My Beloved World

by Sonia Sotomayor

  As the string of lights turned into a hopeless cat’s cradle in my hands, Mami walked in and I gave her a desperate look of distress, but she just shook her head and said, “Juli always did the tree. I don’t know how.”

  No good ever did come of trying to unravel Papi’s sleight of hand. One year, I had been especially zealous about snooping for presents and discovered the mother lode in the back of one closet, very artfully camouflaged. A little ripping revealed an unimaginable treasure: our own TV! Before that, we used to go to Abuelita’s when there was a ball game, and to watch cartoons or the Three Stooges, I went to Nelson’s house. I was so excited at what I’d found I thought I would bust. I ran straight to Papi to ask if we could watch it right away. The startled look, and then the total deflation in his face—it was heartbreaking. I had ruined his surprise. That feeling of excitement crumpling into shame would ensure I was never again tempted to peek, even when, years later, my mother had me wrap gifts that I knew, from the absence of a name card, were destined for me.

  I’d always taken that part of Christmas seriously. For years when I was small, I bought presents for everyone with money I saved from the penny deposits on bottles. I collected the bottles and washed them and carried them back to the store. I recruited Abuelita and my aunts to save their bottles for me too. Abuelita would even take her empties to the bodega and then just give me the money. I earned a bit more by picking up the little winged sycamore pods from Tío Tonio’s backyard: five cents for each shopping bag full. Nelson labored alongside me, but everyone else thought the work was too boring. By the end of the year, I’d have a couple of dollars stashed away, and with that I went shopping at the five-and-dime: a little mirror for Abuelita, a handkerchief for Titi Gloria, some candy for Titi Aurora … None of my cousins did that. I was the only one desperate to do right, to be liked, to be invited over.

  Finally, one way or another, the tree was finished. The cotton skirting around the base became a snowy setting for the Nacimiento with its tiny manger. The picture was complete, soft sparkle and twinkling color, lights peeping shyly from behind the veil of tinsel, the crowning star aglow.

  A hug from Papi would have been nice just then. I couldn’t deny that our life was so much better now, but I did miss him. For all the misery he caused, I knew with certainty that he loved us. Those aren’t things you can measure or weigh. You can’t say: This much love is worth this much misery. They’re not opposites that cancel each other out; they’re both true at the same time.

  Nine

  DR. ELSA PAULSEN intrigued me. She was tall and very polished, even regal, in her white coat. She spoke with a hint of an accent that was not from New York, but not foreign either. When she walked into the pediatric diabetes clinic at Jacobi Medical Center, everybody—interns, residents, nurses—came to attention. You could tell that they wanted to please her, that she was the boss, though she was also warm and friendly. When she checked in on me, she actually talked to me, not just to my mother.

  Dr. Paulsen was the first woman in a position of real-world authority I’d encountered. At Prospect Hospital, where my mother worked, all the doctors were men. The nursing supervisors were women, but that’s as far as it went. Even at Blessed Sacrament, the nuns wielded power only over kids. To Monsignor Hart and Father Dolan the Sisters deferred.

  At the clinic, the nurse would weigh me and take urine samples. If I was lucky, she took my blood too. If I was unlucky, I’d have to face one of the interns doing this for the first time. Feeling now and then like a guinea pig was in retrospect a small price to pay for the benefit of the cutting-edge treatment being developed there by the Albert Einstein College of Medicine. They had a research program on juvenile diabetes, and considering how rare the disease was then, it was amazing good fortune that the clinic happened to be located in the Bronx, even though we still had to take a long subway ride and then a bus to get there.

