As they play the apartment becomes the most glorious one in the whole building, and the building becomes the most glorious one in the Bronx, which becomes the most glorious borough in New York, and New York becomes the best city in America, and America becomes the best country in the world, and the world becomes the best planet in the solar system, and I am the center of it all.
And then, without any warning, we move back in with my father.
Wait until you see the room …” says Ma.
I roll my eyes and don’t answer. We are in the vestibule of the new apartment my parents have decided to try and be happy in. A squat Mexican-looking woman with two fat braids crisscrossing her head and wearing an embroidered peasant blouse is mopping up the floor in the hallway but really she’s locked into our conversation as we enter the apartment’s long hall. Ma sweeps Joe, Petey, and me past a kitchen, a bathroom, and into the living room. The boys run on ahead as she points out the two bedrooms to the left and right of us.
“Petey will stay with me and your father in the big room.”
I wonder when my parents made up. Did he show up at her job? Did she meet him after we went to sleep? Did they meet at Lincoln Hospital after one of Joe’s attacks?
“Qué cara … What a face,” she says. When I don’t respond she goes on, “And you and Joe will share this room.”
Great, Ma.
I ignore the room and go to the window to look out on this new neighborhood. No nice shade and shadows hit the street like on Third Avenue. The sun is bright and Southern Boulevard is exposed and split right down the middle. One side of the boulevard has buildings and people and kids playing, but the other side has garages with orange-painted storefronts and awnings to service the cars that whiz by on nearby Bruckner Boulevard.
The building we have moved into is split as well. You enter a courtyard, then go left or right and up some stairs to your apartment, and I feel just like my surroundings, split in half as well, part of my family and not.
“Nice, right?”
Sure, Ma, great.
At night the commerce across the street stops, and the empty garages with Bruckner Boulevard traffic in the background give the neighborhood an eerie glow, like there are humans on one side and futuristic beings who live in cars on the other. We settle down. Joe was diagnosed with asthma and his gasping for air and Petey’s crying begin to mark the passage of time. I want out, but the farthest I can get away is at the window, which becomes, like the highest point on a sinking ship, the last resort; and I do everything there, brush my hair, paint my nails, and even eat while straining and leaning out.
I discover twenty-five-cent True Confessions magazines with lots of great stories about women in love who have sex before they are married. Taking my magazine out the window I read, leaning on my elbows until the sill scores my forearms. The sun provides light to read my stories during the day; the streetlight illuminates the words at night.
One day I feel eyes on me from above. I look and there is a boy with sandy hair and a sharp nose hooked over small lips. Bothered by his gaze I go back to my magazine, but I can still feel his eyes boring into the top of my head. Sighing, I close my magazine so he thinks I am done reading and was going inside anyway. But he stays in my mind, so the next day I prepare for in case we meet, by making sure the hair on the top of my head is perfect.
“Why don’t you go inside and read with a real light?” he says when he sees me.
I turn around and look up. “Why don’t you?” I answer.
“I can’t. It’s the Sabbath and I’m not even allowed to turn one on.”
A woman calls to him from inside his apartment: “Whaddaya doing? Larry!”
He disappears without even saying good-bye. The next night I brush my hair at the window, one hundred strokes (just like I read in a magazine that a woman should do) so he can see how long and gorgeous it is. I begin. One stroke, two strokes, three strokes—by the time I get to fifty strokes and I haven’t felt any vibrations from above I peek. He is not there and I feel like an asshole.
But often he is there and I get a sexy, flirty feeling as we talk with me on the bottom and him on the top even though there is an apartment between us. We sort of telepathically communicate to each other from our windows, and even know to ignore each other when his parents are with him in the hallway or street. It is only at our windows that we become so real to each other we can almost feel each other’s breath.
One day I paint my nails Pearl White and wave my fingers around.
“Are they dry … ?”
He’s there.
“Yes. Do you like the color?” I say, twisting around to look up.
“I can’t see.”
“Look.” I stretch my fingers way up above my head like I want a hug.
“Nice … I guess …”
I find him funny and laugh at his remark.
“Seems like a silly thing to do, though,” he says.
“What? My nails?”
“Yes.”
“What about not being able to turn on a light?” I say.
“It’s my religion …”
“Can you turn on the TV?”
“No.”
“How about doing your nails then?”
He laughs at my joke and my neck is trembling with the effort but still I smile up at him, and he smiles down on me. We say nothing important and barely listen to each other’s words but are in touch and as close as if we were in the same room keeping a secret so forbidden we even hide it from each other.
I’m enrolled in Junior High School 133, which is so brand-new it’s not even finished. The teachers unload supplies, check inventories, and I wonder when they’ll get around to teaching, but that’s okay because it gives me plenty of time to stroll around and hang out with my new friends Lisa, Dolores, and Rita.
Lisa is big and tall with thick, reddish, light-brown hair. She wears tight skirts, sleeveless turtleneck sweaters, trench coats, and carries clutch bags. Her dream is to go to college in Tarrytown, New York, and study to be a detective.
“Where is Tarrytown?” I ask.
“I don’t know but you can get there from here,” she said.
