When I Was Puerto Rican (28 page)

“Too much work,” she said.

Abuela didn’t think they were too much work. Every Friday she made them and served them with a clear fish head broth on the surface of which floated fresh cilantro.

My grandfather had died the year before, of old age. When I came to Abuela’s house, I mourned the emptiness of his room, from which he had emerged dressed in his white long-sleeve shirt and pants, his feet bare, his platinum hair cropped to a stubble.

Once, while Abuela was in the kitchen, I stepped inside Abuelo’s room. Everything looked the same: the narrow cot, the colorful picture of Jesus’ bleeding head crowned with thorns, a palm frond nailed above it, the simple table and chair. The room was cold, its cement walls whiter than I remembered, the window shaded by a breadfruit tree, its large leaves shedding pale reflections against the ceiling. I touched the small pillow where Abuelo’s head had rested and had an image of him deftly peeling an orange in a long ribbon to his bare feet, which were brown, calloused, and delicately shaped.

“He’s in Heaven, with Papa Dios,” Abuela said behind me, startling me out of the brooding sorrow that pressed against my chest. I let her lead me to the table, where the hot broth and gritty cornmeal soothed the ache.

“I hope when your Mami is in New York you will come visit me,” she said as we washed dishes.

“Mami already went to New York ... last spring.”

“I think she’s going again. Generosa will stay with you for a few weeks.”

I dried my hands on the hem of my dress and leaned against the sink. I took the emptiness of Abuelo’s room inside myself, the cold, stippled walls desolate and hard.

“You know your little brother’s foot is still giving him problems.”

I knew that. But it didn’t matter. His pain meant he got to spend more time with Mami than any of us did. He got to travel to New York, a place Mami spoke of with reverence.

“You have to be a help to your Mami,” Abuela said. “You’re the oldest. She depends on you.”

I caved in to my misery. Mami was leaving, and once more she hadn’t told me, hadn’t included me in her plans.

“I don’t like it when she goes away,” I cried into Abuela’s shoulder, the only place where I could express my loneliness, my fears. To have told Mami would have been wrong. She was overwhelmed by what she called “the sacrifices I have to endure for you kids,” and my love, expressed in demands, added a greater burden. I was keenly aware that she wasn’t
my
mother: I had to share her with Delsa, Norma, Hector, Alicia, Edna, and Raymond. But it seemed that somehow my share was smaller because I was the oldest, because I was
casi señorita,
because I ought to know better.

I walked home from Abuela’s house feeling Mami’s absence as if she had already left. By the time I got home, I had wrapped myself in the blanket of responsibility she was about to drop on me. It felt heavy, too big for me, yet if I made the wrong move, I was afraid it would tear, exposing the slight, frightened child inside.

It wasn’t that when Mami was gone we misbehaved more. It was simply that I couldn’t muster her authority, couldn’t manage to keep my sisters and brother in line with her strict rules of behavior. Not when I, too, saw an opportunity to break them.

“What do you kids like to eat?” Titi Generosa asked us, her voice scratchy as a
güiro.

“Oatmeal!” Hector sang.

“Oatmeal!” Delsa and Norma agreed.

“What else?” Titi Generosa asked.

“Pork chops and fried potatoes,” I said.

“I don’t like fried potatoes.” Edna pouted.

“And I don’t like the pork chops if they’re too crisp,” Alicia said, her blank-toothed grin an explanation.

“But you all like oatmeal.”

“Yeay!” we shrieked, as if she had just answered the question that won the jackpot.

“All right,” she mumbled. “Oatmeal it will be.”

I liked Titi Generosa. Her voice, which everyone said sounded as if she were hoarse, came forth in the rhythmic
jí
baro dialect I loved. But there was one thing Mami had warned us about, a habit we were not to pick up from her under any circumstances. Titi Generosa had a foul mouth.

She lived next to her mother, my
abuela,
whose every other word had God in it, was sister to my father, who wrote poems, and to Tio Vidal, who recited poetry as he clipped men’s hair in his barbershop. But Titi Generosa wasn’t inclined toward elegant speech, nor toward euphemisms. She spoke her mind in the most crude language I’d ever heard, as if there were nothing shameful in it, as if calling a woman a
puta
were not embarrassing. I loved that about her and wished for the courage to express myself in the hard language she used. But just thinking such words made me look around guiltily, as if Mami were standing behind me with a hot pepper, set to rid me of the habit of vulgar speech.

The other thing we liked about Titi Generosa was that even though she was a mother herself, she believed everything we told her, no matter how farfetched. We told her Mami didn’t mind if we wandered around the neighborhood, when in fact Mami didn’t allow us out of the front gate without permission, instructions for the exact route we were to take, and a promise to return at a strictly enforced time. We told Titi Generosa we didn’t have to bathe daily, that we had no chores, that we could eat candy for lunch, and that we could wear whatever we wanted whenever we felt like it.

Delsa and Norma, who liked to dress like princesses whenever possible, wore out their three good dresses in no time. Hector, who had a gift for talking people into doing things they weren’t sure they wanted to do, ingratiated himself with the candy store owner down the street and spent most of his day “helping” the owner and himself. Affable, placid Alicia whiled away her days in bed, playing with dolls in tents constructed from Mami’s sheets. And Edna tagged along with whoever seemed to be having the most fun. I disappeared on long walks through forbidden streets, free of Mami’s vigilance.

