“I’m having rum and Coke,” Mr. Lopez said. “What do you want to drink?”
“I’ll take the same,” Dad said. I knew he was kissing up to Mr. Lopez because Dad despised liquor.
Mr. Lopez nodded questioningly at Mom, but she refused any alcohol, and instead accepted a glass of ice water. Mr. Lopez poured me a Coke in a small, fat glass like he and Dad drank out of. I took a drink and imagined what the rum tasted like. A sofa and two armchairs, both covered in plastic, were all the furniture in the living room. This was the first time I saw furniture covered in plastic, and it didn’t look very comfortable. Mom didn’t seem overly impressed by the furnishings in the Lopez house, and I thought the plastic really put her off.
After Mr. Lopez made Dad’s drink and freshened his wife’s and his drinks, we all went out to a narrow covered back porch.
Rubin’s parents weren’t much younger than my parents, and from the adults’ talk, I learned that Mr. Lopez fought in Korea, and, like Dad, served in the Navy. Mr. Lopez had his training in Pensacola, and once the war finished, he returned a hero to his Puerto Rican village.
He used this prestige to marry his petite wife, who, as Mr. Lopez bragged, was the most beautiful girl in the region, but he didn’t say anything about how she looked now. Mr. Lopez stayed in the Navy and retired to Pensacola, the city where he got his first taste of American living.
Mr. Lopez and Dad, after putting the steaks on the grill, talked up a storm, just like they had in the dojo the other night, while Mrs. Lopez and Mom spoke occasionally to one another about housework and cooking. Both, as they told it, were great cooks. That night, along with Dad’s steaks, Mrs. Lopez prepared an excellent salad of Romaine lettuce, covered with grated Parmesan cheese.
I wondered where Rubin was. He was, after all, the point of us coming over, but no one mentioned his name. Maybe he wasn’t that crazy about the idea of the newest white belt and family coming over for dinner. Working with me at the dojo was one thing, but at his home he would have to hang out with me. We wouldn’t be in our dojo roles of black belt and white belt; we would be teenage boy and adolescent boy thrown together and forced to feign friendship.
But feigning wouldn’t come from me. I would have loved to be friends with Rubin. He was obviously someone Dad approved of, and having the youngest black belt in the state as a friend could not be a bad thing. Reasons for wanting Rubin as a friend were easy to think of, but so were the reasons he wouldn’t want to be my friend. My age and my inexperience at tae kwon do were only the two most obvious. Being covered with nasty-looking acne and sporting a rolypoly shape were the other two reasons.
“Wesley, you can go to Rubin’s room,” Mrs. Lopez said. “He was finishing up a model before you arrived. He should be done now.”
His room was easy to find because the Lopez house had two bedrooms and a bathroom, all down the hall from the living room. The bathroom was directly in front of me at the end of the
hall. The door to the left was open and I saw black and white photographs of Mr. Lopez in his sailor uniform and wedding pictures in which Mrs. Lopez didn’t have the protruding belly. She was, as Mr. Lopez had said, a beautiful woman with dark hair and a lean shapely body.
The door to my right was partially shut, so I knocked softly, barely touching my knuckles to the wood. There was no answer. But Rubin had to be there. The bathroom door was open, so obviously no one was in there. And Mrs. Lopez had said he was in his room. I knocked louder, opened the door a little wider. I saw model airplanes, classics and jet fighters, hanging from the ceiling and a Spiderman poster on the wall. A blue light shone from behind the door, but I didn’t see Rubin, and I wasn’t about to enter his room without his permission.
I was about to return to the company of parents when I heard: “Hey, Wesley. Where you going?”
I turned and Rubin stood in the doorway.
“Where were you?”
“In the room, laying down,” he said. “You didn’t see me? I saw you.”
He smiled and his teeth brightened the dark hallway like a lightning bug at dusk.
Closets with sliding doors dominated the left wall of his bedroom. A small desk, stacked with comic books sat under a square window. Next to it was his bed, small and narrow, and immaculately made. I hated making my bed, would rather take a whipping than make it. But Dad thought that making my bed taught me responsibility and a sense of pride. Rubin’s father, I saw, enforced the same bed making discipline on his son. Only Rubin was good at it. My blanket was never straight enough, the sheets never pulled tight enough, and a small crinkle always rippled what was supposed to be the smooth surface of the blanket. I doubted if Dad knew Rubin made his bed so well, but if Rubin could teach me this too, Dad would get a bonus on his investment.
Model planes were suspended from the low ceiling in various positions: most of the jets had their noses in the air, looking as if they were climbing higher in the sky; the planes from World War II kept a more level flying pattern, though many had one of their wings dropped, as if they were about to circle back on an unseen enemy. All these planes filled the small room with activity, and the lowness of the ceiling meant that they hung less than a foot above my head.
Rubin’s other three walls were covered with comic book posters and homemade paintings that imitated comic book characters: Captain America, Batman, Superman, and a bunch of others that I didn’t recognize. While I enjoyed reading, comic books and I weren’t a fit. Something about reading a cartoon didn’t appeal to me. I wondered why they appealed so much to Rubin.
Comic books, after all, were for the uncoordinated, uncool kids. Or at least that was my experience. Did this mean Rubin, black belt and all, wasn’t really cool?
The only sign of tae kwon do in the room was in the very center of his closet, where his gi hung with the black belt draped over the neck of the hanger. The gi was bright white, crisp and wrinkle-free. I was supposed to wash my gi, but Mom did. I wondered if Rubin’s mother washed his?
“We should sit out back with our folks,” Rubin said.
He turned the blue light off and I followed him to the back porch. I should have said something while I was in his room. Stupid silence was not a good impression.
“I don’t want the blood inside mine,” Mr. Lopez said. His wife, with a wave of the hands and loud uhmp, agreed.
“You ruin a steak when you cook it well-done,” Dad said, his face flushed.
“Not my steak, no,” Mr. Lopez said. “Blood is dirty. It’s not good for your insides.”
Dad opened his mouth but didn’t say anything. He was silent because of Rubin and tae kwon do. Seeing me become the second youngest black belt in the state of Florida was more important at this moment to Dad than the steaks.
Their dining room table was a rectangle like ours and took up almost the entire dining room. Unlike ours, theirs was not wood, but Formica with stainless steel legs, and it sat horizontally, so whoever sat at the head of the table, in this case Dad, got a perfect view of the bathroom. Mr. Lopez was on the other end, his wife to his right, and Rubin to his left. A halfgallon
jug of red wine sat in the center of the table, and everyone had a glass, even Mom, which I was glad to see. She and Mrs. Lopez were side by side, and I didn’t know if they had become friendlier on the back porch in my absence, or if it was the few sips of wine each of them had, but now they spoke more often and in louder voices.
After a few minutes of eating, Dad asked: “How you like those steaks?”
“Delicious,” Mr. Lopez said. “You’ve got to tell me who your butcher is.”
Dad’s face hardened. “You just tell me what kind of cut you want and I’ll get it for you.”