An Island Like You Page 4

  The old guy came toward me with the mop over one shoulder. He was bent at the spine from an old war injury, he later told me. But that night I thought he was daring me to see him as Jesus Christ. I looked down at his shadow and my hair stood on end. I sat down in the hard pew, letting my frozen hands and feet come back to life, and watched him mop the wooden floor so slowly it drove me crazy. I wanted to take that mop from his shaky old hands and just do it myself. But he seemed happy to be doing it. In a sort of trance. I was getting dizzy myself watching him move down the middle aisle, genuflect at the altar, pull himself up with the mop handle like it was one of those shepherd’s staffs you see in Nativity scenes, then go up the sides of the church, moving his lips at every station of the cross, praying maybe. I considered the fact that I might be sitting in an empty church with a crazy man who might hit me over the head with his mop and leave me there to bleed to death in the very clean house of God.

  But what happened was that when I sat back down, I started to relax in that church like I hadn’t anywhere since I was a little kid. I breathed better. The way the air smelled like incense and candles cleared my head, and the old wood and leather all around made me feel kind of safe, like in a library. And the shape of the place gave me a weightless sensation; it was a cave with plenty of room to move around and breathe. Or maybe I was just spacing out.

  After a while I fell into a sort of dream where I could make myself float up to the ceiling and say hello to God up there. His face changed as I stared at it. It looked like old Johann at first, then like my father, then like Miss Rathbone (that surprised me a lot), and even like Kenny Matoa. I shook myself out of it and tried to get back to earth.

  I was dozing off when I heard the old guy sort of creak and crack into the pew next to me. Everything smelled good, like lemon or pine or something. It was really late, but I could tell old Johann had things on his mind. I waited awhile, trying to stay awake. I mean, by that time I was wiped out. I asked him why he worked these late hours, being old and all; he should be in bed. Besides, the streets of Paterson aren’t safe even at noon! He said he liked being alone, and that’s why he cleaned the church late at night.

  I started to feel funny after a while because he just sat there with a patient, sort of saintly look on his face, waiting for me to say something, I guessed.

  “Johann, when did you come to Paterson?” I said, trying to sound like Johnny Carson interviewing a guest. I mean, we had to get this over with, right?

  He folded his hands on his lap and stared at the candles still burning in front of the cross where Jesus hung, then he started talking. In the empty, quiet church, his low voice with its thick accent sounded like it came from far away. I stared at the candles too, making them be a sort of movie screen where I tried to picture what Johann was saying. It was like he had been waiting for me to show up at St. Joe’s so he could tell me this story.

  He said that he had once lived on a farm in Germany with his wife and his son. Then Hitler took over. For several years they suffered many hardships (he used these words like he had looked them up in a dictionary). But the real problems had begun when troops had come through the village, forcing — conscripting he called it — young men to fight. His son had been made to go with them at gunpoint. When he and his wife had protested, Johann had been beaten with the butt of a gun. That — he smiled in a weird way when he said this — was the “war injury” that had left him minus a couple of ribs and permanently in pain. Though he and his wife survived the war, they had never heard how their son had died, only that he was dead. In the last days of the war, nobody had bothered to keep records. He and his wife had applied for visas in the early fifties and had finally been allowed to come to America during President Kennedy’s time in the sixties. His wife’s heart had failed during bypass surgery three years ago. He had been alone since then.

  “Why Paterson?” I was really curious about how Johann had come to be in this city, of all places in the United States.

  “The Church. The Catholic Church sometimes sponsors people. This parish of St. Joseph’s used to be mainly Polish, Irish, and German immigrants. Now it has many Puerto Ricans too. I was given a job here.”

  “You live around here?” Suddenly I wanted to know everything about Johann. His story was sort of like the tragedies we read in class. No happy ending like the ones in grammar school. No good fairy godmothers bringing the lost boy back to his parents. This was more like the ones where somebody pulls their eyes out of their heads because things are so bad they might as well get even worse so they can get better. Old Johann told me he had a room in a private house on Market Street. He also said that Father Capanella had already told him that the Church was making plans to retire him. That meant that he would be going to a Catholic retirement home away from Paterson.

