When I Was Puerto Rican - Esmeralda Santiago [61]
“There’s a letter from Tata!” Mami sang, waving a thick envelope. She ripped it open. “With a note for you, Negi.”
My grandmother in New York didn’t write very often, but when she did, I sent her one of my best school compositions, or a drawing, or a joke copied from the newspaper. She rarely responded directly but sent hugs and kisses in Mami’s letters.
The lined airmail paper was so thin I took it into the shade because the midday sun shone right through it. She had folded it tightly, as if she didn’t want anyone else to open it. “Dear Negi,” she wrote in a broad, graceful script. “Thank you for the story you wrote for school. It was very good, but I had trouble reading it because your penmanship is so poor. It’s always hard to read what you write. Next time, take more care forming your letters for this old lady. Love and kisses, Tata.”
My eyes burned, and a trembling pain started in my gut and moved out, like water into an overfilled glass.
“Oh good!” Mami exclaimed as she read her letter, a happy expression on her face. She turned the page with an eager smile, her right hand over her heart.
I crumpled Tata’s letter and threw it into the yard.
Mami looked up. “What’s the matter?”
“Nothing,” I collapsed into her lap.
“What’s wrong? What did the letter say?” She was as upset as I was, her eyes darting from my sobbing face to the balled-up letter in the yard. “Héctor!” she called to my brother, who was practicing marble shots into a hole in the ground. “Bring me that piece of paper.” She read it, took in a breath, and put the paper under her thigh so the breeze wouldn’t blow it away. She held me for a few minutes then raised my face up and wiped my cheeks with the hem of her dress. “From now on, when you write to Tata,” she said with a smile, “print.”
That night, as Felipe Rodriguez sang that his love had left him with nothing to keep him company but a bottle of rum, I heard Mami and Papi murmuring in their bed. The noise coming from the bar made it impossible to hear everything they said, but after a while Papi was angry and rolled out of bed. I heard him open the door to the outside, and go out into the night. He didn’t come back for days.
Because of all the running around she had to do with Raymond, Mami couldn’t work a steady job anymore. Still, his medications and doctor visits meant we needed money, so Mami talked our landlord into paying her for cooking a daily caldero of rice and beans and a stack of fried chicken pieces or pork chops, which he then sold at the bar. Sometimes she left the house, not in her work clothes but dressed a little better than what she wore around the house. She didn’t tell us where she was going on those days, and it was years before I learned that she went to clean other people’s houses. One day I came back from school to find a rope stretched across the front room and men’s white shirts, clean and crisp, hanging in a row.
“Don’t touch them. They’re not ours.”
“Whose are they?”
“They belong to the laundry down the street.”
She spritzed some water from a bottle onto the cuff of a shirt and pressed the iron against it, making the steam rise up to her face.
“How come you’re doing their ironing?”
“They were very nice and let me bring the work home instead of do it there.” She finished the shirt and put it on a wire hanger alongside the others.
Of all the things in the world Mami had to do, this was her least favorite. She liked cooking, sewing, mopping, even dusting.