When I Was Puerto Rican - Esmeralda Santiago [86]
“Where are you going?” she mumbled, half asleep.
“To the bathroom,” I whispered.
The bed was pressed into the corner against the wall across from the window, next to a wide doorway that led into the next room. A long dresser stretched from the doorway to the window wall, leaving an aisle just wide enough to open the drawers halfway out.
It was six in the morning of my first day in Brooklyn. Our apartment, on the second floor, was the fanciest place I’d ever lived in. The stairs coming up from Tata’s room on the first floor were marble, with a landing in between, and a colored glass window with bunches of grapes and twirling vines. The door to our apartment was carved with more bunches of grapes and leaves. From the two windows in the main room we could look out on the courtyard we had come through the night before. A tree with broad brown leaves grew from the middle of what looked like a well, circled with the same stones that lined the ground. Scraggly grass poked out between the cracks and in the brown dirt around the tree. The building across from ours was three stories high, crisscrossed by iron stairs with narrow landings on which people grew tomatoes and geraniums in clay pots. Our building was only two stories high, although it was almost as tall as the one across the courtyard. We, too, had an iron balcony with a straight ladder suspended halfway to the ground. It made me a little dizzy to look down.
The main room of our apartment was large and sunny and decorated with more braided molding. The whole apartment was painted pale yellow, except for the ceilings, which were smoky gray. The floor was covered with a flat rug whose fringes had worn away into frayed edges where they met the wood floor. A fireplace had been blocked up with a metal sheet. More cherubs, grapes, and vines decorated the mantel. One of the cherubs was missing a nose; another had lost both hands and a foot. Next to the fireplace there was a small stove with four burners close together, a narrow counter with shelves underneath, and a deep sink. A door next to the sink led to the toilet, which was flushed by pulling a chain attached to a wooden box on the wall above the seat. On the other side of the toilet room door, on the wall opposite the windows, there was a huge, claw-foot bathtub covered by a metal sheet. In the middle of the room was a formica table and four chairs with plastic seats and backs that matched the tabletop. A lopsided couch and lumpy chair covered in a scratchy blue fabric faced the tub as if bathing were a special event to which spectators were invited.
The windows and door were locked, and Mami had warned the night before that I was not to leave the apartment without telling her. There was no place to go anyway. I had no idea where I was, only that it was very far away from where I’d been. Brooklyn, Mami had said, was not New York. I wished I had a map so that I could place myself in relation to Puerto Rico. But everything we owned was packed and stacked against the yellow walls. Not that there was a map in there, either.
There was nothing to do, nowhere to go, no one to talk to. The apartment was stifling. Inside the closed rooms, the air was still. Not even dust motes in the sunlight. Outside the windows, a steady roar was interrupted by sharp sirens or the insistent crash and clang of garbage cans, the whining motors of cars, and the faint sound of babies crying.
La marketa took up a whole block. It was much bigger and more confusing than the plaza in Bayamón, although it carried pretty much the same types of things. It was a red brick building with skylights in the high ceiling, so that whatever