The Time It Snowed in Puerto Rico (9 page)

In that moment, I saw it all. Mamá’s yarn holding the
turrones
on the tree, our brown paper from the kitchen, the heels from the Montgomery Ward catalog, the journal that Papi had scripted my official name in. Papi and Mamá gave me these gifts, not Santa. There really was no Santa.

Tears welled. The colored lights on the tree spread out like globs of syrup in a
piragua
.

“Now you have a place to write,” said Papi. “Good, clean pages.” He took the journal and ran his hand along the spine.

I wished I could go back to the hour before, the day before, or even the year before, when there might be a Santa who just couldn’t find our
barrio
, couldn’t find Puerto Rico; back to before I saw Mamá and Papi on the couch, before the cockfight and Papi at the
jíbaros
bar. I wanted to forget everything and go to the States.

“Feliz Navidad
, Verdita,” Mamá kissed my head. “Do you want some mango for breakfast?”

I wasn’t hungry, but I pulled an almond nougat off the tree and stuffed it in my mouth.

“You’ll get sick if you eat candy so early,” she warned.

I pulled another off. “I like it.” I could lie too.

“No sweets this early,” Papi said. We eyed each other without blinking, then the telephone rang. It was Tío Orlando in Washington, D.C., calling to wish us a Merry Christmas.

While Mamá and Papi handed the phone back and forth, I took my journal to my room and sat on the bed. With my pumps on, my feet could reach the floor; they couldn’t when I was barefoot. I took a black pen and scribbled across where Papi had written my name. Over the black jungle of spirals and lines, I wrote
Verdita
in strong, straight print.

“Verdita!” Papi called from the living room. “Come talk to Omar.”

I came out, still wearing my pumps, and click-clicked to the phone.

“You’ll get holes in the soles before you’ve even worn them out of the house,” Mamá said from the kitchen. She sliced a ripe mango, the mango I’d already decided I wasn’t going to eat, no matter how much my stomach growled.

“Hello?” I said into the receiver.

“What’s up?” said Omar.

“Huh?” I wondered how he knew I was wearing heels.

“Merry Christmas.”

“Merr—” It was hard to say it like he did. My
r
’s kept rolling together.
“Feliz Navidad,”
I said instead.

“Santa finally make it to the
barrio
this year?” Omar asked. He didn’t wait for me to answer. “I got a bike. You should see. It’s practically brand new. My best friend, Blake—his dad’s going to oil the chain for me.”

“Blake? Who’s that?” I asked.

“He moved in on my street. He’s over right now ‘cause I got this new board game called Risk. It’s cool, man.”

I didn’t know why Omar was calling me a man, nor did I think playing a game where you were cold sounded like fun. Omar and his dumb games.

“Well, it’s nice here. Not cold at all,” I said. “I’ll get my
real
gifts on Three Kings Day. I got new pumps—those are shoes with heels. And a journal.”

“Cool,” said Omar.

“No.” I was confused and annoyed with Omar and his new best friend. “It’s
warm
.”

“Yeah, okay. Well, I got to go. Blake’s ready to play. ‘Bye, Verdita.”

I handed the phone back to Papi. “How’s Omar?” he asked.

“Don’t know. He had a friend over. They’re playing some cold game.” I rolled my eyes.

Truth was, I missed him. We never said we were best friends, but I always kind of thought it. It stung my ears to hear him say it about somebody else.

“Omar is stupid,” I whispered under my breath. Papi heard.

He took the phone and scrunched his eyebrows together, but didn’t say anything, just went over to Mamá and kissed her neck and took a bite of mango. I thought of Teline’s kiss at the
parranda;
goosebumps rashed over my skin, and I shivered in the heat of Christmas morning.

A Blond Bomb

B
Y SPRING, THE CURLS I’D CUT AWAY ON THE DAY
we went to see President Kennedy had grown back in sprouts that stuck straight out of my temples, too short to pull back in my ponytail and too long to stay hidden. I tried to pomade them down, but they always sprang up and dried, crispy wet. Mamá noticed and asked me what I’d done to myself. I told her it was
my
hair, and I liked it that way, even though I didn’t.

