“No, gracias,” says my mother, turning down the soup. “I can’t even eat.”
“That’s how men are,” offers Flor, the words lisping out of her mouth because of her missing teeth. I look at the hole of her mouth surrounded by red lips and her cotton-candy pale yellow hair. She lives with her two children and manages to keep two brothers, who fight over her, at bay. “That’s why I stay single.”
They all nod in agreement.
“¡Borracho! And he hit your head against the radiator? Horrible.”
What? My father was drunk? He hit her head against the radiator!
“Pobrecita.”
Can that be true? I can’t believe it! They repeat the story over and over again.
“Drunk?”
“¡Madre de Dios!”
“Terrible.”
Flor and Doña Cabeza eventually leave, agreeing on their way out that this happened because my father loves my mother so much. My mother and I, finally alone, look at each other. She yawns, then suddenly jumps out of bed, goes into the kitchen, and pulls some cheese out of the refrigerator. Then she opens a great big green tin of crackers.
“Want some?”
“Yes,” I say.
There’s a knock on the door and she quickly puts the cheese and crackers back.
“But … ?”
“Later! Go answer the door.”
I go to answer the door.
“Wait!”
I stop and watch her get back into bed and arrange her face to look sad again.
“Now!”
“Who?” I ask carefully like I’ve been taught to do.
“Genoveva,” says one voice.
“Lydia,” says another.
I hate Genoveva but I like Lydia because she is pretty and white and so Americanized she speaks perfect English and is always so nice to her son, Dennis, even when he nods himself to sleep on the sidewalk. The door has a police lock; it’s heavy, but I feel I can do it. I must.
Genoveva and Lydia flutter passed me, like I’m not even there and didn’t just go through all the trouble of opening the door, so I hurry up and stand between them and my mother so they see me. But I must be invisible because they look through me and gasp at the sight of Ma. Genoveva has an ice bag and is happy to have someone to minister to. My mother begins her sorry tale all over again.
“He was like a crazy man. So drunk …” says Ma.
“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph …” says pinched-face Genoveva.
“And look at all the broken furniture,” says Lydia.
Then they look at my broken mother, taking in her bump and black eye.
“Here, put this ice on that bump,” says Genoveva.
“I have makeup that can cover that eye so you can go to work,” says Lydia.
“Wear long sleeves for work,” suggests Genoveva.
Then, out of nowhere, comes the big question. “Why did he do it?”
I try to think—is it because he loves her? Right?
They go on.
“Men!”
“Men,” Lydia agrees.
Men? What does that mean? Some men? All men? Do all men bang their wives’ heads into radiators and punch them? My cousin Little Eddie is going to be a man someday—will he beat his wife as well?
There is another knock. “Who?” I ask cautiously, opening the door a sliver.
“¿Quién es?” My mom wants to know who it is. I run back and tell her.
“It’s La Puerca/Bizca.”
Genoveva and Lydia snicker.
“Shhh. Don’t call her that!” says Ma.
“It’s not her fault,” says Lydia, defending me. “Everybody calls her that!”
“Not to her face,” says my mother. “Let her in!”
I let her in and look to Ma. She always laughs at this woman but now she is serious. The story is told again.
“This radiator?”
On cue I point to the radiator.
“¡Madre de Dios!”
“¡Terrible! ¡Pobrecita!”
I nod in agreement and sigh like Lydia did and I go along with the script. All the women’s words fly around in my head.
“Never let him into the apartment again. You must think of yourself and the children. No man is worth it—even if he loves you. Don’t let him treat you like that. Men.”
Everyone knows how others should live, and I wonder if everyone’s life is like a coat they can give each other to try on for size. Or were the neighbors part of our lives, like waves sneaking up and then away on sandy shores?
“Is there somewhere you could run away to?” asks Genoveva.
“It’ll be hard at first, but you work! You make money!” adds Lydia. “You could do it! You make your own money!”
“I’ll do it,” says Ma forcefully.
