Mami Gets A Job

MAMI GETS A JOB
 Con el agua al cuello y la marea subiendo
 With water to the chin and the tide rising

The sky fell to the tops of the mountains. The air hung heavy, moist. Birds left the barrio, and insects disappeared into hidden cracks and crevices, taking their songs. A cowboy rounded up the cattle in Lalao’s finca, and on her side of the fence, Doña Ana led her cow to the shack behind her house. The radio said Hurricane Santa Clara was the biggest threat to Puerto Rico since San Felipe had destroyed the island in 1918. “Papi, why do they name hurricanes after saints?” I asked as I helped him carry a sheet of plywood he was going to nail against the windows of our house. “I don’t know,” he answered. The hurricane warning must have been serious if Papi couldn’t stop to talk about it. Mami bundled our clothes, pushed her rocking chair, the table and stools, her sewing machine, and the pots and pans into a corner, tied everything to the socles, pressed it all against the strongest wall of the house, and covered it with a sheet, as if that would keep everything from being blown away. “Negi, take the kids to Doña Ana’s. We’ll be there in a while.” I rounded up Delsa, Norma, Hector, Alicia, and Edna. For once I didn’t have to chase them all over the place, didn’t have to threaten, yell, or pull their ears for ignoring me. They lined up solemn as soldiers, Alicia and Hector hanging on to Norma’s hand, Edna on Delsa’s hip. The baby was asleep in his hanging cradle, but Mami took him out, bundled him in flannel sheets, and handed him to me. “Take Raymond. Make sure no drafts get to him.” The baby was thirty days old, and we had to be careful about infections, foul breezes, and the evil eye. Mami had strung a nugget of coral and an onyx bead on a safety pin and attached it to Raymond’s baby shirt at birth. It was the same charm she had used on all of us, kept in a little box among her thimbles and needles between babies, to be brought out and pinned to the tiny cotton shirts, supposedly for the first forty days and forty nights of our lives. She claimed she didn’t believe “any of that stuff,” but each time, the charm stayed on long after it was supposed to. We trudged single file along the path connecting our yard with Doña Ana’s. Her sons had nailed plywood sheets to the windows and along the front of her house, so that the only way in was the back door leading to the latrine, barn, and pigsty. These structures had also been reinforced with plywood, and debarked tree limbs buttressed every wall. As we passed from the barn, we heard the muffled and frightened moo of the cow, the frantic squealing of pigs, and the rustle and cackle of hens and roosters. Inside the house, every crack and chink had been plugged with rags to keep the wind out. Mattresses were stacked, bunches of green bananas hung from the rafters, the gash where the machete had cut dripped white sticky ooze onto the floor. The room was shadowy, lit with quinqués and fat candles, steamy with the fragrance of garlic and onions. Several old hens had been sacrificed and everyone contributed something to the communal meal that would be cooked on our kerosene stove, spiced with Doña Lola’s fresh oregano, and shared by the four families who would pass the hurricane in Doña Ana’s one-room cement house. Papi and Mami brought in bundles of food, clothes, blankets, and baby diapers. Papi put his battery-operated radio on a shelf and kept it tuned the whole time the hurricane blew, even though all we heard was static. Although Doña Ana’s house was no bigger than ours, its sturdy concrete walls and roof made it safe and cozy. The warmth of the thirty or so people inside, the familiar aroma of spices and good cooking, and the hushed play of children was extraordinarily comforting, the way wakes were, or weddings or baptisms. The men set up a domino table and took turns playing, the losers giving up their chairs to the ones waiting their turn. The women cut up chickens, peeled plantains, cubed potatoes, made sofrito, washed dishes, brewed coffee, and tended babies. The muchachas huddled in a giggly group between the plantains and the mattresses, while the muchachos crouched against the wall opposite, pretending to play cards. We kids played among ourselves or circulated among the various groups, observing the domino game, snatching boiled chicken hearts or livers, carrying mysterious messages from the older boys to the older girls. Every so often a thump quieted everyone, and arguments erupted about which tree had fallen in which direction. The cows and pigs couldn’t be heard above the roar of the wind, the thunder, the crashing zinc sheets from less sturdy roofs, and the flying outhouses lifted in