When I Was Puerto Rican (18 page)

With Mami at work, I took advantage of Gloria’s vigilance with the younger kids to make my own getaway into the montes, up trees, behind sheds and outhouses, and once, on a dare, into Lalao’s
finca,
where I filled the skirt of my dress with the coveted grapefruits.

“Where did these come from?” Mami asked when she came home from work.

“I found them,” I said.

“No, she didn’t. She sneaked into Lalao’s
finca
with Tato and Pepito.” Delsa smirked, and Mami’s eyes disappeared behind a frown.

“Haven’t I told you not to go in there?”

“They were on the ground, just on the other side of the fence....”

She looked at the grapefruits, green speckled with yellow and tiny black dots. Their citrus fragrance filled the room like smoke.

“Don’t go in there again,” she said, picking one up, “or I’ll really let you have it.”

She peeled one in long strips and sucked on the sweet juice hungrily. I sought Delsa’s eyes and saw fear, not of Mami but of me, because Delsa knew that while Mami was at work the next day, I’d get her for tattling.

One morning Mami cooked our dinner, left everything ready for Gloria, dressed, and got us off to school one at a time. When I came home, she was still there, her work clothes stretched on the bed, rumpled and forgotten.

“Where’s Gloria?” I asked.

“She escaped,” Mami said, which meant that Gloria had eloped. No girl ever ran away by herself, although boys disappeared for weeks the minute they thought of themselves as men.

“Is she coming back?”

“I don’t know. No one knows the man she ran off with.”

Mami couldn’t go to work for a couple of weeks, and we had to live with her bad temper and complaints. “I’m not the kind of person to sit around doing nothing,” she said to Doña Ana, and I wondered how she could think of her housework as nothing when she spent hours doing it.

“So how do you like the factory?” Doña Lola asked Mami as we shucked pigeon peas in her new kitchen.

“It’s good work,” Mami answered, pride in her voice. “I started as a thread cutter, and now I’m a sewing machine operator.”

“¡Que bueno!”

Doña Lola’s son Tato ran into the kitchen. “Is there anything to eat?”

“Rice and beans in the pot.”

Tato rattled lids and dropped a spoon on the new cement floor. Doña Lola stood up with a jerk. “Let me serve you,” and under her breath, “Men are so useless.”

Tato looked at me from beneath his long lashes. Doña Lola handed him a tin plate mountained with white rice and red beans. He sat in the corner, spooning it in as if he hadn’t eaten in a week.

He was a year older than I, skinny, brown as a chocolate bar, his hair orange, his hazel eyes full of mischief and laughter. He was the dirtiest boy I’d ever seen, not because he didn’t wash, but because he couldn’t stay clean no matter how many times Doña Lola dunked him in the tin tub in back of the house.

Tato was not afraid of anything. He caught bright green lizards, pinched their jaws at the side, and forced them to bite his earlobes, to which they clung like festive, squirming decorations. He trapped snakes and draped them around his neck, where they writhed in sumptuous silvery waves that seemed to tickle. He speared iguanas and roasted them on open fires, claiming that their meat was tastier than chicken. He was an expert slingshot maker, and it was he who taught me to choose the forked branches that we stripped of bark, dried in the sun, and carved until we could tie split inner tube strips and a rubber square that held the lethal stones we shot with uncanny accuracy.

I was as good as he with both slingshots and painstakingly constructed bows and arrows, with which I could drop birds in flight. We had an uneasy, competitive friendship, made more special by the fact that Mami didn’t approve.

“You’re almost
señorita.
You shouldn’t be running wild with boys,” she’d tell me. But I didn’t have anything in common with the girls my age. Juanita Marin had found more kindred friendships at her end of the barrio, and Doña Zena’s daughters, who were about my age, were kept on a tight leash because of their parents’ religiosity, which didn’t allow for outside influences. My sisters close to my age were not as interesting as the neighborhood boys who ran and climbed and didn’t mind getting dirty.

Tato put his dish and spoon in the dishwater. “Let’s go play outside.” His small, dirty face betrayed no hint of what we were really going to do.

“Can I Mami?”

She cracked the tip off a pod, pulled the string, snapped the casing open, slid her thumb inside the slithery shell, and added the peas to the mound in the bowl between her knees. She looked at me with a warning. “Don’t go too far. We’re going home soon.”

I thought maybe she had read our minds, and for a minute I was afraid to go with him.

“Come on!” Tato called from the yard.

I backed out of the kitchen, but Mami and Doña Lola had gone back to their shucking. We ran around the yard a couple of times to throw them off then sneaked into the oregano bushes that grew thick and fragrant behind the outhouse.

