When I Was Puerto Rican - Esmeralda Santiago [2]
“It felt like it was going right into my brain,” she muttered with an embarrassed smile.
Delsa and Norma toddled through the underbrush. “Mami, come see what I found,” Delsa called.
A hen had scratched out a hollow and carpeted its walls and floor with dry grass. She had laid four eggs, smaller and not as white as the ones our neighbor Doña Lola gave us from time to time.
“Can we eat them?” Delsa asked.
“No.”
“But if we leave them here a snake will get them,” I said, imagining a serpent swallowing each egg whole. Mami shuddered and rubbed her arms where tiny bumps had formed making the fine hairs stand straight up. She gave me a look, half puzzled, half angry, and drew us to her side.
“All right, let’s get our sticks together and bring them to the kitchen.” As she picked hers up, she looked carefully around.
“One, two, three, four,” she chanted. “One, two, three, four.”
We marched single file into our yard, where Papi stacked floorboards.
“Come look,” he said.
The dirt was orange, striped in places where crumbs had slipped through the cracks when Mami swept. Papi had left a few boards down the center of the room and around his and Mami’s bed, to stand on until the ground was swept and flattened. Mami was afraid to come into the house. There were small holes in the dirt, holes where snakes and scorpions hid. She turned around swiftly and threw herself off balance so that she skipped toward the kitchen shed.
“Let’s go make supper!” She singsang to make it sound like fun. Delsa and Norma followed her skirt, but I stared at the dirt, where squiggly lines stretched from one wall to the other. Mami waited for me.
“Negi, come help in the kitchen.”
I pretended not to hear but felt her eyes bore holes in the back of my head. Papi stepped between us.
“Let her stay. I can use the help.”
I peered between his legs and saw her squint and pucker her lips as if she were about to spit. He chuckled, “Heh, heh,” and she whirled toward the kitchen shed, where the fire in the fogón was almost out.
“Take these boards and lay them on the pile for the cooking fire,” Papi said. “Careful with the splinters.”
I walked a broad circle around Mami, who looked up from her vegetable chopping whenever I went by. When I passed carrying a wide board, Mami asked to see it. Black bugs, like ants, but bigger and blacker, crawled over it in a frenzy.
“Termites!” she gasped.
I was covered with them. They swarmed inside my shirt and panties, into my hair, under my arms. Until Mami saw them, I hadn’t felt them sting. But they bit ridges into my skin that itched and hurt at the same time. Mami ran me to the washtub and dunked me among my father’s soaking shirts.
“Pablo!” she called, “Oh, my God! Look at her. She’s being eaten alive!”
I screamed, imagining my skin disappearing in chunks into the invisible mouths of hundreds of tiny black specks creeping into parts of my body I couldn’t even reach. Mami pulled off my clothes and threw them on the ground. The soap in the washtub burned my skin, and Mami scrubbed me so hard her fingernails dug angry furrows into my arms and legs. She turned me around to wash my back and I almost fell out of the tub.
“Be still,” she said. “I have to get them all.”
She pushed and shoved and turned me so fast I didn’t know what to do with my body, so I flailed, seeming to resist, while in fact I wanted nothing more than to be rid of the creepy crawling things that covered me. Mami wrapped me in a towel and lifted me out of the tub with a groan. Hundreds of black bugs floated between the bubbles.
She carried me to the house pressed against her bosom, fragrant of curdled milk. Delsa and Norma ran after us, but Papi scooped them up, one on each arm, and carried them to the rope swing. Mami balanced on the floorboards to her bed, lay me beside her, held me tight, kissed my forehead, my eyes, and murmured, “It’s all right. It’s over. It’s all right.”
I wrapped my legs around her and buried my face