An Island Like You

by Judith Ortiz Cofer

  Anita and Jennifer are shooting baskets in the gym when I go through it on my way to the lockers. They’re being punished for unsportsmanlike conduct. Their teacher knows they both hate to ruin their nails, so she’s making them take turns shooting the ball — which is hell on sculptured nails. Anita throws me the ball as I pass her, and I shoot it way above Jennifer’s head and right into the basket. Jennifer gives me the mal de ojo, and I pretend to spit three times over my shoulder and give her the sign of the horns with my index and little finger. Anita starts laughing so loud that Ms. Landers, her P.E. coach, comes out of the locker room to yell at them. I do one perfect cartwheel in front of Anita and she gives me the signal to wait for her after the bell, one thumb up, one down, so we can walk home together.

  Before last bell I run up three flights of stairs and then back down to calm myself before I go see Mrs. Laguna in her ground-floor classroom. She is very understanding, but she says that I should not let people like Jennifer López upset me so much that I mess up in school. I get my homework from her, and as I am leaving, she says something strange: “You are a late bloomer, Sandra. And flowers that bloom slowly last longer.” Sometimes teachers say and do very weird things. But I give it some thought anyway. How late a bloomer am I?

  Anita and I walk home together; that is, I walk at a normal pace, and she sort of strolls, pulling me back by grabbing my backpack once in a while. She’s told me many times that I walk like a jock. I take it as a compliment. She starts telling me that she has been going downtown after school to try to meet older guys.

  “Where do you go?” I know she doesn’t have much money and she isn’t old enough to go into bars.

  “I just ride the bus to the places where they’re hanging out after work. You know, the diner under the el near City Hall. Around five all these guys hang out there, some of them wearing suits and all.”

  “Do you talk to them? How are you going to get one to ask you out?” I am really curious about how Anita is going to manage a date with an older guy (someone with a job and money is what she is looking for).

  “I just catch his eye; then I walk to a restaurant and sit by myself. If he’s interested, he’ll follow,” she says like I was asking her very stupid and obvious questions. “I saw that work in a movie I saw the other day. A mature man knows when a woman wants to meet him.”

  “But what if he turns out to be a murderer? I mean, how would you know?”

  “Ay, niña, you are such a child sometimes.” Anita looks at me with disdain, the same way I’ve seen her mother look at her when I go over and they’re arguing. Then someone blows his car horn and Anita runs to get in without saying adiós, bye, or drop dead. All in all, it has been a day from hell.

  As I come to the front stoop of our building, I have another problem facing me: the “three amigos,” the unemployed bums that do nothing but hang out and harass women, are at their posts, blocking my way in. They are like triplets with their dirty undershirts and jeans and cans of beer: Juan, José, and Justo. Nobody knows where they came from or why they stay. But everyone wants them to disappear. They have the basement apartment and hang out on the steps. Mami thinks they’re drug dealers, but nobody can prove it. My father is trying to get a petition going to get them evicted, but they pay their rent, so he doesn’t think that will work. It’s not a crime to say stupid things to women and to drink beer in your dingy T-shirt. But he’s trying to catch them at something illegal. I really admire my old papi.

  “Mira, linda,” says Bum Number One, calling me “pretty” in a sarcastic way, “when are you going to put a little flesh on those bones, huh?”

  “Hombre, she’s got a pretty face, you know?” says Bum Number Two.

  “I have time, I’ll wait for you, my little bird,” says Bum Number Three.

  And then all three laugh as I run past them to the front door. I stumble on a step and they laugh harder, hooting and howling and making comments. I really hate the way they talk to women. But they know that if they cross the line and say something really dirty, I can call the police or tell Papi. So they just say stupid things.

  As if all that wasn’t enough to finish ruining my day, I also have to deal with my aunt Modesta, who moved into our place a few days ago after filing for a divorce. She says it’s a short visit. I sure hope so. Our apartment is small enough to begin with, and with Aunt Modesta and her ton of clothes and boxes of makeup, there’s no room to breathe.