“You first,” he said.

“No way! You first.”

He pulled down his shorts and just as quickly pulled them up. “Your turn,” he said.

“I didn’t see anything!”

“Yes you did!”

“I didn’t. And I’m not going to show you mine until I do!” Although I’d seen both Hector’s and Raymond’s penises when I changed their diapers, I’d never seen one outside the family. Tato had no sisters, so I was pretty sure he’d never seen a girl’s private parts. I, of course, had seen several of those, too.

“Well, I’m not pulling my pants down again!” Tato said walking away.

“Fine. I don’t have to see your silly old little chicken, I’ve seen my brothers’, and I bet they’re nicer than yours.”

“Those are baby
pollitos.
I’m already big. Mine has hair on it!”

“Oh, sure!”

“It does. And it gets so big, it can already go into a woman.”

“You’re disgusting!”

“I can get it into a woman and wiggle it around and around, like this.” He wriggled his finger in arches that circumscribed a space much larger than his hand, at the same time wiggling his hips in figure eights.

“You’re sick!” I ran into Doña Lola’s yard just as Mami came out.

“I was coming to find you,” she said, looking behind me. Tato watched us from the path into the bushes. “Grab that bag. We’re going home.”

Doña Lola handed me a sackful of pigeon peas.

“Tato, go and feed those pigs! They’ve been squealing all afternoon.” He ran off, and Mami led the way up the road to our house.

“What were you two doing in back of the outhouse?” she asked casually.

“Just playing.” I hoped she hadn’t heard us talking. She didn’t say any more, and I took the shortcut home, through the yucca plants, past the barren mango tree at the edge of Lalao’s
finca.

Another day Tato and I were behind the latrine.

“I can see it better if you squat,” Tato said, crouching in front of me to get a better look at the smooth slit between my legs.

“Forget it!” I pulled up my panties.

“But it’s not fair. You saw mine real good!”

“Sí.
And you lied. There’s no hair on it at all.”

“You didn’t look close enough.”

“There was nothing to see. It’s just as shrivelled and small as my baby brother’s.”

“You have to rub it to make it big.”

“No way am I touching your dirty little
pollito!”

“It’ll grow big and long, you’ll see!”

“No way!”

“I’ll touch you if you touch me.”

“I don’t want you to touch me!”

“It feels good.” He rubbed his crotch as if he had an itch. He thrust his hips out toward me. “Oooh, it’s so good.... Mmmm!” He closed his eyes and smacked his lips like he was eating the sweetest candy.

I stared at him writhing, his tongue flicking in and out of his mouth, foamy spit at the corners, his eyes rolling in his head, his hands moving faster and faster. “Men are such pigs!” The words flashed into my head like the headline on a newspaper, only I heard it too, in the voices of Mami and Doña Lola, Gloria and Doña Ana, Abuela,
bolero
singers, radio soap opera actresses, and my own shrill scream into Tato’s face.

“¡
Cochino
!” Pig! His eyes popped open, and his mouth dropped into a grimace that became a lewd, ugly, humiliating smile. He tried to grab between my legs, and, enraged, I drew back my foot and kicked as hard as I could so that it seemed that I lifted him on my shin before he crumpled to the ground, hands between his legs, no longer rubbing but holding fast to what I was afraid had come loose.

Mami and Doña Lola came running. Between sobs, Tato told them I had kicked him for no reason at all, and Mami dragged me home, her fingers pinching my bony arm.

I screamed, trying to explain what Tato had tried to do. But Mami wouldn’t listen. I pulled loose and ran, and she chased me into our yard and through the house. On the way out the kitchen door, she grabbed a frying pan and thwacked my head. She tied my wrists together in one of her strong hands, and beat me, again and again, raising welts on my arms, my back, the back of my head, my forehead, behind my ear. My sisters and brothers came out from wherever they’d been playing, even Raymond who had just learned to walk, and they watched as Mami lifted the pan over her head and let it fall on the ball I had become, hanging from her hand like an unripe fruit on an unbending tree.

“Don’t you ever, ever do that again,” she growled, and I wasn’t sure if she meant kicking a boy between his legs or letting him see my private parts. Because it seemed to me she knew what Tato and I did behind the latrine while she and Doña Lola talked about their lives. She knew, and she was waiting for me to do something worse than what I could imagine so that she could do something far worse than what I would expect. I let my body go limp to take her abuse, and part of me left my body and stood beside my sisters and brothers, their eyes round, tear filled, frightened, their fingers interlaced into each other’s, their skinny bodies jerking with every hit I took.