When I Was Puerto Rican - Esmeralda Santiago [53]
“Stop with the whispering and giggling,” Doña Andrea snapped.
She poured canned milk over the cereal. I hated the flavor of canned milk, but Mami had told us that when somebody gives you something to eat, you eat it, even if you throw it up later.
Doña Andrea was short and round and had a wart on her cheek. Her hair was stringy, and she was missing a few teeth. Raymond was afraid of her, and Hector said she looked like a witch. I had to spank them both for being disrespectful.
Her house floated at the end of a narrow pier with one other house. Between them a rowboat floated in the black water, held by a rope knotted around a rusty hook. Doña Andrea made us stay inside all day because there was no place to play outside.
“I don’t want one of you falling into the lagoon,” she said, and I shuddered at the thought of touching that dirty water.
Being cooped up inside all day was boring. In Macún, we could run and climb trees and jump from rock mountains. But in El Mangle, we couldn’t do anything. There wasn’t even schoolwork because Mami wouldn’t sign us up for school until she found a job.
Mami wanted to rent the house next to Doña Andrea. Then we would have our own kitchen, our own rooms, and she would bring our furniture from Macún.
“Mami, when is Papi coming to see us?” I asked one day as she sat on the steps of our future house, rubbing her feet.
“I don’t know,” she said in a sharp voice and looked away.
It occurred to me then that she hadn’t told him where we were.
Papi wouldn’t live in such a place because he couldn’t stand strong smells. They made his mouth water, which made him spit. So at home in Macún our latrine was far from the house.
But in El Mangle, we couldn’t get away from the stench. The air smelled like the brewery, and the water like human waste. Food didn’t taste good. The smell lived inside us, and even though Mami used a lot of garlic and oregano when she cooked, it didn’t help. I could still taste shit when I ate.
The school was made of stone. Mami said the floors were marble, which was why they were so shiny. The uniform was an ugly mustard shirt with a chocolate-colored skirt and brown shoes. Unlike every other teacher I’d ever had, my new teacher, Sra. Leona, insisted on Spanish and refused to answer when we said “Mrs.”
“It is a bastardization of our language,” she said, “which in Puerto Rico is Spanish.”
I didn’t like her. She was always angry, and she was mean. Once she hit a boy with a ruler because he laughed when she dropped a map. He wasn’t the only one to laugh, but she picked on him.
When I came to school in the middle of the year, my class was studying fractions. In Macún, we hadn’t got to fractions, so I was lost and had a hard time following what Sra. Leona wrote on the board. I read the pages in my math book that other kids had read weeks earlier, but nothing made any sense. Mami couldn’t help me. She said she had never studied fractions when she was in school.
Sra. Leona wrote some fractions on the board and called on the boy behind me to solve the first one. She didn’t just expect you to solve it, you were supposed to explain how to do it as you went along. I was cold and sweaty at the same time. The boy mentioned integers. I didn’t know what they were. He wrote a bunch of numbers on the board, and Sra. Leona smiled at him as he returned to his seat.
“Esmeralda, come up and solve the next one.”
I knew she was going to call on me. I just knew it. The prob lem was ⅔ + =
I walked as slowly as I could to the blackboard, looking hard at the numbers. I tried to solve the problem in my head, so that by the time I got to the blackboard, it would be figured out and I wouldn’t make a fool of myself. ⅔. That means if there are supposed to be three bananas you have only two of the three. Okay. Four-sixths means if there are supposed to be six guavas you have only four. All right. Wait a second. How many bananas? Two. Right. And four guavas. What does that make? I don’t think the fruit trick works with this.
The chalk was dry and