Part 10 (2/2)
Beyond the very circ.u.mscribed world of my family and our few blocks of the South Bronx, a much wider world was opening up to me, if only in a New York sort of way. If you grow up on salsa and merengue, then polkas and jitterbugs look as if they jumped off the pages of National Geographic. To Puerto Rican taste buds, the blandness of German, Polish, and Irish food left something to be desired, but it did seem we had a lot to learn about preparing vegetables. I noticed too that the mis.h.i.+gas on display in the hallways of Co-op City or at Zaro's more than matched the volubility of Puerto Rican family life, but if we'd slung the kinds of insults that our Jewish neighbors regularly did, the dishonor and acrimony would have stuck for generations. I was always amazed to hear them laughing together again within minutes of a flare-up.
The differences were plain enough, and yet I saw that they were as nothing compared with what we had in common. As I lay in bed at night, the sky outside my window reflecting the city's dim glow, I thought about Abuelita's fierce loyalty to blood. But what really binds people as family? The way they sh.o.r.e themselves up with stories; the way siblings can feud bitterly but still come through for each other; how an untimely death, a child gone before a parent, shakes the very foundations; how the weaker ones, the ones with invisible wounds, are sheltered; how a constant din is medicine against loneliness; and how celebrating the same occasions year after year steels us to the changes they herald. And always food at the center of it all.
JUST AS my emotional world was growing in Co-op City, my intellectual horizons were beginning to expand at school. Miss Katz, who taught us history my junior year, was different from any teacher I'd had before, different, in fact, from anyone I had ever known. Compared with the nuns, she seemed young and vibrant. She warned us against getting stuck in rote learning, about how we needed to master abstract, conceptual thinking. The meaning of all this would be revealed once we'd written our first essays. Our first what? There we sat, rows of blank faces in our regulation navy skirts, white blouses, and sweater vests. Eleven years of memorization had molded our minds to be no less uniform. Essay? Somehow we had reached junior year in high school without having written anything beyond book reports. The nuns had always fed us facts, and we had always parroted them back. I was very good at it. I prided myself on being able to soak up vast oceans of facts. No teacher had ever asked anything more in exchange for an A.
Miss Katz asked something more. Her p.r.o.nouncements and challenges intrigued me. What would it mean to think critically about history? How do you a.n.a.lyze facts? At least I'd learned by then the value of asking for help. If I went to talk to her after cla.s.s, she wouldn't slam the door on me.
In fact, the door was wide open, and we had several long and fascinating conversations. She told me about her boyfriend, a Brazilian she described as a freedom fighter working on behalf of the poor and oppressed under the military dictators.h.i.+p. I asked how, being Jewish, she'd come to work at a Catholic school, and she told me she was inspired by the nuns and priests she'd encountered in Latin America. They put their lives at risk for the sake of helping the poor. She talked in a similar way about Father Gigante, too, which took me by surprise, but it made sense.
Father Gigante was our priest at St. Athanasius, where I'd attended Ma.s.s with t.i.ti Aurora before the move to Co-op City. I would only gradually become aware that the familiar figure at the altar was a larger-than-life presence beyond the sanctuary, an activist for tenants' rights who famously walked the mean streets with a baseball bat as he negotiated with gangs and landlords. In the same parish where Abuelita and all my family had lived until my mother led the exodus, Father Gigante was working to reclaim buildings that were abandoned or gutted by arson and renovate them as low-cost housing. It wouldn't have occurred to me to call him a freedom fighter, but why not?
Miss Katz was the first progressive I'd ever encountered up close. There certainly weren't many others at Cardinal Spellman High School in those days, and she would last there only one year. I remember wondering what made her so intriguing. How could one become an interesting person? It wasn't just having a boyfriend you could describe as a hero, though that certainly got my attention. It had more to do with her questioning the meaning of her existence, thinking in terms of a purpose in life. She was a teacher but still educating herself, learning about the world and actively engaged in it. I began to have an intimation that education could be for something other than opening the doors of job opportunity, in the sense of my mother's constant refrain.
