by Jaquira Díaz
While my father only listened to salsa on vinyl, Héctor Lavoe and Willie Colón and Ismael Rivera, my mother was all about Madonna. My mother was Puerto Rican but also American, she liked to remind us, born in New York, and she loved everything American. She belted the lyrics to “Holiday” while shaving her legs in the shower, while making us egg salad sandwiches served with potato chips for lunch. She talked about moving us to Miami Beach, where Grandma Mercy and most of our titis lived, about making sure we learned English.
On New Year’s Eve, she made me wear a red-and-white striped dress and white patent leather shoes. It was hideous. I looked like a peppermint candy. She styled my hair in fat candy curls and said she wanted me to look like Shirley Temple. I had no idea who Shirley Temple was, but I hoped she didn’t expect me to be friends with her. I wasn’t trying to be friends with girls in dresses and uncomfortable shoes.
I knew that these were things meant for girls, and that I was supposed to like them. But I had no interest in my mother’s curtains, or her tubes of red lipstick, or her dresses, or the dolls Grandma Mercy and Titi Xiomara sent from Miami. I didn’t want to be Barbie for Halloween, like my mother suggested. I wanted to be a ninja, with throwing stars and nunchucks and a sword. I wanted to kick the shit out of ten thousand men like Bruce Lee. I wanted to climb trees and catch frogs and play with Star Wars action figures, to fight with lightsabers and build model spaceships. I didn’t have a crush on Atreyu from The NeverEnding Story, like my brother said, teasing me. I wanted to be Atreyu, to ride Falkor the luckdragon. When I watched Conan the Destroyer, I wanted to be fierce and powerful Grace Jones. Zula, the woman warrior. I wanted her to be the one who saved the princess, to be the one the princess fell for in the end.
(Years later, would I think of Zula during that first kiss, that first throbbing between my legs? It would be with an older girl, the daughter of my parents’ friends. We’d steal my mother’s cigarettes, take them out back behind our building, and light them up. She would blow her smoke past my face, stick her tongue in my mouth, slide her hand inside my shorts. How she’d know just what to do without me having to tell her—this was everything, this butch girl, so unafraid, getting everything she wanted. And how willing I was to give it to her.)
Our new neighbor arrived in the middle of the night, carried her boxes from somebody’s pickup into her living room, then waved goodbye as it drove away. She arrived in silence, filling the empty space of the apartment next door, where nobody had ever lived as long as I could remember, hung her flowerpots from hooks on the balcony. She arrived with almost nothing, just those plants and some furniture and her daughter Jesenia, a year older than me.
The morning after, Eggy and I were outside catching lizards, holding onto them until they got away, leaving their broken-off tails still wriggling between our fingers. She stepped out on her balcony, watering her plants with a plastic cup.
“Guess you have a new neighbor,” Eggy said.
La vecina, as we learned to call her, was nothing like Mami. She wore no makeup, a faded floral housedress and out-of-style leather chancletas like my abuela’s, her curly brown hair in a low ponytail. She had deep wrinkles around the corners of her eyes, although she didn’t look as old as Abuela. When she looked up at Eggy and me, she smiled.
“Hola,” she said. “Where’s your mom?”
“Working,” I said.
She pressed her hand to her cheek. “And she lets you play outside by yourself?”
“Sure,” I said.
We talked for a while, la vecina asking us questions about the neighborhood, about the basketball courts, about what time the grano man came by on Sunday mornings. Eggy and I answered question after question, feeling like hostages until my father emerged.
“Buenas,” Papi said.
La vecina introduced herself, and Papi walked over, shook her hand over her balcony’s railing. They got to talking, ignoring me and Eggy, Papi smiling, the way he never smiled. My father always had a serious look on his face, a look that made him seem angry, even when he was happy. And he was always trying to look good, ironing his polo shirts, grooming his mustache every morning, massaging Lustrasilk Right On Curl into his hair before picking it out, even if he was just lying around the house on the weekend. The only time my father dressed down—in shorts, tank tops, and his white Nike Air Force high-tops—was when he played ball or when we went to the beach.
La vecina laughed at something he said, and my father patted his Afro lightly. When I saw the opening, I tapped Eggy on the shoulder and we took off running toward the basketball courts.
My mother worked long shifts at an electronic parts factory in Las Piedras. Sometimes, when Mami was at work and Anthony at school, Papi took me to Abuela’s house for lunch. Abuela lived in the next building over, and Mami usually dropped off Alaina at her house before her shift. Abuela’s kitchen always smelled like fried meat and café, her bedroom a blend of Maja soap, bay rum, and Bal à Versailles perfume. The second bedroom belonged to my tío David, who was a priest at the Catholic church in the city and only came home occasionally.
In Abuela’s apartment, where he’d lived before he and Mami got married, before we were born, Papi was at home. He had a special bookcase there, and some books I was not allowed to touch—expensive signed first editions on the top shelf, stories not meant for children on the second. That bookcase was his refuge, where he sometimes went when Mami was yelling or flinging plates across the room. He’d sit in Abuela’s kitchen, turning pages, always with his café. I would do the same, take a book off the lower shelf, sit at the table trying to make out which words I knew, as if this would transfer a sort of magic to me—secrets only Papi knew.
