Call Me Maria Read online

  and built like a football player. Yet he speaks softly

  and seems shy. Sometimes

  he looks out at the gray sky and the slush-covered

  streets from his classroom window and I know

  that he is missing the Martian-red ground,

  the green woods, and the hot sun

  of his native Georgia. Maybe he is thinking

  of juicy peaches, of red-orange pumpkins

  like the setting sun, and of a silver moon

  over a fishing pond deep in the green woods

  where a boy could sit under a weeping willow tree

  and think of numbers:

  the dozens of fish in the water,

  the hundreds of rabbits in the bushes,

  the thousands of birds navigating

  by the sun and moon,

  heading south in the fall and north

  in the spring. Mr. C. has told us that hummingbirds

  beat their wings seventy-eight times a second and are only

  about two and one-half inches long,

  yet they will fly hundreds of miles

  as they migrate from one continent to the next

  in search of the sweet nectar of hibiscus and poppy,

  of red flowers that depend on the cycle

  of pollination for their own survival. It is all

  part of the circle, folks. Who remembers

  the formula for distance?

  Bees can collect pollen

  from more than 500 flowers

  in one single trip. (I imagine him chasing a bee

  from flower to flower, counting, 497, 498, 499, 500!)

  And did we know that a falcon can dive

  at one hundred miles per hour when pursuing prey?

  Numbers, shapes, animals, the food chain, all go around

  in a circle called life. Come on, y’all, wake up! Mr. C.

  informs us that he has known schools of fish that look livelier

  than we do at this time of the afternoon. Math gets harder

  the later in the day it is, I know. Wake up,

  or I’ll tell you another fishing story.

  No, no! We all yell, pretending

  we hate his stories about growing up in the country,

  all of them math problems for us to solve.

  We are his last group of the day.

  He meets us when it’s already almost dark

  outside, when he has to work as hard as an actor

  on the stage to make numbers dance and sing for us.

  He looks at the class waiting

  for us to tell him about circles in our lives and sighs,

  only ten more minutes of math class left. He zeroes in

  on me. What do you have to say

  about circles, María? I am suddenly feeling timid,

  and just shake my head.

  In my mind I say: Circles are the shape

  I drew with my toe on the sands of la playa,

  where my mother took me every day to play.

  We made up a game of finding treasures

  the sea gave away after a tide. She taught me

  shapes and colors this way, by looking for los tesoros del mar

  under the yellow ball of the tropical sun

  shining on our little Island, a dot

  on the globe of the world. These are the circles

  in my world, Mr. C.

  I understand, María, says Mr. C.,

  glancing out the window at the snow

  covering everything now —

  there is no green in our world today, no hay verde,

  the color of hope, the color of home,

  no colors anywhere. I understand, Mr. C. repeats,

  although I have not spoken a word.

  What does he understand? Why I do not always

  choose to talk in class? Does he understand

  what it is like to sound different from others

  so that some people will look at you as if you are

  from another planet, and others will laugh

  as if everything you say is a joke? I think

  he understands missing the colors, sounds,

  and the smells of the place where you will not

  be asked where you are from the minute

  you open your mouth to speak. I think Mr. C.

  understands how I feel on this cold winter day

  that looks like somebody threw a white bedsheet

  over the entire city, no colors anywhere.

  The bell rings,

  but even as we leave his room, he is still

  at the chalkboard, lost in his dream

  of circles. Is he thinking about the way the moon

  and the stars guide the birds to the flowers,

  and the flowers draw the bees, and the fish rise to the surface

  to warm themselves in the summer sun, and the boy

  goes to the pond to think of numbers, and somehow

  all of it leads him to us?

  Later, at home,

  as I memorize the formula for finding the area

  of a circle — pi times the radius squared — I think

  of Mr. C. dividing the pie into halves, and fourths,

  and eighths, and sixteenths, and more, trying to teach us

  in the best way he knows, how everything

  is connected, how straight lines can be shaped

  into a circle, and a circle transformed

  into the pie of his dreams, the pie

  he will somehow find a way

  for all of us to share.

  In February, my mother sent her mother, my abuela, to check up on me because she and Papi were not talking. Poor Abuela hates the cold, and she hates our dark basement apartment. So I painted the tiny room we call our guest room white; everything in it got a whitewash, including the twin bed Papi bought from a tenant. He gave me money and I bought white sheets. It was brilliant, I thought. White on white. When you opened the door and turned on the overhead light (one hundred watts), it was as if a flashbulb had gone off in front of your face. Abuela would not be able to say that she had to walk around like a bat in a cave, finding her way by radar in our apartment.

  My grandmother comes into the kitchen where I am sitting down at the table reading a magazine. It is a dark winter day. Rain and sleet have been predicted. Abuela shakes her head as she looks out the window of our basement apartment. All the feet that pass by are wearing boots. She pours herself a cup of coffee and sits down across from me. She sighs as if her heart is breaking. She shivers and pulls her sweater around her shoulders. Papi comes in whistling. It is his day off. He will spend it with friends he knew from when he was a boy in the barrio. They will go to the park, even if it’s raining or cold, and talk about the good times they had as children.

