An Island Like You

by Judith Ortiz Cofer

  Doris and Arturo are hanging out in front if the La Discoteria, the record shop, looking through a box of bargain tapes.

  “Hey, Yolanda, where you going?” Doris yells as I run past them.

  “St. Mary’s!” I don’t stop, especially since I can hear a police siren somewhere ahead and I just know they’ve found her body. I’m gonna be an orphan! I’m gonna be sent to live in foster homes where I’ll be beaten and abused! I run faster even though my lungs feel like they’re going to burst. I can hear Doris and Arturo behind me trying to catch up. They’re laughing. They probably think I’m just freaking out from being cooped up for weeks.

  “Hey, Yolanda, are they after you?” Doris points to the police car trying to get through the barrio street, which people use like it was their front yard on weekends. Some couples are even dancing in the middle of the road.

  I’m right in front of the church before I slow down. I hear music filtering up through the gate on the sidewalk. The dance is in the basement. It’s a bolero that’s playing, by this old island singer my mother is crazy about, Daniel Santos. He’s been dead for ages, but people still play his records, older people, that is. Since it’s more than half over, they’ve stopped collecting tickets, so I push through the sweaty people on the steps heading for the basement. It is crowded and dark. I finally squeeze in. I hear Doris behind me breathing hard. They’ve followed me in, and they had to run fast to do it.

  “You think you’ll lose the cops in here, Yoli?” Doris is trying to be funny. I tell her to shut up and help me look for my mother. It’s Arturo who says in his soft voice, “There is your mamá, Yolanda.”

  “Where?” I see a bunch of people making a circle as tango music begins, but I can’t see through them. Arturo is taller than me by a head. He points to a couple dancing in the middle of the circle. I push two people apart so I can get a better view. Behind me, Doris giggles. It’s a strange sight.

  My mother is doing this tango with Don José. They are looking into each other’s eyes as if hypnotized. He dips her right, and then left, until her head almost touches the ground. Their movements are in perfect tune to the music, and when they do one of their fancy turns some people clap. Don José doesn’t look so much like a gangster in his pinstripe suit and pointy shoes under the strobe lights. It’s more like he’s a professional dancer in costume putting on a show. My mother’s face is radiant. Her eyes are big and bright and her cheeks are red. The sequins on her dress give off tiny sparks of light as she moves in perfect sync with him.

  “Hey, they’re good,” Doris says.

  When the song ends, people clap and whistle. But they don’t seem to notice. It’s like they’re alone in the middle of the crowd. He’s still holding her hands. She looks up at him and smiles. He raises her fingers up to his lips and kisses them. That’s when I turn around and start pushing my way out of the basement. Doris and Arturo follow me out to the street.

  I try to run ahead of them, but can’t shake them. There’s something that’s choking me in my throat. I don’t want them to see me get sick. But Doris has caught up and Arturo is not far behind, so I decide that maybe what I need is a little company too.

  “You guys wanna come over and watch some TV?”

  “Sure,” says Doris, and Arturo nods his head. “But I thought you were still grounded, Yoli. Didn’t your mother say you couldn’t have company unless she was there?”

  “Things are different now,” I tell her. “Mami thinks that we’ve got to start living a normal life again.”

  “Who’s the dancer?” Doris asks. “New boyfriend?”

  I say, “Yeah,” and I start to tell them about Don José of la mancha. They laugh at my description of his clothes. I give them a little sample of one of his songs. “Ay, ay, ay, ay,” I sing out. People stop to stare at us, especially when Doris and Arturo start doing a pretty good imitation of the dance they saw my mother and Don José doing. Soon we’re all laughing so hard we have to hold on to each other so we don’t fall. But suddenly something happens in my head, and I find myself crying instead of laughing. Doris puts an arm around my shoulders and says, “You’re thinking about your father, right?”

  And I am. I keep seeing my mother’s face out there on the dance floor and wishing she had been looking up at Papi when she smiled like she did. But that can’t happen anymore. And that’s the part that makes me feel like I’m choking on a chicken bone. But then, it’d been a long, long time since I’d seen her smile at all. Out of nowhere Arturo says, “He dances good, but he sure dresses funny.”

