When I Was Puerto Rican: List 5

Eyes fixed straight ahead, she pretended to ignore the gallantries, but a couple of times her lips curled into a smile.

I wanted to jump on those men and punch their faces in, to quiet the promises and the seductive looks, to chill the heat they gave off, palpable as the clothes I wore.

I kept replaying the walk to the bus stop, her proud bearing, the men’s stares, their promises, and the nakedness her accessible beauty made me feel.

He was as withdrawn as a person can be and still live in the same household: morose, preoccupied with matters that were none of our business.

They say my arroz con pollo is good,
Especially when enhanced by red beans
Soaked overnight,
Cooked at low heat with ham and delectable spices.

The more convoluted the story lines, the more I liked them, and I imagined that all the long-suffering heroines looked like me, or rather, that I looked like them.

A group of boys leaned against the wall of the school, pretending not to watch us. Maritza and her retinue giggled near them.

“There’s no such thing, Pablo,” Mami chided.

“Where did you get such a funny name?” I asked, evil as the radio vixens.

Laughter came from the living room where my sisters and brothers watched Don Cholito’s slapstick.

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.

I looked behind me at Papi, his face inscrutable, at Delsa, Norma, Héctor, and Alicia huddled against the terminal window.

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.

The stewardesses minced up and down the narrow aisle, glancing from side to side like queens greeting the masses.

I pressed against her and felt the sharp prongs of the rhinestone brooch on her left shoulder against my face.

Behind her loomed a man shorter than she, but as imposing.

Finally, a swarthy man with thick black hair and a flat cap on his head stopped, got out of his taxi, and helped us load our stuff.

There were angels on the ceiling. Four fat naked cherubs danced in a circle, their hands holding ivy garlands, their round buttocks half covered by a cloth swirling around their legs.

They were called delis, and there were foreign symbols in the windows, and underneath them the word kosher.

I imagined it was a delicacy that only Jewish people ate, which is why their restaurants so prominently let them know you could get it there.

They dressed like Americanos but walked with a jaunty hop that made them look as if they were dancing down the street, only their hips were not as loose as Puerto Rican men’s were.

Half of them never showed up, or, when they did, they slept through the lesson or nodded off in the middle of Miss Brown’s carefully parsed sentences.

Every night that first winter we gathered in the kitchen around the oven door, and I embellished fairy tales in which the main characters were named after my sisters and brothers, who, no matter how big the odds, always triumphed and always went on to live happily ever after.

He had straight black hair combed into a pompadour, black eyes, and very pale skin.

We knew to stay away from the kitchen, where they argued about politics, the price of ham hocks, whether or not his daughters were uppity, and which horse had won the trifecta.

He was having a great time, while I vacillated between fear and curiosity...

But it was just the two of us, me smiling brazenly while inside I quaked in terror, and him, flustered beyond comprehension.

Even with all those clothes on he looked like a skeleton. His elbows were pointy, and the skin on his face, hands, and feet was translucent. Bones stuck out of his back like truncated wings.

We joked about her handbag, which we worried was an inducement for muggers, since it was big and bulging.

“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.

“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.

Her makeup streaked, her hair dishevelled, she left the welfare office with her back slumped and her eyes cast down and furtive.

We couldn’t even go to the bodega across the street.

On the television “fifty of America’s most beautiful girls” paraded in ruffled tulle dresses before a tinsel waterfall.

Only my curiosity about the people who lived behind these walls ended where the façades of the buildings opened into dark hallways or locked doors.

Nothing good, I imagined, could be happening inside if so many locks had to be breached to go in or step out.

I was to play Christina, a young married woman confronting her mother-in-law. I learned the monologue phonetically from Mr. Gatti. It opened with “You belong to a type that’s very common in this country, Mrs. Phelps—a type of self-centered, self-pitying, son-devouring tigress, with unmentionable proclivities suppressed on the side.”

Her voice was rich, modulated, each word pronounced as if she were inventing it.

I shook hands all around then backed out of the room in a fog, silent, as if the pantomime had taken my voice and the urge to speak.

“We admired,” she said, “the courage it took to stand in front of us and do what you did.”
“So you mean I didn’t get into the school because of my talent, but because I had chutzpah?”