My Beloved World

by Sonia Sotomayor

  There was speculation about whether Mami’s own mother had died of this terrible affliction and talk of a special herb that might cure it. Abuelita knew all about healing with herbs. The least sniffle or stomachache had her brewing noxious potions that would leave me with a lifelong aversion to tea of any sort. Now she was scheming with my aunts to get word to her brother in Puerto Rico. She would tell him where to find the plant, which he was to pick at dawn before boarding a flight from San Juan the same day so she could prepare it at the peak of potency. He actually pulled it off, but sadly Abuelita’s herbal remedy would prove ineffective, and this failure of her skill in a case so close to her heart would disturb her deeply.

  Abuelita’s obvious anxiety that afternoon, and the talk of my other grandmother’s death, did achieve one thing: it made me realize how serious this situation was. Now my mother’s crying made sense to me, and I was shaken. I was even more shaken when I learned that I had to be hospitalized to stabilize my blood sugar levels, which was routine in those days.

  IN 1962, when I was first diagnosed, the treatment of juvenile diabetes was primitive by today’s standards, and life expectancy was much shorter. Nevertheless, Dr. Fisher had managed to locate the best care for the disease in New York City, and possibly in the entire country. He discovered that the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, a leader in juvenile diabetes research, ran a clinic at Jacobi Medical Center, a public hospital, which by luck happened to be located in the Bronx. The vastness of Jacobi Medical Center awed me. It made Prospect Hospital seem like a dollhouse.

  Every morning, starting at eight o’clock, they would draw my blood repeatedly for testing. Hourly, they used the thick needle with the rubber tube on my arm, and every half hour they would slice my finger with a lance for a smaller sample. It continued until noon, and the next day they did the same thing over again. This went on for an entire week and part of the next. I didn’t holler and I didn’t run, but I have never forgotten the pain.

  Other things they did, though less painful, seemed strange. They attached electrodes to my head. They brought me to a classroom in the hospital where I sat facing rows of young doctors who stared at me as an older doctor lectured about diabetes, about the tests they had done and more they still had to do. He rattled off terms like “ketones,” “acidosis,” “hypo-this and hyper-that,” and much else that I didn’t understand, all the while feeling very much the guinea pig and terrified.

  BUT EVEN MORE THAN the clinical procedures, it was my absence from school for so long that set off my inner alarm. I knew I had to be seriously sick for my mother to allow it. School was just as important as work, she insisted, and she never once stayed home from work. Equally worrying, she brought me a present almost every day I was in the hospital: a coloring book, a puzzle, once even a comic book, which meant she was thinking hard about what I would like instead of what she wanted me to have.

  My very last day at the hospital started again at eight o’clock with the big needle and the lances. My arm was aching, and my fingers were burning right from the very beginning. I made it through the first two hours, but just as they were lining up their instruments for the ten o’clock torture, something inside me broke. After all those days of being brave and holding it in, I started crying. And once I started, I couldn’t stop. My mother must have heard me because she burst in, and I flew sobbing into her arms. “Enough!” she said, fiercer than I’d ever seen her. Fiercer even than when she fought with my father. “We stop now. She’s done.” She said it in a way that nobody—not the lab technician standing there with the syringe in his hand, not any doctor in Jacobi Medical Center—was going to argue with her.

  “DO YOU KNOW how much to give, Sonia?”

  “Up to this line here.”

  “That’s right. But do it carefully. You can’t give too little and you can’t give too much. And you have to be careful, Sonia, not to let any bubbles get into the needle. That’s dangerous.”

  “I know how to do this part. But it doesn’t make sense to say I’m giving it, Mami. I’m the one who’s getting the shot.”

  “Whatever you say, Sonia.”

  “I’m doing both.”

  And I did. I held my breath, and I gave myself the shot.

  One

  I WAS NOT YET eight years old when I was diagnosed with diabetes. To my family, the disease was a deadly curse. To me, it was more a threat to the already fragile world of my childhood, a state of constant tension punctuated by explosive discord, all of it caused by my father’s alcoholism and my mother’s response to it, whether family fight or emotional flight. But the disease also inspired in me a kind of precocious self-reliance that is not uncommon in children who feel the adults around them to be unreliable.