  “Hey, Yolanda. Maybe you can take him shopping for some new clothes,” says Doris. Then she looks kind of worried, maybe remembering that shopping is how I got into trouble. So I say, “Yeah, maybe I will. But this time I’ll have to remember to stop by the cash register and pay before leaving the store.”

  Doris smiles, relieved, I guess, that she hadn’t put her foot in her mouth. We race up the stairs and plop down in front of the TV. We’re all sort of in a stupor by the time I hear the voices saying good night in Spanish outside the door. Then there’s a minute or so of quiet before she puts the key in the lock. In my mind I see the final scene of the movie I had been watching earlier, the one where the two people knock themselves out just for that one little kiss at the end. I’ll never understand it.

  She comes in smiling and eases in between Doris and me. She’s warm and a little sweaty. She smells of her perfume mixed with somebody else’s. I try to move away, but she gently pulls me closer and kisses the top of my head, holding me for a long time. I get the feeling that she’s trying to transfer something to me, something she’s feeling — love, happiness, whatever it is, it feels good, so I just close my eyes and try to enjoy it. But glued to the back of my eyelids is a picture of Papi, looking sharp in his white shirt and tie. Don’t forget me, he whispers in my head. Don’t forget.

  You made me feel like a zero, like a nothing,” she says in Spanish, un cero, nada. She is trembling, an angry little old woman lost in a heavy winter coat that belongs to my mother. And I end up being sent to my room, like I was a child, to think about my grandmother’s idea of math.

  It all began with Abuela coming up from the Island for a visit — her first time in the United States. My mother and father paid her way here so that she wouldn’t die without seeing snow, though if you asked me, and nobody has, the dirty slush in this city is not worth the price of a ticket. But I guess she deserves some kind of award for having had ten kids and survived to tell about it. My mother is the youngest of the bunch. Right up to the time when we’re supposed to pick up the old lady at the airport, my mother is telling me stories about how hard times were for la familia on la isla, and how la abuela worked night and day to support them after their father died of a heart attack. I’d die of a heart attack too if I had a troop like that to support. Anyway, I had seen her only three or four times in my entire life, whenever we would go for somebody’s funeral. I was born here and I have lived in this building all my life. But when Mami says, “Connie, please be nice to Abuela. She doesn’t have too many years left. Do you promise me, Constancia?” — when she uses my full name, I know she means business. So I say, “Sure.” Why wouldn’t I be nice? I’m not a monster, after all.

  So we go to Kennedy to get la abuela and she is the last to come out of the airplane, on the arm of the cabin attendant, all wrapped up in a black shawl. He hands her over to my parents like she was a package sent airmail. It is January, two feet of snow on the ground, and she’s wearing a shawl over a thin black dress. That’s just the start.

  Once home, she refuses to let my mother buy her a coat because it’s a waste of money for the two weeks she’ll be in el Polo Norte, as she calls New Jersey, the North Pole. So since she’s only four feet eleven inches tall, she walks around in my mother’s big black coat looking ridiculous. I try to walk far behind them in public so that no one will think we’re together. I plan to stay very busy the whole time she’s with us so that I won’t be ask
ed to take her anywhere, but my plan is ruined when my mother comes down with the flu and Abuela absolutely has to attend Sunday mass or her soul will be eternally damned. She’s more Catholic than the Pope. My father decides that he should stay home with my mother and that I should escort la abuela to church. He tells me this on Saturday night as I’m getting ready to go out to the mall with my friends.

  “No way,” I say.

  I go for the car keys on the kitchen table: He usually leaves them there for me on Friday and Saturday nights. He beats me to them.

  “No way,” he says, pocketing them and grinning at me.

  Needless to say, we come to a compromise very quickly. I do have a responsibility to Sandra and Anita, who don’t drive yet. There is a Harley-Davidson fashion show at Brookline Square that we cannot miss.

