When I Was Puerto Rican: List 3

Colored lights swung from the rafters where pigeons and warblers perched, forcing vendors to put up awnings against bird droppings.

I was floating in a fog of colors and smells and warbling birds and voices singing, “I like you, and you, and you, and no one else but you, and you, and you.”

Red crocheted roses on bright green petals hemmed the doilies on the side tables.

The drape covering the blinds also had peacocks on it, only they faced forward, their plumage spread into a thousand blue-green eyes that seemed to watch us.

Radios blared frenzied merengues from one house, while from another, an Evangelist exhorted his listeners to abandon their sinful lives and seek salvation in the arms of Jehovah, Aleluya, Amen!

I remembered Margie and her mother and imagined them in New York, wearing beautiful clothes and eating bright yellow eggs. I mulled over Mami’s words that men were always up to one pocavergüenza or another.

It was days before I realized he lived in the small room near the front door, the only room in the house unadorned by Abuela’s crochet.

By comparison, Abuela’s room was opulent, with its double bed, thick mattress, four bedposts from which to tie the mosquito netting, pillows, and a small crocheted rug.

I had looked closely at the elaborate motifs of her tablecloths and doilies and had tried to draw them on lined notebook paper or on flattened grocery bags.

I had sat mesmerized in the almost holy silence in which she worked, as she wove the needle in and out of stitches, forming pictures with thread.

To crochet well, I had to focus on the work, had to count and keep track of when and where I increased or decreased stitches, and keep a picture in my head of what the finished cloth should look like, all the while estimating how much cotton thread it would take, and making sure when I ran out of one spool, that the other was joined in as seamlessly as possible

Sounds dwindled into dull, distant murmurs, backgrounds receded into a blur, and sensations waned as I slid under the hypnotic rhythm of a hook pulling up thread, the finished work growing into my palm until its very weight forced me to stretch it out on my lap and look, and admire, and be amazed at what my hands had made.

He had sparse white hair and eyes the color of turquoise.

The altar had an enormous Jesus on his cross at the center, the disciples at his feet.

I knelt piously, my hands in prayer, and stared in front of me, trying to look like I was having nothing but the very best thoughts.

But the blue haze of evening shrouded the street, stifled sounds, and sent everyone indoors to their secrets, and Papi didn’t come.

“Hallowed be thy name...”
“What does that mean?”
She raked her fingers through her hair, fluffing it, untangling the knots. “It means His name is holy.”

Mami’s rouge was streaked, and her eyes were swollen.

I dressed to their murmurs in the other room, their voices soft but strained, and I wondered if men ever talked like this, if their sorrows ever spilled into these secret cadences.

These structures had also been reinforced with plywood, and debarked tree limbs buttressed every wall.

We heard the ominous quiet of the hurricane’s eye as it passed over us.

No one in Macún died, but many lost their belongings, poultry, pigs, milk cows, vegetable gardens, kiosks for selling fried codfish fritters, and shops where rusty old cars received one more chance at the road.

We scoured the side of the road for discarded bottles to exchange for pennies when the glass man came around.

She put her hands on her hips, that familiar gesture of exasperation that always made her seem larger, and I saw the unnatural diamond shape formed by her elbows and narrowed waist.

She woke early, sometimes even before Papi, cooked the beans and rice for our supper, ironed our school uniforms and her work clothes, and bathed, powdered, and stuffed herself into her tortuous undergarments.

With Mami at work, I took advantage of Gloria’s vigilance with the younger kids to make my own getaway into the montes, up trees, behind sheds and outhouses, and once, on a dare, into Lalao’s finca, where I filled the skirt of my dress with the coveted grapefruits.

He trapped snakes and draped them around his neck, where they writhed in sumptuous silvery waves that seemed to tickle.

He trapped snakes and draped them around his neck, where they writhed in sumptuous silvery waves that seemed to tickle.

He was an expert slingshot maker, and it was he who taught me to choose the forked branches that we stripped of bark, dried in the sun, and carved until we could tie split inner tube strips and a rubber square that held the lethal stones we shot with uncanny accuracy.

I was as good as he with both slingshots and painstakingly constructed bows and arrows, with which I could drop birds in flight.

Juanita Marín had found more kindred friendships at her end of the barrio, and Doña Zena’s daughters, who were about my age, were kept on a tight leash because of their parents’ religiosity, which didn’t allow for outside influences.

His eyes popped open, and his mouth dropped into a grimace that became a lewd, ugly, humiliating smile.

She tied my wrists together in one of her strong hands, and beat me, again and again, raising welts on my arms, my back, the back of my head, my forehead, behind my ear.

But Mami left our house every morning, primped and perfumed, for a job in a factory in Toa Baja.

I got the message that my mother was breaking a taboo I’d never heard about.

But there were no answers in Delsa’s solemn eyes, or in Norma’s haughty beauty, or in Héctor’s eagerness to please.

“Who else wants a ride?” she asked, enjoying the attention, the voices clamoring her name.

I turned toward home, dejected and abandoned by my sisters and brothers who wouldn’t stand by me against this spoiled brat.

But the foul air was thick and oppressive, clinging to us as if anything new, clean, and fresh had to be contaminated by this noxious atmosphere or it wouldn’t survive.

But the foul air was thick and oppressive, clinging to us as if anything new, clean, and fresh had to be contaminated by this noxious atmosphere or it wouldn’t survive.