My Beloved World Part 10

One evening at United Bargains, the women were making crank calls, dialing random numbers out of the phone book. If a woman's voice answered, they acted as if they were having an affair with her husband, then howled with laughter at their poor gull's response. t.i.ti Carmen would join in, taking her turn on the phone and laughing as long and hard as any of them. I couldn't understand how anyone could be so cruel-so arbitrarily, pointlessly cruel. What was the pleasure in it? Walking home, I asked her, "t.i.ti, can't you imagine the pain you're causing in that house?"

"It was just a joke, Sonia. n.o.body meant any harm."

How could she not imagine? How could the cop not imagine what two large shopping bags full of fruit might measure in a poor vendor's life, maybe a whole day's earnings? Was it so hard to see himself in the other man's shoes?

I was fifteen years old when I understood how it is that things break down: people can't imagine someone else's point of view.

CHAPTER Twelve

THREE DAYS BEFORE Christmas and midway through my freshman year at Cardinal Spellman High School, we moved to a new apartment in Co-op City. Once again, my mother had led us to what seemed like the edge of nowhere. Co-op City was swampland, home to nothing but a desolate amus.e.m.e.nt park called Freedomland, until the cement mixers and dump trucks arrived barely a year before we did. We moved into one of the first of thirty buildings planned for a development designed to house fifty-five thousand. To get home from school, I had to hike a mile-down Baychester Avenue, across the freeway overpa.s.s, and through the vast construction site of half-built towers and bare, bulldozed mud-before reaching human habitation. An icy wind that could lift you off your feet blew from the Hutchinson River. Flurries of snow blurred the construction cranes against an opaque sky of what seemed like Siberia in the Bronx.

At least now we lived close enough for me to walk to school, and I was glad of that. The hour-long trek by bus and train from Watson Avenue had been tedious. Poor Junior, who was only in sixth grade when we moved, would make the commute in reverse from Co-op City to Blessed Sacrament for another two and a half years. No one we knew had ever heard of Co-op City. My mother learned about it from some newspaper article on the city's plans for building affordable housing. The cost of living there was pegged to income, and at the same time you were buying inexpensive shares in a cooperative, so in theory there was a tax break.

My mother was eager to get us into a safer place because the Bronxdale projects were headed downhill fast. Gangs were carving up the territory and each other, adding the threat of gratuitous violence to the scourges of drugs and poverty. A plague of arson was spreading through the surrounding neighborhoods as landlords of crumbling buildings chased insurance. Home was starting to look like a war zone.

It was Dr. Fisher who made the move possible. When he died, he left my mother five thousand dollars in his will, the final and least expected of the countless kindnesses that we could never repay, although we tried. When Dr. Fisher was hospitalized after his wife died, Abuelita made Gallego stop on the way to work every morning to pick up Dr. Fisher's laundry and deliver clean pajamas to him.

Yes, Co-op City was the end of the earth, but once I saw the apartment, it made sense. It had parquet floors and a big window in the living room with a long view. All the rooms were twice the size of those cubbyholes in the projects, and the kitchen was big enough to sit and eat in. Best of all, my mother's friend w.i.l.l.y, a musician who did handiwork too, was able to part.i.tion the master bedroom into two little chambers, each big enough for a twin bed and a tiny bureau, so Junior and I could finally have separate rooms. Each had its own door, and w.i.l.l.y even let us each choose our own wallpaper. Junior chose something neutral, in a restrained shade of beige. Mine had constellations, planets, and signs of the zodiac in an antique style, as if a Renaissance cartographer had drawn a map for s.p.a.ce travel.

