NATIONAL CHERRY BLOSSOM DAY by Lenore Myka
Gabriela runs her fingers over the embossed lettering of the party invitation, an insufficient Braille, and holds it to the light coming through the car window as if she might discover a watermark, some clue to a mystery she’s been trying to unmask for a long while. The paper is substantial, a gold-colored cardstock bordered with an Asian-inspired print of tree branches coming into flower, but that look instead like question marks. “It is a holiday? National Cherry Blossom Day?”
“Is it,” corrects her husband Joe; a bad habit acquired nine months ago, shortly after they moved from Romania to Washington. “And no, not officially. Christina was just being cute.”
The traffic is bumper to bumper; they jerk their way in silence through Dupont Circle. The longer it takes, the harder it is for Gabriela to resist flinging the car door open, leaping out, and sprinting in the opposite direction from where they’re headed. All morning she paced the apartment, rummaging through closets and squinting under furniture, searching for some excuse. But she knew what Joe would say.
“You never know who you’ll meet at these things,” he says now, immediately ducking as if he were expecting Gabriela to lob an axe in his direction.
Gabriela winces. Another bad habit. She would prefer nail-biting or nose-picking – anything – to this. “Maybe,” she offers, trying on hope even though she knows it won’t fit. She has attended enough of these parties to identify a lost cause when she sees one. And anyway she isn’t interested in who will be there because she already knows who won’t: her mother, her sisters, her niece and colleagues from the university; Marta and Lavinia, her oldest childhood friends. “Do you realize there are holidays for everything here? Groundhog Day and Valentine’s Day, Presidents’ Day and St. Patrick’s Day . . .”
“We have a lot to celebrate.”
Or nothing worth celebrating enough. Gabriela’s feeling about holidays is the same as friendships: if you have too many, the quality of all of them suffers. “The cherry blossoms haven’t even blossomed yet.”
Joe reaches over, pats her knee. “They will.”
She gazes at his hand where it rests on her leg. With the exception of meticulously trimmed nails, it is the very same one that insisted she give him a chance four years ago. She knows she should place her own over his, that this is the right thing to do, but her arms feel heavy at her sides, impossible to lift.
She turns her face away, looks up through the closed window at the crocheted dome of fresh leaves bursting from the trees above them. The branches shiver. There are starlings and sparrows hopping from one limb to the next, shaking out their feathers, snapping their thorny beaks at invisible bugs. The skin on Gabriela’s knee where Joe touches her begins to itch. The car lurches, bucks, stops. A pigeon veers dangerously close to their windshield before careening upward and away; car horns bleat at a cyclist weaving through the jam. And just when it seems he will never move it, Joe gives the tight flesh of her knee one final tug before placing his hand firmly back on the steering wheel.
“Cherry blossoms? Why, they’re fashionably late, of course,” jokes the hostess of the party, Christina Neufhausen Bryant the Third. Her manner suggests years of acting classes. As she speaks, her long hands flutter like they are caged and seeking escape exits; they land, fingers extended on her collarbone when she is pretending to listen. Gabriela does not like her. “Never count on Mother Nature to provide cohesion to a thematically-based festivity.”
Other guests chuckle. Gabriela sips her drink and presses herself hard against Joe, her heartbeat slowing only when he puts his arm around her. She hates that this is what it takes. She does not know this person she becomes at such events, the person she has become more and more lately.
“They’ll be here eventually,” continues Christina. “In the meantime: bottoms up.” She raises her glass, her eyes meeting Gabriela’s, and winks. Gabriela drops her gaze into her drink, slurps.
“Gabriela’s dying to the see them,” says Joe. “Aren’t you, sweetheart?”
It’s true that she has wanted to see the blossoms since their very first date when Joe had described for her the Jefferson Memorial and Tidal Basin in April; the way the blossoms smelled so delicious you’d want to stuff your mouth full of them; how once they’d passed their peak, the wind swept them up and spread them like ticker-tape, the city besieged by a full-on floral assault. I’d love to see that, she’d said. I’d love to show you, he’d replied.
But now his eagerness and effort make her wilt. Stop trying, she wants to say. Instead, she mutters: “Yes. I am dying to see them.”
The unseasonably cold spring is the official reason why the trees are unrelenting. But sometimes, during evenings of insomnia, Gabriela thinks the cherry blossoms were nothing more than a ruse Joe thought up to convince her to leave Romania.
