When I Was Puerto Rican (11 page)

The next expert uncovered another easel on which there was a picture of a big black bug. A child screamed, and a woman got the hiccups.

“This,” the expert said scratching the top of his head, “is the magnified image of a head louse.”

Following him, another
Americano
who spoke good Spanish discussed intestinal parasites. He told all the mothers to boil their water several times and to wash their hands frequently.

“Children love to put their hands in their mouths,” he said, making it sound like fun, “but each time they do, they run the risk of infection.” He flipped the chart to show an enlargement of a dirty hand, the tips of the fingernails encrusted with dirt.

“Ugh! That’s disgusting!” whispered Mami to the woman next to her. I curled my fingers inside my palms.

“When children play outside,” the expert continued, “their hands pick up dirt, and with it, hundreds of microscopic parasites that enter their bodies through their mouths to live and thrive in their intestinal tract.”

He flipped the chart again. A long flat snake curled from the corner at the top of the chart to the opposite corner at the bottom. Mami shivered and rubbed her arms to keep the goose bumps down.

“This,” the
Americano
said, “is a tapeworm, and it is not uncommon in this part of the world.”

Mami had joked many times that the reason I was so skinny was that I had a
solitaria,
a tapeworm, in my belly. But I don’t think she ever knew what a tapeworm looked like, nor did I. I imagined something like the earthworms that crawled out of the ground when it rained, but never anything so ugly as the snake on the chart, its flat body like a deck of cards strung together.

“Tapeworms,” the expert continued, “can reach lengths of nine feet.” I rubbed my belly, trying to imagine how long nine feet was and whether I had that much room in me. Just thinking about it made my insides itchy.

When they finished their speeches, the experts had all the mothers line up and come to the side of the room, where each was given samples according to the number of people in their household. Mami got two sacks of groceries, so Delsa had to carry Edna all the way home while I dragged one of the bags full of cans, jars, and bright cartons.

At home Mami gave each of us a toothbrush and told us we were to clean our teeth every morning and every evening. She set a tube of paste and a cup by the door, next to Papi’s shaving things. Then she emptied the bags.

“I don’t understand why they didn’t just give us a sack of rice and a bag of beans. It would keep this family fed for a month.”

She took out a five-pound tin of peanut butter, two boxes of cornflakes, cans of fruit cocktail, peaches in heavy syrup, beets, and tuna fish, jars of grape jelly and pickles and put everything on a high shelf.

“We’ll save this,” she said, “so that we can eat like
Americanos cuando el hambre apriete.”
She kept them there for a long time but took them down one by one so that, as she promised, we ate like Americans when hunger cramped our bellies.

One morning I woke up with something wiggling inside my panties. When I looked, there was a long worm inside. I screamed, and Mami came running. I pointed to my bottom, and she pulled down my panties and saw. She sat me in a basin of warm water with salt, because she thought that might draw more worms out. I squatted, my bottom half in, half out, expecting that a
solitaria
would crawl out of my body and swim around and when it realized it had come out, try to bite me down there and crawl back in. I kept looking into the basin, but nothing happened, and after a long time, Mami let me get up. That night she gave us only a thin broth for supper.

“Tonight you all get a
purgante,”
she said.

“But why,” Delsa whined. “I’m not the one with worms.”

“If one of you has worms, you all have worms,” Mami said, and we knew better than to argue with her logic. “Now go wash up, and come get your medicine.”

The
purgante
was her own concoction, a mixture of cod-liver oil and mugwort, milk of magnesia, and green papaya juice, sweetened to disguise the fishy, bitter, chalky taste. It worked on our bellies overnight, and in the morning, Delsa, Norma, Hector, and I woke up with cramps and took turns at the latrine, joining the end of the line almost as soon as we’d finished. Mami fed us broths, and in the evening, a bland, watery boiled rice that at least stuck to our bellies and calmed the roiling inside.

“Today,” Miss Jiménez said, “you will be vaccinated by the school nurse.”