I was reading a lot of science fiction and fantasizing about travel to other worlds or slipping through a time warp. It had been only the summer before, in July 1969, that two astronauts had walked on the moon, and I was awestruck that it had happened in my own lifetime, especially when I remembered how Papi had predicted this. From the earth's leaders, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin carried messages etched in microscopically tiny print on a silicon disk, messages that could fit on the head of a pin, to be deposited on the surface of the moon. Pope Paul's was from Psalm 8: "I look up at your heavens, made by your fingers, at the moon and stars you set in place. Ah, what is man that you should spare a thought for him? Or the son of man that you should care for him? You have made him a little less than an angel, you have crowned him with glory and splendor, and you have made him lord over the work of your hand."

I STARTED a new job at Zaro's Bakery, in the small shopping center right across the street from our building in Co-op City. On the days that I worked the morning shift, I would open the shop along with the manager and her a.s.sistant. I'd fire up the machine that boiled the bagels and fill the display cases with the pastries and breads. Then, while waiting to open, we all settled down together for coffee and a snack, always a chocolate-covered French cruller for me, offset by a low-starch lunch, of course. I loved those few minutes every day, laughing over the stories amid the smells of fresh bread and coffee. It carried me back to Tio Mayo's bakery in Mayaguez.

Soon the customers would be lining up for the familiar ritual of making change and small talk. I would shake my head when they tried to engage me in Yiddish. "What, no Yiddish? A nice Jewish girl like you?" I heard that so often that I knew the routine: my boss would explain with a bit of Yiddish I did recognize. "Shiksa" was technically derogative, but she said it so affectionately that I couldn't fault it. At least it wasn't "spic"-elsewhere I'd get that often enough too.

Co-op City gradually transformed from a construction site to a community. When the harshest days of winter had pa.s.sed, you could see young couples strolling, little kids playing, senior citizens watching from the benches. A fair portion of the residents were Jewish, as the bakery's clientele indicated, but you saw people of every imaginable background, drawn from across the five boroughs, a slightly more prosperous population than we were used to in the projects: teachers, police officers, firefighters, and nurses like my mother. The buildings were pristine and flawless then, the shoddiness of their construction not yet apparent. The grounds were landscaped with trees and flowers, and the whole place was lit up at night.

Once Mami planted the flag in Co-op City, it started to look like a good idea to everyone else. Alfred, married and with kids by then, ended up in a building not far from us. Eventually, t.i.ti Carmen arrived with Miriam and Eddie; Charlie with his new wife, Ruth; and finally t.i.ti Gloria and Tio Tonio came too. t.i.ti Aurora had beaten them all to the punch: as soon as we were settled, my mother's sister moved in with us.

As fond as I'd always been of t.i.ti Aurora, this was not good news. No sooner had we finally acquired enough s.p.a.ce to breathe than we were overcrowded once again. t.i.ti slept on a daybed in the foyer. She was an early riser and grumbled if Junior and I stayed out past ten. If we had friends over, she would retire to my mother's bedroom. t.i.ti was also a bit of a pack rat. I couldn't open a closet to grab a towel without triggering an avalanche on my head. And to say t.i.ti Aurora was frugal would be an understatement. I don't think she ever spent a penny on her own pleasure or bought anything that wasn't strictly necessary. She wore the same clothes year after year and mended them expertly until mending was a lost cause. The very idea of eating out in a restaurant, of spending a dollar for eggs and toast, was deeply upsetting to her. t.i.ti's frugality, in turn, was deeply upsetting to my mother, who took pride in dressing well and delighted in splurging on small pleasures. Mami never saved, never put money away, and she would overextend herself for something that really mattered-like the encyclopedias or keeping us in Catholic school. She often had to go into debt, but she worked long and hard to pay off those commitments.

