An Island Like You

by Judith Ortiz Cofer

  She winked at me and said, “It worked.”

  “What worked?” I had no idea what she was talking about.

  Outside my door the noise level was climbing. People were pouring out into the yard, which was right outside my window. I saw Mamá Ana dancing up a storm in the middle of a circle of people. When she had taken her bows, she started making her way through the crowd of short people like a small tank aiming right for my room. Papá Juan was taking Ramón around, apparently introducing him to the guests, or trying to keep him from getting trampled to death. I had to give him credit; he didn’t seem to care if he made a fool of himself. But most people in town seemed to think he was pretty great. I watched him looking at each guest with his kind brown eyes, and I asked myself whether he really could see inside their heads and their hearts.

  “Your grandfather’s cure. Mami and I cleaned out house from top to bottom. No more bad influences left in it; the first thing we’ve done together in months. And best of all, she threw him out.”

  “Rita, Rita!” It was my grandmother, yelling out for me over the noise of people, scratchy records, and a hysterical rooster. “It’s time to sing ‘Feliz Cumpleaños’!” She looked great in her bright red party dress and seemed to be having a blast. She had this talent for turning every day into a sort of party. I had to laugh.

  “I can’t believe this,” I said to Angela, falling back on the bed and putting my face under a pillow. She giggled and pulled the pillow away from me.

  “You’ll get used to it,” she said. “I wish I had a grandmother like yours. Both of mine are dead.”

  “You can borrow mine,” I offered.

  “Come on,” she said, and we both jumped off the bed, with me nearly breaking my neck on my new high heels.

  The party was fun with Angela there. Even her mother seemed to be enjoying herself, although people continuously bugged her for autographs. I even saw somebody handing her a magazine with a toothpaste ad for her to sign. She just kept smiling and smiling.

  They stayed until after midnight, when the last person went home. Papá was snoring in his rocking chair, and Mamá and Angela’s mother were cleaning the kitchen. Angela and I talked in my room. We agreed to get together as much as possible until I had to go back home to Paterson. Even then, she said, she would come visit me. She had money to travel.

  I spent a lot of time at the pink house over the next weeks. I even began liking the color. I told Angela about Johnny Ruiz even though I had not really thought about him, not as much anyway, in the last month. She said that he sounded like a troubled boy. A mala influencia? I suggested. We both laughed at the thought of Johnny’s being followed around by a restless ghost. The whole thing with him and Joey Molieri, and the mess with Meli’s and my parents, began to seem like a movie I had seen a long time ago. And one day, while we were walking down the beach after dinner, she told me about how hard her life had been, moving from place to place while her mother was trying to make it on TV. She had spent a lot of time with babysitters, especially after her father had left them, when Angela was just five.

  “Where is he now?” I asked her.

  “He lives in New York with his new family. I plan to go see him when I visit you. My mother only lets him come down once a year. But we’ve been talking about it, and she thinks I can take care of myself now. See, he’s not a bad man, but sometimes he drinks too much. That’s what started the trouble between them.”

  Then she told me about Mr. Jones, a rich guy who owned hotels. He had left them the pink house and a lot of money when he died in a small-plane crash a year ago. Angela said that he had been a nice guy too, although not too interested in her, or in much else besides making money. But the man whom she really hated was the boyfriend who had recently been chased out by an “evil spirit.” Angela laughed when she said that, but got serious when she told me it had been a really awful time. That’s when her mother had called in Don Juan, as she called Papá, for a consultation.

  “Your mother seems like a smart person,” I said. “Does she really believe in all this ghost-evil-spirit-haunted-house stuff?”

  “She’s not the only one, Rita. Don’t you see it took someone with special powers to drive out the bad influence in my house?” She looked at me in a really serious way for a minute; then she started giggling.

  “Come on!” She started running back to the house. “It’s time for the telenovela and my mother’s new commercial!”

