My Beloved World Part 7

My mother still often worked six days a week, but she was no longer trying to escape from us. Home was now a good place to be, and so she worked the early shift at Prospect Hospital, leaving at six in the morning in order to be home by the time we finished at Blessed Sacrament. Ana came over in the mornings to fix breakfast and get us off to school. I could have managed by myself, but Junior was such a sleepyhead that we'd never have gotten to school on time without help.

The apartment was always immaculate, but it was no longer my doing. I quit my compulsive cleaning and left it to my mother, who cared about the place now. With the bit of insurance money left over after Papi's burial, she even bought a mirror that covered one wall of the living room, making it seem bright and s.p.a.cious.

I didn't entirely trust this new reality, my mother's transformation included. Once in a while, not often, she would date: a friend's brother, or someone's divorced son. I wondered what would happen to Junior and me if she got married again. Would she leave us behind? Would the fighting resume with a new combatant? My anger still lingered at what I had perceived for so long as her abandonment and her coldness toward us. It would take me many years to let go of that anger completely, and just as long for her to lose the last of her chill. It just wasn't in my mother's nature at that time to show affection, give you a hug, or get down on the floor to engage with a kid. She had been deprived of the formative security that nurtures such impulses. Besides, they would have mussed up her outfit.

My mother always dressed with effortless style, which seemed almost magical given her modest means. Even now in her eighties, she still looks flawless, camera ready, perfectly put together at all times. She would never understand why I lacked this talent that came so naturally to her. There was always some fault in my appearance that was glaring to her and invisible to me, and she badgered me constantly for being sloppy. Ana's daughter, Chiqui, who was a few years older than I and idolized my mother, would say, "Celina looks like a movie star and acts like Florence Nightingale."

Chiqui cared about fashion, about looking good and dressing up; I was convinced that deep down my mother would have gladly swapped daughters with Ana. But about Florence Nightingale, too, Chiqui was right. However undemonstrative, Mami cared about people, and she served as the unofficial visiting nurse on twenty-four-hour call for family, friends, and neighbors throughout Bronxdale and beyond. She took temperatures, gave shots, changed dressings, and called the doctor with any questions she couldn't answer herself. She grumbled only when people took advantage-"t.i.ti Celina! I need some suppositories for my hemorrhoids!" Perhaps they a.s.sumed she could pick up supplies for free at the hospital. The staff there would often help themselves, but my mother wouldn't dream of it. "Mayo beat me over a three-cent postage stamp!" she would remind us. "You think I'm going to steal a bottle of aspirin or a box of disposable needles, even for you, Sonia?" She hardly had extra money to pay for them, but it scared her to see my needles, reused to the point of bending when I tried to inject myself.

The healing wasn't limited to physical aches and pains. Some of her best medicine involved listening to people's troubles, which she could do with full attention and sympathy, while reserving judgment. I remember my mother's friend Cristina in tears over her son, who was struggling with drugs. That was a common theme, especially with the sons returning from Vietnam. Sometimes, even if there was no useful advice to give, I saw that listening still helped.

There was also John, the Korean War vet, who sat in his wheelchair in front of our building, the only spot of shade in the new projects, where the trees had barely grown. Every day, two neighbors, older men but still strong, would carry his chair down the four steps on their way to work. The kindness left him stranded until they returned, and so John spent his days watching people come and go. My mother always stopped. She'd ask him how he was, whether he'd heard from his family or needed anything. I never had the courage to stop and chat with John when I wasn't with Mami, but her compa.s.sion impressed me, and I would never neglect to smile at him or wave when I pa.s.sed. The role of confidante to friends has come naturally to me, and I credit the example of my mother, who, left on a park bench, could probably get a tree to tell her its woes.

ONE MEMORY OF my mother's comforting sneaks up on me in the night sometimes. The bedroom I shared with Junior on Watson Avenue, with its one little window, was not just tiny but unbearably hot in summer. We had a little electric fan propped up on a chair, but it didn't help much. Sometimes I would wake up miserable in the middle of the night, with the pillow and sheets drenched in sweat, my hair dripping wet. Mami would come change the bed, whispering to me quietly in the dark so as not to wake Junior. Then she'd sit beside me with a pot of cold water and a washcloth and sponge me down until I fell asleep. The cool damp was so delicious, and her hands so firmly gentle-expert nurse's hands, I thought-that a part of me always tried to stay awake, to prolong this blissful taken-care-of feeling just a bit longer.