  Abuela says, shivering, “María, let me tell you about my Island in the sun. The place where I was born. A paradise.”

  Papi, frowning as he struggles to put on his boots, says, “I know, I know your paradise. I lived there once, remember? In San Juan, I couldn’t see the sun behind the buildings. I’ll take the island of Manhattan anytime, if what I want is a paradise made of concrete.”

  Abuela, ignoring him, tapping my hand as she speaks.

  I am trying to stay out of it, hiding behind my magazine: “Ay, bendita hija. When I was growing up on my Island, everyone treated each other nicely, like family. We shared what we had, and if you were poor, your neighbors helped you. La familia, los amigos, el amor, that’s what mattered. People were not always angry; people were not cold like they are here in this cold place, these are cold people … the sun shines every day on my Island.”

  Papi, sounding angry: “The familia on your Island made fun of me, called me el gringo because my Spanish sounded funny to their ears. They laughed when I complained that the mosquitoes were eating me alive. Fresh American blood, they joked, to fatten up our hungry bugs. I couldn’t wait to come home to my country where people understand what I say
, and the mosquitoes treat everyone the same.”

  Abuela, paying no attention to Papi, moving her chair closer to mine: “When I was your age on my Island there was no crime, no violence, no drugs. The children respected the adults. We obeyed the teachers, the priests, the Pope, the governor, and our parents. The sun shines every day. On my Island …”

  Papi: “I once had my wallet stolen in the plaza of your pueblo, Señora. I used to watch the news in the bedroom, while everyone else sat hypnotized by the romantic telenovelas in the living room. On my screen was the same world I see on our TV here: drugs, guns, angry people, and violence. Only difference — the bad news was in Spanish.”

  Abuela, not listening. Looking into her cup as if she were watching a movie: “The sun shines every day. On my Island …”

  Papi, in a mocking tone of voice: “The sun shines every day, that’s true. While I was unhappy, missing my friends here, while I was lonely, the sun shone every day and it was 110 degrees in the shade.”

  Abuela: “On my Island …”

  Before she can finish her sentence, the lights flash on and off, and then we hear the gasping sounds of electrical things shutting down and darkness. A roll of thunder shakes the glass window. We hear the sound of feet running on the sidewalk above our heads. Abuela gets a candle from a kitchen drawer, places it on the table, and lights it. There is another roll of thunder and the sound of pouring rain. I hear Papi opening the pantry door to get his flashlight. The telephone begins to ring. I run to get it, grateful that it has interrupted a culture clash I have been hearing all of my life. It is the old battle between Island Puerto Rican and mainland Puerto Rican. It is what finally drove my parents apart.

  On the telephone, I hear Doña Segura’s shaky voice asking me in Spanish if Papi can come see about a smell like gas in her apartment. Everyone else is away for the day. She is blind. She does not even know that it is dark. Abuela nods. I know she will go stay with Doña Segura.

  Papi, already dressed for his day of freedom, listens to me tell Doña Segura that she will be right up. I look at my father by the light of the candle. Both of us sigh in unison, a big, deep, melodramatic, Puerto Rican sigh. Abuela’s candle is blown out by our breath. Then there is the sound of three people laughing together in the dark.

  Abuela knocks on my bedroom door. She has come to my room this morning to watch me choose my outfit for Who You Are Day at school. This is a day when we are allowed to dress in clothes that we think tell the world who we really are. (Within reason, our principal warned — no extremes will be tolerated. I hope that her definition of the word extreme is the same as my friend Whoopee’s. Nothing that she will put on this morning has ever been seen on this planet, much less at school.)

  Abuela makes herself comfortable on my bed as I put on my costume of myself made up of pieces of my life. I thought about my Who You Are Day outfit a lot. Mr. Golden told us in English class to think about our choices: are you going to walk around as a joke or as a poem? I have a suspicion that our teachers have allowed us this chance to dress up as ourselves for a reason. Our school is already a united nations, a carnival, and a parade all at once. There are students from dozens of different countries, and we do not always get along. Most of us are too shy to talk to others outside our little circles, and so misunderstandings come up. The principal has tried almost everything. The Who You Are Day is another of her crazy ideas to get us to communicate. In each of my classes, the teacher said, let us know something about what has made you who you are by what you wear to school tomorrow. It all sounds like a conspiracy to me. But I like dressing up so I do not complain like the boys have been doing. Most of them hate the idea!

  Abuela looks at my choices hanging on the door and shakes her head, smiling, like she did when we went to see Cats. It is a smile that says, I do not understand, but if it is important to María, I will bear it the best I can. She is elegant even at 7:00 A.M. in her embroidered silk robe and red velvet slippers. She has wrapped a shawl over her shoulders because she is always cold in our cueva, as she calls the apartment. The shawl was handmade by her mother and it is Abuela’s most prized possession. As a little girl, I liked to put it over my head because the pattern of sequins made a night sky full of stars and because it smelled like Abuela.

  Abuela sips from her cup of café con leche as she watches me.