A couple of blocks from our house, on busy Avenida Roosevelt, I came upon an enormous round building, its zinc roof bright red, its walls adorned with murals of fierce fighting cocks with sharp beaks and murderous round eyes. It was ringed by hurricane fencing; a padlock sagged from a chain wrapped around the gate. From the rear of the building cocks screeched furiously, their cries mingling with the roar of the avenue, their cries interrupted every so often by the lilting
quiqui-ri-quí
of the roosters they once were. I felt sorry for those trapped birds, whose skinny legs were plucked to reveal spurs sharpened into lethal spikes.

Across the avenue, which was so busy I was afraid to cross to the other side, a development was going up. From backhoes, cranes, cement-mixing trucks, and men in hardhats came a roar of clanging metal, grinding gears, sliding gravel—and the occasional whistle at a passing woman.

Further down, behind a new shopping center with FOR RENT signs in the plate-glass windows, a neighborhood of
parcelas,
little farms, slept within the rustle of mango and avocado trees. Skinny dogs lay in the sun of the unpaved road; open sewers at either side obliterated the spicy smells wafting from cooking fires.

Boys played stickball in dusty yards, while girls strolled in giggly groups of two and three. I heard them whisper at the impropriety of my roving about unaccompanied, but I didn’t care. Unlike them, I had no one to whom I needed give account. The freedom I had gained from Titi Generosa’s ingenuousness was usually given only to boys, and it set me apart from any friends I might have had at the time, whose mothers were as cautious as mine. I savored it, as I might savor an expensive piece of candy given only at Christmas.

Behind Titi Generosa’s back we called her Titi Avena, Auntie Oatmeal, because oatmeal was all she cooked for us. Papi once asked why it was that there was never any food in the house, and we told him. He rubbed his chin and looked at us suspiciously but didn’t say anything.

Another day he gathered us on the back steps and told us that Titi Avena said we fought too much and gave her too many problems.

“You must behave yourselves,” he said, “or she won’t come to watch you anymore.”

This was no threat, since the only choice would have been, we thought, Mami’s speedy return from New York. We didn’t have to consult each other or come up with an elaborate plan. We simply did the exact opposite of what was expected, knowing we would be punished by Mami when she returned but willing to take the chance to have her back.

We took every opportunity to make Titi Avena miserable. We played Caribs and Spaniards in the house, whooping and pretend-dying around her as she stirred our oatmeal. Delsa, who had a more disciplined conscience than I did, tried to take over the role of responsible older sister, but we turned on her, sending her in tears to sit resentful and hurt in the corner of the yard while we broke furniture, tore bedding, and fought one another until we drew blood. I knew what we were doing was wrong, but it was fun, even though every night I went to bed worried that Mami would show up and see the dirty house, the torn sheets, the disorder that Titi Avena tried to prevent but couldn’t because she was outnumbered.

At first Papi didn’t seem to notice what we were doing. He worked seven days a week, dawn to dusk, and when he came home, he gave a look at the confusion in what was once an orderly, neat three-room house and shook his head but didn’t say much.

One morning, however, he didn’t go to work. When Titi Avena came, she helped me pack a bag, and Papi took me to Tío Lalo’s house.

“Why do I have to go there, Papi?” I cried on the bus.

“Because your
titi
can’t watch you kids. And I have to work, so I can’t stay home and take care of you.”

“Why doesn’t Mami come back?”

“I don’t know.” He said it as if he didn’t care if she ever returned.

He had a cup of coffee and a piece of Tio Lalo’s rice with coconut and raisins then kissed me on the forehead. “You be a good girl now, until your mother comes.”

I stood on the threshold of Tio Lalo’s house, Gladys’s watery eyes fixed on me, Angie’s face hiding a smile, Angelina’s catlike voice miaowing assurances that Mami would be back soon, and then I could see my sisters and brothers again.

The visit with my cousins took on a routine as dull and uninspired as the previous days had been exhilarating. Gladys and I rose early to peel potatoes, then we sat for hours in the front porch playing jacks or jumping rope to made-up rhymes. Occasionally, Angie joined us, but most of the time she remained sequestered in her pink room, listening to the music we were forbidden in the rest of the house. I once considered running away and packed my belongings in the ragged bag Mami had given me, but I didn’t have the courage to step out of Tio Lalo’s house into the large world beyond his stoop. I counted the days by the sacks of potatoes that Gladys and I peeled. Fingers burning, I stripped the hot skin off potatoes in silence, swallowing hurt and resentment with the same outward resignation that Gladys manifested. But although it seemed that Gladys had simply accepted her lot with meekness, I seethed, playing Titi Avena’s dirtiest words inside my head as I dropped potato after potato into the bowl where they would be mashed. One potato,
coño.
Two potato,
puñeta.
Three potato,
carajo.

DREAMS OF A BETTER LIFE

Adiós Candelaria hermosa
las espaldas te voy dando,
no siento lo que me llevo
sino lo que voy dejando.