Almost a Woman : A Memoir (9780306821110) (3 page)

Ojo se. Can. Juice. ¿Y?

Bye de don surly lie.

Whassoprowow we hell

Add debt why lie lass gleam in.

Whosebrods tripe sand bye ¿Stars?

True de perro los ¡Ay!

Order am parts we wash,

Wha soga lang tree streem in.

 

I had no idea what the song said or meant, and no one bothered to teach me. It was one of the things I was supposed to know, and like the daily recitation of the pledge of allegiance, it had to be done with enthusiasm, or teachers gave out demerits. The pledge was printed in ornate letters on a poster under the flag in every classroom. “The Star-Spangled Banner,” however, remained a mystery for years, its nonsense words the only song I could sing in English from beginning to end.

On a chill October afternoon, Mami, Don Julio, and I went to the airport to pick up the rest of my sisters and brothers, who'd stayed in Puerto Rico with our father until Mami could afford their plane fare. Delsa, Norma, Hector, and Alicia were smaller than I remembered them, darker, more foreign. They huddled close to one another, holding hands. Their eyes darted from corner to corner of the enormous terminal, to the hundreds of people waving, hugging, kissing, to the luggage that banged into them. Bird-like, they lifted their heads, mouths open, toward the magnified, disembodied voices bleating orders from the ceilings. I wondered if I had looked that frightened and vulnerable only two months earlier.

We'd moved to a new, larger apartment on Varet Street. Tata and Tío Chico had been cooking all morning, and as we entered the apartment, the fragrance of roasting
achiote,
garlic, and oregano,
the family milling around, laughing and talking, made it like Christmas.

We had many relatives in Brooklyn. Paco, Tío Chico's son, was short and muscular. His arms and face were always bruised, his eyes swollen and bloodshot, his nose bandaged, the result of his work as a wrestler. His professional name was El Santo. In the ring, he wore white tights and boots, a white leather belt, a white mask, a milky satin cape with a stand-up collar studded with rhinestones. He was one of the good guys, but although he usually won his fights, he always received a beating from the guys in black.

Paco's brother, Jalisco, worked in a factory. He was tall and lean like his father and groomed his mustache into a black, straight fuzz over his lips, like Jorge Negrete, the Mexican singer and movie star. Whenever Jalisco came over, I circled him like a febrile butterfly—offering drinks or food, or reminding him he'd promised to sing “
Cielito Lindo”
after supper. Mami never left me alone with him.

Tata's two sisters lived within a few blocks of our apartment. Tía Chia and her daughters—Margot, Gury, and La Muda—were close to my mother. They came dragging bags full of clothes and shoes they no longer wore. Gury, the youngest, was slender and soft-spoken. Her clothes fit me, although Mami said that the straight skirts, sheer blouses, and high heels Gury favored were not appropriate for a girl my age.

Her sister La Muda was deaf and mute. According to Mami, La Muda had been born with perfect hearing but as a toddler she got sick, and when she recovered, she was deaf.

“Then why don't they call her La Sorda ...” I began, and Mami warned I was disrespectful.

La Muda read lips. If we spoke with our faces away from her, she shook our shoulders and made us repeat what we'd said while her eyes focused on our mouths. We quickly learned to interpret her language, a dance of gestures enhanced with hums, gurgles, and grunts that didn't seem to come from her throat but from a deeper source, inside her belly. Her hands were large, well manicured,
bedecked with numerous gold and stone rings that shimmered as her fingers flew here and there.

La Muda liked us to read the paper to her. That is, Mami or Don Julio read it aloud, while we kids acted out the news. La Muda's eyes darted from Mami's lips to our portrayals of that day's murders, car crashes, and results at the track, enacted race by race around the kitchen table. Her laugh, frequent and contagious, was deep but flat, as if, unable to hear herself laugh, she couldn't get the tone.

Her boyfriend was someone we'd known in Puerto Rico. He was a thin, laconic, dark-haired man who dressed in a beige suit. When we first met him, my six sisters and brothers and I were afraid of him, but he took a deck of cards from his pocket, performed some tricks, and after that we called him Luigi, which sounded like the perfect name for a magician.

Tata's other sister, Titi Ana, had two daughters who were closer to my age than La Muda, Margot, or Gury. Alma was a year older, and Corazón a year younger. They spoke English to each other, and when they talked to us or to their mother, their Spanish was halting and accented. Mami said they were Americanized. The way she pronounced the word
Americanized,
it sounded like a terrible thing, to be avoided at all costs, another
algo
to be added to the list of “somethings” outside our door.

When they walked into the apartment, my sisters and brother submitted to hugs and kisses from people who were strangers to them but who introduced themselves as Cousin this or Auntie that. Delsa was on the verge of tears. Norma held on to Alicia as if afraid they'd get lost in the confusion. Hector circulated among the men, followed by Raymond, who chattered about Paco's exploits in the ring or about Don Julio's generosity with pocket change.