There had never been a school nurse at Macún Elementary School, but lately a woman dressed in white, with a tall, stiff cap atop her short cropped hair, had set up an infirmary in a corner of the lunchroom. Forms had been sent home, and Mami had told me and Delsa that we would be receiving polio vaccines.

“What’s polio?” I asked, imagining another parasite in my belly.

“It’s a very bad disease that makes you crippled,” she said.

“Is it like meningitis?” Delsa asked. A brother of one of her friends had that disease; his arms and hands were twisted into his body, his legs splayed out at the knees, so that he walked as if he were about to kneel.

“No,” Mami said, “it’s worse. If you get polio, you die, or you spend the rest of your life in a wheelchair or inside an iron lung.”

“An iron lung!?!?” It was impossible. There could not be such a thing.

“It’s not like a real lung, silly,” Mami laughed. “It’s a machine that breathes for you.”

“¡
Ay Dios Mío!”
Polio was worse than
solitaria.

“But how can it do that?” Delsa’s eyes opened and shut as if she were testing to see whether she was asleep or awake.

“I don’t know how it works,” Mami said. “Ask your father.”

Delsa and I puzzled over how you could have an iron lung, and that night, when Papi came home from work, we made him draw one for us and show us how a machine could do what people couldn’t. He drew a long tube and at one end made a stick figure face.

“It looks like a can,” Delsa said, and Papi laughed.

“Yes,” he said, “it does. Just like a can.”

Miss Jiménez sent us out to see the nurse two at a time, in alphabetical order. By the time she got to the S’s, I was shaky, because every one of the children who had gone before me had come back crying, pressing a wad of cotton against their arm. Ignacio Sepúlveda walked next to me, and even though he was as scared as I was, he pretended he wasn’t.

“What crybabies!” he said. “I’ve had shots before and they don’t hurt that much.”

“When?”

“Last year. They gave us shots for tuberculosis.” We were nearing the lunchroom, and Ignacio slowed down, tugged on my arm, and whispered, “It’s all because of politics.”

“What are you talking about? Politics isn’t a disease like polio. It’s something men talk about at the bus stop.” I’d heard Papi tell Mami when he was late that he’d missed the bus because he’d been discussing politics.

Ignacio kept his voice to a whisper, as if he were telling me something no one else knew. “My Papá says the government’s doing all this stuff for us because it’s an election year.”

“What does that have to do with it?”

“They give kids shots and free breakfast, stuff like that, so that our dads will vote for them. ”

“So?”

“Don’t you know anything?”

“I know a lot of things.”

“You don’t know anything about politics.”

“Do so.”

“Do not.”

“Do so.”

“Who’s the governor of Puerto Rico, then?”

“Oh, you could have asked something really hard! ... Everyone knows it’s Don Luis Muñoz Marín.”

“Yeah, well, who’s
el presidente
of the Jun-ited Estates?”

“Ay-sen-hou-err.”

“I bet you don’t know his first name.”

I knew then I had him. I scanned Papi’s newspaper daily, and I had seen pictures of
el presidente
on the golf course, and of his wife’s funny hairdo.

“His first name is Eekeh,” I said, puffed with knowledge.

“And his wife’s name is Mami.”

“Well, he’s an imperialist, just like all the other
gringos
!” Ignacio said, and I was speechless because Mami and Papi never let us say things like that about grown-ups, even if they were true.

When we came into the lunchroom, Ignacio presented his arm to the nurse as if instead of a shot he were getting a medal.

He winced as the nurse stuck the needle into him and blinked a few times to push back tears. But he didn’t cry, and I didn’t either, though I wanted to. There was no way I’d have Ignacio Sepúlveda calling me a crybaby.

“Papi, what’s an imperialist?”

He stopped the hammer in midstrike and looked at me. “Where did you hear that word?”

“Ignacio Sepúlveda said Eekeh Aysenhouerr is an imperialist. He said all
gringos
are.”

Papi looked around as if someone were hiding behind a bush and listening in. “I don’t want you repeating those words to anybody ...”

“I know that Papi.... I just want to know what it means. Are
gringos
the same as
Americanos?”