Clap When You Land Page 4

but she’s granola to the core. A tree-hugging,

  squirrel-feeding, astrology-following vegan.

  Me? I was a fashion-loving, chess-playing negrita

  who quit at the top of my game.

  We both know what it’s like to have our parents look at us

  like we are dressed in neon question marks.

  We also know exactly what it’s like to look at the other

  & see all the answers of ourselves there.

  I am a girl who will notice

  if your nostril hair grows long

  or if your nails are cut too close to the quick.

  I’d as soon compliment you

  on how well you groom your edges

  as I would on how smoothly you steer a debate.

  Dre will turn any conversation

  into one about gardening.

  If you tell a dirty joke,

  Dre will talk about plants that pollinate themselves.

  If you talk about hoing around,

  you’d see Dre blink as her mind goes down a

  long winding path of tilling dirt & sowing seeds.

  Here we are, with our interests in chess

  & astrology & dirt & each other.

  Dre has been texting me

  since this morning.

  She must have seen the news.

  She didn’t hear it from me

  because I turned off my phone.

  The thought of speaking

  makes me want to

  uncarve myself from this skin.

  But you can only ignore

  your girlfriend for so long

  before she knocks on the window

  & sticks her head in.

  “Is it true, Yaya?”

  & I hear the tremble

  in her voice

  that threatens the wobble

  in my own.

  Dre loved Papi

  as if he were her own family.

  Would make Papi laugh

  with her precise school Spanish

  & North Carolina manners.

  “I don’t know, Dre.

  Anything is possi—”

  I stop myself midway.

  It feels like such a lie.

  Nothing & no one feels possible anymore.

  I cannot see her nodding.

  But I know that she is.

  I know that tears are streaming

  down her clay-brown cheeks.

  She tucks her long legs through

  the window & folds herself onto the floor,

  rests her head against my knee

  & hugs my legs.

  “I’m here, Yaya. I’m here.”

  For hours we sit. Just like that.

  Dre is originally from Raleigh.

  & although she’s lived in New York

  for a long time, every now & then

  her accent will switch up.

  Especially when she’s upset

  or hurting or trying to be strong.

  When New Yorkers are mad?

  Our words take on an edge,

  we speed talk like relay racers

  struggling to pass the baton to the next snide phrase.

  But Dre, when she’s upset, her words slow down,

  & she becomes even more polite, & I know then

  she is Dr. Johnson’s child through & through.

  Dr. Johnson takes on that same precise & calm manner,

  her words an unrolling ribbon that you aren’t sure

  you’ll see the end of.

  When Dr. Johnson is upset, her hands fold

  in front of her stomach, & her head cocks to the side

  as she lectures us on why we should have finished

  our homework sooner, or why a certain movie or social-media clip

  wasn’t actually as funny as we thought

  if we put it in a larger context.

  Mr. Johnson, or should I say, Senior Master Sergeant Johnson,

  is in the Air Force. I’ve only met him a handful of times,

  & he didn’t talk enough for me to evaluate how quick or slow,

  how calm or angry the pacing of his speech was.

  But Dre speaks to me slowly. Like I’ve seen her

  whisper to a drooping plant. Believing that her own breath

  can unfurl a dying leaf. Can sing it back to health.

  Can unwilt the stalk.

  The summer before seventh grade,

  Dre grew tall. When extended completely,

  her legs stretched beyond the bars

  of the fire escape & hung over the edge

  like Jordan-clad pigeon perches.

  Dre wants to study speech therapy in college,

  but I’ve always thought she should do agriculture.

  I’ve never seen anyone make as much grow

  in a small pot on a fire escape as I’ve seen

  Dre coax small seeds to bud & flower here.

  She has a railing planter where she grows okra;

  on our side of the fire escape, which gets better light,

  she’s planted tomatoes. One time she planted

  these little peppers that came out green & spicy.

  Although the landlord has sent notices

  that her fire-escape nursery is a fire hazard,

  Dre just figures out another way to stack her plants,

  or hang them on the railing, or hide them in plain sight,

  so she can blossom. Even when the pigeons pick at her

  seedlings, or squirrels munch on fresh shoots,

  Dre just laughs & puts her black hands back in the soil:

  decides to grow us something good.

  Papi never saw what Dre

  & I were to each other. At least,

  he never mentioned it.

  Ma is more watchful.

  & it’s not that Ma did not like

  that I liked Dre. It’s that she understood

  I wanted no big deal to be made.