She started snooping through my stuff around then, cleaning my room when I told her not to, asking if I had any dirty clothes to wash, standing outside the bathroom every time I came out. The two of us were home alone a lot. Papi stayed out later and later. He said they were a man short on the
finca
, but his razor box was empty. I knew where he was. I hadn’t forgotten the
jíbaros
bar—the piles
of money and the easy way he held the red playing cards. But I wouldn’t tell Mamá. I’d keep his secret.

After school each day, I wrote in my journal on the front porch, making myself too busy to be bothered. I cut out pictures from Mamá’s magazines and catalogs—pictures of pretty dresses and shoes and hairstyles. I taped them to the pages of my journal and wrote on the top of each why I liked them and where I imagined wearing the outfit. The first picture was the blond Simplicity girl with the bluebonnet dress. I liked everything about her: her dress, her shoes, her hair. At the top of the page, I wrote that I’d wear
her
every day and everywhere. I hid the journal under my mattress, pushing the book as far into the middle as my arm could reach. I didn’t want Mamá finding it and reading, like I knew she would. It was only fair—if Mamá and Papi had secrets, I could have them too.

Around the same time, thin, light hairs grew down low on my private parts. At first it was just a few, and I pulled them out thinking that maybe the curlicues I chopped off my head had accidentally found a spot somewhere else. But where I plucked one, five more grew. I hadn’t seen Mamá under her skirt before, but Papi’s arms and legs had dark curls, so I figured I took after him. The coloring was different, though, and I liked it—light brown and sometimes blond in the light. Once a week I locked myself in my bedroom and used Mamá’s clamshell mirror to look at them. I thought they were the prettiest part of me. I wanted all my hair to change color to match and thought maybe it
would, but after a few weeks of waiting, the hair on my head stayed black and fuzzy. I was sick of looking at it, especially now, with the sprouts at my temples. Titi Lola owned a hair salon. If anybody could help, she could.

“I want to get my hair done,” I announced one day. It was the first time I’d spoken directly to Mamá in a while. She smiled wide and put down the blue and white striped blanket she’d been crocheting since the
Navidad
. It lay over her lap like a giant doll skirt. “I want to go to Titi Lola’s,” I continued.

She eyed the frizz clipped sideways down my back. “I can call her today. I have to go to town on Saturday for an ALA meeting. I’ll drop you at Titi’s and run my errands,
sí
?”

That worked perfect, and it meant that Mamá wouldn’t be hanging around the salon telling me how to do my hair. A few weeks before, she’d started taking English lessons through the American Legion Auxiliary, and I guessed they were working because she brought home a thick English textbook with more words than my Dick and Jane. She sat at the kitchen table reading for hours when she wasn’t on the couch crocheting and watching
telenovelas
. It made me boiling mad. She was only learning English so Papi and I wouldn’t have our own language anymore. She wanted to get between us and was using words to do it.

Titi Ana took Mamá to the ALA meetings. It was a women’s club for the wives of the Borinqueneers. Papi was a Borinqueneer before I was born, and so was Tío Benny. They were part of the Sixty-fifth Infantry in Korea. Papi
was in G Company. G like a
guiro
. Tío Benny was in C Company. C like a
cuatro
guitar. I imagined the Sixty-fifth as a big troubadour band, each company a different instrument. I liked thinking of Papi making the rat-ti-tat sound of a scraped hollow gourd while Tío Benny played his guitar. Papi didn’t talk much about Korea except to say that the weather was bad and the food made him sick. He kept his uniform in the back of his closet. I used to sneak into his room and smell it. Korea was sweet and sour like
morcilla
, blood sausage. I licked it once to see if it tasted the same, but I only got a tongue full of fuzz that tasted like the bitter bark of sugarcane.

