Ordinary Girls

by Jaquira Díaz

  Papi came out to the balcony, barefoot, wiping sleep from his eyes. But how could I explain what had just happened? From my mother, I’d learned that a girl’s body was special, that I should stay away from men, who were not to be trusted, that I should not let boys see my private parts, or let them show me theirs. How could I explain what the man had done without admitting that I’d stupidly let him? Years later I’d remember this moment, how I’d thought it was my own fault. How, ashamed, I thought of it like a secret that needed to be kept.

  Standing there, heart pounding in my chest, I said nothing as my father rushed over, as he wrapped his arms around me, as he asked, “What’s wrong?”

  I held my stomach, willing the tears to come, as Papi asked again and again, “What’s wrong? Where does it hurt?”

  But I kept it to myself, just cried and cried, wilting like moriviví in his arms.

  I adored my father. He was the center of my universe, and I wanted, more than anything else, to be the center of his. That whole year, I had Papi mostly to myself during the day. But when I didn’t, at least I had his books.

  In my father’s books, I would learn about the genocide of the Taínos, about our island’s Taíno name, Borikén, which then became Borínquen, and later, Puerto Rico. About Africans who were brought through the Transatlantic slave trade, including part of our black family, although most of my father’s side came from Haiti right after the Haitian Revolution, and settled in Naguabo. In my father’s books, and in my father’s own stories, I would find our history:

  Ponce, 1937

  After Pedro Albizu Campos’ first imprisonment in La Princesa, members of the Puerto Rican Nationalist Party and civilians organized a march in protest. Puerto Ricans wanted independence from the United States, and from Blanton Winship, the US-appointed governor, who had not been elected by the people. They secured all the necessary permits, invited a marching band, gathered with their families after church. Men, women, and children headed toward the parade, where they would celebrate Palm Sunday with music and palm fronds.

  Hundreds of people marched as the band played “La Borinqueña.” They were met by hundreds of police officers in riot gear who shot their Tommy Guns directly at the crowd of unarmed civilians. Under Winship’s orders, the cops surrounded the demonstrators, leaving them no route for escape.

  The shooting lasted about thirteen minutes, some people say. Others insist it was fifteen.

  The police murdered nineteen people, and wounded about 235, including a seven-year-old girl, a man shielding his young son, and an eighteen-year-old boy looking out his window.

  Witnesses said that as the cops walked by the dead or dying, they beat them with their clubs. Most of the victims who lay dead on the street, the evidence showed, were shot in their backs while running away from the gunfire.

  Although an investigation by the US Commission on Civil Rights found that Governor Winship had ordered the massacre, none of the murderers were ever convicted, or even prosecuted. [1]

  This was our history, I would eventually learn. We’d come from uprisings against colonial rule, slavery, massacres, erasure. We’d carried histories of resistance, of protest.

  And I would also learn that my father, even though he spent his days selling perico, was imagining some other life. All that time lost in his books, all those nights writing poetry and painting, every single dollar he stashed away—Papi dreaming of another place, where his kids could play outside, where he didn’t have to sell dope anymore. One day, he would tell me all his secrets, all the stories not meant for children: the other woman he’d loved, the baby who died before I was born, the army days. And I would write it all down, determined to remember.

  Prohibido olvidar.

  El Caserío

  This is where I begin. I come from poverty, from El Caserío Padre Rivera, the government housing projects, and there are stories here I never want to forget.

  In El Caserío, Anthony and I spent most summer days playing outside. It was a world of men, of violence, a place too often not safe for women or girls. There were shoot-outs in the streets, fourteen-year-old boys carrying guns as they rode their bikes to the candy store just outside the walls. We watched a guy get stabbed right in front of our building, watched the cops, who we called “los camarones,” come in and raid places for drugs and guns. Outsiders were not welcome. Outsiders meant trouble.

  We were poor, like everybody who lived there, but we didn’t know any better. At times, El Caserío was like the Wild West, but what you didn’t know unless you lived there was that most people were just trying to raise their families in peace, like anywhere else. The neighbors kept an eye on all the kids, fed them, took them to school, took them trick-or-treating on Halloween. All over the neighborhood, people told stories. El Caserío was where I learned about danger and violence and death, but it was also where I learned about community.

