An Island Like You

by Judith Ortiz Cofer

  Hey, Yolanda, you’re gonna miss Betrayed by Love Again. It’s a hot episode tonight. They said on the commercial that she might leave him when she finds out about the other woman,” Maricela yells out at me as she lugs a bag of groceries and drags her little kid up the front stairs. She’s rushing ’cause it’s almost time for the evening soap opera.

  “Hey, Pablito, wanna play hopscotch?” I try to get his attention by waving a piece of chalk so he knows I really mean it. He’s only two or three years old, but he likes to hop into those squares with both feet. I can see him trying to squirm away from Maricela, but she’s got a tight hold on his little hand. Nothing’s gonna keep her from the TV. I hear him screaming, “Yoli, Yoli,” which is what he calls me, all the way up to the third floor. It’s crazy, I mean the whole barrio is addicted to this show — it’s the only time the street in front of El Building is practically deserted. The men are even watching in the back room of Cheo’s bodega while they play dominoes.

  But I’m sitting on the front stoop of El Building instead of watching the telenovela with my mother because of her new boyfriend, Don José. Don is not his first name, it means Mr. or Sir, or Your Majesty, or something. All I know is that my mother wants me to treat the guy with R-E-S-P-E-T-O. She actually spelled it out for me.

  I see Kenny Matoa maneuvering his bicycle down the sidewalk, and I think this might be my chance for a little conversation in English. Don José doesn’t speak the language, so I have to drag out my small Spanish vocabulary for him every night. Kenny doesn’t look like he’s in a talking mood, though. I hear he’s changed a lot since he got strung out on something and ended up in the emergency room one morning. All I know is that he stays home a lot these days. I know because his apartment is right next to ours and I can hear his radio on half the night.

  “Hey, Don Matoa? Where you been? Whatcha gonna do this summer? Gotta job yet?” I shoot these questions at him as he ties his bike to the rail, ignoring me the whole time I’m talking except to pull my ponytail on his way in. This is my social life. Since I got into a little trouble with the cops at the beginning of the year for shoplifting, my mother is treating me like a child. I can’t go anywhere unless it’s in a group and with an adult. And it’s gotten worse.

  Mami has started seeing a man. I mean, I thought she had settled down to being a widow, visiting with Papi’s ghost at her weekly séances. It’s really been rough for both of us since Papi was killed. The worst part is that nobody from the place, a fancy uptown store where he was a security guard, ever even said they were sorry. In fact, it’s been two years and they haven’t paid his insurance. They’re calling it his fault because he got in the way of the bullet, or something. They’ve got lawyers fighting us. I don’t get it. Mami is having to work seven days a week, and she’s going a little nuts. I just try to forget the past and have some fun. I did take a couple of little things from stores I figured they wouldn’t miss.

  But Mami didn’t see it that way. After she picked me up at the police station, she told me they’d have to send her to Bellevue if I got in trouble again, because she just couldn’t handle any more worry and pain. So I’ve been cool, humoring her with the candles and the séances and all, but the boyfriend is something else.

  One night we had just started lighting the candles to Papi’s soul in the bathtub — El Building is a towering inferno waiting to happen, so I talked my mother into this arrangement. She was so impressed with my suggestion that as we both knelt in front of the tub like it was a giant white birthday cake, she said, “Yolanda, hija, I think you are really maturing.” She said it in Spanish — madurando is the word for both “maturing” and “ripening” — so I said to her, “Just let me know when I start to smell. I don’t want to go bad without knowing it.” But she didn’t get it — see, you have to be bilingual to understand jokes like this. Her English is very basic. Anyway, we hear a knock at the door. I was hoping it was one of my friends, but it being Saturday night, most of them are out having fun, while I stay home lighting candles for the dead with my mother. I open the door and there stands this guy who looks like he’s just stepped off the airbus from the Island. Clothes all wrong. And a tan he didn’t get from sunbathing at the beach. I mean, you can tell if someone is new to the barrio. It’s because of what they call la mancha around here. It means “the stain.” And it’s sort of like having a big old grease spot on your clothes. There’s no hiding it.