They were an odd couple, those two sisters. Neither of them showed affection, and t.i.ti especially could be austere and forbidding, but it was also clear that they were bound to each other in a way that I didn't entirely understand. They were like two trees with buried roots so tangled that they inevitably leaned on each other, and also strangled each other a bit. The sixteen-year difference between them made them more like mother and daughter, which was how they'd begun and how they would remain. Junior and I both suspected that one of Mami's motivations for inviting t.i.ti Aurora to move in was to enlist her as a spy or at least as a deterrent. Surveillance was maintained, and Mami ducked the blame. They did have an understanding, however, that t.i.ti was not permitted to discipline us directly. She had to report to Mami whatever terrible thing we had done-or rather, Mami, who wasn't eager to hear bad news, would reluctantly extract a report from t.i.ti's pointedly sullen mumbling-and then it was up to our mother to decide what punishment was warranted. This often worked in our favor. When t.i.ti phoned the hospital in a panic to report that Junior had committed an unspeakable offense, how could Mami be anything but relieved to learn that no, he hadn't committed a crime, or turned to drugs, or landed in jail? Catching him with a girlfriend in the bedroom was almost good news if you framed it like that.

JUST AS in the projects, our home was still my friends' favorite hangout. And even with t.i.ti grumbling, the party continued, my mother coming in for a cup of coffee at regular intervals, just to remind us of her presence. If we got too noisy, though, one of the neighbors was bound to call Co-op City security. The first time that happened and a uniformed guard was banging at the door, we scrambled, looking for somewhere to hide two whole six-packs of beer. But the next thing I knew, Mami came bounding out of her bedroom like a tigress, fire in her eyes. She threw open the door and yelled into the hallway, "You tell those neighbors that these are young kids having fun in my house! That's why kids get into trouble, because people don't let them have fun at home!" Then louder still, "If anyone has a problem with that, they can come talk to me! Not call security!" When she was done shouting, she invited the guard in for coffee and told the kids already gathering their stuff that they could stay, but just keep the volume down, please.

And so, thanks to Mami, our home became party central as well as campaign headquarters for student council elections. We threw poster-making parties, painting slogans on banners stretched all the way down the halls. We threw victory parties when we won and consolation parties when we lost. Throughout my high school years, apartment 5G, 100 Dreiser Loop, was the place to be.

MARGUERITE GUDEWICZ AND I both had a crush on Joe. He was messing around with both of us, being straight with neither. What did he think, that girls don't talk? When he dumped us both for someone else, Marguerite and I became best friends.

There was something about going to Marguerite's house that stirred memories of Abuelita's when I was small. The place was like a village, with grandparents living downstairs, Marguerite and her brother and parents upstairs, and Uncle Walter in the bas.e.m.e.nt apartment. I felt right at home.

Marguerite's father, John Gudewicz, was not one to censor himself, but at least he made an effort to tone down his remarks when I was in earshot. He still had his views on "those Puerto Ricans," but his kindly laugh made it impossible to take offense. In 1971, when Archie Bunker first appeared on All in the Family, we all joked that Mr. Gudewicz could sue CBS for copyright infringement. Still, when push came to shove, he stood up for me. One night at a party, his brother asked pointedly, "Who's the spic?"

"She's a guest of ours, and if you don't like it, you can get the h.e.l.l out," he said. And he wasn't just being a good host. I learned that when Marguerite's parents married, in their communities a match between a German and a Pole was virtually miscegenation. What's more, Marguerite's mother, Margaret, a modest woman who never talked about herself, had hidden Jews in wartime Germany. The Gudewiczes were not people who needed any lessons on the evils of prejudice.

Beyond the very circ.u.mscribed world of my family and our few blocks of the South Bronx, a much wider world was opening up to me, if only in a New York sort of way. If you grow up on salsa and merengue, then polkas and jitterbugs look as if they jumped off the pages of National Geographic. To Puerto Rican taste buds, the blandness of German, Polish, and Irish food left something to be desired, but it did seem we had a lot to learn about preparing vegetables. I noticed too that the mishigas on display in the hallways of Co-op City or at Zaro's more than matched the volubility of Puerto Rican family life, but if we'd slung the kinds of insults that our Jewish neighbors regularly did, the dishonor and acrimony would have stuck for generations. I was always amazed to hear them laughing together again within minutes of a flare-up.

