“Don’t touch that!”
So I go over to her stack of construction paper.
“Get away.”
I wish she would let me touch her paper and pencils, but she turns back to her project furiously. The album is so big you can sit on it like a stool. But I have something to show, too.
“Want to see something … ?” I tease.
“No.”
“Look.” I show her my ankles.
“That’s disgusting! Maaaaaa!”
Ma comes in. “What?”
“Look!”
Ma looks at my ankles, then marches me into the bathroom, where she sees a roach in the tub.
Just last week Ma had set off a roach bomb. When it was safe to come back home every surface was covered with roach carcasses, their feet comically sticking up into the air. Triumphantly sweeping them into a pile in the middle of the room the way people on television piled up leaves in the middle of their lawns in the fall, Ma’s eyes had shone with the joy of success and conquest. Wetting one edge of a newspaper, sticking it on the floor to be used as a dustpan, and sweeping all the papery roach bodies onto the paper she cracked, “We don’t got a lot but we sure got a lot of roaches.”
So the one roach in the tub that had escaped death really pisses her off. After squashing the roach and swishing it down the drain, she makes me get into the tub.
I get in and wait for the warm water to rise up above my caked ankles. “And don’t forget to clean your knees and elbows, too,” she adds, flying out the door yelling for my sister.
“Aurea, help me defrost the refrigerator!”
I scrub my ankles until they are sparkling clean. But when I start to scrub my knees the movement of the washcloth reminds me of the hem of a skirt, so I drape the edge of the washcloth over my knee and make believe it’s my hemline. Then I drape it over my shoulder and make a fancy sleeve; across my crotch it makes a bathing suit bottom …
“What are you doing?” Ma is back!
I stare at her from my watery fashion world.
“I tol’ you to scrub your ankles! Look—if you don’t scrub your knees and ankles and elbows they will turn to tin! Do it!” Punctuating her statement with a slam of the door she leaves again. I think about what she said in the wake of her exasperation. Had she said “tin”? That my knees would turn into tin? Like the tin in the Tin Man in The Wizard of Oz? Bent they looked pretty good but straightened they looked pretty dark. Was that dirt? I scrub then reexamine them, but they don’t look any cleaner no matter how much I scrub. Then they start to feel a little stiff. Oh no, I can’t bend them. Oh my God! Oh my God! I’ll never walk again! I feel my face get hard as tin as well with the only movement being snot and tears running down to my chin. Ma bursts back into the room.
“¿Qué te pasa?”
“My knees have turned to tin.”
She stares. After a moment she sinks to the floor, leans against the wall, and puts her hands on her knees; then, placing her head on her arms, she rests. I stop crying to look at her.
“What’s the matter?”
She doesn’t say a word and it is silent and serious.
“Ma … ?”
But she doesn’t hear me as she finally crawls over to me, wipes my face with the washcloth, helps me out of the tub, dries me off, and gets me into pajamas. As we march through the living room, I see warm light slipping out from underneath the door of my sister’s room and in bed I dream about pencils and paper.
School has plenty of pencils and paper and even crayons. When it’s Halloween we draw pumpkins and leaf shapes and cut them out with safe scissors. “Color them all the beautiful colors of the fall,” says the teacher. “Yellow, and orange, and gold, and purple.”
I think she is silly for telling me that leaves come in yellow and orange and gold and purple because everybody knows leaves come in green then turn brown before dropping dead to the ground. But I do what she says so I can use all the crayons. I’ll even make blue leaves if it’ll make her happy.
“Very nice, Sonia. We’ll put your leaves on the windows.”
On the block Aurea and I dress up as hoboes to go trick-or-treating. We run in and out and up and down the buildings, knocking on every door, and people give us money! And it’s fun and wonderful but we look over our shoulders for the crazy white boys from other neighborhoods who don’t know enough to dress up like anything at all and come armed with long stockings full of colored chalk. Suddenly they are upon us.
“Here they come! Run!” says Aurea.
Thwack! A boy with spiky yellow hair and green teeth hits her with his sock before hitting me, leaving a cloudy streak of pink down both our backs. It doesn’t hurt but we scream and shriek and try to get away, but not really. By the time we straggle back home we look like hoboes dressed up as rainbows.
“What happened to you two?” says Ma. “Maronna!”
Ma is working with Italian seamstresses and likes to sound like them.
The next day at school the teacher asks what we did for Halloween. I tell her we dressed up as hoboes and got money …
“Money? Not candy or treats … ?”
“No …” I say carefully.
“What did you do with the money?”
What a stupid question, I think, but I answer, “Bought candy.”
She is so shocked she sputters. “If you are going to get money … you should at least give it to UNICEF …”
Give our money away? She must be crazy, so I don’t even bother telling her about the white boys beating us with colored socks. She’d never get it.
Should we tell her?” Mimi asks her brother Chaty. She is pale and thin with a bright, sweaty, sick look, as always.
“No, don’t,” he answers.
