Almost a Woman : A Memoir (9780306821110) (6 page)

Mami surprised me one day in front of my school. I trembled as she frowned at my skirt, which was midcalf when I left in the morning but now hovered above my knees. She scrutinized the smudged lines around my eyes, the faint traces of rouge on my cheeks. Every morning on the way to school, Yolanda and I ducked into the doorway of an apartment building on Bushwick Avenue and rolled up our skirts to the length other girls wore theirs. We drew lines around our lids with an eyebrow pencil stolen from Yolanda's mother. In school, the girls who took pity on those of us with old-fashioned mothers often shared their lipsticks and rouge and helped us tease our hair into beehives sprayed stiff. On the way home, we unrolled our skirts to their natural length; removed traces of makeup with spit; brushed our hair back into limp, decent ponytails.

As soon as she saw my mother, Yolanda dropped her head so that Mami wouldn't see her face. Mami grabbed my arm, dragged me across the street before I could shake off her strong grip. I avoided the eyes of boys who laughed, slapped each other five, gave Mami the thumbs up and called “Go Mamma” as we passed. She silenced them with a withering look that wiped the smirks from their faces.
“Títeres,”
she muttered, “so disrespectful to adults.”

“Why did you have to spy on me,” I screamed as we went up the stairs of our building. I expected a beating, the severity of which might be reduced if I showed the appropriate humility. But
I didn't care if Mami killed me once we got home. I'd been humiliated in front of the school, and I never wanted to go back there.

“I wasn't spying on you. I came to take you shopping,” she said in a subdued voice, aware that the neighbors peeked under their chain stops to see what the yelling was about.

“You should have waited until I got home,” I screeched, banging on the door, to which I had no key. Hector opened it and held it as we stepped into the crowded room, and I slammed my books hard on the floor.

Mami grabbed my hair. “Who do you think you are?” she screamed, “talking back like that?” I raised my arms, tried to wrench loose, pulled my hair toward my scalp as she pulled in the opposite direction. “Don't think because we're here you can act like those fast American girls,” Mami screamed, her face red, her eyes narrowed into slits, her lips taut. She pushed me away into the bottom bunk of the bed where Norma and Alicia sat, wide-eyed and scared. Tata appeared from the back of the apartment and stood between us. But Mami was done. I lay face down on the bed, stifled with rage, choked on the sobs that followed her beatings. I rubbed my burning scalp, wheezed without crying, beat the mattress with my forehead until Norma poked me with her toes. “Move,” she said, “you're crushing our paper dolls.” I raised my head to the bland stare of blonde, blue-eyed, red-lipped girls, their shapely bodies dressed in tight, short, revealing clothes. I swiped them off the bed, stepped on them as I stood up and climbed into the top bunk, Norma and Alicia's cries deafening mine.

That night, I lay next to Delsa and left myself and her, the apartment on Varet Street, Brooklyn, New York. I flew to the warm breeze of a Puerto Rican afternoon, the air scented with jasmine, the
coquí
singing in the grass. I placed myself at my father's side
as he poured cement, his shovel working quickly in the gray mud, scraping the edges, mixing them into the gooey center. As he worked, he sang a Bobby Capó
chachachá.

The wheelbarrow full of cement squeaked as Papi pushed it closer to the wall he built. His brown arms corded from the strain, the muscles on his back bulged down to his waist. I fell asleep telling him about my day, about the walk to school along the broad sidewalks, about the crowded classrooms, about the gangs kids joined to protect themselves from other gangs, about how in the United States we were not Puerto Rican, we were Hispanic. I told him Mami was disappointed in me, accused me of being Americanized when all I wanted was to be like other girls my age. I talked to him the way I used to when we lived together and he and Mami made up after every argument. And I asked him to come get us out of Brooklyn the way he used to rescue us from the places Mami took us to when they fought. One of these days he would show up at the door, the way he used to in Puerto Rico, to convince Mami that he'd changed, that he still loved her. He'd write her long, flowery poems about happy homes and the love a man feels for the mother of his children. He'd soften her up with gifts—a flower in a paper cup, a half-melted coconut ice. These had worked before, and they would work again. Mami would give in and agree to return to him, and we would go back to Puerto Rico, where we would never be cold, where our lives would resume in our language, in our country, where we could be a family again.

Papi wrote to say he'd married a woman none of us had ever heard of and had moved to a town none of us had ever visited.

