My Beloved World (33 page)

There was shopping therapy as well. “Sonia, you’ve got how many pairs of shoes under your desk? Every single one of them is frumpy. Buy yourself one nice pair, will you?” It was tough love, challenging my ingrained relentlessly negative physical self-image: “Who cares what your mom told you twenty years ago? What matters is how you look this Saturday night. Stop censoring yourself. You look great.” No, I don’t. Maybe not quite as bad as I did then, but great I don’t look. Standing beside Nancy in front of the dressing room mirror, I would say to myself: She has such great style. This would really look good on her. I wish I had my own sense of style.

WHEN SUMMER CAME AROUND
, I still hadn’t figured out my next move, but I knew I needed a break from my mother. We would be at each other’s throats if I couldn’t get away at least for some weekends. Nancy had a summer share on Fire Island, a group house she wanted me to join, and so I went to check it out. It was quite a scene: more people than rooms, parties, and late nights.

“It’s not my style, Nancy.”

But she insisted it would be a great way to kick-start my social life. “Never mind the crowd,” she said. “I don’t know most of them myself.” I wasn’t sure why she thought that made it more appealing.

“Just try it.”

In the end, I refused to be convinced, saying I needed something more sedate. So Nancy introduced me to a college friend who was in another group house on the island, a very different scene, as she described it: shared meals, quiet evenings playing board games and reading. I threw caution to the wind and signed up for that one sight unseen.

My first trip out, the ferry abandoned me on the dock late at night in the middle of a storm that had knocked out the power and phone lines. I got hopelessly lost on the half-mile walk through the dunes from the ferry landing. Knocking on a random door for directions, I was embarrassed to discover I had disturbed somebody’s illicit love nest. When I finally found the house and burst in, Mark Serlen, a housemate who’d
been dozing, looked as if he’d just seen a sea monster come through the door. But from there on it was a lovely, exquisitely peaceful summer. Every other weekend would find Valerie, her fiancé, Jack, Mark, and assorted other friends playing Trivial Pursuit and Scrabble, reading the Sunday
Times
or a good mystery, sailing the weathered little skiff, cooking marvelous meals with clams gathered from the bay, and smoking endless cigarettes. I confess that the first night I spent alone there, many things went bump in the dark and I armed myself with a kitchen knife and broomsticks. But I would eventually come to feel there was no place safer.

We repeated the house share for a few summers, each of us eventually moving on to other arrangements, but the friendships that began at Fire Island continue. The kids have grown up and have their own kids. The summer rituals have given way to other traditions, like season tickets to the ballet year after year with Mark. But at least one weekend every summer I still find my way back to the beach with my Fire Island family.

“
YOU
’
VE GOT TO
find yourself a cop,” Nancy said. “Cops are sexy, believe me.” I began to open up to the possibility of dating again. It was tentative at first, I’ll admit, but being outgoing and enjoying the process of getting to know a person in all his curious particularity, I grew to like dating. I wouldn’t exactly fall hard for anyone, but I did meet some men who renewed my faith that I might be appealing and who even caused some of that nervousness of anticipation that I hadn’t really felt since high school. Even a little romance can do wonders, if you are prepared to enjoy the moment and let the moments accumulate, whatever may come of it.

Probably nothing constrained my dating life as much as living at home with my mother. To hear her screaming from the bedroom “Sonia, it’s midnight. You have to work tomorrow!” did not exactly make me feel like Mary Tyler Moore. If I was out late, she panicked. If she couldn’t reach me by phone, she would call all my friends looking for me. We were making each other miserable.

Dawn Cardi told me her next-door neighbor in Carroll Gardens,
Brooklyn, had an apartment for rent. By train it was twenty minutes from my office at 100 Centre Street, forty minutes on foot. The neighborhood was great, she said, a kind of Mayberry-on-the-Gowanus, only Italian. Many of the families on the block had been there for generations, and they watched out for one another, which sounded something like Abuelita’s neighborhood when I was little. I went to see it that same evening. The building had real character, even an original tin ceiling, and the apartment was adorable. Naturally, the landlord wanted a security deposit. I said I could bring a check the next day, not yet knowing where I would get the money. But before I committed, I told him, my mother would have to see the place, not to make the decision, but for her own peace of mind, to be sure it was safe. The landlord liked that so much, he later told me, he called the real estate agent as soon as I left to delist the apartment.