  With a strong focus on patient education, the clinic was pioneering much that is now standard practice: child-friendly lessons on how to live with diabetes, on nutrition, and on what’s going on in your body. Since I’d first begun treatment, my disease had progressed to the point where my pancreas was producing no insulin at all. Without my shots, I’d have been dead within days, if not sooner. The insulin available then was long acting, a single dose given in the morning, but there were sometimes unexpected fluctuations in blood sugar throughout the day. So you had to eat on a rigid schedule and keep snacks or juice at hand in case of a sudden drop. It wasn’t true that I couldn’t eat sweets, or that mangoes would kill me, as my aunts warned. Fortunately, my mother had a better understanding, and we celebrated after each visit to the clinic by sharing a piece of cherry cheesecake from the hospital cafeteria. It wasn’t so much a lesson in moderation; she already knew she could trust me to eat right. Nor was it really my reward: my mother was always fonder of sweets than I was, and there was maternal guilt to be fed.

  For the most part, moderation with sweets came naturally to me because I so disliked the sensation caused by a spike in blood sugar. I could recognize the first hints of that slow-motion heaviness, that feeling of trying to get out of the chair with a thousand-pound barbell on my lap. Low blood sugar felt just as bad but in a different way. I would start to sweat and get dizzy; I would lose patience, and my thinking became fuzzy. Complicating matters, there was then no easy, accurate way to test your own blood sugar, no glucose meter, only urine strips that reflected what your levels had been hours earlier. So to keep track of my blood sugar, I cultivated a constant mindfulness of how my body felt. Even now, with much more precise technology at hand, I still find myself mentally checking physical sensations every minute of the day. Along with discipline, that habit of internal awareness was perhaps another accidental gift from my disease. It is linked, I believe, to the ease with which I can recall the emotions attached to memories and to a fine-tuned sensitivity to others’ emotional states, which has served me well in the courtroom.

  But even if I took the shots like clockwork and watched my diet carefully, there was the grim reality of the disease then: I would still probably die sooner rather than later from complications. Given the advances in treatment since I was a child, a shortened life span is no longer as likely as it was. But that was the reality at the time, and it explains why my family had received my diagnosis as a catastrophe of tragic dimensions. My mother’s biggest fear was the threat of amputations, blindness, and a panoply of other complications that were then typical. As collected and professionally cool as she was in the emergency room, as confident and reassuring when helping a sick neighbor, she would fall apart when I was the patient. If I stubbed my toe, she’d be yelling about gangrene. Sometimes I would vent my annoyance through reckless antics on the playground, just to scare her. And always, since that first day, I had asserted my independence by giving myself my own shots.

  It could have been worse, I realized. My cousin Elaine had one arm that was paralyzed and stunted since birth, encased in a brace. My diabetes, being invisible, seemed the lesser evil. And Elaine got even more grief from Titi Judy than I did from my mother. As soon as Elaine would muster the courage to venture the simplest move on the playground, Titi Judy would panic. Her mother’s fear was contagious and I thought might be holding Elaine back from much that she was perfectly capable of doing.

  My cousin Alfred was the only one who refused to believe that diabetes was a terrible disability. Perhaps that explained his drill sergeant’s determination to toughen me up. It was Alfred who would get me up on a pair of skis and even put me on a horse two or three times. When he took Junior and me to the Statue of Liberty, he made us climb all the way to the crown. I was spent by the time we had scaled the pedestal, but no: “Onward and upward! All the way to the top!” The last flights were torture, my legs in such pain that I couldn’t stop tears from coming. But no way was I going to let Alfred see me cry, which meant I had to stay ahead of him, and that’s how I made it to the top.

  Eventuall
y, I would translate my family’s fatalism into an outlook that better suited my temperament: I probably wasn’t going to live as long as most people, I figured. So I couldn’t afford to waste time. Once in school, I would never contemplate taking a semester or year off. Later might never come, so I’d better get to work right now. That urgency has always stayed with me, even as the threat has receded.

  ——

  SITTING IN the waiting room at the clinic, I wondered, did it never occur to anyone at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine that kids who might not have long to live shouldn’t have to wait endless hours with nothing to read but stacks of old Highlights? I should have brought my Nancy Drew book, I grumbled.

