Revolution of Evelyn Serrano (9780545469586)

by Manzano, Sonia

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Chapter 1: My Mother the Slave

  Chapter 2: El Barrio

  Chapter 3: The Lady with No Eyebrows Appears

  Chapter 4: If Only I Were a Cockroach

  Chapter 5: Wilfredo

  Chapter 6: Killer Photo Album

  Chapter 7: First Spanish Methodist Church

  Chapter 8: A Separate World Nearby

  Chapter 9: Angel

  Chapter 10: Garbage on Fire

  Chapter 11: Who Is a Young Lord?

  Chapter 12: The Faceless Killer

  Chapter 13: Bodega Break-In

  Chapter 14: Bread Pudding

  Chapter 15: A Motor in the Heart

  Chapter 16: Abuela’s Love Life

  Chapter 17: Riot

  Chapter 18: The March

  Chapter 19: Operation Pasteles

  Chapter 20: The Takeover

  Chapter 21: The Enchanted Cottage

  Chapter 22: My Bodyguard

  Chapter 23: Puzzle

  Chapter 24: The Poet

  Chapter 25: Revelation

  Chapter 26: Mami

  Chapter 27: Happy Holidays

  Chapter 28: Hot Snow

  Chapter 29: Healing

  Author’s Note

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  For Further Reading

  Copyright

  Want some more café?”

  Oh, for heaven’s sake. Why did Mami always have to be so beggy? I hated that beggy voice of hers. She sounded like a slave. I just wanted to go to the bathroom and then back to my room like I did on any other normal morning, not hear her pitiful beggy voice offering me more coffee. Besides, I knew she was mad at me. She knew she was mad at me — as mad as she ever had the nerve to get. Why couldn’t she act mad if she felt mad? She could at least not speak to me, or shoot me a dirty look. Instead she wanted to give me more coffee.

  “No, thanks, Mami. I don’t want any more coffee. One cup is enough.”

  “¿Avena?”

  “I don’t want oatmeal, either.”

  “You have to eat something before you go to your first day at work.”

  I couldn’t believe it. Going to work at the five-and-dime was exactly what she was mad at me about. She had wanted me to work in the bodega for the whole summer — but it wasn’t my grocery store. It was hers and my stepfather’s. Working all of July in that store that smelled like bacalao, the world’s smelliest fish even when it was fresh, and listening to old people talk about Puerto Rico as they watched Telemundo on television, was enough, thank you!

  Please — this was 1969, and who cared about Puerto Rico in the old days anyway? Not me.

  Mami went into her room and came out with a freshly ironed blue-checked sleeveless shirt. “Here is your shirt, nice and planchada.”

  Only my mother would iron in weather like this. Who irons in July? And when did she iron it, in the middle of the night?

  “Mami, you didn’t have to press it. The shirt looked okay the way it was.”

  “Are you kidding?”

  Fine.

  “Thanks, Mami.” I grabbed the shirt and tried to go into my room before she could say another word. But I wasn’t fast enough.

  “¿Huevos?”

  “No eggs!”

  Thank God I had my own bedroom, where I could be all by myself in this tiny apartment of ours. There were only two other rooms in our home, not counting the kitchen and the bathroom — the living room and my mother and stepfather’s bedroom. This morning I was glad to duck into my own space.

  I had fixed up my room all by myself without my mother’s help. That’s why it wasn’t decorated in late 1960s Puerto Rican décor — plastic covering all the furniture and fake roses everywhere. Which was Mami’s way of making our home look pretty.

  She’d put a vase of plastic roses on top of the television set, and there were even plastic roses poking out from behind picture frames on the wall. What was it with Puerto Ricans and plastic roses anyway? Did my mother really think those tacky flowers looked good against her greasy turquoise walls?

  Then there were the plastic covers on the armchairs. I always tell people you haven’t lived until you’ve sat on plastic-covered furniture while wearing shorts in the middle of summer and had your thighs stick to the seat when you tried to stand up.

  At least the sofa didn’t have plastic on it — but that was only because it was a pullout, and it would’ve been too hard to take the covers off every time we were going to use it. Not that that happened very often. But we never knew when some starving somebody from Puerto Rico was going to come over, asking to sleep on our sofa for the night, which always turned into having a houseguest for a month.

  Mami’s yellow kitchen didn’t escape plastic and roses, either. She’d even found a plastic flowered tablecloth in La Marqueta, where you could buy anything from a crucifix to a freshly killed chicken.

  Mami’s other “decorating” was done with tapetes. My mother spent hours crocheting those lacy table coverings. Some were as big as pizzas, others as dainty as daffodils. Mami put tapetes under vases, beneath picture frames, and on all the tables. She even draped them on the armchairs and the back of the sofa.

  What did Mami think? That nobody would notice the dirty walls because they would be too busy drooling over her tapetes?

  There’s a Puerto Rican expression that says some people try to “tapar el cielo con la mano” — to cover the sky with their hand.

  That was Mami. She was always covering up what she didn’t want to see, or putting something pretty on top of something ugly.