WHILE MY MOTHER seemed to find new confidence and strength after the loss of my father, Abuelita would never emerge from her luto at all. She had always dressed simply, but now it was simply black, as if all color had vanished from her life. The parties were over for good; the dominoes and dancing would exist only as memories. I still went to see her often, especially after she moved to the projects, just a block away from us. But her eyesight was beginning to fail, and she didn't go out unless it was absolutely necessary. Our visits became more sedate, just the two of us talking, spending time together comfortably. I would bring my homework or read a book while she cooked; it was always quieter at her house.

That year of my father's death had been incredibly hard on her. Her mother, my bisabuela, would die very soon after Papi. Abuelita didn't even go to Puerto Rico for the funeral, she was so overwhelmed with grief for her son. She never spoke about my father after he died, at least not in my hearing, but my aunts and uncles understood the transformation that came over her: Juli was the firstborn, the protected one. If he could be taken away from her, then nothing in the world was safe. Something in the fabric of her universe was torn beyond repair.

Her husband's Parkinson's disease had been steadily claiming more and more of him for a long time. By the time my father died, Gallego's speech was fading, and within a few months he was completely bedridden, another reason Abuelita rarely left the house. My mother went every week on her day off from the hospital to bathe him and help change the sheets. Perhaps my grandmother was mourning prospectively for her husband too, the sadness heaving back and forth between Papi and Gallego like a trapped wave. When Gallego died a few years later, she would move to the seniors' home at Castle Hill within days. In the same way that my mother refused to go back into the old apartment after my father died, Abuelita couldn't bear to be in that s.p.a.ce where memories and emptiness collided. And so we did the rosario for Gallego in a brand-new, subsidized senior citizens' home.

THINGS HAD CHANGED at school, too. My fourth-grade teacher, Sister Maria Rosalie, made an effort to be kinder, and I enjoyed an unofficial respite from reprimand from April, when Papi died, until summer vacation. Not coincidentally, by the time fifth grade started, school had become for the first time something to look forward to. Until then, I had been struggling to figure out what was going on, especially since my return from being in the hospital. Now suddenly lessons seemed easier. It certainly didn't hurt that I had spent the entire summer vacation with my nose in a book, hiding from my mother's gloom, but there was another reason too. It was around that time that my mother made an effort to speak some English at home.

As early as kindergarten, Mami once told me, a teacher had sent a letter home saying that we should speak English in the house. But that was easier said than done. My mother's English was accented and sometimes faltering, though she could manage well enough at the hospital, even working an occasional weekend shift on the telephone switchboard. At home, however, she felt awkward speaking in front of Papi in a language that he didn't know well.

I don't know if my father spoke any English at all. Perhaps he was too shy to speak it badly in front of us. I'm guessing he would have picked up a few phrases to get through his days at the factory, though I never actually heard him say a word. I know that Abuelita couldn't manage in English, because my mother interpreted for her whenever she had to deal with officialdom. I doubt her daughters knew more than a few words, or else they would have been helping Abuelita themselves. I can't even begin to imagine t.i.ti Gloria carrying on in English the way she does in Spanish. Some things just don't translate. In any case, our family life was conducted entirely in Spanish.

It sounded odd when my mother first started speaking English at home, addressing Junior and me as if she were talking to a doctor at the hospital. But as soon as she found the words to scold us, it began to seem natural enough. In time I hardly noticed which language we were speaking. Still, as easily as Junior and I shifted gears into English with the flexibility of youth, at the age of thirty-six my mother could not have steered that change without a mighty effort. Only her devotion to our education could have supplied such a force of will. "You've got to get your education! It's the only way to get ahead in the world." That was her constant refrain, and I could no more get it out of my head than a commercial I'd heard a thousand times.

One day the doorbell rang, and my mother opened the door to a man carrying two big briefcases. It wasn't the man who made the rounds of the projects selling insurance. It wasn't the old man who came to collect two dollars every Sat.u.r.day for the drapes he'd sold us months before. My mother sat down with the salesman at the kitchen table, and they talked for a very long time, looking at books, adding up numbers. I was in the other room, overhearing bits and pieces: "priceless gift of knowledge ... like a library of a thousand books ... easy monthly payments ..."

When the two big boxes labeled Encyclopaedia Britannica arrived, it was Christmas come early. Junior and I sat on the floor surrounded by piles of books like explorers at the base of Everest. Each of the twenty-four volumes was a doorstop, the kind of book you'd expect to see in a library, never in someone's home and certainly not twenty-four of them, including a whole separate book just for the index! As I turned the densely set onionskin pages at random, I found myself wandering the world's geography, pondering molecules like daisy chains, marveling at the physiology of the eye. I was introduced to flora and fauna, to the microscopic structures of cells, to mitosis, meiosis, and Mendel's garden of peas. The world branched out before me in a thousand new directions, pretty much as the salesman had promised, and when it became overwhelming, all I had to do was close the book. It would wait for me to return.