  “Do you want to do that?” I couldn’t believe how he seemed to just accept the Church’s “retiring him.” Putting him out to pasture was more like it.

  “It does not matter where I go, Arturo. I can always find peace in myself.”

  “You mean God? Religion?” I was listening very carefully to Johann, but I didn’t intend to sit through a sermon. I had made my own decision about religion.

  “No, my boy. Not religion in the way most people speak of it. I am religious. I go to mass, I say my prayers. But peace does not come from doing these things. For me, it meant finding my place in this world. My God is in my thoughts, and when I am alone and thinking, I am conversing with Him.”

  We sat there together for a while longer. Then I left him to watch his candles and went home. I was in no mood anymore to run away. Old Johann’s story had made me feel like a crybaby for thinking my troubles were that bad. I don’t ever want to be as alone as he is, with only his thoughts for company. That doesn’t mean I won’t get on that bus another time. But I had something to do first. It was almost three. I still had time to rescue Willy’s poems from the jaws of the dump truck. I just had to know what Kenny Matoa was going to have to recite in front of our class that day.

  So I did what I had to do.

  I climbed up on the green monster that smelled of the garbage of humanity, of vomit, rotting meat, the urine of bums who slept in the alley, of everything that people use and abuse and then throw out. I balanced my foot on one of the handles the truck hooks onto and I reached for the top. I pulled myself halfway into the pit of hell and nearly ralphed. Man, ten thousand outhouses could not compete with that stink. But I saw the book right away. It was on top of a ton of trash; nobody had thrown a dead cat on it, or last night’s arroz con pollo. It took me a couple of minutes to fish it out, but I got it, right before I started to sort of pass out from the stench and all.

  I may never tell anyone except old Johann, who can listen to a weird tale if he can tell one, what I felt like leaning on a Dumpster like a strung-out junkie or worse, holding a book of Shakespeare’s sonnets to my chest. For God’s sake, I must be “The Flea.” I must be old Donne’s bloodsucking Purple Flea to be climbing a Dumpster at three o’clock in the morning for a stupid book. I could have started bawling like a baby right then, except I remembered why I had gone through all that trouble. The book was a little on the tacky side, so I had to kind of peel the pages apart. Under the lamppost I finally got to CXII. I had to sound out the words, since William wrote in very weird English. “Your love and pity doth the impression fill …” I didn’t get that, but with Shakespeare you gotta give it a little time before it starts making sense. “Which vulgar scandal stamp’d upon my brow; For what care I who calls me well or ill, So you o’er-green my bad, my good allow?” I decided to give him two more lines to get his message across, or back into the mouth of hell it would doth be tossed. I said the lines out loud; sometimes that helps. “You are my all-the-world, and I must strive,” I yelled in the direction of my window two floors up. I saw a light come on. “To know my shames and praises from your tongue …”

  Right then I saw in my mind Kenny saying these lines and the whole cl
ass staring at him. He wouldn’t have a clue what the poem meant, but I knew what the message was for me: whose opinion did I really care about anyway? And I’d get to hear Kenny recite a poem for me, even if he didn’t know it. Mrs. R. had done it. Revenge, Shakespearian-style. Anon, anon, and all that.

  Clara had come to the window and saw me down there orating Shakespeare by the Dumpster.

  “Arturo, hijo. Is that you?” There is no better tragic hero than a Puerto Rican mother, I swear. She put so much pain into those few words. Ay, bendito! I was in a sorry state by then, and almost anything would have made me cry. That’s what staying up all night listening to sad stories does to you.

  “Do you know what time is it?” It was the witch Doña Monina sticking her scrawny neck out of her apartment window on four.

  “¿Saben qué hora es?” was what she really said.

  I yelled back, “Son las tres, son las tres.” Because it rhymed with what she had said. Even when I’m not trying, I’m good at this, I can’t help myself.

  “Arturo, please come in. It’s cold.” Clara opened her arms out to me as if I could spread my angelito wings and fly up to her, for God’s sake.

