When I Was Puerto Rican - Esmeralda Santiago [77]
Mami sent Delsa, Norma, Hector, Alicia, and Edna to school, their protests proving my point, making me cry even harder. Raymond rubbed my leg gently, but I kicked him away, unwilling to accept pity. In the kitchen Mami scrubbed the dishes, sighing, “Ay Dios Mío Santo, help me make it through their puberties!”
Our house sat on concrete stilts that allowed enough headroom underneath for us to stake out play areas with clearly defined boundaries. Discarded pieces of zinc, chicken wire, cardboard, torn sheets that Mami had given us, and dried palm fronds formed the walls of our very own barrio under the house. My spot was on the back corner nearest the kitchen, where the land sloped toward Papi’s shed. I couldn’t quite stand up, but I could crawl in and kneel or squat comfortably. I had swept the ground smooth and placed mismatched tiles in the center for a colorful mosaic floor. It was there that I went when I was sick and tired of everybody, which was most of my twelfth year.
Through a hole in the burlap bag that served as the door of my hideaway I had a view of the creek, the malanga and bananas growing on the slope, and the gardenia near the porch. The more I looked at it, the more I loved that bush that had never flowered. It was oval shaped, with branches sticking out here and there like a woman who had not combed her hair.
“Papi,” I asked one night as he sat on the porch reading the paper, “how come the gardenia never blossoms?”
“It probably needs water,” he said.
So every day I filled an old coffee can two or three times and watered around the roots of the bush, moistening the earth until it became spongy. The bush grew rounder, taller, its leaves thick and green.
“If you prune the tips,” Mami said, “it will grow faster and fuller.”
With a rusty pair of scissors, I trimmed the branches. “I’m sorry, little tree,” I murmured so no one else could hear, “but I want you to grow and give us flowers.” Whatever I cut off, I put under the bush, to feed the roots.
“I’ve taken real good care of it,” I said to Papi, “but it still won’t bloom.”
“It takes patience. You’ve only been doing it for a week. Give it time.”
“It won’t flower when you want it to,” Mami said. “Keep taking care of it and you’ll see. One day it will surprise you.”
I stopped asking the bush to give me gardenias but continued watering it and clipping its branches. The leaves grew larger, greener, veined underneath in pale chartreuse, the blades thick and full of liquid that I kept expecting to smell like gardenias, but it didn’t.
“It’s probably a macho tree,” Papi said. “It needs a female to blossom.”
“There’s no such thing, Pablo,” Mami chided. “Gardenias are not like people.”
“But some plants need a male and a female before they can give fruit. Plantains, for instance.”
“Yes, plantains. But not gardenias!” She laughed, and Papi didn’t say any more.
Johannes Vélez didn’t ask to carry my books after I brushed him off, but during math class he stared at me. I smiled, but he looked at his notebook and seemed to be concentrating on the problems Mrs. Nuñez had given us to solve. Every day for a week I stopped to buckle my shoe, or to drink from the hall fountain, so that Johannes Vélez would have enough time to catch up. But he didn’t, and I couldn’t bring myself to be the first to speak. One Saturday, as I watered my gardenia bush, he showed up.
“Hola.” He stood stiffly on the other side of the gate, sleepy eyes begging me to ask him in. My first instinct was to run and change my tattered dress for something nicer. At the same time I was furious that he had just appeared uninvited.
Mami materialized on the porch steps as if she’d been expecting him. From every corner of the world my sisters and brothers emerged to stare at us as though at animals in a zoo.
“Buenas tardes,” Mami said, wiping her hands against her hips. “Negi, is this your friend from school?”
I wished a