When I Was Puerto Rican (37 page)

We teased her. “Mami has a boyfriend. Mami has a boyfriend.”

“Stop that nonsense,” she’d say. “You’re being disrespectful.” But there was a secret smile on her face, and we knew she wasn’t angry.

Tata didn’t like Francisco. “He’s younger than you are,” she told Mami. “You should be ashamed.”

But Mami wasn’t. Evenings, after work, she visited across the street, where Francisco lived with his parents and brother. After dinner they played cards around the dining room table. Mami never stayed long, but she always came back from his house happy. That put Tata in a dark mood, especially when she’d been drinking.

“Everyone’s talking,” she’d say.

“I don’t care,” Mami would answer. “It’s my life.”

Once, Tata and Don Julio had been drinking all afternoon. We knew to stay away from the kitchen, where they argued about politics, the price of ham hocks, whether or not his daughters were uppity, and which horse had won the trifecta. When Mami came home from work, she took her dinner to the living room and ate in front of the television while we did our homework.

There was a knock on the door and when Mami opened it, Francisco stood in the hall, a shy smile on his lips.

“Who’s there?” Tata called from the kitchen in a challenging tone.

Mami didn’t answer, but stepped aside to let Francisco in. As soon as she saw him, Tata flew out of the kitchen like a witch toward the full moon and screamed insults at Francisco.

“Tata, please,” Mami begged, “behave yourself. He’s a guest. Don’t embarrass me.”

But Tata pushed against Don Julio, who held her back, as if she wanted to jump on Francisco and beat the daylights out of him. In tears, Mami let Francisco out, then she gathered us for bed while Don Julio dragged Tata back to the kitchen. We turned the lights out in our part of the apartment, but we could still hear Tata and Don Julio arguing about whether a thirty-year-old woman with seven children should encourage a man in his twenties.

“And what about your daughters?” Tata yelled. “What kind of an example are you giving them?” Mami just pulled the covers over her head.

A week later we moved down the street to a two-room apartment in front of a bottling company. Francisco came to visit every day. He could be counted on to play gin rummy and dominoes, to bring us candy and soda, and to make Mami smile like she hadn’t done in a long time. One day he came for dinner, and the next morning he was still there. After that, he lived with us.

That summer, Marilyn Monroe killed herself.

Across the street from our apartment trucks idled in the loading zone of the soft-drink warehouse at all hours while men loaded crates of cola, grape, and orange soda in to the backs of the trucks. I often leaned on the window sill and watched the huge garage doors groaning up and down, the forklifts whizzing in and out with pallets stacked with crates of delicious fizzy drinks.

I listened to the radio anecdotes about Marilyn and watched the activity across the street and down the block, where someone had opened a hydrant and children squealed in and out of the rushing water. No matter how hot it got, Mami wouldn’t allow us to cool off in the hydrant with the neighborhood kids, whom she considered a bad influence.

A truck pulled up, the driver went into the building across the street, came out, sat in his truck, and waited for it to be loaded. He waved at me, and when I looked, he dove his hand into his crotch and pulled out what looked like a pale salami. I couldn’t take my eyes off it as his hand pumped rhythmically to the loud rock and roll on his radio. He was at it a long time, and I lost interest, closed the venetian blind, and joined my sisters and brothers in front of the television set. But after a while I was curious, so I went back and lifted one of the blinds. He still sat there, but his hand now toyed around his crotch as if he’d lost something. He saw me and began rubbing again, a grimace on his face.

I’d changed enough diapers to know what happened if a boy was touched a certain way, but this man, touching himself and only coming to life if I watched, added a new dimension to my scanty knowledge of sex.

The fact that his penis had grown when I was looking meant something. I hadn’t done any of the things women did to get men interested. I’d been minding my own business at home, hadn’t dressed up, had not acted provocatively, had not flirted, had not, I was sure, smiled when he waved for me to look. It was alarming, and at once I realized why Mami always told me to be
más disimulada
when I stared at people, which meant that I should pretend I wasn’t interested.

Men only want one thing, I’d been told. A female’s gaze was enough to send them groping for their
huevos
. That was why Marilyn Monroe always looked at the camera and smiled. Men only want one thing, and until then, I thought it was up to me to give it up. But that’s not the way it was. A little girl leaning out a window watching the world fulfilled the promises Marilyn Monroe made with her eyes. I who had promised nothing, who knew even less, whose body was as confusing as the rock and roll lyrics accompanying the trucker’s hand pumping up and down to words yelled, not sung.

I left the window and looked for Mami in the kitchen. She was in her at-home clothes, her hair not curled, her eyebrows not drawn in.

“What’s the matter?” she asked. “Why do you look so scared?”

“Nothing,” I said.

