My Beloved World (3 page)

I knew well enough that we were isolated, but that condition had more to do with my father’s drinking and the shame attached to it. It
constrained our lives as far back as my memory reaches. We almost never had visitors. My cousins never spent the night at our home as I did at theirs. Even Ana, my mother’s best friend, never came over, though she lived in the projects too, in the building kitty-corner from ours, and took care of my brother, Junior, and me after school. We always went to her place, never the other way around.

The only exception to this rule was Alfred. Alfred was my first cousin—the son of my mother’s sister, Titi Aurora. And just as Titi Aurora was much older than Mami, and more of a mother to her than a sister, Alfred, being sixteen years older than I, acted more as an uncle to me than a cousin. Sometimes my father would ask Alfred to bring him a bottle from the liquor store. We counted on Alfred a lot, in part because my father avoided driving. This annoyed me, as it clearly contributed to our isolation—and what’s the point of having a car if you never drive it? I didn’t understand until I was older that his drinking was probably the reason.

My father would cook dinner when he got home from work; he was an excellent cook and could re-create from memory any new dish he encountered as well as the Puerto Rican standards he no doubt picked up in Abuelita’s kitchen. I loved every dish he made without exception, even his liver and onions, which Junior hated and shoveled over to me when Papi’s back was turned. But as soon as dinner was over, the dishes still piled in the sink, he would shut himself in the bedroom. We wouldn’t see him again until he came out to tell us to get ready for bed. It was just Junior and I every night, doing homework and not much else. Junior wasn’t much of a conversationalist yet. Eventually, we got a television, which helped to fill the silence.

My mother’s way of coping was to avoid being at home with my father. She worked the night shift as a practical nurse at Prospect Hospital and often on weekends too. When she wasn’t working, she would drop us off at Abuelita’s or sometimes at her sister Aurora’s apartment and then disappear for hours with another of my aunts. Even though my mother and I shared the same bed every night (Junior slept in the other room with Papi), she might as well have been a log, lying there with her back to me. My father’s neglect made me sad, but I intuitively understood that he could not help himself; my mother’s neglect made
me angry at her. She was beautiful, always elegantly dressed, seemingly strong and decisive. She was the one who moved us to the projects. Unlike my aunts, she chose to work. She was the one who insisted we go to Catholic school. Unfairly perhaps, because I knew nothing then of my mother’s own story, I expected more from her.

However much was said at home, and loudly, much also went unsaid, and in that atmosphere I was a watchful child constantly scanning the adults for cues and listening in on their conversations. My sense of security depended on what information I could glean, any clue dropped inadvertently when they didn’t realize a child was paying attention. My aunts and my mother would gather in Abuelita’s kitchen, drinking coffee and gossiping. “
¡No me molestes!
Go play in the other room now,” an aunt would say, shooing me away, but I overheard much regardless: how my father had broken the lock on Titi Gloria’s liquor cabinet, ruining her favorite piece of furniture; how whenever Junior and I slept over with our cousins, my father would phone every fifteen minutes all night long, asking, “Did you feed them? Did you give them a bath?” I knew well enough that my aunts and my grandmother were all prone to exaggeration. It wasn’t really every fifteen minutes, but Papi did call a lot, as I gathered from my aunts’ exasperated and mechanically reassuring side of the conversations.

The gossip would then take a familiar turn, my grandmother saying something like “Maybe if Celina ever came home, he wouldn’t be drinking every night. If those kids had a mother who ever cooked a meal, Juli wouldn’t be worrying about them all night.” As much as I adored Abuelita—and no one resented my mother’s absence more than I did—I couldn’t bear this constant blaming. Abuelita was unconditionally loyal to blood kin. Her sons’ wives were not outside the ambit of her protection, but they didn’t enjoy the same immunity from prosecution. And often my mother’s efforts to please Abuelita—whether a generously chosen gift or her ready services as a nurse—went dimly acknowledged. Even being Abuelita’s favorite, I felt exposed and unmoored when she criticized my mother, whom I struggled to understand and forgive myself. In fact, she and I wouldn’t achieve a final reconciliation before working on it for many years.