  He’d come to sell us tickets to a salsa dance at St. Mary’s, where he’s the custodian. And from what I could tell, the church basement is all he’s seen of the United States of America since he landed here. Standing in our doorway with a straw hat in his hands, he tells us he’s from a mountain town in Puerto Rico, a widower with no children who wanted to see Nueva York. He sounds like he’s from the mountains. He keeps saying, “Ay, caramba,” after every other word and scratching his head as if he can’t remember what he came for. I was gonna inform him that he’s in New Jersey, not Nueva York, but my mother pinches my arm lightly, which means shut up. She seems to be fascinated by his singsongy talk. She buys two tickets and he finally leaves, but not before she asks him over to watch the telenovela on Monday night.

  “He thinks he’s in New York,” I can’t help pointing out when she closes the door. “Can you believe it?”

  “Some people from the Island call all of the U.S. Nueva York, Yolanda,” she explains to me, giving me a “You should know that” look. Ignorant people, I say to myself.

  “His pants are too short,” I tell her. I could’ve also mentioned the fact that nobody wore five-inch-wide ties anymore, or pointy-toed brown-and-white shoes either.

  “Yolanda, Don José lived in the campo, the countryside, of the Island all his life. His clothes are old-fashioned —”

  “Mami, he dresses like a hick.”

  “What does this word hick mean, hija?”

  I search my brain for the word I’d heard her use before to describe out-of-it people: “Jíbaro,” I say. “He acts like a jíbaro.”

  “To some people that’s not an insult, Yolanda,” she says, “When I was a little girl on the Island, the jíbaros were the backbone of our country — the good, simple people who farmed the land.” She doesn’t look too happy with me for having called him a jíbaro. But it’s from listening to her gossip with her friends about people just up from the Island that I learned about jíbaros with la mancha. It comes from the idea that people who grow their own food on the island always had plantain stains on their clothes. Now it means that they dress and act funny — like they’ve never been in a city before. I think Don José must have kept those clothes in a box for twenty or thirty years, hoping to get to wear them in Nueva York.

  * * *

  So for the last two weeks he’s been coming over to our place every night. And lately he brings his guitar and sings stupid jíbaro songs to her while she makes him café con leche, mostly sweet milk with a little coffee in it the way he likes it. It drives me nuts. I secretly taped the songs on my mini-tape recorder I hid in my pocket so she could hear how ridiculous he sounds.

  “Ay, ay, ay, ay,” he always starts out like a cat wailing, “I come to sing you this song, jewel of my heart and soul. I bring you flowers from my island, I give them to you, ay, ay, ay, ay. My song, my flowers, and my love.” In Spanish it sort of rhymes, but I gag anyway. Both he and his guitar sound like they’re crying. My mother actually does when she listens to him sing the old songs. And when I play the tape for her, instead of agreeing with me that it sucks, she asks me for it so she can listen to it again. That’s when I know she’s getting serious about this guy.

  I gotta admit it, though, Don José has given me a break from worrying about my mother. It’s been tough seeing her so lonely and miserable, talking to the dead more than to the living, and lighting candles when she’s not working her tail off at the supermarket. A couple of months ago, not long after I was taken down to the police station (they let me go after she begged them to let her pay for th
e merchandise and get me counseling), I found her crying into a pillow in the living room. She was trying to stifle it so I wouldn’t hear her, but I could tell that she was seriously hurting. She had even stopped caring how she looked, wearing an ugly housedress when she wasn’t dressed for work in an even uglier cashier’s smock. The last few days she’s been fixing herself up just to sit down and watch TV with Don José. I’m not even gonna mention his clothes anymore, but the cologne he’s apparently bathing in drives me out of the apartment.

  I come in during a commercial and catch them laughing at something. I had forgotten what she looked like, happy.

  “José tells me that he has won trophies for his salsa dancing, Yolanda. Can you believe it?”

  “No, I can’t.” I am just in for a pit stop, but I have to walk past him to get to the bathroom. It’s a mistake. He springs to his feet, bows to me, and says, “¿Bailamos, señorita?”

  “You gotta be kidding me,” I say. I just give him a look I hope lets him know what I think of him; then I go do my business. I mean, who does this clown think he is, asking me to dance with him?

