The Time It Snowed in Puerto Rico (6 page)

“Mamá!” Papi called.

She looked up and smiled,
“Ay Faro!”
She kissed Papi’s cheeks. I hadn’t seen her since the day before my birthday when she’d taxicabbed up the mountain with three dozen
besitos de coco
macaroons, only to realize it was the wrong day. But I didn’t mind. It meant I got to celebrate for two days instead of one.

“Bendición”
I said.

“Yo
le bendigo en el nombre del espíritu santo.”
I bless you in the name of the Holy Spirit. Mamá Juanita was a devout Catholic, even more than my mamá, which was hard to imagine. She kissed my cheeks twice over and crossed my forehead.

“You have grown so tall—and what a beauty. You have my eyelashes, you know.” She batted them. They looked like two black flies caught on her face. I laughed. It felt nice to be beautiful like Mamá Juanita.

“And how is my prince?” she asked.

Papi was the eldest of Mamá Juanita’s boys and the only one she called a prince. All of her children had moved to the States except Tío Benny and Papi. She flew to Washington, D.C., and Miami for holidays, but stayed mostly in San Juan. She liked it in the city. She’d never truly been a
jíbara
woman.

“I’m fine, but Venusa is sick,” he replied.

Mamá Juanita opened her eyes big and stuck out her lips. “I hope it isn’t the cancer.”

My heart quickened. That’s how Abuelo died. Cancer. He’d been overseeing the
finca
like any other day when he got a sudden pain in his middle. The doctors said the tumor had been growing in him for years. I looked to Papi and ground my back teeth against each other. I didn’t want Mamá to die. I didn’t hate her that much.

Papi shook his head. “Morning sickness.”

“Ah.” She smiled. “Tell her to have
sopa de leche
and a sip of
malta
—she’ll be fine.” She patted Papi’s cheek.

I unclenched my jaw.

“Are you ready to see
el presidente de los Estados Unidos?”
she asked.

“Sí
. President John F. Kennedy.” Papi had taught me to say his full name perfectly.

“And so smart!” she said. Papi winked at me for doing well on the name, and I batted my eyes at him the way I’d seen Mamá Juanita do it. She took my hand in hers, soft from cocoa butter, like Mamá’s. “
Vámonos”
she said, and
we followed the crowds down San José Street toward the Plaza de Armas and City Hall.

The crowd filed into the square. A large woman who smelled of witch hazel and
café
stood in front of me. I tried not to breathe her in. Boys and girls my age and younger already claimed seats on top of the Four Seasons statues around the plaza. Papi tried to make room for us to squeeze closer to the front, but no one would budge.

“This is fine, Faro,” Mamá Juanita said.

“Can you see, Verdita?” Papi asked.

I could see every stitch in the witch-hazel woman’s teal
pantalones
, but that was about it. “No, Papi.”

He tried to move me, but the crowd was thick. Someone gave a push, and I was sandwiched between the witch hazel and a man who spoke a language I had never heard before, neither Spanish nor English. It sounded like the last time I was sick and coughed up green chunks. I held my breath and tried to sing a song to myself—one of Mamá’s nursery rhymes—but the heat of the day and the bodies around made it hard to keep a tune that didn’t follow the pounding in my temples. And then something started to rise from my stomach, a hot taste, like an iron spoon left in the soup pot. The colors around me, the brightness of Mamá Juanita’s dress, the blue of the
pantalones
, the green of the trees, all began to darken, to turn to grays. I looked up to the sky, trying to breathe, trying to reach the fresh air, but I couldn’t swallow it fast enough. The darkness crawled over and everything faded. The
smells and sounds turned to tastes: burning and bitter. The American and Puerto Rican flags flew side by side over City Hall. Red, white, and blue. Red and white. White.

I leaned forward and threw up. The crowd opened into a ring. Papi, Mamá Juanita, and I stood in the center of the
gallera
. All eyes on us.

“Ay bendito!”
said the witch-hazel woman. Her face twisted, and she gagged.

Papi scooped me into his arms and carried me out of the plaza, my legs wrapped around his waist like when I was little. We walked away from City Hall, Governor Muñoz, and President John F. Kennedy.

“Es okay,
es
okay,” Mamá Juanita kept saying.

I couldn’t stop the tears from coming. It wasn’t okay. I wanted to see America.