My surveillance activities became family legend the Christmas that
Little Miss Echo arrived. I had seen the doll with its concealed tape recorder advertised on television and begged for it. It was the hottest gift of the season, and Titi Aurora had searched far and wide for a store that still had one in stock. I sent my cousin Miriam into the kitchen with the doll to bug the adults’ conversation, knowing that I would have been immediately suspect. But before anything could be recorded, Miriam cracked and gave me up at the first question, and I got walloped anyway.

One overheard conversation had a lasting effect, though I now remember it only dimly. My father was sick: he had passed out, and Mami took him to the hospital. Tío Vitín and Tío Benny came to get Junior and me, and they were talking in the elevator about how our home was a pigsty, with dishes in the sink and no toilet paper. They spoke as if we weren’t there. When I realized what they were saying, my stomach lurched with shame. After that I washed the dishes every night, even the pots and pans, as soon as we finished dinner. I also dusted the living room once a week. Even though no one ever came over, the house was always clean. And when I went shopping with Papi on Fridays, I made sure we bought toilet paper. And milk. More than enough milk.

The biggest fight my parents ever had was because of the milk. At dinnertime, Papi was pouring a glass for me, and his hands were shaking so badly the milk spilled all over the table. I cleaned up the mess, and he tried again with the same result. “Papi, please don’t!” I kept repeating. It was all I could do to keep myself from crying; I was utterly powerless to stop him. “Papi, I don’t want any milk!” But he didn’t stop until the carton was empty. When my mother got home from work later and there was no milk for her coffee, all hell broke loose. Papi was the one who had spilled the milk, but I was the one who felt guilty.

A
BUELITA WAS GOING
to cook for a party, and she wanted me to come with her to buy the chickens. I was the only one who ever went with her to the
vivero
.

I loved Abuelita, totally and without reservation, and her apartment on Southern Boulevard was a safe haven from my parents’ storms at home. Since those years, I have come to believe that in order to thrive, a child must have at least one adult in her life who shows her unconditional love, respect, and confidence. For me it was Abuelita. I was determined to grow up to be just like her, to age with the same ungraying, exuberant grace. Not that we looked much alike: she had very dark eyes, darker than mine, and a long face with a pointed nose, framed by long straight hair—nothing like my pudgy nose and short, curly mop. But otherwise we recognized in each other a twin spirit and enjoyed a bond beyond explanation, a deep emotional resonance that sometimes seemed telepathic. We were so much alike, in fact, that people called me Mercedita—little Mercedes—which was a source of great pride for me.

Nelson, who among my many cousins was closest to me in age as well as my inseparable co-conspirator in every adventure, also had a special connection with Abuelita. But even Nelson never wanted to go with Abuelita to the
vivero
on Saturday mornings because of the smell. It wasn’t just the chickens that smelled. They had baby goats in pens and pigeons and ducks and rabbits in cages stacked up against a long wall. The cages were stacked so high that Abuelita would climb up a ladder
on wheels to see into the top rows. The birds would all be squawking and clucking and flapping and screeching. There were feathers in the air and sticking to the wet floor, which was slippery when they hosed it down, and there were turkeys with mean eyes watching you. Abuelita inspected all the chickens to find a plump and lively one.

“
Mira
, Sonia, see that one in the corner just sitting there with droopy eyes?”

“He looks like he’s falling asleep.”

“That’s a bad sign. But this one, see how he’s ready to fight the others when they come close? He’s feisty and fat, and I promise you he’s tasty.”

After Abuelita picked out the very best chicken, it was my job to watch them butcher it while she waited in line for eggs. In a room all closed up in glass, a man stood breaking necks, one after another, and a machine plucked the feathers. Another man cleaned the birds, and another weighed each one and wrapped it up in paper. It was a fast-moving line, as in a factory. I had to watch carefully to make sure that the chicken we’d chosen was the one we got in the end. I was supposed to tell Abuelita if they mixed them up, but it never happened.