  “The mass in Spanish is at ten sharp tomorrow morning, entiendes?” My father is dangling the car keys in front of my nose and pulling them back when I try to reach for them. He’s really enjoying himself.

  “I understand. Ten o’clock. I’m out of here.” I pry his fingers off the key ring. He knows that I’m late, so he makes it just a little difficult. Then he laughs. I run out of our apartment before he changes his mind. I have no idea what I’m getting myself into.

  Sunday morning I have to walk two blocks on dirty snow to retrieve the car. I warm it up for Abuela as instructed by my parents, and drive it to the front of our building. My father walks her by the hand in baby steps on the slippery snow. The sight of her little head with a bun on top of it sticking out of that huge coat makes me want to run back into my room and get under the covers. I just hope that nobody I know sees us together. I’m dreaming, of course. The mass is packed with people from our block. It’s a holy day of obligation and everyone I ever met is there.

  I have to help her climb the steps, and she stops to take a deep breath after each one, then I lead her down the aisle so that everybody can see me with my bizarre grandmother. If I were a good Catholic, I’m sure I’d get some purgatory time taken off for my sacrifice. She is walking as slow as Captain Cousteau exploring the bottom of the sea, looking around, taking her sweet time. Finally she chooses a pew, but she wants to sit in the other end. It’s like she had a spot picked out for some unknown reason, and although it’s the most inconvenient seat in the house, that’s where she has to sit. So we squeeze by all the people already sitting there, saying, “Excuse me, please, con permiso, pardon me,” getting annoyed looks the whole way. By the time we settle in, I’m drenched in sweat. I keep my head down like I’m praying so as not to see or be seen. She is praying loud, in Spanish, and singing hymns at the top of her creaky voice.

  I ignore her when she gets up with a hundred other people to go take communion. I’m actually praying hard now — that this will all be over soon. But the next time I look up, I see a black coat dragging around and around the church, stopping here and there so a little gray head can peek out like a periscope on a submarine. There are giggles in the church, and even the priest has frozen in the middle of a blessing, his hands above his head like he is about to lead the congregation in a set of jumping jacks.

  I realize to my horror that my grandmother is lost. She can’t find her way back to the pew. I am so embarrassed that even though the woman next to me is shooting daggers at me with her eyes, I just can’t move to go get her. I put my hands over my face like I’m praying, but it’s really to hide my burning cheeks. I would like for her to disappear. I just know that on Monday my friends, and my enemies, in the barrio will have a lot of senile-grandmother jokes to tell in front of me. I am frozen to my seat. So the same woman who wants me dead on the spot does it for me. She makes a big deal out of getting up and hurrying to get Abuela.

  The rest of the mass is a blur. All I know is that my grandmother kneels the whole time with her hands over her face. She doesn’t speak to me on the way home, and she doesn’t let me help her walk, even though she almost falls a couple of times.

  When we get to the apartment, my parents are at the kitchen table, where my mother is trying to eat some soup. They can see right away that something is wrong. Then Abuela points her finger at me like a judge passing a sentence on a criminal. She says in Spanish, “You made me feel like a zero, like a nothing.” Then she goes to her room.

  I try to explain what happened. “I don’t understand why she’s so upset. She just got lost and wandered around for a while,” I tell them. But it sounds lame, even to my own ears. My mother gives me a look that makes me cringe and goes in to Abuela’s room to get her version of the story. She comes out with tears in her eyes.

  “Your grandmother says to tell you that of all the hurtful things you can do to a person, the worst is to make them feel as if they are worth nothing.”

  I can feel myself shrinking right there in front of her. But I can’t bring myself to tell my mother that I think I understand how I made Abuela feel. I might be sent into the old lady’s room to apologize, and it’s not easy to admit you’ve been a jerk — at least, not right away with everybody watching. So I just sit there not saying anything.

  My mother looks at me for a long time, like she feels sorry for me. Then she says, “You should know, Constancia, that if it wasn’t for this old woman whose existence you don’t seem to value, you and I would not be here.”