  There are uses to adversity, and they don’t reveal themselves until tested. Whether it’s serious illness, financial hardship, or the simple constraint of parents who speak limited English, difficulty can tap unsuspected strengths. It doesn’t always, of course: I’ve seen life beat people down until they can’t get up. But I have never had to face anything that could overwhelm the native optimism and stubborn perseverance I was blessed with.

  At the same time, I would never claim to be self-made—quite the contrary: at every stage of my life, I have always felt that the support I’ve drawn from those closest to me has made the decisive difference between success and failure. And this was true from the beginning. Whatever their limitations and frailties, those who raised me loved me and did the best they knew how. Of that I am sure.

  The world that I was born into was a tiny microcosm of Hispanic New York City. A tight few blocks in the South Bronx bounded the lives of my extended family: my grandmother, matriarch of the tribe, and her second husband, Gallego, her daughters and sons. My playmates were my cousins. We spoke Spanish at home, and many in my family spoke virtually no English. My parents had both come to New York from Puerto Rico in 1944, my mother in the Women’s Army Corps, my father with his family in search of work as part of a huge migration from the island, driven by economic hardship.

  My brother, now Juan Luis Sotomayor Jr., M.D., but to me forever Junior, was born three years after I was. I found him a nuisance as only a little brother can be, following me everywhere, mimicking my every gesture, eavesdropping on every conversation. In retrospect, he was actually a quiet child who made few demands on anyone’s attention. My mother always said that compared with me, caring for Junior was like taking a vacation. Once, when he was still tiny and I wasn’t much bigger, my exasperation with him inspired me to lead him into the hallway outside the apartment and shut the door. I don’t know how much later it was that my mother found him, sitting right where I’d left him, sucking his thumb. But I do know I got walloped that day.

  But that was just domestic politics. On the playground, or once he started school at Blessed Sacrament with me, I watched out for him, and any bully thinking of messing with him would have to mix it up with me first. If I got beat up on Junior’s account, I would settle things with him later, but no one was going to lay a hand on him except me.

  Around the time that Junior was born, we moved to a newly constructed public housing project in Soundview, just a ten-minute drive from our old neighborhood. The Bronxdale Houses sprawled over three large city blocks: twenty-eight buildings, each seven stories tall with eight apartments to a floor. My mother saw the projects as a safer, cleaner, brighter alternative to the decaying tenement where we had lived. My grandmother Abuelita, however, saw this move as a venture into far and alien territory, el jurutungo viejo for all practical purposes. My mother should never have made us move, she said, because in the old neighborhood there was life on the streets and family nearby; in the projects we were isolated.

  I knew well enough that we were isolated, but that condition had more to do with my father’s drinking and the shame attached to it. It constrained our lives as far back as my memory reaches. We almost never had visitors. My cousins never spent the night at our home as I did at thei
rs. Even Ana, my mother’s best friend, never came over, though she lived in the projects too, in the building kitty-corner from ours, and took care of my brother, Junior, and me after school. We always went to her place, never the other way around.

  The only exception to this rule was Alfred. Alfred was my first cousin—the son of my mother’s sister, Titi Aurora. And just as Titi Aurora was much older than Mami, and more of a mother to her than a sister, Alfred, being sixteen years older than I, acted more as an uncle to me than a cousin. Sometimes my father would ask Alfred to bring him a bottle from the liquor store. We counted on Alfred a lot, in part because my father avoided driving. This annoyed me, as it clearly contributed to our isolation—and what’s the point of having a car if you never drive it? I didn’t understand until I was older that his drinking was probably the reason.

  My father would cook dinner when he got home from work; he was an excellent cook and could re-create from memory any new dish he encountered as well as the Puerto Rican standards he no doubt picked up in Abuelita’s kitchen. I loved every dish he made without exception, even his liver and onions, which Junior hated and shoveled over to me when Papi’s back was turned. But as soon as dinner was over, the dishes still piled in the sink, he would shut himself in the bedroom. We wouldn’t see him again until he came out to tell us to get ready for bed. It was just Junior and I every night, doing homework and not much else. Junior wasn’t much of a conversationalist yet. Eventually, we got a television, which helped to fill the silence.