“Blame it on global warming,” one of the other guests says.
“That’s right. Bizarre weather patterns are a sure sign of it.”
“It’s really unusual, isn’t it?” Joe adds. “The weather, I mean.”
“You always say that,” blurts Gabriela, immediately regretting it.
Joe blinks at her. “Always say what?”
“Nothing.” She shoves her hand in her purse, searching for something on which to cling.
“But I want to know.” The arm that protects her begins loosening its hold. “What do I always say?”
Mere minutes into the evening and Gabriela realizes she has already broken some unspoken rule of party etiquette. The other guests smile close-mouthed at each other or comment on how delicious the freezer-burned mini quiches are, but Gabriela knows underneath their politesse they are waiting for conflict the way seagulls wait for a tossed bagel, popcorn spills. Plucking a strawberry that looks to be hand-painted from a proffered tray, Gabriela tries to sound casual. “You always say: ‘It’s really unusual.’ ”
He’d started saying it last summer, when they arrived to Washington in the midst of a drought. The lawns up and down the street in Mount Pleasant where they’d rented an apartment burned through to dried dirt, the leaves on the trees became as brown and shriveled as worms trapped in the sun; the air outside settled sap-like in their lungs. Normally the summers were hot, he explained to her, but this stretch – the drought? – was highly unusual.
By the look on his face, Gabriela can tell Joe is hurt. “But it is really unusual,” he says.
“Bourbon chicken skewers, anyone?” shrieks Christina. “They’re a nod to my Kentucky roots!”
Their first month in Washington they’d sought refuge in the air-conditioned bar of a local Salvadoran restaurant, numbing their uncertainties with cheap merlot and plate after plate of pupusas. While at the university, Gabriela had had a colleague who spent a year in California on a Fulbright exchange and had come back thirty pounds heavier; now she was certain the same thing was happening to her. She pinched the skin on her waist, whined. Joe tried to buoy her spirits with chirpy pseudo-scientific explanations she could never fully comprehend – something about the Gulf Stream, weather patterns that ran on a seven-year cycle – and suspected he was making it up. At night they had lain spread-eagle on a mattress their landlord had loaned them until the rest of their belongings shipped from Romania, their bodies too hot for embraces, spooning. Windows and doors were open wide to encourage a cross-breeze that never came; sweat pooled in the small of their backs, in the shallow valley between Gabriela’s breasts. She pulled her thick black hair up onto the pillow, pounded fists against the mattress. “Is it always this hot?”
“It’s definitely strange.” Joe patted her damp thigh. “But wait until next spring. You’ll see. Rain, rain, and more rain.”
He never said Bucharest is just as hot or At least here there is air conditioning. Sometimes Gabriela wished he would; at least if he retaliated she’d feel she had a reason to be mean.
“Liberal conspiracy theorists, the lot of you,” laughs Christina Neufhausen Bryant the Third, taking charge. “Just wait till my boy wins the election. He’ll debunk all your environmental mumbo-jumbo.”
This induces a cacophony of cheers and groans, the inevitable political debate. Voices rise and people jockey for position in the crowd, the circle growing tighter. A wedge is created between Gabriela and Joe, releasing the loose hold they have on each other. The next thing Gabriela knows he is standing opposite her, engaged in intense conversation with a woman who resembles Hillary Clinton. Someone bumps Gabriela, splashing her cocktail. After inspecting her blouse for damage she looks up, expecting to meet an apologetic face, only to discover she’s been squeezed entirely outside of the circle. Sighing, she bites into the strawberry. It tastes of nothing but water.
“Do you know the drink you’re holding is the precise color of cherry blossoms?” A stout, eagerly smiling woman stands next to Gabriela, she too having been excluded from the inner circle. “It’s true.” The woman nods in agreement with herself. “Christina did research.”
Gabriela considers the half-drunk glass in her hand. “This is what the cherry blossoms look like?” The drink goes down easily enough but is the same artificial color as the farm-raised salmon Joe insists she buy for him each week, eschewing her famous fried meatballs and cheese omelets – all the foods they’d enjoyed together back home – for food with packages that advertise “all natural” as if it were a modern invention. “Aren’t eggs natural?” she sometimes chides him when he refuses a plate of something she’s cooked. “What’s more natural than pork?” “Sorry, sweetheart,” he always replies, patting his belly good-naturedly. “Time to lose some L-B-S’s.”
