Almost a Woman : A Memoir (9780306821110) (4 page)

“What's wrong with that woman? Her place is good enough for you to visit, but ours is not good enough for her precious daughter?” After that, I wasn't allowed to go to Yolanda's apartment.

One day Yolanda asked me to accompany her to the library. I couldn't because Mami forbade unplanned stops on the way home from school. “Ask her and we'll go tomorrow. If you bring proof of where you live, you can get a library card,” Yolanda suggested, “and you can borrow books. For free,” she added when I hesitated.

I'd passed the Bushwick Public Library many times, had wondered about its heavy entrance doors framed by columns, the wide windows that looked down on the neighborhood. Set back from the street behind a patch of dry grass, the red brick structure seemed out of place in a street of rundown apartment buildings and the tall, forbidding projects. Inside, the ceilings were high, with dangling fixtures over long, brown tables in the center of the room and near the windows. The stacks around the perimeter were crammed with books covered in plastic. I picked up a book from a high shelf, riffled the pages, put it back. I wandered up one aisle, down another. All the books were in English. Frustrated, I found Yolanda, whispered goodbye, and found my way to the front door.

On the way out, I passed the Children's Room, where a librarian read to a group of kids. She read slowly and with expression, and after each page, she turned the book toward us so that
we could see the pictures. Each page had only a few words on it, and the illustrations made their meaning clear. If American children could learn English from these books, so could I.

After the reading, I searched the shelves for the illustrated books that contained the words for my new life in Brooklyn. I chose alphabet books, their colorful pages full of cars, dogs, houses, mailmen. I wouldn't admit to the librarian that these elementary books were for me. “For leetle seesters,” I said, and she nodded, grinned, and stamped the date due in the back.

I stopped at the library every day after school and at home memorized the words that went with the pictures in the oversized pages. Some concepts were difficult. Snow was shown as huge, multifaceted flakes. Until I saw the real thing, I imagined snow as a curtain of fancy shapes, stiff and flat and possible to capture in my hand.

My sisters and brothers studied the books too, and we read the words aloud to one another, guessing at the pronunciation.

“Ehr-RAHS-ser,” we said for
eraser.
“Keh-NEEF-eh,” for
knife.
“Dees” for
this
and “dem” for
them
and “dunt” for
don't.

In school, I listened for words that sounded like those I'd read the night before. But spoken English, unlike Spanish, wasn't pronounced as written.
Water
became “waddah,”
work
was “woik,” and wordsranintoeachother in a torrent of confusing sounds that bore no resemblance to the neatly organized letters on the pages of books. In class, I seldom raised my hand, because my accent sent snickers through the classroom the minute I opened my mouth.

Delsa, who had the same problem, suggested that we speak English at home. At first, we broke into giggles whenever we spoke English to each other. Our faces contorted into grimaces, our voices changed as our tongues flapped in our mouths trying to form the awkward sounds. But as the rest of the kids joined us and we practiced between ourselves, it became easier and we didn't laugh as hard. We invented words if we didn't know the translation for what we were trying to say, until we had our own language,
neither English nor Spanish, but both in the same sentence, sometimes in the same word.

“Passing me esa sabanation,” Hector called to Edna, asking her to pass a blanket.

“Stop molestationing me,” Edna snapped at Norma when she bothered her.

We watched television with the sound on, despite Tata's complaints that hearing so much English gave her a headache. Slowly, as our vocabularies grew, it became a bond between us, one that separated us from Tata and from Mami, who watched us perplexed, her expression changing from pride to envy to worry.

One day Mami told me I couldn't go to school because I had to go somewhere with her. “Don't start with your questions,” she warned, as I opened my mouth.

We took two buses, walked several blocks to a tired brick building with wire screens on the windows. Inside, the waiting area was crowded with women on orange plastic chairs, each holding a sheaf of papers. A counter divided the room, and behind it, three rows of gray metal desks were littered with stacks of folders, brochures, printed forms, and other papers.

APPLICATION FOR PUBLIC ASSISTANCE, the top of the forms declared, DEPARTMENT OF PUBLIC WELFARE: AID TO FAMILIES WITH DEPENDENT CHILDREN (AFDC). “Here,” Mami handed me a pen, “fill them out in your best handwriting.”

“But what's it for?”

“So we can get help until I find another job.” She spoke in a whisper, looking right and left for eavesdroppers.

I filled out the forms as best I could, leaving the spaces blank when I didn't understand the question.

As the morning wore on, more women arrived, some dragging children, others alone. It was easy to pick out those who'd been to the welfare office before. They sauntered in, scanned the room to assess how many had arrived before them, went up to the
receptionist, took the forms, filled them out quickly—as if the questions and answers were memorized. The women new to welfare hesitated at the door, looked right and left until they spotted the reception desk, walked in as if prodded. They beseeched the receptionist with their eyes, tried to tell their story. She interrupted them with a wave of the hand; passed over forms; gave instructions to fill them out, have a seat, wait—always in the same words, as if she didn't want to bother thinking up new ways to say the same thing.