  When I go through the living room on my way out again, they’re sitting quietly on the sofa, one on each end, watching a woman and a man kiss on TV. But I can tell by their eyes that they’re not really seeing what’s on the screen, they’re looking at something inside their own heads. It’s like the temperature has dropped twenty or thirty degrees, like they say it does when a ghost enters a room. I heard them talking softly while I was in the bathroom; I thought it might be about me. I wonder if she’s told him what I’ve been saying about him being a hick and all. I don’t care. She can do better than this jíbaro.

  I’m still hanging out in front of El Building, watching the people start coming back to life after the telenovela, when he comes out the door. He nods his head in my direction but doesn’t smile or speak. I notice that he’s looking a little more sophisticated tonight. His pants cover most of his white socks, and he’s wearing black shoes although they are still knife blades — like those in the old joke about why Puerto Ricans wear pointy shoes: to get at the cockroaches in the corner. Old Don José, the exterminator, the dude, walks with his back very straight down the block. At least he doesn’t look around and up at the buildings like some people just up from the Island do, like they’ve never seen anything taller than two stories. His black hair shines like patent leather in the streetlights: it’s easy to tell that he goes for the mousse as much as he does for the cologne.

  My mother barely answers me when I say “Good night,” then “Buenas noches,” kind of loud. This is really strange because it’s like we’ve traded places: she’s acting like I do when I’m mad at her, and I’m acting like she does when she’s trying to get me to talk to her.

  My next step in trying to get Mami back to reality is to take out the photo album one day and start asking her about pictures of Papi. He was a good-looking guy who had been born in San Juan — not some hick mountain town. He came to Paterson when he was a teenager. He met Mami when he went down to see his mother one year. Then they came back here to live. Mami had grown up on the Island and she’s always homesick for it. I think that’s why she likes this guy so much — that’s all they talk about, la isla, la isla. She looks at the pictures with me, but she doesn’t get depressed like she used to.

  “Do you miss Papi?” I ask her, trying to get her to remember how she felt about him before Don José and his guitar took over our sofa. I hold the album open to a picture of Papi in his brand-new security guard uniform that he was so proud of. Working at the store was his moonlighting job. During the day he worked in a meatpacking plant. He would never have let anyone take his picture in the bloody apron that he had to wear there. He hated it. He had been a sharp dresser once, before they got married and had me. Then he had to work two jobs to support us. Getting the security guard position had been a dream come true for him. I heard him say to Mami, “I finally get to wear a starched white shirt and a tie to work.” He had come out of the bedroom to model his clothes on that first day and she had taken this picture. She held the album in her hands for a few minutes; then she said, “Yes, hija, I miss your papi very much. But I believe that his soul is at rest now.”

  “Are we gonna light the candles to him tonight? It’s Saturday.” She raised an eyebrow at me, like she didn’t believe what I was asking to do. I had complained about the candles every time I did the dumb routine with her. But she just said, “Yolanda, it is time for us to let your father’s spirit rest. He would want us to start living a normal life again.”

  I look at pictures of us at Coney Island and at Seaside Heights, and there’s one of Papi and me in the Tilt-A-Whirl at an amusement park when I was just a little girl, and I think that maybe life can be “normal” again for her, but not for me. Even though the pictures were of the few times we spent together since Papi worked night and day, they still meant family to me. I shut the album and put it back on the shelf.

  That’s when Mami tells me we’re going to the St. Mary’s salsa dance that night.

  “I’m not going,” I say to her. I think things are moving a little too fast between her and Don José. After all, they’ve only been watching their telenovela together for ten nights and they have been to only two Sunday masses together. If things are going to be “normal” now, then that means I can get back to my life too.

  “Está bien, Yolanda. You can stay home if you like.” She doesn’t sound mad, just disappointed. Then she spends the afternoon primping. She dyes the gray out of her hair, then she irons her green sequined dress. She takes a bath that lasts at least an hour. I hear her singing one of the dumb jíbaro songs while she rolls her hair.