“I’m Louisa.” The woman is offering Gabriela her hand. “Christina really knows how to throw a party, doesn’t she?”
Christina Neufhausen Bryant the Third had been the former ambassador to some East African nation and the ethnic bric-a-brac of her Woodley Park townhouse – woven baskets and free standing carvings of giraffes and dark bowls made of illegal woods – clashes with the tastefully bland china plates stacked on linen tabletops and cocktail napkins printed with the presidential seal. The hostess herself wears large, brightly beaded bracelets on her slender, liver-spotted arms; a misdirected choice thinks Gabriela, when the hand on the end of that arm holds an Irish crystal goblet filled with Californian pinot noir. All the hors d’oeuvres appear color-coordinated, segregated, earth tone nuts and breads here, vibrant tropical fruits and pink-frosted cupcakes there, none of it homemade.
Music Gabriela has come to associate with expensive home furnishing stores – something instrumental, repetitive, with bongos and steel drums, Latin American-Caribbean fusion – trickles out of tiny speakers mounted to the walls. It is a festively insipid choice, one that urges guests to have fun but not too much fun. Dancing, for example, is not on the schedule for tonight. Party games, yes; Charades or Celebrity if enough alcohol is consumed. But absolutely, positively, under no circumstances will there be dancing.
Earlier in the week Gabriela had spoken with her mother and sisters. What were her plans for the weekend, they all were eager to know. Another party? They’d gasped. Good lord! How lucky you are, Gabit¸a!
It was what her family had been saying all along, ever since Gabriela had been hired to provide translation services to the American Embassy in Bucharest. Like the rest of the world she had decided to take advantage of the post-revolutionary influx of the West, earning some extra money to supplement her meager professor’s salary. She’d been translating a document reporting the breeds and numbers of fish counted in the Danube Delta during spawning season when Joe approached her one afternoon, his soft frame casting round, uncertain shadows over trout and pike percentages.
“Aren’t you at the wrong embassy?” he’d joked when he learned that in addition to translating, she had a job as a French professor at the University of Bucharest.
She did not smile back. “I double majored.”
“I see.” He jiggled the keys in his pocket. “The last communists, the first capitalists.”
Gabriela knew he was only repeating something he’d heard. Still, she set her jaw. “You’ve got that wrong. I wasn’t a communist at all.” It was a source of pride; she’d refused party membership, her name, she liked to imagine, still appearing on some torn, yellowing blacklist buried in the back of a forgotten government file.
Joe’s forehead rippled. “But wasn’t everyone?” He wasn’t joking this time.
“No. Everyone was not.” Gabriela turned her back on him.
The shadows wavered, but remained. “I’m sorry. I think we got off on the wrong foot.” A hand was thrust under her nose. “I’m Joseph.”
She considered the hand. It was plump, smooth, suggesting privilege, an easy life thus far. But then there were the nails like the edge of a serrated knife.
“And your name is?” The hand wasn’t going anywhere.
He started bringing her coffee and tea, snacks from the embassy shop, things she’d never seen before – granola bars, Doritos; a jar of peanut butter her mother had taken a sniff of before shoving it deep into the recesses of the kitchen cupboard. Eventually, Joe asked her to dinner.
They went to an exclusive Greek restaurant and sat among expatriates, members of the Italian and Russian mafias, local celebrities from a newly privatized television company. They talked about his job, his travels; he told her about the cherry blossoms. She described for him her mother, sisters, and niece, and taught him how to ask for another bottle of wine in Romanian.
She liked his modesty, the way he was quick to blush. She liked the way he spoke in exclamations (How interesting! You don’t say!), his enthusiasm so infectious she found that by the end of the evening she was mimicking him. His optimism, particularly for the future of Romania, struck her as endearingly naïve, his opinions, those only an American could have.
She realized she was having a good time and, in the midst of him telling her a story, she snatched his hand up, rendered him mute. “What are you doing next weekend? I’m having a party.”
Joe stood on her doorstep with a bouquet of flowers and a box of baklava purchased from the same Greek restaurant. When he saw the empty room, the pots on the stove only just boiling, he apologized saying he’d thought Gabriela had said the party started at six.
“I did. But that doesn’t mean you come at six.”