Not all of my mother's efforts to expand our horizons were as welcome as the encyclopedias. Ballet cla.s.s was a brief torture that I managed to whine my way out of. I was too gangly and uncoordinated; end of story. Piano wasn't much better, and just as brief. I still can't hold a beat, even though the metronome mesmerized me. Guitar lessons, which Junior and I took together, were the worst of all. The real problem was getting there and back through a neighborhood on White Plains Road where a gang of taunting bullies made clear Puerto Rican kids were not welcome. I got smacked by one of them and tried to fight back, but eventually we just made a run for it: no way I could actually beat them.

My cousin Alfred had an answer for this menace: he would teach us self-defense, just the way he learned in the army reserves. We had to do push-ups with him shouting orders like a crazed drill sergeant. He slapped me. Again and again. He counted the slaps, fifty in all. This would build up my courage and resistance, he said. I didn't have the heart to tell him no amount of basic training was going to toughen me enough to take on a gang of much bigger kids just for the sake of playing guitar badly. Sometimes you have to cut your losses.

There was one more reason, beyond the pleasure of reading, the influence of English, and my mother's various interventions, that I finally started to thrive at school. Mrs. Reilly, our fifth-grade teacher, unleashed my compet.i.tive spirit. She would put a gold star up on the blackboard each time a student did something really well, and was I a sucker for those gold stars! I was determined to collect as many as I could. After the first As began appearing on my report card, I made a solemn vow that from then on, every report card would have at least one more A than the last one.

A vow on its own wasn't enough; I had to figure out how to make it happen. Study skills were not something that our teachers at Blessed Sacrament had ever addressed explicitly. Obviously, some kids were smarter than others; some kids worked harder than others. But as I also noticed, a handful of kids, the same ones every time, routinely got the top marks. That was the camp I wanted to join. But how did they do it?

It was then, in Mrs. Reilly's cla.s.s, under the allure of those gold stars, that I did something very unusual for a child, though it seemed like common sense to me at the time. I decided to approach one of the smartest girls in the cla.s.s and ask her how to study. Donna Renella looked surprised, maybe even flattered. In any case, she generously divulged her technique: how, while she was reading, she underlined important facts and took notes to condense information into smaller bits that were easier to remember; how, the night before a test, she would reread the relevant chapter. Obvious things once you've learned them, but at the time deriving them on my own would have been like trying to invent the wheel. I'd like to believe that even schools in poor neighborhoods have made some progress in teaching basic study skills since I was in the fifth grade. But the more critical lesson I learned that day is still one too many kids never figure out: don't be shy about making a teacher of any willing party who knows what he or she is doing. In retrospect, I can see how important that pattern would become for me: how readily I've sought out mentors, asking guidance from professors or colleagues, and in every friendship soaking up eagerly whatever that friend could teach me.

At the time, all I knew was that my strategy worked. Soon Mrs. Reilly had moved me to the row next to the window, which was reserved for the top students. My pleasure was diluted, however, when I found out that Junior's teacher had a.s.signed him to the farthest row from the window, where the slowest kids sat. Naturally, Junior was upset, and the unfairness irked me too. It's true that I called him stupid, but that was a big sister's prerogative, and I knew that he wasn't really. He studied almost as hard as I did. He was quiet, but he listened and paid attention; nothing slipped by him.

"He's a boy," said Mami. "He'll get there when he does." The Sisters of Charity held a pessimistic view of male children: they were trouble for the most part, often in need of a good thrashing, and unlikely to amount to much. There was more wisdom in my mother's open-ended encouragement. She would never push Junior and me to get better grades, never crack the whip regarding homework or lecture us about setting our goals high, the way Tio Benny did with my cousin Nelson. When I brought my report card home for her to sign, I could tell she was delighted to see that I was getting As. That same proud smile greeted the news in later years that I'd made valedictorian or was graduating summa c.u.m laude. It didn't matter that she didn't understand exactly what I'd accomplished to earn her pride. She trusted me, and Junior too. "Just study," she would say. "I don't care what grade you get, just study. No me importa si trabajan lavando banos. Lo importante es hacerlo bien." I don't care if you clean toilets, just do it well. Achievement was all very well, but it was the process, not the goal, that was most important.