  My mother’s way of coping was to avoid being at home with my father. She worked the night shift as a practical nurse at Prospect Hospital and often on weekends too. When she wasn’t working, she would drop us off at Abuelita’s or sometimes at her sister Aurora’s apartment and then disappear for hours with another of my aunts. Even though my mother and I shared the same bed every night (Junior slept in the other room with Papi), she might as well have been a log, lying there with her back to me. My father’s neglect made me sad, but I intuitively understood that he could not help himself; my mother’s neglect made me angry at her. She was beautiful, always elegantly dressed, seemingly strong and decisive. She was the one who moved us to the projects. Unlike my aunts, she chose to work. She was the one who insisted we go to Catholic school. Unfairly perhaps, because I knew nothing then of my mother’s own story, I expected more from her.

  However much was said at home, and loudly, much also went unsaid, and in that atmosphere I was a watchful child constantly scanning the adults for cues and listening in on their conversations. My sense of security depended on what information I could glean, any clue dropped inadvertently when they didn’t realize a child was paying attention. My aunts and my mother would gather in Abuelita’s kitchen, drinking coffee and gossiping. “¡No me molestes! Go play in the other room now,” an aunt would say, shooing me away, but I overheard much regardless: how my father had broken the lock on Titi Gloria’s liquor cabinet, ruining her favorite piece of furniture; how whenever Junior and I slept over with our cousins, my father would phone every fifteen minutes all night long, asking, “Did you feed them? Did you give them a bath?” I knew well enough that my aunts and my grandmother were all prone to exaggeration. It wasn’t really every fifteen minutes, but Papi did call a lot, as I gathered from my aunts’ exasperated and mechanically reassuring side of the conversations.

  The gossip would then take a familiar turn, my grandmother saying something like “Maybe if Celina ever came home, he wouldn’t be drinking every night. If those kids had a mother who ever cooked a meal, Juli wouldn’t be worrying about them all night.” As much as I adored Abuelita—and no one resented my mother’s absence more than I did—I couldn’t bear this constant blaming. Abuelita was unconditionally loyal to blood kin. Her sons’ wives were not outside the ambit of her protection, but they didn’t enjoy the same immunity from prosecution. And often my mother’s efforts to please Abuelita—whether a generously chosen gift or her ready services as a nurse—went dimly acknowledged. Even being Abuelita’s favorite, I felt exposed and unmoored when she criticized my mother, whom I struggled to understand and forgive myself. In fact, she and I wouldn’t achieve a final reconciliation before working on it for many years.

  My surveillance activities became family legend the Christmas that Little Miss Echo arrived. I had seen the doll with its concealed tape recorder advertised on television and begged for it. It was the hottest gift of the season, and Titi Aurora had searched far and wide for a store that still had one in stock. I sent my cousin Miriam into the kitchen with the doll to bug the adults’ conversation, knowing that I would have been immediately suspect. But before anything could be recorded, Miriam cracked and gave me up at the first question, and I got walloped anyway.

  One overheard conversation had a lasting effect, though I now remember it only dimly. My father was sick: he had passed out, and Mami took him to the hospital. Tío Vitín and Tío Benny came to get Junior and me, and they were talking in the elevator about how our home was a pigsty, with dishes in the sink and no toilet paper. They spoke as if we weren’t there. When I realized what they were saying, my stomach lurched with shame. After that I washed the dishes every night, even the pots and pans, as soon as we finished dinner. I also dusted the living room once a week. Even though no one ever came over, the house was always clean. And when I went shopping with Papi on Fridays, I made sure we bought toilet paper. And milk. More than enough milk.

  The biggest fight my parents ever had was because of the milk. At dinnertime, Papi was pouring a glass for me, and his hands were shaking so badly the milk spilled all over the table. I cleaned up the mess, and he tried again with the same result. “Papi, please don’t!” I kept repeating. It was all I could do to keep myself from crying; I was utterly powerless to stop him. “Papi, I don’t want any milk!” But he didn’t stop until the carton was empty. When my mother got home from work later and there was no milk for her coffee, all hell broke loose. Papi was the one who had spilled the milk, but I was the one who felt guilty.