We hardly ever go to her house because it’s full of appliances her brother has stolen from their neighbors. The apartment looks like a warehouse. One time I went to visit, and we took off our coats and threw them onto the plaid sofa. When it was time to leave Lisa shook her coat out and advised me to do the same.
“Why?”
“Roaches.”
We always shake out our shoes at my house before putting them on so I knew what she was talking about. We never go to her apartment again.
Dolores is tiny and dark and smart. She found some drug works in her brother’s room and told the guidance counselor. I came upon them talking in the hallway between classes.
“Always come to me when there is a problem, Dolores. Always …”
Dolores saw me and tried to get away, but the guidance counselor held her tight. Even though she was a little, old, white woman with gray bits of hair, her grip was strong.
“Always,” the guidance counselor continued, “always. There is always a solution. I spoke to your parents and it turns out your brother is diabetic. Now isn’t that better than what you thought?”
Dolores agreed weakly, pulled away, and ducked into the bathroom, where I found her.
“What’s up?” I said.
“Nothing.”
We never talk about it and we never go to her apartment, either.
Rita lives on Fox Street around the corner. There is something dark and closed about Fox Street, like it’s just a crooked alley off Southern Boulevard and not a street with integrity and a name of its own. Her father hates black people and wears a suit and tie to work every day even though everyone knows he works in a factory. Her mother is a housewife. The one time I visit, Rita’s mother has a kerchief tied around her face because the right side of it has collapsed.
“The apartme
nt was really hot,” Rita explains. “And when Mami opened the refrigerator the sudden coldness made her face fall.”
Since I had been to Rita’s house I invite her to mine when Barbra Streisand is going to be on television. I have never seen anyone who looks like Streisand on TV and want Rita to see her, too. But my father comes home dangerous.
“I think I better go,” she says.
She never comes back.
Yvonne, I meet in the street. She has quit school and is a little older than me. I go to her house once.
“This is my mother, and Samuel, my stepfather, and these are my two sisters and three brothers.”
I wonder where they all sleep because there is only one bedroom.
A young woman comes into the apartment with a little girl.
“Oh, and this is Angela and her little girl, Julie. Mami rents them the bedroom.”
So now I know where Yvonne’s family sleeps. Wherever they can, all over the living room on cots. There are so many people in that apartment all the time, Yvonne and I hang outside sitting on cars. One day an old man with thin arms and legs and a sharp projectile belly approaches and asks Yvonne where Angela, the woman who rents a room in Yvonne’s apartment, is.
“I think she’s inside,” says Yvonne.
As he turns to go Yvonne whispers, “That’s Angela’s boyfriend. He pays Mami rent for Angela and Julie to have the bedroom. Angela just has to sleep with him a few times a month for that.”
But I stop going there because Angela has the habit of calling her daughter “little whore” and beating her across the legs with a slipper while toilet training her. It’s better to socialize in the street or the fire escape.
Ma and I are at the fire escape we share with our Mexican-looking, floor-mopping neighbor. She is not Mexican after all—she is Puerto Rican and her name is Mercedes. She lives with her husband and daughter. They all look alike, squat, long-haired, and like they should live on a farm instead of in the Bronx. Mercedes is sharp but the daughter has a wandering eye and is so lax I often see her tongue resting on the lower lip of her slightly open mouth. I am sitting with my legs dangling through the bars and Ma is sipping coffee and smoking a cigarette when Mercedes joins us at her window.
“How’re you doing?” she asks.
“Okay,” says Ma self-consciously. Mercedes disapproves of smoking for religious reasons. Her living room is plastered with NO SMOKING signs, making me feel like I’ve entered a dentist’s office whenever I go over there to borrow something. Ma debates in her head whether or not to put out her cigarette when we see a beautiful woman step out of our building and click-clack her way up the street on high heels.
“Look,” whispers Mercedes suspiciously. “That’s Irena; she lives alone on the other side of the building.”
I look down on Irena. She has short, curly hair and is wearing a coral spring coat tied tight to her waist. The hem just hits her big strong calves, which are covered in dark sheer stockings. A boxy handbag dangles from the crook of her elbow and slaps against her hip as she dashes down the street like she has somewhere important to go.
“You know what she does …”
But the sight of a small but really handsome man with light, wispy hair coming up the street stops her from finishing her sentence. Mercedes is suddenly confused, disoriented, and I can’t decide who I want to know more about, the woman Irena with the coral-color coat and high heels, or the handsome, wispy man! I learn of neither because Mercedes disappears into her apartment and even shuts her window.
“Great, I can smoke,” whispers Ma, lighting up.
A few days later Mercedes is in our apartment, crying.
“She might be pregnant by now,” Mercedes blubbers, one braid coming undone and flapping around. “He always comes back and does … this!” She can’t go on.
Ma tries to soothe her with coffee.
“And then he leaves her and we don’t know what is going on.”
“Who is he?” asks Ma.
“Her husband!”
“Her husband?” Ma shoots me a look. “How long has your daughter been married to him?”
I’m surprised to hear that her daughter with the weak eye and lax tongue is married.
