My Beloved World (11 page)

I don’t know if my father spoke any English at all. Perhaps he was too shy to speak it badly in front of us. I’m guessing he would have picked up a few phrases to get through his days at the factory, though I never actually heard him say a word. I know that Abuelita couldn’t
manage in English, because my mother interpreted for her whenever she had to deal with officialdom. I doubt her daughters knew more than a few words, or else they would have been helping Abuelita themselves. I can’t even begin to imagine Titi Gloria carrying on in English the way she does in Spanish. Some things just don’t translate. In any case, our family life was conducted entirely in Spanish.

It sounded odd when my mother first started speaking English at home, addressing Junior and me as if she were talking to a doctor at the hospital. But as soon as she found the words to scold us, it began to seem natural enough. In time I hardly noticed which language we were speaking. Still, as easily as Junior and I shifted gears into English with the flexibility of youth, at the age of thirty-six my mother could not have steered that change without a mighty effort. Only her devotion to our education could have supplied such a force of will. “You’ve got to get your education! It’s the only way to get ahead in the world.” That was her constant refrain, and I could no more get it out of my head than a commercial I’d heard a thousand times.

One day the doorbell rang, and my mother opened the door to a man carrying two big briefcases. It wasn’t the man who made the rounds of the projects selling insurance. It wasn’t the old man who came to collect two dollars every Saturday for the drapes he’d sold us months before. My mother sat down with the salesman at the kitchen table, and they talked for a very long time, looking at books, adding up numbers. I was in the other room, overhearing bits and pieces: “priceless gift of knowledge … like a library of a thousand books … easy monthly payments …”

When the two big boxes labeled
Encyclopaedia Britannica
arrived, it was Christmas come early. Junior and I sat on the floor surrounded by piles of books like explorers at the base of Everest. Each of the twenty-four volumes was a doorstop, the kind of book you’d expect to see in a library, never in someone’s home and certainly not twenty-four of them, including a whole separate book just for the index! As I turned the densely set onionskin pages at random, I found myself wandering the world’s geography, pondering molecules like daisy chains, marveling at the physiology of the eye. I was introduced to flora and fauna, to the microscopic structures of cells, to mitosis, meiosis, and Mendel’s
garden of peas. The world branched out before me in a thousand new directions, pretty much as the salesman had promised, and when it became overwhelming, all I had to do was close the book. It would wait for me to return.

Not all of my mother’s efforts to expand our horizons were as welcome as the encyclopedias. Ballet class was a brief torture that I managed to whine my way out of. I was too gangly and uncoordinated; end of story. Piano wasn’t much better, and just as brief. I still can’t hold a beat, even though the metronome mesmerized me. Guitar lessons, which Junior and I took together, were the worst of all. The real problem was getting there and back through a neighborhood on White Plains Road where a gang of taunting bullies made clear Puerto Rican kids were not welcome. I got smacked by one of them and tried to fight back, but eventually we just made a run for it: no way I could actually beat them.

My cousin Alfred had an answer for this menace: he would teach us self-defense, just the way he learned in the army reserves. We had to do push-ups with him shouting orders like a crazed drill sergeant. He slapped me. Again and again. He counted the slaps, fifty in all. This would build up my courage and resistance, he said. I didn’t have the heart to tell him no amount of basic training was going to toughen me enough to take on a gang of much bigger kids just for the sake of playing guitar badly. Sometimes you have to cut your losses.

There was one more reason, beyond the pleasure of reading, the influence of English, and my mother’s various interventions, that I finally started to thrive at school. Mrs. Reilly, our fifth-grade teacher, unleashed my competitive spirit. She would put a gold star up on the blackboard each time a student did something really well, and was I a sucker for those gold stars! I was determined to collect as many as I could. After the first As began appearing on my report card, I made a solemn vow that from then on, every report card would have at least one more A than the last one.

A vow on its own wasn’t enough; I had to figure out how to make it happen. Study skills were not something that our teachers at Blessed Sacrament had ever addressed explicitly. Obviously, some kids were smarter than others; some kids worked harder than others. But as I also
noticed, a handful of kids, the same ones every time, routinely got the top marks. That was the camp I wanted to join. But how did they do it?