one piece by the wind and swept from one end of the barrio to the other. After we had our asopao with plantain dumplings, we curled against one another on the mattresses and slept, lulled by the crackling radio inside and the steady gusts of the hurricane outside. We heard the ominous quiet of the hurricane’s eye as it passed over us. Papi and Dima, Doña Ana’s son, pried the door open a crack. It was raining lightly, gray misty drops like steam. The men stepped outside one at a time, looked around, up to the sky, down to the soaked ground that turned into muddy pools wherever their feet had sunk. The women clustered at the door, forming a wall through which we children couldn’t pass, although we managed to catch a glimpse by pressing against their hips and thighs, crouching under their skirts, between their legs, against their round calves striated with varicose veins and dark, curly hair. Mist hung over the yard littered with branches, odd pieces of lumber, a tin washtub that seemed to have been crushed by a giant, and the carcass of a cow, with a rope around her neck still tied to a post. Doña Ana’s barn still stood, and the animals inside whimpered softly, as if their normal voices would make the wind start up again. The men walked the edges of the yard in a semicircle, their hands outstretched like the stiff figures I liked to cut from folded newspapers. A sliver of sun broke through like a spotlight and travelled slowly across the yard, forming a giant rainbow. The women pointed and held up the smaller children to see, while those of us big enough to stand by ourselves crowded the door in awe of that magic spectacle: the figures of our fathers and brothers moving cautiously in a world with no edges, no end, and that bright slice of sun travelling across it, not once touching them. “We had eleven avocado trees and nine mango trees,” Mami was saying. “Now there’s only the two avocados and three mangos left.” “My entire coffee patch washed right off the hill.” Doña Lola spit into the yard. “And you can see what it did to my medicinal herbs.... Even the weeds are gone.” Doña Lola’s house, nestled at the side of the mountain, had been spared, but the adjoining kitchen had disappeared, except for the three stones of her fogón. Our outside kitchen, too, had flown away, as had our latrine. The whole barrio had been stripped of anything too flimsy, too old, or too weak to withstand the winds and rain that had pelted the island for hours, flooding towns and washing downhill entire communities built along the craggy slopes. No one in Macún died, but many lost their belongings, poultry, pigs, milk cows, vegetable gardens, kiosks for selling fried codfish fritters, and shops where rusty old cars received one more chance at the road. “Pablo said the government will help rebuild ...” “¡Sí, cuando las gallinas meen!” Doña Lola laughed, and Mami chuckled, her eyes twinkling at me to see if I understood what Doña Lola meant by “when hens learn to pee.” I’d been around enough hens to know they never would. Papi and Uncle Cándido repaired our house, replaced parts of the roof, extended the house to incorporate a kitchen and a site for a bathroom, anticipating the day when water would be piped down the hill to our end of the barrio. They rebuilt the latrine with shiny zinc walls and added a new, more comfortable seat. Mami propped up her pigeon pea and annatto bushes, which had been flattened by the storm, and soon they bloomed again, their leaves as new and fresh as babies. For months after the hurricane all people talked about was money. Money for the cement and cinder blocks that rose out of the ground in solid, grey walls and flat square roofs. Money for another cow, or a car, or zinc for the new outhouse. Money to install water pipes, or to repair the electric wires that had gone down in the storm and hung like limp, useless, dried-up worms. Even children talked about money. We scoured the side of the road for discarded bottles to exchange for pennies when the glass man came around. Boys no older than I nailed together boxes out of wood scraps, painted them in bright colors, and set off for San Juan or Rio Piedras, where men paid ten cents for a shoeshine. Papi made maví, bark beer, and took two gallons with him to the construction sites where he worked, to sell by the cup to his friends and passersby. Even Doña Lola, who seemed as self-sufficient as anyone could be in Macún, cooked huge vats of rice and beans to sell in the refillable aluminum canisters called fiambreras that men took to work when their jobs were not near places to eat. Mami talked about sewing school uniforms and actually made a few. But she soon realized that the amount of work she put into them was