The differences were plain enough, and yet I saw that they were as nothing compared with what we had in common. As I lay in bed at night, the sky outside my window reflecting the city's dim glow, I thought about Abuelita's fierce loyalty to blood. But what really binds people as family? The way they sh.o.r.e themselves up with stories; the way siblings can feud bitterly but still come through for each other; how an untimely death, a child gone before a parent, shakes the very foundations; how the weaker ones, the ones with invisible wounds, are sheltered; how a constant din is medicine against loneliness; and how celebrating the same occasions year after year steels us to the changes they herald. And always food at the center of it all.

JUST AS my emotional world was growing in Co-op City, my intellectual horizons were beginning to expand at school. Miss Katz, who taught us history my junior year, was different from any teacher I'd had before, different, in fact, from anyone I had ever known. Compared with the nuns, she seemed young and vibrant. She warned us against getting stuck in rote learning, about how we needed to master abstract, conceptual thinking. The meaning of all this would be revealed once we'd written our first essays. Our first what? There we sat, rows of blank faces in our regulation navy skirts, white blouses, and sweater vests. Eleven years of memorization had molded our minds to be no less uniform. Essay? Somehow we had reached junior year in high school without having written anything beyond book reports. The nuns had always fed us facts, and we had always parroted them back. I was very good at it. I prided myself on being able to soak up vast oceans of facts. No teacher had ever asked anything more in exchange for an A.

Miss Katz asked something more. Her p.r.o.nouncements and challenges intrigued me. What would it mean to think critically about history? How do you a.n.a.lyze facts? At least I'd learned by then the value of asking for help. If I went to talk to her after cla.s.s, she wouldn't slam the door on me.

In fact, the door was wide open, and we had several long and fascinating conversations. She told me about her boyfriend, a Brazilian she described as a freedom fighter working on behalf of the poor and oppressed under the military dictatorship. I asked how, being Jewish, she'd come to work at a Catholic school, and she told me she was inspired by the nuns and priests she'd encountered in Latin America. They put their lives at risk for the sake of helping the poor. She talked in a similar way about Father Gigante, too, which took me by surprise, but it made sense.

Father Gigante was our priest at St. Athanasius, where I'd attended Ma.s.s with t.i.ti Aurora before the move to Co-op City. I would only gradually become aware that the familiar figure at the altar was a larger-than-life presence beyond the sanctuary, an activist for tenants' rights who famously walked the mean streets with a baseball bat as he negotiated with gangs and landlords. In the same parish where Abuelita and all my family had lived until my mother led the exodus, Father Gigante was working to reclaim buildings that were abandoned or gutted by arson and renovate them as low-cost housing. It wouldn't have occurred to me to call him a freedom fighter, but why not?

Miss Katz was the first progressive I'd ever encountered up close. There certainly weren't many others at Cardinal Spellman High School in those days, and she would last there only one year. I remember wondering what made her so intriguing. How could one become an interesting person? It wasn't just having a boyfriend you could describe as a hero, though that certainly got my attention. It had more to do with her questioning the meaning of her existence, thinking in terms of a purpose in life. She was a teacher but still educating herself, learning about the world and actively engaged in it. I began to have an intimation that education could be for something other than opening the doors of job opportunity, in the sense of my mother's constant refrain.

I wish I could say that the same kind of reflection that lit up my conversations with Miss Katz had thrown some light on the problem of writing a history essay. Somehow her prescription for critical thinking and a.n.a.lysis remained abstract, if tantalizing. Though I did well enough in her cla.s.s, I would have to wait till college before I could really understand what she meant.

IT HAD BEEN established that Sonia Sotomayor was not much to look at. I had a pudgy nose. I was gawky and ungraceful. I barreled down the halls of Cardinal Spellman, headfirst, unlike those who knew how to amble with a s.e.xy sashay. My own mother told me that I had terrible taste in clothes.

