The Time It Snowed in Puerto Rico (11 page)

Mamá shoved Papi out of the room and covered me with her arms, even though I pushed her away, even though I told her I hated her.

“Los pollitos dicen, pio, pio, pio …”
She sang the nursery rhyme she used to sing when I was a baby, the one that always made me feel like I was floating, safe in the magic of story-song. She held me there, singing, until my skin cooled—until the fire was smothered, and I could do no more than rest my head on her breast and sleep.

An Explanation: Eve

F
OR A FEW WEEKS
I
WORE A SCARF AROUND MY
head to school, like Maria in
West Side Story
. Fredo called me a
bruja
, a witch, when I finally took it off. But I called him
cerdito
, to his face. That shut him up. Nobody else said anything. They were too busy talking about Rita Moreno, the first Puerto Rican to win an American Oscar. That news was even bigger than President Kennedy. I cut out magazine photographs of the whole cast and put them side by side in my journal.

By then, Mamá’s baby bump showed through all her skirts. Every day, women from the
barrio
came with congratulatory bowls of
arroz con dulce
or
tembleque
. The sugar ants paraded from dish to dish. I didn’t eat a bite. The women kiss-kissed my cheeks until I was covered with hot pink lipsticks and spit, and somebody always mentioned my hair. They sat around Mamá for hours, cooing over
her belly like it had sprouted orchids. She loved it. I could tell. Sometimes women from church came with Señora Delgado. She was a
curandera
, a woman healer and a midwife, and gave Mamá gingerroot slivers to suck on, bags of powerful herbs to keep under her mattress, and an
azabache
bracelet to wear. Papi didn’t like her. He said her medicine worked as good as spitting into the wind and calling it rain. I stayed away when the church group came to pray over the baby. I figured God already knew how I felt.

Papi shucked corn on the veranda. We had an early crop that year, and the spring rains kept the ears moist. We had to shuck them in a hurry or they’d spoil. I sat beside Papi on the bench, pulling brown, slimy leaves with raw fingers. From the rainwater, gnats made homes in the silky nests of the corn tips. They flew into my face when I ripped back the husks. I waved them away and flicked the rotten threads off my fingers. I wasn’t very good at shucking, but it was better than being inside.

Señora Delgado led the group in prayer chants. Their sound echoed over the tiles in one long note. I wished we could play the radio to hush it. After finishing, they tottered down the road to the Florilla parish to pray some more and light candles before the Virgin Mary. Mamá tried to get me to come, but mass on Sundays was enough for me. She got no help from Papi. He went to church on
Nochebuena
and
Viernes Santo
, and for weddings, funerals, and baptisms when he was invited. Mamá went nearly every day. Twice when Señora Delgado came. As long as I
didn’t have to go, I was glad Mamá spent so much time in God’s house and out of mine.

“Good corn.” Papi held a cob to his nose and breathed in deep. “Sweet.”

I put a cob to my nose and smelled the butter, like a promise. After all the green was peeled back, and the bugs and the dirt washed away, there was goodness.

I hadn’t been alone with Papi since our trip to San Juan. It felt nice to be just us. “Papi, do you believe God hears us better in church or at home?” I asked.

He cleared his throat and scratched his nose with his thumb. “I think God hears us no matter where we are.”

“That’s why you don’t go to church, like Mamá?”

“I don’t need a priest to hear God. I hear him all the time when the wind blows through corn and sugarcane. You know that whistle?” Papi puckered his lips and blew a squeal. I knew it. He was good at whistling. Where Mamá was always reading and humming, Papi sucked his teeth and whistled.

“So, when you whistle while you read the newspaper, are you talking back to him?”

“Some days, Verdita. When your mamá is in a mood,” Papi laughed. It made our bench jiggle. “We see God in different places, your mamá and I. Women need the church, you see.” He tossed a cleaned ear into the pot of golden cobs.

“They do?” I wasn’t a woman yet, but I would be someday, and it worried me that I’d have to spend my time sitting
in the musty pews, my knees aching, my fingers cramped with holy beads.

“Sí
, because of Eve,” Papi said.

I didn’t follow.

“Adam and Eve,” Papi explained. “Everything in this world goes back to them, Verdita. When Eve bit the apple and handed it over to her husband, Adam, she created the first sin and she passed that guilt along to her daughter and her daughter’s daughter, all the way down to Mamá. Women are always trying to purify themselves. That’s why they go to church so much. While men, you see, we know that we were not the ones to pluck the apple from the tree.” Papi pulled back the silk threads of his ear to find a brown hole. He broke off the wormy end and threw the rest into the pot, then continued, “And every woman’s guilty apple is different.”

I didn’t have a guilty apple. I hadn’t done anything wrong. If anyone should feel guilty, it was him and Mamá. There were lots of things they should feel guilty about, and I could list them easy. I sighed and kicked the basket with my toe. Obviously, Papi couldn’t hear my spirit like he used to. Maybe he wasn’t listening, maybe the new baby’s spirit was talking to him now.

I slid my hand along my clean cob, healthy rows of yellow teeth. I wasn’t going to spend my days in a moldy church, feeling guilty over things I didn’t do. I didn’t believe what Papi said about women, but I did believe what
he said about hearing God. I heard God in the snap of peapods, smelled him in the banana leaves, saw him in the bright corn rows, and tasted him in every mouthful of bright white coconut. I didn’t hear him in the church songs and sermons, and I had a feeling I never would.