more than she was paid for and abandoned the idea while she thought of something else. “Negi, help me over here.” Mami stood in the middle of the room, her dress bunched on her hips, hands holding fast a long-line brassiere that didn’t want to contain her. “See if you can catch the hooks into the eyes, all the way up.” The cotton brassiere stretched down to her hipbones, where it met the girdle into which she had already squeezed. There were three columns of eyes for the hooks spaced evenly from top to bottom. Even when I tugged on both ends of the fabric, I had trouble getting one hook into an outermost eye. “It’s too small. I can’t get them to meet.” “I’ll hold my breath.” She took in air, blew it out, and stretched her spine up. I worked fast, hooking her up all the way before she had to breathe again in big, hungry gulps. “Wow! It’s been a while since I wore this thing,” she said, pulling her dress up. “Zip me up?” “Where are you going?” “There’s a new factory opening in Toa Baja. Maybe they need people who can sew.” “Who’s going to take care of us?” “Gloria will be here in a little while. You can help her with the kids. I’ve already made dinner.” “Will you work every day?” “If they hire me.” “So you won’t be around all the time.” “We need the money, Negi.” Mami twisted and sprayed her hair, powdered her face, patted rouge on already pink cheeks, and spread lipstick over already red lips. Her feet, which were usually bare, looked unnatural in high heels. Her waist was so pinched in, it seemed as if part of her body were missing. Her powdered and painted features were not readable; the lines she’d drawn on her eyebrows and around her eyes and the colors that enhanced what always seemed perfect were a violation of the face that sometimes laughed and sometimes cried and often contorted with rage. I wanted to find a rag and wipe that stuff off her face, the way she wiped off the dirt and grime that collected on mine. She turned to me with a large red smile. “What do you think?” I was ashamed to look, afraid to speak what I saw. “Well?” She put her hands on her hips, that familiar gesture of exasperation that always made her seem larger, and I saw the unnatural diamond shape formed by her elbows and narrowed waist. I couldn’t help the tears that broke my face into a million bits, which made her kneel and hold me. I wrapped my arms around her, but what I felt was not Mami but the harsh bones of her undergarments. I buried my face in the soft space between her neck and shoulder and sought there the fragrance of oregano and rosemary, but all I could come up with was Cashmere Bouquet and the faint flowery dust of Maybelline. She woke early, sometimes even before Papi, cooked the beans and rice for our supper, ironed our school uniforms and her work clothes, and bathed, powdered, and stuffed herself into her tortuous undergarments. In whispers, she gave me instructions for the day, told me when she’d be back, warned me to help Gloria with the children, promised to sew the buttons on Hector’s shirt when she came home that night. Papi was not around as much once Mami began work, and our mornings took on a rhythm that left him out the days he was home, each one of us engaged in our own morning rituals of waking, dressing, eating breakfast, and walking the two miles to school. My classes began the earliest, at 7:30, and I left home while the air was still sweet and the ground moist, our neighbors’ houses looming like ghosts in light fog or receding behind greyness when it rained. My Uncle Cándido’s house was halfway to school. He complained to Mami that I never looked up when I went by, never greeted anyone, never looked anywhere but down at the ground. “If you keep walking like that,” he said, “you’ll develop a hunchback.” But that threat wasn’t enough to keep me from wrapping my arms around myself. Books pressed against my chest, I strode head down, looking closely at the way the ground swelled and dipped, listening to the crunch of my hard school shoes on the pebbled stretches and their swish on the sandy patches. And when I didn’t look at the ground, I was blind and would sometimes get to school and not know how. On those mornings my eyes closed in on me and showed me pictures inside my head, while my legs moved on their own up the hills, down the ruts, through the weeds, across gullies, between the aisles of my schoolmates’ desks and to my own, alphabetically in the rear of the classroom. I’d sit down, open my notebook, write the date at the top of the page, and look up to Miss ]iménez and her cheery “Buenos días, clase.” I would then realize I’d come all the way to school with no memory of the journey, my mind a blank slate on which I would write that day’s lessons.