  But she was right. I needed to go in. I had never been so cold in all my life. I heard the rumble of the dump truck going down another street, crunching up the garbage of humanity and swallowing it. Soon it would come down my street. Before going home to take the longest shower of my life, I wiped a greasy stain off the cover of my book and put it in the inside pocket of my leather jacket. I thought maybe old Johann might like to borrow it. But first I was going to read along with Kenny Matoa, moving my lips silently right along when he recited CXII that day. “For what care I who calls me well or ill.” Really. This was going to be good.

  Paco is watching me again, I can feel it. I’m taking my math book out of my locker while everyone else stampedes down the hall, but I just know that he’s somewhere in the crowd, staring a hole right through me. It’s just that I haven’t caught him doing it yet. Paco is shy and the best student in Mrs. Laguna’s algebra class, the one class we have together, but this year he’s trying to be tough instead of smart. It’s only because he’s getting a lot of pressure from the other boys, Luis Cintrón and them, to join their “social club,” as they call their gang at school. If I was good-looking and popular, I’d be getting offers to hang out with them too. My best friend, Anita, is getting some heavy-duty attention from Luis and his boys, but she says she’s not interested in the “babies” of our freshman class. She’s after an older guy — someone who will “make her an offer she can’t refuse,” is what she says. I’m getting no attention from men, young or old, except for Paco, and I can’t even prove that.

  The bell rings and I rush to class with the elephant herd, but I hang back at the door to Mrs. Laguna’s classroom until I see Paco coming down the hall. He’s with Luis and his Barbie doll girlfriend, Jennifer López. She’s got bleached-blond hair and wears about three layers of makeup; to me she looks like she’s got a happy-face mask on, with hot-pink lips and false eyelashes. But she’s got the look that boys like. I could bleach my hair and put on a ton of makeup but I can’t fake the breasts, hips, and butt. Jennifer has forced her way between Luis and Paco, and her head turns this way and that: she gives them equal time with her cheerleader smile and her famous giggle you can hear across a crowded auditorium. “Hee, hee, hee,” she says to Luis, and “Hee, hee, hee,” to Paco. Paco is looking down at his feet as he walks, with his hands in his jeans pockets. He is listening to Luis with the same look of concentration that he wears on his face when he listens to Mrs. Laguna explaining the value of x and y.

  Anita runs down the hall before them. She pinches me with her long red nails as she goes by me into the room, which usually means that she’ll be passing me a note as soon as Mrs. L. turns her back to write on the chalkboard, but I ignore her and pretend to be looking through my papers for my homework. I hear Luis shout at Paco, “Later, man,” and one last giggle from Jennifer before she slinks past me to her seat in the back row, where she’ll do her nails during class. Then Paco walks toward me. I’m right in the doorway, but he looks straight ahead as he squeezes around me. He could have at least said, “Excuse me.”

  Anita’s note says that she’s sneaking out of her house that night, and that if her mother calls, I’m supposed to tell her that she’s taking a bath or something. I don’t really like covering for her, but I have no choice. Anita could be friends with anyone in school. But she likes me. She says that she feels she can relax with me and that she can tell me anything and I won’t spread it around. She is planning to quit school as soon as she turns sixteen. Her parents are too busy fighting with each other to care what she does as long as she shows up to do her chores.

  I plan to stay in school because if I don’t I’ll end up depending on someone else to take care of me, like a man. That seems to be all the women can talk about around the barrio — money and men, men and money. Maybe if I go to college and get a good job, I won’t have to worry that I’ll have to go on welfare if my husband leaves me. I don’t even know if I’ll get married. Look at what happened to my parents. They stayed together only long enough to have me; then she kicked him out. They’re both nice people, but they can’t get along for more than ten minutes. When my father comes over to see me, that’s how long it seems to take before she’s yelling at him about something, or he’s frowning like he does and saying that he’ll send her a check for me but he won’t come back. But he always does. They just can’t seem to stay out of each other’s hair. I think I got the best and the worst from each of them. I’m not as pretty as my mother, but I have her common sense; and I am shy like my father, but nobody’s fool either. They’re both pretty smart, but I’m probably smarter than either of them because I’ve never made less than a C in any of my classes in school and both of them quit school to go to work in the Nabisco cracker factory when they were teenagers.