  Two

  A BUELITA WAS GOING to cook for a party, and she wanted me to come with her to buy the chickens. I was the only one who ever went with her to the vivero.

  I loved Abuelita, totally and without reservation, and her apartment on Southern Boulevard was a safe haven from my parents’ storms at home. Since those years, I have come to believe that in order to thrive, a child must have at least one adult in her life who shows her unconditional love, respect, and confidence. For me it was Abuelita. I was determined to grow up to be just like her, to age with the same ungraying, exuberant grace. Not that we looked much alike: she had very dark eyes, darker than mine, and a long face with a pointed nose, framed by long straight hair—nothing like my pudgy nose and short, curly mop. But otherwise we recognized in each other a twin spirit and enjoyed a bond beyond explanation, a deep emotional resonance that sometimes seemed telepathic. We were so much alike, in fact, that people called me Mercedita—little Mercedes—which was a source of great pride for me.

  Nelson, who among my many cousins was closest to me in age as well as my inseparable co-conspirator in every adventure, also had a special connection with Abuelita. But even Nelson never wanted to go with Abuelita to the vivero on Saturday mornings because of the smell. It wasn’t just the chickens that smelled. They had baby goats in pens and pigeons and ducks and rabbits in cages stacked up against a long wall. The cages were stacked so high that Abuelita would climb up a ladder on wheels to see into the top rows. The birds would all be squawking and clucking and flapping and screeching. There were feathers in the air and sticking to the wet floor, which was slippery when they hosed it down, and there were turkeys with mean eyes watching you. Abuelita inspected all the chickens to find a plump and lively one.

  “Mira, Sonia, see that one in the corner just sitting there with droopy eyes?”

  “He looks like he’s falling asleep.”

  “That’s a bad sign. But this one, see how he’s read
y to fight the others when they come close? He’s feisty and fat, and I promise you he’s tasty.”

  After Abuelita picked out the very best chicken, it was my job to watch them butcher it while she waited in line for eggs. In a room all closed up in glass, a man stood breaking necks, one after another, and a machine plucked the feathers. Another man cleaned the birds, and another weighed each one and wrapped it up in paper. It was a fast-moving line, as in a factory. I had to watch carefully to make sure that the chicken we’d chosen was the one we got in the end. I was supposed to tell Abuelita if they mixed them up, but it never happened.

  We would walk back under the crisscrossed shadows of the train tracks overhead, up Westchester Avenue toward Southern Boulevard and home—which is what Abuelita’s house felt like to me. Of course Abuelita’s house wasn’t a real house like the one her daughter Titi Gloria lived in, in the far northern part of the Bronx, with a front porch and rosebushes. Abuelita lived in a five-story tenement, three apartments to a floor, with a fire escape that zigzagged up the front, like our old building on Kelly Street, where we lived before moving to the projects.

  As we walked back, Abuelita would stop to choose vegetables from the crates that were lined up on the sidewalk. For almost every meal she fried tostones, so we’d buy green plantains, and also peppers, some green ones and some little sweet ones, and onions, tomatoes, recao, and garlic to make sofrito. She would always haggle, and though she made it sound as if she were complaining about the quality and how expensive everything was, by the end she’d be laughing with the vendedor. All these years later, an open market still stirs in me the urge to haggle the way I learned from Abuelita.

  “¿Sonia, quieres una china?”

  Abuelita loved oranges, but they were expensive most of the year, so we would buy just one to share as a treat, and she’d ask me to choose. My father taught me how to choose fruit—how to make sure it’s ripe by smelling its sweetness. My father had shown me how to choose good meat too, with enough fat for flavor, and how to recognize if it’s not fresh. I went grocery shopping with Papi on Fridays, which was payday. Those shopping trips were the best times of the week for me, not counting my days at Abuelita’s. Papi and I would walk to the new Pathmark that was built on the empty lot near our projects and come home with our cart filled. I’d pull the cart while Papi toted the extra bags that didn’t fit.