  But when my turn came, they gave me something else to read—a pamphlet about choosing a profession. I am ten years old, I thought. Isn’t it a little early to be worrying about this? You can be a famous actress, the pamphlet assured me, like Mary Tyler Moore. You can be a professional athlete. You can be:

  a doctor

  a lawyer

  an architect

  an engineer

  a nurse

  a teacher …

  The list of possibilities for a diabetic didn’t seem very long. And then, more darkly, there was a list of professions that were out-of-bounds. You couldn’t be an airline pilot or a bus driver. Fair enough, I thought: you don’t want someone flying a plane who might pass out. You couldn’t serve in the military. Fine: I’d had enough of boot camp for a lifetime thanks to Alfred. And you couldn’t be a police officer … uh-oh. That one stopped me like a slap in the face.

  You couldn’t be a police officer? That meant you couldn’t be a detective. This was a catastrophe! It’s true that Nancy Drew manages without being a police officer, but she is an exception. She was also fictional. I knew enough about the real world to know that detectives are normally cops and not eighteen-year-old girls with charmed lives. And yet Nancy Drew had a powerful hold on my imagination. Every night, when I’d finished reading and got into bed and closed my eyes, I would continue the story, with me in Nancy’s shoes until I fell asleep.

  The young sleuth tools around in her little blue roadster with the top down. She is an incurable optimist who cleverly turns obstacles to her own advantage. Nancy Drew’s father is a lawyer. He talks to her about his cases and gives her tips that help her solve crimes. They are like partners, father and daughter.

  The world they live in is a kind of fairy tale, where people own houses on winding, tree-shaded driveways; visit summer homes at the lake; and attend charity balls at the country club. Nancy travels, too. She’s even been to Paris. What I wouldn’t have given to see the Eiffel Tower one day! But even though Nancy Drew is rich, she isn’t a snob. And even though it is fiction, I knew such a world did exist. It wasn’t Cinderella and pumpkins turning into carriages. It was real, and I was hungry to learn about it.

  I was convinced I would make an excellent detective. My mind worked in ways very similar to Nancy Drew’s, I told myself: I was a keen observer and listener. I picked up on clues. I figured things out logically, and I enjoyed puzzles. I loved the clear, focused feeling that came when I concentrated on solving a problem and everything else faded out. And I could be brave when I needed to be.

  I could be a great detective, if only I weren’t diabetic.

  “JUNIOR, change the channel! Perry Mason’s on.” Okay, so I couldn’t be a police officer or a detective, but it occurred to me that the solution to my quandary appeared on that small black-and-white screen every Thursday night.

  Perry Mason was a lawyer, a defense attorney. He worked alongside a detective, Paul Drake, but even so it was Perry Mason who untangled the real story behind the crime, which was never what it seemed. And it was once the trial started that things got really interesting. You assume, of course, that Perry Mason is the hero. He’s the one the show is named after, the one who gets the close-up shots, who wins the case almost every time and gets the hugs and tears of gratitude at the end. But my sympathies were not entirely monopolized by Perry Mason. I was fond of Burger, the prosecutor, too. I liked that he was a good loser, that he was more committed to finding the truth than to winning his case. If the defendant was truly innocent, he once explained, and the case was dismissed, then he had done his job, because justice had been served.

  Most of all it was the judge who fascinated me. A minimal but vital presence, he was more of an abstraction than a character: a personification of justice. At the end of the hour, when Perry Mason said, “Your Honor, I move to dismiss the charges against my client and release him,” it was the judge who made the final decision—“case dismissed” or “motion granted”—that wrapped up the episode. You had to watch carefully because it was over in a flash, but I knew that was the most important moment in the show. And even before that final decision, it was the judge who called the shots, who decided whether it was “overruled” or “sustained” when a lawyer said, “Objection!”

  There was a whole new vocabulary here. And though I wasn’t sure what every detail meant, I followed the gist of it. It was like the puzzles I enjoyed, a complex game with its own rules, and one that intersected with grand themes of right and wrong. I was intrigued and determined to figure it out.

  I could be a great lawyer, I decided. But a part of me, I knew, would have preferred to be the judge rather than Perry Mason. At the time, with no knowledge of what either aspiration might entail, the one didn’t seem any more outlandish than the other.