  “Sandra, will you come up and put exercise number three on the board for us?”

  Mrs. Laguna must have seen my eyes glaze over. She’s not a monster, but she likes to catch you daydreaming and put you on the spot. A lot of teachers have a mean streak. I think it’s a job requirement. I imagine questions on their application forms like “How many children have you tortured during your career, and did you enjoy it?”

  I go up to the board, hoping that an answer will pop into my head as I stare at my book. Lucky for me, at that moment another teacher calls Mrs. L. out into the hall. But then someone pushes Jennifer’s button, the one in the middle of her back that makes her talk in one-syllable words, and she calls out, “Come on, Sandi baby, show off your brains. What size are they? I think they’re triple A cup, myself. Hee, hee, hee.” In a split second, the class goes nuts. I can’t tell what most of them are yelling out, but I feel like melting into the chalkboard. I hate her. I hate them all.

  I run out of the room, right into Mrs. Laguna.

  “What is going on in here?” she shouted over the laughing and yelling. She is holding my arm and trying to move me back into the classroom. But I pull away and run down to the bathroom. I lock the stall after me and just stand there crying like a fool and reading the graffiti on the door. It’s mostly disgusting drawings except for the usual, Janice loves Tato, and María loves George. I feel like writing my own message, SANDRA HATES EVERYBODY!

  There are footsteps on the tiles, and soon I see Anita’s black leather boots as she goes from stall to stall looking for my feet. She finds my white high-tops with red strings.

  “Sandi, Mrs. Laguna wants to see you.

  “I’m not going back in there.”

  “She says you can come see her after school. I told her you wouldn’t go back into that zoo. What a witch that Jennifer is. I told her that I was gonna drag her by the hair to the water fountain and wash off her makeup so that everyone can see what she really looks like.”

  That’s Anita. She keeps telling me what she was going to do to
Jennifer, like steal her push-up bra from her P.E. locker and hang it up in place of the basketball hoop. She went on and on until I had to laugh. By that time, third period was over and it was time for English. We were going to write an essay on Beauty and the Beast that week, and I didn’t want to miss any classes, mainly because we were going to watch the video first. The others thought it was kids’ stuff, but I love it. Anita helped me straighten out my face, which was a mess after all my stupid crying.

  “I could die. She said that about me in front of Paco,” I said.

  “She was just showing off, girl. She’s trying out for Luis’s gang. She wants to look tough.” While she talked, Anita put on some lipstick. Then she brushed out her naturally curly, thick brown hair. Next to her in the mirror I looked like the “before” picture in a magazine makeover. She smiled at me, and I had to look away from her perfectly straight teeth. I could not look at mine sticking out or I would start crying again.

  “I saw Paco giving Jennifer a dirty look when she said those hateful things to you, Sandi.”

  “You lie.” My heart started pounding even when I just heard Paco’s name. “You lie,” I said again, daring her to deny it.

  “I am not lying. He looked at her like this.” And she brought her eyebrows together like Paco does and made her eyes into slits.

  “Hey, she probably has mal de ojo right now from that look.” She laughed.

  “I’d like to give Jennifer López the evil eye myself,” I said. The bell for fourth period rang and I ran to my English class — lucky for me, neither Paco nor Jennifer is in it — and Anita went down the hall to chorus. She can sing too. Some people have it all. I saw her again at our last period P.E. Anita hates working out and getting sweaty, but I love it. My group is doing track this week, and as soon as I put on my shorts, T-shirt, and running shoes, and tie my hair back in a tight ponytail, I feel like I can fly. It’s because I’m aerodynamic — that’s what my teacher says — she’s also really thin and flat-chested like me. She says there is no air resistance on my body and that’s why I can take off when she blows her whistle, picking up speed with every stride. I love the feeling of total freedom that running gives me. I even like the sweat that pours off me. It makes me feel that for once my body is doing the right thing. Ms. Jackson is trying to talk me into swimming on her team. She says the same thing that makes me take off on the track will happen in a pool. But I don’t know. I hate the way I look in a swimsuit. The others will see my bones sticking out and think of other names to call me. But maybe not if I win some trophies for the school. I’ll have to think about it.