When I look back on my childhood, most of my memories are mapped on either side of certain fault lines that split my world. Opposites coexisted without ever being reconciled: the grim claustrophobia of being home with my parents versus the expansive joy at Abuelita’s; a mundane New York existence and a parallel universe on a tropical island. But the starkest contrast is between the before and the after of my father’s death.
The silence of mourning was over finally, but more important, the constant, bitter conflict that had filled our lives was over too. Of course Junior and I still found plenty of reasons to yell at each other, provoking my mother’s familiar warning call—her la la la la that rose ominously in tone, step-by-step, until we got the message that we had gone too far and that justice would be swift if we didn’t immediately make ourselves scarce. We were still not like a family on television, but the screaming fights that had worn me down with sadness were no more.
My mother still often worked six days a week, but she was no longer trying to escape from us. Home was now a good place to be, and so she worked the early shift at Prospect Hospital, leaving at six in the morning in order to be home by the time we finished at Blessed Sacrament. Ana came over in the mornings to fix breakfast and get us off to school. I could have managed by myself, but Junior was such a sleepyhead that we’d never have gotten to school on time without help.
The apartment was always immaculate, but it was no longer my doing. I quit my compulsive cleaning and left it to my mother, who cared about the place now. With the bit of insurance money left over after Papi’s burial, she even bought a mirror that covered one wall of the living room, making it seem bright and spacious.
I didn’t entirely trust this new reality, my mother’s transformation included. Once in a while, not often, she would date: a friend’s brother, or someone’s divorced son. I wondered what would happen to Junior and me if she got married again. Would she leave us behind? Would the fighting resume with a new combatant? My anger still lingered at what I had perceived for so long as her abandonment and her coldness toward us. It would take me many years to let go of that anger completely, and just as long for her to lose the last of her chill. It just wasn’t in my mother’s nature at that time to show affection, give you a hug, or get down on the floor to engage with a kid. She had been deprived of the formative security that nurtures such impulses. Besides, they would have mussed up her outfit.
My mother always dressed with effortless style, which seemed almost magical given her modest means. Even now in her eighties, she still looks flawless, camera ready, perfectly put together at all times. She would never understand why I lacked this talent that came so naturally to her. There was always some fault in my appearance that was glaring to her and invisible to me, and she badgered me constantly for being sloppy. Ana’s daughter, Chiqui, who was a few years older than I and idolized my mother, would say, “Celina looks like a movie star and acts like Florence Nightingale.”
Chiqui cared about fashion, about looking good and dressing up; I was convinced that deep down my mother would have gladly swapped daughters with Ana. But about Florence Nightingale, too, Chiqui was right. However undemonstrative, Mami cared about people, and she served as the unofficial visiting nurse on twenty-four-hour call for family, friends, and neighbors throughout Bronxdale and beyond. She took temperatures, gave shots, changed dressings, and called the doctor with any questions she couldn’t answer herself. She grumbled only when people took advantage—“Titi Celina! I need some suppositories for my hemorrhoids!” Perhaps they assumed she could pick up supplies for free at the hospital. The staff there would often help themselves, but my mother wouldn’t dream of it. “Mayo beat me over a three-cent postage stamp!” she would remind us. “You think I’m going to steal a bottle of aspirin or a box of disposable needles, even for you, Sonia?” She hardly had extra money to pay for them, but it scared her to see my needles, reused to the point of bending when I tried to inject myself.
The healing wasn’t limited to physical aches and pains. Some of her best medicine involved listening to people’s troubles, which she could do with full attention and sympathy, while reserving judgment. I remember my mother’s friend Cristina in tears over her son, who was struggling with drugs. That was a common theme, especially with the sons returning from Vietnam. Sometimes, even if there was no useful advice to give, I saw that listening still helped.
