When I Was Puerto Rican (15 page)

By comparison, Abuela’s room was opulent, with its double bed, thick mattress, four bedposts from which to tie the mosquito netting, pillows, and a small crocheted rug. Her dresser held a brush and comb, an altar to the Virgin and Child, a rosary, a Bible, candles, a missal, a small bottle filled with holy water, a picture of Papa Pio the Pope, and cards on which were printed prayers to saints with names like San Francisco, Santa Ana, Santa Bárbara, and San José. Papi had told me that Abuela didn’t know how to read, and I wondered what words looked like to her. Did she recognize any of them? Or were they just a pattern, like crochet stitches?

After the first night, she closed the doors and windows right after supper but didn’t make me go to bed. I stayed up reading the day-old newspaper Abuelo left behind or traced the flower patterns on paper napkins with a ballpoint pen.

One rainy afternoon Abuela pulled out her needlework basket. “Would you like to learn?” she asked timidly, as if she’d been working up the courage to ask.

“Sí,
I would!” I had looked closely at the elaborate motifs of her tablecloths and doilies and had tried to draw them on lined notebook paper or on flattened grocery bags. I had sat mesmerized in the almost holy silence in which she worked, as she wove the needle in and out of stitches, forming pictures with thread.

She found a needle with a large hook and had me sit on the stoop, between her legs, so that she could look over my head and adjust my fingers as she helped me guide the thread in and out of the loops. She taught me how to count stitches, how to make chains that became rows, how to join rounds, when to fill in, and when to build space around stitches. After a while, I learned why the silence in which she worked seemed so magical. To crochet well, I had to focus on the work, had to count and keep track of when and where I increased or decreased stitches, and keep a picture in my head of what the finished cloth should look like, all the while estimating how much cotton thread it would take, and making sure when I ran out of one spool, that the other was joined in as seamlessly as possible. Sounds dwindled into dull, distant murmurs, backgrounds receded into a blur, and sensations waned as I slid under the hypnotic rhythm of a hook pulling up thread, the finished work growing into my palm until its very weight forced me to stretch it out on my lap and look, and admire, and be amazed at what my hands had made.

Abuelo was a quiet man who walked with his head down, as if he had lost something long ago and was still trying to find it. He had sparse white hair and eyes the color of turquoise. When he spoke, it was in a low rasp, in the
jíbaro
dialect, his lips in an apologetic half smile. His hands were rough, the nails yellowed and chipped, the fingertips scarred. He left the house before dawn, pushing before him a cart he had fashioned from pieces of plywood and bicycle parts. At the produce market he stacked a pyramid of oranges on the top and kept two more sackfuls in the cabinet underneath.

He spent his days at the corner of Calle San Cristóbal in Old San Juan, peeling oranges with his pocket knife and scooping out a triangular hole through which tourists could suck the sweet juice. Each orange brought him five cents. He slipped the nickels into his right-hand pocket, to jingle as he walked home at the end of the day, the pocket sagging against his thigh.

Evenings when I heard the rattle of his cart I ran out to open the garden gate for him, and each time, he searched the lower cabinet to see if he had any oranges left. There was always one in the farthest corner, and once he’d secured his cart against the side of the house, he sat on the stoop and peeled it for me in one long ribbon that curled and whirled and circled on itself orange, white, orange.

Sunday morning before breakfast Abuela handed me my pique dress, washed and ironed.

“We’re going to Mass,” she said, pulling out a small white mantilla, which I was to wear during the service.

“Can we have breakfast first, Abuela. I’m hungry.”

“No. We have to fast before church. Don’t ask why. It’s too complicated to explain.”

I dressed and combed my hair, and she helped me pin the mantilla to the top of my head.

“All the way there and back,” she said, “you should have nothing but good thoughts, because we’re going to the house of God.”

I’d never been to church and had never stopped to classify my thoughts into good ones and bad ones. But when she said that, I knew what she meant and also knew bad thoughts would be the only things on my mind all the way there and back.

I tried to look as holy as possible, but the white mantilla tickled my neck and the sides of my face. I wished I didn’t have to wear it, and that was a bad thought, since all the women and girls walking in front of us wore theirs without any complaints.

I love my mother, my father, all my sisters and brothers, my
abuela
and
abuelo,
all my cousins, the governor of Puerto

Rico, Doña Lola, my teacher. A boy went by too fast and bumped into me, so I bumped him back, and that was bad, because Jesus said we should turn the other cheek, which seemed stupid, and there went another bad thought.

I counted all the squares on the sidewalk up to the steps of the church, then I counted the steps, twenty-seven. No bad thoughts.

The church was cool, dark, and sweet smelling. Abuela dipped her fingers into a bowl at the entrance and crossed herself. I dipped my fingers, and there was nothing but water. I tasted it, and she gave me a horrified look and crossed herself. She took my hand and walked me down the aisle lined with pews. When we came to the front, she half knelt, looking up to the altar, and crossed herself again before sliding in to take her seat. I did the same thing.