He shrugged, took off his coat, tossed it over the back of a chair, and began rolling up his sleeves. “What can I do?”
He stirred soups, sliced bread. He charmed her mother with boisterous, ungrammatical Romanian and compliments on the apartment and her daughter. When other guests arrived, he served up drinks. Later, furniture was pushed back, the lights turned off; dancing ensued. Joe gamely twisted and spun. “Does this happen at every party in Romania?” he shouted over the buzzing, distorted bass beat of the Macarena.
“What’s a party without dancing?” Gabriela shouted back, laughing as he spun her again and again.
Her three sisters, niece, and mother were the only people in attendance at the wedding a year later. It was held in the living room of her mother’s apartment – Gabriela’s apartment – a place formerly known to her as home.
Joe has moved away from the Hillary Clinton doppelganger and appears, from Gabriela’s perspective, to be helping Christina Neufhausen Bryant the Third refill glasses. She had thought at that very first party back in Bucharest that his help was intended to impress her, but has since learned Joe is like a golden retriever, panting, smiling, always eager to please just about anyone. It is a truth about him others admire but that disappoints her, just like so many other things here.
The room continues to fill up; people break into conversational huddles. In one corner guests consider the impact of Texan culture on Washington fashion (Would there be black ties and ten-gallon hats? Cowboy boots on Capitol Hill?); in another they compare the work ethic of their various Senate offices. Gabriela bounces like a pinball from one group to another. Above the party din, Joe’s voice rises.
“It takes time to adjust,” Gabriela overhears him rationalizing. “Especially if you’re not well-traveled.” And then: “No, she isn’t working . . . She’s fluent in French . . . I keep saying she should call Luc at Alliance Francaise . . .”
Gabriela’s fingers flit over a shot glass filled with toothpicks. She plucks one up, chewing on the end of it before piercing it through a cube of fluorescent cheese and dropping it uneaten onto her plate.
“. . . I keep telling her maybe she could get an adjunct position at one of the universities or a community college . . .”
Gabriela snaps up another toothpick, stabs another cheese cube. That’s the thing about Joe: he believes all problems can be solved with something as straightforward as a new job, a new hobby, a new car, house, religion. He’d suggested as much when, after nearly two years as husband and wife, he’d told her about being transferred back to the States. “There’s a lot you can do there,” he’d explained. “If you didn’t want to work right away, you could go back to school. Take up painting. Or yoga.” Yoga? Even though she had quit smoking years before, Gabriela locked herself outside on the narrow balcony of their single-bedroom apartment, her body trembling with the indignity of it all, and puffed her way through an entire pack of Snagovs.
“Her German isn’t half bad either . . .”
She blamed herself, mostly. Joe had warned her from the beginning that he wouldn’t be able to stay at the embassy forever. It had been an agreement they made; at some point they’d try the States. Was it his fault that Gabriela had secretly prayed it never came to that? After she’d finished her Snagovs and come inside, lungs afire, Joe suggested that maybe he was being too hasty, maybe he could find some sort of work in Bucharest. It is the thing she still loves the most about him, the thing that makes her stay still even though every other part of her yearns for flight: his willingness to try.
Gabriela was, in the end, a good wife. Of course you’ll go, her sisters and mother said. Get out of this hellhole! Live life! There’s nothing worth staying here for. Except you, she’d said. Us? They’d waved their hands. Bah. How could she explain? She loved this hellhole.
“It’ll all work out for the best!” Joe had insisted as their plane took off from Bucharest to the United States. If he was so willing to try, then surely it was the least she could do for him in return. She reminded herself of this as the plane broke through cloud coverage, sunlight glinting off the metallic wings. She pressed her forehead against the small oval window and looked out across an infinite blue sky. Below, she saw a wall of solid, white cumulus clouds heaped on top of each other and veiled by gauzy cirrus. All of them absorbed the colors of the sun so that they were bled through with pink.
“Like the cherry blossoms,” Gabriela had offered to Joe, gesturing at those clouds.
“Something like them,” he said, flipping through the in-flight magazine.
She wonders now, gazing down at the perfectly symmetrical orange squares on her plate, each one pricked through its heart with miniature stakes, if she didn’t set them both up for failure.
A full tray of shrimp cocktail sits untouched on the kitchen counter. In the freezer, behind several boxes of miniature spinach quiches, Gabriela finds a half-full bottle of vodka.
