When I Was Puerto Rican - Esmeralda Santiago [82]
Across the aisle, Mami’s eyes were misty. She stretched her fingers toward mine, and we held hands as the plane rose above the clouds. Neither one of us could have known what lay ahead. For her it began as an adventure and turned out to have more twists and turns than she expected or knew how to handle. For me, the person I was becoming when we left was erased, and another one was created. The Puerto Rican jíbara who longed for the green quiet of a tropical afternoon was to become a hybrid who would never forgive the uprooting.
ANGELS ON THE CEILING
Ahí fué donde la puerca entorchó el rabo.
That’s where the sow’s tail curled.
Uniformed women with lacquered hair, high heels, and fitted skirts looked down on us, signalled that we should fasten our safety belts, place parcels under the seat in front of us, and sit up.
“Stewardesses,” Mami said, admiring their sleek uniforms, pressed white blouses, stiff navy ribbons tied into perfect bows in their hair. None of them spoke Spanish. Their tight smiles were not convincing, did not welcome us. In our best clothes, with hair combed, faces scrubbed, the dirt under our nails gouged out by Mami’s stiff brush, I still felt unclean next to the highly groomed, perfumed, unwrinkled women who waited on us.
“Someday,” Mami mused, “you might like to be a stewardess. Then you can travel all over the world for free.”
The stewardesses minced up and down the narrow aisle, glancing from side to side like queens greeting the masses. I tried to read in their faces where else they’d been, if their travels had taken them to places like Mongolia, Singapore, Timbuktu. That’s where I’d want to go if I were a stewardess. Not New York, Paris, or Rome. I’d want to go places so far away that I couldn’t even pronounce their names. I’d want to see sights so different that it would show on my face. None of the stewardesses seemed to have been anywhere that exotic. Their noncommittal smiles, the way they seemed to have everything under control was too reassuring, too studied, too managed to make me comfortable. I would have felt better had there been more chaos.
“Do these planes ever just fall from the sky?” I asked Mami, who sat across the aisle from me.
The woman sitting in front of her shot me a fearful look and crossed herself. “Ay, nena, don’t say such a thing,” she said in a hoarse whisper. “It’s bad luck.”
Mami smiled.
We were high over thick clouds, the sky above so bright it hurt my eyes. In the window seat, Edna pressed her face flat against the pane. She looked up, eyes shining. “There’s nothing there!” She stretched over my lap and reached out her hand to Mami. “I’m hungry.”
“They’ll serve us dinner soon,” Mami said. “Just wait.”
The stewardesses brought us small trays fitted with square plates filled with sauce over chicken, mushy rice, and boiled string beans. It all tasted like salt.
The sky darkened, but we floated in a milky whiteness that seemed to hold the plane suspended above Puerto Rico. I couldn’t believe we were moving; I imagined that the plane sat still in the clouds while the earth flew below us. The drone of the propellers was hypnotic and lulled us to sleep in the stiff seats with their square white doilies on the back.
“Why do they have these?” I asked Mami, fingering the starched, pique-like fabric.
“So that people’s pomade doesn’t stain the seat back,” she answered. The man in front of me, his hair slick with brilliantine, adjusted his doily, pulled it down to his neck.
I dozed, startled awake, panicked when I didn’t know where I was, remembered