Papi walked us back to the long, green lawn in front of El Morro. He took off his
guayabera
, spread it over the grass, and I lay down. The wind swept over my body and I could breathe again. My tears dried in salty streaks. I was glad they were gone. I didn’t know what had risen up or why, but I was mad at myself for it.

Mamá Juanita bought a tamarind
piragua
and sat beside me, pulled my head into her lap, into a sea of soft white. She opened her umbrella, stuck the handle into the ground, and fed me sweet ice in the shade. Papi lay in his undershirt, his hands beneath his head.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“Sorry?
Por qué?
” Mamá Juanita asked.

“We missed President Kennedy.” I ran my hand over a patch of
morivivi
, life-and-death miracle plants. They pulled their fanned leaves into long prayerful limbs and
muerto
, died.

Papi stretched out long and crossed his ankles. “He is just a man, Verdita. You are my daughter. I can read about it tomorrow. Besides, your mamá is right. I don’t trust these slick-tongued politicians. I’ll wait to see what the newspaper says.” He turned his face toward the sunshine. “It’s good to be Boricua today, eh?” He nodded up.

A group of children flew kites. The wind blew steady and held the paper shapes high in the cloudless sky. The three of us lay on the lawn, watching them swoop and dart, swimming on the sea breeze. It was a beautiful day. I thought of Omar in the States. I doubted his sky was nearly as warm and clear. When I looked down again, the
morivivis
had opened back up, come back to
vivo
, life.

W
E DROPPED
M
AMÁ
Juanita at her pineapple-colored house near the University of Puerto Rico, so she wouldn’t have to ride the bus.

“Gracias
, Verdita,” she said through the jeep window.

“For what?” I asked.

“For the afternoon. I couldn’t have prayed to spend it any different,” she said, and kissed my forehead.
“Bendigo
.” Bless you.

At that moment I loved Mamá Juanita best of all. She
winked at me, hazel-gold flints in the sun. And when we drove away, I felt a pinch inside that made my eyes water and sting. I wished we lived in San Juan with her, not high up on the mountain, so far from the ocean and the rest of the world.

“Are you still feeling bad?” Papi asked.

I leaned my head into the crook of my arm, my elbow sticking out the car window. “No.” I took a bite of the rushing air, eating the wind like it was the doughy middle of
pan de agua
.

“Hungry?” Papi asked.

I wasn’t paying attention to the road ahead, focusing instead on grabbing the wind with my hand and pushing it into my mouth. We took a sharp turn, and my eyes snapped forward to the steady gaze of the American Big Boy.

“But Mamá?”

“We can eat her dinner for lunch tomorrow.”

I imagined Mamá sitting at home alone over a bowl of
mixta
. She’d probably be happy eating nothing but rice and beans until the day she died. Not me. I kissed Papi’s cheek as we pulled into the Big Boy parking lot. Inside, there was a short line leading up to the counter, where a large menu sign hung above a young man in a bright red and white uniform. Across the counter, fat bulbs of colored lights blinked steadily on and off. I couldn’t help but stare. The colors felt good.

“You want a
hamburguesa?”
Papi asked.

But the menu wasn’t just hamburgers. To the left was
the breakfast list: hotcakes, toast, sausage, and eggs. In the middle, chicken cooked five ways, soups, colossal onion rings, and the Big Boy double-decker hamburger. To the right, the desserts: strawberry pie, shakes, malts,
cafés
, and hot fudge sundaes. I was overwhelmed. I’d never been to a place with so many choices. Whatever Mamá made for dinner, we ate. And even the roadside kitchens only sold one thing at a time. Fried chicken or fish. Rice and beans. From the backs of trucks, farmers might sell a bunch of different fruits: oranges, bananas, mamey, custard apples, passionfruit, and acerolas. But I could get those from walking through our
finca
. I’d never been to a place with so much I hadn’t tasted. One cook could not make this much every day. Maybe the food grew from magical American beans—fields of fried onions and hamburger buns.

We reached the front of the line and the man in red and white said,
“Feliz Navidad
. Welcome to de Beeg Boya. May I take jur oda?”

A
jíbaro
. He didn’t speak proper English like we did.

“Sí, una hamburguesa Americana,”
I said.

“Y para usted?”
He looked at Papi.