An Explanation:
Puta

B
Y EARLY
J
UNE MY HAIR HAD GROWN OUT SOME
. Teline said I looked like an Oreo. I had to agree. Titi Lola bought the cookies at Walgreen’s, and Teline ate a handful every afternoon; she carried them in a paper bag everywhere she went, and her teeth always looked like they had dirt stuck in the cracks. Oreos were from the States, more expensive than our island cookies. Papi didn’t like the way they tasted. Too sweet. So I only got to eat them when I visited Teline and only when she had an extra.

That summer, when Omar came to visit, he brought his friend Blake with him. A few days before they arrived, Mamá bought a whole package of Oreos. She said she wanted to make Blake feel at home. But it wasn’t his home, and I was annoyed at her for saying so. Before they arrived, I ate as many as I could and fed the rest to the goats.

When they finally came, Papi took one look at Omar and said he was becoming a man. He patted him on the back and smiled so wide I thought his eyes might disappear into his cheeks. He never smiled like that at me. He never noticed how I was growing. I looked Omar over. I didn’t see a man. He was the same, but taller. So was I, though. He bragged about the dark hairs growing under his arm. Stuck his armpit in my face so I could see. Big deal. I didn’t tell him that I had them too, between my legs. They grew back thick and dark after I cut them. I didn’t show him mine, but I wanted to so he’d stop thinking he was so much more grown up. And he smelled funny. Deodorant, he said. Something called Right Guard. It was strong, like mouthwash; even after he left the room, I could still smell him.

The first night, after we pulled the boys’ cots onto the porch and tented them in mosquito nets, we sat on the veranda eating fried chicken and
tostones
. With Blake there, we didn’t fit at our table anymore. So we sat on the benches outside and held our plates in our laps, listening to Omar talk like he knew everything in the world. I wanted to remind him of what a coward he’d been the summer before, when we’d played Dare. I wanted to tell Blake how he’d whimpered in the dark outside the
jíbaros
bar. He might have forgotten that in the States, but I was here. I remembered everything.

“I want to be a baseball player,” he announced, his mouth crunchy and slick. He wore a Yankees cap, and his eyes shone as black as beetles beneath.

“I’m going to practice all summer with Blake. We got all the stuff.” He pulled a glove and some balls from his bag.

I didn’t know much about baseball, but I knew you needed a bat, and I didn’t see that in there. “Real baseball players have bats. You got one, or you plan to use a stick?”

Mamá frowned at me and Papi wrinkled his brow, but I didn’t care. They could be mad, it didn’t matter; they were having another baby anyhow.

“I got ten bats at home. They didn’t fit in my suitcase.” He eyed me from underneath his cap, then picked plantain from his teeth.

I missed Omar, but I couldn’t tell him that. Not with Blake around. Not while he was acting all high and mighty. So, instead, I let how I felt about Mamá and Papi spill onto him. I didn’t know how to feel about Blake yet. He was a guest, and I’d been raised not to be rude to guests. Family was one thing. They were part of you. You could hate your leg for cramping up or your eye for twitching. You could be mad all you wanted at your parts, but in the end, they were still there. You wouldn’t be you if you cut them off. All the families in our
barrio
were related somehow, and the ones that weren’t blood were at least Boricua. There weren’t any strangers.

But Blake was a stranger to me, to my island, to everybody. I didn’t want to like him. I tried to ignore him at first—speaking a mix of Spanish and English whenever he was nearby, so he wouldn’t know what was going on. So
he would know I knew more than he did. This was
my
home. He talked funny, too. Omar said he was from some-place called Amherst County in Virginia, and even though it was in the States, it was a lot like Puerto Rico. Blake grew up on a
finca
with chickens and goats and some of the same crops we had: corn and tobacco. He called his papi just plain “Pa” and it made me laugh every time he said it. His family had to sell their
finca
because they had bad crops, and his pa had to get work in the city driving a delivery truck. That’s how they ended up on Omar’s street.

He was pale and blond and blue-eyed and looked like the brother of the Simplicity girl I’d chopped up. The first day he was out in the sun, he burned blister-red and Mamá broke every stem of the aloe vera plant to rub on his face and shoulders. He didn’t cry, though, didn’t make one sound when the bubbles oozed yellow and left pink holes in his skin. I’d never seen skin do that. Not Puerto Rican skin, at least. I wondered if it would grow back brown like mine, if he was shedding his old skin for island skin. When he first got burned, I was glad he was in pain, glad that my island sun had hurt him, but then he tanned over and his eyes shone brighter than before. He was changing, becoming more Puerto Rican and less American. I wondered if that happened both ways.

But it wasn’t just his outside that was different. When he first came, he was quiet and seemed afraid of every little lizard, every mound of ants, every rooster’s crow. But
after a few days he started talking more, laughing and yelling louder than the chickens. He caught lizards with his hands, dug up anthills with sticks, and told me stories, mostly about Amherst County—about the apple festival and the grocery stores with cold cow’s milk in giant refrigerators. He’d never even tasted the powdered kind. When I showed him the can of Klim, he laughed and said, “That ain’t milk! Whatever that is, it didn’t come out of no cow, no goat either. Ain’t you never seen a goat suckle its baby?” I had, but I never really thought about cow’s milk until he told me.

“Zuck—zuck—zuck.” He puckered his lips and sucked his cheeks. “It’s like that.” The wet redness of his tongue peeked out between his lips. An unexpected flutter caught beneath my ribs, and I went hot and cold. Sometimes, when I sat next to him, I felt funny like that—sweaty and frozen, like eating a
piragua
.