by Edgardo Vega
Mrs. Barry López-Ferrer, née Elsa Santiago, had forgotten, as if her graduate studies had culturally lobotomized her, that at one time she was a Latin from Manhattan who with her mother, Ursula Santiago, shopped on Orchard Street for bargains and on Saturdays accompanied her to the Essex Street Market to buy chicken and chops, listening to her mother say shiken and shops and not being ashamed of her like some people, because back then she was proud to be a Puerto Rican, ready to throw down and deal if anyone black, white, or Oriental got it into their heads to be fucking with you. “Girl, what’s wrong with you that you be coming around with your bad self selling tickets? You better dig yourself, homegirl, and don’t be sniffing around my man like some stray perra puta. You know what I mean? Cause if you don’t I’ma teach you something you ain’t never gonna learn in school, chile.” All the while talking her modified black English as if the down-home accenting of her Puerto Rican phrases carried with them the malevolent authority of the morenos, whom she, as a Rican, feared and secretly admired for their style in dealing with white people.
In high school, homegirl par excellence Elsa Santiago of Rivington Street had her crew at Seward Park that went back to grammar school. She was down with Sonia Escobar, Mandy Lugo, Denise Aguayo, Baby Contreras, Daisy Marrero, Carmen Texidor, Hilda Pantoja, and Josie Villegas, who became a cop—and who would’ve thought it since she was the baddest of all her homegirls and the one who, when they were eleven or twelve, introduced them all to pot, all of them playing hooky one afternoon and lighting up the joint in Carmen Texidor’s basement apartment while Carmen’s mother, who was the super, was in the hospital having the twins, and all of them getting high and giggling at the slightest little thing, talking about boys, getting hungry, and cleaning out the entire kitchen of all food.
And now this little spic-mick, this Hibernian boricua, this idiotic blend of blarney and pimienta, of bagpipes and salsa, this San Juan Dubliner was making her recall how painful that existence had been and how far she had come from that wretched childhood and how stupid she had been, how utterly romantic she had been about Billy Farrell and his frayed psyche, how desolate everything had been, knowing she would never see her brother Joey again. In later years, when she had the opportunity to be psychoanalyzed, she learned how bad she felt that she didn’t miss Joey or care what had happened to him in Vietnam, not because she was trying to block out the pain that should’ve been there, but because there was no pain at all. Her only concern had been this animal hunger which she felt deep inside her tiny womb, that void crying out to be filled with this Billy Farrell, who permitted himself to be led by her into a love which she herself eventually learned was mostly her own youthful fantasy.
But back then, at fifteen, latching on to that fatigued arm as if it were the most natural thing for a girl to do in the middle of Attorney Street, and, crossing Houston Street, unconcerned by time until they hit the number streets and the alphabet avenues and found themselves down by the river, watching the cars going over the Williamsburg Bridge into Brooklyn and her life crying out for him to possess her, to be inside of her, and not knowing what the hell that was about since all her homegirls did was talk and none of them had done it yet, not even Mandy Lugo, who was a year older than all of them—talking bad but being the good girls their mamis and sometimes papis had brought them up to be. But feeling all the knowledge inside of her and knowing that she was going to have a child by him and therefore instinctively setting up a nest at Sonia Escobar’s apartment in the projects on Avenue D while Sonia’s mother was in P.R.
Elsa, Vidamía’s mother-to-be, came to her homegirl, Sonia, with a story about a friend of Joey’s from Vietnam. He’d been messed up by the war, and not being from New York had no place to stay and he couldn’t stay at her house. “Because you know how mothers are about boys. Yeah, a gringo white boy, who was all lost and whatnot, un americano, panita de Joey”—not wanting to admit to Sonia how much she had been affected by Billy. Sonia gave Elsa the keys and instructed her that if anyone asked what she was doing to say she was a cousin of Sonia’s, watering the plants while her aunt was in P.R., okay?
And then going there and setting up house early in the morning when she was supposed to be going to school and one thing led to another and she couldn’t believe what was happening. Just kissing at first and then his hands were all over her and he was removing her blouse and her bra, then her pants and underwear and she was naked on the couch and his finger and tongue going into her at the same time and far away she could hear herself moaning and the pleasure coming from deep inside of her so that it hurt but not really. And then they were on that big huge bed and she feeling the way she did, so open that she couldn’t tell when his coso actually went in and didn’t even hurt that much like it was supposed to and after the third day liking the full feeling inside of her and it all came out, the feeling and the words that went with it, crazy stuff, but saying those words of love with all her heart in English and Spanish and punctuating it all with Si, sí, vida mía, sí.
After a while, when it was over, he asked her what she was saying and she said, “Nothing.” But he insisted and said, “I’m sorry I don’t understand Spanish, but it sounded like a sweet rose or something like that.” She couldn’t recall her exact words but she relented and said, “What?” “‘Vidamía,’ what does it mean?” he said. And she said, “It means ‘my life.’” “Like I’m your life, or my life belongs to you, or something like that?” he asked, and she said, the words insignificant, but listening to the life growing inside of her, “Yes, something like that.” And she held him while he cried and said, “Thank you and God bless you, that’s the most beautiful thing I ever heard.”
