An Island Like You Read online

  “I have time, Abuelo.” I’m a little embarrassed that he saw me looking at my watch.

  “Yes, hijo. You have spoken the truth. La verdad. You have much time.”

  Abuelo reads: “ ‘I loved words from the beginning of my life. In the campo where I was born one of seven sons, there were few books. My mother read them to us over and over: the Bible, the stories of Spanish conquistadors and of pirates that she had read as a child and brought with her from the city of Mayagüez; that was before she married my father, a coffee bean farmer; and she taught us words from the newspaper that a boy on a horse brought every week to her. She taught each of us how to write on a slate with chalks that she ordered by mail every year. We used those chalks until they were so small that you lost them between your fingers.

  “ ‘I always wanted to be a writer and a teacher. With my heart and my soul I knew that I wanted to be around books all of my life. And so against the wishes of my father, who wanted all his sons to help him on the land, she sent me to high school in Mayagüez. For four years I boarded with a couple she knew. I paid my rent in labor, and I ate vegetables I grew myself. I wore my clothes until they were thin as parchment. But I graduated at the top of my class! My whole family came to see me that day. My mother brought me a beautiful guayabera, a white shirt made of the finest cotton and embroidered by her own hands. I was a happy young man.

  “ ‘In those days you could teach in a country school with a high school diploma. So I went back to my mountain village and got a job teaching all grades in a little classroom built by the parents of my students.

  “ ‘I had books sent to me by the government. I felt like a rich man although the pay was very small. I had books. All the books I wanted! I taught my students how to read poetry and plays, and how to write them. We made up songs and put on shows for the parents. It was a beautiful time for me.

  “ ‘Then the war came, and the American President said that all Puerto Rican men would be drafted. I wrote to our governor and explained that I was the only teacher in the mountain village. I told him that the children would go back to the fields and grow up ignorant if I could not teach them their letters. I said that I thought I was a better teacher than a soldier. The governor did not answer my letter. I went into the U.S. Army.

  “ ‘I told my sergeant that I could be a teacher in the army. I could teach all the farm boys their letters so that they could read the instructions on the ammunition boxes and not blow themselves up. The sergeant said I was too smart for my own good, and gave me a job cleaning latrines. He said to me there is reading material for you there, scholar. Read the writing on the walls. I spent the war mopping floors and cleaning toilets.

  “ ‘When I came back to the Island, things had changed. You had to have a college degree to teach school, even the lower grades. My parents were sick, two of my brothers had been killed in the war, the others had stayed in Nueva York. I was the only one left to help the old people. I became a farmer. I married a good woman who gave me many good children. I taught them all how to read and write before they started school.’ ”

  Abuelo then puts the notebook down on his lap and closes his eyes.

  “Así es la vida is the title of my book,” he says in a whisper, almost to himself. Maybe he’s forgotten that I’m there.

  For a long time he doesn’t say anything else. I think that he’s sleeping, but then I see that he’s watching me through half-closed lids, maybe waiting for my opinion of his writing. I’m trying to think of something nice to say. I liked it and all, but not the title. And I think that he could’ve been a teacher if he had wanted to bad enough. Nobody is going to stop me from doing what I want with my life. I’m not going to let la vida get in my way. I want to discuss this with him, but the words are not coming into my head in Spanish just yet. I’m about to ask him why he didn’t keep fighting to make his dream come true, when an old lady in hot-pink running shoes sort of appears at the door.

  She is wearing a pink jogging outfit too. The world’s oldest marathoner, I say to myself. She calls out to my grandfather in a flirty voice, “Yoo-hoo, Arturo, remember what day this is? It’s poetry-reading day in the rec room! You promised us you’d read your new one today.”

  I see my abuelo perking up almost immediately. He points to his wheelchair, which is hanging like a huge metal bat in the open closet. He makes it obvious that he wants me to get it. I put it together, and with Mrs. Pink Running Shoes’s help, we get him in it. Then he says in a strong deep voice I hardly recognize, “Arturo, get that notebook from the table, please.”

  I hand him another map-of-the-Island notebook — this one is red. On it in big letters it says, POEMAS DE ARTURO.

