Almost a Woman : A Memoir (9780306821110) (24 page)

Respectful attention gave way to a mouthy, aggressive insolence that Mami punished. Her threats, slaps, and insistence that we owed Don Carlos proper courtesy and deference because he
was an adult and the father of our soon-to-be sister or brother didn't change our behavior. Instead, a bitter grudge sprouted where there had once been affection, and although eventually Don Carlos did divorce, did introduce his children to us, and did loosen his wallet, for me at least the damage was done. I'd never forgive him for reopening the still tender wounds caused by Papi's surrender of us to an American fate and Francisco's death.

But what scared me most about Don Carlos's betrayal was that Mami was not immune to the seductive power of a man with a sweet tongue and a soft touch. “Men only want one thing,” she'd said so many times that I couldn't look at a man without hearing it. If
she
could fall under the spell, how could I, younger and less experienced, hope to avoid the same destiny?

Mami worked until a few months before she was due, and then we humbled ourselves at the welfare office. After we explained the situation, the social worker came to the apartment unannounced to make sure Don Carlos wasn't hiding behind the shower curtain or in the closets.

Because we hadn't been warned, the apartment was the familiar chaotic mess I found comfortable but embarrassing, because I knew people shouldn't live like that. The beds were not neat, because they served as seats when we watched television or did our homework. The dishes hadn't been washed, because it was my turn and I always waited until the last minute if I couldn't bribe one of my siblings to do them. Mami hadn't been to the laundromat, so there was a pile of soiled clothes spilling out of the hamper. The bathroom was adorned with drying bras, panties, and stockings, as well as with a few hand-washed shirts and blouses on hangers. Franky's nose was snotty, and no one had helped him clean it. Mami's back ached and she'd been in bed all day, one of the reasons the apartment was such a mess. Tata's bones hurt, so she'd begun to drink early and now sat in the kitchen smoking,
her caramel eyes on the doughy social worker who went from room to room opening cabinets and drawers.

While the social worker was there, we were subdued, afraid to look at her, as if we'd done
algo
and she'd caught us. Mami trailed her, with me and Delsa to interpret. The kids sat on their beds pretending to read because, while I translated for Mami in the kitchen, Delsa ran back to warn them to behave. Don Julio was due any minute, and we worried that the social worker would think he lived with us, which he didn't. Even so, it felt as if he shouldn't visit, as if we shouldn't know any men.

The social worker was thorough. She wrote cryptic shorthand symbols in a pad, pushed her glasses up, opened the refrigerator, made a note, checked inside the oven. When she asked questions, we weren't sure if she was making conversation or if she was trying to trap us into admitting there was a man under the bed or behind a door, even though we knew there wasn't one.

Once the social worker left, the apartment looked smaller and meaner than before she came. There was a dead roach in the corner. The trash barrel was full. Grease congealed on the dirty dishes. The walls had peeling paint, dark wood showed under the torn linoleum. The ill-fitting secondhand curtains were too heavy for the rods. Everything looked worse, which, I supposed, made us look as if we really needed the help.

The noncommittal social worker was the first American to see the way we lived, her visit an invasion of what little privacy we had. It stressed just how dependent we were on the opinion of a total stranger, who didn't speak our language, whose life was clearly better than ours. Otherwise, how could she pass judgment on it? I seethed, but I had no outlet for my rage, for the feeling that so long as I lived protected by Mami, my destiny lay in the hands of others whose power was absolute. If not hers, then the welfare department's. I closed myself off in my room and cried into my pillow, while my family joked and laughed and imitated the social worker's nasal voice, the way she peeked inside the cabinet under the sink, as if a man could fit there. It was not funny
anymore to laugh at ourselves or at people who held our fate in their hands. It was pathetic.

I fell asleep bathed in tears and didn't hear the screams when the world went black, didn't hear Mami shuffle from her room to the front of the apartment, bumping into furniture as she counted heads to make sure we were together in the utter darkness of Brooklyn. I didn't hear her call my name as she and Tata ordered the kids to huddle close until they could figure out what had happened. When I woke up, I was blind, and opening my eyes made no difference. I thought I'd died, but I could feel. I screamed Mami's name and heard her “We're in the front!” I groped my way out of my room, through the kitchen to the open living room windows, where my whole family was crammed against each other. People were on the street, talking in subdued, intimate voices. The warm yellow light of candles flickered in our neighbors' windows.

“What happened?” I asked.

