace her. Children were to be seen and not heard, unless Daddy asked us a question directly. Del and I had to be downstairs at six o’clock on the button, washed up and dressed for dinner, and nobody ate until my father said grace. Our butler, Henry Das — he was half Jamaican and half Hindu — served the courses. Daddy was from an old Mississippi family, and Henry Das wore white starched jackets and black bow ties. He stood at the door to the kitchen, still as a statue while we ate. Dinner was three or four courses, the table set with polished silver, good china, finger bowls. A Cuban lawyer came to dinner at our house once, and after we’d finished eating, he took out his pocket comb, dipped it in his finger bowl, and ran the comb through his hair. Mother was horrified, but she didn’t say anything, of course. Even when Mr. Bloussé arrived with the Haitian wife and the black daughters, Mother was polite. Treated them like she’d treat anyone. She had a little silver bell at her end of the table. When she rang it, Henry Das came to see what we needed, walking with his perfect posture. That man was pure grace. When dinner ended, if there was a game happening out on the avenue, stickball or kick the can, Del and I wouldn’t be excused until after coffee was served. We could hear kids shouting and running around, but we had to stay at the table until Daddy gave the word. After dinner we went out and played until dark. Mother read, or painted with watercolors, or wrote letters to people in the States. Daddy sat on the front veranda listening to the nightly stock quotes on the radio. After the stock quotes was Lowell Thomas, and when Lowell Thomas said “So long until tomorrow,” Daddy called out that it was time to come in and get ready for bed.

I’m pretty sure the Allains were the only Americans in Preston who didn’t have servants. This was highly unusual. In Cuba, the Anglos all had servants. We always had eight or nine people working at our house. Having a staff was part of how you did things in the tropics — they knew how to run a household, haggle with the vendors, maintain everything in that heat, with all that rain. And labor was cheap. But the Allains had no staff. They didn’t live on La Avenida, as I said — they lived in two squat brick houses practically in the armpit of the mill. That’s the pecking order for you. Rudy and Hatch weren’t management, they were blue-collar overseers, and they seemed happy next to the mill and the hump yard. I don’t think they would have wanted to live on La Avenida, with butlers, cooks, houseboys, gardeners, handymen, chauffeurs, and laundresses, all of that.

Flordelis and Mars set big bowls on the outdoor table. They cooked Cajun, which I had never eaten. Oysters, some kind of blackened fish, corn bread, cracklins, rice, black-eyed peas. Delicious, spicy, salt-of-the-earth food. I miss it still. They started serving themselves and so did I, too, just reached in like everyone else and piled what I wanted on my plate. Manners isn’t just being proper, it’s doing things as they’re done at the home of your hosts. I wasn’t taught that; it’s something you pick up as you go. Putting your arm across somebody’s face? That was politeness to them. Hatch and Rudy’s mother, Pearly, came out of the house after everyone had started eating. She was in curlers, bobby pins sticking out every which way. Her head looked like a queen’s mace. “You got a date later on?” Hatch asked her. “Maybe I do,” Pearly said. “That is when I get done whuppin’ your ass.” That is the only person I ever saw give lip to Hatch Allain. After she sat down, Pearly took the little handgun out of her apron pocket and set it gently on the table. I think it was a joke, because everybody laughed. Rudy said, “Watch out somebody don’t get shot tonight.” Mother had the little silver bell next to her place setting, to ring Henry Das. Pearly had the.32 Derringer.

Curtis’s baby brother, Chinaman, threw food all during dinner and nobody cared. In fact, they seemed to delight in it. His name was Clovis, but they called him Chinaman because he was a chubby little guy and he had slanty eyes. All those kids had funny names, except for Curtis Junior, who was always just Curtis. Hatch was Curtis Senior but I never heard anyone call him that. I don’t know what Curtis Junior’s doing now — probably in Louisiana with ten kids of his own. I haven’t talked to him in forty years. Hatch and Rudy are dead, I’m sure. Pearly’s probably buried with that gun in her apron pocket.

Chinaman was maybe two years old, but he knew what he was doing: holding court. It was stiff competition to get the spotlight at the Allain table. After dinner Rudy put his two hands around his right eye and squeezed. His eye popped completely out. I couldn’t believe it. He dropped it on the table like a jumbo jawbreaker — clunk! It was glass. He reached down and turned it so it was staring right at me. “Here’s looking at you, kid,” he said. Then he picked it up and bounced it in his hand. “Yep,” he said, “the price you pay for pissing off Marthize Allain. But I’m working on forgiving her.” He looked at me. “I’ll share something with you, son: it ain’t eye for an eye between a man and his wife. It’s something else. What do you think, Mars?” He was cupping the glass eye, turning it in his fingers. “What would you call it?”

Everyone was quiet. I looked around, and the kids were staring at their plates, except for Tee-Tee, who had this awkward smirk, like here we go again, and in front of the clueless dinner guest. I figured Rudy was joking, although it didn’t seem like a very funny joke. Mars stared at him. Then she started clearing dinner and went into the house with a stack of dirty plates. After she left, everyone sat quietly. Finally, Hatch spoke. “If you don’t shut your trap, Rudy, she might just take out the other one.”

Mars really had gouged his eye out. Years back, when they were all living in Louisiana, she and Rudy had a terrible argument. She broke an empty liquor bottle against the kitchen counter and jabbed the jagged end at him, not meaning to actually hurt him. He lunged toward her to grab it, and the broken end went into his eye. Busted his yolk. You have to wonder what that does to a marriage. She’d done this unforgivable thing to Rudy. And Rudy had experienced a horrific loss because of it — his eye, for Christ’s sake. And now they were stuck with each other.

At our house, Annie made flan, flambé, elaborate triple-layer cakes. Every afternoon, the smell rose up from the kitchen and filled the house. Henry Das would bring dessert out on a rolling tea cart and serve it on Mother’s special cake plates with her silver server. After the table was cleared at the Allains that night, Mars put out a halved watermelon on an old board. We each hacked off our own piece, and everyone spit their seeds in the dust. The adults all smoked. Rudy said he was out of loose tobacco, and Mars offered him one of her pre-rolled cigarettes. He took it and bit the filter off and spit the filter on the ground. He said smoking a cigarette with a filter on it was like — he paused, trying to think of what it was like—“like suckin’ on a titty through a brassiere,” he said.