Ordinary Girls

by Jaquira Díaz

I couldn’t get any words out. My mother was mad as hell, standing there, breathing hard, the stink of her cigarette on my face.

  “It never happened,” Papi said again.

  My mother did not move, did not say a word. She was waiting for me to break. I kept crying, looking at my father for answers. He looked at my mother, beads of sweat collecting at his temple. But he would not look at me.

  “I don’t know what she’s talking about,” my father said, looking down at his feet, at the floor, at the wall, at the stove, unable to meet my eyes. And then, finally, I understood.

  That night, I would swipe Mami’s sewing scissors, cut the hair off every single one of my Barbies, the ones that still had any hair, and flush it in bunches down the toilet. I would pull my father’s favorite book off the shelf, Hugo Margenat’s Obras completas, slide it under my mattress. And while my parents yelled at each other and my mother threw the rotating table fan across the room and threatened to leave, I would lay my head on my pillow and feel nothing but the sharp sting of my father’s betrayal.

  I would never return that book to him, would never let on that I knew where it went, even when Papi asked if I’d seen it, even as I saw him searching and searching the bookcase in Abuela’s house, every closet in our apartment. Even after I am a grown woman with books of my own, after I recognize all the ways I am exactly like my father, a runaway, abandoning relationships, jobs, homes, when things get too complicated, or too intense, or too anything, after looking at him becomes like looking in a mirror, his face my face, his eyes my eyes, his life like a roadmap for my own. My father, loved by so many women, would never love them back the way they wanted, not even my mother, and I would spend my life trying to be exactly like him, moving from lover to lover, someone always reaching for me, someone always trying to please me, and me, wanting everything, taking everything, but giving little in return. My father, keeper of secrets, teller of tales, who passed down to me his love of words and music and stories—and running—who created worlds for me, who would sit me down at sixteen, when I was spending days and nights on the streets of Miami Beach, drinking and using and fighting, and say, This is not the life I want for you, and I’d look him in the eye, toss my notebook, toothbrush, a change of clothes into my backpack and take off, launch myself like a missile into the night.

  . . .

  Days later, me and Eggy walking back from Abuela’s house, where we’d polished off a half-dozen mangoes by ourselves, our faces and forearms sticky with juice and pulp, we ran into a mob of people outside my building. Eggy’s mom and his brothers, the guy who sold pinchos around the corner from the front gate, a bunch of street kids, some viejas who lived a couple buildings over, everybody rowdy, hollering, shoving each other.

  I spotted Pito and Anthony and lost Eggy as I pushed through the crowd to get to them.

  “What’s going on?” I asked.

  Pito pointed toward the middle of the group, his face sweaty and red. He elbowed one of the other kids out of the way and pulled me by the arm, trying to squeeze us both through the small space.

  “Your mom!” he yelled.

  Somebody rammed me right into Pito. I almost fell, but kept moving, struggling through the throng of people, bumping them with my shoulders.

  Behind me, Anthony shoved me, yelling at the back of my head. “Move!”

  “I’m trying!” I hollered back.

  When a space opened up, Pito thrust us through it until we made it to the front and I saw them: Papi had Mami in his arms, trying to hold her back. Mami was kicking and slapping at him, trying to get free, her hair windblown and tangled.

  Our upstairs neighbor, a six-foot-six basketball player everybody called Gigante, was holding la vecina, her curly hair pulled out of its ponytail and torn to shreds. La vecina swung both arms blindly, aiming for anything she could hit.

  As Papi tried to carry Mami toward our front door, she slid down and got loose, and all the street kids exploded, Pito and Anthony and Eggy calling out, “Light her up! Knock her out! Préndela!” It was the same kind of shouting we heard in our living room during boxing matches, my father and his friends knocking back Medallas in front of the TV, everybody jumping to their feet when Macho Camacho started wailing on José Luis Ramírez, hollering, Knock him out! Light him up! Préndelo!

  My mother tangled her hands in la vecina’s hair, pulled her down out of Gigante’s arms and onto the ground, and started kicking. My father got a hold of Mami again, picked her up in the air, my mother red-faced and shrieking, spit flying out of her mouth. He carried her inside.

  Gigante helped la vecina get up. She had three long, bloody scratches over her nose and mouth, like claw marks.

