Part 10 (1/2)
One evening at United Bargains, the women were making crank calls, dialing random numbers out of the phone book. If a woman's voice answered, they acted as if they were having an affair with her husband, then howled with laughter at their poor gull's response. t.i.ti Carmen would join in, taking her turn on the phone and laughing as long and hard as any of them. I couldn't understand how anyone could be so cruel-so arbitrarily, pointlessly cruel. What was the pleasure in it? Walking home, I asked her, ”t.i.ti, can't you imagine the pain you're causing in that house?”
”It was just a joke, Sonia. n.o.body meant any harm.”
How could she not imagine? How could the cop not imagine what two large shopping bags full of fruit might measure in a poor vendor's life, maybe a whole day's earnings? Was it so hard to see himself in the other man's shoes?
I was fifteen years old when I understood how it is that things break down: people can't imagine someone else's point of view.
CHAPTER Twelve
THREE DAYS BEFORE Christmas and midway through my freshman year at Cardinal Spellman High School, we moved to a new apartment in Co-op City. Once again, my mother had led us to what seemed like the edge of nowhere. Co-op City was swampland, home to nothing but a desolate amus.e.m.e.nt park called Freedomland, until the cement mixers and dump trucks arrived barely a year before we did. We moved into one of the first of thirty buildings planned for a development designed to house fifty-five thousand. To get home from school, I had to hike a mile-down Baychester Avenue, across the freeway overpa.s.s, and through the vast construction site of half-built towers and bare, bulldozed mud-before reaching human habitation. An icy wind that could lift you off your feet blew from the Hutchinson River. Flurries of snow blurred the construction cranes against an opaque sky of what seemed like Siberia in the Bronx.
At least now we lived close enough for me to walk to school, and I was glad of that. The hour-long trek by bus and train from Watson Avenue had been tedious. Poor Junior, who was only in sixth grade when we moved, would make the commute in reverse from Co-op City to Blessed Sacrament for another two and a half years. No one we knew had ever heard of Co-op City. My mother learned about it from some newspaper article on the city's plans for building affordable housing. The cost of living there was pegged to income, and at the same time you were buying inexpensive shares in a cooperative, so in theory there was a tax break.
My mother was eager to get us into a safer place because the Bronxdale projects were headed downhill fast. Gangs were carving up the territory and each other, adding the threat of gratuitous violence to the scourges of drugs and poverty. A plague of arson was spreading through the surrounding neighborhoods as landlords of crumbling buildings chased insurance. Home was starting to look like a war zone.
It was Dr. Fisher who made the move possible. When he died, he left my mother five thousand dollars in his will, the final and least expected of the countless kindnesses that we could never repay, although we tried. When Dr. Fisher was hospitalized after his wife died, Abuelita made Gallego stop on the way to work every morning to pick up Dr. Fisher's laundry and deliver clean pajamas to him.
Yes, Co-op City was the end of the earth, but once I saw the apartment, it made sense. It had parquet floors and a big window in the living room with a long view. All the rooms were twice the size of those cubbyholes in the projects, and the kitchen was big enough to sit and eat in. Best of all, my mother's friend w.i.l.l.y, a musician who did handiwork too, was able to part.i.tion the master bedroom into two little chambers, each big enough for a twin bed and a tiny bureau, so Junior and I could finally have separate rooms. Each had its own door, and w.i.l.l.y even let us each choose our own wallpaper. Junior chose something neutral, in a restrained shade of beige. Mine had constellations, planets, and signs of the zodiac in an antique style, as if a Renaissance cartographer had drawn a map for s.p.a.ce travel.
I was reading a lot of science fiction and fantasizing about travel to other worlds or slipping through a time warp. It had been only the summer before, in July 1969, that two astronauts had walked on the moon, and I was awestruck that it had happened in my own lifetime, especially when I remembered how Papi had predicted this. From the earth's leaders, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin carried messages etched in microscopically tiny print on a silicon disk, messages that could fit on the head of a pin, to be deposited on the surface of the moon. Pope Paul's was from Psalm 8: ”I look up at your heavens, made by your fingers, at the moon and stars you set in place. Ah, what is man that you should spare a thought for him? Or the son of man that you should care for him? You have made him a little less than an angel, you have crowned him with glory and splendor, and you have made him lord over the work of your hand.”
I STARTED a new job at Zaro's Bakery, in the small shopping center right across the street from our building in Co-op City. On the days that I worked the morning s.h.i.+ft, I would open the shop along with the manager and her a.s.sistant. I'd fire up the machine that boiled the bagels and fill the display cases with the pastries and breads. Then, while waiting to open, we all settled down together for coffee and a snack, always a chocolate-covered French cruller for me, offset by a low-starch lunch, of course. I loved those few minutes every day, laughing over the stories amid the smells of fresh bread and coffee. It carried me back to Tio Mayo's bakery in Mayaguez.
Soon the customers would be lining up for the familiar ritual of making change and small talk. I would shake my head when they tried to engage me in Yiddish. ”What, no Yiddish? A nice Jewish girl like you?” I heard that so often that I knew the routine: my boss would explain with a bit of Yiddish I did recognize. ”s.h.i.+ksa” was technically derogative, but she said it so affectionately that I couldn't fault it. At least it wasn't ”spic”-elsewhere I'd get that often enough too.
