Call Me Maria Page 8

  * * *

  I say good-bye to Mami in the street, adiós, Mami, adiós. The front stoop is now populated by the quieter night people. The old gate keepers who had worn themselves out during the day are now fanning themselves quietly, watching over the tired-to-the-bone single mothers holding sleepy babies on their laps.

  She says in her most tender Mami-voice, her azúcar-coated-voice, “Write, María. Mi María Alegre, call if you need me.”

  I say, “Yes, yes. Sí, Mami,” in my little María voice. Neither triste nor alegre. Call me María. Just María. I kiss her cheek and she holds me close for a moment. But I knew her eyes were looking past me, looking for her future to drive up. Julio. El amor. Spanish is so beautiful. A perfect language for love. El amor. A few raindrops fall on us.

  A black car pulls up. Mami waves to me as she hurries to a big Eldorado, a rental, already bearing the evidence of dirty little hands all over it. It is starting to sprinkle. The old women are folding their aluminum chairs and hurrying inside. I hear windows being raised, voices calling out “¡Qué lluvia!” It is not a complaint. The smell of rain is a promise of a cooler night for my neighbors and for me. The rain, la lluvia, is a blessing on the long hot nights of this barrio. Tonight, I will wait until the street is wet, shiny, and transformed before going in to begin writing the letter to my mother, the one I want her to find waiting for her when she returns to the Island. I will tell her I am glad that she is happy. I will tell her not to worry about Papi and me. We are home.

  Papi sometimes goes around the barrio acting the part of an abandoned man. He puts on a look of pain and suffering that gives him a new sad and mysterious image among our neighbors, especially the women. He has been betrayed by a spoiled Island woman, too proud to come live with him and his poor daughter in this, a basement apartment in the barrio. ¡Pobrecito! Our family’s story, as told by my father, makes him the working-class hero in a fairy tale and Mami the bruja, the wicked witch. Yet I knew it was not all an act. I heard him late at night, pacing the floor, and more than once I thought I heard a stifled sob. He missed her just as I did. But a real macho does not admit to crying over a woman. I knew that Papi desperately wanted to complete his transformation into the barrio man. The green Puerto Rican chameleon blending into the browns and grays of our American city. Is this his last evolution? He wants to be verde like the chameleon, but for now, my Papi is blue. And my blue father is singing the old lullaby “Cielito lindo.”

  “Ay, ay, ay, ay,” he sings to himself, “canta y no llores.”

  “Sing, and don’t cry.” That is what the lyrics mean. He used to sing that song to me when I was little. He would hold me and his guitar on his lap and let me play along with him, my little hands wrapped around his strong, hard fingers, callused from his hard job cleaning the tourist beach, and from playing his guitar.

  Doña Segura’s daughter’s leaky sink is a disaster en progreso, she yells into our answering machine, for the entire building! If her fifth floor apartment floods, we will all be washed down the street and into the Hudson River! She had left eight messages by the time I got home from school. The last one was a curse in Spanish unless my father showed up by dinnertime.

  “¡Ay, bendito! These mujeres are driving me loco. Es like a lonplei album all day long, do this, do that. I tell them they have to turnearse for my attention. I only have dos manos, even though my talentos are multifarious.”

  My father’s Spanglish is impeccable. I love the word impec-ca-ble. My mother taught me how to pronounce it after I asked her what she called the kind of English Papi spoke. I remember her laughing: “Your papi speaks impeccable Spanglish.”

  Growing up I had to choose which of my parents’ versions of English I would speak. My mother reminded me often that no tests and no job applications would be written in Spanglish. So I chose her impeccable English which I speak with a thick island accent. Now I am learning Spanglish as my third language, my language of adventure, of fun, of survival in the streets of my new home.

  “Hasta la vista, baby.” My father grabs his toolbox and his guitar and looks up at all the stairs he has to climb to reach the place where he will save somebody’s day. He shakes his head in dismay.

  He is a reluctant hero, my papi-azul.

  “Eres my superhero, Papi. You are un supermán.” He laughs at my awkward attempts at speaking Spanglish. I blow him kisses as he makes his way up the stairs. All the way up I hear my father singing the old song “Así son (las mujeres)” with the catchy refrain — that’s the way they are (women), that’s the way they are when you love them. I hear him tapping the rhythm on the walls of each landing with his toolbox, his guitar slung over his back making a thump-thump sound like the beating of a very big strong heart as he climbs flight after flight.

  Así son, así son las mujeres

  Así son, así son cuando se quieren.

  When I clean our apartment, I have to throw open the door and windows, even if it’s winter, to let fresh air clear away the smell of my father’s cigars, a new habit he has picked up at the bodega, where the men like to make a tent of smoke around their dominoes game — it must make them feel like boys in a secret clubhouse; it also keeps wives and daughters away. The dominoes room in the bodega is a man’s world, a room with only a table and chairs for the players and no place for anyone else to sit. It smells of beer and cigars, odors that are part of the nicotine-yellowed plaster on the walls. Any outsider who enters will emerge smelling like a survivor from a three-alarm fire. Once, when I had not learned the lesson of the dominoes, I went past the safety zone of the bodega to find my father.