  My mother is making dinner, and I know Modesta is home because her radio is on. If she’s in the house, awake or asleep, the thing is on full blast. So I sit down on my chair in front of my window to think for a few minutes.

  Modesta is really into her looks. She spends hours getting ready to go out. It’s like a job, especially now that she’s “in circulation” again. She got married before she finished high school, and I don’t think she knows how to be happy without a guy around. She says her husband didn’t pay any attention to her, never even noticed when she was wearing a new outfit. She says she considers his attitude “mental cruelty,” and that’s why she left him. My aunt Modesta is what Papi calls a high-maintenance woman, like his 1957 Chevy, which he has to constantly repair, paint, patch up — but it looks great when he parks it in front of our building.

  From my bedroom window I have a good view of the way men look at my aunt. I watch her as she walks down the block. Mine are not the only pair of eyes following the Ping-Pong game, ’cause that’s the way her hips move when she wears those spiky high heels even to go to the bodega for a pound of coffee. I know that’s where she’s going because Mami has stuck her head out of the living room window and yelled, “Modesta, Modesta, mira, mira!” as loud as she can and told her younger sister to bring only Bustelo coffee, not the Cuban stuff.

  Modesta looks up at us, posing like a movie star on the sidewalk. I hear a long wolf whistle from somewhere in our building, and a car full of guys hanging out the windows slows down so they can stare and yell stuff at her. It’s a warm spring day, so, like Mami says, “All the cucarachas are crawling out of the woodwork.” Modesta is wearing a tight red dress that shows off her hips and breasts, which my American friends would say makes her look fat, but to Puerto Rican men is just right. She is wearing her streaked red hair in a French twist — which tells you how old she is.

  Our whole apartment has changed since she moved in. I used to smell Mami’s cooking and the pine cleaner she uses on our linoleum floor when I came home. Now I smell Passion perfume and hair spray. My mother used to sit with me after school and talk to me about my day; now she sits with Modesta looking at women’s magazines and talking trash, like what to wear when they go out with so-and-so.

  She’s supposed to stay with us until she gets a job and finds her own place. The first thing she did was take over the room that I was getting after we fixed it up, and tell me not to touch her clothes or jewelry. She sees me at my window, and to show off for the guys, she blows me a kiss. I sort of wave to her and go back to taking inventory of myself at my dresser mirror.

  Until this year, I had resigned myself to being just okay-looking. I mean, I’m not ugly, but I haven’t gotten round in the right places yet even though I’m fourteen and three-quarters; and I have buckteeth. I guess my teeth sticking out like they do wouldn’t be so bad if I weren’t so skinny. Right before the end of school last year I heard Paco say to Luis Cintrón that he thought I was pretty, but Luis said, “She ain’t too bad, but she’s got toothpick legs and Bugs Bunny teeth.” After that I started putting my hand over my mouth when I smile.

  My mother just laughs her loud laugh when I try to tell her how I feel about the way I look.

  “You wanna put on some weight? Here, eat more of my rice and beans. Look at me. I wish I could trade places with you!” And she loads up my plate with food and goes back to talking about men with Modesta. Since my parents divorced when I was a baby, my mother has said no to several men trying to take Papi’s place. She says she doesn’t want any strange men in the
house now that I’m a señorita. But she dates on weekends. Everyone tells me that she’s good-looking, like an older, heavier version of Modesta, but to me she’s Mami. I guess she looks good.

  I look at myself close up in the mirror and try to find some good things: I have a very nice nose and high cheekbones, and big eyes with long eyelashes. Everything by itself is okay, it’s just that it doesn’t come together into what I hear Mami and Modesta call belleza, beauty.

  In school my friends have a sort of checklist for great looks: breasts, legs, skin, smile, clothes. I don’t get A’s in any of the above, but I am gonna go ahead and give myself a P for potential. Maybe I’ll bloom.

