When I Was Puerto Rican (36 page)

The walls of the projects and the buildings nearby were covered with graffiti. I didn’t know what LIKE A MOTHER FUCKER meant after someone’s name. Sometimes the phrase would be abbreviated: SLICK L.A.M.F.” or “PAPOTE L.A.M.F.” I had heard kids say “shit” when something annoyed them, but when I tried it at home, Mami yelled at me for saying a bad word.

I didn’t know how she knew what it meant and I didn’t, and she wouldn’t tell me.

“Mami, can I get a bra?”

“What for, you don’t have anything up there.” She laughed.

“Yes, I do. Look! All the girls in my school ...”

“You don’t need a bra until you’re
señorita,
so don’t ask again.”

“Mami,” I said a couple of weeks later as she changed out of her work clothes. “I’m going to need that bra now.”

“What?” she stared at me, ready to argue, and then her face lit up. “Really? When?”

“I noticed it when I came home from school.”

“Do you know what to do?”

“Sí.”

“Who told you?” Her face was a jumble of disappointment and suspicion.

“We had a class about it in school.”

“Ah, okay then. Come with me, and I’ll show you where I keep my Kotex.” We walked hand in hand to the bathroom. Tata was in the kitchen. “Guess what, Tata,” Mami said. “Negi is a
señorita!”

“Ay, that’s wonderful!” She hugged and kissed me. She held me at arms length, her eyes serious. Her voice dropped to a grave tone. “Remember, when you’re like that, don’t eat pineapples.”

“Why not?”

“It curdles the blood.”

In the bathroom Mami showed me her Kotex, hidden on a high shelf under towels. “When you change them, wrap the soiled ones in toilet paper, so no one can see. Do you want me to help you put the first one on?”

“No!”

“Just asking.” She left me alone, but I could hear her and Tata giggling in the kitchen. The next day Mami brought me a couple of white cotton bras with tiny blue flowers between the cups. “These are from the factory,” she said. “I sewed the cups myself.”

While Mami worked in Manhattan, Tata watched us. As the days grew shorter and the air cooler, she began drinking wine or beer earlier in the day, so it wasn’t unusual for us to come home from school and find her drunk, although she still would make supper and insist that we eat a full helping of whatever she had cooked.

“My bones hurt,” she said. “The beer makes the pain less.”

Her blood had never thickened, Don Julio explained, and she had developed arthritis. Tata had been in Brooklyn more than fifteen years, and if her blood hadn’t thickened by then, I worried about how long it would take.

We complained about being cold all the time, but Mami couldn’t do anything about it. She called
“el lanlor
” from work, so that he would turn on the heat in the building, but he never did.

On the coldest days, Tata lit up the oven and the four burners on the stove. She left the oven door open, and we took turns sitting in front of it warming up.

One evening as we all sat grouped around the stove I told the kids a fairy tale I’d just read. Don Julio crouched in the corner listening. Like my sisters and brothers, he frequently interrupted the story to ask for more details, like what color was the Prince’s horse, and what did the fairy godmother wear? The more they asked, the more elaborate the story became until, by the end, it was nothing like what I had started with. When it was over, they applauded.

“Tell us another one,” Hector demanded.

“Tomorrow.”

“If you tell it now,” Don Julio said, “I’ll give you a dime.”

“For a dime,
I’ll
tell a story,” Delsa jumped in.

“I’ll do it for a nickel,” challenged Norma.

“Everyone quiet! It’s my dime. I’ll tell it.”

Edna and Raymond huddled closer to my feet. Delsa and Norma, who had sprawled on the linoleum floor wrapped in a blanket, argued about who had to move to give the other more room.

“Let me get another beer,” Don Julio said, and he lumbered to the refrigerator.

Tata lay on her bed in the next room. “Get me one too, will you Julio?” she called out. “Negi, talk louder so I can hear the story.”

“Would anyone like some hot chocolate and bread with butter?” Mami offered.

There was a chorus of “Me, me, me, me.”

“Do you want me to tell the story or not?”

“Yes, of course,” Don Julio said. “Let’s just get comfortable.”

“Go ahead and start, Negi,” Mami said. “The milk takes a while to heat up, and I have to melt the chocolate bar first.”

“All right. Once upon a time ...”

“One minute,” Alicia interrupted. “I have to go to the bathroom. Don’t nobody take my place,” she warned.

The fluorescent fixture overhead buzzed and flickered, its blue-gray light giving our faces an ashen color, as if we were dead. Don Julio’s face looked menacing in that light, although his small green eyes and childlike smile were reassuring. My sisters and brothers were huddled together as close to the open oven door as they could manage without getting in Mami’s way as she melted a bar of Chocolate Cortés and kept adjusting the flame on the pan of milk so that it wouldn’t boil over. The room looked larger when we were all together like this, leaning toward the warmth. The walls seemed higher and steeper, the ceilings further away, the sounds of the city, its constant roar, disappeared behind the clink of Mami’s spoon stirring chocolate, the soft, even breathing of my sisters and brothers, the light thump each time Don Julio set his beer can on the formica table. Brooklyn became just a memory as I led them to distant lands where palaces shimmered against desert sand and paupers became princes with the whush of a magic wand.

Every night that first winter we gathered in the kitchen around the oven door, and I embellished fairy tales in which the main characters were named after my sisters and brothers, who, no matter how big the odds, always triumphed and always went on to live happily ever after.

“Come kids, come look. It’s snowing!” Mami opened the window wide, stuck out her hand, and let the snow collect on her palm. It looked like the coconut flakes she grated for
arroz con dulce
. The moment it fell onto our hands, it melted into shimmering puddles, which we licked in slurpy gulps.

“Can we go down and play in it, Mami?” we begged, but she wouldn’t let us because it was dark out, and the streets were never safe after dark. We filled glasses with the snow clumping on the fire escape then poured tamarind syrup on it to make
piraguas
Brooklyn-style. But they tasted nothing like the real thing because the snow melted in the cup, and we missed the crunchy bits of ice we were used to.

The next day schools were closed, and we went out bundled in all the clothes Mami could get on us. The world was clean and crisp. A white blanket spread over the neighborhood, covering garbage cans and the hulks of abandoned cars, so that the street looked fresh and full of promise.

When schools opened again, kids ran in groups and made snowballs, which they then threw at passing buses, or at each other. But as beautiful as it was, and as cheerful as it made everyone for a while, in Brooklyn, even snow was dangerous. One of my classmates had to be rushed to the hospital when another kid hit him in the eye with a rock tightly packed inside a clump of snow.

Every day after school I went to the library and took out as many children’s books as I was allowed. I figured that if American children learned English through books, so could I, even if I was starting later. I studied the bright illustrations and learned the words for the unfamiliar objects of our new life in the United States: A for Apple, B for Bear, C for Cabbage. As my vocabulary grew, I moved to large-print chapter books.

Mami bought me an English-English dictionary because that way, when I looked up a word I would be learning others.

By my fourth month in Brooklyn, I could read and write English much better than I could speak it, and at midterms I stunned the teachers by scoring high in English, History, and Social Studies. During the January assembly, Mr. Grant announced the names of the kids who had received high marks in each class. My name was called out three times. I became a different person to the other eighth graders. I was still in 8-23, but they knew, and I knew, that I didn’t belong there.

That first winter, Mami fell in love with Francisco, who lived across the street. He had straight black hair combed into a pompadour, black eyes, and very pale skin. He looked at Mami the way I imagined Prince Charming looked at Cinderella, and she blushed when he was around. When he came to visit, he brought us candy, and once he brought Mami flowers.