There was also John, the Korean War vet, who sat in his wheelchair in front of our building, the only spot of shade in the new projects, where the trees had barely grown. Every day, two neighbors, older men but still strong, would carry his chair down the four steps on their way to work. The kindness left him stranded until they returned, and so John spent his days watching people come and go. My mother always stopped. She’d ask him how he was, whether he’d heard from his family or needed anything. I never had the courage to stop and chat with John when I wasn’t with Mami, but her compassion impressed me, and I would never neglect to smile at him or wave when I passed. The role of confidante to friends has come naturally to me, and I credit the example of my mother, who, left on a park bench, could probably get a tree to tell her its woes.
——
ONE MEMORY OF my mother’s comforting sneaks up on me in the night sometimes. The bedroom I shared with Junior on Watson Avenue, with its one little window, was not just tiny but unbearably hot in summer. We had a little electric fan propped up on a chair, but it didn’t help much. Sometimes I would wake up miserable in the middle of the night, with the pillow and sheets drenched in sweat, my hair dripping wet. Mami would come change the bed, whispering to me quietly in the dark so as not to wake Junior. Then she’d sit beside me with a pot of cold water and a washcloth and sponge me down until I fell asleep. The cool damp was so delicious, and her hands so firmly gentle—expert nurse’s hands, I thought—that a part of me always tried to stay awake, to prolong this blissful taken-care-of feeling just a bit longer.
WHILE MY MOTHER seemed to find new confidence and strength after the loss of my father, Abuelita would never emerge from her luto at all. She had always dressed simply, but now it was simply black, as if all color had vanished from her life. The parties were over for good; the dominoes and dancing would exist only as memories. I still went to see her often, especially after she moved to the projects, just a block away from us. But her eyesight was beginning to fail, and she didn’t go out unless it was absolutely necessary. Our visits became more sedate, just the two of us talking, spending time together comfortably. I would bring my homework or read a book while she cooked; it was always quieter at her house.
That year of my father’s death had been incredibly hard on her. Her mother, my bisabuela, would die very soon after Papi. Abuelita didn’t even go to Puerto Rico for the funeral, she was so overwhelmed with grief for her son. She never spoke about my father after he died, at least not in my hearing, but my aunts and uncles understood the transformation that came over her: Juli was the firstborn, the protected one. If he could be taken away from her, then nothing in the world was safe. Something in the fabric of her universe was torn beyond repair.
Her husband’s Parkinson’s disease had been steadily claiming more and more of him for a long time. By the time my father died, Gallego’s speech was fading, and within a few months he was completely bedridden, another reason Abuelita rarely left the house. My mother went every week on her day off from the hospital to bathe him and help change the sheets. Perhaps my grandmother was mourning prospectively for her husband too, the sadness heaving back and forth between Papi and Gallego like a trapped wave. When Gallego died a few years later, she would move to the seniors’ home at Castle Hill within days. In the same way that my mother refused to go back into the old apartment after my father died, Abuelita couldn’t bear to be in that space where memories and emptiness collided. And so we did the rosario for Gallego in a brand-new, subsidized senior citizens’ home.
THINGS HAD CHANGED at school, too. My fourth-grade teacher, Sis
ter Maria Rosalie, made an effort to be kinder, and I enjoyed an unofficial respite from reprimand from April, when Papi died, until summer vacation. Not coincidentally, by the time fifth grade started, school had become for the first time something to look forward to. Until then, I had been struggling to figure out what was going on, especially since my return from being in the hospital. Now suddenly lessons seemed easier. It certainly didn’t hurt that I had spent the entire summer vacation with my nose in a book, hiding from my mother’s gloom, but there was another reason too. It was around that time that my mother made an effort to speak some English at home.
As early as kindergarten, Mami once told me, a teacher had sent a letter home saying that we should speak English in the house. But that was easier said than done. My mother’s English was accented and sometimes faltering, though she could manage well enough at the hospital, even working an occasional weekend shift on the telephone switchboard. At home, however, she felt awkward speaking in front of Papi in a language that he didn’t know well.
