“Gilmar, you have to say good-bye to everybody. Everybody! Come on, I’ll do it with you.”
The good-bye tour on which I accompanied Gilmar that day was a snapshot of our life in the projects. Pops was the first person we both thought of. We scrambled out of the pipe and ran to the gray truck he kept parked on the service road off Bruckner Boulevard. Every day when my father got home from work, he would give us each a penny, and we would run over to Pops’s truck to buy candy. On Fridays we got a dime, because it was payday.
Pops was surprised to see us so early that day; Gilmar explained that he was moving to California. Pops said he was sad to see Gilmar go, and they shook hands. Then he let us each choose a candy and said we didn’t have to pay.
We went to Louie’s building next and knocked on his door. Louie lived with his grandmother because his parents had died in a car accident. It was a story that I’d only heard in neighbors’ whispers, but it seemed to be confirmed by the fact that his grandmother always wore black. She was Jewish, but I surmised that they had the same custom we did, of wearing black for el luto when people die. Louie attended Hebrew school and didn’t play much with the other kids in the projects, but Gilmar and I played with him because I liked his grandmother. She invited us in that day, but we only stayed for a minute, because we also had to say good-bye to another grandmother in the next building over.
Mrs. Beverly also had a grandson living with her, in this case because his mother had problems. Jimmy might have had something wrong with him too; it was hard to say. Maybe he was just different, or a little slow; anyway, it was clear to me that he was more than the typical burden an elderly woman might bear caring for a young boy, and that gave Mrs. Beverly a heroic aura in my eyes, especially since she also held down an office job. Sometimes my mother and I would run into her on the street and stop to chat. She always wore a fur coat even when the weather was mild, and I thought she was very elegant. Mami explained to me that her coat was probably the only precious thing she owned and that’s why it was important to her. I could see that it gave her pleasure to wear it.
Mrs. Beverly wasn’t expecting Gilmar and me at the door, of course, and when he explained about California and said good-bye, she almost cried. I’ve always thought grandmothers who take care of kids are special.
In the building kitty-corner from ours was Ana, my mother’s best friend, who kept an eye on Junior and me after school until Papi got home. Ana’s husband, Moncho, and her daughter, Chiqui, were both home. Junior was there, too. That was no surprise. He worshipped Moncho and followed him everywhere, even to take out the garbage. Ana called Junior Moncho’s rabo de conejo, his rabbit tail. Ana’s next-door neighbors, Irma and Gilbert, heard the commotion, so of course they came over to see what they were missing. It became almost a party as Gilmar said good-bye to everyone.
We decided to walk over to Blessed Sacrament next, to say good-bye to the nuns. Junior wanted to come with us, but Moncho asked him to stay and help him cook an octopus, which he had in a bucket. He showed it to us, all slimy arms and suckers. Junior’s eyes widened, his mouth was hanging. “Mami doesn’t cook that,” he said. Moncho was a merchant marine who brought his kids exotic souvenirs from far-off lands. I imagined he knew all about the depths of the ocean, as well as how to cook things we’d never even heard of. He certainly knew how to keep Junior occupied, and we continued our good-bye tour unencumbered.
When we reached Blessed Sacrament, the school yard was empty and silent, abandoned for summer vacation, but the office door was open. Sister Marita Joseph and Sister Elizabeth Regina both looked up.
“Hello, Sonia. Hello, Gilmar. Is everything all right? What brings you here on a Saturday?” Sister Marita Joseph looked apprehensive. When Gilmar explained that he was moving to California and saying good-bye to everyone, she asked, “And you, Sonia? Are you accompanying Gilmar on his good-byes?” I just nodded. I might have been a compulsive talker at home, but at school I spoke when spoken to. “That’s very unusual,” she said, looking at me strangely. I thought she approved, but I was not 100 percent sure. Why would it be unusual to keep a friend company? It had practically been my idea, even if it was Gilmar who was leaving.