By Friday, her mother, Ursula Santiago, knew what was going on because all the baby fat and innocence had vanished from Elsa’s body and her hips were wider and her breasts fuller and she talked with the confidence of una mujer encinta, which she was—pregnant—categorically and unarguably from the first emission of love which Billy Farrell shot into her virgin Puerto Rican womb. So her mother asked what was she going to do with a child to raise at such an early age and of course Elsa denied everything and cried, but her mother knew there was another life coming so she added one hundred more grains of rice to one pot and fifty extra beans to another and continued stirring the food at her stove of Caribbean desolation.
They made the best of it, and even tried having Billy live with them, and that was okay because he contributed mightily to the household income from his disability check and even got a job handing out flyers for an exercise studio down on Wall Street to bring in extra money. But the arrangement didn’t work and the more pregnant Elsa became, the sorrier she was she had allowed an intruder into her body, meaning Billy, the stranger who would forever complicate her life. She cried and carried on and was forced to drop out of Seward Park High School and was used as an example by wary mothers and overzealous guidance counselors. She eventually considered an abortion, but by the time she had that thought it was too late.
Nevertheless … once she found out exactly what happens during birth and how she would be ripped apart by this thing growing inside of her—she drove Billy away with her prepartum dementia, unconcerned with how much she and the baby meant to him after going through the shock of Joey dying in his arms, which (as a foretelling of her eventual psychoanalytic leanings) she encouraged him to talk about and get out of his system.
Trusting her with his life, since she indeed was carrying part of him within her, Billy attempted to reveal every gruesome detail, down to the fact that he could actually see Joey’s mangled heart lying inside his open body and his face frozen into, not a pained look, but one of annoyance, so that all Billy could think about was of someone who has just stubbed his toe out of carelessness, making him feel so bad that a few days later, in front of her mother, Ursula Santiago, who knew genuine pain when she encountered it, he again apologized for letting Joey die and said, whatever they did, if it was a boy please name him Joey.
/> “And if it’s a girl?” Ursula said.
“Vidamía,” Billy Farrell said, looking longingly at Elsa.
“Yeah?” Ursula asked, looking at Elsa.
“Yeah, sure,” Elsa said, looking at the linoleum in the kitchen.
“Here’s my number,” Billy said, handing Elsa a piece of paper. “And I’m sorry. If you and the baby need anything, let me know.”
And that was that.
In the fall Billy Farrell returned to the park in the Lower East Side many times until one day he saw Elsa, her stomach flat once again, pushing a baby carriage. He didn’t dare approach her, fearful that upon seeing the child he’d want to hold it and keep it and the pain of not being able to do so would be too great, convinced, perhaps as a wish, that it was a boy and his name was Joey, so that at least he could believe that he had brought his poor friend back to life, though he learned subsequently that the baby was a girl, from the pink baby clothing she was wearing.
When Elsa was brought the cleft product of her despair, she told her mother that she wanted to name her Katherine Ann, or maybe Stacey, and her mother asked her what kind of people did she think they were, promising the father what the child would be called and then going back on their word like some back-stabbing, conniving sneak, stressing that being poor wasn’t a good enough excuse for lying or cheating. So no matter what she may put forth as an argument, it was useless because she had given the child’s father her word.
“Vidamía, just like the father asked, and make sure you spell his last name right to the nurse for the birth certificate because he’s a veteran and the government checks on things like that for benefits,” adding that if Elsa was too young to have sense enough to care for her daughter, she, as the child’s grandmother, wasn’t.
“He ain’t gonna find out, mami,” Elsa said.
“No, Elsa, you gonna name her the way he wanted.”
“Vidamía?”
“That’s right.”
“Vidamía? Vidamía Farrell?”
“Yeah, Vidamía Farrell, just like the father said.”
“That’s it? No middle name, no nothing?”
“Yeah, that’s it. No middle name and no nothing.”
“That ain’t no name, mami.”
“It is now,” Ursula said.
3. Creature Discomforts
And so Ursula Santiago prevailed, and Elsa, thwarted in her efforts to rid herself of the burden of shame that she felt in giving it such an unusual name, celebrated her sweet-sixteen birthday not only having been kissed but deflorated in a love-crazed episode of confusing sensations of pleasure and guilt. Inducted into motherhood, she found, as the years passed and she peeled away layers of her mind, that she not only hated her own motherhood, but was incited to that emotion by her own feelings toward her mother, whom she saw as weak and sacrificing. In Elsa’s opinion her mother was a fool, for Ursula Santiago gave herself first to an ungrateful husband and then to her children, rising early in the morning and standing by the stove, year round, to prepare their breakfast; slaving the rest of the day at making beds, cleaning the house, and doing laundry, often by hand. When not attending to these tasks, Ursula stood sentinel-like by the mailbox to make sure her Aid to Dependent Children checks were not stolen. Additionally, she waited defiantly in line to receive welfare food and then devised ways of making the food palatable.