  Just then, as la vecina was getting to her feet, Mami burst through the front door, a steak knife in her hand. The crowd moved back, opening up more space between themselves and my mother, and everything seemed to slow down, Pito and Anthony and Eggy, all of them, disappearing until it was just me and my mother and my mother’s knife, the three of us echoing through the years, propelled forward in time. And because I am my mother’s daughter more than I have ever been my father’s, it will be this moment I think of when I’m a fourteen-year-old hoodlum tucking razorblades into the sides of my Jordans, brass knuckles and Master combination locks and pocketknives in my backpack, when I am fifteen and getting jumped by five girls at the bus stop, when I am sixteen and trying to decide how to deal with a friend who has betrayed me, when I am seventeen and fighting with my brother. How I would always come back to this, my mother and her knife and all that rage, la vecina leaping back out of her way. And then my father, my father’s face, my father’s hands, my father’s voice, Jeannette, let go of the knife, how he took both of her hands into his, saying it over and over, Suelta el cuchillo, suelta el cuchillo, suelta el cuchillo.

  But my mother would not let it go. Instead, Papi lifted her hands above her head, trying to pry it from her fingers, and Mami bit his shoulder, kicked him. He leaned her up against the doorway, pressing his body against hers until she couldn’t move, subduing her, and when he was finally able to get the knife, some of the onlookers rushed to help. It took three grown men to get Mami, kicking and slapping and hurling insults at them, back inside our apartment.

  Outside, as the crowd split—while la vecina was still fixing her hair and clothes, limping around looking for her chancletas—I saw Jesenia. She saw me, too. Standing on the front lawn, outside the crowd’s perimeter, Jesenia in one of her Jesenia dresses, a white one with big yellow flowers, her hair parted down the middle, braided. How she stood there, alone, her face stained with tears, how nobody else seemed to see her, how nobody stopped as they headed back to their apartments or the basketball courts or la plaza, how nobody asked if she was okay, if she needed help, anything. I’d like to say that when I saw her, Jesenia looking back at me, yellow ribbons in her hair, that we had a moment. That as we looked into each other’s eyes, we both understood that we had been lost, that we had been lucky to find each other in a crowd, and we both thought, Here is a girl who sees me. Here is a girl who understands.

  The truth is we did have a moment, Jesenia and I, seeing each other, knowing each other, and it was clear: We were the same. I hated her and she hated me. Because we were our mothers’ daughters. Because we could not turn back time to the days when our mothers were just girls, or forward, when we would finally break free of them. Because back then we could not see what either of us would become.

  Home Is a Place

  There was a time, before my mother’s illness, before my parents divorced, before we left Puerto Rico for Miami Beach, when we were happy. It was after Alaina was born, after Mami had gone back to work in the factory, after I’d started school and learned to read. I spent countless hours poring over books, reading them to Alaina, who was three years old by then. Books about sharks and dolphins and coral reefs, stories about El Pirata Cofresí, Puerto Rico’s infamous honorable pirate, mythologized for his marauding, but also for his sense of jus
tice.

  On weekends, or whenever we didn’t have school, Anthony slept over at Abuela’s house. Alaina and I spent entire days in our parents’ bedroom, sitting up in their bed, eating Popsicles and watching The Wizard of Oz or Alice in Wonderland or The NeverEnding Story or Jacques Cousteau films about underwater worlds. At night, I’d lie in my own bed, imagining myself in those movies, writing revisions of them that included characters like me. I’d fill composition books with these stories, except in my versions the hero was always an eight- or nine-year-old curly-haired Puerto Rican girl traveling through time, flying Falkor the luckdragon, exploring the ocean floor, trying to find her way home.

  During that period of happiness, Papi couldn’t sit still. He wanted to see Puerto Rico, to find another place for us. When Mami was off from work, we’d climb into Papi’s old Honda Civic and hit the road, the radio loud, the windows down, the island’s green mountains passing us by, palmas and giant ferns and flor de maga until we hit ocean.

  Our family was from the east coast. Mami’s side from Humacao, and Papi’s side from Naguabo. We lived in Humacao, a beach city. There were two small uninhabited islands just off the coast of Humacao: Cayo Batata and Cayo Santiago, which some people called La Isla de los Monos because it was overrun with monkeys running wild. It was off-limits to people. I’d heard stories about the dozens of monkeys that ran free on the beach, how they’d attacked a group of teenagers that made it to the island on a dinghy. I imagined La Isla de Los Monos was kind of like the Haunted Forest in The Wizard of Oz, a small island teeming with flying monkeys, proof that there were places in the real world that were exactly like the movies, like books, like stories. But as much as I begged Papi to take us to Monkey Island, we’d always end up at the regular beach.

