The Hero Next Door

by The Hero Next Door (retail) (epub)

  “She says this is the apartment she wants,” Reina said, skipping behind her mother.

  By then Mr. Damper had given up trying to talk directly to Mrs. Madrid, and turned to Reina.

  “Tell her there are no other Spanish people in this neighborhood,” he said, his eyes opened wide as if he was saying something of the utmost importance.

  Mrs. Madrid turned to look at him. She wore thick glasses with green frames that curved upward at the sides like the tails of the Cadillac she had just sold to pay for their moving expenses. She was a petite woman, very elegant in her white gloves, very beautiful.

  “This is the apartment I want, Mr. Damper,” she said with a smile, enunciating every word so that there could be absolutely no misunderstanding her.

  2.

  It didn’t take Reina long to become one of the pack of neighborhood kids. In Queens, in those days (the 1970s), your neighborhood was strictly limited to a one- or two-block radius. The kids on 160th Street, for instance, were a whole different set of kids from the ones on 158th or 162nd Street. There was no firm rule about it, but groups rarely mingled. The only exception was the building at the very end of 158th Street. This was where Franny Jones lived in apartment 2D. Franny was Reina’s best friend.

  They had met on Reina’s third day in the neighborhood. Reina was sitting on the front stoop of her building with her mother, waiting for the super to come to fix their stove. Franny and her older sister, Carol, were playing with the group of then unfamiliar kids in the long, grassy courtyard behind the buildings. Reina sat very close to Mrs. Madrid, pretending not to notice the kids and ignoring her mother’s entreaties to join them. It was only when a bright pink Spalding ball bounced in front of them, and Reina was forced to catch it so it wouldn’t hit her in the face, that she reluctantly acknowledged the group of kids by throwing the errant ball back to them. It was a good, strong throw coming from a six-year-old. The other kids, who ranged in age from six to nine, might have asked her to join them at that moment, but she quickly went back to pretending they didn’t exist and sidled even closer to her mother. At moments like this, Reina wanted to be like a tattoo on her mother’s arm. This was how shy she was around children she didn’t know.

  The super arrived just as the kids were dispersing. It was dinnertime. The moms were calling their kids in from their various windows along the long courtyard. Franny started walking toward the avenue with Carol, but stopped in front of the stoop as Mrs. Madrid was trying to explain to the super that the stove in the apartment would not turn on. Reina pretended not to see Franny lingering near the stoop, eavesdropping.

  “My mom says the stove won’t turn on,” Reina said to the super. Ironically, she was not the least bit shy around adults.

  “Have you turned on the pilot light?” the super asked.

  “I don’t understand,” Mrs. Madrid kept saying. “Pilot?”

  “We don’t know what you mean,” Reina explained.

  “The pilot light! The pilot light!” the super answered impatiently, before storming into the building and up the stairs to their apartment. Mrs. Madrid followed quickly, and Reina was about to follow, when Franny spoke to her for the first time.

  “Your mother looks like Maria in West Side Story,” she said flatly, as if she were stating the time.

  “What?” said Reina.

  “Maria in West Side Story!” Franny repeated.

  “What’s West Side Story?”

  “You never saw West Side Story?”

  “Reina!” Mrs. Madrid’s voice echoed down the stairwell. “Ven para traducir!”

  “Is that your name? Ray-na?” said Franny. She had an imperious air about her, like she wasn’t used to being disobeyed. She had green eyes and sandy-brown hair and freckles.

  “No, it’s Mah-ree-ah-ew-hen-ee-ah,” answered Reina.

  “Mah-ree-what?” said Franny, somewhat disapprovingly.

  “Reina!” her mother called again.

  “I gotta go,” said Reina.

  “I’m Franny. You throw good. I’ll call for you tomorrow and you can play with us.”

  “Okay, bye.”

  “Bye, Reina!”

