When I Was Puerto Rican - Esmeralda Santiago [44]
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.
“Where did these come from?” Mami asked when she came home from work.
“I found them,” I said.
“No, she didn’t. She sneaked into Lalao’s finca with Tato and Pepito.” Delsa smirked, and Mami’s eyes disappeared behind a frown.
“Haven’t I told you not to go in there?”
“They were on the ground, just on the other side of the fence....”
She looked at the grapefruits, green speckled with yellow and tiny black dots. Their citrus fragrance filled the room like smoke.
“Don’t go in there again,” she said, picking one up, “or I’ll really let you have it.”
She peeled one in long strips and sucked on the sweet juice hungrily. I sought Delsa’s eyes and saw fear, not of Mami but of me, because Delsa knew that while Mami was at work the next day, I’d get her for tattling.
One morning Mami cooked our dinner, left everything ready for Gloria, dressed, and got us off to school one at a time. When I came home, she was still there, her work clothes stretched on the bed, rumpled and forgotten.
“Where’s Gloria?” I asked.
“She escaped,” Mami said, which meant that Gloria had eloped. No girl ever ran away by herself, although boys disappeared for weeks the minute they thought of themselves as men.
“Is she coming back?”
“I don’t know. No one knows the man she ran off with.”
Mami couldn’t go to work for a couple of weeks, and we had to live with her bad temper and complaints. “I’m not the kind of person to sit around doing nothing,” she said to Doña Ana, and I wondered how she could think of her housework as nothing when she spent hours doing it.
“So how do you like the factory?” Doña Lola asked Mami as we shucked pigeon peas in her new kitchen.
“It’s good work,” Mami answered, pride in her voice. “I started as a thread cutter, and now I’m a sewing machine operator.”
“¡Que bueno!”
Doña Lola’s son Tato ran into the kitchen. “Is there anything to eat?”
“Rice and beans in the pot.”
Tato rattled lids and dropped a spoon on the new cement floor. Doña Lola stood up with a jerk. “Let me serve you,” and under her breath, “Men are so useless.”
Tato looked at me from beneath his long lashes. Doña Lola handed him a tin plate mountained with white rice and red beans. He sat in the corner, spooning it in as if he hadn’t eaten in a week.
He was a year older than I, skinny, brown as a chocolate bar, his hair orange, his hazel eyes full of mischief and laughter. He was the dirtiest boy I’d ever seen, not because he didn’t wash, but because he couldn’t stay clean no matter how many times Doña Lola dunked him in the tin tub in back of the house.
Tato was not afraid of anything. He caught bright green lizards, pinched their jaws at the side, and forced them to bite his earlobes, to which they clung like festive, squirming decorations. He trapped snakes and draped them around his neck, where they writhed in sumptuous silvery waves that seemed to tickle. He speared iguanas and roasted them on open fires, claiming that their meat was tastier than chicken. He was an expert slingshot maker, and it was he who taught me to choose the forked branches that we stripped of