When I Was Puerto Rican - Esmeralda Santiago [43]
“Negi, help me over here.”
Mami stood in the middle of the room, her dress bunched on her hips, hands holding fast a long-line brassiere that didn’t want to contain her. “See if you can catch the hooks into the eyes, all the way up.”
The cotton brassiere stretched down to her hipbones, where it met the girdle into which she had already squeezed. There were three columns of eyes for the hooks spaced evenly from top to bottom. Even when I tugged on both ends of the fabric, I had trouble getting one hook into an outermost eye.
“It’s too small. I can’t get them to meet.”
“I’ll hold my breath.” She took in air, blew it out, and stretched her spine up. I worked fast, hooking her up all the way before she had to breathe again in big, hungry gulps.
“Wow! It’s been a while since I wore this thing,” she said, pulling her dress up. “Zip me up?”
“Where are you going?”
“There’s a new factory opening in Toa Baja. Maybe they need people who can sew.”
“Who’s going to take care of us?”
“Gloria will be here in a little while. You can help her with the kids. I’ve already made dinner.”
“Will you work every day?”
“If they hire me.”
“So you won’t be around all the time.”
“We need the money, Negi.”
Mami twisted and sprayed her hair, powdered her face, patted rouge on already pink cheeks, and spread lipstick over already red lips. Her feet, which were usually bare, looked unnatural in high heels. Her waist was so pinched in, it seemed as if part of her body were missing. Her powdered and painted features were not readable; the lines she’d drawn on her eyebrows and around her eyes and the colors that enhanced what always seemed perfect were a violation of the face that sometimes laughed and sometimes cried and often contorted with rage. I wanted to find a rag and wipe that stuff off her face, the way she wiped off the dirt and grime that collected on mine. She turned to me with a large red smile.
“What do you think?”
I was ashamed to look, afraid to speak what I saw.
“Well?” 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. I couldn’t help the tears that broke my face into a million bits, which made her kneel and hold me. I wrapped my arms around her, but what I felt was not Mami but the harsh bones of her undergarments. I buried my face in the soft space between her neck and shoulder and sought there the fragrance of oregano and rosemary, but all I could come up with was Cashmere Bouquet and the faint flowery dust of Maybelline.
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. In whispers, she gave me instructions for the day, told me when she’d be back, warned me to help Gloria with the children, promised to sew the buttons on Hector’s shirt when she came home that night.
Papi was not around as much once Mami began work, and our mornings took on a rhythm that left him out the days he was home, each one of us engaged in our own morning rituals of waking, dressing, eating breakfast, and walking the two miles to school. My classes began the earliest, at 7:30, and I left home while the air was still sweet and the ground moist, our neighbors’ houses looming like ghosts in light fog or receding behind greyness when it rained.
My Uncle Cándido’s house was halfway to school. He complained to Mami that I never looked up when I went by, never greeted anyone, never looked anywhere but down at the ground.
“If you keep walking like that,” he said, “you’ll develop a hunchback.”
But that threat wasn’t enough to keep me from wrapping my arms around myself. Books pressed against my chest, I strode head down, looking closely at the way the ground swelled and dipped, listening to the crunch of my hard school shoes on the