When I Was Puerto Rican - Esmeralda Santiago [54]
“Esmeralda, do you need help?”
Someone behind me giggled. Sra. Leona shushed him.
“No, Sra. Leona, I’m just thinking.”
“Think a little faster, would you please? We don’t have all day.”
Six oranges. No, one orange, six pieces. Three bananas. Four guavas. No, two bananas.
“Didn’t you learn fractions in that school for jíbaros you came from?”
The kids laughed. Sra. Leona smiled. Her teeth were small. I was so cold, my knees shook.
“We were just beginning ...”
“I see. Those country schools are always so far behind. That’s why we have so many ignorant jíbaros ...”
“I’m not ignorant.” She grabbed the chalk from my hand and wrote some numbers on the board. I stepped toward my seat.
“No, young lady. You stand right there and watch, so you can learn.”
My classmates laughed. Someone threw a spitball. In the back of the room three boys sang a jíbaro song about coming from the mountains to the city. Sra. Leona turned around and stared at them through her thick glasses and they quieted down, but the minute she turned her back they started again, in a softer voice.
She talked about converting this to that and adding this, and integers, but I didn’t hear her. I left my body standing in front of her, suffering spitballs and whispered insults. I sent the part of me that could fly outside the window to the flamboyán tree in the yard.
The orange flowers covered me as I sat in their midst. They smelled bitter, like the white sticky ooze that dribbled out from cut stems. From the tree I watched Sra. Leona writing on the board, and me standing nearby, head lowered, eyes focused on the shiny floor. She finished the equation with a great flourish of taps and scratches on the blackboard and looked at me, a triumphant look on her face.
“And that’s how you do it, all right?”
I came back inside. “All right.”
“You can return to your seat now,” she said, and I walked back as fast as I could, my shoes making a flat sound on the cold marble.
The walk home from school was long. No one walked with me. I didn’t want anyone to know where I lived. I walked past a bar, a grocery store, a doctor’s office, past a botánica, its window plastered with pictures of a blonde Virgin Mary, a bloody Jesus Christ, and a tree with a thick trunk and branches stretching out from it like an umbrella. “The Tree of Life” it was called.
Cement houses with wrought iron porch railings and flowery gardens were clustered behind the businesses. From inside one of the houses, a dog barked as I approached and passed. Inside another, birds chirped a song unlike anything I’d ever heard from birds in the trees of Macún. I wished we lived in one of those houses, with their large rooms and lamps instead of bare bulbs hanging from the ceiling.
Girls from my school walked in groups ahead of me, and one by one they went into these nice homes where mothers, dressed in simple skirts and blouses, with hair neatly combed, no paint on their faces, waited by the door and closed it lovingly after their daughters. Once one of them smiled at me, and I was so grateful I wanted to run into her arms and be swallowed by the ruffles on her blouse. Another gave me a dirty look, as if I had no right to walk on her neat street.
At my door, no one was waiting. Mami was working. Doña Andrea gave me a cup of milk with coffee and a chunk of bread with butter, and then I had to watch my sisters and brothers until Mami came home.
Even though we could walk to school on our own, we were still not allowed to play outside the house. I did my schoolwork and helped my sisters with theirs.