It’s decided that we go to Uncle Eddie’s house in Bethpage. I’m thrilled to be with Cousin Eddie and forget all about my mother’s bruises. When we arrive at my uncle’s house, Little Eddie and I lock hearts and souls. Above our heads the grown-ups whisper and plot about what to do, but Eddie and I don’t care because his shiny red tricycle with banners at the handles is the most beautiful thing in the world. I can’t wait for it to be daylight.
Ma goes to work the next day and my cousin and I examine the bike before taking it out on the sidewalk.
“Get on!” he commands.
I sit on the bike and he stands on the back, leaning over me to grab on to the handles, and we push off. In seconds we are flying down the sidewalk, going so fast my feet can’t stay on the pedals. I can hear him giggling in my ear but he is going too fast for me.
“Stop!” I scream.
But he can’t because it is too exciting and wonderful to stop, and he keeps on going until we fall over. My cousin laughs, but I have a cut on my knee and begin to cry.
“Are you okay?” He is about to help me up when we hear, “¡Sinvergüenza! ¡Hijo de puta!” It is his mother, Bon Bon, coming upon us. Thwack! She beats him about the head and back into the house screaming insults. Zoraida, Eddie’s half sister, tries to distract Bon Bon.
“Mami …”
But she can’t be distracted, and Bon Bon beats Little Eddie until she is spent.
Then there is sorry quiet as Zoraida takes her brother into the bathroom and calms him with cool running water. When they come out his white skin is clean and polished, his hair cleanly parted on the side, combed over into a pompadour. The only evidence of what had just happened is a Band-Aid over his eye. Zoraida soothes him with a toy plane, then watches carefully as Little Eddie approaches his disoriented mother.
“Mami, look,” he says sweetly, flying the plane in front of her eyes. “Look at the little plane, look how it flies.” Bon Bon’s eyes are too glazed over to notice.
“Look, Mami …”
Her wild eyes finally focus and she smiles weakly at her son. I am numb and though my crying started the whole thing it is like I am not there.
The next day Zoraida is making us breakfast. The eggs she fries are sizzling on the hot stove.
“My mother puts my hands on the stove,” she says matter-of-factly.
“Why?” I ask her.
“To teach me not to steal.”
I listen to the sizzling eggs. They crackle done and she serves us.
“It’s the only way to teach children,” Zoraida insists.
I eat my eggs but wonder if it was hands on a hot surface or hands in the flames that taught the lesson.
Evenings after Ma comes from work we sit on the porch and look down the walkway into the street. Warning us kids, Bon Bon places a voodoo coconut head at the end of the path.
“Don’t go past that head. If you do it will bite at your legs.”
Ma pulls me to her and sighs with weariness and I see that her bruises have gone from black to yellow. Inside the house, Bon Bon has had a personality transformation. She is now kindly and tenderly tending her husband’s, my uncle’s, aching feet with baby powder. The transformation lasts i
nto the next morning and she is cheerful.
“Do you like Gina Lollobrigida’s hair?” she asks me.
“Who?”
“Gina Lollobrigida, that Italian movie star with the boy cut.”
I don’t know who she is talking about, but I go along with whatever she wants. Zoraida glances at me, and Bon Bon smiles like the three of us are girlfriends. I can play that game but I wonder where Little Eddie and his toy plane are.
Bon Bon puts newspapers under a kitchen chair and calls Zoraida and me into the room to play beauty parlor except Bon Bon is the only one with the scissors. Zoraida goes first. Snip! One long lock of hair drifts to the floor. Snip! Another one. It doesn’t stop until Zoraida looks like Joan of Arc. We both smile hard and no one speaks. Then it’s my turn. I’m sitting in the chair and it’s so quiet I can hear the scissors struggle and saw through my thick, wavy mane. Afraid one of my ears will hit the ground along with a curl or two, I sit perfectly still. When she is done Bon Bon beams with satisfaction and gazes at me like I look at my dolls. I find my reflection somewhere. My hair is cut to the middle of my ear and it doesn’t curl pretty anymore—it is dry and frizzy and I look like a piece of broccoli and wonder if that’s the style.