  I start to push him toward the rec room, but he shakes his finger at me.

  “Arturo, look at your watch now. I believe your time is over.” He gives me a wicked smile.

  Then with her pushing the wheelchair — maybe a little too fast — they roll down the hall. He is already reading from his notebook, and she’s making bird noises. I look at my watch and the hour is up, to the minute. I can’t help but think that my abuelo has been timing me. It cracks me up. I walk slowly down the hall toward the exit sign. I want my mother to have to wait a little. I don’t want her to think that I’m in a hurry or anything.

  Mira! Mira!” my friend Yolanda yells out. She’s always telling me to look at something. And I always do. I look; she does. That’s the way it’s always been. Yolanda just turned sixteen, I’m six months younger. I was born to follow the leader, that’s what my mother says when she sees us together, and it’s true.

  It’s like the world is a deli full of pricey treats to Yolanda, and she wants the most expensive ones in fancy boxes, the ones she can’t afford. We spend hours shopping downtown. Sometimes when Yolanda gets excited about an outfit, we go into the store and she tries it on. But the salespeople are getting to know us. They know we don’t have any money. So we get chased out of places a lot. Yolanda always yells at the security man, “I’ve been thrown out of better places than this!” And we have.

  One time Yolanda and I skipped school and took a bus into the city — just because Yolanda wanted to look around the big store on Thirty-fourth Street. They were having a teen fashion show that day, for all the rich girls in New York and their overdressed mothers. And guess what? Yolanda sneaked into one of the dressing rooms, with me following her, and she actually got in line for one of the dresses being handed out by all these busy-looking women with tape measures around their necks who called all the girls “honey” and measured their chest, waist, and hips in about thirty seconds flat. Then this guy in a purple skintight body suit screeches out, “Hey, you!” and I nearly pass out, thinking we had gotten caught.

  “Those earrings are monstrous!” he screams at Yolanda, who’s wearing pink rubber fish earrings to match her pink-and-black-striped minidress.

  “Here, try these!” He hands her a set of gold hoops in a very fancy black velvet box; then he screams at another model. I go into a dressing stall to hide and Yolanda runs in and sits on my lap, laughing her head off.

  “Mira, Doris, mira.” She shows me the earrings, which look like real gold. I hug Yolanda — I just love this girl. She’s crazy and will try anything for fun.

  I help Yolanda put on the dress she says she’s going to model. The price tag inside says $350.00. It’s my turn to say “Mira” to Yolanda. She shrugs.

  “I ain’t gonna steal it, Doris,” she says. “I’m just gonna walk down that runway, like this.” She walks out of the dressing room with one hand on a hip, looking like a real model in a green velvet dress, gold earrings, and her white sneakers. The man in the body suit runs up to her, screaming, “No, no! What do you think you’re doing? Those shoes are monstrous!” He waves over one of the women with measuring tapes around their necks and has her take down Yolanda’s shoe size. Soon I’m helping her try on shoes from a stack as tall as I am. She decides on black patent leather pumps.

  There’s such
confusion back there that Yolanda doesn’t get caught until the girls are lined up for the show to begin. Then nobody can find Yolanda on the list. She really does a good job of acting offended at all the trouble. I think it’s her New Jersey Puerto Rican accent that gives her away. The others talk with their noses way up in the air, sounding like they have a little congestion.

  “Whaddaya mean my name ain’t there?” Yolanda demands, sticking her nose up there in orbit too.

  I just stand to the side and watch everything, pretending that it’s a play and Yolanda is the star. I promise myself that if it gets too dangerous, I’ll just slip out. See, I’m not flashy like Yolanda. I’m practically invisible. My hair is kinky, so I keep it greased down, and I’m short and plain. Not ugly, not beautiful. Just a nothing. If it wasn’t for Yolanda, nobody would know I’m around. She’s great, but she scares me, like the modeling thing at the store. I have enough problems without getting arrested. So I tell myself that if the police come, I’ll just make myself invisible and walk away. Then I’d be really alone. If Yolanda knew how scared I really am, she’d leave me anyway. Yolanda always says that nothing scares her except scared people. She says she hates a snitch worse than anything, and that’s what scared people do, she tells me. They blame others for their troubles. That’s why she dumped her last best friend, Connie Colón. Connie got scared when her mother found out she’d been skipping school with Yolanda, and told. Yolanda gets a cold look in her eyes when she talks about Connie, like she wants her dead. I don’t want Yolanda to ever look at me that way.

