When I Was Puerto Rican - Esmeralda Santiago [62]
“Can I try?”
“To iron?” Her eyebrows formed a question mark over her round eyes. Her mouth toyed with a smile. This was probably the first time I’d ever volunteered to learn anything useful.
She turned off the iron and looked for one of Papi’s old shirts in her clean laundry hamper. “We wouldn’t want you burning a customer’s shirt,” she chuckled. She stretched it on the board.
Quietly she showed me how to set the temperature for linen or cotton, how to wet my finger on my tongue and listen for the sizzle when I touched the flat bottom of the iron, and how to keep the electric cord from touching the hot metal, which could cause a fire. She turned over the bottle of cold water and sprinkled the inside of my wrist.
“This is how little moisture you need to get the steam to rise.” She curved my fingers around the handle, pressing the iron against the fabric while with the other hand she pulled the cloth taut.
“Always iron the inside button and hole plackets first, then the inside and outside collar, then the cuffs.” We danced around the ironing board, with Mami guiding my hand, pressing down on the iron, and standing away for a minute to see me do as she’d taught. The steam rose from the shirt and filled my head with the clean fresh scent of sun-dried cotton, and bubbles of perspiration flushed along my hair line and dripped down my neck. But I pressed on, absorbed by the tiny squares in the weave, the straight, even stitches that held the seams in place, the way the armhole curved into the shoulder.
“You’re doing a good job,” Mami murmured, a puzzled expression on her face.
“This is fun,” I said, meaning it.
“Fun!” she laughed. “Then from now on you do all the ironing around the house.” She said it with a smile, which meant she was teasing. And she never asked me to do it. But after that, whenever I wanted to feel close to Mami, I stacked wrinkled clothes into a basket, and, one by one, ironed them straight, savoring the afternoon when she taught me to do the one thing she most hated.
In early December our landlord fenced in a corner of the yard and led a squealing pig into the enclosure.
“Christmas dinner,” he said with a grin. With Papi’s help, he dug an oval pit near the back fence, lined it with rocks that we children gathered, stuck two Y-shaped sticks at the edges of the hole, and laid a sturdy rod between them. “This should do,” he smiled.
A couple of days before Christmas we gathered by the pigsty. Mami held a large white porcelain bowl, Papi a rope, our landlord a long butcher knife. Our next-door neighbor and her sons had set up a table on sawhorses nearby, and a caldron of water bubbled over the fire in the pit, tended by some people I didn’t recognize.
Papi tied the squealing pig by its legs and, with the help of one of the men, turned it over and carried it to the table. Our landlord drew a necklace on the pig’s neck with one swift arc of the knife, and blood gushed into Mami’s porcelain bowl, squirted droplets onto her apron, bright red spots that jelled into maroon dots.
“The tail is mine,” I announced, and the grown-ups laughed.
“You have to earn it,” our neighbor said. She handed me a bowl into which the pig’s guts spilled like syrup, quivering pink, blue, and yellow, warm and musky, alive, hard to imagine as solid, piquant, brown sausages.
While the men dressed and roasted the pig, Mami and the women made pasteles. They grated plantains, green bananas, yautías, and yucca, into bowls, seasoned the mixture, spooned mounds of it onto roasted banana leaves, and dropped chunks of savory meat into the centers of the mounds. They then folded the banana leaves into rectangles, tied them with cotton twine, and dropped the pasteles into a huge pot of boiling water. They split ripe coconuts open, broke the thick white meat into chunks that we children grated when we weren’t munching. The flakes were squeezed for coconut milk, to be used for arroz con dulce and tembleque. Some of the coconut milk was mixed with sweet evaporated milk, sugar,