It had all been my fault. Somehow, my just being at the window had made it happen. I went back, opened the blinds all the way, and watched openly. He was having a great time, while I vacillated between fear and curiosity, between embarrassment and the knowledge that, like it or not, I was having my first sexual experience.

I smiled at him then, a wide, seductive, Marilyn Monroe smile that took him by surprise. His eyes veiled suspiciously, and he leaned over to see if anyone else was hanging out from the other windows in the building. But it was just the two of us, me smiling brazenly while inside I quaked in terror, and him, flustered beyond comprehension.

I wondered what I’d done, why he stuffed his now limp penis back into his pants, zipped himself up, leaned his left elbow on his window, and parked his chin on his hand, his eyes focused on the warehouse full of soft drinks, the bald circle on the back of his head as vulnerable as a baby’s soft spot. Whatever he’d wanted from me he didn’t want anymore, and I was certain it was because I’d been too willing to give it to him.

YOU DON’T WANT TO KNOW

Dime con quien andas, y te diré quién eres.

Tell me who you walk with, and I’ll tell you who you are.

A
t about the same time that Mami started looking pregnant Francisco was rushed to the emergency room with a stomachache. We thought he had appendicitis, but after many tests and operations Mami told Tata that Francisco had cancer. We moved, for the fourth time in twelve months, to a bigger apartment in the building next door, so that Tata could live with us again. Every day Mami went from work straight to the hospital. She stayed with Francisco until visiting hours were over then came home, exhausted, hungry, her eyes red. She was very thin, but her belly grew high and round, and everyone knew she was having a boy.

Francisco was in and out of the hospital. When he was home, Tata was nice to him, prepared him special broths, cooked him creamy rice with milk. But when she drank, she was still nasty.

We steered clear of the bedroom Francisco shared with Mami, kept the television low, and did our homework and fighting in the kitchen, where he couldn’t hear us as well. Every once in a while he came out of the room dressed in his pajamas, a cotton robe wrapped around his slight body, his hands large and bony, holding the front of the robe as if he didn’t trust the knot he had tied at his waist. Even with all those clothes on he looked like a skeleton. His elbows were pointy, and the skin on his face, hands, and feet was translucent. Bones stuck out of his back like truncated wings. His black hair, over which he couldn’t trouble as much anymore, grew long and lanky, so that it often covered his eyes, making him look younger.

Mami and Francisco’s baby was born in March. Francisco was in the hospital, but he came home the same day that Mami did. For days he lay in bed with Franky on his chest, singing
jíbaro
songs in a soft voice.

Francisco’s family didn’t want him living with us. Every time he went in for another operation, they argued with Mami that he should be with them. It was embarrassing to hear his family bickering right over his bed, as if he couldn’t hear them.

One time Mami and I went to see him at King’s County Hospital. He was in a huge ward with waxed floors, beds lined up against the walls, each with a small night table to its right and a pale yellow curtain to separate it from the other beds. There was a green metal chair next to his bed.

Mami sent me out to get water in a basin. She then bathed and powdered Francisco, changed his johnny, shaved him, and brushed his hair. His eyes had grown larger and settled deep into his skull. His pale skin had turned gray and smooth. He looked as serene as the dead baby whose eyes I had closed in El Mangle.

“I saw an angel last night,” he told Mami.

“Don’t talk such nonsense,” Mami said, but she gave me a fearful look.

“It was dressed in white and floated inside a ball of light.”

“It was a nurse, probably.”

When we came home, Mami cried when she told Tata about Francisco’s vision.

A few days later he was released from the hospital to his parents’ house. The next day he was dead. Tata said they fed him peanuts, which killed him.

Mami cried for days. Tata took care of her, cooked special treats, and took Franky to bed with her so that Mami could rest.

Mami was in mourning for over a year, and for that whole time she kept white novena candles lit on her dresser, their flame throwing ghostly shapes on the ceiling, where we all could see them.

I had corresponded with Papi for the first few weeks after our arrival in Brooklyn. I described our apartments,
la marketa,
the Jewish people, the Italian girls, and the books I was reading. He wrote back with remembrances from Abuela and newspaper clippings. But when my sisters and brother came, they brought stories with them that he hadn’t included in his letters.

Papi, Delsa said, had married shortly after Mami left with me, Edna, and Raymond. He had scattered Delsa, Norma, Hector, and Alicia among relatives, hadn’t visited them regularly, and hadn’t seemed to care what happened to them. He had, in fact, seemed relieved to be rid of them so that he could start his new life, just as we were starting ours.

I asked Mami about this. She said that yes, Papi had another wife, and there was no chance we would ever live with him again. I wrote him a letter asking why he hadn’t told me, and I told him that from now on he was as good as dead to me. He wrote to Mami accusing her of turning his children against him. Mami yelled at me for lying to Papi about what she said about him. It was all mixed up. Mami blamed me. Papi blamed Mami. I blamed Papi. But none of us said we were sorry.