Fish Out of Agua:. Michele Carlo
is Thanksgiving Day.
“Gobble, gobble, gobble!”)
On the other hand, whenever Señor Pavo saw my Grandma Izzy, he would leap up and try to nip a chunk out of whatever body part he could reach.
On the fourth Wednesday of November, I can only imagine my grandmother whetting her long knife as she berated the boys for making a pet out of her dinner.
“Mira—Señor Pavo—he’s going tomorrow. I told you not to name him.”
The boys shed innocent tears as they climbed into their shared bed. My grandmother most likely dreamed sweet dreams of breast meat, drumsticks, and comeuppance as she paraded that turkey in front of the Blanquitos while she offered them her pot of arroz con gandules—a dream that turned into an open-mouthed nightmare when the next morning she found the rope coiled mockingly next to the kitchen steam pole and Señor Pavo gone.
My father would tell me this story three times, the last, a month before he died. The night before Thanksgiving Day, he woke up scared and breathless in his pitch-black room with an indescribable and unshakable sense of fear. He went into the kitchen to get a glass of milk and saw Señor Pavo on his mat next to the steam pole, his eyes glowing in the light from the icebox. My father got down on the floor to pet and sing to him one last time.
What does Mr. Turkey say?
“Gobble, gobble, gobble!”
Tomorrow is Thanksgiving Day.
“Gobble, gobble…”
Minutes later, my father returned from the front stoop and brushed the leaves off his bare feet as he crawled back into bed with his brothers. He woke up again that morning to the sound of my grandmother applying cocotazos to the backs of his brothers’ heads. He knew he would be next, but he didn’t care.
Grandpa Ezekiel came home from his shift in the middle of Hurricane Izzy wielding her chancletas in one hand and the plancha cord in the other. He looked at the steam pole and then at his sons, took a breath and said, “Isabel, there’s nothing we can do. Just make some extra arroz con gandules. And save some for the kids downstairs.”
So Grandma Izzy resigned herself. Gone was her chance to have a Real American Thanksgiving; her family would have to endure yet another holiday without meat. But as she tended her caldero of rice and pigeon peas, something even more astonishing than the disappearance of Mr. Turkey materialized—the unmistakable smell of roast beast wafting up the stairs. The Blanquitos had received a true Miracle on 106th Street: a freshly roasted turkey on their dinner table and a smile on all their eleven drawn faces.
Later that afternoon Mr. Blanquito told my father he swore he saw the Virgin Mary, or something like it. Upon waking up from his latest three-day bender on the apartment building’s front stoop, he found a turkey curled up next to him. Tamed (and affectionate) from his short life of being hand-fed and petted by his adoring handlers, Señor Pavo didn’t even squawk when Mr. Blanquito scooped him up and brought him inside. I can’t say if he was silent when the knife fell.
Grandma Izzy followed her nose downstairs where two cultures, both known for their love of language and confrontation, came face-to-face. Accusations, insults, and ethnic slurs must have flared until both sides realized they were in the same boat and a truce was reached. There was a greater war going on, and they were each just a family struggling to survive the best way they knew how.
Grandma Izzy went upstairs to fetch her arroz con gandules, and in that late afternoon of the fourth Thursday of November 1944, eighteen people from two different cultures sat in the Blanquitos’ apartment and gave thanks. Which in a neighborhood like Spanish Harlem in 1944 was somewhat of a miracle in itself.
And did they all eat…it? Of course they all ate it! There was no tolerance for alternative lifestyles back then. No grumbling about animal rights, food allergies, or growth hormones. There was a war going on.
At the end of the kids’ table was twelve-year-old Elizabeth, “Betty” Blanquito, sucking the marrow out of a drumstick, inhaling Grandma Izzy’s arroz con gandules, and batting the lashes of her big green eyes at my father as she listened to him tell (and retell) the story of “The Heroic Liberation and Sacrifice of Señor Pavo. At the grownups’ table, Mr. Blanquito nodded in satisfaction—meat-drunk. He would, after this conversion, stay off the sauce for six months, long enough to hold a job and move his family, at last, the six blocks east to Pleasant Ave.
As for Betty Blanquito and Rudy, they kept what used to be called “company” on and off for the next eight years until one summer afternoon my father looked out a window and saw…my mother.
4
JACKIE O AND THE BOY FROM EAST 106TH STREET
It was a hot summer’s day a year and a half after my mother had won her block’s first TV. Daisy, a girl named Lydia, and she were walking along East 106th Street on their way to a party, when Daisy stopped the girls to chat up a group of boys hanging out on the front stoop of a three-story apartment building. On the second floor, lying on the sofa and listening to a New York Giants vs. Dodgers baseball game on the radio, was my father. He stuck his head out of the window when he heard Daisy’s loud laughter and saw my mother. Years later he would tell me that he ran downstairs like hell because he was afraid if he didn’t, she would disappear.
The person who made up the saying “Good things come in small packages” must have seen my mother at the age of twenty. When my father looked out of the window and saw her for the first time, she was petite and curvy, wearing tight but not too tight red Capri pants, a white-on-white, Swiss dot sleeveless blouse tied at her tiny waist, a black patent leather belt, and black patent leather wedge sandals. When he got downstairs for a closer look, he saw her liquid dark-brown eyes, flawless ivory complexion, and jet-black wavy hair. (He would later learn that she slept every night with her hair wrapped around orange juice cans in order to tame its tight curls and that there were other things she was equally rigid about.) That day he thought he could willingly drown in those eyes. His tongue filled up his mouth, and he, who had an answer for everything, could not think of a thing to say.
My mother looked at the boy standing in front of her. He was good-looking at five feet nine inches, with a slim, athletic build from years of recreational stickball, baseball, and dancing. He had brown wavy hair with a cowlick that fell in a curve over his forehead, a ruddy complexion, and a small cleft in his angular chin. (My mother would later learn just how often he relied on his good looks and charm to get him through tough situations.) That day she got butterflies waiting for him to talk to her. She was attracted to him, but would not chase him. Even at twenty, my mother was absolutely a lady.
Rudy didn’t talk to Lucy that day. Instead, he talked to Daisy and Lydia and found out every place they were going to be for the rest of that summer. From Central Park to Orchard Beach to the Starlight Room’s famous dances at the Waldorf Astoria hotel, Rudy appeared and tried to get my mother to notice him—but to no avail. He did become friends with Daisy and Lydia. He danced with them and introduced them to his other friends, while my mother remained a mystery.
That is, until the night Daisy got toasted. The girls usually had a cocktail or two on the nights they went dancing. My mother’s signature drink was one classic martini with olives. It made her feel refined and in control. Daisy, on the other hand, liked whatever was sweet and fruity—and lots of it. Piña coladas, sidecars, and daiquiris all made her happy, and one night, Daisy became so happy that my mother thought it best if they immediately went home.
My mother looked around for Lydia to help her with Daisy, but Lydia had already left with her boyfriend. As my mother steered Daisy out of the hotel, trying not to draw attention, my father appeared. He immediately hailed a cab, but after Daisy got sick in the backseat, they were kicked out, still thirty blocks from their destination.
In the hour it took to walk to 99th Street and Lexington Avenue (where Daisy now lived), my father told every joke, story, and anecdote he knew to keep the girls entertained—and Daisy from barfing again. He told them about the pigeons he kept on different roofs, the horses he used to take care of at the West