Marguerite would lend me the money for the deposit and take the opportunity to tutor me in certain basic life skills, like handling personal finances, which I hadn’t yet learned. To be fair, there hadn’t been much occasion. On my mother’s salary, plus what Junior and I brought home working part-time, we had always lived paycheck to paycheck. In that context, I had always feared debt as something that could easily snowball, a worry that arose whenever Kevin used our credit card for small luxuries. Though I often made loans to my aunts, I was never the borrower. As for saving, I had no acquaintance with that beyond collecting bottles as a child to buy Christmas presents. So Marguerite helped me set up a plan to pay her back in regular installments. When the debt was clear, she had me putting the same amount every week into a savings account. Marguerite knew this stuff. She’d done things in the right order: college, a job, saving money, and then getting married. Dispensing practical wisdom was her low-key expression of profound emotional support.

Moving into Carroll Gardens, I began to enjoy decorating the place, getting a bit of confidence that I could develop a personal sense of style. I realized, to my surprise, that I had an intuition for how space works, how scale and dimensions affect feeling. Architecture has always had a visceral effect on me. But the affective power of Carroll Gardens had more to do with the people there. When Dawn and I became neighbors,
we developed a cozy routine. Getting off the train after a ridiculously long day, often after ten, I would stop at her place most nights before going home. Her husband, Ken, who got up very early for work, had usually gone to bed, but he always left a plate of dinner for me—he’s still a great cook. Dawn would pour us a drink, and we’d talk over that day in the life of New York’s criminal justice system.

Actually, by then we’d found much more than work to talk about, having discovered our backgrounds had plenty in common. She was the daughter of first-generation immigrants who had weathered the sorts of challenges that can break a family, causing her to cultivate a certain self-reliance early on. And like me, she had a mother with extraordinary strength of character, one whom I would come to know and love like an extra mother of mine, just as I had Marguerite’s. Over the years and many holidays, I’d get to know Dawn’s entire family: her parents, her kids—Vanessa, Zachary, and Kyle, who became my unofficial godchildren—her sisters, brothers-in-law, nieces and nephews, cousins, and in-laws.

I’ve always turned the families of friends into family of my own. The roots of this practice are buried deep in my childhood, in the broad patterns of Puerto Rican culture, in the particular warmth of Abuelita’s embrace and her charged presence at the center of my world, the village of aunts, uncles, cousins, in-laws, and compadres scattered across the Bronx. I’d observed how the tribe extended its boundaries, with each marriage adding not just a new member but a whole new clan to ours. Still, in Abuelita’s family, blood ultimately came first, and she strongly favored her own. My mother, being more or less an orphan, poor in kinfolk, approached the matter less dogmatically. She treated my father’s family as her own, and when he died, it was to her sister, Titi Aurora, that Mami would bind herself with an almost metaphysical intensity, not to mention filling the available space in the household. But she continued to expand the family of friends among our neighbors, whether in the projects or in Co-op City: Ana and Moncho, Irma and Gilbert, Cristina, Dinora and Tony, Julia … they were all family to us.

I have followed my mother’s approach to family, refusing to limit myself to accidents of birth, blood, and marriage. Like any family, mine has its rituals and traditions that sustain my tie to every member, no matter how far-flung. My friend Elaine Litwer, for instance, adopted
me for Passover, and though I otherwise see her family only rarely, joining her Seder nurtured our connection. Thanksgiving is Mami’s and Dawn’s in perpetuity. Christmas belongs to Junior and to Junior’s kids, Kiley, Corey, and Conner, when they came. Travel becomes another source of tradition; friendships that might have faded with distance are preserved because every trip to a friend’s city, for whatever reason of business, becomes an occasion to visit. In this way I stay meaningfully connected to old friends, like Ken Moy and his family, and establish new relationships that have sustained me, like those with Bettie Baca and Alex Rodriguez, and Paul and Debbie Berger, whom I met while traveling. We may hardly talk in the intervening years, but we pick up right where we left off.