A dog lies on the bed in the master bedroom, lifting its head when she opens the door. Gabriela immediately identifies the breed of the animal as a Viszla, the Hungarian national dog. Its yellow, intelligent eyes receive her with an open curiosity and interest she feels she is experiencing for the first time in months. Her best friend Marta, who still had distant relatives living in Budapest, used to declare these dogs the most superior breed in the world in order to rope Gabriela into nationalistic debate. But as she thinks of this now, it only makes Gabriela feel a hunger for something that isn’t on the menu.
Placing the shrimp on the nightstand, she strokes the dog’s smooth head with one hand while taking gulps from the vodka bottle with the other. Then she picks up the receiver on the telephone that sits next to the bed.
“Gabit¸a! Are you okay? Is something wrong?” Her mother’s voice is a whisper.
“Wrong?” Gabriela has forgotten: the time change. She glances at the clock on the nightstand. Nine thirty-seven. It was hardly morning yet in Romania. “No, Mama. Nothing’s wrong. Just thought I’d give you a call.”
“Ay, draga.” Her mother’s deep sigh crackles so loudly in her ear she swears she can feel her breath on her skin. “You’ll give me a heart attack one of these days.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Where are you anyway? Weren’t you supposed to be at a party? Where’s Joseph?”
Gabriela takes another sip from the bottle, leans back on the pile of pillows, kicks off her shoes. She imagines her mother as she would be in this moment: curlers, hair net, full-length nightgown she’s been wearing since Gabriela was little. A heavy pain presses against her chest. “He’s here,” she says, casting a look around the empty bedroom.
“You tell him I said ciao, yes? Dear, dear man.”
“I will, Mama.”
“How was the party tonight? Did you enjoy it?”
“It was fine.”
There is a pause on the other end of the line. Gabriela waits through the scratching and scraping of fabric against the telephone as her mother adjusts her position. She imagines her lips moving, counting off the six-hour time difference between them. “You’re home early, aren’t you though?”
“Happy hour.”
Her mother chuckles. “Happy hour. Those Americans.”
“Yes,” Gabriela agrees, squeezing her eyes shut. “They’re something.”
“Are you okay? Your voice sounds funny.”
“I’m eight thousand kilometers away. My voice should sound funny.”
Next to Gabriela, the dog stretches and moans before plopping its head into her lap.
“What’s that?”
Gabriela gazes down at the dog, rests her free hand on its head. “Just Joseph. He’s tired.”
“Is he working too much? You tell him I said not to work so much.”
“I will, Mama.”
“Good. Now listen, before I forget: Dana saw a department store on television – Saks Fifth Avenue? Have you heard of it? She said the clothing looked foarte fine.”
Gabriela holds the cool vodka bottle to her temple. “It’s expensive. Foarte fine e foarte scump.”
“But maybe good for bras, draga. You know how bad they are here. Look, would you? For me?”
“Of course,” Gabriela replies. And yes, panties too. Whatever they need, she’ll get it for them.
“Good,” her mother says, satisfied.
“Mama?”
“Yes, draga?”
She knows what she wants to say, but doesn’t know how to start. And even if she is able to muster up the courage, her mother will say the same things Joe and her sisters have been telling her for months. She will say it is too soon, she needs to give herself more time to adjust. She’ll say her marriage is still young, that these are the sacrifices you make, the risks you take, for love. She will ask Gabriela in a gentle, reprimanding tone if she and Joe have given any thought to expanding the family.
Gabriela feels tired from talking; she needs a cigarette. She pulls open the drawer of the nightstand, rifles through the pens and half a dozen varieties of birth control and emery boards until her fingers discover the crumpled package at the very back and pull it out. Menthols. Just her luck. But at least there are matches.
“Gabit¸a? Are you still there?”
The dog’s head pops up at the snapping sound the match makes. Gabriela blows out a slow trail of smoke, stroking the animal until it lays its head back down in her lap. “I’m here.”
“Don’t forget those chocolates too. The ones you sent the last time? There’s nothing like them here. Absolutely nothing.”
After hanging up the phone, Gabriela smokes first one and then a second cigarette, alternating drags with careful sips of vodka. She realizes she is playing a game, waiting for Joe to come find her. Surely he’s begun to wonder about her absence. The dog is dozing now, its nose making a high-pitched whistling sound each time it exhales. She likes the way its head feels in her lap, likes to watch it sleeping. Perhaps they might get a dog. Perhaps Christina Neufhausen Bryant the Third no longer wants this dog and they could take it home with them tonight.