  Anyway, a big bossy woman came to lead us to her office on the top floor. It was bigger than my bedroom and her desk was at least the size of my bed. There was a rug under our feet that was as thick as a fur coat. From her window you could see most of New York. She looked at Yolanda with an expression on her face like I see on people walking by street people. It’s like they want to ask them, “What are you doing on my sidewalk?” The lady didn’t even look at me, so I glued myself to the gray wall.

  “Young lady, do you realize that what you did today could be considered a crime?” She spoke very slowly, sounding out each word. I guess she knew by now that we were Puerto Rican and wanted to make sure we understood.

  Yolanda didn’t answer. They had made her take off the velvet dress, the shoes, and the earrings. The woman who carried them out with her fingertips put them in a plastic bag before handing them to this woman in front of us now.

  Holding up the plastic bag in front of Yolanda, she asked another question: “Do you know how much money the things you took are worth?”

  I watched Yolanda get up slowly from tying her shoestrings. She put on her pink fish earrings next without any hurry. Then she straightened out her tight skirt. She still looked offended. And maybe like she wanted a fight.

  “I wasn’t stealing your theengs,” she said, imitating the woman’s uptown accent.

  “Then what were you doing in our dressing room, trying to disrupt the fashion show?”

  “No. I was going to model the dress.” Yolanda put her hands on her hips as if daring the woman to argue with her.

  “Model? You wanted to model clothes here?” The woman laughed. “Young lady —”

  “My name is Yolanda.” Yolanda was getting angry, I could tell by the way she made her eyes flash at the woman, like a cat getting ready to pounce. It was strange to watch Yolanda, who is barely five feet tall, facing off with this big woman in a gray suit and high heels.

  “All right, Yolanda. Let me tell you something. You can’t just decide to be a model, sneak into a dressing room, and go on a runway. These girls have been to modeling school. They have been practicing for weeks. Did you really think you could get away with this?” She was sounding angry now. I edged toward the door. “I’ll tell you what. I’m not going to turn you in. I’m going to have our security guard escort you outside. And I never want to see you in this store again. Look.” She pointed to a camera practically invisible on the ceiling.

  “We have pictures of you now, Yolanda.” She finally looked over at me. “And of your partner there. If you come back, all I have to do is show them to the judge.”

  We were shown the way out to Thirty-fourth Street by the security guard, who looked just like any rich shopper in his wool sweater and expensive jeans. You never know who’s watching you.

  So Yolanda is telling the truth when she tells the store people that we’ve been thrown out of better places. She’s always looking for a better place to get thrown out of. But the Thirty-fourth Street store may be hard to beat.

  That same day we went up to the eighty-sixth floor of the Empire State Building — it’s just down the street from the store. Yolanda went all around the viewing deck like a child, yelling out, “Mira! Mira!” from every corner. She was feeling good.

  * * *

  At home there is always salsa music playing, but it’s not because anyone is happy or feels like dancing. To my parents music is a job. They’re both in a Latino music band called ¡Caliente! He plays the drums and she sings, so they’re always listening to tapes. They play at the same barrio club every night, the Caribbean Moon, and the regular customers want to hear new songs every week. So Mami sings along with the tapes, but she looks bored while she’s doing it. Most of my life she stopped singing only to tell me to do something or to yell at me. My father doesn’t say much. He’s hardly ever around during the day; either he sleeps until the afternoon, since they play sets until three in the morning, or he goes down to the basement to practice his drums. The super of our building, Tito, is his best friend and lets Papi keep his drums in a storage room near the washers and dryers. Our apartment has walls thin and crumbly as old cardboard, and if he tried to play drums in it they’d probably crash around our heads.

  My mother is singing along with Celia Cruz, the old Cuban salsera, when I come in. She’s at the stove, sautéing some codfish. I can smell the olive oil simmering, but I’m not hungry. Yolanda and I ate a whole bagful of butterscotch candy. She wouldn’t tell me where she got it and I never saw her buy it, although I spent the whole day with her.