  El Caserío was made up of clusters of two-story cinderblock buildings, each with four apartments on the first floor, and four on the second. Every apartment had two balconies, one facing the front yard, one facing the back. Some buildings, like ours, faced the street, but some had a view of the plaza, or the basketball courts, or the elementary school at the end of the main street.

  We sometimes played cops and robbers, but Anthony and his friends didn’t want girls around—I had to beg them to let me play. I was always the robber, always the one to get shot down by the cops. Because they were boys, they got to carry the guns and do all the shooting. Girls were not supposed to carry weapons—knives or guns or machetes—so how was I supposed to rob a bank? Still, they showed no mercy, shooting me six, seven times. I had to lie on the sidewalk, pretend I was dead.

  Most days I ran wild around El Caserío, dying to hang out with the boys, or my brother when he was around, to be the boy I thought my father wanted. But my brother was nothing like me. I was tanned from days spent in the summer sun, and everything about me was messy. I spent hours climbing the tangled branches of the flamboyanes, riding my bike in the street. I ran around with Eggy, barefoot, splashing in puddles, catching lizards, digging our hands into the mud, pulling up earthworms. Sometimes we’d shoot hoops. If there were no boys around, I’d play double Dutch with the triplets who lived in the next building over, singing along to our Spanish version of the Jackson Five’s “Rockin’ Robin.”

  My brother was the favorite, who never got in trouble for pushing me down, for knocking me upside the head, for tripping me as I walked by. Eventually, I learned to defend myself, to outrun him, to hit him back. Anthony was chubby, with my mother’s piercing blue-green eyes, blond hair, fair skin. He didn’t climb trees, or run through the flooded streets during rainstorms, or hang upside down from the monkey bars—that was all me. My brother mostly stayed inside, watching TV or drawing. He could draw anything in under a minute. With a pencil and paper, he’d take one look at you and turn you into a cartoon. He’d draw cities and underwater worlds and the Millennium Falcon. He’d draw our family: Mami with a round pregnant belly, Papi with boxing gloves and high-tops, Abuela stirring a giant pot of sancocho, and me, with a parrot’s beak for a nose, two red devil horns, and a pointed tail. I was just like Papi, with his wide nose, with dark eyes, tight curls, skin that browned easily after a little bit of sun. I was the wild one, always running, always dirty, sweaty, a tomboy. Anthony was blue-green, light, golden. I was brown, brown, brown, like tierra. But even though we had a white mother, Abuela reminded us that we were a black family, and that every single one of her grandchildren was black, no matter how light-skinned we might look to the world. Even Anthony, with his golden hair and light eyes.

  One afternoon, Anthony and I met the other boys outside our building—Pito and Eggy and a bunch of other kids. Pito, the oldest of all the Caserío street kids, was the shot caller. He was in sixth grade, but smaller than most of the other kids, with a short Afro and a face full of freckles. Eggy was taller, less freckled, and not so bossy.

  “You better be re
ady for war,” Pito said. He tossed a pebble back and forth from one hand to the other.

  Pito decided that we’d all be Taínos, that it was our duty to defend our island from the Spaniards who came to murder and enslave us. If Pito said climb a tree, we climbed. If he told us to break into the neighbor’s apartment, we broke in. So when he said we were going to wage a war against el viejo Wiso, we ran around El Caserío looking for rocks and pebbles to use as bullets and grenades, enough to take down an entire army.

  El viejo Wiso spent all day sitting on his second-floor balcony, looking out at the barrio. He sat there quietly when we rode our bikes in front of his building, and when Pito started a small fire on the lawn so we could cook a can of Spam like soldiers did in the old days of war.

  Across from Wiso’s building was the tallest tree in El Caserío, a ceiba with a trunk thicker than my torso. Everybody said el viejo Wiso was toasted, and we kids were supposed to leave him alone, stay out of his way. But Pito claimed Wiso had killed hundreds of Taínos in Vietnam, which is what made him crazy, and now we were going to make him pay.