Whenever there were family gatherings now, Elsa still recalled fondly the large, ripe plantains carefully hollowed out and filled with a core of welfare cheese from the big five-pound bricks which, as if by some magical family tradition, sat like a beneficent icon in their refrigerator, seemingly never diminishing in size, like some sort of selfgenerating entity. Like all children of the state, she remembered the thick peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches, and the rich butter which they spread liberally on bread and ate whenever hunger attacked them, conflicted as she grew up because the food quelled her hunger but, as she matured, made her curse her fate as a Puerto Rican for suffering the indignity of having the government take care of her.
Her mother even found use for the white flour, which everyone in the neighborhood threw away and which she bought for pennies a pound from them, storing it in large metal Sultana cracker containers which she obtained from bodegas in the neighborhood. She’d buy dried codfish, soak it in water to desalt it, cook it, remove the bones, and tear it into small shreds. She then made a big flour batter which she seasoned with spices. Pushing a supermarket cart that held a can of lard, a large cooking pot, a folding table, frying utensils, paper napkins, her apron, and a money changer she’d bought in a thrift shop, she’d leave early on weekend mornings during warm weather with Joey and Elsa, who were the youngest, while their sisters and Bobby worked at stacking grocery stores or clerking. Trailing their mother and picking up pieces of wood, which they put in a beat-up red wagon, they would make their way east on Houston and across the footbridge to the baseball diamonds.
There in the park, upon a structure of gathered bricks and a shelf from a discarded refrigerator, she lit a fire and placed the large pot on it. In the pot, three-quarters filled with boiling lard, she cooked crispy bacalaitos, which when done, she placed on a large dish and sold for fifty cents each. Hundreds of them in a day, her white fingers and hands shiny with the grease, dropping large spoonfuls of the codfish-laden batter into the boiling shortening, the batter coalescing into big cracker-like golden fritters which people loved, buying them up so fast that she took to preparing three large plastic containers of the batter which Elsa and Joey had to return to the apartment a couple of times during the day to get from the refrigerator and bring back to their mother in the shopping cart. Ursula Santiago always picked the fritters up with a napkin in her left hand, took the money with her right, and quickly maneuvered her coin changer when it was necessary. When she had to deal with large bills she went into her apron and deftly counted out the change, always smiling and thanking everyone. She never had to hawk her wares like other people, possessing a natural magnetism which Elsa, in spite of her feelings, found remarkable and secretly admired.
On days when it rained, her mother sat by the window, bereft of any joy, and lectured them on how important it was to learn and to work hard. But there were more sunny days than rainy ones and on Mondays she would go to the Banco Popular on Delancey Street with a paper bag filled with greasy bills and the pennies, nickels, dimes, and quarters which had been divided into their proper plastic containers—and washed with detergent and dried—before being placed in paper rolls so that the grease didn’t soak through the paper, thus giving the term “money laundering” a whole new meaning. With the money her mother earned she was able to buy everyone extra shoes and winter coats and for their birthdays and Christmas always some special gift or treat. Elsa loved and admired her mother in those days, but somehow something had gone wrong, and she hadn’t figured out yet what that was.
Ursula Santiago, once a shy, plain-looking peasant girl who had come from the town of Cacimar in the mountains of Puerto Rico in 1946, was so strict as to be tyrannical when it came to school, manners, respect for elders, and being truthful. Always encouraging her children with her simple philosophy that if you did good, good things would happen to you, intolerant of sloth and mendacity. Hilda, Bobby, Milagros, Nancy, Joey, and Elsa, all of them stuffed into that two-bedroom apartment, the girls, all three of them, sleeping in the big double bed, Bobby and Joey in the bunk beds in the other room and Elsa, being the baby, with her mother on the sofa bed in the living room. Every couple of weeks their father showed up and she yielded her place and slept with her sisters and listened to them talk about boys.
As Elsa grew up, something that she had never been willing to label hatred crept into her view of Ursula Santiago. So pervasive was this loathing of her mother’s values that it provided the impetus for her master’s thesis. Her study was titled, with a certain measure of self-reflective irony, The Martyr Complex in the Puerto Rican Immigrant Woman and Its Deleterious Effects
on Her Children. Elsa refused to acknowledge that her own drive to excel had been nurtured by her mother, nor was she able to justify, under her theory, how her brother Bobby had supported his family by managing a supermarket and, over the years, had acquired a business degree; nor how Hilda, Milagros, and Nancy had attended college and worked as teachers, Hilda rising to the position of principal at a grammar school in the Bronx.
According to her thesis, the Puerto Rican woman sacrificed herself to such an extent that it made her offspring socially docile and extremely pliable. This docility eventually placed the offspring in various high-risk groups for people suffering sundry mental disorders with their attendant physical problems. As an antidote to this social propensity, and perhaps to justify her distant attitude toward her own daughter, Elsa Santiago considered herself a paragon of scientific objectivity. In every respect she distanced herself from the commonality of simple human emotion, viewing everything in behavioral terms and attributing all expressions of feeling, whether of a negative or positive nature, to aberrational conduct.