This isn’t the first time pet ownership has crossed Gabriela’s mind. She’d first suggested it to Joe last summer, when stories of animal sightings not associated with urban-dwelling – deer, coyotes and, most frighteningly, a mountain lion – began to circulate in their neighborhood.
“A mountain lion?” Gabriela was unable to hide her alarm. She’d been peering over Joe’s shoulder at the Sunday newspaper and saw the amateur photo included with the article, the picture taken at dusk, grainy but unmistakably that of a large shadow, something lurking on a side street blocks from their apartment.
“Coming down from the Shenandoah Valley,” Joe had read aloud. “The drought is happening there too. The animals are looking for food.”
“There are mountain lions here?”
“They’re supposed to be extinct on the East Coast.”
“But people are seeing them.”
“Sweetheart, I’m sure it’s not a mountain lion.”
But over the next several weeks the reports continued – one seen rummaging through the garbage of a nearby grocery store, another slinking off with what looked to be a rabbit dangling between its jaws. Overnight, bulletin boards in neighborhood coffee shops and telephone poles up and down the streets were covered with flyers announcing the disappearance of toy poodles, declawed housecats.
But it wasn’t just the mountain lions that had given Gabriela the idea of getting a dog. One afternoon, when she stepped outside to throw away a bag of garbage, she’d found a line of rats larger than any she’d ever seen in Bucharest balancing on the edge of the dumpster. As she approached they turned skillfully on their haunches, sticking their blunted snouts into the air, making terrifying, high-pitched noises that sent tremors through Gabriela’s hands. She’d dumped the bags where she stood and scurried back to the security of their apartment.
“The city’s built on a swamp,” Joe explained. “They’re swamp rats.”
“Why are there rats at all?” she asked. “Isn’t this the capital of the free world?”
“Rats are everywhere, Gabi. At least they’re not something worse.”
She waited, half hoping for him to say it, overcome with the urge to argue. Bucharest had a terrible problem with stray dogs; Joe had been bitten not once, but three times. But instead of speaking he rubbed her back, trying to calm her.
Gabriela wiggled away from him. “We should get a dog,” she said.
“A dog? For what?”
“Protection.”
Joe began to laugh but stopped when he saw her expression. “Sorry, sweetheart. I’m allergic.”
But now, as this dog rouses itself from its nap, yawning so Gabriela can see the ridges on the roof of its mouth, she thinks that surely in a land where there is cheese for the lactose-intolerant and sausage for vegetarians, there must also be hypoallergenic dogs.
She gulps down more vodka, wipes her mouth with the back of her hand, picks up a shrimp from the tray on the nightstand. The tags around the dog’s neck jangle pleasantly as it gets to its feet. It lets out a quietly possessed whimper; wags its stump of a tail so the entire bed trembles.
“What? You like shrimp, do you?” Gabriela hands a piece of the food to the animal. It consumes it, tail shell and all, its gums smacking, and swallows with great effort. She holds up a second shrimp. “Are these the color of cherry blossoms?” she asks the dog, but this only seems to make it more excited as it snatches the food from her fingers.
Gabriela alternates between taking swigs from the vodka bottle and feeding the dog, occasionally tossing the food up in the air so the animal makes a show of leaping from the bed, catching the pink morsel in midair, the sound of its teeth snapping together like a knife blade falling onto the neck of a chicken.
She must not have been asleep for long because when she wakes, a lit cigarette left on the nightstand is still burning down, its ash hanging threateningly over the edge. The tray of shrimp is empty; the vodka bottle still contains liquid but less than Gabriela hopes. Her throat is raw, her eyelashes feel glued together. Next to her the dog is passed out once more, its mouth hanging open, a small line of drool running from its tongue onto the bedspread. She gives it a pat on the side. It is unresponsive and for a moment she is seized with the thought that shrimp, like chocolate, is poisonous to canines. But then the dog’s hind legs kick out and she realizes it is deep in some doggy dreamland, chasing cars, digging holes.