As the sky darkens and my mother is due home from work, Bon Bon gets excited.
“We will surprise your mother,” she tells me.
“Come quick, Zoraida,” she commands her daughter.
Zoraida goes along like we are getting off easy. Bon Bon makes us hold each other’s hands across our bodies like ballet dancers.
“Así,” she instructs, positioning us like we are her dolls.
Then she takes a peek out of the window. Suddenly—“Here she comes! Quick—turn your heads and look at the corner.”
Zoraida and I stare at each other.
“Like this!” She adjusts us once again, turning our heads to look at a wall at the exact same angle.
My mother comes in exhausted, and it is only when I see her jaw practically hit the ground in despair that I realize how I must look.
The next day we go home, where my father pleads, tears running down his face.
“Please forgive me. I didn’t know what I was doing. I lost my mind. It was the rum.”
My mother rises on her toes, pointing to the radiator and the fading bruises on her arms and face. “Look at me! ¡Abusador! ¡Animal! ¡Loco! ¡Sinvergüenza!”
“I don’t remember anything! Please forgive me. Just stay and I’ll sleep in a corner. Please … ! Forgive me. I don’t know what I was doing. I was drunk. I went crazy. I promise it won’t ever happen again. It wasn’t my fault. It was the rum. I love you. I can’t live without you.”
Then he crumples down in a heap beside the flowered sofa and weeps. I look to my mother but I am stuck because I don’t know what I want to happen, and a lump forms in my throat that threatens to choke me as my heart breaks for him.
I stand, watching him weak and falling apart, and Ma strong and vengeful. I don’t know whose side I am on.
Sitting at my mother’s swollen ankles, I am fascinated by poking them and timing how long the indention takes to fill out.
“Muchacha,” she says before shooing me away. It’s Friday and the whole family, including Uncle Frank; his wife, Iris; and the cousins are shopping for the week at Don Joe’s. Iris has begun to wear high heels all the time; Mickey’s snot has not moved since I first saw him.
“His snot looks like candle wax,” Ma had said and the idea stays with me. But now in the soft light coming from the greasy bulb hanging from the ceiling I notice how her foot makes a right angle as she calls out her order.
“Una libra de cebollas.”
Friendly Don Joe gathers the onions for her, not his brother and co-owner Don Tito, whose smiles are so fleeting they look like tics.
It’s clear to me that riding that ankle would be as great as a ride on la macchina, the merry-go-round on the back of a pickup truck, driven up Third Avenue by an Italian guy who charges twenty-five cents for a ride. Don Joe weighs the brown paper bag of onions, puts it in a box, and writes what Ma will owe him in his black-and-white composition notebook. The neighborhood owes him so much money and he’s turned the pages so many times there is a bump of paper where he clutches to turn the pages.
I try sitting on her foot, but she lets her foot go slack and I am sent tumbling onto the soft sawdust-covered floor.
“Go play with your cousins,” she exclaims.
Chaty and Mickey have found a book of matches and are experimenting with them, and Mimi is lounging around looking bored, and I’m glad they are here so it won’t be a bruised-mother-broken-furniture Friday, but I am not interested in playing with them. I’m more interested in my mother’s leg and foot. Doña Cabeza comes in and buys some coffee and I am once again surprised that such movie-star-red hair surrounds such a wrinkly, ugly face. Mean Genoveva buys cotton and alcohol to apply her shots of penicillin to neighborhood children, and picks her nose on her way out. Flor comes in and all the men admire her big behind and she smiles, revealing missing front teeth. La Puerca/Bizca walks in past Ma and my aunt Iris, who try not to laugh when they see dirt outlines of her breasts on the back of her dress.
“Wearing the dirty part to the back doesn’t fool me. I still know she hasn’t washed that dress in ages,” snickers Ma. Her pregnant-lady blouse hits the top of the wooden crate she sits on. I make two dents in my mother’s swollen leg and watch it poke back out before I make another one.