It was then, in Mrs. Reilly’s class, under the allure of those gold stars, that I did something very unusual for a child, though it seemed like common sense to me at the time. I decided to approach one of the smartest girls in the class and ask her how to study. Donna Renella looked surprised, maybe even flattered. In any case, she generously divulged her technique: how, while she was reading, she underlined important facts and took notes to condense information into smaller bits that were easier to remember; how, the night before a test, she would reread the relevant chapter. Obvious things once you’ve learned them, but at the time deriving them on my own would have been like trying to invent the wheel. I’d like to believe that even schools in poor neighborhoods have made some progress in teaching basic study skills since I was in the fifth grade. But the more critical lesson I learned that day is still one too many kids never figure out: don’t be shy about making a teacher of any willing party who knows what he or she is doing. In retrospect, I can see how important that pattern would become for me: how readily I’ve sought out mentors, asking guidance from professors or colleagues, and in every friendship soaking up eagerly whatever that friend could teach me.

At the time, all I knew was that my strategy worked. Soon Mrs. Reilly had moved me to the row next to the window, which was reserved for the top students. My pleasure was diluted, however, when I found out that Junior’s teacher had assigned him to the farthest row from the window, where the slowest kids sat. Naturally, Junior was upset, and the unfairness irked me too. It’s true that I called him stupid, but that was a big sister’s prerogative, and I knew that he wasn’t really. He studied almost as hard as I did. He was quiet, but he listened and paid attention; nothing slipped by him.

“He’s a boy,” said Mami. “He’ll get there when he does.” The Sisters of Charity held a pessimistic view of male children: they were trouble for the most part, often in need of a good thrashing, and unlikely to amount to much. There was more wisdom in my mother’s open-ended encouragement. She would never push Junior and me to get better grades, never crack the whip regarding homework or lecture us about
setting our goals high, the way Tío Benny did with my cousin Nelson. When I brought my report card home for her to sign, I could tell she was delighted to see that I was getting As. That same proud smile greeted the news in later years that I’d made valedictorian or was graduating summa cum laude. It didn’t matter that she didn’t understand exactly what I’d accomplished to earn her pride. She trusted me, and Junior too. “Just study,” she would say. “I don’t care what grade you get, just study.
No me importa si trabajan lavando baños. Lo importante es hacerlo bien
.” I don’t care if you clean toilets, just do it well. Achievement was all very well, but it was the process, not the goal, that was most important.

ON THAT FIRST CHRISTMAS
without Papi, Alfred helped me carry the tree home. He held the base and I supported the top as we walked it all the way, retracing the expeditions my father had led in years past. People always used to stop him to ask where he found such a perfect tree. No one stopped Alfred and me, but it wasn’t until we got that sorry specimen up the elevator and into the apartment that we noticed how much it leaned to one side. It was a lesson I’d always remember, if only seasonally: make sure the trunk is straight.

I was in charge of decorating now. I did remember how Papi always said you couldn’t have two lights of the same color next to each other, or two identical ornaments side by side, and you had to drape each icicle of silver tinsel separately over a branch. No tossing clumpy handfuls, which disqualified Junior from helping, since he just didn’t have the patience to do it right. But what I couldn’t figure out was how Papi always managed to string the lights so cunningly that the wires were invisible. I spent hours at it without success. He’d always fussed over it a long time too. So I knew it wasn’t easy, but obviously it involved some particular trick that he had never let me in on. I was reminded of another Christmas when I was very young—young enough that family still came to our house for holidays, before Papi’s drinking was out of control. I had gone into the kitchen, and there was a
lechón asado
occupying the entire table, with golden, crackly skin and an apple in its mouth. I was mystified: the pig was clearly too big to have fit in our
oven, and I couldn’t imagine how my father had cooked it. Had he carefully cut it up, roasted it in sections, and put it back together afterward? Stare as I might, I couldn’t see any seams.

As the string of lights turned into a hopeless cat’s cradle in my hands, Mami walked in and I gave her a desperate look of distress, but she just shook her head and said, “Juli always did the tree. I don’t know how.”