  * * *

  My family arrived in early August. We went to pick them up in three cars, with two more following for the welcoming committee. My mother kept looking at me at the airport. She acted like she was a little scared of coming too close. She had heard only from her mother about me — since I had forgotten to write home — and she must have thought Mamá Ana was probably exaggerating when she wrote that I was having a great time and had not had an asthma attack in weeks. They had never gotten it straight on the asthma, which my mother figured was one of my tricks. She knew me a little. Finally I gave her a break and came over and hugged her.

  “You are so tanned, mi amor. Have you been to the beach a lot?”

  I didn’t want her to think it had all been a vacation, so I said, “A few times. Have you seen Meli?” She looked at me with a kind of sad look on her face, scaring me. I hadn’t written to Meli either, so I didn’t know whether she was dead, or what.

  “You don’t know? She went on that retreat with the sisters, you know. It turns out that she liked it. So she won’t be at Central High with you next year. I’m sorry, hija. Meli is going to start school at St. Mary’s in the fall.”

  I almost burst out laughing. Our parents had really come up with some awful punishments for Meli and me. I’d had one of the best summers of my life with Angela, and I was even really getting to know my grandparents — the Ghostbusting magnificent duo. I had been taking medium lessons from them lately, and had learned a few tricks, like how to look really closely at people and see whether something was bothering them. I saw in my mother’s eyes that she was scared I might hate her for sending me away. And she should have been, so I let her suffer a little. But then I squeezed in next to her in Papá’s toy car and held her hand while Mamá Ana told her all the intimate details about me, including the fact that she had cured my asthma with a special tea she had made me drink. I looked at my mother and winked. She gave me a loud kiss on my cheek that made my ears ring. I know now where she picked up that bad habit. Since I already knew everything Mamá Ana was going to tell my mother, being a mind reader myself now, I settled back to try to figure out how Meli and I were going to get together in September. I had heard St. Mary’s basketball team had some of the best-looking guys.

  Sometimes I just have to get out and walk. It’s a real need with me. I guess it’s one of the things that make me odd in everyone’s opinion. Almost everyone’s. My parents worry about me, but they think I’m God’s gift. All of them are wrong about me. What I am is impatient. Sometimes I feel trapped, trapped in a school that’s like an insane asylum, a trapped rat in this city that’s a maze — no matter how long and how far you walk, you always end up in the same place, at least it all looks the same: old apartment buildings with too many people squeezed in, bars with sad-looking people staring into their cups, and stores so bright with lights that they hurt my eyes.

  The only place that doesn’t give me a headache is that old church my mother still goes to, where I made my first communion: St. Joseph’s. An old guy that I know cleans it at night, and he lets me in. At that hour there is only the red security light on, and the candles that the people at the evening service have lit. Johann, the old guy, says that they have to be left alone. They can’t be blown out because they’re prayers and requests people have made. He acts like he’s the keeper of the Olympic torch or something. But I understand what he means. It would be wrong to blow out a candle someone lit for a special reason — like stealing a wish.

  I met Johann one night when he found me sitting on the steps o
utside. I had decided to leave Paterson, and I was making my plans. I think I frightened him with my punk look. That was during my purple hair and leather period. It was a way of making a statement to the people at school. But it backfired and really hurt my mother and the old man. Anyway, that night I was sitting on those steps looking pretty scary, I guess, with my purple spiked hair, black leather jacket, and all. I guess I was looking kind of miserable too because there was this old guy just standing there looking at me with, you know, that good-Samaritan expression on his face. We both stared at each other for a good long time. I was considering taking off when he spoke in a thick accent, in a strange old-fashioned way: “Young man, are you seeking asylum?” It made me smile. That was a line right out of a movie. “No, man, I’m not looking for an asylum, but I know where one is if you need one.” I felt like ribbing the old guy a little. But he didn’t seem to get my joke.

  “Are you hungry?” he asked, lowering his wrinkled old face to look at me. He was wearing glasses so thick that his eyeballs looked like two blue fish swimming in a bowl.

  “I’m not hungry, just cold.” Then I noticed I really was cold. Freezing, in fact. I had been walking the streets for a couple of hours by then. The old man extended his hand to me. I shook it, and it felt like a dry leaf. “My name is Johann. I am the caretaker of the church.” He took some heavy-looking keys out of his coat pocket and unlocked the huge wooden front door of the church. “Please follow me,” he said, sounding just like a butler in an old black-and-white horror movie. “Walk this way,” I said like Igor in the Frankenstein movie, dragging my left foot. I was still trying to be funny. But he didn’t seem to get it.

