Almost a Woman : A Memoir (9780306821110) (5 page)

Before we took a drink of water, we washed the already washed glass. Before cooking, we rinsed the scrubbed pots and utensils. Before serving, we ran every plate, bowl, cup, and spoon under water and dried it with a clean kitchen cloth. We kept food in tight-lidded containers, refrigerated what didn't fit in the cabinets, swept and mopped the kitchen floor every night before going to bed. But no matter how much we scrubbed and wiped and rinsed, the roaches always came back to parade across the floors, the counters, the dressers, the windowsills.

I lay in bed imagining an army of roaches crawling in orderly rows toward the bed I shared with Delsa. I pulled the sheets up and tried to cover my ears, but as I tugged my end, Delsa jerked hers down. I tried to cover my head with the pillow, but the bouncy foam balanced on my forehead, didn't conform to the shape I tried to impose on it, around the top of my skull, alongside my ears past the lobe. Images of roaches about to crawl inside me kept me awake. I was afraid to leave the bed. What if the legions of roaches I envisioned were marching around the floor? Before I could reach the light switch, I'd step on them in my bare feet. I squirmed, trying to wipe the images from my mind. I scraped the spot where I'd found the roach with a corner of the sheet, but no matter how much I rubbed, I still felt it. In fact, lots of crawly things crept over me, but as I reached to swat them, they moved to a different spot. I turned on my right side, then my left, because if I didn't stay in one spot for long, the roaches wouldn't have time to crawl inside the various orifices I imagined were their goal.

When the alarm rang, I slid out of bed, exhausted. I tiptoed, so that if there were roaches on the floor, I would step on as few of them as possible. The linoleum was bare, shiny clean, except for the yellowish ooze from the brown cockroach near the shoe I'd used in the middle of the night. There were no live cockroaches
to be seen. But that was no comfort. I knew they hid in the crevices of the baseboard, inside the cracks along the door jamb, under the bed.

As fall became winter and the days cooled, we discovered that our apartment was unheated. Mami went to the
bodega
to call the landlord; sometimes the radiators clinked and clanged and got lukewarm, but not enough to reach the corners of the rooms. Tata lit the stove, and we spent most of our time at the formica table, in front of the open oven. Inevitably, one of us came down with a cold, and pretty soon, we were all up half the night wheezing and coughing.

Mami and Tata ran from one to the other with a bowl full of hot water into which they had melted a tablespoon of Vick's Vaporub. While Mami held the bowl under our noses, Tata tented a towel over our heads. Once each of us had inhaled as much steam as we could, Tata plastered leaves on our chests and backs with more Vick's Vaporub, then made us put on our warmest sweaters. The next day, Mami devised a concoction with Breacol cough syrup as a base, laced with her own formula of ingredients whose flavor didn't disappear despite the generous amounts of honey she poured into the bottle. The syrup was black, bitter, smelled like burnt cloves and camphor. She forced it on us, and within hours we no longer sniffled and our coughs were gone. From then on, as soon as one of us sneezed or showed a drippy nose, she brought out the sticky bottle, which was enough to cure us instantly. We called it
tutumá,
a mysterious name for that strange, powerful medicine that we didn't have to take to feel better.

Tata claimed that the first winter in New York was the hardest, because, coming from a warm climate, our blood was not thick enough. To thicken hers, she drank beer or wine daily, which also dulled the aches in her bones she swore didn't respond to
anything else. To thicken ours, she cooked soups and stews dense with
ñames
,
yautías,
and other Puerto Rican vegetables.

“But,” I argued one day, “if we eat the same food we ate in Puerto Rico, it won't thicken our blood. It didn't while we lived there.”

“She has a point,” Don Julio chortled.

“We'll just keep getting the same thin blood we've always had,” I pressed.

“What they need,” Don Julio suggested, “is American food.”

Tata was unpersuaded. “American food is not nutritious.”

“But look how big and healthy American kids are,” Mami allowed. “Their food must be doing something for them.”

“They look like boiled potatoes,” Tata asserted.

“But their blood is thick,” Delsa argued, “and they never get sick.”

In spite of Tata's mistrust of American food, Mami was willing to try anything to thicken our blood. At our urging, she bought a few cans of products we'd seen advertised on television: Franco-American spaghetti, Chef Boyardee ravioli, Campbell's chicken noodle soup.

“Yecch, it's slimy,” Tata stared suspiciously at the potful of canned ravioli Mami heated for us. “I don't know how you can eat it,” she grimaced, as we scooped every bit of sauce out of our bowls.

Mami gave us canned American food every day for a week, but our colds didn't disappear with anything but a spoonful of
tutumá.
So she lost faith in American food and only fed it to us as a special treat, never as a substitute for the hearty Puerto Rican meals she and Tata continued to prepare. When Tata asked why she let us eat it, Mami explained: “They should learn to eat like Americans—in case someday they're invited to an American home, they don't act like
jíbaros
in front of their food.”

That silenced Tata and gave me an idea. “Mami, all American girls wear makeup to school.”

“I don't care what American girls do. You're Puerto Rican and too young to wear makeup.”

It was good to be healthy, big, and strong like Dick, Jane, and Sally. It was good to learn English and to know how to act among Americans, but it was not good to behave like them. Mami made it clear that although we lived in the United States, we were to remain 100 percent Puerto Rican. The problem was that it was hard to tell where Puerto Rican ended and Americanized began. Was I Americanized if I preferred pizza to
pastelillos?
Was I Puerto Rican if my skirts covered my knees? If I cut out a picture of Paul Anka from a magazine and tacked it to the wall, was I less Puerto Rican than when I cut out pictures of Gilberto Monroig? Who could tell me?