  Pito filled the pockets of his jeans with rocks, small pebbles, and pieces of broken glass. Some of the boys didn’t have pockets, so they stuffed my overalls’ pockets with their ammunition, even though I was forbidden from throwing rocks. (According to Pito and Anthony, everybody knew girls couldn’t throw.) When Pito gave the order, we marched our way across the narrow, cracked sidewalks, cutting through patches of grass and weeds and moriviví, all the way to el viejo Wiso’s building on the other side of El Caserío. He was exactly where we expected, just sitting there on his balcony, fanning himself with his worn, gray, newsboy cap.

  When Pito threw the first rock, it landed in the middle of the front yard. Wiso didn’t move.

  “Attack!” Pito ordered, one fist raised over his head.

  And then, all at once, the boys started flinging rocks, hurling them at the planters and the rusty bike el viejo Wiso kept on his balcony, some of them landing in the yard or hitting the neighbor’s windows. Anthony and Eggy and Pito picked my pockets for their rocks, throwing one after another and another.

  “Get up!” Pito shouted. “Come down and fight!”

  But Wiso still didn’t move.

  I pulled a rock from one of my pockets, got ready to fling it, but Anthony snatched it without a word, as if I was just handing it to him. I watched him throw it as I scrunched my face under the sun. He bit his bottom lip, something he did when he was trying to concentrate, and sent it flying over the lawn, his bushy blond locks lifting in the wind.

  When everyone ran out of ammo, Pito scanned the lawn for more rocks, turned all my pockets inside out. He searched the ground beneath the ceiba tree, until he found exactly what he was looking for: an empty beer bottle. He grabbed it, measured the distance between the balcony and his throwing arm, and without another word, he flung it, hard.

  It landed right in the middle of the balcony, shattering into a million pieces, glass exploding like shrapnel.

  Slowly, Wiso rose from his chair. He dropped his hat right there and stepped back into his apartment. We watched, wide-eyed and nervous, waiting for him to come back out, maybe with a pot of hot water to throw at us, like some of the viejas when they were fighting with their husbands, or the mailman, or the neighbors.

  But suddenly, without warning, Pito took off, pushing boys out of the way, running in the same direction we’d come from. Eggy grabbed my arm, pulled me, hard. And that’s when I saw it: el viejo Wiso crossing the lawn, headed right for us, a machete in his hand.

  Then we all took off. Most of the boys split, peeling off toward their own apartments. Eggy, Anthony, and I followed Pito, who was heading toward Abuela’s place. It was home base, Abuela’s house, where we all went for lunch or snacks, where we all took refuge when we were in trouble, when we were hiding from our parents or each other, or when los camarones came in to raid places or take someone away.

  I cut through the same spots of patchy grass and moriviví, all the boys yelling, “This way!” and “Faster!” and “Get out of the way!”

  I followed Pito. Maybe because he was older and I thought he’d have a plan. Maybe I thought he wouldn’t let Wiso chop my head off. After all, he was brave. He was the boss.

  A few weeks later, after everybody had heard how Wiso came after us with the machete, they found him in pieces. Limbs, torso, head severed. His body had been left in a saco, inside a dumpster a few blocks from our building. They said he’d been dead at least a week. Eggy was the one who told me, his eyes glossy and wide with excitement, as if he was retelling the end of Star Wars or Jaws.

  Some people said Wiso owed somebody money, one of the hustlers around El Caserío. Some said he was just a crazy old man who must’ve chased the wrong tecato with his machete. Some suspected the wife.

  People went around El Caserío telling their stories of el viejo Wiso, wanting to be connected to him in death, even if they had no connection in life: “He sprayed me with a hose as I walked out of my building” or “I knew him before he went to Vietnam.” Even us kids: “He almost chopped our heads off!”

  Later, we would go back to climbing the flamboyanes, back to playing in the streets. We would forget about Wiso, the machete, its polished blade gleaming in the sunlight. We would forget the stories of Vietnam. Our parents would set us free, let us run wild, like they could not imagine a future where the street kids in El Caserío would no longer point toy guns at each other, but real ones, where the boys were no longer boys.

