When I Was Puerto Rican - Esmeralda Santiago [98]
I collapsed on the bed, holding myself against the pain and humiliation, but I didn’t scream. On his way back he threw a dollar at me. It was wrinkled and dirty, its edges ragged. I stretched it out and flattened it with my palm. George Washington, I had just learned, was the Father of our country. I put him inside my thick history book. The next day, on the way home from school, I ate my very first sundae with three kinds of ice cream, pineapples, nuts, chocolate sauce, and marsh-mallows.
“Tomorrow,” Mami said, “you’re not going to school. I need you to come with me to the welfare office.”
“Ay, Mami, can’t you take Delsa?”
“No, I can’t.”
When Mami was laid off, we had to go on welfare. She took me with her because she needed someone to translate. Six months after we landed in Brooklyn, I spoke enough English to explain our situation.
“My mother she no spik inglish. My mother she look for work evree day, and nothin. My mother she say she don’t want her children suffer. My mother she say she want work bot she lay off. My mother she only need help a leetle while.”
I was always afraid that if I said something wrong, if I mispronounced a word or used the wrong tense, the social workers would say no, and we might be evicted from our apartment, or the electricity would be shut off, or we’d freeze to death because Mami couldn’t pay for heating fuel.
The welfare office was in a brick building with wire covering the windows. The waiting room was always packed with people, and the person at the front desk never knew when we would be helped or where the social workers were. It was a place where you went and waited for hours, with nothing to do but sit and stare at the green walls. Once there, you couldn’t even go out to get a bite to eat, because your name might be called any time, and if you were gone, you’d lose your turn and have to come back the next day.
On the way there, Mami bought the paper, and I brought along the thickest library book I could find. The first couple of hours usually went by fast, since there were forms to fill out and interesting conversations going on around us as the women told each other their stories. There were never any men, just tired-looking women, some with their children, as if bringing children there would make the social workers talk to them.
Mami dressed nicely for the welfare office and insisted that I do too.
“We’re not going there looking like beggars,” she said, and while we waited she kept reminding me to sit up, to stay alert, to look as neat and dignified as the women on the other side of the partition, phones at their ears, pens poised over the forms handed to them by the receptionist with the dour expression who wouldn’t smile if her life depended on it.
Occasionally there were fights. Women beat up on the clerks who refused them help, or who made them wait in line for days, or who wouldn’t see them at all after they’d waited for hours. Once Mami punched a social worker who was rude to her.
“They treat us like animals,” she cried after she’d been restrained. “Don’t they care that we’re human beings, just like them?”
Her makeup streaked, her hair dishevelled, she left the welfare office with her back slumped and her eyes cast down and furtive. I was sure everyone on the bus knew that we had spent the day in the welfare office and that Mami had just hit a social worker. That night as she told Tata and Don Julio what had happened, Mami made it sound like it was a joke, no big deal. I added my own exaggerated details of how many people had to restrain her, without any mention of how frightened I’d been, and how ashamed I’d felt when she lost control in front of everybody.
Often I would be asked to translate for other women at the welfare office, since Mami told everyone I spoke good English. Their stories were no different from Mami’s. They needed just a little help until they could find a job again.
Every once in a while I could tell that the people I translated for were lying.
“What do you think?” they’d ask. “Should I say my husband