I don’t know if my father spoke any English at all. Perhaps he was too shy to speak it badly in front of us. I’m guessing he would have picked up a few phrases to get through his days at the factory, though I never actually heard him say a word. I know that Abuelita couldn’t manage in English, because my mother interpreted for her whenever she had to deal with officialdom. I doubt her daughters knew more than a few words, or else they would have been helping Abuelita themselves. I can’t even begin to imagine Titi Gloria carrying on in English the way she does in Spanish. Some things just don’t translate. In any case, our family life was conducted entirely in Spanish.
It sounded odd when my mother first started speaking English at home, addressing Junior and me as if she were talking to a doctor at the hospital. But as soon as she found the words to scold us, it began to seem natural enough. In time I hardly noticed which language we were speaking. Still, as easily as Junior and I shifted gears into English with the flexibility of youth, at the age of thirty-six my mother could not have steered that change without a mighty effort. Only her devotion to our education could have supplied such a force of will. “You’ve got to get your education! It’s the only way to get ahead in the world.” That was her constant refrain, and I could no more get it out of my head than a commercial I’d heard a thousand times.
One day the doorbell rang, and my mother opened the door to a man carrying two big briefcases. It wasn’t the man who made the rounds of the projects selling insurance. It wasn’t the old man who came to collect two dollars every Saturday for the drapes he’d sold us months before. My mother sat down with the salesman at the kitchen table, and they talked for a very long time, looking at books, adding up numbers. I was in the other room, overhearing bits and pieces: “priceless gift of knowledge … like a library of a thousand books … easy monthly payments …”
When the two big boxes labeled Encyclopaedia Britannica arrived, it was Christmas come early. Junior and I sat on the floor surrounded by piles of books like explorers at the base of Everest. Each of the twenty-four volumes was a doorstop, the kind of book you’d expect to see in a library, never in someone’s home and certainly not twenty-four of them, including a whole separate book just for the index! As I turned the densely set onionskin pages at random, I found myself wandering the world’s geography, pondering molecules like daisy chains, marveling at the physiology of the eye. I was introduced to flora and fauna, to the microscopic structures of cells, to mitosis, meiosis, and Mendel’s garden of peas. The world branched out before me in a thousand new directions, pretty much as the salesman had promised, and when it became overwhelming, all I had to do was close the book. It would wait for me to return.
Not all of my mother’s efforts to expand our horizons were as welcome as the encyclopedias. Ballet class was a brief torture that I managed to whine my way out of. I was too gangly and uncoordinated; end of story. Piano wasn’t much better, and just as brief. I still can’t hold a beat, even though the metronome mesmerized me. Guitar lessons, which Junior and I took together, were the worst of all. The real problem was getting there and back through a neighborhood on White Plains Road where a gang of taunting bullies made clear Puerto Rican kids were not welcome. I got smacked by one of them and tried to fight back, but eventually we just made a run for it: no way I could actually beat them.
My cousin Alfred had an answer for this menace: he would teach us self-defense, just the way he learned in the army reserves. We had to do push-ups with him shouting orders like a crazed drill sergeant. He slapped me. Again and again. He counted the slaps, fifty in all. This would build up my courage and resistance, he said. I didn’t have the heart to tell him no amount of basic training was going to toughen me enough to take on a gang of much bigger kids just for the sake of playing guitar badly. Sometimes you have to cut your losses.
There was one more reason, beyond the pleasure of reading, the influence of English, and my mother’s various interventions, that I finally started to thrive at school. Mrs. Reilly, our fifth-grade teacher, unleashed my competitive spirit. She would put a gold star up on the blackboard each time a student did something really well, and was I a sucker for those gold stars! I was determined to collect as many as I could. After the first As began appearing on my report card, I made a solemn vow that from then on, every report card would have at least one more A than the last one.
A vow on its own wasn’t enough; I had to figure out how to make it happen. Study skills were not something that our teachers at Blessed Sacrament had ever addressed explicitly. Obviously, some kids were smarter than others; some kids worked harder than others. But as I also noticed, a handful of kids, the same ones every time, routinely got the top marks. That was the camp I wanted to join. But how did they do it?
