Almost a Woman : A Memoir (9780306821110) (10 page)

“Go home, tell mama,” his wife said, guiding me out of the store. I thanked them, tried to make eye contact with both, but they looked past me and waved me out, unwilling to accept my gratitude. I dragged myself home, each step like needles into my ribs and hips. Mami was in the bathroom when I came in, so I slouched into the front room, changed into clothes that hid the bruises on my arms and legs, spent the rest of the night bent over a book so that she wouldn't see the scratches on my cheeks, the swollen lip. After dinner I took a long, hot bath, covered my sobs by splashing water and belting out Mexican
corridos
about traitorous lovers and revolution. If Mami noticed, she didn't say a thing, and neither did my sisters and brothers, whose own struggles with bullies had similar outcomes.

For the rest of the year I avoided the candy store, ashamed but not knowing why, the nameless owners' kindness like a weight, unrelieved by the fact that Lulu never bothered me again.

One day I came home from school and Mami's hair was in curlers.

“Do you have much homework?” Mami asked as she set a cup of coffee in front of me.

“I have to study for final exams.”

“We should buy you a graduation dress.”

I'd given up on anyone noticing that in less than a month I'd be graduating from junior high school. My fifteenth birthday came
and went during the sad times, and it seemed that the same would be true for the last day of school.

“Can we come?” Edna asked.

“No. You stay here with Tata, we won't be long.” Before Francisco's death, Edna and Raymond would have argued, cried, offered to be the best children in the universe if Mami took them along. But now they just looked disappointed.

“I'll change.” I ran into the front room where two bunk beds, Franky's crib, and Tata's cot were lined up in rows. The windows that looked out on the street were open. Delsa, Norma, and Alicia were on the sidewalk jumping double dutch.

Tata lay on her bed, cuddling Franky, and when I came in, she looked up with a smile. I grabbed a dress from one of the hooks Mami had screwed into the wall because the apartment had no closets. With two towels pinched under the mattress of the top bunk I created a private space in which to change out of my school clothes and put on the cotton dress.

Mami was in her room, which served as a passage between the front room and the kitchen. Her bed was pressed against the corner under a window that opened to a dark air vent. Four mismatched dressers, with a drawer for each of us and a couple for Mami, lined the walls. She stood in front of the one with a mirror above it combing out her curls.

“We'll be back in a couple of hours,” she told Tata as we went out. Edna and Raymond watched us wistfully.

“Bring us candy,” Raymond begged as Mami shut the door.

Delsa, Norma, and Alicia stopped jumping rope when we came down the front stoop. Before they could ask where we were going, Mami scanned the street.

“Where's your brother?”

“He went to the corner,” Alicia answered.

“What corner, who said he could wander off like that?”

“Hector always does that, Mami. He goes off whenever he wants. . . .” Norma nudged Delsa before she could say more. “He'll be back soon,” Delsa continued in a subdued voice.

“Don't stay out here too long,” Mami warned, and walked toward Broadway.

“Where are you going?” Alicia called.

“To buy me a graduation dress,” I called back, pleased to see my sisters' envious expressions. I hurried after Mami, whose decisive steps had already brought her to the corner.

It was the beginning of the month, when the welfare and social security checks came in the mail. Broadway was crowded with harried shoppers going in and out of stores, or standing at the bus stops with bulging bags at their sides. Overhead, the elevated train rattled by every few minutes, screeched to a stop at the station on Flushing Avenue. The beams holding up the train tracks divided the street into four lanes, the center two, where traffic moved in both directions, and the outside lanes for local traffic, always congested with double-parked cars, slow buses, and delivery trucks.

I followed Mami into the check-cashing office, a storefront with a huge sign above the door and a group of men loitering on the sidewalk. This time of the month, they were always there, waiting for their women to hand them money from the checks they'd cashed. One kissed and hugged the woman when she gave him money. Another took it without looking at her, stashed the bills in a pocket, and walked away without so much as a thank you. A third started arguing with the woman the minute she came out. She said she needed the money to feed the kids and to pay the rent and electricity. But he wrested it from her, counted it, and took off, leaving her in tears and cursing him while passersby walked a wide circle around her.

Inside, there were two long lines in front of two men behind thick glass. The cashiers wore white shirts, black pants with suspenders, and skullcaps. They had ringlets on either side of their face, like the vendors at the
marketa
and at the used furniture stores on Graham Avenue.

We stood on line behind a skinny woman struggling with a child. The little girl screamed and kicked, scratched at the hand
that held her tightly by the wrist. Those waiting stared at them, moved away without relinquishing their place on line. The woman yelled at the little girl to stop it, stop it, stop it, yanked her hand, smacked her, which made the child cry harder, fight more. The woman looked up at everyone staring, her eyes defying us to say something, and we shifted our gaze elsewhere. Inside their cages, the cashiers were the only ones who dared look back at her, their contempt directed at her, at the child, at all of us waiting on line.

When our turn came, Mami pulled a ballpoint pen from her purse and signed the welfare check in front of the cashier. She didn't look at the man insulated behind the plate glass, and he didn't look at her. Their transaction was silent, the air heavy with her shame and his disdain for people like us: female, dark-skinned, on welfare.