Papi sucked his teeth.
“Una hamburguesa Americana también
.”

We paid, and the man gave us a plastic card with a number. We took a seat in the dining room. At the head of our table was a cardboard flyer with a cartoon of Santa Claus in a checkered Big Boy shirt. He flew across a dark sky behind two lines of horses with tree branches coming
out of their heads. In one hand he held a double-decker hamburger; in the other, the reins.

“Papi, why do they put sticks on the horses’ heads?” I asked.

“Those aren’t sticks, they’re reindeer,” he said.

“Why do they put reindeer on the horses’ heads?”

Papi laughed. “No, Verdita. Those aren’t horses. They’re reindeer. They have horns like goats,” he explained.

I’d never seen reindeer before, and Santa Claus had just started coming to Puerto Rico for the
Navidad
. Mamá and Papi said that he used to fly right over when they were young. It was a small island. And in the dark, back when not everybody had electricity, I could imagine we were easy to miss. Until this year, he had only visited the homes in the cities. Now he was coming to our mountain
barrio
. Papi saw the announcement in the newspaper and told me. I was sure it was going to be the most exciting
Navidad
ever. First, Saint Nicolas Claus would bring me presents and then, a week later, gifts from Saints Gaspar, Melchor, and Baltasar.

“There aren’t any reindeer in Puerto Rico. Right, Papi?” I asked, still staring at the cartoon.

“Sí
.”

“Are there reindeer in the States?”

“I think so.”

“Does Omar have reindeer in Washington, D.C.?”

“Maybe.”

We split a Coca-Cola, but I drank most of it before
the man brought our food. When he did, I had to turn the checkered paper tray around three times. It was the biggest sandwich I had ever seen, let alone eaten. I could tell that Papi was surprised too. He asked the server for a knife and fork, but the man said that most people used their hands.

“In the estates, they pick it up.
Como esto
.” The man cupped his hands into two Cs and pretended to take a bite.

“Gracias,”
Papi said, and picked up the hamburger as the man had shown. I did the same.

“I guess you have to eat American hamburgers like an
Americano
.” Papi shrugged and bit into the sandwich. Some red sauce seeped out the side and landed in a glob on the table. He wiped it up with his napkin and chewed, his cheeks bulging.

I tried to get my mouth around mine, but could only manage to take a chunk out of the white bread. I tried again and hit meat. It didn’t taste like I expected. Not like the men and women on television said it did. Sweet and spongy, it left my mouth feeling slimy around the corners.

“It’s good?” I asked Papi.

He turned the hamburger around and set it back in the tray.

I tried to smile, but my lips slid apart on the sugary grease. The bottom one pouted out. “They’re fun to eat,” I said and G-cupped my hamburger again, this time nosing my mouth beneath the bread. I didn’t want Papi to think I was ungrateful for my food. And if Americans liked hamburgers, then they had to be good. I figured I’d get
used to the taste soon enough. “Do you think President Kennedy eats hamburgers?” I asked.

“Probably.”

“Do you—” I started to say, chewing on a hunk of beef.

“Verdita, we may be eating American food, but we aren’t American cowboys chewing tobacco. Swallow first. Then speak.”

Papi chewed tobacco sometimes. I decided not to bring that up. Instead, I swallowed. “Do you think he likes them?”

“You should never presume to know a man’s likes or dislikes—only your own.”

Papi’s hamburger sat on the tray. One bite in the side. I had a pretty good guess about Papi’s dislikes, but I kept quiet.

I ate until my stomach pushed into the table ledge. I didn’t even really like the hamburger, but I liked that it came from America—that I was eating like an American. It made me feel bigger than my
finca
on the mountain, bigger than the whole island. I’d seen the States, even if I hadn’t seen President Kennedy. My stomach was full of America.

We took our leftovers home in brown bags. I still had half of my Big Boy double-decker. I’d save it, freeze it next to the plucked chickens and ripe bananas. Then later, when I wanted to eat America again, I’d have it ready.

“You weren’t hungry?” I asked when we were back in the jeep, the Styrofoam box on my lap, Papi’s whole hamburger alongside my half.

“Not too much. I need your mama’s food to fill me up.” He turned the ignition key, and we started our drive back up the mountain. I’d freeze his too, just in case he changed his mind. Just in case Mama’s food
wasn’t
enough.