I am not sure I want to know what they don’t want to tell me. We are in their living room waiting for Iris to come home. The television’s horizontal hold has been broken for about a year but the constant scroll does not seem to bother anyone, least of all Mickey, who is sitting two feet from the screen, his pointy face mesmerized by what he is seeing. I guess, with his brain trouble, it looks fine to him.
“Let’s tell her,” Mimi says.
“Tell me,” I say.
“No,” says Chaty.
“But she wants to know,” says Mimi.
They go back and forth a few times but then Mimi asks, “How do we get presents for Christmas?”
“Santa Claus …” I say cautiously. I don’t know if I should tell them the whole story. How Santa magically dissolves the window behind our Christmas tree, carefully creeps around it, leaves our presents, and then creeps out and magically puts the window back.
“Why does he leave some presents for us at your house?” she challenges.
Saves time, I think. If Santa had to wait for us Puerto Ricans to stop partying on Christmas Eve and go to bed, he’d never finish delivering gifts and we would hold up the whole world getting presents. That’s why Santa often drops off presents for the whole family at one relative’s house. But I don’t say that—the looks and grins going on between Mimi and Chaty make me suspicious.
“Come look,” she says finally. We go into the boys’ room. It’s so small the door hits the bunk bed against the wall. Both beds are a tangled mess of clothes and sheets shiny with gray dirt. The window faces the courtyard but there is some sooty light coming in through it. Mimi opens the door to a small closet. “Look,” she says. At the top of the closet are boxes wrapped in bright red-and-green paper and pretty golden bows.
“Those are the presents for Christmas. Our parents bought them. There is no Santa Claus,” she says.
I back out of the room slowly, not knowing where to put this news. My back? My lap? The floor. We sit and watch the television scrolling endlessly for a while because no one knows what to say. Chaty finally provokes Mickey until Mickey wrestles Chaty to the ground to fart on his head. When it’s time for me to go, Mimi suddenly blurts out, “Okay, look—there is a Santa Claus. We were just kidding
…”
“Yeah, right …” adds Chaty.
I don’t answer and just take my new burden with me. When I get home my parents are fighting over a suckling pig on the table. It’s pink with some spiky black hairs.
“What am I supposed to do with this?” Ma barks.
“What do you think, prepare it!” Pops laughs, walking out the door.
“I hate this shit …” she exclaims once he is gone.
I think about Santa—that traitor.
“Go get Genoveva,” she tells me.
I do. She comes up. “¿Qué pasó?”
“Look at this,” says Ma, sniffling like she doesn’t know what it is. “I’ve never prepared a thing like this.”
I don’t understand what’s going on. First the news about Santa Claus and now my mother forgets how to cook?
“You just grind up some garlic, and oregano, and olive oil, and vinegar, and slap it on the pig,” says Genoveva.
“Really?” says Ma, looking helpless, as if she’s never heard of those ingredients before in her life.
“Look, I’ll show you,” says Genoveva. And she gets the wooden pestle and grinds some garlic, adds the other stuff, and makes a paste. “See?” she says when she’s done.
“Now what?” says Ma weakly.
“Well, you make holes in the pig and stuff it with this stuff.”
My mother looks like she’s forgotten how to understand both English and Spanish. Genoveva picks up a knife and starts to stab the pink suckling pig all over. It looks like she is stabbing a baby, then sticking vinegar and garlic in the wounds, so I leave and look at our Christmas tree to ponder Santa Claus and make up stories about the ornaments like I always do. The horse ornament is on its way to meet the mouse ornament to take it for a ride, and they will stop to eat a little bit of candy cane, then pick up the angel, who will ride on the mouse’s head to the top of the tree. It doesn’t matter about Santa Claus.
I hear the door. It’s my father.
“Now what do I do with this pig?” says Ma. “I told you it won’t fit in the oven!”
“Why are you worried? I’m going to take it to Valencia Bakery. They will roast it for me.”
I go into the kitchen in time to see him stuffing the pig into a cardboard box to take it to the bakery. Hours later he comes back with the cooked pig on his back.
“Wonderful,” says Ma, snitching off a little piece of crackling.
“I guess you haven’t forgotten how to eat it,” my father teases.
I go to the window to wait for the Christmas Eve eruption. It is snowing and I’m hoping it stops. Even though there are a thousand, million songs about how swell a white Christmas is, and every picture of Christmas you draw in school has to have snow, we always pray for it not to snow because after we celebrate here, we will get into our cars and drive to someone else’s house to party.
Instantaneously the apartment is full of relatives and all the neighbors in the building. Flor wearing a tight skirt and stockings with a seam up the back, Iris wearing high heels, the cousins from Fulton Avenue, and Little Eddie—who pulls me aside.
“Let’s stay awake all night and catch Santa.”
I look at him and wonder if he’s kidding, if he knows that there is no Santa, too. Kitchen chairs are brought into the living room. Uncle Eddie tunes his guitar, somebody scrapes on a güiro with a fork, and Ma sings an aguinaldo. Uncle Frank is so delighted with his siblings that he claps, not like an adult but like a kid playing patty-cake, sitting in a chair with his feet slightly running in place. My father doesn’t know where to look he is so cheerful, and I feel that Ma is better than the other mothers who cook and serve because my mother can sing.