Before we stepped outside, Mami put her cash in her wallet, stashed it deep inside the purse she held tightly against her side, and led me out. The men glanced up expectantly and then turned from us, annoyed when neither of us was the woman they waited for.

“Which store are we going to?” I asked Mami as she led me past.

“That one.” She glanced across the avenue, toward Dolores's Ladies Shoppé, where on the way home from school earlier that week, I had spotted the perfect thing in the window, a yellow sleeveless dress with a full skirt and a wide sash at the waist.

“Does my dress have to be black, or can I get a color?”

She looked at me quizzically as we crossed the street, didn't answer until we were on the other side. “You can wear any color you like.”

My sigh of relief brought a smile to her lips, and she put her hand on my shoulder as we entered Dolores's Ladies Shoppé, where my dress waited, yellow as lemon peel, its bodice and skirt made of lace, the sash of nylon organza tied into a bow at the back.

“It makes you look jaundiced,” Mami said when I tried it on.

I looked in the full-length mirror, at the golden glow on my brown arms and legs, at the light the dress reflected on my face. “I think it looks nice on me.”

“Maybe she would like this baby blue one,” Dolores rummaged through the clear plastic bags that encased every garment hanging along the walls of her cramped storefront.

“She doesn't like baby blue,” Mami said, as she joined Dolores in her search through the plastic bags.

I narrowed my eyes to get a different view in the mirror, tried to see myself as a stranger might, and saw a young woman with dark brown hair teased into a flip, dark eyes with blue eye shadow on the lids and black liner all around ending in a tail at the corners. On my lips, pink frosted lipstick so pale that my lips looked white. On my feet, spiked heels with pointy toes. I looked like one of the Chiffons, the girl group that sang “He's So Fine.” Opening my eyes fully, I saw the way I really looked, with shoulder-length hair in a loose ponytail, no makeup, brown loafers with knee socks.

“Here's one,” Mami said. “It's more your color.” She held up a navy blue dress with a square neckline, three-quarter sleeves, a dropped waist. It was like the dresses she always bought for me, simple and modest, not like the bold ones American girls wore.

I squinted into the mirror again. “I like this one.” I sensed both of us brace for an argument. “It's my graduation, I should wear something dressy.” I turned my back on her.

Mami stiffened, but she wouldn't make a scene before Dolores, who lingered near us holding two plastic bags with dresses as conservative and dull as the one Mami held. The yellow dress was luminous, made me feel special and pretty.

“You said I could wear any color,” I reminded Mami, whose shapeless black dress hung from her shoulders unadorned, skimming her bust and hips without accentuating their fullness. Her black clothes, her belly still swollen from childbirth, her legs striped with varicose veins made her appear solid and heavy, earthbound.

The neckline of my yellow dress was cut above the gentle bumps of my growing breasts. The sash tied around a skinny waist, and the full skirt, made fuller by a built-in crinoline, appeared to lift me off my feet, off the dirty, scratchy rug in front of the narrow mirror in Dolores's Ladies Shoppé. Standing next to each other, Mami and I looked like darkest night next to brightest morning, each determined to get her way, knowing one would have to cede to the other, waiting until the last possible moment of uncertainty before she surrendered.

“Fine, take the yellow dress,” she sighed, her voice brittle, exhausted, sad.

“I don't know what's with you,” Mami muttered as we walked back to Ellery Street. “You've changed.”

I hugged the plastic bag with my yellow dress. “I'm getting older, Mami.” I chuckled, to make light of it, so she wouldn't accuse me of talking back.

“Older, yes,” she continued, unappeased. “And stubborn, and disrespectful.” She looked at me from the corner of her eye. “Don't think just because you're going to that school for
blanquitos
I'm going to put up with any
pocavergüenzas
from you.” She turned the corner, and I dawdled after, trapped between thoughts.

When Mami and I went to the welfare or unemployment office, a box in the forms asked us to identify our race: White, Black, Other. Technically, Mami was white. Her skin was creamy beige, lacked the warm brown tones her children with Papi had inherited. My memory of my paternal grandparents was that they were white, but Papi and some of his sisters and brothers were dark brown, evoking a not-too-distant African ancestor. Franky, Mami's son with Francisco, was lighter-skinned than the seven older brothers and sisters. He had his father's pale complexion, dark eyes and hair.

When I had to indicate my race, I always marked “Other,”
because neither black nor white was appropriate. Pretending to be white when I was clearly not was wrong. If I could “pass,” which I couldn't, there was always the question Puerto Ricans asked when someone became too arrogant about the value of their white skin:
“Y tu
abuela, ¿donde está?”
Asking “Where is your grandmother?” implied that in Puerto Rico no one really knew the total racial picture and claims of racial purity were suspect.

I was not oblivious to race in Puerto Rico. I'd noticed that white skin was coveted by those who didn't have it and that those who did looked down on those who didn't. Light-skinned babies in a family were doted on more than dark ones. “Good” hair was straight, not kinky, and much more desirable than the tightly coiled strands of “bad” hair, which at its tightest was called
pasitas,
raisins. Blue or green eyes proclaimed whiteness, even when surrounded by dark skin.