I sat on the edge of Mami's bed reading the letter over and over, the tight, neat script, evenly spaced, wide-margined, so familiar and so painful.

I disliked his new wife instantly, swore never to visit them,
never to accept her. My letters to him, until then newsy and full of fears and confusion, became short salutations, lists of grades achieved in school and the progress of Raymond's medical treatments, which were successfully saving his foot.

Mornings, on my way to JHS 49, I yearned for my life in Macún. I missed the dew-softened air, the crunchy gravel of the dirt road, the rooster's crow, the buzz of bees, the bright yellow sun of a Puerto Rican dawn. I resisted the square regularity of Brooklyn's streets, the sharp-cornered buildings that towered over me, the sidewalks spotted with crusted phlegm and sticky chewing gum. Every day we spent in Brooklyn was like a curtain dropping between me and my other life, the one where I knew who I was, where I didn't know I was poor, didn't know my parents didn't love each other, didn't know what it was to lose a father.

With Papi married, our ties to Puerto Rico unraveled. He was the strongest link we had to the island, since most of Mami's family was in Brooklyn and Papi's sisters and brothers had never been an important presence in our house.

When I tried to find out if Mami was as disappointed as I was, she brushed me off, saying that Papi had a right to his own life and that we should never blame or disrespect him. But I couldn't shake the feeling of being cast adrift. By not including us in his decision to marry, Papi had excluded us from the rest of his life.

We knew Mami was in love, because she hummed and sang
boleros
as she cleaned or ironed. She was in love, because once she found another job, she bought a new outfit, which she hadn't done since we'd arrived in Brooklyn. She was definitely in love, we knew it, because her brown eyes shone and her lips were quick to smile, and she beamed when she looked at us as if we were the most perfect children any mother could have. We were sure she was in love, because Tata argued with her over every tiny thing and stood at the window when Mami left the house to see which direction she took. Three or four times a week Mami went across the street after work, stayed for an hour or so, then came back cheerful. She never stayed past nine o'clock, but Tata made it sound as if Mami was all over town until dawn.

When we finally met Francisco, who lived across the street with his parents, we knew Mami was in love because she was calm around him, and the hunted expression cleared from her face. She was thirty, Francisco twenty-eight, and the two-year difference in their ages didn't seem as big a deal to us as it was to Tata.

On a bright, late winter day moist with melting snow, we emerged one by one from our building, each carrying a box or a suitcase. Passersby stared with bemused expressions. We were afraid to provoke Tata, so we tiptoed in and out of the old apartment with our belongings until we'd moved everything but the
heaviest things to an apartment down the street. Paco and Jalisco came by at the end of the day to carry the furniture to our new place, and we settled into the two-room apartment before dark.

A few days after we moved, Francisco came for dinner. Afterwards, he and Mami talked in the kitchen while we watched
Candid Camera
in the front room. He left early but came back the next day, and every day for a week, staying later each time—until one morning he was still there.

“What do we call him? ” I asked Mami, when it was clear Francisco had moved in. “We can't call him Papi . . .”

She squinted her eyes in my direction, as she did whenever I was disrespectful. “No, he's not your father,” she finally said, as she paired socks.

“And he's too young to be Don Francisco.”

“Yes, he is.” She found a pair of panties and smoothed them. I could tell she was embarrassed, that I should stop asking questions and leave her in peace.

“Then what do we call him?”

“Franky, that's what his family calls him,” she said curtly, handing me the panties and a couple of folded shirts. “Put these in Edna's drawer.” Her eyebrows met over her eyes, which meant she was not about to answer any more questions.

I put the clothes away, but I couldn't stop thinking about it. Franky didn't sound official enough, since he was our stepfather. Well, not quite. Because he wasn't married to Mami, he wasn't technically her husband. But she hadn't been married to Papi either, and he had been her husband. Or had he? Not officially. Papi was our father, it said so on our birth certificates. But what was he to her? And now that Francisco was part of our household, what was he to us?

I couldn't ask Mami. It was disrespectful to pry into her personal life. But I knew that women who were married looked down on those who weren't. “Oh, she's just living with him,” they said, with a wave of the hand and a disgusted expression.

I also knew that marriage in a white gown and veil—with a
walk down the aisle of a church, a priest, bridesmaids in colorful dresses, and groomsmen in tuxedos—was Mami's dream for me and my sisters.