Luigi, his usually solemn face lit by the hint of a smile, performed new tricks, and the kids relaxed somewhat, as if this reminder of our life in Puerto Rico were enough to dissolve their fears. Margot had brought a portable record player and records,
which played full blast in the kitchen, while in the front room the television was tuned to the afternoon horror movie. The kids shuffled from room to room in a daze, overdosed on the Twinkies, Yodels, and potato chips Don Julio had brought for us.

The welcome party lasted into the night. Don Julio and Jalisco went to the
bodega
several times for more beer, and Tío Chico found a liquor store and came back with jugs of Gallo wine. Mami ran from the adults to the kids, reminding the men that there were children in the house, that they should stop drinking.

One by one the relatives left, and the kids once more surrendered to hugs and kisses. Our pockets jingled with pennies that the aunts, uncles, and cousins had handed out as if to pay for the party. Luigi escorted La Muda from the apartment. His pale fingers pressed against her waist, his too-big suit flapped around his scarecrow frame. As they walked out, the adults exchanged mysterious smiles.

Tío Chico and his sons were the last to leave. Tata and Don Julio went into her room and drew the curtain that separated their part of the apartment from ours. “It's time for bed,” Mami reminded us. We got ready, Delsa and I on the top bunk, Norma and Alicia on the bottom, Hector on the sofa, Raymond in the upholstered chairs pushed together, Edna and Mami in the double bed. She turned out the light, and the soft rustles of my sisters and brothers settling into their first night in Brooklyn filled me with a secret joy, which I never admitted but which soothed and reassured me in a way nothing had since we'd left Puerto Rico.

Like every other Puerto Rican mother I knew, Mami was strict. The reason she had brought me to New York with the younger kids was that I was
casi señorita,
and she didn't want to leave me in Puerto Rico during what she said was a critical stage in my life. Mami told her friend Minga that a girl my age should be watched by her mother and protected from men who were sure to take advantage of a child in a woman's body.

While my body wasn't exactly womanly, I knew what Mami meant. Years of eavesdropping on her conversations had taught me that men were not to be trusted. They deceived with
pocavergüenzas,
shameless acts that included drinking, gambling, and squandering money on women not their wives while their children went hungry. To cover up their
pocavergüenzas,
men lied. A man would call his wife “
mi amor
,” while looking over her shoulder at another woman passing by.

“A girl is smart to be suspicious of any man who talks sweet to her,” Minga declared. “To her, his words are the most beautiful things she's heard. She has no idea he's said them a thousand times before . . . and will keep on saying them as long as there's some
pendeja
to listen.”

According to Mami and her friends, women committed
po
cavergüenzas
too. They flirted with men who were taken by more worthy women and lured those feckless men astray.

Having heard countless stories of deceitful men and wily
women, I decided never to become one of those calculating
putas,
but neither would I become a
pendeja,
who believed everything a man told her, or looked the other way while he betrayed her. There was a midpoint between a
puta
and a
pendeja
that I was trying to figure out, a safe space in which decent women lived and thrived and raised their families. Mami belonged there, as did her friends and female relatives. Her lectures, and the pointed conversations I was supposed to overhear, were meant to help me distinguish between a
puta
and a
pendeja.
But there was always a warning. One false move, and I ran the risk of becoming one or being perceived as the other.

I made a friend in school, Yolanda, a girl who spoke good English but spoke Spanish with me. Yolanda was the only Puerto Rican I'd met who was an only child. She was curious about what it was like to have six sisters and brothers, and I asked what she did all day with no one to play or fight with.

“Oh, you know, watch television, read, and I have my albums.”

She collected pictures in three-ring binders, organized by type. “These are flowers,” she said, pulling down a fat binder from a shelf over her bed. She opened it to a page cluttered with flowers from the Carnation milk can label. “And over here are lips.” Pages and pages of lips, male and female, some with mustaches over them, others the disembodied smiles of movie stars. “This one is letters.” Arranged alphabetically, hundreds of letters were pasted on the pages, uppercase letters sprinkled on the left side, lowercase on the right. Other albums contained product labels from cans, sanitary pad boxes, garment tags. Another held hair and beauty product advertisements cut out from newspapers and magazines. The fattest one held modes of transportation: cars, trains, cruise ships, ferries, bicycles built for two. Yolanda, I decided, spent too much time alone.

“Would you like to come to my house?” I offered. She had to ask her mother, but she was sure it was okay. The next day, she said her mother wouldn't let her. “I begged,” Yolanda explained, her eyes misting, “but she's so strict with me.” I was disappointed but understood, since Mami, too, was strict. But when I told Mami that Yolanda's mother wouldn't let her visit us, Mami was offended.