  We drove all over Puerto Rico during those months, visiting swimming holes in Arecibo, El Yunque’s rainforest waterfalls, Fajardo’s bioluminescent bay, seaside restaurants in Naguabo, rivers and chorros all over the island. And so I learned to swim, to dive headfirst into the ocean, to float on my back with my eyes closed, the sun on my face, arms extended. And I learned to love the road, to feel restless while standing still, always sensing that pull, the water calling, the ocean like a beacon.

  In some versions of the legend, El Pirata Cofresí is just a pirate, a thief who sails the Atlantic, deep into the Caribbean, with his crew of thieves aboard the Ana, stealing from the rich. He arrives at night, docks the Ana at the port near el Paseo de la Princesa in el Viejo San Juan, before descending on the sleeping pueblo.

  In others, Cofresí is a child of the ocean, born and raised on the coast of Cabo Rojo, near the red salt flats on the southwest, where he sleeps with the waves crashing at his window, the sea pulsing like his own blood in his veins. A hero, he spreads his loot to the poor, gold and silk and rum, feeding the hungry, guiding the lost.

  In my version, the pirate is an ordinary girl, an octopus tattooed on one shoulder, a seahorse on the forearm, wielding a golden cutlass. She is smart and fierce, captain of the Aurora, hunting phantom ships in the night. She imagines herself like Jacques Cousteau, diving among moray eels and spiny urchins and sea anemones, watching schools of fish dance underwater. She is looking for something. A place. Somewhere like home.

  Three years after Alaina was born, my father found a new place for us. We were getting out of the projects, moving away from El Caserío into a house. A real house.

  We moved into the new place in Fajardo a few weeks after that, a big yellow house with five bedrooms, a large living room with fancy furniture, a brand new big screen television, a record player with a new salsa collection for Papi, a laundry room that was bigger than the old room I’d shared with Alaina and Anthony. But we didn’t just get a new house—we got a completely new life. Mami’s mom, Mercy, moved back from Miami, and overnight she was living ten minutes away with our titis. We also got new clothes and shoes, new wheels and a paintjob for Mami’s RX-7, an Atari 2600 for Anthony, new bikes for me and Alaina. Mami didn’t have to work at the factory anymore, and every couple of weeks Papi would show up with another new car: a BMW, a Ford pickup, a brand new El Camino.

  Abuela got a new house, too. Papi had bought a building on a block in the city square in Fajardo. The first story, he turned into a liquor store with a warehouse in the back. On the second story, he built Abuela an apartment with two bedrooms, a large balcony in the front, a huge terrace in the back, and a view of the city square. Abuela’s house—and Papi’s store—were two blocks away from my new school, so after I walked home I spent whole afternoons with Abuela in her kitchen while she cooked.

  Abuela, who had raised Papi and Tío David on her own, was the strongest woman I knew. A devout Catholic, she had two large portraits hanging in her living room—one of Jesus Christ, and one of Abuelo, who died of a brain hemorrhage when Papi was three. When my parents got married, they’d moved into the spare bedroom in Abuela’s apartment in El Caserío until they were able to get a place of their own. It was Abuela who’d raised us, who took care of us while Mami was at work, or while Papi was running the liquor store.

  Abuela was unapologetically Boricua, unapologetically black. She owned the word “negra.” In Abuela’s house, we were all negros, even if we had a white mother, even though Alaina and I looked brown, even though my blond-haired brother looked white. She called us “mi negrita” and “mi negrito,” always as terms of endearment. She refused white people’s standards of beauty, refused to perm her hair or use a hot comb. She wore her hair in an Afro, and when it grew long, she oiled it with TCB or Alberto VO5, parted it, twisted it, and rolled it into four moñitos.

