When I Was Puerto Rican - Esmeralda Santiago [66]
Two Sundays later I woke up early, peeled potatoes, then packed my bag. I showered, braided my hair with ribbons, and sat in the living room reading a religious magazine while I waited for Mami to pick me up. Angelina had taken the girls to church, as she did every Sunday. To my relief, Angelina didn’t seem intent on converting me. She had probably given me up for lost to the Devil the first day we met.
I sat in my nice dress, with my good shoes on, trying to look as innocent and good as I possibly could so that when Mami came she would see that I had learned my lesson. But Mami didn’t come. Angelina and the girls came back from church, and we sat down to Sunday supper, and Angie disappeared into her room and Gladys into hers, and I waited, feeling more and more abandoned as afternoon lengthened into evening, then night.
Tio Lalo closed the store, came inside the house, found me sitting on the same chair, my bag at my side, the religious magazine crinkled from having been read so many times.
“She’s not coming.”
“How do you know?”
“She wrote me a letter that says she’s coming next Friday.” He smiled.
He was lying, even though he was Evangelical and they were supposed to tell the truth. He had waited until I was humiliated before bothering to tell me she wouldn’t be coming that day. But his lie about the letter was only covering up for what we both knew: Mami wasn’t coming today and no one knew when she would return.
I picked up my bag and sidled past him, my eyes flooded with the tears that were lately so close to the surface. I heard him chuckle as I went into Gladys’s room and undressed, crumpling my dress and pretty ribbons into a ball as solid and round as his stuffed potatoes.
She came with presents wrapped in The Daily News. For me, a yellow handbag with a small mirror on the flap. “And at home I have a lot of clothes sent by your New York cousins.” She was excited and handed Angelina, Tio Lalo, Angie, and Gladys their presents while she chattered about Tata and Ana and Margot and Gury and Chico and all our relatives in New York. The doctors who had seen Raymond were the best in the world, she told us, and had assured her that with the proper treatment, his foot would heal as good as new.
I hung on to her, afraid that when it was time to leave she would forget me. But she didn’t. She helped me pack my bag, put a couple of pennies in my yellow handbag, and we walked away from Tio Lalo’s laden with sweets for my sisters and brothers and a dozen freshly fried stuffed potato balls.
On the bus Mami told me how tall the buildings were in New York, and how she had travelled around on trains that were much faster and nicer than our crowded, stuffy buses. We got off at a different stop, and when I told her we’d made a mistake, she said, “No. It’s all right. We’ve moved.”
CASI SEÑORITA
Con la música por dentro
With the music inside
I didn’t mean to steal the nickels from the baby’s glass piggy bank. But they left me alone with her, and the pig sat right there on top of the dresser as she slept. I had no idea an old lady was peeking in the window and saw me tip the pig over and slide out one nickel, two, three at most. When Papi gave me a talk about being trustworthy, and Mami a few cocotazos, I wasn’t sorry I stole the money. I was mad that no one asked why the neighbor had been looking in the window.
That snoopy old lady in our new neighborhood put an end to my baby-sitting career. And the well-intentioned neighbor next door ensured that I would never go to church.
“Even if you don’t accept the Lord,” she told my mother one day as they chatted on opposite sides of their fences, “you can send your children to Sunday school. At least it gives you a free morning.”
Mami lined us up for a bath, and, in keeping with the occasion, checked behind our ears and around our necks so that, even though people might complain we were heathens, no one could say