Co-op City gradually transformed from a construction site to a community. When the harshest days of winter had pa.s.sed, you could see young couples strolling, little kids playing, senior citizens watching from the benches. A fair portion of the residents were Jewish, as the bakery's clientele indicated, but you saw people of every imaginable background, drawn from across the five boroughs, a slightly more prosperous population than we were used to in the projects: teachers, police officers, firefighters, and nurses like my mother. The buildings were pristine and flawless then, the shoddiness of their construction not yet apparent. The grounds were landscaped with trees and flowers, and the whole place was lit up at night.
Once Mami planted the flag in Co-op City, it started to look like a good idea to everyone else. Alfred, married and with kids by then, ended up in a building not far from us. Eventually, t.i.ti Carmen arrived with Miriam and Eddie; Charlie with his new wife, Ruth; and finally t.i.ti Gloria and Tio Tonio came too. t.i.ti Aurora had beaten them all to the punch: as soon as we were settled, my mother's sister moved in with us.
As fond as I'd always been of t.i.ti Aurora, this was not good news. No sooner had we finally acquired enough s.p.a.ce to breathe than we were overcrowded once again. t.i.ti slept on a daybed in the foyer. She was an early riser and grumbled if Junior and I stayed out past ten. If we had friends over, she would retire to my mother's bedroom. t.i.ti was also a bit of a pack rat. I couldn't open a closet to grab a towel without triggering an avalanche on my head. And to say t.i.ti Aurora was frugal would be an understatement. I don't think she ever spent a penny on her own pleasure or bought anything that wasn't strictly necessary. She wore the same clothes year after year and mended them expertly until mending was a lost cause. The very idea of eating out in a restaurant, of spending a dollar for eggs and toast, was deeply upsetting to her. t.i.ti's frugality, in turn, was deeply upsetting to my mother, who took pride in dressing well and delighted in splurging on small pleasures. Mami never saved, never put money away, and she would overextend herself for something that really mattered-like the encyclopedias or keeping us in Catholic school. She often had to go into debt, but she worked long and hard to pay off those commitments.
They were an odd couple, those two sisters. Neither of them showed affection, and t.i.ti especially could be austere and forbidding, but it was also clear that they were bound to each other in a way that I didn't entirely understand. They were like two trees with buried roots so tangled that they inevitably leaned on each other, and also strangled each other a bit. The sixteen-year difference between them made them more like mother and daughter, which was how they'd begun and how they would remain. Junior and I both suspected that one of Mami's motivations for inviting t.i.ti Aurora to move in was to enlist her as a spy or at least as a deterrent. Surveillance was maintained, and Mami ducked the blame. They did have an understanding, however, that t.i.ti was not permitted to discipline us directly. She had to report to Mami whatever terrible thing we had done-or rather, Mami, who wasn't eager to hear bad news, would reluctantly extract a report from t.i.ti's pointedly sullen mumbling-and then it was up to our mother to decide what punishment was warranted. This often worked in our favor. When t.i.ti phoned the hospital in a panic to report that Junior had committed an unspeakable offense, how could Mami be anything but relieved to learn that no, he hadn't committed a crime, or turned to drugs, or landed in jail? Catching him with a girlfriend in the bedroom was almost good news if you framed it like that.
JUST AS in the projects, our home was still my friends' favorite hangout. And even with t.i.ti grumbling, the party continued, my mother coming in for a cup of coffee at regular intervals, just to remind us of her presence. If we got too noisy, though, one of the neighbors was bound to call Co-op City security. The first time that happened and a uniformed guard was banging at the door, we scrambled, looking for somewhere to hide two whole six-packs of beer. But the next thing I knew, Mami came bounding out of her bedroom like a tigress, fire in her eyes. She threw open the door and yelled into the hallway, ”You tell those neighbors that these are young kids having fun in my house! That's why kids get into trouble, because people don't let them have fun at home!” Then louder still, ”If anyone has a problem with that, they can come talk to me! Not call security!” When she was done shouting, she invited the guard in for coffee and told the kids already gathering their stuff that they could stay, but just keep the volume down, please.
And so, thanks to Mami, our home became party central as well as campaign headquarters for student council elections. We threw poster-making parties, painting slogans on banners stretched all the way down the halls. We threw victory parties when we won and consolation parties when we lost. Throughout my high school years, apartment 5G, 100 Dreiser Loop, was the place to be.
MARGUERITE GUDEWICZ AND I both had a crush on Joe. He was messing around with both of us, being straight with neither. What did he think, that girls don't talk? When he dumped us both for someone else, Marguerite and I became best friends.
There was something about going to Marguerite's house that stirred memories of Abuelita's when I was small. The place was like a village, with grandparents living downstairs, Marguerite and her brother and parents upstairs, and Uncle Walter in the bas.e.m.e.nt apartment. I felt right at home.
Marguerite's father, John Gudewicz, was not one to censor himself, but at least he made an effort to tone down his remarks when I was in earshot. He still had his views on ”those Puerto Ricans,” but his kindly laugh made it impossible to take offense. In 1971, when Archie Bunker first appeared on All in the Family, we all joked that Mr. Gudewicz could sue CBS for copyright infringement. Still, when push came to shove, he stood up for me. One night at a party, his brother asked pointedly, ”Who's the spic?”
”She's a guest of ours, and if you don't like it, you can get the h.e.l.l out,” he said. And he wasn't just being a good host. I learned that when Marguerite's parents married, in their communities a match between a German and a Pole was virtually miscegenation. What's more, Marguerite's mother, Margaret, a modest woman who never talked about herself, had hidden Jews in wartime Germany. The Gudewiczes were not people who needed any lessons on the evils of prejudice.