When I Was Puerto Rican (38 page)

Still Mami insisted that we keep in touch with him.

“You must never forget your father,” she reminded us at Christmas, Father’s Day, and his birthday. “You’re his flesh and blood, and even if he has another family now, he still loves you.”

We didn’t believe her. Grudgingly, we sent him cards on special days, copied out our best compositions, stayed in touch, knowing it was all show. Because in Brooklyn, after Francisco’s death, Mami became, even more than before, both mother and father to us. We could count on her in a way we had never been able to count on Papi, Tata, or Francisco, who had made everyone happy for such a short time before dying and becoming a ghost that haunted us all for the rest of our lives.

Mornings, Mami left the house while it was still dark for the subway ride into Manhattan. She dressed “for work” in clothes that she changed out of the minute she came home, so that they wouldn’t get stained with oil,
achiote,
or tomato sauce. She began as a thread cutter, even though in Puerto Rico she had been a machine operator.

“Here you have to prove yourself all over again,” she said. She tried hard, which impressed her supervisors, and was moved up quickly to the stitching work she loved.

She bought a special pair of scissors for work. When she walked across the projects on her way home from the subway, she put them in her pocket and held them tight until she was safely inside the house. She then wiped the sweat off them and put them in a special quilted case she had made.

We joked about her handbag, which we worried was an inducement for muggers, since it was big and bulging. In it she carried our birth certificates, immunization records, and school papers. She also kept a small notebook in which she wrote the hours she worked, so that
el
bosso wouldn’t cheat her on payday. She kept her makeup (pressed powder, eyebrow pencil, rouge, and lipstick) in its own small pouch. If a mugger were to steal her purse, he wouldn’t get any money, because she carried that in a wallet in her skirt pocket under her coat.

When she worked, Mami was happy. She complained about sitting at a machine for hours, or about the short coffee breaks, or about
el bosso.
But she was proud of the things she made. Often she brought home samples of the bras and girdles she worked on and showed us how she had used a double-needle machine, or how she had figured out that if you stitched the cup a certain way, it would fit better. But even though she was proud of her work, she didn’t want us to follow in her footsteps.

“I’m not working this hard so that you kids can end up working in factories all your lives. You study, get good grades, and graduate from high school so that you can have a profession, not just a job.”

She never asked to see our homework, but when we brought home report cards, she demanded that we read her the grades and then translate the teachers’ comments so that she would know exactly how we were doing in school. When the reports were good, she beamed as if she herself had earned the good marks.

“That’s what you have to do in this country,” she’d say.

“Anyone willing to work hard can get ahead.”

We believed her and tried to please her as best we could. Since we’d come to Brooklyn, her world had become full of new possibilities, and I tried very hard to share her excitement about the good life we were to have somewhere down the road. But more and more I suspected Mami’s optimism was a front. No one, I thought, could get beat down so many times and still come up smiling.

Sometimes I lay in bed, in the unheated rooms full of beds and clothes and the rustle of sleeping bodies, terrified that what lay around the corner was no better than what we’d left behind, that being in Brooklyn was not a new life but a continuation of the old one. That everything had changed, but nothing had changed, that whatever Mami had been looking for when she brought us to Brooklyn was not there, just as it wasn’t in Puerto Rico.

Tata’s brother Chico didn’t live with us, but he spent a lot of time in our apartment. He, Tata, and Don Julio split whatever money they made at their jobs, or playing the numbers, to buy cheap wine and six-packs of beer. Unlike Tata and Don Julio, who only drank in the afternoon, Chico drank all the time. Once, when we were trying out new English words, one of us called him a bum. Mami smacked whoever it was and warned us never to say that word again.

Chico’s pockets jingled with coins, which he handed out if we did him small favors.

“Get me another beer,” he’d say, and we’d scramble to the refrigerator.

“Light my cigarette,” and three or four matches would be struck at the same time. He paid us all.

While Tata tended to get loud and angry when she drank, Chico was quiet and morose. Mami said he was a harmless drunk, “like a kid,” and always made sure he ate something when he was at our house.