We would walk back under the crisscrossed shadows of the train tracks overhead, up Westchester Avenue toward Southern Boulevard and home—which is what Abuelita’s house felt like to me. Of course Abuelita’s house wasn’t a real house like the one her daughter Titi Gloria lived in, in the far northern part of the Bronx, with a front porch and rosebushes. Abuelita lived in a five-story tenement, three apartments to a floor, with a fire escape that zigzagged up the front, like our old building on Kelly Street, where we lived before moving to the projects.

As we walked back, Abuelita would stop to choose vegetables from the crates that were lined up on the sidewalk. For almost every meal she fried
tostones
, so we’d buy green plantains, and also peppers, some green ones and some little sweet ones, and onions, tomatoes,
recao
, and garlic to make
sofrito
. She would always haggle, and though she made it sound as if she were complaining about the quality and how expensive everything was, by the end she’d be laughing with the
vendedor
. All these years later, an open market still stirs in me the urge to haggle the way I learned from Abuelita.

“¿Sonia, quieres una china?”

Abuelita loved oranges, but they were expensive most of the year, so we would buy just one to share as a treat, and she’d ask me to choose. My father taught me how to choose fruit—how to make sure it’s ripe by smelling its sweetness. My father had shown me how to choose good meat too, with enough fat for flavor, and how to recognize if it’s not fresh. I went grocery shopping with Papi on Fridays, which was payday. Those shopping trips were the best times of the week for me, not counting my days at Abuelita’s. Papi and I would walk to the new Pathmark that was built on the empty lot near our projects and come home with our cart filled. I’d pull the cart while Papi toted the extra bags that didn’t fit.

I could tell we were almost back at Abuelita’s when I saw the marquee across the street, though we never went to see movies there because of the prostitutes standing around. When my cousin Miriam—Nelson’s sister and Titi Carmen’s daughter—asked me what “prostitute” meant, I wasn’t sure either, but I knew it was bad and that they wore very short skirts and very high heels and lots of makeup. We would figure out more of what the occupation entailed by the time the look came into fashion in the late 1960s, distressing our mothers deeply. When Titi Gloria did take us to the movies, it was at a different theater, farther down Southern Boulevard, and usually to see Cantinflas, the brilliant Mexican comic actor whose humor was as deft verbally as Charlie Chaplin’s was physically.

Our shopping trip would conclude with a final stop to pick up bread and milk at the bodega a few doors down from Abuelita’s. The bodega, a tiny grocery store, is the heart of every Hispanic neighborhood and a lifeline in areas with no supermarkets in walking distance. In those days, the bread they sold was so fresh that its warm smell filled the store. Abuelita would give me
la tetita
, the crunchy end, even though she liked it too, I knew. The bodega was always crowded with the same guys having their daily party. They sat in the corner, reading
El Diario
and arguing about the news. Sometimes one of them would read the
Daily News
and explain to the others in Spanish what it said. I could tell when he was improvising or embellishing the story; I knew what news
sounded like in English. Usually, they only read the
Daily News
for the horse-racing results, although they didn’t actually follow the horses. The last three digits of the total bets taken at the track became the winning number for the illegal lottery they played.

Before Abuelita moved, when she still lived on Kelly Street, there was a bodega right downstairs from her apartment. Sometimes she would send me downstairs by myself with a dollar bill wrapped up in a napkin that had numbers written on it. I had to tell the man whether she wanted to play them straight or in combination, or fifty cents each way. My grandmother counted extraordinary luck among her many gifts. Sometimes she saw the winning numbers in her dreams. I’ve never dreamed of numbers, but I’ve inherited more than my share of luck at games of chance, winning many a stuffed animal, and I’m even better at games like poker, where skill mediates luck. Sometimes Abuelita would see bad luck coming too, and that brought fear to my family. Too often in the past she had been right.

The stairs up to the third-floor apartment were narrow and dark, and Abuelita didn’t have an elevator to rely on as we did. But in the projects, the elevator was more than a convenience: Junior and I were absolutely forbidden to take the stairs, where my mother had once been mugged and where addicts regularly shot up, littering the scene with needles and other paraphernalia. I can still hear Mami’s warning that we should never, but never, touch those needles or take that junk: if we did, we would surely die.