Rachel Kushner - Telex From Cuba

Tip Carrington commandeered the bar and mixed up a batch of martinis, making the task into an impromptu tutorial for the benefit of the three Jamaican bartenders. He explained to them that extra dry meant not a little bit, but the merest suggestion of vermouth, in a sense none. Which he demonstrated by tipping the vermouth bottle over the shaker, and righting it before any actual alcohol poured from the spout.

“It’s a gesture of the wrist — like a dance,” he excitedly explained to the bartenders. “You boys like those native dances, right? Rumba?”

Tip Carrington leaned the vermouth bottle again, leaned it back. He capped the stainless steel canister of gin and ice, shook it up and down — another kind of dance — and strained it into an empty canister.

The men talked business and the women compared notes on settling in, as Tip Carrington circulated the party with a fogged cocktail shaker, filling people’s drinks.

“Is the freezer they gave you auto-defrost?” one of the wives asked. “Because I don’t think mine is, and I was promised an auto-defrost. I specifically asked—”

“But what do you plan on filling it with? I mean, I just can’t get over the lack of produce,” one of the women said, “no peas, no celery, no carrots. Only tropical things. We’ve got alligator pears coming out our ears, and my kids won’t eat them. Yesterday I broke down and paid a dollar twenty-five for a head of lettuce at the commissary in Preston.”

“Aren’t you on the produce vendor’s route? He comes by the house, the cutest thing, ringing a bell. A little old Chinaman named Lumling. I send the houseboys out, and they haggle with him.”

“The Chinese vendor?” Mrs. Lederer asked. “But I was told he grows with night soil.” Night soil being the only polite term she could think of to convey that the Chinese vendor was fertilizing his turnips with human waste.

“The produce can’t possibly be as bad as the dairy products, which, as you know, come from Gonzalez’s dairy. Mrs. Billings took a tour of the place and said it was most unsanitary. Just absolutely dreadful. Cows urinating and defecating practically into the milk. I’ve half a mind to order a home pasteurizer.”

“Well, don’t order it from the Sears in Havana. They’ll ship you a vacuum cleaner instead— by accident, of course.”

One of the women commented that the heat was making her listless, and Blythe Carrington said cheerfully that people everywhere were listless, and at least they had something to blame it on.

“Has anyone noticed that the air in Nicaro — I daresay, the heat itself —seems rust-colored?”

“The factory,” Mrs. Carrington said. “Nickel oxide.”

Charmaine Mackey, whose husband, Hubert Mackey, was the new general manager, patted her face with a handkerchief and said she couldn’t believe how infernal the weather had been, and what bad timing it was for setting up a household. Blythe Carrington said her advice was to stock up on cube ice. She said it went quickly in this heat, and that all you could do to stay cool was keep your drink fresh and the fans on high.

“Don’t they say it’s deleterious to one’s health to drink in equatorial zones?” Mrs. Mackey asked. “I read it in the brochure the company sent, Tips for Anglos .”

“Deleterious?” Mrs. Carrington said, suppressing her desire to smack Mrs. Mackey right there at the party, in front of the other women. “Forgive me, Mrs. Mackey, but I’m not sure if I know the term.”

“Bad for the health,” Mrs. Mackey replied, nervously clutching her handkerchief to dampen the shake of her hands. She’d seen a doctor for the problem. He’d prescribed something for nerves, but the medication, and the idea that she suffered from nerves, had made her hands shake more. It was a stupid thing to have said, and she knew better. Her neighbor Mrs. Billings had informed Mrs. Mackey that Mrs. Carrington had a drinking problem. “It’ll end badly,” Mrs. Billings had said. Mrs. Mackey had nodded, wondering silently what would end badly. A great deal of her time was spent not understanding what other people meant when they made these ominous, sweeping, and vague statements. It’ll end badly . Statements that often were lost on Mr. Mackey as well, but Mr. Mackey seemed perfectly comfortable not understanding, didn’t notice there was anything to miss, especially now that his hearing was partly compromised in one ear. When they’d arrived, a month earlier, Hubert had insisted that quinine, their company-allotted malarial vaccine, was harmless. In his fear of tropical diseases, he’d ingested more than five times the recommended dose and lost the hearing in his right ear. He insisted that his hearing was restored, “good as new,” but several times she caught him switching to people’s left as he conversed. The only normal one of them was Phillip. How did they manage to have such a normal son? Phillip could have been spokesman for the Boy Scouts of America. He could have been on television.

Blythe Carrington took a deep breath and said that Mrs. Mackey might recall that she and Mr. Carrington had just relocated from Bolivia. And that due to her husband’s engineering career, they had been living in Central and South America for most of their adult lives. That it might be the case that Mr. and Mrs. Mackey were from Peoria — or was it Moline? — but she and Mr. Carrington were more from Lima, from Caracas, from Panama City, than they were from anywhere else. And whatever “they” were saying about whether and how much booze was good for you, she could assure Mrs. Mackey that a person could drink herself to oblivion in the tropics and wake up feeling like a million bucks.

“Carlsbad, New Mexico,” Mrs. Mackey said. But Blythe Carrington wasn’t listening. “We’re from Carlsbad, New Mexico, ” she repeated, but there was no point. Blythe Carrington was a bully, and she didn’t care where the Mackeys were from. Earlier in the day, Mrs. Mackey had run into her in the beauty parlor. Mrs. Carrington had been friendly, but even her friendliness was confrontational. “Some of the gals are going down to the club for happy hour,” Mrs. Carrington had said from under her domed dryer. “Meet there at five.” Mrs. Mackey had leaned forward from her own domed dryer, thanked Mrs. Carrington for the invitation but said she thought she’d go home and rest before the party. Mrs. Carrington shrugged. “Whatever suits you.”

“How was your rest?” Mrs. Carrington had asked her when the Mackeys arrived at Mr. Gonzalez’s.

Upon returning from the beauty parlor, Mrs. Mackey had gone out to the laundry shed to make sure the new laundress was following directions, ironing Mr. Mackey’s suit on low, as she’d instructed and then repeated with emphasis. These people, it was hard to tell if they listened. The company sent them over and they’d knock at the kitchen door and announce that they were your houseboy, your gardener, your cook, with a curious mix of shyness and dogged insistence. You almost had no choice but to let them in, was Charmaine Mackey’s feeling, even if they made her nervous with their yellow and bloodshot eyes, their impossible Jamaican accents, and their pink hands, which forced you to feel sorry for them somehow. She hated their pink hands. Before she’d gotten to the laundry-shed door, what she saw through the window stopped her in her tracks. Lenore, the new laundress, had taken a long drink of water from a pitcher and was holding the liquid in her mouth with her cheeks puffed out. She blew out a magnificent spray, all over Mr. Mackey’s suit laid out on the ironing table. Mrs. Mackey opened the door. The air inside the laundry shed was inhumanly hot, heavy with the smell of starch and heated cloth. “Lenore, what on God’s Earth are you doing?”