When I Was Puerto Rican (34 page)

“Where are you going?” she mumbled, half asleep.

“To the bathroom,” I whispered.

The bed was pressed into the corner against the wall across from the window, next to a wide doorway that led into the next room. A long dresser stretched from the doorway to the window wall, leaving an aisle just wide enough to open the drawers halfway out.

It was six in the morning of my first day in Brooklyn. Our apartment, on the second floor, was the fanciest place I’d ever lived in. The stairs coming up from Tata’s room on the first floor were marble, with a landing in between, and a colored glass window with bunches of grapes and twirling vines. The door to our apartment was carved with more bunches of grapes and leaves. From the two windows in the main room we could look out on the courtyard we had come through the night before. A tree with broad brown leaves grew from the middle of what looked like a well, circled with the same stones that lined the ground. Scraggly grass poked out between the cracks and in the brown dirt around the tree. The building across from ours was three stories high, crisscrossed by iron stairs with narrow landings on which people grew tomatoes and geraniums in clay pots. Our building was only two stories high, although it was almost as tall as the one across the courtyard. We, too, had an iron balcony with a straight ladder suspended halfway to the ground. It made me a little dizzy to look down.

The main room of our apartment was large and sunny and decorated with more braided molding. The whole apartment was painted pale yellow, except for the ceilings, which were smoky gray. The floor was covered with a flat rug whose fringes had worn away into frayed edges where they met the wood floor. A fireplace had been blocked up with a metal sheet. More cherubs, grapes, and vines decorated the mantel. One of the cherubs was missing a nose; another had lost both hands and a foot. Next to the fireplace there was a small stove with four burners close together, a narrow counter with shelves underneath, and a deep sink. A door next to the sink led to the toilet, which was flushed by pulling a chain attached to a wooden box on the wall above the seat. On the other side of the toilet room door, on the wall opposite the windows, there was a huge, claw-foot bathtub covered by a metal sheet. In the middle of the room was a formica table and four chairs with plastic seats and backs that matched the tabletop. A lopsided couch and lumpy chair covered in a scratchy blue fabric faced the tub as if bathing were a special event to which spectators were invited.

The windows and door were locked, and Mami had warned the night before that I was not to leave the apartment without telling her. There was no place to go anyway. I had no idea where I was, only that it was very far away from where I’d been. Brooklyn, Mami had said, was not New York. I wished I had a map so that I could place myself in relation to Puerto Rico. But everything we owned was packed and stacked against the yellow walls. Not that there was a map in there, either.

There was nothing to do, nowhere to go, no one to talk to. The apartment was stifling. Inside the closed rooms, the air was still. Not even dust motes in the sunlight. Outside the windows, a steady roar was interrupted by sharp sirens or the insistent crash and clang of garbage cans, the whining motors of cars, and the faint sound of babies crying.

La marketa
took up a whole block. It was much bigger and more confusing than the plaza in Bayamón, although it carried pretty much the same types of things. It was a red brick building with skylights in the high ceiling, so that whatever sun made it in lit up the dusty beams and long fluorescent light fixtures suspended from them. The floor was a gritty cement and gravel mix, sticky in places, spotted with what looked like oil slicks. Stalls were arranged along aisles, the merchandise on deep shelves that slanted down.

On the way to
la marketa
we had passed two men dressed in long black coats, their faces bearded. Ringlets hung from under their hats alongside their faces.

“Don’t stare,” Mami pulled on my hand.

“Why are they dressed so strange?”

“They’re Jewish. They don’t eat pork.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t know. They all live in the same neighborhood and only buy food from each other.”

In la
marketa
almost all the vendors were Jewish, only they didn’t wear their coats and hats. They wore white shirts and little round doilies on their heads. Many of them spoke Spanish, which made it easy for Mami to negotiate the price of everything.

“You never pay the first price they tell you,” she instructed.

“They like to bargain.”

We went from stall to stall, arguing about every item we picked out. The vendors always made it seem as if we were cheating them, even though Mami said everything was overpriced.

“Don’t ever pay full price for anything,” Mami told me. “It’s always cheaper somewhere else.”

It was a game: the vendors wanting more money than Mami was willing to spend, but both of them knowing that eventually, she would part with her dollars and they would get them. It made no sense to me. It took most of the day to buy the stuff we needed for our apartment. Had she spent less time shopping around, she might have bought more. As it was, she only had half the things we needed, and we were exhausted and irritable by the time we got home. I had spent my entire first day in New York hunting for bargains.

The second day was no different. “We have to buy your school clothes, and a coat,” Mami said.

Winter would be coming soon, Tata said, and with it, chilly winds, snowstorms, and short days.