Delsa shushed me. Through the static of her battery-operated radio, we heard the news. New York and the entire Northeast were blacked out. I went back to the window. Above the scrawny trees, over the ragged flat lines of buildings, tiny bright lights beckoned and danced, the first stars I'd seen since we'd come to Brooklyn.

In the depths of winter we moved to a single-family house on Stanhope Street. I no longer had a room to myself but shared with Delsa, Norma, Alicia, and Edna while the boys—Héctor Raymond, and Franky—slept in another room. Mami put the soon-to-be-born baby's crib, her double bed, and the dressers in the middle bedroom, the only one with a door. The downstairs had a small living room and dining area and a good-size kitchen. Tata's cot went into the pantry, across from the rice, flour, dry beans, cans of tomato sauce.

Having a whole house to ourselves made us feel rich. No downstairs neighbors to bang on the ceilings because we made too much noise. No one upstairs walking heavily overhead, shaking the light fixtures. But it also meant no super if the toilet broke, and when there wasn't enough heat, it was because we hadn't paid the bill, not because the landlord was stingy.

We lived close to the relatives again, and I could visit Alma and Corazón on the way home from school. They too had moved, to a roomy but dark apartment on Flushing Avenue, half a block from the elevated train. Alma had graduated from high school and worked as a secretary for a sock wholesaler. Her office was a few blocks from Performing Arts, and every week we met for dinner in the city. We got along so well that we soon came up with a plan
to share an apartment as soon as I graduated from high school and could find a job.

“It'll have to be a two-bedroom,” Alma said, “I need privacy.”

“Yes, and I hope you know I can't cook.”

“Neither can I. We'll eat out,” she suggested.

We combed the classifieds for a sense of what we'd have to pay in the Upper East Side, our first choice. Alma had read somewhere that we shouldn't spend more than the equivalent of one week's salary, and it was soon clear that a two-bedroom apartment anywhere in Manhattan was out of the question.

“We might have to look in Queens,” she suggested, to which I objected. “I don't want to live in the outer boroughs.”

“We'll keep looking, then.” The next week we went over the listings again. We figured out how much to put aside for a security deposit, the first month's rent, furniture, towels, sheets, curtains, and rugs. If we were thrifty, if Alma got a raise, if I found a good job, we'd be able to afford an apartment six months after I graduated.

“We'll move in for Christmas,” I said, “and throw a housewarming party.” I imagined an apartment not unlike Mrs. Kormendi's, filled with people whose faces were a blur because I didn't know them yet.

It was so much fun to plan our lives as single girls in Manhattan that we didn't think of asking our mothers.

“The only way you're leaving my house,” Mami vowed when I broached the subject, “is as a married woman.”

“But I don't want to get married.”

“Decent girls don't live alone in the city.”

“We won't be living alone. Alma and I will be together, in the same apartment.”

“Still,” she spat out, and when I was about to make another point, she held up her finger in my direction, “just because you're in that school for
blanquitos
,” at which point I tuned out.

Alma had the same argument with Titi Ana, and we had to accept that, according to our mothers, two young women living
together were still alone if there was no man to keep an eye on them.

Charlie was born in February, and Don Carlos used the birth of his son to insinuate himself back into our lives. He showed up with a scarf for Mami one day, a birthday present for Franky, an outfit for Charlie. He played gin rummy with us, or sat with Tata and Don Julio until late at night, then climbed the stairs to Mami's bedroom when he thought we were asleep. As soon as he left for work, Tata ragged on Mami for taking Don Carlos back. When he returned at night, she served him supper, muttering insults under her breath. “
Sinvergüenza
,” she said as she set down his rice and beans, “
desgraciado
,” as she poured his coffee.

Mami was embarrassed by Tata's candor, but Don Carlos didn't seem to care. He ignored Tata, his eyes trapped behind his tinted glasses, a half-smile on his lips as if what she said were amusing but not offensive. He tried to win her over with presents: a jug of Gallo wine, a carton of cigarettes, a velvet painting of John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King facing each other across the bleeding heart of Jesus. Tata took his offerings but didn't let up, until I wondered if Don Carlos enjoyed the abuse Tata heaped on him, if part of the reason he wanted to live with us was to hear an honest accounting of what kind of person he was. I figured he must love Mami to put up with her eight children and bristly mother. And she loved him, because pretty soon, Don Carlos's dark suits hung in her closet like giant bats, and her fingers caressed the cuffs and collars of his white cotton shirts as she ironed them every morning.