  “Are you in pain?” he asked, looking in my eyes again. This time I didn’t answer him because the question made me think. Was I?

  The church at night is like no other place I’ve been in. As I followed old Johann, I felt like I was in a dream. It all had a misty quality to it. Like that book we read in English, Jane Eyre, or something, where you imagine everything takes place on a foggy night in a spooky old house.

  The old man showed me to a pew in the front.

  “You may rest here,” he said, patting my back as I slid in, for God’s sake. The guy was a relic. “Do you need anything?” I shook my head. How the hell was I supposed to tell this guy what I needed? So I sat there and decided I was just going to act like this was the movies or a theater and this old guy was going to put on a play or something for me. Hell, I didn’t have anything better to do. I wasn’t going to go home. I had one hundred and nineteen dollars and eighty-four cents in my wallet, money I made carrying grocery bags for the old women of El Building, my place of residence, choice tenement for the PRs of Paterson, until my outstanding hair and black leather jacket got to them, that is. The worst one, Doña Monina, ambushed Clara, my mother, after Spanish mass right here in St. Joe’s, and told her that I looked like un bum. Don Manuel asked me to dress better for work, and no purple spiked hair. But I was in no mood to take orders from anybody at the time. That night I told my mother about getting fired, and the look she gave me made me want to scream. She looked betrayed, for God’s sake. Am I an angel or am I Judas? Somebody ought to tell me. My father’s got a bad heart, and that worries me a little. I mean, he’s been getting so upset lately that the next thing that’s going to happen is that he’ll drop dead and then I’ll be a murderer. Patricide, that’s what my English teacher called it when we read about that old Greek guy who killed his old man and married his mother. Very nice. Some kind of example we get in school.

  Right about then I started to worry about being locked up in an empty church with the old guy. He’d been gone a long time. The old midnight madness was taking over my mind. I thought maybe I’d get hacked to death and nobody would know until the viejas from El Building dragged in for the 6:00 A.M. mass and found my corpse in the aisle. You never know these days. An ax murderer can look like a nice batty old guy with an accent. Need asylum? Come into my lair, young man, let me feel your purple spiky hair. I can make anything rhyme in two languages.

  I have to admit, I’m good at this poetry biz. Not a talent that’ll get you very far in the barrio. I’ve always done real good in English class. The grammar bores me, but the lit-te-ra-turrr, like Miss Rathbone says it, is easy. I can get into those stories.

  But it was a poem that started the mess. It was when Rathbone asked me, no, ordered me in her marine-drill-sergeant voice, to recite, not just say, but recite, a part of John Donne’s poem “The Flea.” Jesus, I could feel myself burning up. I sweated right through my jeans and flannel shirt. I tried to fake not knowing it, but she knew I did because I had been stupid enough to tell her, I had thought, in confidence, after she had told us to find a poem in our book that we could relate to. Man, she’s like in a time warp. Relate to. Who says that anymore? So I had flipped through the book and opened it to any page, and there it was, “The Flea.” Considering the other titles in the index, like “Intimations of Immortality,” and “An Essay on Man,” this one sounded like something I could “relate to.” And it was so weird. This guy, who was a priest or something, writes to his girlfriend to say that he wishes — this is good — that the same flea that bit him and sucked his blood would bite her! I mean, that’s kind of sick. But he rhymes it so it sounds like a poem. Still, as Miss Wrath-Bone would say, “I do not expect that the young lady would relate to this particular declaration of love.”