“¿Qué más, doña Isa?” asks Don Joe.
“Cinco libras de arroz,” says Ma. Don Joe scoops out some rice, pours it into a brown paper bag, folds the top over, then karate chops it at just the right angle and just hard enough to seal it, and laughs.
“The factory has so much work,” Iris says to Ma. “I can work twelve hours a day if I want to. Fabulous.”
“There’s always a lot of piecework,” says Ma.
“I’m happy with it.”
“It’s okay, but I like to put the whole dress together. Más interesante.”
“Well, you speak English better …”
“As soon as I got off that plane from Puerto Rico—my brother Eddie helped me learn how to say ‘thread’ and ‘needle’ and everything else I have to say in English. It was hard but I did it!”
“Did you come on those tiny World War Two planes, too?” asks Don Joe.
“Sí, sí. AveMaríaPurísima, what a trip; we sat along the sides of the plane like soldiers do before jumping out. All we could afford.” Then she starts laughing. “It’s funny now, but not then. No. No. Did I tell you, Iris, about the poor barber traveling with us?”
“Sí, sí, but tell it again.”
“El pobre had all his tools in a cardboard box. Scissors, clippers, brushes, razors, but every time the plane angled in one dirección or another …”
She’s laughing so hard she can barely go on.
“… the box with all the tools went spilling out, traka, traka, traka across the plane to the other side. And he … he …”
Don Joe brings her a glass of water. She gulps it down. “Gracias, Don Joe,” and then she continues. “As soon as he picks his barber tools up and goes to the other side and sits, the plane angles in the other direction and out, traka, traka, traka go his scissors, clippers, brushes all over again. It got to the point everybody was just waiting to catch a comb or a brush for him for our entertainment.”
I see my chance to try to make a dent in her ankle again.
“Stop, mija,” she says, shaking her foot.
Then she turns her attention back to her shopping. “Five pounds of beans y nada más.”
Don Joe gives the same karate treatment to five pounds of beans. Chewing on the end of a red carpenter’s pencil to sharpen it, he adds the new debt to our old debt, and Iris begins her shopping.
Finally the shopping is done. Iris calls Uncle Frank, who has been drinking outside with my father. They leave the milk crates they had been precari
ously sitting on, come in, throw their boxes of food onto their shoulders, and he-man it out of the store.
Uncle Frank yells to Chaty to leave the matches alone. Chaty ignores him and slips them into his pocket. We all step over Moncho, the bum who sleeps in the building’s doorway. Entering, we hear metal hitting each step above us. It’s Americanized Lydia pulling her son, Dennis, up the stairs, his polio braces making the noise. Dennis is always either sleeping out on the street or dancing the mambo, braces and all. We step around them.
“Drogas, Dennis is a drug addict,” says Pops the minute we get into our apartment.
Chaty and Mickey and I jump back and forth from the sofa to the chair, careful our feet don’t touch the ground because we have decided the floor is quicksand.
“What’s quicksand?” asks Mickey.
Something is wrong with Mickey’s brain so Chaty helps him understand what we are playing. “Never mind—it’s fire, Mickey, make believe it’s fire.”
“Stop jumping around,” screams Mimi, rubbing her head. “I’m trying to watch television.”
She always looks so sweaty and hot. Chaty uses matches to help Mickey explore under the bed and I stay near the kitchen to listen. Ma makes coffee for all as Iris peels the plantains.
“Did you hear the one about the jíbaro who was so stupid he tried to blow out the electric light with his hat?” says my uncle Frank and they all laugh.
“What about the sugarcane worker who kept infecting his wound so that the government would keep giving him money?” says Pops, making them all laugh even harder. I wonder why they laugh—it’s not funny.
“La pobreza. When my mother died we were really starving with no one to take care of us—remember, Franco?”
“Sí, I remember that but I don’t remember our mother.”
“If I was five years old when she died you must’ve been three,” says Ma.
Then they turn to my father like he’s done something wrong.
Becoming Maria Page 2