Abuela always said that I was like Papi’s tail, that when he came into a room, I was usually not far behind. You are just like your father, she’d say, knowing how much I loved hearing that. She’d tell me stories about Papi as a kid. Cano, my father’s nickname, given to him by my tío David when he was a baby, meant “light.” When he was born, my father had been a light-skinned baby with very light hair, and my uncle, three years old at the time, found that hilarious.
Cano, Abuela told me, would climb guayaba trees to steal fruit, sneak out of the house to run through the cañaverales with the street kids. He was always getting in trouble: Cano throwing down with the school bully to defend my tío, the quiet, Jesus-loving kid who refused to fight. Cano getting whooped with a belt by the assistant principal for smacking another kid upside the head. Cano, who’d spent only a short time in the army. Cano the prankster, the papichulo with a girlfriend in every other town, always finding trouble. Cano, who—before any of us were born—had taken off to New York for a couple of years after trouble finally found him.
Every time I ran into la vecina, she wanted to talk. She lived alone with her daughter, Jesenia, she told me. Jesenia wasn’t in school yet, but she would be starting in a couple of days. Jesenia was shy. Jesenia loved to watch TV. Do you want to watch a movie with Jesenia? Do you want to jump rope with Jesenia? I hadn’t seen this Jesenia yet, but I was already done with her.
One morning, Mami at work, Papi asleep on the couch, la vecina caught me leaving our apartment. She was sweeping the front steps when I came out, and called after me when I tried to sneak past her. “Jaqui, wait!” She leaned the broom against her door and sat on the stoop, tapping the space next to her.
I exhaled dramatically, then plopped down on the step.
“Where were you headed?” she asked.
“Out.”
“Is your brother at school?”
“Yes.”
“Is your mom at work?”
“Yes.”
“When does she come home?”
“I don’t know.”
“Does she come home at night?”
I rolled my eyes. “Yes, she comes home at night.”
“Is your father home?”
“He’s sleeping.”
“Does he take care of you when your mother
’s not home?”
I studied her face, trying to figure out why all the questions about my parents. “Sometimes Abuela takes care of us.”
“Who makes dinner for you?”
“Abuela,” I said. “And sometimes Papi.”
“What do you like to eat?”
“Ice cream.”
She laughed. “What about your father?”
I shrugged. “He likes arroz con pollo, I guess.”
At first it felt like being interrogated, but after a while, I was so happy to have a grownup listening to me talk about myself, I let it all out. I told her about the kioskos on the beach where Papi took me to eat ensalada de pulpo. I told her all about how Anthony almost died when he was born, how they kept him in the hospital for two months because he was so little, how he’d had machines to help him breathe. I told her how Anthony and I were always fighting, how I wasn’t supposed to go to the plaza, but I still snuck over there sometimes. She listened to every word I said, really listened, even laughed when I made a joke. Then, I don’t know what made me do it, but I told her about the tecato who came up to our balcony and pulled out his dick.
“Do you know who he was?” she asked.
“No, but I’ve seen him before.”
“Did you tell your father?”
“No.”
“You know,” she said, “if you ever need to, you can talk to me.” She looked right into my eyes and waited.
“Okay,” I said. And I believed her.
Anthony, Alaina, and I shared a cramped bedroom—linoleum covering the concrete floors, aluminum persianas, spider-web cracks on cinderblock walls. Anthony’s twin bed against one wall, mine against the opposite, Alaina’s crib in the middle. The thick smell of something burning in the air, wafting from the cañaverales, from the nearby mills where they made sugar and guarapo de caña.
I woke up sweaty, Anthony still snoring, Alaina sitting up, crying softly, her chubby fingers in her mouth, brown curls stuck to her moist forehead. Pedro Conga’s “Soy Peregrino” blared from the record player in our living room.
I could hear Mami and Papi arguing in the kitchen. My mother slamming plates and silverware in the sink, asking over and over about la otra, a dirty fucking whore she could smell all over him, this woman who had taken the money she worked for, the money she brought home to take care of her children while my father was chillin’ with his homeboys in la plaza.
My father denied everything. There was no smell on him. He had not spent the night with another woman. He’d gone out with friends and was too drunk to drive home. She was imagining things. She was making shit up. How could she think that he would ever do something like that? It was ridiculous. It was crazy.
“Don’t you call me crazy!” my mother yelled, then she started screaming, like she really was crazy, the sound of it threatening to crack the cinderblock walls around us. A few years later, I would listen to my mother screaming, just like this, during another one of their fights. All of us already living in Miami Beach, Anthony, Alaina, and I hiding in the bedroom, our parents hurling coffee mugs and ashtrays at each other, yanking the phone off the wall, turning over the dining room table. My father already so fed up with Mami, with all of us, he would accuse her of making shit up, call her foolish, ridiculous, crazy. And my mother, not even thirty and already in the snares of schizophrenia and addiction and three kids at war with each other, with themselves, Anthony pounding on me, depression already like a noose around my neck.
. . .