  It would be decades before I really thought about how much violence found its way into our childhood games, how it had been us kids who drove Wiso to attack, taunted him, targeted him, until he picked up that machete and walked out of his house determined to hack us all to pieces. Or how he’d lived in that apartment with his wife, spent his days watching the ceiba, watching the leaves fall, the neighbor’s bony backyard chickens strutting by with their pollitos. Or who he was before they shipped him off to fight in someone else’s war, how maybe he’d been the kind of man who stepped back in his apartment for a piece of stale bread to crumble and toss over the balcony for the birds. Or how else the story could’ve played out: In some other version, the girl is left behind by all the boys. She runs as fast as she can toward her abuela’s house, but trips over her chancletas on the sidewalk. She falls or maybe she doesn’t. She gets back up or maybe she never gets the chance. The boys run and run and run, the sun on their faces, the sour smell of caña burning somewhere in the distance, until finally, that front door opens. That front door open.

  In some other version, there is no front door. There is no girl. There is just Wiso, alive.

  La Otra

  The first time she saw my father, my mother knew he was hers. She was in high school. He was in college. She lied about her age. She had always looked older, my mother, and by the time she was fourteen, Grandma Mercy was already leaving her to care for two of her sisters, twelve-year-old Xiomara and one-year-old Tanisha, while she was at work.

  My father says he didn’t know my mother’s real age, that she’d told him she was eighteen, that he found out only when Mercy caught them in bed. My mother says he didn’t really find out until they were applying for their marriage license a week later, when he finally got a look at her birth date.

  My father had been a college activist, protesting the naval occupation of Culebra, studying literature, writing poems about American colonialism in Puerto Rico. My mother—so young, so desperate to leave her abusive mother, so in love with my father—would’ve done anything to keep him.

  Sometimes when I write this story, I think of my mother as the villain, tricking my father, knowing the exact time my grandma Mercy would come home from work, leaving the bedroom door unlocked, forcing him to become a husband, a father, when what he really wanted was to read books and write poems and save the world. How maybe I wouldn’t be here if Grandma Mercy hadn’t threatened to have him thrown in jail.

 
; Sometimes it’s my father who is the villain. The brilliant college student who pretended not to know my mother’s age as he slithered his way into her bed. How he decided to ignore the school uniform folded neatly and left on a chair in the corner of her bedroom.

  They are different people now, divorced more than twenty-five years. But no matter how much they’ve changed, there is always this: My mother loved my father obsessively, violently, even years after their divorce. My father was a womanizer, withdrawn, absent. And it was after three children, after leaving Puerto Rico for Miami, after eleven years of marriage, after my father left her for the last time, that my mother started hearing voices, that she started snorting coke and smoking crack. But each time I write and rewrite this story, it’s not just my mother’s intense, all-consuming love for my father that destroys her. It’s also her own mother, Grandma Mercy. And her children—my older brother, my little sister, and me. Especially me.

  By the time my mother was twenty-two, she had three children. She’d already been a mother for a third of her life. It was 1985. These were the days of Menudo and “We Are the World,” the year Macho Camacho gave a press conference in a leopard-skin loincloth as Madonna’s “Like a Virgin” blared from radios across the United States. In one month, the space shuttle Challenger would explode while all of America watched on television, entire classrooms full of kids, everyone eager to witness the first teacher ever launched into space.

  In those days, Mami teased her blond hair like Madonna, traced her green eyes with blue eyeliner, applied several coats of black mascara, apple-red lipstick, and matching nail polish. She wore skin-tight jeans and always, no matter where she was going, high heels. She dusted her chest with talcum powder after a bath, lotioned her arms and legs, perfumed her body, her hair. My mother loved lotions, perfume, makeup, clothes, shoes. But really, the truth was my mother loved and enjoyed her body. She walked around our apartment butt-ass naked. I was more used to seeing her naked body than my own. You should love your body, my mother would say. A woman’s body was beautiful, no matter how big, how small, how old, how pregnant. This my mother firmly believed, and she would tell me over and over. As we got older, she would teach me and Alaina about masturbation, giving us detailed instructions about how to achieve orgasm. This, she said, was perfectly normal. Nothing to be ashamed of.