When I Was Puerto Rican - Esmeralda Santiago [97]
When she worked, Mami was happy. She complained about sitting at a machine for hours, or about the short coffee breaks, or about el bosso. But she was proud of the things she made. Often she brought home samples of the bras and girdles she worked on and showed us how she had used a double-needle machine, or how she had figured out that if you stitched the cup a certain way, it would fit better. But even though she was proud of her work, she didn’t want us to follow in her footsteps.
“I’m not working this hard so that you kids can end up working in factories all your lives. You study, get good grades, and graduate from high school so that you can have a profession, not just a job.”
She never asked to see our homework, but when we brought home report cards, she demanded that we read her the grades and then translate the teachers’ comments so that she would know exactly how we were doing in school. When the reports were good, she beamed as if she herself had earned the good marks.
“That’s what you have to do in this country,” she’d say.
“Anyone willing to work hard can get ahead.”
We believed her and tried to please her as best we could. Since we’d come to Brooklyn, her world had become full of new possibilities, and I tried very hard to share her excitement about the good life we were to have somewhere down the road. But more and more I suspected Mami’s optimism was a front. No one, I thought, could get beat down so many times and still come up smiling.
Sometimes I lay in bed, in the unheated rooms full of beds and clothes and the rustle of sleeping bodies, terrified that what lay around the corner was no better than what we’d left behind, that being in Brooklyn was not a new life but a continuation of the old one. That everything had changed, but nothing had changed, that whatever Mami had been looking for when she brought us to Brooklyn was not there, just as it wasn’t in Puerto Rico.
Tata’s brother Chico didn’t live with us, but he spent a lot of time in our apartment. He, Tata, and Don Julio split whatever money they made at their jobs, or playing the numbers, to buy cheap wine and six-packs of beer. Unlike Tata and Don Julio, who only drank in the afternoon, Chico drank all the time. Once, when we were trying out new English words, one of us called him a bum. Mami smacked whoever it was and warned us never to say that word again.
Chico’s pockets jingled with coins, which he handed out if we did him small favors.
“Get me another beer,” he’d say, and we’d scramble to the refrigerator.
“Light my cigarette,” and three or four matches would be struck at the same time. He paid us all.
While Tata tended to get loud and angry when she drank, Chico was quiet and morose. Mami said he was a harmless drunk, “like a kid,” and always made sure he ate something when he was at our house.
“At least he knows how to hold his liquor,” she’d tell us.
I was on my way to school. Chico was coming in from his night job to sleep on our couch.
“Show me and I’ll give you a quarter.”
“Show you what?”
“Open your blouse,” Chico said, “and let me see. I’ll pay you.”
“No!”
He blocked the hallway with his long arms. “I won’t touch you. I just want to look.” His eyes were teary.
“If you don’t let me by I’ll scream.”
“Come on, Negi ... I’m family.” Sharp white stubble covered his chin. He smacked his lips.
“You’d better not bother me again, or I’m telling Mami.” I pushed past him and ran down the stairs and out into the street.
The next day I was brushing my hair in front of the dresser in the bedroom of our railroad-style apartment. Chico lay on the couch, watching television with the kids, but every once in a while I noticed his eyes fixed on me. I turned my back, face burning, goose bumps rising. Tata called him to the kitchen. His bones creaked when he got up. As he passed behind me, he slipped his hand under my raised arms and pinched my left nipple.
“Don’t tell