  The picture of her father on the dresser in her bedroom was another good example of Mami’s bad decorating skills. That thing had both roses and a tapete. The fakeness of the plastic roses matched the fakeness of the photo. Like in all the old-fashioned pictures I had seen from Puerto Rico, the photographer had decided to make it better by coloring it in and putting lipstick and blush on Abuelo, whose thin black moustache looked super stupid with all that makeup.

  Little did I know that Abuelo’s life was my mother’s ultimate act of — “tapando el cielo con la mano.”

  I wish Mami would have just demanded that the landlord paint our apartment. Whenever I asked her about calling the landlord, she said, “We don’t have to paint. We’re not going to live here forever. Someday we’ll buy a house in the Bronx.” Yeah, she did want to buy a house in the Bronx, but really Mami was too afraid of the landlord to complain. When it came to standing up for herself, she was as frail and delicate as one of her tapetes.

  Since my room was off-limits to Mami’s decorating — and plastic roses and anything lacey — the walls were creamy beige. I had a corduroy bedspread that was once yellow but had been washed so many times, it was faded to almost white — just the way I liked it. My bare dresser, without a tapete on it, stood in the corner, and a table I found on 110th Street served as a desk. I’d painted the dresser and the table white.

  With Mami still in the kitchen holding her egg pan in one hand and her iron in the other, I got dressed. I was tucking my shirt into my A-line skirt, when Pops busted into my room.

  “What are you doing?” he shouted. “You should be helping your mother.”

  My stepfather had been acting super parental lately. I just looked at him.

  “I want you to take out the garbage. If you can’t help in the bodega, you can help more in the house! In Puerto Rico, a young girl knows her place. Knows that she should help her mother. What are you, a hippie?”

  Pops had an issue with hippies.

  “¡Malcriad
os sinvergüenzas! Shameless spoiled kids,” he called them.

  Before I could answer, my mother stepped in behind Pops, saying, “That’s okay. I’ll take out the garbage.”

  My mother the slave was all I could think.

  I had to be at the five-and-dime, six blocks away, by ten thirty. I looked at myself in the mirror over my dresser. I still had a small pink hair curler in my bangs. The curler helped my bangs be a little smoother. I hated my hair because I never knew what it was going to do. If the weather was sticky, my hair got frizzy and stuck out like a triangle. I took out the hair curler and combed my bangs with my finger. In the top drawer of my desk, I found a thick rubber band. I snapped it around my wrist, brushed my hair into a ponytail, and slipped the rubber band over to hold it in place.

  Trying to see myself from the side was hard, but I could tell I had an ugly profile. I looked better from the front.

  I shoved my feet into my white tennis shoes that made my size eights look even bigger. I didn’t even care that the sneakers hurt. I just wanted to get going.

  My mother the slave was back, calling from the living room.

  “Rosa, do you —”

  “Evelyn, Mami, remember?” I yelled, correcting her. Ever since my fourteenth birthday last month, I told everybody I wanted to be called Evelyn. My full name is Rosa María Evelyn del Carmen Serrano. But I shortened it. El Barrio, Spanish Harlem, U.S.A., did not need another Rosa, María, or Carmen.

  The boys in our neighborhood always joked by calling out “Hey, María” every time they saw a group of girls together. They were sure one of us would look their way. They were right. That’s why I cut off half my name and chose Evelyn — it was the least Puerto Rican-sounding name I could have.

  Mami said, “Oh, sí … Evelyn … do you need money?”

  When I came out of my bedroom, Mami was dusting the furniture and shaking out all the tapetes.

  “I’m okay, Mami. I don’t need any money.”

  I had saved up what Mami and Pops had given me for the time I worked in their bodega.

  Mami kissed me.

  “Good luck, mija.”

  “Bye, Mami.”

  I ran out the door.

  Bang.

  The heat of the sun smacked my face the second I stepped out onto the street. I untucked my shirt and rolled up my skirt at least an inch. Mami thought I was too young to wear miniskirts, and Pops didn’t think it was right for any girl to wear them. Who cared what they thought.

  The daily sweats were about to begin. But the heat wasn’t as bad as what hit my senses next — the El Barrio fart smell of garbage. With the hot sun beating down, food rotted even faster. The smells of spoiled fish, melons, and beans blended together into one big, funky mess that stunk like everybody had decided to cut loose some gas at the same time. I tried to walk with my nose up in the air so I wouldn’t have to smell the El Barrio fart. But the only way to avoid it would’ve been to fly.

  The stench didn’t seem to bother two little kids who were doing a good job cooling off by throwing water balloons at each other. The fire hydrants weren’t open all the way like they would be later in the day, but they trickled enough water so that the kids could fill up their balloons. I couldn’t blame them. Water-balloon fights were as close as those kids were going to get to water sports this summer.

  Almost holding my breath, I walked around the corner to Lexington and looked around at the usual scene of old men playing dominos; the guy who sold bacalaítos fritos — codfish fritters — from his pushcart; old ladies who spent the day leaning on windowsill pillows, looking out the windows onto bunches of kids whose only way of enjoying the great outdoors was to hang out on the fire escapes and stoops.

