When I Was Puerto Rican - Esmeralda Santiago [92]
“Ay, that’s wonderful!” She hugged and kissed me. She held me at arms length, her eyes serious. Her voice dropped to a grave tone. “Remember, when you’re like that, don’t eat pineapples.”
“Why not?”
“It curdles the blood.”
In the bathroom Mami showed me her Kotex, hidden on a high shelf under towels. “When you change them, wrap the soiled ones in toilet paper, so no one can see. Do you want me to help you put the first one on?”
“No!”
“Just asking.” She left me alone, but I could hear her and Tata giggling in the kitchen. The next day Mami brought me a couple of white cotton bras with tiny blue flowers between the cups. “These are from the factory,” she said. “I sewed the cups myself.”
While Mami worked in Manhattan, Tata watched us. As the days grew shorter and the air cooler, she began drinking wine or beer earlier in the day, so it wasn’t unusual for us to come home from school and find her drunk, although she still would make supper and insist that we eat a full helping of whatever she had cooked.
“My bones hurt,” she said. “The beer makes the pain less.”
Her blood had never thickened, Don Julio explained, and she had developed arthritis. Tata had been in Brooklyn more than fifteen years, and if her blood hadn’t thickened by then, I worried about how long it would take.
We complained about being cold all the time, but Mami couldn’t do anything about it. She called “el lanlor” from work, so that he would turn on the heat in the building, but he never did.
On the coldest days, Tata lit up the oven and the four burners on the stove. She left the oven door open, and we took turns sitting in front of it warming up.
One evening as we all sat grouped around the stove I told the kids a fairy tale I’d just read. Don Julio crouched in the corner listening. Like my sisters and brothers, he frequently interrupted the story to ask for more details, like what color was the Prince’s horse, and what did the fairy godmother wear? The more they asked, the more elaborate the story became until, by the end, it was nothing like what I had started with. When it was over, they applauded.
“Tell us another one,” Hector demanded.
“Tomorrow.”
“If you tell it now,” Don Julio said, “I’ll give you a dime.”
“For a dime, I’ll tell a story,” Delsa jumped in.
“I’ll do it for a nickel,” challenged Norma.
“Everyone quiet! It’s my dime. I’ll tell it.”
Edna and Raymond huddled closer to my feet. Delsa and Norma, who had sprawled on the linoleum floor wrapped in a blanket, argued about who had to move to give the other more room.
“Let me get another beer,” Don Julio said, and he lumbered to the refrigerator.
Tata lay on her bed in the next room. “Get me one too, will you Julio?” she called out. “Negi, talk louder so I can hear the story.”
“Would anyone like some hot chocolate and bread with butter?” Mami offered.
There was a chorus of “Me, me, me, me.”
“Do you want me to tell the story or not?”
“Yes, of course,” Don Julio said. “Let’s just get comfortable.”
“Go ahead and start, Negi,” Mami said. “The milk takes a while to heat up, and I have to melt the chocolate bar first.”
“All right. Once upon a time ...”
“One minute,” Alicia interrupted. “I have to go to the bathroom. Don’t nobody take my place,” she warned.
The fluorescent fixture overhead buzzed and flickered, its blue-gray light giving our faces an ashen color, as if we were dead. Don Julio’s face looked menacing in that light, although his small green eyes and childlike smile were reassuring. My sisters and brothers were huddled together as close to the open oven door as they could manage without getting in Mami’s way as she melted a bar of Chocolate Cortés and kept adjusting the flame on the pan of milk so that it wouldn’t boil over. The room looked larger when we were all together like this, leaning toward the warmth. The walls seemed higher and steeper, the ceilings further away, the sounds of the city, its constant roar, disappeared behind the clink of Mami’s spoon stirring chocolate, the soft, even breathing of my sisters and brothers, the light thump each