I hadn't brought a book, so I looked around. Mami elbowed me to stop staring. I immediately dropped my gaze to the floor. As I was about to complain that I was hungry, men and women straggled in through a back door and took seats at the desks behind the counter.

When it was our turn, the social worker led us to the far end of the office. He was a portly man with hair so black it must have been either dyed or a wig. He took the forms I'd filled out, scratched checks next to some of the squares, tapped the empty spaces. He spoke to Mami, who turned to me as if I knew what he'd said. He repeated his question in my direction, and I focused on the way his lips moved, his expression, the tone of voice, but had no idea what he was asking.

“I don't know,” I said to Mami.

She clicked her tongue.

“Plis, no spik inglis,” she smiled prettily at the social worker.

He asked his question again, pointed at the blank spaces.

“I think he wants the names and birth dates of the kids,” I interpreted. Mami pulled our birth certificates from her purse, stretched each in front of him as he wrote down the information.

“Tell him,” Mami said to me, “that I got
leyof.
”

“My mother
leyof,”
I translated.

“Tell him,” she said, “that the factory closed. They moved to another state. I don't have any money for rent or food.” She blushed, spoke quickly, softly. “I want to work, tell him that,” she said in a louder voice. “
Cerraron la fabrica.
” she repeated.

“Fabric no,” I said. “She work wants.”

The man's eyes crinkled, his jowls shook as he nodded encouragement. But I had no more words for him. He wrote on the papers, looked at Mami. She turned to me.

“Tell him I don't want my children to suffer. Tell him I need help until the factory opens again or until I can find another job. Did you tell him I want to work?”

I nodded, but I wasn't certain that the social worker understood me. “My mother, she work want. Fabric close,” I explained to the social worker, my hands moving in front of me like La Muda's. “She no can work fabric no. Babies suffer. She little help she no lay off no more.” I was exhausted, my palms were sweaty, my head ached as I probed for words, my jaw tightened with the effort to pronounce them. I searched frantically for the right combination of words, the ones that said what Mami meant, to convince this man that she was not asking for aid because she was lazy but because circumstances forced her. Mami was a proud woman, and I knew how difficult it was for her to seek help from anyone, especially a stranger. I wanted to let him know that she must have been desperate to have come to this place.

I struggled through the rest of the interview, my meager English vocabulary strained to the limit. When it was over, the social worker stood up, shook Mami's hand, shook mine, and said what I understood to mean he'd get back to us.

We walked out of the office in silence, Mami's back so straight and stiff she might have been wearing a corset. I, on the other hand, tensed into myself, panicked that I'd failed as a translator, that we wouldn't get help, that because of me, we wouldn't have a place to live or food to eat.

“You did a good job,” Mami reassured me in front of Tata and Don Julio that night. “You know a lot of English.”

“It's easier for kids,” Don Julio mumbled between sips of beer. “They pick up the language like that.” He snapped his fingers.

I was grateful for Mami's faith in me but couldn't relax until we heard from the welfare office. A few days later our application was approved. By then I'd decided that even when it seemed that
my head couldn't hold that many new words inside it, I had to learn English well enough never again to be caught between languages.

I woke in the middle of the night with something crawling toward my ear. I batted it away, but it caught in the strands of hair near the lobe. I stumbled in the dark, frantically searching for whatever was caught in my hair. By the time I reached the switch by the door, I'd pinched a crackly, dry, many-legged cockroach between my thumb and index finger before it could climb inside my ear canal.

“Turn off the light,” Delsa hissed from her end of the bed. I threw the roach down, whacked it with a shoe before it scuttled away.

“What are you doing?” Mami sat up on her bed.

“A roach almost crawled into my brain.” I felt dirty, and my fingers itched as if the roach were still between them.

“I'll fumigate tomorrow,” she grimaced, then settled back to sleep.

I shook the sheets to make sure no more roaches lurked in the folds.

“Stop that,” Delsa pulled on her end of the covers. In the bottom bunk, Norma and Alicia moaned and turned over.

Where there was one roach, I knew, there were hundreds. I imagined hordes of dark brown cockroaches poised at the cracks of the baseboard, waiting for me to switch off the light so that they could begin their march across the room. I'd seen them skitter for cover when I came into the kitchen for a drink late at night. Roaches roamed over the counter, inside the cups and glasses, around the edges of the paring knife, in the space between the sugar bowl and its cover. Mami bought ever more powerful poisons to spray the corners of our apartments. The roach poison made us cough and irritated our eyes. For days after she sprayed,
our clothes gave off the pungent chemical smell of Black Flag or Flit. But the roaches didn't die. They went away until the acrid poisonous gas dissipated, then returned, more brazen and in greater numbers.