We were early. Music came from somewhere behind us. When I turned around to see, Abuela leaned down and whispered, “Face forward. You should never look behind you in church.” I was about to ask why, but Abuela put her fingers to her lips and shushed me as everyone stood up. I couldn’t see anything except the back of the man in front of me. He wore a wrinkled brown suit that stretched into folds around his waist because he was so fat. That must have been a bad thought.

The church’s windows were of colored glass, each window a scene with Jesus and his cross. The two I could see without turning my head were beautiful, even though Jesus looked like He was in a lot of pain. The priest said something, and everyone knelt. The altar had an enormous Jesus on his cross at the center, the disciples at his feet. Tall candles burned in steps from the rear of the altar to the front, where the priest, dressed in purple and yellow robes, moved his hands up and down and recited poetry that everyone in the church repeated after him. Two boys wearing white lace tunics helped him, and I was jealous, because their job seemed very important. Envy, I knew, was a bad thought.

I counted the times people stood up, knelt down, stood up. That didn’t seem right. I shouldn’t be in church counting things. I should feel holy, blessed. But I got an itch in the space between my little toe and the sole of my foot. I scraped my shoe against the kneeling bench on the floor. The itch got worse. We knelt again, so I leaned back and took the shoe off to scratch my foot. But I had to get up, because the person next to me wanted to get through. And other people in the same pew got up and squeezed past me, kicking my shoe toward the aisle in the process. Abuela leaned down. “I’m going to take communion. You wait right here.”

As soon as she was gone, I slid over to the end of the pew and looked up the aisle. No shoe. I felt for it with my foot all along under the pew but couldn’t find it. It was wrong to look back in church, so it seemed that it would be worse to look down. But I didn’t want Abuela to come back and find me with one shoe missing.

The people who went up to the altar knelt in front of the priest so he could put something into their mouths. As soon as Abuela knelt, I dove under the pew and looked for my shoe. It was under the pew behind us so I crawled under ours, over the kneeling bench, and stretched to get the shoe. I crawled up just as Abuela came down the aisle. I knelt piously, my hands in prayer, and stared in front of me, trying to look like I was having nothing but the very best thoughts. Abuela went into the pew in front of me, looked over, seemed confused, got out, then knelt next to me. “How foolish. I thought we were one pew up,” she whispered.

When everyone had come back, I realized the man with the wrinkled brown suit was two pews up, and I looked up at Jesus on his cross and prayed, “Please, Jesus, don’t let her find out I moved during the service.” Which I knew was a bad thought.

I packed my clothes and put the doily I had made for Mami into a corner of my small bag. Abuela made fish head soup with plantain dumplings, and we ate some for lunch.

“Don’t take your dress off,” she said. “When he comes to pick you up, Pablito might be in a hurry to get back.”

But Papi didn’t come. Sunday stretched long and hot, through
siesta
time. Abuela made coffee in the late afternoon, and we sat at the table with a stack of soda crackers.

“He’ll probably come for dinner,” she said. But the blue haze of evening shrouded the street, stifled sounds, and sent everyone indoors to their secrets, and Papi didn’t come. Abuela went in to say her prayers. “He must have been held up. Why don’t you change into something comfortable.”

I took off my white pique dress, which was no longer clean and starched. I thought, The minute I change clothes he’s going to show up. But he didn’t, and when Abuela came out from her prayers, we sat by the door, working our needles in, around, up, and out, silently making patterns with thread that might have told a story had either one of us known how to transform our feelings into shape.

Instead, she worked an altar cloth she’d promised Father David, and I added red flowers to the doily I’d made for Mami. And neither one of us said what we both knew. That Papi wasn’t coming. That perhaps the person he had to see the Sunday before needed him again, and he went there, and maybe that person needed him so much that he had forgotten about us, just like he sometimes forgot about Mami chasing after babies in Macún. We worked our crochet until it was too dark to see, until after Abuelo had brought his cart into the yard and tied it up against the fence, until he’d peeled an orange in one long ribbon, until we’d closed up the house and gone into our separate rooms and had wrapped ourselves in the white cotton sheets edged with crocheted scallops.

And I thought about how many nights Mami had left food warming on the ashes of the
fogón,
how often she’d sat on her rocking chair, nursing a baby, telling us to be still, that Papi would be coming any minute, but in the morning he wasn’t there and hadn’t been. I thought about how she washed and pressed his clothes until they were new-looking and fresh, how he didn’t have to ask where anything was because nothing he ever wore stayed dirty longer than it took Mami to scrub it against the metal ripples of the washboard, to let it dry in the sun so that it smelled like air. I wondered if Mami felt the way I was feeling at this moment on those nights when she slept on their bed alone, the springs creaking as she wrestled with some nightmare, or whether the soft moans I heard coming from their side of the room were stifled sobs, like the ones that now pressed against my throat, so that I had to bury my face in the pillow and cry until my head hurt.