ON THAT FIRST CHRISTMAS without Papi, Alfred helped me carry the tree home. He held the base and I supported the top as we walked it all the way, retracing the expeditions my father had led in years past. People always used to stop him to ask where he found such a perfect tree. No one stopped Alfred and me, but it wasn't until we got that sorry specimen up the elevator and into the apartment that we noticed how much it leaned to one side. It was a lesson I'd always remember, if only seasonally: make sure the trunk is straight.

I was in charge of decorating now. I did remember how Papi always said you couldn't have two lights of the same color next to each other, or two identical ornaments side by side, and you had to drape each icicle of silver tinsel separately over a branch. No tossing clumpy handfuls, which disqualified Junior from helping, since he just didn't have the patience to do it right. But what I couldn't figure out was how Papi always managed to string the lights so cunningly that the wires were invisible. I spent hours at it without success. He'd always fussed over it a long time too. So I knew it wasn't easy, but obviously it involved some particular trick that he had never let me in on. I was reminded of another Christmas when I was very young-young enough that family still came to our house for holidays, before Papi's drinking was out of control. I had gone into the kitchen, and there was a lechon asado occupying the entire table, with golden, crackly skin and an apple in its mouth. I was mystified: the pig was clearly too big to have fit in our oven, and I couldn't imagine how my father had cooked it. Had he carefully cut it up, roasted it in sections, and put it back together afterward? Stare as I might, I couldn't see any seams.

As the string of lights turned into a hopeless cat's cradle in my hands, Mami walked in and I gave her a desperate look of distress, but she just shook her head and said, "Juli always did the tree. I don't know how."

No good ever did come of trying to unravel Papi's sleight of hand. One year, I had been especially zealous about snooping for presents and discovered the mother lode in the back of one closet, very artfully camouflaged. A little ripping revealed an unimaginable treasure: our own TV! Before that, we used to go to Abuelita's when there was a ball game, and to watch cartoons or the Three Stooges, I went to Nelson's house. I was so excited at what I'd found I thought I would bust. I ran straight to Papi to ask if we could watch it right away. The startled look, and then the total deflation in his face-it was heartbreaking. I had ruined his surprise. That feeling of excitement crumpling into shame would ensure I was never again tempted to peek, even when, years later, my mother had me wrap gifts that I knew, from the absence of a name card, were destined for me.

I'd always taken that part of Christmas seriously. For years when I was small, I bought presents for everyone with money I saved from the penny deposits on bottles. I collected the bottles and washed them and carried them back to the store. I recruited Abuelita and my aunts to save their bottles for me too. Abuelita would even take her empties to the bodega and then just give me the money. I earned a bit more by picking up the little winged sycamore pods from Tio Tonio's backyard: five cents for each shopping bag full. Nelson labored alongside me, but everyone else thought the work was too boring. By the end of the year, I'd have a couple of dollars stashed away, and with that I went shopping at the five-and-dime: a little mirror for Abuelita, a handkerchief for t.i.ti Gloria, some candy for t.i.ti Aurora ... None of my cousins did that. I was the only one desperate to do right, to be liked, to be invited over.

Finally, one way or another, the tree was finished. The cotton skirting around the base became a snowy setting for the Nacimiento with its tiny manger. The picture was complete, soft sparkle and twinkling color, lights peeping shyly from behind the veil of tinsel, the crowning star aglow.

A hug from Papi would have been nice just then. I couldn't deny that our life was so much better now, but I did miss him. For all the misery he caused, I knew with certainty that he loved us. Those aren't things you can measure or weigh. You can't say: This much love is worth this much misery. They're not opposites that cancel each other out; they're both true at the same time.

CHAPTER Nine

DR. ELSA PAULSEN intrigued me. She was tall and very polished, even regal, in her white coat. She spoke with a hint of an accent that was not from New York, but not foreign either. When she walked into the pediatric diabetes clinic at Jacobi Medical Center, everybody-interns, residents, nurses-came to attention. You could tell that they wanted to please her, that she was the boss, though she was also warm and friendly. When she checked in on me, she actually talked to me, not just to my mother.

Dr. Paulsen was the first woman in a position of real-world authority I'd encountered. At Prospect Hospital, where my mother worked, all the doctors were men. The nursing supervisors were women, but that's as far as it went. Even at Blessed Sacrament, the nuns wielded power only over kids. To Monsignor Hart and Father Dolan the Sisters deferred.

At the clinic, the nurse would weigh me and take urine samples. If I was lucky, she took my blood too. If I was unlucky, I'd have to face one of the interns doing this for the first time. Feeling now and then like a guinea pig was in retrospect a small price to pay for the benefit of the cutting-edge treatment being developed there by the Albert Einstein College of Medicine. They had a research program on juvenile diabetes, and considering how rare the disease was then, it was amazing good fortune that the clinic happened to be located in the Bronx, even though we still had to take a long subway ride and then a bus to get there.