  At the end of the day when I got home from work, I was going to see the same people doing the same things. Nothing changes in El Barrio.

  As I walked down Lexington, there was that kid Angel Santiago — the biggest pain in the world — coming up the street. I pretended not to see him, but he saw me.

  “Well, whaddaya know. If it isn’t Rosa María Evelyn del Carmen Serrano.”

  He should talk about names. He had the stupidest name of all time. Angel. What was he, a spirit? Besides, there was nothing angelic about him.

  He ran up alongside me.

  I kept walking.

  “Hey.” He was trying to keep up with my steps.

  “I’m busy, Angel. I’m going to work.”

  “Well, excuse me.”

  I kept moving.

  He looked a little desperate. “Can I walk you?”

  “No, I can walk myself, and another thing — my name is Evelyn.”

  “That’s right, I forgot. It’s just that I been calling you Rosa for the longest time.”

  That was true. Angel and I have known each other forever. I lived on 110th Street, near Lexington. He lived on 107th, near Park. I couldn’t remember a time Angel wasn’t around. Just like I couldn’t remember a time he wasn’t skinny and annoying.

  Sometimes my mother let Angel come upstairs to our apartment to eat. That’s why he thought he was my friend.

  Angel lived alone with his father, who sold frozen ices, piraguas, from a pushcart. There was something funny about Angel’s father. Not “funny ha-ha” but “funny weird.” Sometimes he acted like he knew you and sometimes he acted like he didn’t. And he could be really mean. Like last month he punished Angel for going on the roof to try and watch the Fourth of July fireworks. To discipline Angel, his father made him kneel on raw rice while holding a pot of boiling water over his head. It was stuff like that that made Angel always look like somebody was going to hit him between the eyes. He wore such a pained expression all the time. The only thing that helped Angel not look so sad was his long eyelashes. At least they gave him a cute face.

  But that kid still had hurt going on. He always bit his nails and chewed on the skin around them until they turned all red and raggedy.

  Angel had been left back one year at school. And when he came to school, he was in what they called the “remedial class.”

  Now he was working extra hard to keep with my steps.

  “Angel, I have to go, so see you.” I kept walking toward Third Avenue to the five-and-dime, leaving him behind.

  Like always, I counted my steps in my head — one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight.

  On eight, a water balloon smacked me in the back. I was going to start my first day of work with a wet blouse. When I turned around to see who’d thrown the balloon, another one came at my face.

  “I’m gonna get you for that, Angel!” Now my bangs were dripping wet. He ran up to me, all grinning and silly looking.

  “Got you!” He was laughing.

  I pushed him as hard as I could. He fell back, hit the ground, and stayed there with a hurt look on his face.

  “Hey, it was just a joke. You gonna get dry in a minute, it’s so hot out here.”

  Angel was right. But now my bangs were frizzy, and I was mad. People started slowing down as they passed Angel on the ground and me standing over him. Then they looked at me like I was the one who’d done something wrong.

  I left Angel where he was and started to walk off how mad I felt. Counting while walking always calmed me down.

  One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight …

  I made my way toward Third Avenue.

  One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight … I could’ve made a left on up to 116th Street but decided to take a longer way over to First Avenue.

  One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight … I finally took a left and walked past Thomas Jefferson Park up to 116th, where the five-and-dime was between First and Second.

  I must’ve counted to eight about a million times between Angel and the store where I was going to be working. That’s how many steps it took me to get un-mad.

  I tried to pat my bangs. They felt like a bush. I looked in the side-view mirror of a parked car to check them out. It was what I’d expected — they
were all frizzy. Finger combing them to the side didn’t help. Stupid Angel.

  I tried to be calm when I got to the store and found Mr. Simpson, the manager, in the back office.

  Mr. Simpson was chubby, with dark hair that came to below his ears. He was trying to wear his hair as long as he dared, but knew that he couldn’t be too way out or he wouldn’t have a job. My boss was trying to be a hippie. Sort of. Someday I’d tell Pops that the man I worked for had hippie hair.

  “Evelyn,” he said.

  “Hi.”

  “Let’s go right out and I’ll show you what you have to do.”

  He came from behind his desk, and I noticed the buttons on his shirt were almost popping.

  “First thing you do when you come to work is punch in,” he explained, leading me to a big clock. “You take this card with your name on it and push it down this slot when you get here and then again when you leave. That way we can keep track of exactly how many hours you work every day. Since you’re just starting, your hours will change on a daily basis, but by punching in, we’ll be able to keep track.”

  I took the card and slipped it in the slot. It made a ching-bang sound and marked the time on the card. I liked this way of keeping track of things. Mr. Simpson and I walked out into the store and past the lunch counter, which had a row of saggy balloons hanging over it. I read the sign stuck onto the mirror behind the counter:

  TAKE A CHANCE ON A BANANA SPLIT.

  ONE CENT TO SEVENTY-NINE CENTS.

  The balloons were stuffed with price tags ranging from a penny to seventy-nine cents, and depending on which balloon you picked, you paid from one penny to seventy-nine cents. This was the store’s tricky way of selling banana splits.