Sister Elizabeth was our teacher that year. The best I could say about third grade was that it was a more or less continuous state of dread. As hard as I tried to keep a low profile, trouble seemed to find me. At Christmas, for instance, all the students brought presents for their teachers. That year my father had chosen my present for Sister Elizabeth. He’d never once come to school, had never even met her, but he chose the present, which he proudly handed to me in a long box, already gift wrapped by him. He wouldn’t even tell me what it was.
Sister Elizabeth opened her presents in front of the class; there was soap, candy, a zippered prayer book, a box of stationery, and then there was Papi’s present. Inside the box was a ruler. And not an ordinary wooden or plastic ruler, but a ruler made of some indestructible metal alloy no doubt invented to build rocket ships or bank safes—the Ruler of the Future, likely fabricated at the factory where Papi worked.
The sight of it was like a punch in the stomach, and actual ones came my way at recess, as I had predicted from the daggers of hatred being shot from every pair of eyes in the class. Pleading ignorance won me no mercy, and I cried all the way home. Fortunately, the hatred eventually died down, because the ruler was never to reappear, either for measurement or for punishment. Sister Elizabeth had her merciful side, too.
Discipline was what made Catholic school a good investment in my mother’s eyes, worth the heavy burden of the tuition fees. The Bronx public schools of the 1960s were not yet as severely troubled as they would become, though they struggled with de facto segregation and a chronic lack of funding and offered a rough environment compared with the parochial alternative. Still, none of my uncles and aunts chose the sacrifice of sending my cousins to Catholic schools.
Among the black-bonneted nuns who managed classrooms of forty or fifty kids in my school, discipline was virtually an eighth sacrament. It might mean my copying a prayer in my clumsy cursive however many times it took to get every loop perfect or submitting to slaps and blows for some infraction. I often stewed with righteous anger over physical punishments—my own or others’—especially when they seemed disproportionate to the crime. I accepted what the Sisters taught in religion class: that God is loving, merciful, charitable, forgiving. That message didn’t jibe with adults smacking kids. I remember watching as Sister continued to slap one boy who’d disrupted class even after the braces in his mouth drew blood that ran down his chin. Many of my classmates have happier memories of Blessed Sacrament, and in time I would find my own satisfaction in the classroom. My first years there, however, I met with little warmth. In part, it was that the nuns were critical of working mothers, and their disapproval was felt by latchkey kids. The irony of course was that my mother wouldn’t have been working such long hours if not to pay for that education she believed was the key to any aspirations for a better life.
——
AFTER WE’D FINISHED saying good-bye to everyone we could think of, Gilmar and I went back to say our good-byes to the concrete pipe and to each other. Lying inside, all we could see was the circle of bright sky. Our voices bounced around in the hollow of the concrete. We shouted and stretched the words out long and loud to get a really good echo.
“Good-bye, Gilmar!”
“Good-bye, Sonia!”
“I’ll miss you!”
“Write me a letter!”
“Write me a letter, too!”
“From the palm trees?”
“From the palm trees!”
I WOULDN’T GET to see California until my second summer at law school. I remember driving the freeways with palm trees in view and thinking of Gilmar, among other friends I’ve lost touch with who may never know what memories they’ve left behind in my keeping.
Four
THIS IS my mother, Sonia, your bisabuela,” said
Abuelita. “Give her a kiss.” The cheek that was my target was wrinkled and translucent, so fragile that I feared my lips would bruise it. Her eyes were blank. As I leaned in to kiss her, she seemed to pull away, but it was just the rocking chair easing back from my weight. There was no spark of awareness or curiosity. I don’t know if I was more disturbed by this absence that gave no hint of how I should relate to her or by the shadow of Abuelita’s features that I could see arranged inanimately on her mother’s face.
Bisabuela Ciriata was in her nineties, though she looked two hundred years old to me. Her rocking chair of carved wood and woven cane tilted between this world and another that was beyond imagining, wafting scents of talcum and medicinal tea, auras of lace-edged santos whose eyes rolled up to a heaven too close for comfort.