I did get asked out occasionally. Usually, a friend's boyfriend had a friend, and they were looking for a fourth to double-date. Sometimes he would ask me again, and sometimes it would last for a while but never as long as going steady. Once I was the one to put an end to it: as his contribution to a meal that some friends were making at my house, my date decided to shoplift the bacon for the BLTs. Making matters worse, it wouldn't have happened except that Mami didn't have enough money to put together a meal for us that day. She was terribly ashamed, but she would have been horrified to learn about the shoplifting. I wanted nothing more to do with that guy.

Mostly, I felt like everybody's second choice, which is why a compliment could catch me off guard, especially an unconventional one. For instance, according to Chiqui, I had "baseball bat legs." Thanks a lot, Chiqui.

"No, that's good! You see how your ankles are small and the calves curve? You've got good legs."

I would hear worse: Kevin told me that Scully's dad said I was "built like a brick s.h.i.t-house."

"It's a compliment, Sonia."

"What kind of compliment is that?"

"It's just an expression," Kevin insisted. "It means you're well built. Not like some flimsy wooden job." I couldn't believe my ears. Was that what they meant by Irish wit?

Apart from dubious flattery, the truth was that Kevin Noonan made me feel attractive in a way that was new to me and not unwelcome. I, in turn, was entranced by his blue-gray eyes. I found myself scanning the hallway on the far side of Cardinal Spellman's divisive crack to catch a glimpse of that frizzy halo of sandy curls that made his slight figure stand out in the uniformed crowd.

On our first date, we took the train down to Manhattan. We walked the entire city, walked for hours, talking as he showed me his favorite spots. The first place he took me was a tiny park on East Fifty-Third Street where a curtain of water still runs down a stone wall. The sound of the fountain makes the city seem far away and turns the vest-pocket park into a private cove.

From that first date, we were inseparable. For the first month that I knew Kevin, he brought me a rose every single day. One time after school I was walking with him to the stop where he caught the bus home to Yonkers. We pa.s.sed by t.i.ti Gloria's house, and I dragged Kevin in to meet her and Tio Tonio. Really, I just wanted to postpone our parting, but as soon as we got there, Kevin turned pale and clammed up. I thought maybe he was put off because t.i.ti Gloria and Tio Tonio kept switching to Spanish, even though they were making quite an effort, welcoming us with cake and cookies and sodas. But Kevin remained stony, and I was more than a little upset by this.

The next day when I got to school, there was no rose. I was getting seriously worried that things were over between us. But finally Kevin confessed: he had been stealing my daily roses from Tio Tonio's garden! He looked at me with a hangdog expression that didn't go with his sparkling eyes and said, "There's a lot of them, Sonia." It was true: Tio Tonio's rosebushes were magnificent. I laughed so hard I almost choked. I was happy to accept that the rose-colored phase of our romance was over. Now we were just a couple.

Kevin practically moved in with us except, of course, that my mother made him go home at night. We couldn't afford much dating beyond the local pizzeria. Instead, we hung out at home, studying together or watching TV. He loved reading as much as I did, and we might silently turn the pages side by side for hours at a time. We went for walks, or visited my family, or worked on Kevin's car. And we talked constantly about everything imaginable.

We didn't go over to his house much, because his mother had a hard time accepting me. She wouldn't say it to my face, but the message came through with a tightening of the lips, a slant of the eyebrow, a slam of the door. She would have been happier if I were Irish, or at least not Puerto Rican. I'd seen this before. One guy I'd dated before Kevin had ducked a teacup thrown at his head when his mother found out I was Puerto Rican. Kevin's mom was not so kinetic about her distress, seeking the counsel of her priest. He either shared her opinion of my people or else lacked the backbone to tell her that it was not a very Christian view. Kevin defended him. The parish in Yonkers was 100 percent Irish, he rationalized, and the priest had no choice but to affirm his community's values. I disagreed. Bigotry is not a value.