When I Was Puerto Rican (32 page)

“What’s that?”

“In the United States, when children reach the age of thirteen, they’re called
teeneyers.
It comes from the ending of the number in English.
Thir-teen. Teen-ager.”

I counted in English to myself. “So I will be a
teeneyer
until I’m twenty?”

“That’s right. Soon you’ll be wanting to rock and roll.” He laughed as if he had told a very funny joke.

“I don’t like rock and roll,” I protested. “Too noisy. And it’s all in English. I don’t understand the songs.”

“Mark my words,” he said. “When you’re a
teeneyer
it’s like something comes over you. Rock and roll sounds good. Believe me.” He laughed as if I knew what he was talking about. I hadn’t seen him this happy in a long time.

“Well, it’s not going to happen to me.” I pouted and ignored his chuckles at my expense.

“Just wait,” he said. “Once you’re in New York, you’ll become a regular teeneyer
Americana.”

“I’m not going to New York.”

“Your mother’s talking about moving there.”

My stomach fell to my feet. “What?!”

“Didn’t you tell them, Monin?” He called into the house, where Mami and the kids watched a program on our very own black-and-white television set.

“Tell them what?” She came out to the porch, hands on hips.

“That you’re moving to New York.” He didn’t look at her; he just spit out the words like phlegm into the night.

“Pablo ...,” she said as one might murmur a prayer.

“Is it true Mami?” Laughter came from the living room where my sisters and brothers watched Don Cholito’s slapstick.

“How can you be so cruel?” She said to Papi. “You know I have no choice.”

“You have a choice,” he growled.

“Stay here? Put up with your
pocavergüenzas?”

“I’ve given you a home. I’m not a rich man, but we’ve always had enough to eat.”

“Do you consider that enough?” Her voice was tense and rising in pitch.

“I don’t know what you want from me, Monin. I just don’t know.”

“I’ve lived with you for fourteen years. We have seven children together. You won’t marry me. You won’t leave me alone.”

“Is that what you want? Marriage? What would that do? I’ve recognized them all. They all have my last name ...”

“Mami, Papi, please ...”

Rage transformed them; a red fury choked the good in both of them and bottled the love they once felt into a dark place where neither could find it.

“Please stop ...”

Their hands formed into fists; their eyes squinted into slits that sent out invisible daggers.

“Please, Mami and Papi ...”

They growled words that made no sense, echoes of all the hurts and insults, the dinners gone to waste, the women, the abandonments.

I crouched against the wall and watched them injure each other without touching each other, hurling words that had the same effect as acid on metal. Each word diminished them, flattened them against the night until they were puppets, pointing fingers in each other’s faces. Their voices extinguished night sounds, and darkness swallowed everything but these two people I loved, the overhead light a dim spotlight that disfigured their features into grimaces. One by one Delsa, Norma, Hector, Alicia, Edna, and Raymond came out on the porch, their eyes round as guavas, tears glistening the tips of their lashes. In their passion Mami and Papi had forgotten about us. They were real only to one another. We huddled in a corner, afraid that if we left them, they might eat each other.

August marked the beginning of hurricane season. Thunder and lightning broke overhead, while in our house, a dreadful calm settled like clear water in a tainted pool. Mami prepared for our trip with the steady resolve of someone who never looks back. She bought suitcases and filled them with our good clothes, allowing us to wear only the faded dresses and shirts that we would leave behind like butterflies a cocoon. Edna, Raymond, and I were to go with her. Delsa, Norma, Hector, and Alicia would stay with Papi until Mami could save enough money for their airfare.

“Does this mean you’re divorcing Papi?” I asked.

“We were never married,” she answered. “We can’t get divorced.”

“Why doesn’t he marry you?”

“He says he doesn’t love me anymore.”

“Do you love him?”

“It doesn’t matter....”

She was a stone packed inside a shell that wouldn’t crack. Papi was numb, detached even from himself, his voice flat, his step so light it was difficult to know he was there at all. We tiptoed around them and saved our voices for play far from the house, where even our laughter was received by Mami and Papi with a stare, a quizzical look, a warning glance.

“Your father is a good man,” Mami told me. “Don’t you ever think otherwise.”

It didn’t seem possible that he was a good man when he wasn’t fighting for her or for us. He was letting us go to New York as if it no longer mattered where we were, as if the many leavings and reconciliations had exhausted him, had burned out whatever spark had made him search for us in swamps and fetid lagoons.

“No, I’ll never go there,” he said when I asked, and a wound opened in my heart that I was certain would never heal. He brought me magazines with pictures of Fabian and Bobby Rydell and encouraged me to accept what was coming with no questions, no backward glances. As if these teenage idols could ever take the place he was so willingly giving up. I tacked the pinup photos on my wall next to Don Luis Lloréns Torres, whose poems had inspired me to love my country, its
jíbaros,
and the wild natural beauty that could be found even in the foul air of El Mangle.

