When I Was Puerto Rican (26 page)

“So how long will you be in New York?” Tio Lalo asked.

Everyone looked at me. Mami wore a frightened expression. “A couple of weeks,” she said.

“You’re going to New York?” I couldn’t believe she hadn’t told me. Now I knew why I had to spend time in this quiet, cheerless house.

“Your grandmother made an appointment for Raymond to see a specialist. Maybe they can save his foot.” It was an apology, not a reason.

“But why didn’t you tell me?” I couldn’t help the whine in my voice, the tightness that closed my throat, making it difficult to speak without pain. “Why can’t I go with you?”

“Your Mami can’t afford to take both of you,” Angelina said. “It’s very expensive to go to New York. Besides, we’re so happy to have you. You’ve never been to visit us,” she said, as if it were my fault.

“Come on,” Tio Lalo muttered, “don’t make it hard for your Mami.”

Mami had never needed anyone to defend her, and all of a sudden it was as if she were the child and I the grown-up who was exacting justification for something that should have been obvious.

“I’ll come for you as soon as I get back,” she said.

“When?”

“A couple of weeks.”

“But when? Which day?” I didn’t care if they all thought I was a spoiled, disrespectful, impertinent brat.

Mami took in a long, deep breath that doubled the size of her chest and cleared the flush from her cheeks. “Sunday after next.” She was embarrassed by my behavior, but she wasn’t going to do anything about it in front of her uncle.

“What time?” I pushed.

“One-thirty in the afternoon,” she said through her teeth.

“Your beans are getting cold,” Angelina murmured, her voice a miaow.

I ate the tasteless beans, the sticky rice, the greasy fried chicken. To my right Mami felt tense and tight, but she talked to Angelina and Tio Lalo as if nothing special was happening, as if disappearing into the sky for weeks was something she did all the time, like killing chickens and washing her hair. Across from me, Angie toyed with her food, dispersing it over her plate so that it would look as if she’d eaten it. Gladys munched as slowly and deliberately as a cow, her huge black eyes fixed on me, her lips curled into a slight smile.

That night I lay next to Gladys, unable to sleep.

“If I ever talked to Mamita like that,” Gladys whispered,

“Papito would beat me until I had no skin left.”

I felt no sympathy, no desire to accept hers.

“Once I talked back, and Papito took me behind the kitchen and beat me with his belt.”

I had no idea where my sisters and brothers were, who was watching them while Mami took Raymond to New York. I wondered if Papi had to stay home from work. Why couldn’t I stay with him and the kids? After all, I was the oldest.

“Angie talks back all the time, but they never hit her.”

Mami probably didn’t trust me with my sisters and brothers. After Raymond’s accident she never left me alone with them for more than an hour. Maybe she knew his accident was my fault.

“Papito favors her because she’s named after Mamita. I don’t know why they didn’t give me her name. I’m the oldest. I should have my mother’s name.”

Mami was probably planning to stay in New York and leave us in Puerto Rico. Maybe she had given us away, the way people who couldn’t take care of their kids did. Maybe she gave me away to Tio Lalo and Angelina because they were so strict.

“They make me peel all the potatoes. She always has an excuse. Now they’ll probably make you peel her potatoes while she sleeps late.”

“What potatoes? What are you talking about?”

“For the stuffed potato balls. Papito is famous around here for them.”

“What does that have to do with me?”

“You’re here to peel potatoes. Every morning he boils two sackfuls, and we can’t do anything else until they’re clean, or Papito gets mad.”

“Why do we have to do it?”

“Who else? He has to tend the store, and Mamita has to clean the house.”

It wasn’t fair. Mami had given me away to Evangelicals who would make me peel potatoes all day long. I scrunched the pillow over my head and let the sobs out. It seemed like more punishment than I deserved for letting Raymond have an accident.

Tio Lalo set the potatoes to cook as soon as he woke up, and he had drained them by the time Gladys and I sat down to breakfast. No sooner did we finish eating than he called us into the room behind the store.

“Show her how it’s done,” he said to Gladys.