  There is an artist my mother loved,

  Juan Gabriel, who was once asked

  in an interview if he was gay.

  His reply: What’s understood need not be said.

  I remember how Mami’s eyes

  fluttered to me

  like a bee on a flower

  acknowledging the pollen is sweet.

  I have never had to tell

  Mami I like girls.

  She knew. & she knew that Dre was special.

  Last year, for Valentine’s Day, before I left for school,

  Mami handed me an envelope

  with a twenty-dollar bill inside,

  stirring a pot of something fragrant

  while she said, “Pa que le compre algo nice a Andreita.”

  With her, I did not have to pretend

  my best friend was just a friend.

  The girl next door being the girl for you

  is the kind of trope my English teacher

  would have us write essays about in class.

  But that’s how it happened for Dre & me.

  One day we were best friends,

  & the next day we were best friends

  who stared at each other’s mouths

  when we shared lip gloss.

  I don’t think I understood the word

  W O N D E R

  until the day our tongues touched

  & we both wanted

  to have them touch again. This girl

  felt about me how I felt about her.

  The day we first kissed,

  I walked into my parents’ bedroom

  & offered thanks to the little porcelain saint

  Papi kept on his armoire:

  thank you, thank you.

  I whispered to everything that listened.

  The only thing about Dre

  that gets on my nerves

  is that Dre is sometimes

  too good. She has a scale

  for doing what’s right

  that always balances out

  nice & evenly
for her.

  Which is why she was

  so disappointed that I

  didn’t “come out” in

  the way she wanted me to.

  She said we shouldn’t hide

  what we are to each other.

  & I told her I wasn’t hiding,

  I just wasn’t making

  a loudspeaker announcement

  to my parents or anyone.

  People who know me, know.

  Dre’s quirks come out

  in other ways too.

  Sometimes Dre wants me

  to have a clear opinion

  on plastic straws, or

  water rights, or my feelings

  about Papi, & she doesn’t

  always see I need time

  to watch the board,

  to come to terms with

  the possibilities.

  I’m telling you about my skin,

  & my home, & mostly about Dre,

  because it’s easier than telling you

  Papiisdead.

  If I say those words,

  if I snap apart the air with them,

  whatever is binding me together

  will split too.

  The house phone has been ringing

  off the hook all day.

  Reporters from American

  & Latin American channels

  & newspapers & magazines

  & podcasts & websites.

  Family members

  from the Bronx & DR.

  The neighborhood association,

  which invites us to grief counseling,

  special sessions that will be

  held at the church.

  The phone rings & rings,

  & Mami’s voice,

  raw as unprocessed sugar,

  responds & responds

  but does not answer

  where we’ll go from here.

  Here is a thing that no one knows,

  & probably wouldn’t believe if I told them.

  The night before Papi got on the plane,

  I almost asked him not to go.

  It would have been the first full sentence

  I’d spoken to him in almost a year.

  We haven’t been close, not like we were,

  since I stopped playing chess,

  since he tried to force me to go back,

  since I saw the certificate in the sealed envelope.

  When I quit playing chess,

  he told me I broke his heart.

  I never told him he’d broken mine.

  In the Dominican Republic,

  before he met Mami & came here

  & started this life for us

  Papi was an accountant,

  a man of numbers & money,

  but here he hustled his way into

  owning a billiards on Dyckman Street.

  I don’t believe in magic

  or premonitions. Not like Papi,

  who crossed himself every time he left the house.

  Not like Mami, who tries to interpret dreams.

  But on the night before Papi left for DR,

  something yanked on my heart,

  & I wanted to ask him to stay.

  But I never said the words.

  & Papi did something

  he hadn’t done in over a year:

  came to my room to say good night

  & tangled his hand in my hair

  while I was two-strand twisting my curls.

  I hate when he messes up my fresh wash,

  but I also missed him. My fingers caught in his. Held.

  Before I moved away. Removed myself from his reach.

  “Me tengo que ir, los negocios. Ya tú sabes.”

  He’s always back right before my birthday in September,

  but every year around this time,

  Mami’s spine becomes rigid, her lips pulled tight

  as sneaker laces biting into the tongue.

  As his departure nears it seems like I can see

  the space between my parents stretch & grow.

  & she refuses to drive him to the airport

  despite how much I beg her so that I can be there when he leaves.

  Papi stopped trying to joke her out of her ill humor years ago,

  & I wonder if she now regrets that his last few days

  here, at home, alive,

  were spent in bed with her anger.