  Reina dashed up the stairs, two at a time. She had never heard the term “call for you” before but intuited that it meant she had a new friend. Exhilarated, but still nervous, she got to the apartment just as the super finished showing her mother how to ignite the pilot light under the stove. The gruffness he’d exhibited before seemed to be all gone now. He was friendly, almost bashful. Mrs. Madrid had this effect on people, Reina knew. “Everyone loves your mother,” her father used to tell her.

  “Yep, the pilot light is a tricky thing,” the super said in a strong Queens accent, wiping his hands on his pants. It seemed like he was trying to prolong his visit. “Even for people who know stoves, pilot lights are tricky. But you’re probably not that familiar with them, where you’re from. Do they have stoves in your country?” It was asked innocently, without malice.

  Mrs. Madrid smiled her charming smile. Reina could tell she thought the question was ridiculous.

  “Yes” was all she answered.

  “Of course they have stoves,” Reina chimed in, annoyed that her mother didn’t elaborate, didn’t tell him that if she didn’t know about “pilot lights,” whatever those were, it wasn’t because she’d never seen a stove before, but because she’d grown up with maids and cooks who did all the cooking in her house. “You should see the house she grew up in! It was big. It had marble floors.”

  “My husband is cook here” was all that Mrs. Madrid added.

  “Huh, well, there you go,” said the super, nodding awkwardly.

  He finished, turned the knobs on all four burners to show them that the stove now worked, and accepted the glass of water Mrs. Madrid offered him. Then he left.

  Reina did not ask her mother why she had made it seem like her father was still alive to the super. She knew. She had been in enough hospital rooms and lawyers’ offices to understand the coded way adults talk, the way their mouths might say one thing but their eyes say another. She learned that a sentence like “I’m sure your dad will be fine” actually meant “Your dad is dying but you’ll be fine.” Or “Your mom’s going to need you to be brave” meant “I don’t want to deal with you crying right now, little girl.” Reina had become very good at this language of Things Not Said. This was why she had become so indispensable to her mother in the months after her father’s passing—she would translate not just the content but the intent of conversations that her mother couldn’t follow. “No, mami, the lawyer didn’t say papi didn’t have any money, he said papi owed more money than he had, so that’s why we’re not getting anything.”

  In this way, Reina Madrid had become, very quickly, an equal partner in the new enterprise that was the Madrid family. Where before it had been her father and mother making all the big decisions together, now it was her and her mother. Where they should live. What they should do next. The two of them divided the work that had to be done, the things that Reina’s father used to do for the family. Reina, for instance, was not only the translator now, but the map reader, the subway navigator, the appliance operator, the picture taker, and the game explainer. These were all things that her father used to do that Mrs. Madrid didn’t do particularly well (in addition to cooking, baking, or sewing). The things Mrs. Madrid did do well were far less practical in nature. Storytelling. Dream deciphering. Mind reading. Added to these responsibilities were now sand-castle building, Easter egg painting, card playing, and driving (the latter only because Reina would not be able to do it for a good number of years). The thing Mrs. Madrid was best at, though—and this was something Reina would hear over and over again as she grew older—was her uncanny ability to make everyone she spoke to feel like there was nothing in the world they could not do. If
you wanted to fly to the moon, Mrs. Madrid would help you build the spaceship. This was her greatest talent.

  3.

  Four years passed. In that time, Franny and Reina became true best friends. They knew each other’s secrets, could make each other laugh with just a look. They negotiated well who would go first at this or that, and in all those years, they had never had a fight. Franny, who was a year older than Reina (which is why they never saw each other in school) went to Reina’s house right after school every day. The two would sit side by side at the kitchen table and do their homework. Then, once they were both finished, they would go out and play until it was time for dinner. Most nights, Franny ate at Reina’s house. On Friday nights, she almost always slept over on the little cot Mrs. Madrid would pull out from under Reina’s bed. Saturday mornings they would watch cartoons until noon, eating breakfast brought to them in bed by Mrs. Madrid, whose one true cuisine was Aunt Jemima pancakes.