“The first winter is always the worst,” Don Julio explained, “because your blood is still thin from living in Puerto Rico.” I imagined my blood thickening into syrup but didn’t know how that could make me warmer.

“I can’t wait to see snow,” Edna chirped.

“Me neither,” said Raymond.

Two days in Brooklyn, and they already loved everything about it. Tata cared for them while Mami and I shopped. She sat them down in front of a black-and-white television set, gave each a chocolate bar, and they spent the entire day watching cartoons, while Tata smoked and drank beer.

“What good kids they are,” she complimented Mami when we came back. “Not a peep out of them all day.”

Graham Avenue in Williamsburg was the broadest street I’d ever seen. It was flanked by three- and four-story apartment buildings, the first floors of which contained stores where you could buy anything. Most of these stores were also run by Jewish people, but they didn’t speak Spanish like the ones in la
marketa.
They were less friendly, too, unwilling to negotiate prices. On Graham Avenue there were special restaurants where Mami said Jewish people ate. They were called delis, and there were foreign symbols in the windows, and underneath them the word
kosher.
I knew Mami wouldn’t know what it meant, so I didn’t bother asking. 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. We didn’t go into the delis because, Mami said, they didn’t like Puerto Ricans in there. Instead, she took me to eat pizza.

“It’s Italian,” she said.

“Do Italians like Puerto Ricans?” I asked as I bit into hot cheese and tomato sauce that burned the tip of my tongue.

“They’re more like us than Jewish people are,” she said, which wasn’t an answer.

In Puerto Rico the only foreigners I’d been aware of were
Americanos.
In two days in Brooklyn I had already encountered Jewish people, and now Italians. There was another group of people Mami had pointed out to me.
Morenos
. But they weren’t foreigners, because they were American. They were black, but they didn’t look like Puerto Rican
negros
. 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. According to Mami, they too lived in their own neighborhoods, frequented their own restaurants, and didn’t like Puerto Ricans.

“How come?” I wondered, since in Puerto Rico, all of the people I’d ever met were either black or had a black relative somewhere in their family. I would have thought
morenos
would like us, since so many of us looked like them.

“They think we’re taking their jobs.”

“Are we?”

“There’s enough work in the United States for everybody,” Mami said, “but some people think some work is beneath them. Me, if I have to crawl on all fours to earn a living, I’ll do it. I’m not proud that way.”

I couldn’t imagine what kind of work required crawling on all fours, although I remembered Mami scrubbing the floor that way, so that it seemed she was talking about housework. Although, according to her, she wouldn’t be too proud to clean other people’s houses, I hoped she wouldn’t have to do it. It would be too embarrassing to come all the way from Puerto Rico so she could be somebody’s maid.

The first day of school Mami walked me to a stone building that loomed over Graham Avenue, its concrete yard enclosed by an iron fence with spikes at the top. The front steps were wide but shallow and led up to a set of heavy double doors that slammed shut behind us as we walked down the shiny corridor. I clutched my eighth-grade report card filled with A’s and B’s, and Mami had my birth certificate. At the front office we were met by Mr. Grant, a droopy gentleman with thick glasses and a kind smile who spoke no Spanish. He gave Mami a form to fill out. I knew most of the words in the squares we were to fill in: NAME, ADDRESS (CITY, STATE), and OCCUPATION. We gave it to Mr. Grant, who reviewed it, looked at my birth certificate, studied my report card, then wrote on the top of the form “7-18.”

Don Julio had told me that if students didn’t speak English, the schools in Brooklyn would keep them back one grade until they learned it.

“Seven gray?” I asked Mr. Grant, pointing at his big numbers, and he nodded.

“I no guan seven gray. I eight gray. I teeneyer.”

“You don’t speak English,” he said. “You have to go to seventh grade while you’re learning.”

“I have A’s in school Puerto Rico. I lern good. I no seven gray girl.”

Mami stared at me, not understanding but knowing I was being rude to an adult.

“What’s going on?” she asked me in Spanish. I told her they wanted to send me back one grade and I would not have it. This was probably the first rebellious act she had seen from me outside my usual mouthiness within the family.

“Negi, leave it alone. Those are the rules,” she said, a warning in her voice.

“I don’t care what their rules say,” I answered. “I’m not going back to seventh grade. I can do the work. I’m not stupid.”

Mami looked at Mr. Grant, who stared at her as if expecting her to do something about me. She smiled and shrugged her shoulders.

“Meester Grant,” I said, seizing the moment, “I go eight gray six mons. Eef I no lern inglish, I go seven gray. Okay?”

“That’s not the way we do things here,” he said, hesitating.