When I Was Puerto Rican - Esmeralda Santiago [87]
On the way to la marketa we had passed two men dressed in long black coats, their faces bearded. Ringlets hung from under their hats alongside their faces.
“Don’t stare,” Mami pulled on my hand.
“Why are they dressed so strange?”
“They’re Jewish. They don’t eat pork.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t know. They all live in the same neighborhood and only buy food from each other.”
In la marketa almost all the vendors were Jewish, only they didn’t wear their coats and hats. They wore white shirts and little round doilies on their heads. Many of them spoke Spanish, which made it easy for Mami to negotiate the price of everything.
“You never pay the first price they tell you,” she instructed.
“They like to bargain.”
We went from stall to stall, arguing about every item we picked out. The vendors always made it seem as if we were cheating them, even though Mami said everything was overpriced.
“Don’t ever pay full price for anything,” Mami told me. “It’s always cheaper somewhere else.”
It was a game: the vendors wanting more money than Mami was willing to spend, but both of them knowing that eventually, she would part with her dollars and they would get them. It made no sense to me. It took most of the day to buy the stuff we needed for our apartment. Had she spent less time shopping around, she might have bought more. As it was, she only had half the things we needed, and we were exhausted and irritable by the time we got home. I had spent my entire first day in New York hunting for bargains.
The second day was no different. “We have to buy your school clothes, and a coat,” Mami said.
Winter would be coming soon, Tata said, and with it, chilly winds, snowstorms, and short days.
“The first winter is always the worst,” Don Julio explained, “because your blood is still thin from living in Puerto Rico.” I imagined my blood thickening into syrup but didn’t know how that could make me warmer.
“I can’t wait to see snow,” Edna chirped.
“Me neither,” said Raymond.
Two days in Brooklyn, and they already loved everything about it. Tata cared for them while Mami and I shopped. She sat them down in front of a black-and-white television set, gave each a chocolate bar, and they spent the entire day watching cartoons, while Tata smoked and drank beer.
“What good kids they are,” she complimented Mami when we came back. “Not a peep out of them all day.”
Graham Avenue in Williamsburg was the broadest street I’d ever seen. It was flanked by three- and four-story apartment buildings, the first floors of which contained stores where you could buy anything. Most of these stores were also run by Jewish people, but they didn’t speak Spanish like the ones in la marketa. They were less friendly, too, unwilling to negotiate prices. On Graham Avenue there were special restaurants where Mami said Jewish people ate. They were called delis, and there were foreign symbols in the windows, and underneath them the word kosher. I knew Mami wouldn’t know what it meant, so I didn’t bother asking. I imagined it was a delicacy that only Jewish people ate, which is why their restaurants so prominently let them know you could get it there. We didn’t go into the delis because, Mami said, they didn’t like Puerto Ricans in there. Instead, she took me to eat pizza.
“It’s Italian,” she said.
“Do Italians like Puerto Ricans?” I asked as I bit into hot cheese and tomato sauce that burned the tip of my tongue.
“They’re more like us than Jewish people are,” she said, which wasn’t an answer.
In Puerto Rico the only foreigners I’d been aware of were Americanos. In two days in Brooklyn I had already encountered Jewish people, and now Italians. There was another group of people Mami had pointed out to me. Morenos. But they weren’t foreigners, because they were American. They were black,