With a strong focus on patient education, the clinic was pioneering much that is now standard practice: child-friendly lessons on how to live with diabetes, on nutrition, and on what's going on in your body. Since I'd first begun treatment, my disease had progressed to the point where my pancreas was producing no insulin at all. Without my shots, I'd have been dead within days, if not sooner. The insulin available then was long acting, a single dose given in the morning, but there were sometimes unexpected fluctuations in blood sugar throughout the day. So you had to eat on a rigid schedule and keep snacks or juice at hand in case of a sudden drop. It wasn't true that I couldn't eat sweets, or that mangoes would kill me, as my aunts warned. Fortunately, my mother had a better understanding, and we celebrated after each visit to the clinic by sharing a piece of cherry cheesecake from the hospital cafeteria. It wasn't so much a lesson in moderation; she already knew she could trust me to eat right. Nor was it really my reward: my mother was always fonder of sweets than I was, and there was maternal guilt to be fed.

For the most part, moderation with sweets came naturally to me because I so disliked the sensation caused by a spike in blood sugar. I could recognize the first hints of that slow-motion heaviness, that feeling of trying to get out of the chair with a thousand-pound barbell on my lap. Low blood sugar felt just as bad but in a different way. I would start to sweat and get dizzy; I would lose patience, and my thinking became fuzzy. Complicating matters, there was then no easy, accurate way to test your own blood sugar, no glucose meter, only urine strips that reflected what your levels had been hours earlier. So to keep track of my blood sugar, I cultivated a constant mindfulness of how my body felt. Even now, with much more precise technology at hand, I still find myself mentally checking physical sensations every minute of the day. Along with discipline, that habit of internal awareness was perhaps another accidental gift from my disease. It is linked, I believe, to the ease with which I can recall the emotions attached to memories and to a fine-tuned sensitivity to others' emotional states, which has served me well in the courtroom.

But even if I took the shots like clockwork and watched my diet carefully, there was the grim reality of the disease then: I would still probably die sooner rather than later from complications. Given the advances in treatment since I was a child, a shortened life span is no longer as likely as it was. But that was the reality at the time, and it explains why my family had received my diagnosis as a catastrophe of tragic dimensions. My mother's biggest fear was the threat of amputations, blindness, and a panoply of other complications that were then typical. As collected and professionally cool as she was in the emergency room, as confident and rea.s.suring when helping a sick neighbor, she would fall apart when I was the patient. If I stubbed my toe, she'd be yelling about gangrene. Sometimes I would vent my annoyance through reckless antics on the playground, just to scare her. And always, since that first day, I had a.s.serted my independence by giving myself my own shots.

It could have been worse, I realized. My cousin Elaine had one arm that was paralyzed and stunted since birth, encased in a brace. My diabetes, being invisible, seemed the lesser evil. And Elaine got even more grief from t.i.ti Judy than I did from my mother. As soon as Elaine would muster the courage to venture the simplest move on the playground, t.i.ti Judy would panic. Her mother's fear was contagious and I thought might be holding Elaine back from much that she was perfectly capable of doing.

My cousin Alfred was the only one who refused to believe that diabetes was a terrible disability. Perhaps that explained his drill sergeant's determination to toughen me up. It was Alfred who would get me up on a pair of skis and even put me on a horse two or three times. When he took Junior and me to the Statue of Liberty, he made us climb all the way to the crown. I was spent by the time we had scaled the pedestal, but no: "Onward and upward! All the way to the top!" The last flights were torture, my legs in such pain that I couldn't stop tears from coming. But no way was I going to let Alfred see me cry, which meant I had to stay ahead of him, and that's how I made it to the top.

Eventually, I would translate my family's fatalism into an outlook that better suited my temperament: I probably wasn't going to live as long as most people, I figured. So I couldn't afford to waste time. Once in school, I would never contemplate taking a semester or year off. Later might never come, so I'd better get to work right now. That urgency has always stayed with me, even as the threat has receded.

SITTING IN the waiting room at the clinic, I wondered, did it never occur to anyone at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine that kids who might not have long to live shouldn't have to wait endless hours with nothing to read but stacks of old Highlights? I should have brought my Nancy Drew book, I grumbled.

But when my turn came, they gave me something else to read-a pamphlet about choosing a profession. I am ten years old, I thought. Isn't it a little early to be worrying about this? You can be a famous actress, the pamphlet a.s.sured me, like Mary Tyler Moore. You can be a professional athlete. You can be:

a doctor