  Later, Mrs. Madrid would take them to the movies or bowling. Sometimes, in the winter, they would go ice-skating. In the summer, Mrs. Madrid usually took them to the beach, or Adventurers Inn. Anyone who didn’t know better would have thought they were sisters, the way Mrs. Madrid treated the two girls. Whatever she bought for Reina, she bought for Franny: stuffed animals at the carnival; ice skate pom-poms at the rink. Mrs. Madrid had gotten a job as a receptionist in the Spanish-language department of a nearby college. She earned enough money now that she could afford to spoil Reina the way she wanted to. This was why Reina had been the first in her neighborhood to get a five-speed Stingray, and the only one to go to Disney World. Mrs. Madrid was unapologetic about indulging her only daughter’s wants and wishes, and if that meant paying for her daughter’s best friend on all these adventures, she didn’t mind. Reina didn’t mind. And certainly Franny didn’t seem to mind, either.

  For a little while early in their best-friendship, Reina did wonder why she had never been invited for a sleepover at Franny’s house, despite all the times Franny had slept over at her house. It didn’t bother her, exactly, but it made her wonder. Then, one day when Franny was sick with the flu and had missed a couple of days of school, Reina brought her a jar of soup after school. She rang Franny’s bell, expecting Franny’s mom to come downstairs. But she was buzzed in, and walked upstairs and knocked on Franny’s door. Franny opened the door, looking terrible, said her mother was at the drugstore, took the soup, coughed, thanked her, and then closed the door.

  In that brief time, Reina glimpsed inside Franny’s home and understood instantly why her best friend had never invited her over. Piles of clothes everywhere. Boxes and crates strewn all over the floor. It looked like a tornado had hit the apartment. It was the same size as the one-bedroom she and her mother shared, but it looked so different! How did five people live there? Franny, her sister and brother, their two parents? No wonder Franny didn’t have friends over—there was no room!

  Seeing Franny’s apartment also helped explain a story Franny had once told her, which she had really never believed because it seemed so outrageous, but now made sense. Franny told her that she had once gotten locked inside her coat closet for twelve hours, and no one had even realized she was missing until her dad needed his jacket the next morning! She had pounded and pounded on the door, but between the TV blaring in the living room and her older brother blasting his music in the other room, no one heard her. Franny had told the story in such a funny way that Reina had laughed. They had both giggled when Franny imitated her dad’s expression on finding her in the closet. But afterward, Reina could not stop thinking about how horrible it must have been to have gotten locked inside a closet and not have anyone know you were missing. She felt bad for Franny, though she never said anything. She liked that her own mother always kept close tabs on her, annoying as that could be sometimes. Even when her mother was at work, Reina had to check in with her.

  Reina liked that her mother worked in an office and had the kind of job where she had to wear nice clothes every day. None of the other moms in the neighborhood had jobs like that. Not Karen and Tommy’s mom, who was kind of the Band-Aid mom in the neighborhood, the one whose apartment you went to if you scraped a knee and your own mom wasn’t home. Not Debbie’s mom, who was the wounded-creature mom. If you found a baby bird that had fallen out of its nest, you would take it to Debbie’s mom, who was said to have once nursed an electrocuted squirrel back to health. Neither Josephine’s mom, David’s mom, nor Georgie’s mom worked outside their homes, either. Roy Ponte’s mom sold Tupperware, but worked from her home.

  The only other mom who had an office job, besides Reina’s mom, was Patty Perry’s mom in building 3. Mrs. Perry worked in the city as a secretary at a big ad agency. She wore very fashionable clothes and had the brightest, yellowest hair Reina had ever seen. Perhaps because they were the only two single working moms in the neighborhood, or because they both had a certain glamour to them, Mrs. Perry and Mrs. Madrid had become close friends. By then, Mrs. Madrid was fluent enough in English that her sly humor could poke through (although her Spanish accent now had a distinctly Queens flavor to it). Despite her accent, or perhaps because it made her seem worldly and intriguing to the other moms on the block, Reina’s mother was a greatly sought-after friend in the neighborhood.