  Abuela was resourceful, believed in living modestly. She owned maybe nine dresses and one or two pairs of shoes, never wore pants. Nothing in her house was wasted. She made her own curtains, her own sofrito, cooked everything from scratch. Stale bread was saved for bread pudding. Leftover rice was fed to the chickens she raised in the terrace out back. She grew a garden in the front balcony, roses and amapolas, plantas curanderas, herbs for cooking and for teas. She had been raised in the country in Naguabo, where her own mother had taught her to keep house while her father and her five brothers cut cane in the cañaverales. Everybody worked, period. In those days, she told me, you grew your own food. You wanted meat? You went fishing. In Naguabo, they’d been poor, but happy. She went to school, and eventually became a nurse, got married, and moved to Humacao to be closer to her job at Ryder Memorial Hospital.

  Abuela believed in treating people with kindness. She always made us feel loved, even with her deadpan humor. She had been a nurse for over thirty years, and even after she retired, she visited the homes of the elderly around the neighborhood, taking care of those who were sick, took them her asopao de pollo. Occasionally, someone would knock on her door with a fever, a rash, a bloody gash between their thumb and forefinger, and Abuela would take care of them, dousing kids in alcoholado to break fevers, boiling water for te de tilo y manzanilla, bandaging injuries. Every single person who set foot in her house was offered a place to sit, something to eat or drink. She ate almost every meal standing in her kitchen. She was always caring for others, and took breaks only to drink her café, black, no sugar—café puya, she called it—to chain-smoke on her balcony, and to watch her novelas: Cuna de lobos, Cadenas de amor, and El extraño retorno de Diana Salazar. Caffeine and menthol and melodrama—those were her only vices.

  She was easy to love. She loved us all, but Anthony was her favorite. Abuela was old school. Anthony had been her first grandchild, and when he and I fought, which was often, she always took his side, no matter what. I always wondered why, if it was because he was the only boy, or that he was white, or that he’d almost died when he was born. Abuela had helped deliver him. He was born two months premature, was kept in an incubator in the NICU for months, and Abuela took care of him while Mami was in recovery.

  When Anthony was seven, Mami started showing symptoms of schizophrenia, hearing voices. When she became violent,
Anthony ran away from home and went to Abuela’s house. Abuela agreed to take care of him to give Mami a break, and so my brother started living with her. He refused to come back to live with us, and Mami gave up trying to make him. And so, wherever Abuela went, Anthony went. The second bedroom in Abuela’s house became his.

  After school, I came home to Abuela’s house, sat in the kitchen, and watched her cook while Alaina and Anthony plopped on the living room floor watching TV. Abuela stirred a caldero of white rice, red beans simmering in a large pot. Always in my abuela’s kitchen: bags of red beans that had to be soaked overnight, a heavy sack of white rice on the bottom shelf of the pantry, adobo, sazón, bags of frozen gandules, three different kinds of café from Yauco, extra-virgin olive oil in a large green can, a jar of manzanilla olives stuffed with pimentos, calabaza, plátanos, ñame, aguacate, batatas, potatoes, yautía, pana. And in a large wooden basket on the counter, everything she needed to make sofrito: garlic bulbs, onions, recao, cilantro, green bell peppers, handfuls of ají dulce. Sometimes she made oxtail, or carne de res, but most often we ate lechón, the chickens she raised herself, or bacalao. On special occasions, she made my favorite: ensalada de pulpo with a side of tostones.

  Almost every afternoon, while Alaina and Anthony were watching ThunderCats, I had Abuela to myself. I shadowed her, boiling water, peeling batatas, washing rice, fetching saucepans, learning how to sift flour, how to separate egg yolks from whites, how to pack la cafetera full of ground coffee, how to soak salted bacalao.

  In my abuela’s kitchen, with the aroma of sautéed garlic and frying chicharrón de pollo settling on my skin, I forgot about the long days in my new school, where nobody believed that Anthony and I were brother and sister because he was a beautiful golden boy with blue-green eyes that all the girls loved, and I was a gap-toothed sweaty girl with a lopsided Afro and a unibrow, the strange girl from El Caserío, a misfit from the projects who read above her grade level, always off in some corner with her nose in a book, while the other kids ran around the P.E. field during recess. In the kitchen, I forgot about how at night, Alaina and I lugged our backpacks into Mami’s car. How we drove home alone, the three of us, to wait for Papi. How Papi was always working late nights at the liquor store, and how some nights he didn’t come home at all, Mami pacing the big yellow house, talking to herself in the dark about all the women Papi was running around with, about the phone calls, about the pictures she’d found in Papi’s office at the liquor store.