The party is still in full swing; through the crack in the bedroom door she hears the voice of Christina directing someone who sounds like Joe to the bathroom down the hall. As his footsteps approach Gabriela realizes he is coming for her and puts out the cigarette on the tray, brushes back her hair, searches for her shoes. But then the footsteps continue past her; the bathroom door clicks shut. The clock on the nightstand reads ten thirty; she’s been absent from the party nearly an hour and still no Joe. She wonders if he will ever come for her.
She slinks down onto the floor, finds her shoes; slips them onto her feet. Willing herself not to cry, she makes a plan: she will call a cab, insist to Joe that she is fine heading home alone, that he should stay and continue to enjoy himself, that tomorrow morning, after they’ve both had a good night’s sleep, they will talk about what is to be done. But Gabriela cannot move. Instead of picking up the phone, she remains seated on the floor for five, ten minutes. Eventually the dog stirs and jumps down off the bed, seating itself beside her. It licks her hand, her cheek, gives her arm a nudge with its wet nose. When none of this works, it gives up and shakes itself out before squeezing itself through the narrow crack of the bedroom door.
Although she tries not to, her ears are still trained for outside noise, voices – Joe’s voice asking people if they’ve seen her, Joe’s voice calling out to her – and it is then that she notices something has shifted in the tenor of the party. It seems louder but it’s not that it has grown in volume; the quality of noise is different. She places her hands on the ground, pushes herself up; listens. What is it that has changed? Vibrations thrum through the ground; she feels the rhythm in the palms of her hands and knows now what it is. The music. The Macarena.
Before that party in Bucharest, she’d never really liked the song or the silly dance that accompanied it. But ever since then she can’t help smiling at the sound of it blaring from a passing car window or included in some television or movie soundtrack. She remembers now how she, her sisters, and her niece had cajoled her mother into joining them on the floor of the living room, how they all kicked off their shoes and did the dance in unison, slapping their shoulders and arms, wiggling their hips, laughing. She remembers how good it felt knowing that Joe was watching her, admiring her, already falling in love with her, and how the knowledge of all that lit her up more, gave her the energy and strength to continue.
Remembering that evening, she feels it now, the feeling that energized her, that made her jump. She knows it because she hasn’t felt it for nearly a year and has desperately missed it. As she stands her body quakes with it; her head is dizzy with its power. She hurries out into the living room. She needs to get there before the song ends.
Gabriela does not pause to take stock of the living room where, besides the musical selection, little else has changed. She does not care that no one else is dancing or that people gawk at her, their expressions as uniform as strip malls as she gently presses them to make room, carving out space for herself so that she can begin. She does not care that they murmur to each other as she flings her arms across her chest and waist, bouncing her knees to keep the beat, singing at the top of her lungs, jutting her pelvis forward before jumping a quarter of a turn, the dance repeating itself over and over again. She does not care that no one – not even Joe – joins her; that he does not watch her with joy and admiration as he had four years ago, but with shame that causes his face and neck to go splotchy. She will not let any of this ruin the moment for her; she closes her eyes, dancing blindly, singing, singing.
Excited by the commotion Gabriela is causing, the dog dashes into the room, barking and leaping up at her flapping hands, bounding around her. Finally, a dance partner.
Earlier in the evening someone had opened a window and Gabriela can feel the cool night air on her damp skin as she flies about the room. She inhales, the air burning her lungs, and that’s when she tastes it on the back of her tongue, tickling her throat; something entirely new to her even though she knows immediately what it is. Sugary, elusive but more abundant in flavor than the pink cocktail she’d consumed so much of earlier in the evening. Fecund earth, flower nectar, tree bark.
She squeezes her eyes tighter, spins faster. The flavor awakens her vision; they begin to bloom on the backs of her eyelids. Stars, she thinks, she is seeing stars – but no, she is mistaken; not stars at all. She smiles, drops her head back, the music driving her on. She sees them as she saw the clouds from the airplane window nearly a year before and wonders if they hadn’t been there all along. It is not how she had imagined seeing them, not the way Joe has described them to her, but she’ll take it. Outside, they have not yet broken free from their green casings, haven’t officially revealed themselves to the rest of the world, but tonight, on a night that surely translates into failure, they privately unveil themselves to her, their petals wings, lifting her up, away.
Lenore Myka’s work has appeared in the Massachusetts Review, H.O.W. Journal, Upstreet Magazine, Talking River Review, and the anthology Further Fenway Fiction.