“Three years, but he only lived with her one year—and now … now … he just comes when he has the desire. I’m afraid she’ll get pregnant. It’s terrible!”
“Why don’t they get a divorce?”
Mercedes looks like she has been struck in the face with a dead fish. Then she recoils in horror.
“Because marriage is holy!” she wails.
“Calm down. Calm down,” says Ma, thinking, and then adds slowly, “Why do you leave them alone in the apartment?”
“Because married couples need privacy!” says Mercedes, blowing her nose.
Ma suppresses a grin and yearns for but does not reach for a cigarette. I look at Mercedes’s flyaway braid and think about her stupid daughter and feel bad that if I had to choose between being like Ma or Mercedes—I’d be like Irena, the pretty woman in the coral coat and high heels, no matter what she does for a living.
Her hot red panties sizzled like bacon through the bushes …” I am reading True Confessions when the prettiest girl I have ever seen comes knocking at the door.
“Hola, yo soy Vanessa y vivo en el otro lado.”
She has two fuzz balls of hair on either side of her head.
“¿… tienen aspirina?”
She wants aspirin. My mother comes to the door and this girl explains herself again. Her name is Vanessa Delmonte, she just moved from Puerto Rico to live with her mother, and she’s wondering if we have any aspirin because she has her period and has cramps.
“Who is your mother?” Ma asks.
“Irena.”
My ears perk up. I want to know more about Irena with the high heels and coral coat. Vanessa smiles; she has a gap between her two big white teeth, and she makes herself comfortable at the kitchen table, not minding at all that we stare at her.
“This stone in my navel isn’t working to keep the pain away,” she says in Spanish, holding up an orangey-red pebble.
Ma sneaks a look at me. Vanessa’s lips are thick but she has the perfect white-person nose. I stare as she begins her story in Spanish after swallowing the pills.
“I used to live with my grandmother in Gurabo, but I got to be too much for her so now she sent me to live with my mother here. I don’t know her very well, just met her, really. She sleeps most of the day, anyway …”
Ma begins to measure out the rice for dinner. Vanessa jumps up to help.
“I can do that!”
She sorts through the rice, expertly picking out pebbles or tiny rocks. I can tell she knows how to cook.
“I used to cook for my grandmother before she started hiding my clothes.”
My father walks in from fixing our car on the people side of the street.
“Café,” he grunts and goes into the living room.
My mother starts to make coffee. We hear him tuning his guitar and then start to sing. Joe and Petey groan. They had been watching television.
“Quítame los zapatos.” My father makes Petey take his shoes off. Petey cries. My mother looks up and spreads her fingers taut to the heavens.
“Paciencia …” She goes into the living room. “What’s going on in here?”
The coffee starts to boil over. Vanessa catches it just in time.
Ma and Petey come back into the kitchen. She sits him down and gives him a cracker, makes the coffee, and puts the water on for the rice. Her mind is elsewhere. But I want to hear more from Vanessa.
“Why did your grandmother hide your clothes?” I ask.
“Who?”
“Your grandmother.”
“Because I got too big for her to tie up.”
The water for rice starts to boil. Ma lowers the flame, adds some salt and lard. I examine the image of the happy pigs on the green-and-white lard container so I sound casual.
&n
bsp; “Why did she tie you up?”
“Why do you think? So I wouldn’t go out! But that didn’t stop me because there were plenty of sheets.”
“Sheets?”
“The sheets she had washed. I always waited for them to dry—then snuck out, grabbed one, and wrapped it around me—like a dress.”
Vanessa stays in the kitchen with us until dinner is ready. She’s fine just sitting and being quiet and I stare at her perfect nose and her thick two-toned lips and purple gums.
But then—Petey screams; he’d clamped his finger in the electric can opener he’d been playing with and turned on. I pull at his arm weakly. My father races in, screaming, “What the hell is going on?” Ma turns the machine off and releases Petey’s finger.
“Come,” I say to Vanessa and she follows me into the living room, where Joe has started to wheeze on the sofa.
After bandaging Petey, Ma serves him and my father dinner, and then comes into the living room to ponder Joe. His wheezing is worse. She goes back into the kitchen and serves Vanessa and me. Standing at the stove, she gulps a few mouthfuls of rice and warns my father, “Ese muchacho ya está sinfónico” and that if Joe gets any worse they’ll have to take him to Lincoln Hospital. Then she blurts out to Vanessa, “¿Y tu mama? ¿No te está esperando? You better go home.”
“Ma won’t be back until tomorrow morning,” replies Vanessa in Spanish.
I jump at the chance—“What does your mother do?” I blurt out.
“She works in a bar,” says Vanessa and she scurries out as quickly as she scurried in.
The minute she is gone I lock myself in the bathroom and look in the mirror and examine my earlobes, eyes, eyelashes, gums, lips, and teeth. My earlobes are fine, they do not stick out, eyes okay, eyelashes are fine, too, but my gums now seem a little purple. My lips are good, but a little small. I whip my head around suddenly, trying to catch myself unawares, wondering what I would think of my looks if I suddenly came upon myself in the street. There is a knock on the door.
Becoming Maria Page 12