 With Mami at work, I took advantage of Gloria’s vigilance with the younger kids to make my own getaway into the montes, up trees, behind sheds and outhouses, and once, on a dare, into Lalao’s finca, where I filled the skirt of my dress with the coveted grapefruits. “Where did these come from?” Mami asked when she came home from work. “I found them,” I said. “No, she didn’t. She sneaked into Lalao’s finca with Tato and Pepito.” Delsa smirked, and Mami’s eyes disappeared behind a frown. “Haven’t I told you not to go in there?” “They were on the ground, just on the other side of the fence....” She looked at the grapefruits, green speckled with yellow and tiny black dots. Their citrus fragrance filled the room like smoke. “Don’t go in there again,” she said, picking one up, “or I’ll really let you have it.” She peeled one in long strips and sucked on the sweet juice hungrily. I sought Delsa’s eyes and saw fear, not of Mami but of me, because Delsa knew that while Mami was at work the next day, I’d get her for tattling. One morning Mami cooked our dinner, left everything ready for Gloria, dressed, and got us off to school one at a time. When I came home, she was still there, her work clothes stretched on the bed, rumpled and forgotten. “Where’s Gloria?” I asked. “She escaped,” Mami said, which meant that Gloria had eloped. No girl ever ran away by herself, although boys disappeared for weeks the minute they thought of themselves as men. “Is she coming back?” “I don’t know. No one knows the man she ran off with.” Mami couldn’t go to work for a couple of weeks, and we had to live with her bad temper and complaints. “I’m not the kind of person to sit around doing nothing,” she said to Doña Ana, and I wondered how she could think of her housework as nothing when she spent hours doing it. “So how do you like the factory?” Doña Lola asked Mami as we shucked pigeon peas in her new kitchen. “It’s good work,” Mami answered, pride in her voice. “I started as a thread cutter, and now I’m a sewing machine operator.” “¡Que bueno!” Doña Lola’s son Tato ran into the kitchen. “Is there anything to eat?” “Rice and beans in the pot.” Tato rattled lids and dropped a spoon on the new cement floor. Doña Lola stood up with a jerk. “Let me serve you,” and under her breath, “Men are so useless.” Tato looked at me from beneath his long lashes. Doña Lola handed him a tin plate mountained with white rice and red beans. He sat in the corner, spooning it in as if he hadn’t eaten in a week. He was a year older than I, skinny, brown as a chocolate bar, his hair orange, his hazel eyes full of mischief and laughter. He was the dirtiest boy I’d ever seen, not because he didn’t wash, but because he couldn’t stay clean no matter how many times Doña Lola dunked him in the tin tub in back of the house. Tato was not afraid of anything. He caught bright green lizards, pinched their jaws at the side, and forced them to bite his earlobes, to which they clung like festive, squirming decorations. He trapped snakes and draped them around his neck, where they writhed in sumptuous silvery waves that seemed to tickle. He speared iguanas and roasted them on open fires, claiming that their meat was tastier than chicken. He was an expert slingshot maker, and it was he who taught me to choose the forked branches that we stripped of bark, dried in the sun, and carved until we could tie split inner tube strips and a rubber square that held the lethal stones we shot with uncanny accuracy. I was as good as he with both slingshots and painstakingly constructed bows and arrows, with which I could drop birds in flight. We had an uneasy, competitive friendship, made more special by the fact that Mami didn’t approve. “You’re almost señorita. You shouldn’t be running wild with boys,” she’d tell me. But I didn’t have anything in common with the girls my age. Juanita Marin had found more kindred friendships at her end of the barrio, and Doña Zena’s daughters, who were about my age, were kept on a tight leash because of their parents’ religiosity, which didn’t allow for outside influences. My sisters close to my age were not as interesting as the neighborhood boys who ran and climbed and didn’t mind getting dirty.