That next Saturday, after breakfast, Mamá came into my room. “Are you ready?” She wore a pink blouse that Vee-ed tight to her chest, then billowed out at the bottom where her waist was growing. I liked it, but I wouldn’t tell her that. A red, white, and blue ALA badge with Papi’s name and company was pinned to the left side of her shirt, just above the bulge of her breast.

“Sí,”
I said, and slipped into my pumps. I was only a little shorter than Mamá in them. We almost stood eye to eye. I’d grown three inches since the summer before, and with the heels on, everything looked different. From there, I realized how small Mamá was: short, thin from her head to her waist, then plump from the hips down, like all the muscle and fat had run away from her head and settled in her
culito
. I was sure I took after Papi—tall, with long legs and strong arms. Papi and I could climb every tree on our
finca
while Mamá seemed to grow tired from lifting her crocheting needle. I couldn’t wait until I was taller. That would be a fine day.

We normally walked to town, but Mamá had been sick on and off all winter. Now that she felt better, she didn’t want to risk getting wet in a rain shower. Sometimes in the spring, showers passed from one end of the island to the other in a comb of water. Drenching rain for a minute, then mist rising before the sunshine. Since Papi was home putting up new wire fencing in the chicken coop and tending to the
gandule
bush in the garden—the green pigeon peas had mites—we took his jeep to town. Mamá kept the top up and barely let me roll down the windows; she said she didn’t want the wind to mess her hair. Inside was hot and thick with her perfume; the bottled roses stank too candy-sweet to be natural. She kept the radio off and pumped the brake at every turn, starting and stopping all along the bendy road. It made my stomach feel like a beaten egg, frothy around the edges. I closed my eyes and hung my fingertips out the cracked window so they could drink in the air.

It took us twice as long to get to town as it did when Papi drove. When we finally pulled up to Titi Lola’s salon, I opened the jeep door before Mamá put the car in park.

“Ay bendito
, Verdita! You’re going to kill yourself,” Mamá said when I jumped out, the tires rolling to a stop. But I planned to be around long after her and then some.

Titi Lola’s house had two levels. On the bottom was
the salon, with pink cushioned high chairs and long mirrors strung around the room. On the top was their home: a small kitchen, a living room, Tío and Titi’s bedroom, Delia’s bedroom, and Teline and Pepito’s bedroom. Delia and Teline used to share a room, but Titi Lola made Teline move in with Pepito once Delia became a
señorita
. I felt bad for Teline, having to live with a baby who still wet the bed, and a boy on top of that. I didn’t have to share a room with anybody, and I never wanted to. The new baby could sleep in the tub for all I cared. My room was off limits.

I pushed open the door and stepped into the loud rhythm of a
bomba
coming from the old radio in the corner; women chattered back and forth through the mirrors and across the room to each other; a hair dryer began to blow, and water ran in the sink. The salon always felt alive with change and newness. It was full of women, a few actually getting their hair done while the rest sat in the high chairs reading magazines, tapping their feet to the radio, and lending an occasional
Ay, Dios mio!
to the gossip. Titi Lola stood in the middle with a paintbrush in one hand and a bowl of white paste in the other. An old, yellow-skinned woman with bits of hair poking through a rubber cap raised an eyebrow when I entered. She looked like a sea turtle, her skinny neck poking out of the green smock.

“Verdita! Here you are!” said Titi Lola. “You’re right on time. Is your mamá with you?”

The last time I’d seen Titi Lola was at the
Navidad
. Her hair was red then. Now it was brown. I liked it better red.
“Sí
.” I nodded toward the door. The bell over it clanged when she entered. I hadn’t heard it do that when I came in.

“Venusa!” everyone said at the same time.

Mamá moved around the room kiss-kissing cheeks. I followed behind, getting residual pecks before making my way to an empty high chair.

“I can’t stay. I have an ALA meeting and then an appointment.” Mamá stuck out her chest so everybody could see the pin.