She speared a steaming potato with a fork and showed me how to peel it until there wasn’t a spot on it. “If there are any peels left,” she said, “the balls come out gritty and the customers complain.”

The potatoes had to be peeled while they were hot, she explained, because the skin stuck if they got too cold. Papito, she said, didn’t want a lot of waste.

Every so often, Tio Lalo came and stood behind me to see how I was doing. Whenever he did, I shook inside but let my fingers fly over the potatoes, stripping off every centimeter of skin until they were clean, yellow, and unblemished.

Two Sundays later I woke up early, peeled potatoes, then packed my bag. I showered, braided my hair with ribbons, and sat in the living room reading a religious magazine while I waited for Mami to pick me up. Angelina had taken the girls to church, as she did every Sunday. To my relief, Angelina didn’t seem intent on converting me. She had probably given me up for lost to the Devil the first day we met.

I sat in my nice dress, with my good shoes on, trying to look as innocent and good as I possibly could so that when Mami came she would see that I had learned my lesson. But Mami didn’t come. Angelina and the girls came back from church, and we sat down to Sunday supper, and Angie disappeared into her room and Gladys into hers, and I waited, feeling more and more abandoned as afternoon lengthened into evening, then night.

Tio Lalo closed the store, came inside the house, found me sitting on the same chair, my bag at my side, the religious magazine crinkled from having been read so many times.

“She’s not coming.”

“How do you know?”

“She wrote me a letter that says she’s coming next Friday.” He smiled.

He was lying, even though he was Evangelical and they were supposed to tell the truth. He had waited until I was humiliated before bothering to tell me she wouldn’t be coming that day. But his lie about the letter was only covering up for what we both knew: Mami wasn’t coming today and no one knew when she would return.

I picked up my bag and sidled past him, my eyes flooded with the tears that were lately so close to the surface. I heard him chuckle as I went into Gladys’s room and undressed, crumpling my dress and pretty ribbons into a ball as solid and round as his stuffed potatoes.

She came with presents wrapped in The Daily News. For me, a yellow handbag with a small mirror on the flap. “And at home I have a lot of clothes sent by your New York cousins.” She was excited and handed Angelina, Tio Lalo, Angie, and Gladys their presents while she chattered about Tata and Ana and Margot and Gury and Chico and all our relatives in New York. The doctors who had seen Raymond were the best in the world, she told us, and had assured her that with the proper treatment, his foot would heal as good as new.

I hung on to her, afraid that when it was time to leave she would forget me. But she didn’t. She helped me pack my bag, put a couple of pennies in my yellow handbag, and we walked away from Tio Lalo’s laden with sweets for my sisters and brothers and a dozen freshly fried stuffed potato balls.

On the bus Mami told me how tall the buildings were in New York, and how she had travelled around on trains that were much faster and nicer than our crowded, stuffy buses. We got off at a different stop, and when I told her we’d made a mistake, she said, “No. It’s all right. We’ve moved.”

CASI
SEÑORITA

Con la música por dentro

With the music inside

I
didn’t mean to steal the nickels from the baby’s glass piggy bank. But they left me alone with her, and the pig sat right there on top of the dresser as she slept. I had no idea an old lady was peeking in the window and saw me tip the pig over and slide out one nickel, two, three at most. When Papi gave me a talk about being trustworthy, and Mami a few
cocotazos,
I wasn’t sorry I stole the money. I was mad that no one asked why the neighbor had been looking in the window.

That snoopy old lady in our new neighborhood put an end to my baby-sitting career. And the well-intentioned neighbor next door ensured that I would never go to church.

“Even if you don’t accept the Lord,” she told my mother one day as they chatted on opposite sides of their fences, “you can send your children to Sunday school. At least it gives you a free morning.”

Mami lined us up for a bath, and, in keeping with the occasion, checked behind our ears and around our necks so that, even though people might complain we were heathens, no one could say we weren’t clean. Hector and Raymond were buttoned into their school assembly shirts, and us girls put on our good dresses, while Mami combed our hair into tight braids held at the nape with modest white ribbons.