  I decide to take some beauty lessons from my aunt Modesta. After all, she is probably thirty-five years old and can still make herself look good enough to shake up our barrio. So I watch her doing her walk, on her way back from the bodega, in her tight red dress: ping-pong, ping-pong go her hips, and tap-tap-tap, her high heels beat time on the sidewalk — it’s like she’s a one-woman salsa band. Horns blow, men whistle, women look back, some smile and others frown. I smell Passion crawling like an invisible snake up the stairs. It creeps through the cracks and into our apartment even before she makes her entrance. She sweeps in, winks at me, sighs dramatically as she sets the little brown bag on the table. And she smiles, her big white teeth flashing through the red lips.

  “Sandrita, qué pasa?”

  Not waiting for an answer, she kicks her heels into her room and starts unzipping her dress on her way there. I am going to ask her if I can watch her put on her makeup, but she turns up her radio to the Spanish station, loud — it has to be loud, since everyone else in our building has theirs on full blast and all our windows are open. I decide that my aunt won’t care if I watch her. Stars like an audience, after all.

  So I sink down to the floor and sit Indian-style just inside her room. I watch her take out her contact lenses — she is blind as a bat without them — and then she peels off her false eyelashes. I didn’t know she wore false ones; mine are just as long, and they’re real. I see her rub some white cream all over her face, and suddenly she starts to change. Her cheeks have been painted on, and the big red lips too. It’s like her expression is gone and she looks like a blank TV screen. I start to feel funny about watching her without her knowing, and I am about to slip out of her room quietly when I see something that stops me dead. My glamorous aunt Modesta has turned into an old woman! I watch it all in the dresser mirror as she squints, trying to see herself while she takes out a set of false teeth! Her face just sort of caves in when she does this. It’s like watching a horror movie. I can’t move. Now I can’t let her know that I’m there. She’d be angry and embarrassed that I had seen her that way. She finishes taking off her face at the dresser, then puts on some thick glasses and goes to her closet, to choose a dress for her date that night, I guess. While her back is turned, I slip quietly out of the room.

  I am shaking as I jump up on my barstool in front of my dresser. I look at myself again, imagining what I will look like in another ten, twenty, thirty years; and after I am dead in the grave. Then I look at myself again close up and I say to myself that I look okay, maybe better than okay. I may have Bugs Bunny teeth, but they are mine, and if I put on a few pounds, they might even look all right on my face, which at least is my real face, and not painted on. When I see Paco by himself next time, I’m gonna talk to him. I think he likes the way I look. After all, even if he hasn’t said anything, I know he watches me when he thinks I can’t see him. I think there’s hope for that boy.

  I’m about to go out for a walk, checking out the street from the stoop, when I hear the machine-gun tap-tap-tap. It’s Aunt Modesta coming down the stairs in her gold high-heel dancing shoes and tight black dress. She’s got her face back on again, and she flashes her movie-star smile at anyone who might be looking as she and her perfume rush by me. She blows me a kiss and winks. I blow her a kiss too, feeling sorry for her. It is such a hard job to be beautiful. Now that I know how it really is with her, I’m going to try to be nicer, even though I’d like to get my room back. When she leaves, I’ll help Mami clean the place until the smell of Passion disappears. I just hope she gets a life of her own soon.

  I start walking toward the playground. Sometimes Paco shoots baskets by himself at this hour. I hear the ball bounding off the concrete even before I get there, and my whole body wakes up like when I’m about to do the fifty-yard dash.

  I walk up to the fence. He is there dancing the ball around the yard, getting ready to shoot it. He is not wearing a shirt, just his P.E. shorts and high-top sneakers. I notice for the first time that he is thinner than he looks in the big shirts that he usually wears. He is not exactly built like Mr. Universe. He is not that tall either. But when he jumps like a ballet dancer into the air, with the ball on the tips of his fingers, the sun shines on the sweat on his chest and back, and to me he looks beautiful.