 Gloria came back to live in a neat wood house in the middle of a coconut grove behind her mother’s property. Her marido was from a nearby barrio and worked for the electric company. “Maybe now,” Mami joked, “we’ll get light back in Macún.” As soon as Gloria returned, Mami unfolded her work clothes, washed her hair, and polished her shoes. But instead of Gloria coming to our house every morning, we now went to her shady house under the palms. One day she handed me a small paper bag, tightly packed with something soft. “Throw this into the latrine, would you please?” “What is it?” “Nothing that concerns you.” “Then why should I throw it out?” “Are you this mouthy all the time or just with me?” “All the time.” “I figured. Take the thing out and I’ll tell you about it when you come back.” I was tempted to open the bag and look inside, but she kept her eye on me as she changed Raymond’s diaper. When I looked down the hole of the latrine I noticed a couple of little bags like the one I held floating on the dark smelly waste at the bottom. “Okay, I threw it out.” She put Raymond and Edna down for their afternoon siesta. The air was light, breezy, aromatic of guavas, which grew in tall bushes along the side of her house. “What was inside the bag?” “A Kotex.” “What’s that?” She poured water into a bowl and salted it generously. “How old are you?” “Ten.” She grabbed two green plantains from a high shelf and brought them to the table. “And Doña Monin hasn’t told you about being a señorita?” “She told me I should stop playing with boys because I’m almost señorita, and that I should keep my legs closed when I sit.” Gloria laughed so hard she almost dropped the knife she found near the fogón. “What’s so funny?” I was embarrassed and pleased. Clearly there was a lot more to this señorita business, and Gloria knew what it was. I laughed with her, sensing she was about to tell me something my mother was supposed to but hadn’t. “Do you know where babies come from?” “Everybody knows that!” “Do you know how they’re made?” I’d seen roosters chase hens, catch up, climb on top of them, and dig sharp beaks into the hen’s head as she cackled and screeched and he flapped his wings. I’d seen male dogs chase females, the male climb on top of the female, ride her while she tried to shake him off, and dig his narrow pink penis into her backside. I’d seen bulls ride cows, horses hump mares, pigs rolling in mud, their bodies connected under the female’s tail. And I’d seen eggs laid, bloody puppies wet and shimmery, calves encased in a blue bubble, slippery wet ponies thin and vulnerable, and hundreds of pink piglets suckling engorged teats. But until Gloria asked, I’d never put it together that in order for me and my four sisters and two brothers to be born, Papi had to do to Mami what roosters did to hens, bulls did to cows, horses did to mares. I shuddered. “Yes, I know how babies are made.” Gloria slit a plantain from tip to tip, peeled the casing back, and cut diagonal slices which she dipped in the salted water. “Before you can make babies, you have to be a señorita, which means you bleed once a month.” Gloria then explained what a period was, how long it lasted, what a woman had to do so her clothes wouldn’t get soiled. “Very soon you will be a señorita,” she said, “and then you have to keep your legs crossed, just like your Mami says, all the time.” She laughed at her own joke, which didn’t seem so funny to me. “Ay, you’re so solemn! I must have scared you. Don’t worry, it’s nothing. Just a nuisance you learn to live with. Every woman does.” But I wasn’t worried about my period, which couldn’t possibly be worse than the worms I’d found in my panties. I imagined Mami and Papi, in bed, stuck together in the middle. I remembered Tato’s words that he could stick his penis in a woman, and I realized that’s what Papi did to Mami after we’d all gone to sleep and the springs on their bed creaked in rhythms that always ended in a long, low moan, like a moo, or a hoarse whimper. Mami was one of the first mothers in Macún to have a job outside the house. For extra money women in the barrio took in laundry or ironing or cooked for men with no wives. But Mami left our house every morning, primped and perfumed, for a job in a factory in Toa Baja. The barrio looked at us with new eyes. Gone was the bland acceptance of people minding their own business, replaced by a visible, angry resentment that became gossip, and taunts and name-calling in the school yard. I got the message that my mother was breaking a taboo I’d never heard about. The women in the neighborhood turned their backs on her when they saw her coming, or, when they talked to her, they scanned the horizon, as if looking at her would infect them with whatever had made her go out and get a job. Only a few of the neighbors stood by Mami—Doña Ana, whose daughter watched us, Doña Zena, whose Christian beliefs didn’t allow for envy, and Doña Lola, who valued everyone equally. Even Tio Cándido’s wife, Meri, made us feel as if Mami was a bad woman for leaving us