No good ever did come of trying to unravel Papi’s sleight of hand. One year, I had been especially zealous about snooping for presents and discovered the mother lode in the back of one closet, very artfully camouflaged. A little ripping revealed an unimaginable treasure: our own TV! Before that, we used to go to Abuelita’s when there was a ball game, and to watch cartoons or the Three Stooges, I went to Nelson’s house. I was so excited at what I’d found I thought I would bust. I ran straight to Papi to ask if we could watch it right away. The startled look, and then the total deflation in his face—it was heartbreaking. I had ruined his surprise. That feeling of excitement crumpling into shame would ensure I was never again tempted to peek, even when, years later, my mother had me wrap gifts that I knew, from the absence of a name card, were destined for me.

I’d always taken that part of Christmas seriously. For years when I was small, I bought presents for everyone with money I saved from the penny deposits on bottles. I collected the bottles and washed them and carried them back to the store. I recruited Abuelita and my aunts to save their bottles for me too. Abuelita would even take her empties to the bodega and then just give me the money. I earned a bit more by picking up the little winged sycamore pods from Tío Tonio’s backyard: five cents for each shopping bag full. Nelson labored alongside me, but everyone else thought the work was too boring. By the end of the year, I’d have a couple of dollars stashed away, and with that I went shopping at the five-and-dime: a little mirror for Abuelita, a handkerchief for Titi Gloria, some candy for Titi Aurora … None of my cousins did that. I was the only one desperate to do right, to be liked, to be invited over.

Finally, one way or another, the tree was finished. The cotton skirting around the base became a snowy setting for the
Nacimiento
with its tiny manger. The picture was complete, soft sparkle and twinkling
color, lights peeping shyly from behind the veil of tinsel, the crowning star aglow.

A hug from Papi would have been nice just then. I couldn’t deny that our life was so much better now, but I did miss him. For all the misery he caused, I knew with certainty that he loved us. Those aren’t things you can measure or weigh. You can’t say: This much love is worth this much misery. They’re not opposites that cancel each other out; they’re both true at the same time.

D
R. ELSA PAULSEN
intrigued me. She was tall and very polished, even regal, in her white coat. She spoke with a hint of an accent that was not from New York, but not foreign either. When she walked into the pediatric diabetes clinic at Jacobi Medical Center, everybody—interns, residents, nurses—came to attention. You could tell that they wanted to please her, that she was the boss, though she was also warm and friendly. When she checked in on me, she actually talked to me, not just to my mother.

Dr. Paulsen was the first woman in a position of real-world authority I’d encountered. At Prospect Hospital, where my mother worked, all the doctors were men. The nursing supervisors were women, but that’s as far as it went. Even at Blessed Sacrament, the nuns wielded power only over kids. To Monsignor Hart and Father Dolan the Sisters deferred.

At the clinic, the nurse would weigh me and take urine samples. If I was lucky, she took my blood too. If I was unlucky, I’d have to face one of the interns doing this for the first time. Feeling now and then like a guinea pig was in retrospect a small price to pay for the benefit of the cutting-edge treatment being developed there by the Albert Einstein College of Medicine. They had a research program on juvenile diabetes, and considering how rare the disease was then, it was amazing good fortune that the clinic happened to be located in the Bronx, even though we still had to take a long subway ride and then a bus to get there.

With a strong focus on patient education, the clinic was pioneering much that is now standard practice: child-friendly lessons on how to live with diabetes, on nutrition, and on what’s going on in your body. Since I’d first begun treatment, my disease had progressed to the point where my pancreas was producing no insulin at all. Without my shots, I’d have been dead within days, if not sooner. The insulin available then was long acting, a single dose given in the morning, but there were sometimes unexpected fluctuations in blood sugar throughout the day. So you had to eat on a rigid schedule and keep snacks or juice at hand in case of a sudden drop. It wasn’t true that I couldn’t eat sweets, or that mangoes would kill me, as my aunts warned. Fortunately, my mother had a better understanding, and we celebrated after each visit to the clinic by sharing a piece of cherry cheesecake from the hospital cafeteria. It wasn’t so much a lesson in moderation; she already knew she could trust me to eat right. Nor was it really my reward: my mother was always fonder of sweets than I was, and there was maternal guilt to be fed.