“At least he knows how to hold his liquor,” she’d tell us.

I was on my way to school. Chico was coming in from his night job to sleep on our couch.

“Show me and I’ll give you a quarter.”

“Show you what?”

“Open your blouse,” Chico said, “and let me see. I’ll pay you.”

“No!”

He blocked the hallway with his long arms. “I won’t touch you. I just want to look.” His eyes were teary.

“If you don’t let me by I’ll scream.”

“Come on, Negi ... I’m family.” Sharp white stubble covered his chin. He smacked his lips.

“You’d better not bother me again, or I’m telling Mami.” I pushed past him and ran down the stairs and out into the street.

The next day I was brushing my hair in front of the dresser in the bedroom of our railroad-style apartment. Chico lay on the couch, watching television with the kids, but every once in a while I noticed his eyes fixed on me. I turned my back, face burning, goose bumps rising. Tata called him to the kitchen. His bones creaked when he got up. As he passed behind me, he slipped his hand under my raised arms and pinched my left nipple.

“Don’t tell anyone,” he mumbled into my ear.

I collapsed on the bed, holding myself against the pain and humiliation, but I didn’t scream. On his way back he threw a dollar at me. It was wrinkled and dirty, its edges ragged. I stretched it out and flattened it with my palm. George Washington, I had just learned, was the Father of our country. I put him inside my thick history book. The next day, on the way home from school, I ate my very first sundae with three kinds of ice cream, pineapples, nuts, chocolate sauce, and marsh-mallows.

“Tomorrow,” Mami said, “you’re not going to school. I need you to come with me to the welfare office.”

“Ay, Mami, can’t you take Delsa?”

“No, I can’t.”

When Mami was laid off, we had to go on welfare. She took me with her because she needed someone to translate. Six months after we landed in Brooklyn, I spoke enough English to explain our situation.

“My mother she no spik inglish. My mother she look for work evree day, and nothin. My mother she say she don’t want her children suffer. My mother she say she want work bot she lay off. My mother she only need help a leetle while.”

I was always afraid that if I said something wrong, if I mispronounced a word or used the wrong tense, the social workers would say no, and we might be evicted from our apartment, or the electricity would be shut off, or we’d freeze to death because Mami couldn’t pay for heating fuel.

The welfare office was in a brick building with wire covering the windows. The waiting room was always packed with people, and the person at the front desk never knew when we would be helped or where the social workers were. It was a place where you went and waited for hours, with nothing to do but sit and stare at the green walls. Once there, you couldn’t even go out to get a bite to eat, because your name might be called any time, and if you were gone, you’d lose your turn and have to come back the next day.

On the way there, Mami bought the paper, and I brought along the thickest library book I could find. The first couple of hours usually went by fast, since there were forms to fill out and interesting conversations going on around us as the women told each other their stories. There were never any men, just tired-looking women, some with their children, as if bringing children there would make the social workers talk to them.

Mami dressed nicely for the welfare office and insisted that I do too.

“We’re not going there looking like beggars,” she said, and while we waited she kept reminding me to sit up, to stay alert, to look as neat and dignified as the women on the other side of the partition, phones at their ears, pens poised over the forms handed to them by the receptionist with the dour expression who wouldn’t smile if her life depended on it.

Occasionally there were fights. Women beat up on the clerks who refused them help, or who made them wait in line for days, or who wouldn’t see them at all after they’d waited for hours. Once Mami punched a social worker who was rude to her.

“They treat us like animals,” she cried after she’d been restrained. “Don’t they care that we’re human beings, just like them?”

Her makeup streaked, her hair dishevelled, she left the welfare office with her back slumped and her eyes cast down and furtive. I was sure everyone on the bus knew that we had spent the day in the welfare office and that Mami had just hit a social worker. That night as she told Tata and Don Julio what had happened, Mami made it sound like it was a joke, no big deal. I added my own exaggerated details of how many people had to restrain her, without any mention of how frightened I’d been, and how ashamed I’d felt when she lost control in front of everybody.