  That’s when I’m sent to my room to consider a number I hadn’t thought much about — until today.

  I can’t swim very well, mainly because my eyesight is so bad that the minute I take off my glasses to get in the pool, everything becomes a blob of color and I freeze. But I managed to talk my way into a summer job at the city pool anyway, selling food, not being a lifeguard or anything. It’s where I want to be so I can be with some of my friends from school who don’t have to work in the summer. I’m a scholarship student at St. Mary’s, and one of the few Puerto Ricans in the school. Most of the other students come from families with more money than us. Most of the time that doesn’t bother me, but to have some nice clothes and go places with my school friends I have to work all year — as a supermarket cashier mostly, until now. I got the job with the Park Services because my friend Anne Carey’s father is the park director. All I’ll be doing is selling drinks and snacks, and I get to talk to everyone since the little concession stand faces the Olympic-size pool and the cute lifeguard, Bob Dylan Kalinowski. His mother is a sixties person, and she named him after the old singer from that time. Bob Dylan lettered in just about everything this year.

  As I walk to the bus stop, I’m thinking about how good it’s going to be to get away from El Building this summer. It does take me forty-five minutes to get to the other side of town where the pool is, but it’s worth it. It’s a good first day. The woman, Mrs. O’Brien, who shows me around, says I don’t need any training. I can run a cash register, I can take inventory, and I am very friendly with customers — even the obnoxious ones. The only thing I don’t really like is that Mrs. O’Brien tells me that she expects to be told if I ever see Bob Dylan messing around on the job.

  “People’s lives, children’s lives, are in that young man’s hands,” she says, looking toward the lifeguard stand where Bob Dylan is balancing himself like a tightrope walker on the edge for the benefit of Clarissa Miller, who is looking up at him like she wants him to jump down into her arms. She’s about six foot tall and well muscled herself, so I get distracted thinking how funny it would be to see her tossing him over her shoulder and taking him home, like she’s always saying she wants to do. Mrs. O’Brien brings me back when she says in an insistent voice, “Keep an eye on him, Teresa, and use that phone there to call me, if you need to. I’m in my office most of the time.” (She’s Mr. Carey’s assistant, or something, and her office is luckily kind of far from the pool and store.)

  I say, “Yes, ma’am,” even though I feel funny about being asked to spy on Bob Dylan. He’s a senior at my school, a diver for the varsity swim team, and, yeah, a crazy man sometimes. But if they gave him the job as a
lifeguard, they ought to trust him to do it right, although the fact that Anne Carey is absolutely and hopelessly in love with him probably had something to do with his getting the job.

  That was the first day. Except for O’Brien asking me to fink on Bob Dylan, I had a good time taking in the action at poolside. And one thing nobody knows: I’m interested in Bob Dylan too. But I would never hurt Anne. And as of now, he is playing the field, anyway. He flirts with every girl in school. Even me. That’s what I really like about Bob Dylan — he’s democratic. But not too humble: I once heard him say that God had given him a great body and it was his duty to share it.

  The second day is bad news. A disaster. I got assigned a “mentally challenged” assistant by the city. There’s a new program to put retarded people to work at simple jobs so they can make some money, learn a skill, or something. I thought I approved of it when the man came to St. Mary’s to explain why these “mildly handicapped” individuals would be showing up around the school, doing jobs like serving lunch and picking up around the yard. At first they got hassled a little by the school jerks, but Sister sergeant-at-arms Mary Angelica started flashing suspension slips at us, and then everybody soon got used to the woman who smiled like a little girl as she scooped up mashed potatoes and made what she called snow mountains on our plates. And we learned not to stare at the really cute guy who stared right through you when he came in to empty the wastebaskets in our classrooms. I sometimes wondered what he thought about. Maybe nothing. This guy could have been on TV except when you looked into his eyes: they were like a baby’s eyes, sort of innocent, but sad too. Nobody believed it when the rumor started that he wasn’t born like that, but had been a war hero in Vietnam, where he got shot in the head. Who knows? I didn’t think he was that old.