Their song ends. “Bravo …” Everybody claps. Then there is a commotion of chairs scraping and guitar tuning, toasts and shots of rum being drunk. No matter how hard I watch I never see Ma and Uncle Eddie signal each other to start the next song; I never even notice them deciding which song to sing next.
They take a break for food and drink. Eddie and I and the Fulton cousins whirl around. The Fulton cousins have forgotten what they’ve told me. Chaty takes off and the rest follow; we fly around faster and faster, and then we try to knock each other over, or trip each other as we wait, wildly, for anything to happen.
Chano the singer appears at our door. I only see him once a year when he follows my uncle around to sing aguinaldos and he always looks the same. A small man in a pale blue suit, thin socks, and pointy black shoes, his hair is unbelievably thick and wavy; his face looks like it was carved out of a rock and his eyes are slanted up.
Like a movie star he steps around the police lock, throws his head back, and starts to sing a made-up lyric about what my mother is wearing and how generous my father is with the coquito, a creamy coconut drink I’m not allowed to have because it has rum. Each lyric is more clever and funnier than the previous one. But then he sings of the birth of Jesus.
“Ya vendrán los reyes …”
And it is still the most beautiful story I ever heard, whether there is a Santa Claus or not.
By this time the small flame of a party has erupted into a three-alarm blaze and several songs later it is time to move on. We are on fire with love and music and sadness for the poor little baby in the manger.
Little Eddie and I and the cousins travel down the stairs and out onto the street, riding the wave of mothers juggling food and little kids, their high heels slipping into the snow, and men holding guitars over their heads. We pile into our jalopies, and with tires spinning in the snow we take off to someone else’s block. There, we do the same thing—making the parranda a longer and longer parade of revelers as we travel, slipping and sliding all over the Bronx.
And then it’s Christmas morning. And I wake up with my face stuck on Iris’s plastic-covered sofa and Little Eddie is holding his face in his hands, staring at me like an owl.
“We didn’t make it,” he says as I unstick myself from the sofa.
“No …”
“We fell asleep and missed Santa …”
“Merry Christmas, Sonia,” says Iris, handing me a tea set exactly like the tea set she handed me last year.
Christmas Day is spent in a daze of exhaustion, and it’s bedtime before I tell Ma what I know about Santa Claus.
“Who told you?” she says, annoyed.
“Mimi and Chaty.”
She grits her teeth. “Stupid asses.”
But it’s really okay with me. I drift off to sleep comforted that the story about baby Jesus is just as unbelievable as Santa Claus and no one says that that story’s not true.
“¡Guerra! ¡Guerra interplanetaria!”
I’m awakened by Pops screeching and I shoot straight up out of a deep sleep. What? What! My heart beats a hundred times per minute. But I’m confused. It’s morning, daytime—bad things only happen at night. My father comes into my room.
“¡Cállate!”
We lock eyes as he tells me to shut up. I stare back and realize it had been me doing the screaming. He turns away and goes back to maniacally yelling about interplanetary warfare, then about war breaking out between Puerto Rico and El Barrio.
“¡Guerra entre Puerto Rico y El Barrio!”
What? War had broken out between Puerto Rico and El Barrio. My brain tries to sort out all that’s happening, with ideas falling into place like balls in a pinball machine. There’s no danger. Ha-ha! What he is saying is funny, and I remind myself it’s Sunday after Christmas and we are going to El Barrio to visit Grandmother.
We pile into the car.
“Hey, Pops, how come you never go to church?” I ask.
“Because when Jesus walked the earth He stole chickens just like the rest of us.”
“Hey, Ma, how come you don’t go to church every Sunday?”
“I don’t have to go. Jesus understands that I’m a poor working mother.”
“How come we ate meat last Friday?”
“Because Jesus understands that I’m a p
oor working mother.”
By that time we are crossing the Willis Avenue Bridge. We get a parking spot right in front of Grandmother’s on 111th Street.
“Linda keeps your grandmother’s house sparkling like a mirror!” says Ma as we go up the brownstone steps into the apartment—and even as we enter, Uncle Ángel’s wife, Linda, is polishing a table.
“¡Hola!” she says in a musical voice that puts Snow White tidying up after the Seven Dwarfs into my mind. She is so cheerful and gay I think I see golden sparkles in the wake of her cleaning cloth. Her children, Evelyn and Peter, are such perfect mirror images of each other they might be twins, but I know they are not. My aunt La Boba hugs me as my father, bowing his head, says to Grandmother, “Échame la bendición.” She blesses him and he barely acknowledges his brother Ángel, who ignores him as well.
“Sooonnniiiaaa,” Uncle Ángel says with a grin, giving me a Shirley Temple doll. He works in a toy store and gives me a Shirley Temple doll every year. Still, my heart almost stops it is so beautiful. “¡Felicidades!” he says. But before I can think what to say, Virginia, a half sister of Pops and Uncle Ángel, breezes in.
Becoming Maria Page 4