CHILDREN ELEVATE
the art of found families to another level. I adore kids and have a special affinity with them, an ability to see the world through their eyes that most adults seem to lose. I can match any kid’s stubbornness, hour for hour. I don’t baby anyone; when we play games, I play to win. I treat kids as real people. Sometimes I think I love my friends’ kids even more than I love my friends. Over the years, I have gathered more godchildren than anyone I know, and I take the role seriously. I was only thirteen when my cousin Adeline asked me to be godmother to her daughter. Erica was my first, and I was more than a little awed by the responsibility and the honor that the request implied. Alfred’s son Michael was next, then Marguerite’s Tommy. Tommy’s brother John has adopted me as his surrogate godmother. I thought David, the son of my dentist and dear friend Martha Cortés, would be the last, but then Erica asked me to be her own son Dylan’s godmother. Michael and his wife Lisandra have just had a baby girl, Alexia, and they have asked me to be her godmother.

Kiley is mine in a different way.

When I first set eyes on her, she was little more than a tangle of stick-thin limbs and tubes in the neonatal intensive care unit: one pound, eleven ounces. She was impossibly frail, and then very unlikely to survive, but I stood there awestruck at the sight of her drawing little breaths, a miracle of both life and science. I thought I knew everything
about family before that ringing phone woke me up in the middle of the night: Junior, calling from Detroit to say that he had rushed Tracey to the hospital. I got on the next plane.

Junior had met Tracey during his residency at Syracuse, where she was a nurse. She’d followed him to Philadelphia for a fellowship, where they married before moving to Michigan. Now Junior stood beside me before the glass partition of the ICU, reciting the clinical details in his best doctor’s voice. It was how he kept himself from going to pieces, but I could tell he was very scared. I felt closer to him in that moment than I ever had. It was not just the effect of seeing my little brother going through the worst experience of his life. It was also seeing what fatherly strength and devotion he had learned. Junior, who couldn’t even remember Papi, had figured out for himself what it was to be a man.

Kiley’s prognosis was not good, but she would be spared the seizures that can lead to complications. Tracey spent hours and hours every day sitting beside the incubator, watching, until the amazing day when she was first able to hold her daughter in her hands. Almost daily, it seemed, the doctors were intervening to solve some new problem. But slowly, very slowly, we allowed hope to take root. And then one day, sitting alone beside her, I somehow knew with absolute certainty that Kiley would make it.

It was almost a year before she first laughed, every milestone seeming to come at an excruciatingly slow pace. She’d remain a tiny child, my mother horrified at how little she ate. But I would be the one to get her to have mashed bananas laced with brown sugar and to introduce her to White Castle hamburgers, watching with delight as she actually finished her very first. But not until she was five could I persuade Junior to let her spend the day alone with me. Kiley needed no persuading. We explored the Children’s Museum, ate ice cream at Serendipity, saw the Christmas show at Radio City Music Hall and the crèche at St. Patrick’s—all on our first solo outing. After Junior moved the family from Michigan to Syracuse, Kiley never missed a chance to come stay with Titi Sonia.

SEEING MY ENTHUSIASM
for being something of a crazy aunt—Titi Sonia might drive for hours to deliver on a promise to a child, or
show up in an elf costume—many loved ones naturally asked whether I would one day have kids of my own. The question was never uncomplicated, even when my marriage seemed secure.

The prospects of my having a baby, or rather the potential for complications caused by diabetes, terrified my mother. She let Kevin know that if we had any intention of having children, she was counting on him to become a doctor first, not so as to be able to support a family, but to understand fully the risks involved. It wasn’t my mother’s decision, but I was not indifferent to her fears. In fact, a part of me felt them too. I knew of course that type 1 diabetics did have kids. It wasn’t impossible, but the incidence of maternal complications was sobering, especially since I’d spent most of my life imagining I’d be lucky to live past forty. My projected longevity and the chance for a safe pregnancy had certainly improved alongside the methods of disease management since I’d been diagnosed, but I still feared that I wouldn’t see old age. Even if that risk did not dictate my decision entirely, it seemed inarguable that having kids would be tempting fate.