We were in an area of San Juan called Santurce. Abuelita visited with her sisters and brothers while I played on the balcony or in half-hidden gardens. There had been ten of them all together, she said (Diezilita, Piatrina, Angelina, Eloys …), but I couldn’t keep track or tell sisters and brothers from cousins and uncles and aunts. We were in a city, but it seemed to teeter on the edge of dissolving into nature. Vines snaked under iron fences and up balustrades. Chickens scrabbled under hibiscus bushes and bright yellow canario flowers. I watched the afternoon rains pour down like a curtain enclosing the balcony, rutting the street below with muddy streams, pounding on the corrugated roofs and wooden walls until Abuelita called me inside to a treat for merienda—maybe a tembleque, a gelatin made of coconut milk and sweet condensed milk, or fruits that I’d never seen in New York: guavas with their sharp perfume, quenepas with pits as big as grapes and a thin layer of featherlight flesh that puckered your mouth when you sucked on it, and mangoes of a melting sweetness unlike any I had tasted back home. At night, I slept with Abuelita in a room crowded with sisters and cousins, and the mosquito nets transformed our bed into a cozy hideaway among gauzy clouds. The traffic noise gave way to the rickety rhythm of the ceiling fan and coquís—the tiny musical frogs that are a symbol of the island—chirping in the shadows as I drifted to sleep.
On my earliest trips to Puerto Rico, when I was small—including my first as a toddler—it was just Abuelita and I. My mother was determined that she would never, ever go back to the island, but then she changed her mind. Some of the best summer vacations I remember were traveling with my mother and Junior to Mayagüez to visit her family.
Traveling with Mami to Puerto Rico was a little like being around Rip van Winkle on the day he woke up. She wore an expression of constant wonderment: everything surprised her by how much it had changed, except for the things that surprised her because they were just as she remembered them.
Barely out of the airport, we would stop at the food stands on the roadside, joining the traffic jam of people returning who couldn’t wait another minute for a first taste of home. The coconuts were big and green, not like the shriveled hairy brown things in boxes on the sidewalks of the Bronx. We would shake them and listen to find one that had a lot of liquid swishing around inside. The vendor would hack a piece off the top with a single swipe of a long machete and stick a straw in the hole. We would sip the almost-sweet nectar as the cars passed by on the highway, and I would listen to my cousin Papo and Titi Aurora, my mother’s elder sister, filling my mother in on the news she needed to know before we saw the rest of the family: who’d married whom, who’d had whose baby, who’d been sick … Though Titi Aurora lived in New York, she went often to Puerto Rico to visit friends and sort out family problems. Before she finished her briefing, I’d hand the empty coconut back to the vendor with the machete, and he would hack it in two so I could use the little top piece that he’d cut off first to scoop out the creamy flesh, which to me was the best part of all.
Another day, my mother stopped a perfect stranger with his cow in a field beside the road and asked him for a glass of milk. He looked at her as if thinking: crazy American. Even in Puerto Rico people were drinking their milk pasteurized by then, not straight from the cow. But memories of the old ways must have overwhelmed her. She pushed the tin cup at me, but I wouldn’t touch it. I just watched as she drank, a look of heavenly bliss spreading over her face.
IN MAYAGÜEZ, we usually stayed at Titi Maria’s house. She was the first wife of Tío Mayo, my mother’s eldest brother. Titi Maria helped to look after my mother when she was small, and their family bond outlasted the marriage. My mother is close to Tío Mayo’s later families too; she has a talent for not taking sides, which is handy in a complicated extended family. It is a trait I’ve adopted, trying never to lose contact with cousins and second cousins whose parents have separated or divorced. We visit with everybody. There were family members whom I’d never even heard of before; my mother was set on showing Junior and me off to every single one of them over a cup of coffee. At first, people would laugh because our Spanish was clumsy and limited, but within days I could hear myself improving, and people would compliment me on it. Junior would have improved too if he’d have just opened his mouth and said something once in a while. It took me years to appreciate how hard it must have been for him to be always in the company of two chatty and strong-willed women.