When the day finally came, he drove us to the airport, the radio tuned to the American radio station, where Brenda Lee sang her regrets. He hummed along with her, his eyes focused on the road, the rest of us silent as fog. At the airport he unloaded our bags, helped us verify our tickets. I kept expecting him to change his mind, to get down on his knees and beg Mami not to leave. But he didn’t. When it was time to go, he kissed us good-bye, held us for a long time. I grasped his neck and pressed myself against his chest, smelled the minty fragrance of his aftershave, tickled my fingers through his kinky hair. Behind him Mami gathered Edna and Raymond, her eyes focused on the door to the tarmac, her mouth set in a solid line. I didn’t want to give up either one of them. But it felt as if I were losing them both. Papi pushed me away, kissed both of my cheeks, and brushed the hair from my eyes.

“Write to me,” he said. “Don’t forget.”

Edna, Raymond, and I followed Mami outside the terminal, down the strip to the waiting plane, gray and cold in the dusk. I looked behind me at Papi, his face inscrutable, at Delsa, Norma, Hector, and Alicia huddled against the terminal window. Several times I bumped into Mami as I walked backwards, unwilling to face the metal bird that would whisk us to our new life. She tugged on my arm and swung me around to face forward, but I kept turning back to the horizon dotted with palm trees in front of moss green mountains that rose to an innocent pink sky. Mami pushed me into the plane, down a long aisle lined with seats dead-ending against a wall—my first glimpse of what New York would be like.

Across the aisle, Mami’s eyes were misty. She stretched her fingers toward mine, and we held hands as the plane rose above the clouds. Neither one of us could have known what lay ahead. For her it began as an adventure and turned out to have more twists and turns than she expected or knew how to handle. For me, the person I was becoming when we left was erased, and another one was created. The Puerto Rican
jíbara
who longed for the green quiet of a tropical afternoon was to become a hybrid who would never forgive the uprooting.

ANGELS ON THE CEILING

Ahí fué donde la puerca entorchó el rabo.

That’s where the sow’s tail curled.

Uniformed women with lacquered hair, high heels, and fitted skirts looked down on us, signalled that we should fasten our safety belts, place parcels under the seat in front of us, and sit up.

“Stewardesses,” Mami said, admiring their sleek uniforms, pressed white blouses, stiff navy ribbons tied into perfect bows in their hair. None of them spoke Spanish. Their tight smiles were not convincing, did not welcome us. In our best clothes, with hair combed, faces scrubbed, the dirt under our nails gouged out by Mami’s stiff brush, I still felt unclean next to the highly groomed, perfumed, unwrinkled women who waited on us.

“Someday,” Mami mused, “you might like to be a stewardess. Then you can travel all over the world for free.”

The stewardesses minced up and down the narrow aisle, glancing from side to side like queens greeting the masses. I tried to read in their faces where else they’d been, if their travels had taken them to places like Mongolia, Singapore, Timbuktu. That’s where I’d want to go if I were a stewardess. Not New York, Paris, or Rome. I’d want to go places so far away that I couldn’t even pronounce their names. I’d want to see sights so different that it would show on my face. None of the stewardesses seemed to have been anywhere that exotic. Their noncommittal smiles, the way they seemed to have everything under control was too reassuring, too studied, too managed to make me comfortable. I would have felt better had there been more chaos.

“Do these planes ever just fall from the sky?” I asked Mami, who sat across the aisle from me.

The woman sitting in front of her shot me a fearful look and crossed herself.
“Ay, nena,
don’t say such a thing,” she said in a hoarse whisper. “It’s bad luck.”

Mami smiled.

We were high over thick clouds, the sky above so bright it hurt my eyes. In the window seat, Edna pressed her face flat against the pane. She looked up, eyes shining. “There’s nothing there!” She stretched over my lap and reached out her hand to Mami. “I’m hungry.”

“They’ll serve us dinner soon,” Mami said. “Just wait.”

The stewardesses brought us small trays fitted with square plates filled with sauce over chicken, mushy rice, and boiled string beans. It all tasted like salt.

The sky darkened, but we floated in a milky whiteness that seemed to hold the plane suspended above Puerto Rico. I couldn’t believe we were moving; I imagined that the plane sat still in the clouds while the earth flew below us. The drone of the propellers was hypnotic and lulled us to sleep in the stiff seats with their square white doilies on the back.

“Why do they have these?” I asked Mami, fingering the starched, pique-like fabric.

“So that people’s pomade doesn’t stain the seat back,” she answered. The man in front of me, his hair slick with brilliantine, adjusted his doily, pulled it down to his neck.

I dozed, startled awake, panicked when I didn’t know where I was, remembered where we were going, then dozed off again, to repeat the whole cycle, in and out of sleep, between earth and sky, somewhere between Puerto Rico and New York.

It was raining in Brooklyn. Mist hung over the airport so that all I saw as we landed were fuzzy white and blue lights on the runway and at the terminal. We thudded to earth as if the pilot had miscalculated just how close we were to the ground. A startled silence was followed by frightened cries and
aleluyas
and the rustle of everyone rushing to get up from their seats and out of the plane as soon as possible.