  Ten

  I WAS DOING my homework in front of the TV one night when my mother and her friends piled in to watch The Ed Sullivan Show. Ana, Cristina, and Irma were all there, chattering away. They used to give my mother a hard time for letting Junior and me do homework with the TV on, but she always answered them: “Those kids are a lot more intelligent than I am. They study four, five hours every night, and they bring home good grades. Who am I to tell them how to study?” They couldn’t argue with that logic. Still, they were not alone in their anxieties. The nuns at Blessed Sacrament had their own theories about the dangers television posed to impressionable minds. They could tolerate Ed Sullivan but not The Man from U.N.C.L.E., a godless Russian spy in the role of a good guy being too great a threat to the received cold-war narrative. It seemed lost on everyone that television helped broaden our horizons beyond the Bronx, where I was unlikely to have encountered a lawyer in action, or much else I could aspire to.

  In any case, it wasn’t as if I was actually watching the TV most of the time. It had now become just background noise, where once it had been a talisman to ward off the suffocation of an engulfing silence in the house. I’d long since learned how to concentrate with other things going on around me. Sometimes a bomb could have dropped on Bruckner Boulevard, and it wouldn’t have distracted me. So Mami and her friends probably thought I had totally tuned them out that night in 1965 when Tom Jones was grinding his hips and growling, “It’s not unusual …”

  “¡Qué guapo!” Ana said, whistling under her breath.

  “If he asked me for a date, I wouldn’t say no.” My ears perked up. Did my mother just say that? Okay, maybe it’s not true that nothing could distract me.

  Cristina topped them both: “I wouldn’t mind finding his slippers under my bed.” I must have turned beet red.

  Not that I was innocent. I knew that my new friend Carmelo and his girlfriend did more than kiss in our bedroom when they came over; it was one of the reasons they liked visiting our house. Kids gossiped. Donna showed off her hickeys. Stuff happened. Stuff happened all the time, whether you wanted it to or not. But I, for one, wasn’t there yet.

  I was beginning to find my own role in the social scene of middle school, and Carmelo had a lot to do with it, especially his nickname for me: Computer-Head, or Compy for short. He meant it as a compliment: I was rational and methodical. When my mind went to work, he imagined, lights blinked and tapes whirred, men in white coats with clipboards feeding me punch cards for breakfast. Carmelo saw the bene
fit of being friends with a nerd and would always sit beside me for every quiz and test, even though I didn’t make it easy for him. He must have pulled his share of neck muscles trying to get decent grades. But he was still grateful: in turn, he looked out for me and wouldn’t let me be bullied by anyone.

  Carmelo was one of the most popular kids at school. He had the special ease of a cute boy: tall, with close-cropped curly hair and a dimple on one side when he smiled. He and Eileen, another one of the cool kids, were both good friends of mine, which did wonders for my social standing. Both lived in the Rosedale Mitchell-Lama co-op on the other side of the highway, a notch up from the Bronxdale Houses. (Or several notches, if you listened to Titi Judy and Tío Vitín, who lived there too.)

  The gang liked to hang out at my place because my mother, happy to have her kids nearby and under her surveillance, made everyone feel at home. There was never a hint of disapproval about anyone I might choose to invite: all were welcome, with plenty of rice and beans to go around. Often, Eileen’s stepsisters, Solangela and Myra, came too, even though they were older, in high school. They were Mami’s friends as much as mine, endlessly discussing their love lives with her.

  “Mami, if I invite some kids over tomorrow, can you make your chuletas?” I stuck my nose in the refrigerator, taking stock of what we had, what we needed to buy. My mother gave me a look as if I’d just asked her to address the United Nations General Assembly in five minutes. For all her willingness to welcome my friends, she remained convinced that she was a lousy cook, ever since the Thanksgiving after Papi died, when she roasted her first turkey with the paper packet of giblets left inside. It was a mystery how someone who never enjoyed cooking made such heavenly pork chops.