At Titi Maria’s house, my cousin Papo always prepared a special welcome. Waiting for me under the sink would be two whole shopping bags of mangoes that he’d gathered from under the trees up the hill in anticipation of our arrival. I ate them all day long, in spite of constant warnings that I would get sick. Looking back, I suspect I was getting a higher dosage of insulin than I needed—not uncommon for juvenile diabetics in that day—making the added sugar manageable. In any case, I hated the sluggish feeling that high blood sugar brought on, and I didn’t need reminding. I might have had to eat less of something else, but I could indulge my lust for mangoes.
At lunchtime, the whole family came home from work, and Titi Maria cooked a big meal for all her kids—my adult cousins—and some of their kids too. Even those who lived elsewhere would often come for that meal. After lunch we settled down for a siesta. I would read a book—sleep wouldn’t come to me easily—but I loved this time when everyone was gathered at home and quietly connected.
Papo had a job designing window displays for a number of big stores on the island. He claimed to be the first person doing this work as a professional designer in Puerto Rico, and he often traveled to New York to gather ideas. Charo was a high school teacher. Minita was the senior executive secretary for the newspaper El Mundo. Evita worked in a government office. It was clear to me even then that the people I knew on the island had better jobs than the Puerto Ricans I knew in New York. When we walked down the street in Mayagüez, it gave me a proud thrill to read the little signs above the doors, of the doctors, the lawyers, and the other professionals who were Puerto Rican. It was not something I had often seen in New York. At the hospital where my mother worked, there were Puerto Rican nurses but only one Puerto Rican doctor. At the larger shops and businesses in the Bronx, there were Puerto Rican workers but rarely managers or owners.
Tío Mayo’s panadería was my favorite place to visit. They called it a panadería, but it was much more than a bakery. There were loaves of bread and rolls that Tío Mayo started making while it was still dark outside, kept warm in a special case with a heat lamp. There were cases full of cakes and pastries filled with cream, homemade cheese, and guava jam. My uncle’s then wife, Titi Elisa, also got up early to make lunch and snacks to sell to the workers who sewed in the factory across the street. She fried the chicken and roasted the pork, made stews and meat pies and pots of rice and beans. The smells of her cooking mixed with the yeasty smell of the bread, and the coffee, and the whole amazing cloud of flavors spread down the street and up into the balconies.
When the noon whistle blew at the factory, the bakery would fill up in minutes. I helped with serving, and I loved the two-handed challenge of the lunch hour rush. I knew the price of every item, and I knew how to make change—I was discovering that I had a
facility with numbers, which I inherited from Papi—and Titi Elisa would let me work the cash register when my uncle wasn’t around. Although he had seen me in action, he couldn’t quite believe it. He wasn’t comfortable with the idea of girls handling money.
When I wasn’t busy helping, I played with my cousin Tito in the alleyway behind the bakery, reenacting scenes from the Three Stooges. Tito was Moe and I was Curly. We could usually convince Junior or someone else to be Larry, the third chiflado, but only Tito and I knew all the moves and the right sound effects: a twang for a fake eye poke, a ratchety sound for an ear twist, and the all-purpose “Nyuk! Nyuk! Nyuk!”
Before she left Puerto Rico, my mother had lived in Lajas and San Germán and had seen very little of the island beyond the neighborhoods of her childhood. She was eager to show us places that she’d heard about but had never seen herself. We went to the beach at Luquillo. It was nothing like Orchard Beach in the Bronx, which was the only beach I knew. There were no traffic jams in Puerto Rico, no waiting for hours packed in a hot car to get there, no dirty sand, no standing in line for the bathroom. Progress has caught up with the island since my childhood, and it has its share of traffic jams, but the water is still warm and clear, and the sand is perfectly white. When you look down into the water, you can see the bottom, and it rolls out blue until it meets the blue of the sky.
The Parque de Bombas in Ponce fascinated me, a fantasia of red and black stripes that wouldn’t go away even when you closed your eyes. The fire truck looked like a giant toy with its ding-dong bell, and I couldn’t imagine it in action. How did they ever put out a real fire? “Mi’ja,” said Mami, “all those little wooden houses burned down anyway. But they did the best they could.” She would say that about a lot of things: they did the best they could.
My Beloved World Page 4