alone. I was confused by the effect my mother’s absence caused in other people. “Why, Mami? Why is everyone so mean just because you have a job?” I pleaded one day after a schoolmate said Mami was not getting her money from a factory but from men in the city. “They’re jealous,” she said. “They can’t imagine a better life for themselves, and they’re not willing to let anyone else have it either. Just ignore them.” But I couldn’t close my ears to their insults, couldn’t avert my eyes quickly enough to miss their hate-filled looks. I was abandoned by children who until then had been friends. The neighbors on the long walk to and from home were no longer friendly; they no longer offered me a drink of water on a hot afternoon or a dry porch when it rained. Papi seemed to have the same opinion about Mami’s job as the neighbors. He looked at her with a puzzled expression, and several times I heard her defend herself: “If it weren’t for the money I bring in, we’d still be living like savages.” He’d withdraw to his hammers and nails, to the mysterious books in his dresser, to the newspapers and magazines he brought home rolled up in his wooden toolbox. I had worried that not having Mami around would make our lives harder, but at first it made things easier. Mami was happy with her work, proud of what she did, eager to share with us the adventures of her day in the factory, where she stitched cotton brassieres she said had to be for American women because they were too small to fit anyone we knew. But her days were long, filled in the morning with the chores of making both breakfast and dinner, getting seven children ready for school or a day with Gloria, preparing for work, going there and back, returning to a basketful of mending, a house that needed sweeping, a floor that needed mopping, sheets that had to be washed and dried in one day because we didn’t have two sets for each bed. As she settled into her routine, Mami decided she needed help, and she turned to me. “You are the oldest, and I expect you to be responsible for your sisters and brothers, and to do more around the house.” “But isn’t Gloria going to take care of us?” “I can’t count on anyone from outside the family. Besides, you’re old enough to be more responsible.” And with those words Mami sealed a pact she had designed, written, and signed for me. “Delsa, you’d better get in here and do the dishes before Mami gets home.” Delsa looked up from the numbers she wrote in her composition book. Rows and rows of numbers, over and over again, in neat columns, in her small, tight script. “It’s not my turn.” She went back to her homework. “Whose turn is it then?” “Yours. I did it yesterday.” The sink was full. Plates, cups, spoons, pot lids, the heavy aluminum rice pot, the frying pan, all half submerged in gray water with a greasy scum floating on the top. “Norma!” “What!” “Come here. I’m going to teach you to wash dishes.” “I’m watching Raymond.” “Well, let Hector watch him.” “I don’t want to.” “If these dishes aren’t washed by the time Mami comes home ...” “You do them, then.” I didn’t want to either. I didn’t want to do any of the things Mami asked of me: feed the kids an after-school snack; make sure they did their homework; get Raymond and Edna from Gloria’s; change the water on the beans and put them on the stove to cook over low heat; sweep the floor; make the beds; mound the dirty clothes in the basket; feed the chickens and the pigs. Delsa and Norma were supposed to help, but most of the time they refused, especially when I tried to get them to do the unpleasant tasks like changing Raymond’s diaper or scrubbing the rice pot. Almost every day just before Mami came home I scrambled around to do all the things she’d asked me to take care of that morning. And almost every day I received either a lecture or cocotazos for not doing everything. “You’re almost señorita. You should know to do this without being told.” “I just can’t ...” “You’re lazy, that’s your problem. You think everything will be handed to you.” “No I don’t,” I whimpered, my hands protecting my head from the inevitable blows. “Don’t you talk back!” And she pushed me away as if I were contagious. “The least you can do is set an example for your sisters and brothers.” I looked at Delsa, who at nine could already make perfect rice, and at Norma, who swept and mopped with precision, and at Hector, who dutifully changed out of his uniform into play clothes every day without being told. “What makes them so good and me so bad?” I asked myself. But there were no answers in Delsa’s solemn eyes, or in Norma’s haughty beauty, or in Héctor’s eagerness to please. Every night Mami told me how I had failed in my duty as a female, as a sister, as the eldest. And every day I proved her right by neglecting my chores, by letting one of the kids get hurt, by burning the beans, by not commanding the respect from my sisters and brothers that I was owed as the oldest. I wished I could trade places with my cousin Jenny. She was an only child who ran her parents with tantrums and demands