  I feel a little strange about being in my underwear in front of her and go in my closet with my choices, which are:

  My mother’s red skirt that she wore when she had a part in a musical play on the Island. I have played dress-up with it since I was five years old, but it finally fits me perfectly. It is the kind of skirt that opens like an umbrella when you turn in circles.

  A top I sewed together from an old sari Uma’s mother was going to throw away. It is turquoise blue with silver edges.

  And finally, over my sari, I will wear my father’s sharkskin suit jacket — it’s big on me but I can roll up the sleeves. It is what he likes to wear when he sings at rent parties. Under the light, it changes colors and seems to come alive as the design shifts and moves. Papi says it is great for dancing; you don’t even need a partner.

  And finally, tall platform shoes we found buried deep in Whoopee’s closet, circa 1974, she told me. Whoopee collects antique shoes to go with her science fiction outfits. It is a fashion statement; she will tell anyone who asks. No one knows what the statement means, and that is just fine with Whoopee.

  When I part the clothes in my closet and come out like an actor in a play, Abuela’s eyes open wide. Before she can say anything, I point to each piece of my outfit and say a name: Mami, Papi, Uma, and Whoopee.

  Abuela’s face changes as she begins to understand the meaning of my fashion statement.

  “Ahora sé quién eres, María, y quién puedes ser, si quieres. Ven acá, mi amor.”

  Abuela says that she knows who I am and who I may be if I choose. I have heard those words before but I don’t remember when or where. Abuela embraces me and kisses my face several times. This is a Puerto Rican thing. It goes on for a while. I close my eyes to wait it out and I suddenly inhale a familiar scent. When I open my eyes, I see a starry sky. Abuela has put her shawl over my head.

  “Algo mío para tu día de ser quien eres, mi hija,” she tells me. Something of mine for your day of being who you are. She is letting me borrow her mother’s beautiful shawl!

  All day at school, I feel elegant. Whenever anyone tries to make fun of my costume, I think of the words my grandmother quoted to me: I know who you are and who you may be if you choose. And when I go into Mr. Golden’s class and his eyes ask me, Who are you today, María? I will say by the way I walk in, head held high, that today I am a poem.

  When Abuela went home, she left behind a black notebook in which she wrote her pensamientos, her thoughts, each night before going to bed. When I called her to ask if she wanted me to mail it to her, she said I should keep it and translate it — to practice my Spanish. Mami laughed when I told her about this. Abuela had left her journals around for her to read when she was my age. It is Abuela’s way of letting us know who she really is, and what she thinks is important. On the hardback cover of all her notebooks she had quotations from books she had read.

  My María put me in a room sterilized and painted in shades of white like a hospital. The bed is hard and the sheets always feel so stiff, I think they have just been taken out of their store packages, never having been shaped and molded by any human body. I have to take a deep breath and brace myself as I plunge under the icy sábanas. I know that she is trying hard to make me comfortable, but how I long to be in my own bed that cocoons me in its soft and yielding middle as it did my own mother before me, and to throw my ventanas open to the breezes of my Island and to the sound of the coquíes. I must remember to ask my comadre to make sure that no creatures get in my house while I am away; I always hate coming home to sweep up the dried-up little corpses of lizards and the countless spiders and mosquitoes that insist on comin
g into the house to die.

  I would rather look through a family album of photographs, even old and faded ones, than at a museum full of pictures of lonely mountains and skeletal trees. My granddaughter wants me to see how educated and cultured she is becoming. One day María and I spent three hours doing just that! Mr. Ansel Adams must have really liked being out in the cold by himself, that is all I could find to say about him. After we had crawled up from one level to another of the museum to see mountains, more mountains, trees, more trees, rivers, creeks, puddles, and all of it in black and white! Not one single human face in the entire exhibit. And this Guggenheim building an evil architect had designed in the shape of a nautilus shell nearly caused me to have a thrombosis. You had to be a slimy snail to enjoy going around and around and up and up.

  Another time, we went to see a play called Gatos. I confess only to you, Dear Diary — I find it impossible to be moved by a female cat singing her heart out about a hard life, and this after having been run over by a car. Who can believe that? But my María Alegre, my darling nieta, loved the actors in their feline costumes and was thrilled when they ran out into the dark theater flashing their eyes like little headlights. And she was moved to tears by their songs. I saw her wiping away tears while that scraggly gata wailed about her tragic life and early demise. I must admit that I was probably missing the symbolism that made my granddaughter weep because of my limited understanding of the English language. But still, to cry over gatos? And it is not as if I had not been exposed to culture in my time. On the Island, my mamá María and my papá José took us to the theaters to see some wonderful productions. Many of the plays were the works of our own young play-wrights, as well as classics from Latin America and Spain. The tears shed there by the audience were for the end of love, for death, for la patria — important matters of the heart and soul. Maybe I am just an old abuela from the Island. Maybe I should wear my hair in a bun and dress only in black clothes. Let them call me a jíbara, if they want. I will never shed a tear for a cat, no matter how tragic their lives may be. How ridiculous.