  Like I said, I liked the screwy poem. And I stay after class to show off a little: “Mark but this flea,” say I in my best imitation English-snob accent, “and mark in this, How little that which thou deniest me is; Me it sucked first, and now sucks thee. And in this flea, our two bloods mingled be.” Sick. Old John Donne was a pervert. But if he could make it sound good, maybe he still got the girl. Anyway, I thought that Rathbone liked me. I mean she puts Good! You have a gift! and crap like that all over my essay papers. So I thought I’d give her a thrill by memorizing a couple of lines from the poem. And what does the Miss Brutus-You-Too do? She announces it to the whole class the next day. “Arthur, as in King Arthur,” she says, for God’s sake, “has a surprise for us today.” If I didn’t wet my pants then, I never will. I mean, I know I had a minor stroke or something. I felt the blood crashing against my eyeballs. Behind me Kenny Matoa said, “King Arthur will now rethite for uth.” I knew my life was over then. See, for the guys of the barrio, reading poetry is like an unnatural act. Liking poetry makes you suspicious as to your sexual preference. Unless you’re a girl. It’s so stupid I can’t even explain it to myself. It’s just words. Poetry is like the words of a song, and these guys would kill to write songs and be rock stars.

  Two weeks later it was still hell for me on my street. Someone had spray-painted “The Flea” on my locker, and that’s what they called me. “Suck my blood,” signed “The Flea,” was scrawled on my notebook when I came back from the bathroom one day. Kenny, a guy I’ve known and hated since third grade, was leading the campaign against me. Most of the people in my school are also my neighbors in El Building or the barrio, so there was no escaping it. And I admit I didn’t know how to fight it. Then last weekend I went crazy and dyed my hair purple. I just wanted everyone to call me something else. Crazy, maybe. But I wanted to shock them into seeing me a different way.

  All that happened was that my mother, Clara, screamed when she saw me. And my father took one of his pills and told me that we had to talk. I got fired at the bodega. They started calling me “the Purple Flea” at school. I finally made my decision to get out of town for good when Clara looked like she was ready to have a serious talk: a fate worse than death. I walked in. She said, “You gotta grow up, hijo.” And before she could start another sentence, I went into my room and dragged my book where I kept my money out from under my bed. Shakespeare’s sonnets. I took the bills out and threw Willy’s poems into the Dumpster down on the street. I can hit it from my window. Very convenient, except at 5:00 A.M. when the truck comes, sounding like a herd o
f stampeding elephants.

  Then I started out for the Greyhound bus station. Destination unknown. I walked for a while, then sat down to rest on the church steps for un minuto.

  That’s when St. Johann of the Broom invited me into his asylum, where he kept me waiting half the night. I didn’t know what I was waiting for. I heard him dragging things around in the sacristy. I considered giving him a hand. I changed my mind, since I was thinking about some things. It was like the place made you want to do that. I remembered something important. The next day Kenny was getting to recite from Shakespeare. Turns out everybody had to do it. When Miss R. surprises herself with a new idea, she goes nuts. Anyway, since Kenny couldn’t find a poem that he could “relate to,” Miss R. had chosen one for him, Shakespeare’s sonnet number CXII. She had written it on the chalkboard. Is that a hundred and twelve? I learned those Roman numerals in elementary school and haven’t had much use for them since then. I had started to wonder in an obsessive way what the poem was about. But Shakespeare was in the Dumpster, and it was midnight already.

  Finally old Johann came in dragging his pail, mop, and broom. I had started walking out, since I figured he had lost his marbles in the back and was trying to find them. I stopped to look around one last time. At that spooky hour, with the candles moving everything around on the walls and the ceiling, the nave looked like the inside of a ship. The names of everything came back to me from catechism class: sacristy, sanctuary, altar, holy of holies, and all that. Clara had walked me here every Saturday afternoon for one year when I was six years old to take first-communion lessons. Then, when I was twelve, I was “confirmed” in the church. That’s when the bishop slaps your face (a little tap with his soft hand is all it is) to test your faith. Then you’re a real Catholic, whatever that means. I stopped coming to mass with my parents when I started high school this year. I was having doubts of all kinds by then, not just about religion, but about everything. Including myself. Like why was I so different from Matoa, Garcia, Correa, and the other guys? I didn’t like to hang with them anymore. I was bored by their stupid talk about gangs, girls, drinking, and stuff. And — this really worried me — I was actually enjoying some of my classes at school.