It was then, in Mrs. Reilly’s class, under the allure of those gold stars, that I did something very unusual for a child, though it seemed like common sense to me at the time. I decided to approach one of the smartest girls in the class and ask her how to study. Donna Renella looked surprised, maybe even flattered. In any case, she generously divulged her technique: how, while she was reading, she underlined important facts and took notes to condense information into smaller bits that were easier to remember; how, the night before a test, she would reread the relevant chapter. Obvious things once you’ve learned them, but at the time deriving them on my own would have been like trying to invent the wheel. I’d like to believe that even schools in poor neighborhoods have made some progress in teaching basic study skills since I was in the fifth grade. But the more critical lesson I learned that day is still one too many kids never figure out: don’t be shy about making a teacher of any willing party who knows what he or she is doing. In retrospect, I can see how important that pattern would become for me: how readily I’ve sought out mentors, asking guidance from professors or colleagues, and in every friendship soaking up eagerly whatever that friend could teach me.
At the time, all I knew was that my strategy worked. Soon Mrs. Reilly had moved me to the row next to the window, which was reserved for the top students. My pleasure was diluted, however, when I found out that Junior’s teacher had assigned him to the farthest row from the window, where the slowest kids sat. Naturally, Junior was upset, and the unfairness irked me too. It’s true that I called him stupid, but that was a big sister’s prerogative, and I knew that he wasn’t really. He studied almost as hard as I did. He was quiet, but he listened and paid attention; nothing slipped by him.
“He’s a boy,” said Mami. “He’ll get there when he does.” The Sisters of Charity held a pessimistic view of male children: they were trouble for the most part, often in need of a good thrashing, and unlikely to amount to much. There was more wisdom in my mother’s open-ended encouragement. She would never push Junior and me to get better grades, never crack the whip regarding homework or lecture us about setting our goals high, the way Tío Benny did with my cousin Nelson. When I brought my report card home for her to sign, I cou
ld tell she was delighted to see that I was getting As. That same proud smile greeted the news in later years that I’d made valedictorian or was graduating summa cum laude. It didn’t matter that she didn’t understand exactly what I’d accomplished to earn her pride. She trusted me, and Junior too. “Just study,” she would say. “I don’t care what grade you get, just study. No me importa si trabajan lavando baños. Lo importante es hacerlo bien.” I don’t care if you clean toilets, just do it well. Achievement was all very well, but it was the process, not the goal, that was most important.
ON THAT FIRST CHRISTMAS without Papi, Alfred helped me carry the tree home. He held the base and I supported the top as we walked it all the way, retracing the expeditions my father had led in years past. People always used to stop him to ask where he found such a perfect tree. No one stopped Alfred and me, but it wasn’t until we got that sorry specimen up the elevator and into the apartment that we noticed how much it leaned to one side. It was a lesson I’d always remember, if only seasonally: make sure the trunk is straight.
I was in charge of decorating now. I did remember how Papi always said you couldn’t have two lights of the same color next to each other, or two identical ornaments side by side, and you had to drape each icicle of silver tinsel separately over a branch. No tossing clumpy handfuls, which disqualified Junior from helping, since he just didn’t have the patience to do it right. But what I couldn’t figure out was how Papi always managed to string the lights so cunningly that the wires were invisible. I spent hours at it without success. He’d always fussed over it a long time too. So I knew it wasn’t easy, but obviously it involved some particular trick that he had never let me in on. I was reminded of another Christmas when I was very young—young enough that family still came to our house for holidays, before Papi’s drinking was out of control. I had gone into the kitchen, and there was a lechón asado occupying the entire table, with golden, crackly skin and an apple in its mouth. I was mystified: the pig was clearly too big to have fit in our oven, and I couldn’t imagine how my father had cooked it. Had he carefully cut it up, roasted it in sections, and put it back together afterward? Stare as I might, I couldn’t see any seams.
My Beloved World Page 8
