When I Was Puerto Rican (25 page)

“Don’t touch them. They’re not ours.”

“Whose are they?”

“They belong to the laundry down the street.”

She spritzed some water from a bottle onto the cuff of a shirt and pressed the iron against it, making the steam rise up to her face.

“How come you’re doing their ironing?”

“They were very nice and let me bring the work home instead of do it there.” She finished the shirt and put it on a wire hanger alongside the others.

Of all the things in the world Mami had to do, this was her least favorite. She liked cooking, sewing, mopping, even dusting. But she always complained about how much she hated ironing.

“Can I try?”

“To iron?” Her eyebrows formed a question mark over her round eyes. Her mouth toyed with a smile. This was probably the first time I’d ever volunteered to learn anything useful.

She turned off the iron and looked for one of Papi’s old shirts in her clean laundry hamper. “We wouldn’t want you burning a customer’s shirt,” she chuckled. She stretched it on the board.

Quietly she showed me how to set the temperature for linen or cotton, how to wet my finger on my tongue and listen for the sizzle when I touched the flat bottom of the iron, and how to keep the electric cord from touching the hot metal, which could cause a fire. She turned over the bottle of cold water and sprinkled the inside of my wrist.

“This is how little moisture you need to get the steam to rise.” She curved my fingers around the handle, pressing the iron against the fabric while with the other hand she pulled the cloth taut.

“Always iron the inside button and hole plackets first, then the inside and outside collar, then the cuffs.” We danced around the ironing board, with Mami guiding my hand, pressing down on the iron, and standing away for a minute to see me do as she’d taught. The steam rose from the shirt and filled my head with the clean fresh scent of sun-dried cotton, and bubbles of perspiration flushed along my hair line and dripped down my neck. But I pressed on, absorbed by the tiny squares in the weave, the straight, even stitches that held the seams in place, the way the armhole curved into the shoulder.

“You’re doing a good job,” Mami murmured, a puzzled expression on her face.

“This is fun,” I said, meaning it.

“Fun!” she laughed. “Then from now on you do all the ironing around the house.” She said it with a smile, which meant she was teasing. And she never asked me to do it. But after that, whenever I wanted to feel close to Mami, I stacked wrinkled clothes into a basket, and, one by one, ironed them straight, savoring the afternoon when she taught me to do the one thing she most hated.

In early December our landlord fenced in a corner of the yard and led a squealing pig into the enclosure.

“Christmas dinner,” he said with a grin. With Papi’s help, he dug an oval pit near the back fence, lined it with rocks that we children gathered, stuck two Y-shaped sticks at the edges of the hole, and laid a sturdy rod between them. “This should do,” he smiled.

A couple of days before Christmas we gathered by the pigsty. Mami held a large white porcelain bowl, Papi a rope, our landlord a long butcher knife. Our next-door neighbor and her sons had set up a table on sawhorses nearby, and a caldron of water bubbled over the fire in the pit, tended by some people I didn’t recognize.

Papi tied the squealing pig by its legs and, with the help of one of the men, turned it over and carried it to the table. Our landlord drew a necklace on the pig’s neck with one swift arc of the knife, and blood gushed into Mami’s porcelain bowl, squirted droplets onto her apron, bright red spots that jelled into maroon dots.

“The tail is mine,” I announced, and the grown-ups laughed.

“You have to earn it,” our neighbor said. She handed me a bowl into which the pig’s guts spilled like syrup, quivering pink, blue, and yellow, warm and musky, alive, hard to imagine as solid, piquant, brown sausages.

While the men dressed and roasted the pig, Mami and the women made
pasteles.
They grated plantains, green bananas,
yautías,
and yucca, into bowls, seasoned the mixture, spooned mounds of it onto roasted banana leaves, and dropped chunks of savory meat into the centers of the mounds. They then folded the banana leaves into rectangles, tied them with cotton twine, and dropped the
pasteles
into a huge pot of boiling water. They split ripe coconuts open, broke the thick white meat into chunks that we children grated when we weren’t munching. The flakes were squeezed for coconut milk, to be used for
arroz con dulce
and
tembleque.
Some of the coconut milk was mixed with sweet evaporated milk, sugar, egg yolks, and rum to make
coquito.
I helped Papi string colored lights across the yard, and we decorated an eggplant bush with crepe paper flowers and cutout figures. For once, the music coming from the other side of our wall was festive and hopeful, with only one or two songs blaming women for men’s troubles.

On Christmas Eve the bar was closed, and neighbors came out of their houses dragging tables, which were lined up along one end of our yard and then laden with food made by women

I’d never seen, who came in and out as if they were long-lost relatives, stroking our hair, smiling at me and my sisters and brothers as if we were the most wonderful creatures on earth. A group of men showed up with a
cuatro,
a guitar, maracas, and
güiros.
The middle of the yard was cleared and swept for a dance floor. We all sang
aguinaldos,
and for the rest of the night people danced and sang and ate and drank and celebrated as if we were all friends and had only needed an excuse to get together.

“Tomorrow I’m taking you to visit your cousins,” Mami said some weeks later.

“What cousins?”

“Gladys and Angie. They’re really my cousins, but they’re your age. You’re spending a few days with them.”