that, had they come from me, would have got me a swift slap or a cocotazo from Mami’s sharp knuckles. Jenny was so spoiled that even Papi, who never criticized anybody, complained that Jenny had no manners and no respect for her elders. She was so bad that we were not allowed to play with her. Jenny was a year younger than I was, but I’d heard Mami tell Doña Lola that Jenny was already señorita. Her body had developed into a petite figure like her mother’s, with round hips and pointy bumps on her chest. While it had been a long time since I’d seen her sitting on her mother’s lap sucking her breast, I assumed that becoming señorita had rid her of that habit. But it hadn’t changed very much else about her. She still boasted about the clothes and shoes, dolls, games, and jewelry that her parents bought for her. She slept in her own bed, in a room decorated with dolls that had never been played with, with a closet full of pretty dresses and shiny patent-leather shoes. Envy, Doña Lola had once said, eats at you from the inside and turns your eyes green when you look at the person of whom you’re jealous. If so, my eyes must have turned the color of the lizards that lived inside banana leaves every time I passed Jenny’s house. I hated the fact that even though she was a brat, she got whatever she wanted. She had no chores around the house, no sisters or brothers with whom to share her clothes and toys, no limits as to where she could go, whom she could go with, or how long she could stay out. She didn’t have to do her homework, didn’t have to do anything she didn’t want to, and her parents, the quiet, patient Tio Cándido and the tinny-voiced Meri, wouldn’t say a thing, wouldn’t beat her or yell at her or call her humiliating names. I was so jealous of Jenny that I couldn’t stand to be with her. Mami and Papi had forbidden that we fight anyone for any reason, yet every time I came near Jenny, I wanted to beat her up, to wipe the smirk off her face, to quiet her boasting once and for all so that she would see what it was like to hurt. “Jenny got a bicycle!” Delsa’s eyes shimmered, her little hands fluttering in front of her as they drew a picture in the air of a girls’ bike. “And she’s giving everyone a ride.” I dropped the mop in the middle of the floor and ran after her. Up the road, past Doña Zena’s house, Jenny straddled her two-wheeler. She wore shorts and sneakers, and a tight white shirt that displayed the bumps on her chest. Children clustered around Jenny while she showed off the shiny fenders, the thick tires, the handlebars with multicolored streamers. “Who else wants a ride?” she asked, enjoying the attention, the voices clamoring her name. I was choking with rage. I gathered my sisters and brothers, who clustered possessively around Jenny. “Come on, let’s go. We have to get home.” “Aw, come on, Negi,” Jenny cried. “They want a ride on my new bike.” “I don’t care. Mami doesn’t want us playing all the way up here.” “I’ll ride the bike down closer to your house. Then you can all get a turn.” “Forget it.” “But why, Negi?” Hector whined. “Just forget it, okay?” Jenny followed us on her bike as I shoved the kids in front of me toward the house. “You’re not their mother. You can’t tell them what to do!” she cried. “Yeah!” Delsa yelled. “You’re not Mami. You can’t order us around,” and my sisters and brothers backed away from me, pushing against each other to be next to Jenny’s bike. “You’re always so bossy,” Norma yelled. “You think you’re a grown-up or something.” I wanted to cry that no, I didn’t think I was a grown-up, and it wasn’t fair that they all got to ride on the bike and I didn’t. I wanted to remind them that Mami didn’t want us playing with Jenny, but it would be wrong to say that in front of her. I grabbed Raymond by the hand and pulled him toward me. “Fine, if you want to ride on that stupid bike, then go ahead. But when Mami gets home ...” “I want to ride on the bike too,” Raymond wailed beside me, wriggling his hand out of mine. “I want a ride!” And he ran to Jenny, who scooped him up and tried to balance him on the handlebars. “Jenny, he’s too little to do that.” “He’s all right.... You sit on the seat,” she said to him, “and I’ll ride standing up.” “Stop it, Jenny. He’ll fall off. Raymond, get off that bike.” “Leave us alone. I know what I’m doing.” She stood up on the pedals and pushed off slowly. Raymond giggled. “See, he’s having a good time.” “Well, if you don’t care,” I yelled back, “then I don’t care either. Go ahead and ride the stupid bike!” I glared at Delsa and Norma, who, as the next oldest, should have known better. “You two are in trouble.... You’re supposed to obey me when Mami’s not around. She left me in charge.” They laughed and chased after Jenny, who was riding the bike faster, with Raymond gripping the seat underneath him. My face was hot, and tears tickled my eyes, but I wasn’t about to let them see me cry. I turned toward home, dejected and abandoned by my sisters and brothers who wouldn’t stand by me against this spoiled brat. As I reached our yard