When I Was Puerto Rican - Esmeralda Santiago [91]
Our new place was a railroad-style apartment on the second floor of a three-story house. There were four rooms from front to back, one leading into the other: the living room facing Varet Street, then our bedroom, then Tata’s room, then the kitchen. The tub was in the bathroom this time, and the kitchen was big enough for a table and chairs, two folding racks for drying clothes washed by hand in the sink, and a stack of shelves for groceries. The fireplace in the living room, with its plain marble mantel, was blocked off, and we put Tata’s television in front of it. The wood floors were dark and difficult to clean because the mop strings caught in splinters and cracks. The ceilings were high, but no cherubs danced around garlands, and no braided molding curled around the borders.
On October 7, 1961, Don Julio, Mami, and I went to the airport to pick up Delsa, Norma, Hector, and Alicia. Papi had sent them unescorted, with Delsa in charge. The first thing I noticed was that her face was pinched and tired. At eleven years old Delsa looked like a woman, but her tiny body was still that of a little girl.
In the taxi on the way home, I couldn’t stop talking, telling Delsa about the broad streets, the big schools, the subway train. I told her about the Italians, the morenos, the Jewish. I described how in Brooklyn we didn’t have to wear uniforms to school, but on Fridays there was a class called assembly in a big auditorium, and all the kids had to wear white shirts.
Tata prepared a feast: asopao, Drake’s cakes, Coke, and potato chips. The kids were wide-eyed and scared. I wondered if that’s the way I had looked two months earlier and hoped that if I had, it had worn off by now.
All my brothers and sisters were sent back one grade so they could learn English, so I walked to the junior high school alone, and my sisters and brothers went together to the elementary school on Bushwick Avenue. Mami insisted that I take the long way to school and not cut across the projects, but I did it once, because I wanted to find the spot where the little girl had fallen. I wondered if she had been dead when she fell, or if she had been still alive. Whether she had screamed, or whether, when you fall from such a great height, you lose air and can’t make a sound, as sometimes happened to me if I ran too fast. The broad concrete walkways curved in and around the massive yellow buildings that rose taller than anything else in the neighborhood. What would happen to the people who lived there in case of fire? I imagined people jumping out the windows, raining down onto the broad sidewalks and cement basketball courts.
The walls of the projects and the buildings nearby were covered with graffiti. I didn’t know what LIKE A MOTHER FUCKER meant after someone’s name. Sometimes the phrase would be abbreviated: SLICK L.A.M.F.” or “PAPOTE L.A.M.F.” I had heard kids say “shit” when something annoyed them, but when I tried it at home, Mami yelled at me for saying a bad word.
I didn’t know how she knew what it meant and I didn’t, and she wouldn’t tell me.
“Mami, can I get a bra?”
“What for, you don’t have anything up there.” She laughed.
“Yes, I do. Look! All the girls in my school ...”
“You don’t need a bra until you’re señorita, so don’t ask again.”
“Mami,” I said a couple of weeks later as she changed out of her work clothes. “I’m going to need that bra now.”
“What?” she stared at me, ready to argue, and then her face lit up. “Really? When?”
“I noticed it when I came home from school.”
“Do you know what to do?”
“Sí.”
“Who told you?” Her face was a jumble of disappointment and suspicion.
“We had a class about it in school.”
“Ah, okay then. Come with me, and I’ll show you where I keep my Kotex.” We walked hand in hand to the bathroom. Tata was in the kitchen. “Guess what, Tata,” Mami said. “Negi is a se