They lived in a cement house with a blue and white porch next to Lalo’s Cafetin, a landmark in the area known as La Parada 22. Mami had grown up on this street, and Tio Lalo had built his fortune here, in a store that specialized in homemade sweets and Puerto Rican fast food—codfish fritters, fried plantain balls, and his famous stuffed potatoes.

We were greeted by his wife, Angelina, and their two daughters. On the way to their house Mami had told me to be especially nice to Gladys and when I met her, I understood why. She was tall and gaunt, with huge black watery eyes and a timid manner that told me she would remain
jamona
the rest of her life. Her sister, Angie, was pretty, lively, with a quick sense of humor and the air and manner of someone who was used to getting her way. I liked Gladys better, but I could see that Angie was more fun.

“Girls, take Negi and show her your rooms,” Angelina said. Angie bounded off behind a curtain, and I followed Gladys, who walked at a leisurely pace, as if counting seconds.

“This is where we will sleep,” Gladys said, stepping into a narrow room by a neatly made bed that took up most of the floor space. A small Miami window looked out on a cement yard and the wall of the next house. There was a small rug in front of the bed, and a long bare dresser across from it, near a door to another room patched with pictures of singers and movie stars.

“Those are her pictures,” Gladys muttered in a voice that reminded me of the sound from a comb harmonica.

“You can come in now,” Angie sang and opened the door a crack. “Not you!” she said to her sister. Gladys backed away and lay on her bed, hands on her chest, her huge eyes fixed on the ceiling.

Angie’s room was pink and ruffled, carpeted, and decorated with stuffed animals, dolls, and pictures of American movie stars. She had her own pink record player and a collection of albums. Books and magazines were stacked in a basket near her bed. The dresser held a matched comb and brush set, a mirror tray with tiny perfume bottles shaped like kittens and bunnies. On the night table a ballerina held aloft a lamp shade, and a soft pink light bathed her porcelain tutu, accentuating the curves of her strong legs.

“Wow!” I couldn’t help myself. Even Jenny’s room wasn’t this nice.

“You can’t come in here unless I ask you,” Angie said, and I backed away, afraid that if I touched anything I would stain, or break, or somehow contaminate the feminine air of this fragrant room. Angie closed the door. I retreated to the edge of Gladys’s bed and stared at the curtain leading to the room where Mami and Angelina murmured in soft cadences.

“She’s so mean,” Gladys muttered. “Mamita and Papito spoil her just because she’s the youngest.” It seemed strange that Gladys should call her parents by the diminutive, which was usually reserved for small children. “They insist we call them that,” she said, as if she had read my mind. “I know it sounds babyish, but they make us do it.”

I looked around her room, the only decoration in it a framed copy of the Lord’s Prayer. Soft music came from Angie’s door so faintly that it could have been in the house next door.

“Don’t you have a radio?” I asked.

“No. My mother is Evangelical. She doesn’t like the radio, unless it’s preachers.”

A wave roiled inside my stomach, and my fingertips and toes felt cold. In Macún many of our neighbors were Evangelicals. The men dressed in neat white shirts and ties, and the women wore sleeved blouses and long skirts in solid, dull colors year-round. They never cut their hair and didn’t wear makeup, shorts, or jewelry. They didn’t dance, drink, or read popular novels. Every other word out of their mouths was “Blessed be the Lord” or “Aleluya,” and they went around door-to-door every Sunday selling religious magazines. From what I could see, they lived dull, inhibited lives. But they lived them with a fervor that was frightening. Our family never went to church, and I worried that people who did were infallible and we were wrong in our willful resistance to religious guidance. Mami had not told me Uncle Lalo and Angelina were Evangelicals, and I worried that she didn’t know and that they would try to convert me. Then I wouldn’t be any fun and would spend the rest of my days selling The Watch Tower and brushing my long hair into a single braid that dangled down my back.

“I want to see my mother,” I said to Gladys and stepped through the curtain. Mami and Angelina were in the kitchen cooking. “Mami can we go now?”

“No, silly. You’re spending a few days here.” She said it with an edge to her voice, letting me know I was being disrespectful by asking to leave when we hadn’t even eaten. Angelina smiled.

“And you haven’t seen your Tio Lalo’s store yet. Come, and you can choose a dessert for after dinner.” She led me through a door into a room with a long table and a sink on either end. There were shelves along the wall, and a refrigerator. Against a corner there was a stack of burlap sacks with fancy black lettering: POTATOES. We stepped down twice into another room dominated by glass-front refrigerator cases that served as the counter for the store. On either side of the narrow center aisle there were more refrigerated cases for ice cream and sodas, and the walls of the store were dappled with candy in shiny cellophane wrappers clipped to metal skeletons.

Tio Lalo stood behind the counter. Every second we were there he was serving people lined up to buy his stuffed potato balls or his creamy
tembleque.

“Hello!” he murmured, his solemn face not giving any hint that he was happy to see me. “Pick any sweet you like,” he said. I looked around, unable to decide, until he pulled a Hershey’s Milk Chocolate Bar from the wall. “Take this one,” he said, “and get back to the house.” Even though I wouldn’t have chosen that one, I took it and scrammed, sensing that the store, with all its colors and things to make a child happy, belonged to Tio Lalo alone, and not even his family was allowed to go in there.

Angelina’s cooking was bland and colorless. Before we could eat, she offered a prayer, and we had to bow our heads to hear it. At the end, Mami elbowed me so that I would say “Amen” along with everyone else.