Mami's cousins Alma and Corazón were born in Puerto Rico, but their mother, Titi Ana, brought them to Brooklyn as toddlers. They lived on the corner of Varet Street and Bushwick Avenue, at the top of a six-story building with bow windows in the front. The hallways and landings were paved with black-and-white mosaic tiles. Huge windows let light into the staircase, whose wide steps and banisters were cool, cool marble, worn in the center from years of up, down, up. There were four apartments on each story, two facing Varet Street, two in the back. As I climbed to the sixth floor, I stopped at each landing to catch my breath, and to listen to the sounds behind every door or to smell the delicious aromas of dinner being prepared. Behind one door someone watched a soap opera, muted voices punctuated by organ music. I smelled brewed coffee across the hall, and further up, someone cooked salted codfish with eggplant. On the next level,
sofrito
sizzled into hot oil, and across the hall, the beans needed water, because they smelled scorched. A
merengue
played full blast behind another door, while across from it, the two apartments in the back were silent, and no fragrance seeped into the landing. By the time I arrived at the top and knocked on Titi Ana's door, I was hungry and my ears rang.

Corazón opened the three locks and chain on their door to
let me in. She held a bottle of Coke in her hand. “Help yourself,” she said, nodding toward the refrigerator. “Alma's in there,” she pointed to a door off the kitchen, and disappeared into her room. There was always a six-pack of Coca-Cola in Titi Ana's refrigerator, ice cream in her freezer, Hostess cakes in the cabinet over the sink. I grabbed a soda and knocked on Alma's door.

She sat on her bed, reading a heavy book about men with big mustaches. “I have a test tomorrow,” she said, looking up. “History.”

Alma's room was familiar, not only because I'd spent so much time in it since I'd arrived in Brooklyn but because it looked like the rooms of all the girls I'd met whose parents had money to spend on things other than the bare necessities. Her bed was white, covered with a ruffled, flowery spread that matched the curtains and the skirt of her dressing table. The linoleum floor was also a flower print, giving the impression that Alma moved and slept in a bright, flat, eternal spring. A window looked out over the roofs of two-and three-story buildings.

“There's a new
Archie
,” she pointed to the shelf where she stacked her comic books, the most recent ones on top.

Archie, Veronica, Betty, Reggie, and Jughead were the only American teenagers I'd come to know. There were no Americans in our Puerto Rican neighborhood, and the few that went to the same school as I did kept to themselves in tight, impenetrable groups of chattering, cardigan-wearing, ponytailed girls and pimply, long-legged boys. Like Archie and his friends, they were not Italian or Jewish, Negro or Puerto Rican. They had short, easy-to-remember names like Sue, Matt, Fred, Lynn. They were the presidents of clubs, the organizers of dances, the editors of the school paper and yearbook. They looked like the actors on television: white-skinned, dressed in clothes that never were wrinkled or dirty, hair always in place, an air of superiority setting them apart.

My neighbors, mostly dark-skinned or identified by country of origin, lived in rundown, vertical apartment buildings. From
Archie
I learned about another United States—the trim, horizontal
suburbs of white Americans. Through him, I discovered that American teenagers' lives were very different from mine, their concerns as foreign to me as mine might be to them.

Archie and his friends lived in a world with no parents, made their own decisions about where to go and how to get there without consulting anyone but each other. My world was dominated by adults, their rules written in stone, in Spanish, in Puerto Rico. In my world, no allowance was made for the fact that we were now in the United States, that our language was becoming English, that we were foreigners awash in American culture.

Archie never ate at home. His meals, and those of his friends, were taken at Pop's soda shop, where their diet consisted of sandwiches, hamburgers, fries, ice cream sodas—food that could be eaten without utensils. In our apartment, Mami and Tata spent a lot of time in the kitchen, preparing thick
asopaos,
rice and beans, chicken fricassees, huge meals that required time to savor and a close connection to the cook, who lingered near us asking if it tasted good and checking that we ate enough.

Betty and Veronica talked and worried a lot about dating. At fourteen years of age, I was not allowed to go anywhere with a boy who wasn't my brother. We had no telephone, so unlike Betty and Veronica, I couldn't sit with shapely legs draped over the armrest of an upholstered chair chattering with invisible friends about boys. We had no upholstered chair. I had no friends.

Archie and his friends sometimes carried books, but they were never seen in class, or taking exams, or studying. Their existence revolved around their social life, while mine was defined by my obligations as a student and as the eldest sister. Neither Betty nor Veronica was called upon to be an example for younger siblings. They existed solely for themselves, their only responsibilities were to look beautiful and to keep their boyfriends happy.

From Titi Ana's kitchen, I plunged into Archie's bright, shadowless world, jealous of that simple life of fun and trivial problems so far removed from the realities of my own life. No one was ever born or died in Archie's world, no one shared a bed with a sister,
or bathed in the kitchen, or mourned an absent father. I wanted to live in those uncrowded, horizontal landscapes painted in primary colors where
algo
never happened, where teenagers like me lived in blissful ignorance of violence and grime, where no one had seven sisters and brothers, where grandmothers didn't drink beer late into the night and mothers didn't need you to translate for them at the welfare office.