  “Hola, Doris, how’s school?” my mother asks. But she doesn’t look at me and she doesn’t wait for me to answer. She just keeps on singing something about leaving the cold American city and going home to a lover in the sun. I stand there watching her; I’m feeling invisible again. The tape ends and she asks me where I’ve been, since school let our hours ago.

  “New York.”

  She finally looks at me and smiles as if she doesn’t believe me. “I bet you’ve been following that Yolanda around again. Niña, I’m telling you that señorita is trouble. She’s trying to grow up too fast, sabes? Mira …” Mami takes my chin into her hand that smells like oregano and garlic and other Island spices. She looks really tired. She’s short like me and we look a lot alike, but I don’t think she’s noticed. “Doris, tonight is not a school night, why don’t you come to the club with us and listen to some music?” She’s asked me to do that once a week for years, but I’m not interested in hanging out at a cheap nightclub with a bunch of drunks. Besides, I’d have to sit in the back the whole time because I’m a minor. In case the police do a check — I can slip out the kitchen door. When I was little, I had to go with them a lot, and it wasn’t fun. I’d rather stay home by myself.

  I shake my head and go into my room. I put a pillow over my face so I won’t hear the music and my mother singing about people in love and islands with beaches and sun.

  I spend all day Saturday at Yolanda’s. We have the place to ourselves because her mother works weekends. She believes in spiritism, so there are candles everywhere with things written on the glass jars like “For money and luck,” and “For protection against your enemies,” and “To bring your loved one home.” She’s got a little table set up as an altar with statues of santos and the Virgin Mary, and a picture of her dead husband, Yolanda’s father, who was killed during a robbery. Yolanda says she doesn’t remember him that we
ll anymore, even though it’s only a couple of years since he died.

  The place is stuffy with incense smells, and Yolanda tells me we are going shopping today.

  “You got money?” I notice that she’s wearing a big raincoat of her mother’s. It’s made if shiny bright green plastic and it has huge pockets. I start feeling a little sick to my stomach and almost tell her I’m going home to bed.

  “I got what it takes, honey.” Yolanda models the ugly raincoat for me by turning around and around in the small room.

  We have to pass my apartment on our way out, and I can hear my mother singing an old song without the usual music tape accompanying her in the background. I stop to listen. It’s “Cielito Lindo” — a sort of lullaby that she used to sing to me when I was little. Her voice sounds sweet, like she is really into the song for once. Yolanda is standing in front of me with her hands on her hips, giving me a funny look like she thinks I’m a sentimental baby. Before she says something sarcastic, I run down the stairs.

  Yolanda is not just window-shopping today. She tells me that she’s seen something she really wants. When we get to the store — one of the most expensive ones downtown — she shows me. It’s a black beaded evening bag with a long strap. She puts it on over her shoulder.

  “It’s cute,” I tell her, feeling sicker by the minute. I want to get out of the store fast, but I’m too weak to move.

  “You really like it, Doris?” Yolanda unlatches the flap on the purse and takes out the crumpled paper in it. She reaches into her pocket for a fistful of candy. “Want some?” In one motion she has stuffed the little bag into her coat pocket.

  “Yolanda …” I finally begin to feel my legs under me. I am moving back, away from the scene that starts happening really fast in front of me, as if someone had yelled “Action!” on a movie set. Yolanda is standing there eating candy. I am moving backward even as she tries to hand me some. A man in a gray suit is moving toward her. I am now behind a rack of purses. I smell the leather. It reminds me of my father’s drums that he used to let me play when I was little. Yolanda looks around, but she can’t see me. I’m still moving back toward the light of the door. I know that I can’t act scared, that I shouldn’t run. People look at me. I know they can see me. I know where my arms are, where my legs are, where my head is. I am out on the street in the sun. A woman with a baby carriage bumps into me and says, “Excuse me!” She can see me! I hear a police car siren getting louder as I hurry across the street. I walk faster and faster until I am running and the world is going by so fast that I can’t tell what anyone else is doing. I only hear my heart pounding in my chest.