  When he lands back on the ground, he stands there smiling to himself. That’s when I call out his name — “Paco!” — and he does not stop smiling when he turns around and sees me on the other side of the fence, waiting for him to come open the gate. I retie my lucky red shoestrings on my high-tops while he takes his time dribbling the ball in my direction. I feel every muscle in my body tightening up. My heart is bouncing like the basketball.

  I’m getting ready to fly.

  Luis Cintrón sits on top of a six-foot pile of hubcaps and watches his father walk away into the steel jungle of his car junkyard. Released into his old man’s custody after six months in juvenile hall — for breaking and entering — and he didn’t even take anything. He did it on a dare. But the old lady with the million cats was a light sleeper, and good with her aluminum cane. He has a scar on his head to prove it.

  Now Luis is wondering whether he should have stayed in and done his full time. Jorge Cintrón of Jorge Cintron & Son, Auto Parts and Salvage, has decided that Luis should wash and polish every hubcap in the yard. The hill he is sitting on is only the latest couple of hundred wheel covers that have come in. Luis grunts and stands up on top of his silver mountain. He yells at no one, “Someday, son, all this will be yours,” and sweeps his arms like the Pope blessing a crowd over the piles of car sandwiches and mounds of metal parts that cover this acre of land outside the city. He is the “Son” of Jorge Cintron & Son, and so far his father has had more than one reason to wish it was plain Jorge Cintron on the sign.

  Luis has been getting in trouble since he started high school two years ago, mainly because of the “social group” he organized — a bunch of guys who were into harassing the local authorities. Their thing was taking something to the limit on a dare or, better still, doing something dangerous, like breaking into a house, not to steal, just to prove that they could do it. That was Luis’s specialty, coming up with very complicated plans, like military strategies, and assigning the “jobs” to guys who wanted to join the Tiburones.

  Tiburón means “shark,” and Luis had gotten the name from watching an old movie about a Puerto Rican gang called the Sharks with his father. Luis thought it was one of the dumbest films he had ever seen. Everybody sang their lines, and the guys all pointed their toes and leaped in the air when they were supposed to be slaughtering each other. But he liked their name, the Sharks, so he made it Spanish and had it air-painted on his black T-shirt with a killer shark under it, jaws opened wide and dripping with blood. It didn’t take long for other guys in the barrio to ask about it.

  Man, had they had a good time. The girls were interested too. Luis outsmarted everybody by calling his organization a social club and registering it at Central High. That meant they were legal, even let out of last-period class on Fridays for their “club” meetings. It was just this year, after a couple of botched jobs, that the teachers had started getting suspicious. The first one to go wrong was when he sent Kenny Matoa to borrow some “souvenirs” out of Anita Robles’s locker. He got caught. It seems that Matoa had been re
ading Anita’s diary and didn’t hear her coming down the hall. Anita was supposed to be in the gym at the time but had copped out with the usual female excuse of cramps. You could hear her screams all the way to Market Street.

  She told the principal all she knew about the Tiburones, and Luis had to talk fast to convince old Mr. Williams that the club did put on cultural activities such as the Save the Animals talent show. What Mr. Williams didn’t know was that the animal that was being “saved” with the ticket sales was Luis’s pet boa, which needed quite a few live mice to stay healthy and happy. They kept E.S. (which stood for “Endangered Species”) in Luis’s room, but she belonged to the club and it was the members’ responsibility to raise the money to feed their mascot. So last year they had sponsored their first annual Save the Animals talent show, and it had been a great success. The Tiburones had come dressed as Latino Elvises and did a grand finale to “All Shook Up” that made the audience go wild. Mr. Williams had smiled while Luis talked, maybe remembering how the math teacher, Mrs. Laguna, had dragged him out in the aisle to rock-and-roll with her. Luis had gotten out of that one, but barely.