I heard a scream. Raymond, Jenny, and the bike had fallen over. “Serves them right,” I thought and continued into the yard. But the screams were loud and frightened, more than I would have expected from a simple fall. They were screams of terror, of pain. I ran, and as I did, it seemed that the whole barrio was converging in a circle around the bicycle, around Raymond whose toes were caught in the chain, his foot twisted on itself, mangled into a mess of blood, grease, and dirt. Doña Zena and Doña Ana shooed us away. I gathered my sisters and brothers, like a hen her chicks, and stood by the side of the road as someone pulled the bicycle apart and took Raymond’s foot out. His shrieks cut into me, and I wanted to run to him, but the adults surrounded him and wouldn’t let anyone through. Someone wrapped his foot, and someone else took him to the emergency room in Bayamón. Mami was found at her job and brought there, and Papi too, somehow. I was left to care for my sisters and brothers. We ate the rice and beans that Gloria made for us, and in silence we bathed and dressed for bed, crawled under the mosquito netting, tucked ourselves in, and listened, listened for Papi to come home, or Mami to come home, or Raymond to come bouncing in with his goofy grin. But they didn’t, and he didn’t, and I fell asleep dreading what Mami would do to me when she found out that I had walked away and let Raymond get hurt. But Mami didn’t do a thing. Somehow Raymond’s accident became Jenny’s fault. Mami, Meri, Tio Cándido, and Papi talked, and every neighbor who had seen what happened talked, and it was agreed that Jenny was to blame. Even though no one said so, it had been my responsibility to watch the kids, especially Raymond, who was the youngest. But no one yelled at me or called me names or beat me because I hadn’t watched my sisters and brothers. Jenny was accountable. I was furious that she was getting all the attention for something that was my fault. Mami had to quit her job to care for Raymond. For many months she ran from one doctor to another because Raymond’s foot wouldn’t heal. The doctors told her that so much bicycle grease had got into the wound that they couldn’t be sure if they’d cleaned it all out. Raymond, Mami told Papi, would be plagued by all sorts of problems with his foot for the rest of his life, and she went on to list diseases the doctors had told her he was likely to develop. Diseases that all ended with -itis. But the more frantic Mami became in her search for the right treatment for Raymond, the more distant Papi became, as if we were all wounded in some way that he couldn’t help. There were more fights, more arguments, more yelling in the night, more long absences. Until it seemed as if anything would be better than living with these people who hated each other. One day as I walked back from school, it started to rain. I stood under an oak tree for a while, but the rain didn’t let up. I put my books under my shirt, took off my shoes, and ran from tree to tree. At the entrance to Barrio Macún, Mami and my six sisters and brothers clustered at the público stop with bundles all around them. Mami was annoyed. “What took you so long? I almost left you behind.” “Where are we going?” “We’re moving to Santurce.” “But I have a math test tomorrow!” “Well, then, you’re lucky, aren’t you?” The kids were quiet. They must have been as scared as I was, but none of us dared say anything. We waited a long time for a público that could take all of us, our bundles, and our suitcases. “Are you moving?” the público driver asked with a laugh, and Mami glared at him. He didn’t say anything more after that. It took us three hours to get to the city. The rain was heavy, and traffic into Santurce was backed up for miles because of floods. Mami sat up in front with Edna and Raymond, while Delsa, Norma, Hector, Alicia, and I sat in the back. We didn’t dare speak or move because Mami kept looking at us with a dark expression on her face. She passed us a chunk of bread and cheese, and the público driver gave her a dirty look. I guessed he didn’t like people eating in his car. When the público let us off, all we could see was the pale yellow light of electric bulbs reflected on water, and tall stacks with a red neon sign flashing CORONA BREWERY. As heavy rain drops plunked on either side of us, Mami told us to be careful, because we were walking on a bridge. It was slippery and narrow, with nothing to hold on to along the sides. If we took one false step, we would fall into black, smelly water. I raised my head to the rain, to wash my face and clear the nasty stench that lodged in my nostrils, as if my insides were rotting. But the foul air was thick and oppressive, clinging to us as if anything new, clean, and fresh had to be contaminated by this noxious atmosphere or it wouldn’t survive. We arrived at Doña Andrea’s house, and her husband helped us get our things in. She showed Mami into a back room with two beds, and we fell into them, so tired we didn’t even have dinner or look to see where we were.