  He comes to the door dressed like a gangster in an old black-and-white movie: pin-striped suit, wing-tip shoes, and a hat that he takes off when my mother comes out of her room. His eyes get big when he sees her in her tight green dress and wearing makeup — which she hadn’t done since Papi died. I’m surprised myself. It’s like she washed ten years off her when she took that hour-long bath.

  “You look like primavera on our emerald Island,” Don José says to my mother. And she actually blushes. Then he offers her his arm, and they start to walk out without a glance back at me.

  “Hey!” I yell at her from the sofa, where I’m pigging out on ice cream and chocolate chip cookies — leaving crumbs on her best piece of furniture, and she doesn’t even notice. “You got your keys? I may go out tonight.” I say this so she’ll know that I don’t consider myself as being grounded anymore. If she can go party, so can I.

  She looks at me without letting go of his arm. “I have my keys. Make sure you are home before I am if you go out.” She is giving me that “I mean business” look.

  “So when are you gonna be home?” I ask her, yawning and sounding bored so she doesn’t think I really care.

  “I don’t know,” she says, smiling up at Don José. They look like two stupid, overdressed, middle-aged lovebirds. I hear them laughing as they go down the stairs. I run to the window and catch a glimpse of them as they walk arm in arm down the street. St. Mary’s is only five blocks away, so apparently they’re going to stroll through the barrio street looking like they went shopping at the Salvation Army store that day.

  Saturday night television is crap. It’s either sports or old movies. I try to watch Bette Davis being a witch and getting away with it, but she goes soft over a guy. It’s hard to believe some of the things people say and do in these old films: the world simply stops when they fall in love, and all they think about is how to get the other person to love them back. It’s like a job, a full-time job, being in love is. And all for that one kiss at the end. Even I know that’s not all they’re after.

  Then, out of the blue, I start worrying about my mother. She’s not exactly experienced with men. She’s told me a hundred times that Papi had been her only boyfriend.

  What if this Don José is just pretending to be an innocent jíbaro so he can get
her alone? I should have checked out his story about his job at St. Mary’s. Now that Papi is dead, I’m responsible for Mami’s safety. She doesn’t have street smarts like I do. I can take care of myself. I remember when the cops came to tell us that Papi’d been shot. Mami got hysterical, and I was the one that had to take her by taxi to the hospital even though I was just thirteen years old. I waited outside the morgue while she identified the body; and I sat up with her that night when she didn’t want to close her eyes because she said she kept seeing Papi covered in blood. I saw the picture in the paper. His white shirt had a big star-shaped stain on it. He would have hated that the only time his picture was in the paper he was such a mess. I went shopping with her for his burial clothes. We didn’t have much money, so we had to settle for a Puerto Rican dress shirt, a guayabera, and a pair of plain black pants. That made her sadder. She knew that he would have liked to have been buried in a nice suit. I just wanted it all to be over soon. That’s when I started to get mad at people in stores. The place where he worked sent some plastic flowers to the funeral home, but nobody showed up to pay their respects. And we’re still waiting for what they owe us.

  By now I’m pacing back and forth like the lion at the Bronx Zoo. I imagine her in an alley, her throat cut, her green dress torn. I see her tied up in a dark room somewhere, a prisoner to a man who sings stupid folksongs as he plots her murder. I imagine horrible things being done to my mother by someone who dresses like a hick only to fool his victims. I can see how a Puerto Rican lady about my mother’s age would fall for that trick. Jíbaros are supposed to be good people, innocent like children, I’ve heard people say, country bumpkins who wouldn’t hurt a fly.

  By this time I’ve made myself sick. I’m nauseous and my stomach feels like I swallowed a rock. I throw out the empty carton of vanilla fudge swirl ice cream and the bag of chocolate chip cookies that now has only crumbs at the bottom. Then I try to sit down and relax. When I switch channels, I get caught up in a news-channel special on violent crimes in American cities. That does it. I grab the keys and run down the stairs, double-time it in the direction of St. Mary’s. The barrio is really jumping tonight. There’s a domino championship at Cheo’s bodega and the place is packed. Somebody’s put a boom box on a chair outside the store. A Ruben Blades song is blasting out, something about how women love a well-dressed man.