Another day, la vecina’s apartment door wide open, she caught me as I was coming home from the basketball courts, sweaty and breathless, my face hot from the sun.
“Hey, Jaqui!” she called after me, “come in and play with Jesenia!”
I didn’t know how to say no to her, and I didn’t think she’d like it if I told her that Eggy and I always avoided Jesenia when we saw her riding her bike out front. Jesenia and her Jesenia dresses, one in every color of the rainbow, and her folded-down ankle socks. Jesenia with ribbons in her hair. Jesenia and her stupid pigtails. She was everything I wasn’t. I had a mass of sunburned frizz that stood straight up and I liked it that way. Whenever Mami put ribbons in my hair, they ended up on the floor, or stuffed between the couch cushions, or in one of Abuela’s planters.
She led me into her kitchen, where her only table was a child-sized plastic one with two small red chairs. Jesenia sat there, a plate of chocolate chip cookies in front of her, getting crumbs all over her purple dress. Her pigtails were perfect, each plaited into a tight, long braid and secured with a ribbon. La vecina pulled out the other chair and set a small plate for me.
“Jesenia, say hello to Jaqui.”
Jesenia barely looked at me. “Hola.”
I nodded, took a cookie, and instead of playing with Jesenia, I answered more questions for la vecina.
“Where does your father work?”
“He goes to the university,” I told her, even though I could not remember the last time my father took any classes.
“Really? What does he study?”
“Books,” I said, which made her laugh.
Jesenia got up, pushed her chair aside, and left the room.
La vecina poured a cup of milk, set it on the table, then wiped her hands on her dress. “So what’s your mother like?”
I studied her for a minute, not sure what she was asking.
La vecina was nothing like Mami. My mother would never wear a dress like my abuela’s, would never smell like fried plátanos and pine oil, would never ask question after question before getting to the point. My mother was direct and she took no shit. She got right to it. We’d go to a party and right away she was dancing. She was small but scared of nothing, a foulmouthed chain-smoker with a hot temper, who drove a stick-shift Mazda RX-7, who never set foot outside without makeup, without her door-knocker earrings, or her heels. As petite as she was, my mother owned every room she walked into. She eclipsed the sun with her confidence, took the world by the throat and shook it until it gave up what was hers. You crossed her and she was ready to throw down on the spot, taking off earrings and heels and tying up her hair. She was curvy, with a swing in her hips, and everywhere we went she had admirers, leering men asking her name, asking for her phone number, calling after her, Mira, mami! But she didn’t give any of them the time of day. My mother was utterly and completely in love with my father. Hers was the blazing, frenzied love of Puerto Rican novelas, the kind of love that drives you mad. She loved her children, the three of us, even more so. And she never let us forget it.
La vecina waited for me to respond. This woman, so different from my mother, I just couldn’t picture her in red stilettos and a fishnet dress, dancing like Madonna in front of her TV.
“She’s blond,” I said finally, “with green eyes like my brother. And she likes Madonna.”
Jesenia came back into the room, dropped a bunch of dolls on the table. “Do you like Barbies?” she asked.
“Sure,” I said, which was not entirely true. I had Barbies, dolls Mami had given me for my birthday or Christmas, or that my titis had handed down to me. But I didn’t exactly like them. They were like reminders of everything I wasn’t—blond-haired, blue-eyed. They always made me feel ugly, the brown kid who would never look like her white mother. They’d end up on the floor, tossed aside, with their heads bald. Later, when I learned about sex, I started posing them strategically: Barbie and Barbie facing each other, kissing, their stiff arms sticking up, naked Barbie on top of naked Barbie.
“Do you want to take your father some lunch?” la vecina asked.
“Okay,” I said.
She sent me home with a platter of arroz con pollo, some red beans on the side. It was so heavy I almost dropped it walking through our front door, but Abuela took it off my hands.
Hours later, after Abuela was already gone, Anthony watching TV, and Alaina in her crib, Mami walked through the door, tired from work. She sat at the kitchen table, rubbing her feet.
/> “Did you eat?” she asked. “I’ll make you something.”
“I already ate,” I said. “Had some of la vecina’s arroz con pollo.”
“La vecina?” my mother asked.
“She sent a big platter of food for Papi.”
Suddenly, my mother got up, slamming her fist on the table, shut her eyes tight, brought her hands to her face. Then she stomped out of the kitchen.
My father, again, denied everything. He followed my mother as she came back to the kitchen.
“It’s not true, Jeannette,” he said. “I don’t know what she’s talking about.”
My mother opened the refrigerator, opened the freezer, the oven, lifted the lid to our trashcan. She inspected the dishes in the sink, opened and closed all the cabinets, searching and searching. She came over and took me by the arm.
“Show me,” she said. “Where is it?”
I looked for la vecina’s platter everywhere, opening cabinets and checking the fridge again, but nothing.
“I don’t know,” I said, tears starting to sting my eyes.
“I’m telling you,” my father said, “it never happened.”
I looked to my father, trying to understand, trying to look in his eyes. But there was nothing there that could clear things up. I burst into tears.
Mami looked back and forth from Papi to me then Papi again. She finally turned back to me, leaning down so her face met mine. “Are you lying?” she asked me.