  I did not reply to him. Whenever he left,

  he said it was for business. I now knew he was lying.

  He fiddled with the light switch in my room.

  “Negra bella, te quiero. I know things haven’t been normal

  between us, but I hope when I come back, we can talk about it.”

  I peeked at him from the mirror

  while my fingers twirled & twirled my hair.

  I remember how I started to say something,

  then yanked the words before they could get loose.

  He shook his head as if changing his mind.

  “While I’m gone, cúidate, negra.”

  & I never said a word.

  Once, when I was still young to chess competitions,

  I was in a tournament with all older kids.

  I’d made it to one of the last rounds

  & had been playing well the whole time.

  I was convinced I was going to win the whole thing.

  But I missed an opponent’s trap & was put in check.

  My hands shook, tears welled up in my eyes,

  the clock kept ticking, but I wouldn’t move.

  When I finally looked up, I could see Papi watching

  through the glass of the double doors.

  He didn’t blink, he didn’t shake his head,

  he didn’t do anything, but somehow I knew.

  I straightened my back; I wiped my eyes.

  I knocked down my king.

  The train ride home was silent.

  But before we got off at our stop,

  Papi turned to my nine-year-old self & said:

  “Never, ever, let them see you sweat, negra.

  Fight until you can’t breathe, & if you have to forfeit,

  you forfeit smiling, make them think you let them win.”

  Four Days After

  on the news

  blunt force

  trauma on impact

  medical examiner

  unidentifiable

  extreme forces

  not intact

  unconfirmed

  dental records

  anthropological forensics

  tattoos fingerprints

  teeth personal items

  I watch video footage

  of the plane spearing into the ocean.

  The waves rising open arms welcome.

  I wait for news that the passengers

  got their life jackets on.

  That there were previously unreported life rafts.

  That their initial assessment was wrong

  That the Coast Guard found someone breathing.

  The news only repeats the same words:

  No survivors found. The number of dead: unconfirmed.

  Where the plane went down is 120 feet deep.

  Divers have been jumping into the water,

  fifteen-minute intervals at a time,

  trying to pull up what might be left.

  I tell Mami we need to go to Queens,

  the closest shore to where the plane fell.

  Dozens of people have been lighting candles

  by the water. The small hope inside me is illogical.

  I know this. But it urges me to go. If I

  can just be as close as possible to the crash site,

  my presence might change the outcome.

  All Mami does is drag herself to her room

  where she denies my request

  with a sharp but quiet click.

  Papi sat me in front of a chessboard

  when I was three years old.

  He patie
ntly explained all the pieces,

  but I still treated each one like a pawn.

  He loved . . . loves to tell the story

  of how I would give up my king

  all willy-nilly but would protect my knight

  because “Me gustan los caballitos!”

  (In my defense, why would a three-year-old

  pick a dry-ass-looking king over a pony?)

  But even when I was bored, I was also good

  at memorizing the patterns for openings

  & closings, for when to castle & when to capture.

  I was fascinated by the rhythm of the game;

  it came as naturally to my body as when Papi

  taught me how to dance. It’s all just steps & patterns.

  By the time I was four,

  I could beat Papi if he wasn’t paying attention.

  On my fifth birthday, I defeated him

  in just six moves.

  After that, he would take me downtown on the C train

  to compete against the Washington Square Park hustlers

  who played for money. They were straight sharks

  & thought the little girl too cute to beat.

  But Papi would put a twenty-dollar bill down, & those dudes

  learned quick: shorty had patient fingers & played three moves ahead.

  Most important, I loved how much

  Papi loved to watch me win.

  I began competing in chess tournaments

  when I was in second grade.

  From September to June,

  Papi never missed one of my matches.

  Never complained about picking me up from

  late team meetings or the cost of additional coaching,

  even though I knew he must have cut funds

  from other places & people to afford both.

  Every couple of years

  he built a new shelf with his own hands

  & put up my trophies & plaques,

  pinned up my ribbons & awards.

  “Negra bella, lo vas a ganar todo.”

  & so I did. I won everything for him.

  Until I couldn’t. Until I didn’t know why

  or how I should.

  Did I love chess?

  I did chess.

  But love? Like I love

  watching beauty tutorials?

  Love, like I love when

  something I say catches Dre

  by surprise & her laugh is Mount Vesuvius—

  an eruption that unsettles & shakes

  me to my core? Love, like I love the scent

  of Mami cooking mangú & frying salami?

  Or how I love Papi’s brother, Tío Jorge,