It is only now, six months after my grandmother’s death, that I am comfortable remembering her sounds.
The noises she made–a subtle grunt when hugged too hard, the hum and exhale when petting a cat, the dragging of her feet in plastic slippers–just came back to me.
Now, I confuse missing her with nostalgia for a Cuban history I’ll never fully know. The clues that remain are locked up, with the dust, in her Miami house.
I was born in Miami. I am Cuban because my grandmother is Cuban. Her death erases stories of an island I’ve never seen, but love just the same.
Tata died before she could turn 84 years old.
I dreamed of her on a night when I wore her nightgown. In the dream, she told me she was afraid to die. I told her now she could see her mother in heaven. And she seemed happy.
I inherited some of her clothes–a couple of antique clutches, a few embroidered blouses with missing buttons I won’t fix, the small purse with chain strap that slid off her shoulder.
She left us her first essay in English. Reading it is complicated by the verbs in wrong tenses, a detail almost too real to take.
In it, now, I get to know my abuela, finding answers to questions it is too late to ask.
She says she was born on a clear morning, that she saw her first light at her grandparents’ home in Sancti Spiritus, sandwiched in the middle of Cuba, decades before the communist revolution pushed Tata to freedom in Miami.
She gives me the names of teachers.
Catholicism comforted her. The saintly figurines that crowded the top of her bureau, waiting for direction, granting jobs and healing colds across the country. In the essay, I get to the paragraph that was mine to read at her funeral mass: “I began to dream. Those dream of that romantic age.”
I couldn’t finish and had to step down from the podium. I never knew her dreams. She decided to study philosophy, instead of law. But there was a student strike in 1940 at her university. It scared her parents, and she left college. It would be the first revolution of two that she would run from.
She says she was engaged to a young architect from town.
“With whom I expect to marry one day,” she concluded, signing the essay, March 27, 1945.
Tata did marry him and 60 years later left us with him. He misses the way she fried Cuban steaks.
It’s been months, but I won’t ever forget Tata lying in the pink, satin coffin wearing the flower-print blouse she wears in a portrait I have of her. In the coffin, pearls doubled around her neck, a rosary, as always, tangled in her fingers, now cold.
The rosary was a nice touch by the mortician, I thought. I imagined that he took a moment to understand Tata.
I loved her hands, fingers with a little too much skin at the last joint. She was buried wearing beige nail polish, one of the few times she let someone paint her nails. I was thankful to have insisted on holding those hands while they were still warm.
Once, those hands tried to teach me to play the piano, but it didn’t work. Tata knew I would much rather write words to the music.
My grandmother died with a bald spot on her triumphantly arched right eyebrow.
The story begins in a Cuban house, pictures of which Tata kept in plastic sleeves, crammed into drawers she never did organize. My grandmother kept closets brimming with clothes too small to fit her, bills and tax returns long-since paid. She was afraid, it seems now, to have thrown unwanted things away.
I hang my clothes facing the same way on matching plastic hangers, I file my bills and think of her.
After reading a book on communism, Tata feared the government would take away her children. So, she decided that her family–my mother, her two sisters and brother–had to leave Cuba secretly at dawn on Nov. 9, 1960.
My mother packed her toys, her books from school and thought it fun that her entire family was taking a trip together. Besides, they had visited Miami Beach three years earlier on vacation.
“Nobody knew that it was going to be forever,” said my mother, whose name is my name and 11 years old at the time. The family had 27 suitcases and boarded a plane to Miami.
My grandmother maintained that she would not return to Cuba until it was free.
And she died, waiting.
In Miami Beach hotels, Tata made beds so her children could attend private school. She wanted to be a good maid, she said, so she took classes, learning to stretch the sheets and tuck them tight.
Later my grandmother welded radios at a factory and built pacemakers.
Years ago, she and my grandfather were mugged after church and almost beaten to death. Even after this, they would not leave the house where they had lived for decades, now in a troubled part of town dotted with cheap motels. Like me, Tata hated change.
Pictures of my grandparents’ vacations abroad filled walls along with photographs of grandchildren and a hallway full of wedding pictures where I had hoped mine would one day hang.
In pictures, Tata was usually a little off center, sometimes failing to look at the camera.
Tata always told me she envied my moves from Miami, New York, Los Angeles to Chicago. She told me she had wanted to be unafraid. But, she was, once, so her family could be free.
I can’t remember a smell the last time I saw her alive in December. But it was night, she wore a housedress and worried about bills, although she and my grandfather had worked their whole lives, retired and had more than enough money in the bank. (She worried about many things without reason.)
Her house always made me want to eat dry cereal. In my grandfather’s architectural office, on a high desk and old typewriter, I composed my first poems. I learned how strong I could be around boys when my two cousins and I tore down a tree in the front yard.
I learned patience; not waking the sleeping cats on her back porch.
Tata sat in a rollaway chair at the dining room table, offered me soda that was likely flat because her hands had lost their grip.
Later, I sat on the armrest of her recliner, her feet propped up, her body and face swollen from taking cortisone for an episode of shingles months earlier.
I held Tata’s hand in mine. Sometimes I called her manitos, small hands. She called me La Musa, her term of endearment for cats. She was always a little shy about rampant affection. In that way, we were also different.
She asked about my boyfriend, my job. Unlike other relatives, she never pressured me to come home. She was happy not knowing exactly where I was, knowing I was wandering, free.
Even when I visited Miami, Tata said she was happy being the No. 2 grandmother, as she called herself, leaving first place to my father’s mother, Ita, who had only two to Tata’s eight grandchildren.
Tata walked me to the door that night as she always did. I hugged her, told her I loved her. As I drove away, she waved, standing there in the moonlight, talking to the neighborhood’s stray cats.
Today, relatives trail in and out of the dust-filled house where Tata lived 41 years. They cry into shirtsleeves, feeding stray cats that still wait for Tata on doorsteps.