  The only mother Mrs. Madrid didn’t become friends with, strangely enough, was Franny’s mother, Mrs. Jones. The truth was, Franny’s mom wasn’t really friends with any of the other mothers in the neighborhood. On summer nights, when all of them brought out their lawn chairs to sit and chat in the courtyard while the kids caught fireflies, Mrs. Jones would say hello when she came to pick up her daughters, but she never joined them or lingered for longer conversations. Reina herself had only talked to Mrs. Jones a handful of times. As for Franny’s dad, Mr. Jones, Reina had never—not even once—been introduced to him, or talked to him, or seen him up close. She’d spotted him from afar a few times, getting off the bus in his tweed cap, walking with his wife and children to church. But she’d never interacted with him. Not that she thought much of that. In those days, it was commonly accepted that most dads were only minimally involved in the day-to-day aspects of their kids’ lives. Aside from an occasional football toss with the kids, or a swing of the stickball bat, dads were a distant and unapproachable phenomenon. To Reina, whose memories of her own dad were becoming a little fuzzy at the edges, there was no problem in accepting this blurry version of Franny’s dad.

  4.

  The Fourth of July was everyone’s favorite holiday, next to Christmas and Halloween. The big kids from a nearby neighborhood, led by the infamous Simone brothers, would put on a fireworks display from the roof of the tall building on 156th Street. Every year, rumors would circulate for days prior to the show about what kinds of fireworks would be displayed. There were rumors, too, that Eddie Simone had lost his right pinkie from a firecracker accident, which only added to the glamour of the spectacle.

  No one went to sleepaway camp in Reina’s neighborhood. Reina had heard about kids in school who went away for weeks on end, but it mystified her. Why would anyone choose to leave for the summer? Summer was a magical time. You got to go out all day long, play with your friends, stay out late as long as there was even a little bit of light in the sky. The days lasted forever. The kids cycled through new phases of things to do every week or so. One week they’d be setting up Evel Knievel stunt courses for their bikes in the courtyard. Another week they’d be making go-carts to push down the grassy slope in Kissena Park. Sometimes they played wild games like Ride the Pony, where somebody always got hurt. Sometimes they played Spud. Sometimes they’d put on shows for the moms, acting out Partridge Family songs in their bell-bottom pants.

  For Reina, every day of summer started the same. A quick breakfast. Run down to Karen and Tommy’s house on the first floor. Wait for them to get ready. Then the three of them would go “call for” the other kids in the neighborho
od, one window at a time.

  On July Fourth, Reina started early, tiny American flag in hand. After getting Tommy and Karen, who were also ready to go earlier than usual, the three trotted to Debbie’s building first, since it was adjacent to theirs, rang the buzzer, and then waited below Debbie’s third-floor kitchen window. All the windows on that side of the building were wide open, since most people, if they had an air conditioner, had it in their living room on the other side of the building. A few minutes later, Debbie’s mom poked her head out the window. “She’s brushing her teeth. She’ll be down in a minute!” she called to the trio below.

  “Happy Fourth of July!” Reina yelled, waving her tiny flag enthusiastically.

  “You too, Reina!” Debbie’s mom answered.

  Two minutes later, Debbie came running outside, a smear of toothpaste on her cheek. The four then went to call for the next kid. It didn’t take long for the group to grow to epic proportions, since everyone was ready to play as soon as they were called for. Josephine, David, Georgie, Kim, Marisa the new girl, Big Frank, Pete, Patty, Danny, and Roy Ponte, who alone among all of them lived in a house on 159th Street. It was a big crowd for so early in the morning. They were all giddy in anticipation of the day and, most especially, the night to come. They argued about what game to play on the way to call for Franny and Carol, the last stop before beginning their adventures. Somehow, punchball was settled on.

  They rang the buzzer for 2D, and then waited outside the building entrance. Franny quickly came to the window.

  “I’m almost finished with breakfast!” she called down, her mouth full.

  “What about Carol?” Roy Ponte asked.

  Franny’s sister, Carol, was the prettiest girl on the block, and everyone knew she and Roy were starting to like each other.