  Papi had not shown up to eat by seven — I had just heated up a can of red kidney beans and made an ollita of white rice for him — so I walked over to Cheo’s bodega. I found him in the back at the dominoes table making those mysterious passes over the ivory pieces, which always look to me like a magic trick being performed. He was chewing on the stub of a cigar and nodding to his partner — a secret code. They were playing for money.

  “Papi.” I stood at the door to the storeroom where they play.

  “María, ¿qué haces aquí? I already ate a sandwich here. Didn’t I tell you I’d be late tonight?” I was hurt by his tone, but his eyes told me that he was trying to save face. So I said nothing.

  One of the other men, a younger one with freckles and a head of burnt-orange kinky hair, winked at my father.

  “She’s just doing her duty, hombre. Your daughter is a real mujer now. She wants to take care of her poor abandoned papi.”

  “Shut up, Iván.” My father’s tone was a harsh warning so that all talk and movement ceased, and the men turned their eyes away from me.

  There was a muffled guffaw from the orange-haired man. Papi continued distributing the dominoes, averting his eyes from them and from me.

  “Está bien, Papi.” I turned on my heel and walked out of the fog of smoke just as the harsh laughter of men erupted. He and I would have to talk later, and I would say I was sorry for having embarrassed him in front of his friends, and he would apologize for doing the same to me. I felt sorry for my father, who was trying as hard as I was to earn a part in the script of our new American life that we have to write for ourselves, every day. Así somos. That’s the way we are.

  A poem by María Alegre

  I confess,

  I had to steal English

  because what I had

  was never enough.

  The sly taking

  started as a word here,

  a word there.

  It was easy.

  I slipped words

  into my pockets,

  my crime unnoticed

  as the precious palabras

  spilled out

  of unguarded mouths,

  and when they were left behind

  like empty glasses and china

  after a banquet,

  or like familiar jewelry,

  the everyday gold

  tossed anywhere

>   at bedtime.

  I took what I needed

  and a little more

  from places I slipped easily into

  wearing my heavy accent,

  my cloak of invisibility.

  I slipped in

  while the ones who had more

  than they could ever use, dreamed

  their long, luxurious dreams,

  spoiled children

  unaware of the real value,

  their inherited wealth,

  language.

  It is different now.

  What I had to steal then

  is legally mine

  since no one has ever claimed

  a word, taken back a sentence.

  My treasure room is full.

  My second language

  is a silver cup

  from which I intend to drink

  the best wine.

  Each word I make mine

  is a pearl, a diamond,

  a ruby, I will someday string

  into a necklace

  and wear everywhere,

  as if I had been born

  rich in English.

  This book could not have been written the way it was without the vision and support of my very cool editor, Amy Griffin. The task of being my second pair of eyes fell to my apreciada asistente Billie Bennet, to whom I am very grateful for her devoted attention to the writing. Special thanks go to John Cofer, who gave me his insights on the dynamics of a high school classroom, as well as technical advice on the subjects of math and science. His unwavering belief in the power of a good teacher to shape the lives of young people is at the heart of this book.

  Judith Ortiz Cofer was born in Puerto Rico and moved to Paterson, New Jersey, as a child. The New York Times has deemed her “a writer of authentic gifts, with a genuine and important story to tell.” Orchard Books published Cofer’s book An Island Like You: Stories of the Barrio, which won the Pura Belpré Award and the Américas Award, among many others.

  Cofer’s other books include The Meaning of Consuelo, which was named an ALA Best Book for Young Adults; and Silent Dancing: A Partial Remembrance of a Puerto Rican Childhood, which was awarded the 1991 PEN/Martha Albrand Special Citation for Nonfiction and was named a New York Public Library Best Book for the Teen Age. She is the Franklin Professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Georgia, and lives in Louisville, and Athens, Georgia, with her family.

  Copyright © 2004 by Judith Ortiz Cofer. All rights reserved. Published by Scholastic Inc. SCHOLASTIC and associated logos are trademarks and/or registered trademarks of Scholastic Inc.

  Excerpt from “La Poesía” by Pablo Neruda used by permission of Houghton Mifflin. Translation of “La Poesía” excerpt by Judith Ortiz Cofer. The phrases quoted from Así son are from the recording by El Gran Combo de Puerto Rico, Combo Records RCLSP-2013, 1979.

  This book was originally published in hardcover by Orchard Books in 2004.

  First Scholastic paperback printing, July 2006

  Cover image and design by Tim O’Brien & Elizabeth B. Parisi

  e-ISBN 978-0-545-91307-2

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this publication may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher. For information regarding permission, write to Scholastic Inc., Attention: Permissions Department, 557 Broadway, New York, NY 10012.