I wish I could say that the same kind of reflection that lit up my conversations with Miss Katz had thrown some light on the problem of writing a history essay. Somehow her prescription for critical thinking and a.n.a.lysis remained abstract, if tantalizing. Though I did well enough in her cla.s.s, I would have to wait till college before I could really understand what she meant.
IT HAD BEEN established that Sonia Sotomayor was not much to look at. I had a pudgy nose. I was gawky and ungraceful. I barreled down the halls of Cardinal Spellman, headfirst, unlike those who knew how to amble with a s.e.xy sashay. My own mother told me that I had terrible taste in clothes.
I did get asked out occasionally. Usually, a friend's boyfriend had a friend, and they were looking for a fourth to double-date. Sometimes he would ask me again, and sometimes it would last for a while but never as long as going steady. Once I was the one to put an end to it: as his contribution to a meal that some friends were making at my house, my date decided to shoplift the bacon for the BLTs. Making matters worse, it wouldn't have happened except that Mami didn't have enough money to put together a meal for us that day. She was terribly ashamed, but she would have been horrified to learn about the shoplifting. I wanted nothing more to do with that guy.
Mostly, I felt like everybody's second choice, which is why a compliment could catch me off guard, especially an unconventional one. For instance, according to Chiqui, I had ”baseball bat legs.” Thanks a lot, Chiqui.
”No, that's good! You see how your ankles are small and the calves curve? You've got good legs.”
I would hear worse: Kevin told me that Scully's dad said I was ”built like a brick s.h.i.+t-house.”
”It's a compliment, Sonia.”
”What kind of compliment is that?”
”It's just an expression,” Kevin insisted. ”It means you're well built. Not like some flimsy wooden job.” I couldn't believe my ears. Was that what they meant by Irish wit?
Apart from dubious flattery, the truth was that Kevin Noonan made me feel attractive in a way that was new to me and not unwelcome. I, in turn, was entranced by his blue-gray eyes. I found myself scanning the hallway on the far side of Cardinal Spellman's divisive crack to catch a glimpse of that frizzy halo of sandy curls that made his slight figure stand out in the uniformed crowd.
On our first date, we took the train down to Manhattan. We walked the entire city, walked for hours, talking as he showed me his favorite spots. The first place he took me was a tiny park on East Fifty-Third Street where a curtain of water still runs down a stone wall. The sound of the fountain makes the city seem far away and turns the vest-pocket park into a private cove.
From that first date, we were inseparable. For the first month that I knew Kevin, he brought me a rose every single day. One time after school I was walking with him to the stop where he caught the bus home to Yonkers. We pa.s.sed by t.i.ti Gloria's house, and I dragged Kevin in to meet her and Tio Tonio. Really, I just wanted to postpone our parting, but as soon as we got there, Kevin turned pale and clammed up. I thought maybe he was put off because t.i.ti Gloria and Tio Tonio kept switching to Spanish, even though they were making quite an effort, welcoming us with cake and cookies and sodas. But Kevin remained stony, and I was more than a little upset by this.
The next day when I got to school, there was no rose. I was getting seriously worried that things were over between us. But finally Kevin confessed: he had been stealing my daily roses from Tio Tonio's garden! He looked at me with a hangdog expression that didn't go with his sparkling eyes and said, ”There's a lot of them, Sonia.” It was true: Tio Tonio's rosebushes were magnificent. I laughed so hard I almost choked. I was happy to accept that the rose-colored phase of our romance was over. Now we were just a couple.
Kevin practically moved in with us except, of course, that my mother made him go home at night. We couldn't afford much dating beyond the local pizzeria. Instead, we hung out at home, studying together or watching TV. He loved reading as much as I did, and we might silently turn the pages side by side for hours at a time. We went for walks, or visited my family, or worked on Kevin's car. And we talked constantly about everything imaginable.
We didn't go over to his house much, because his mother had a hard time accepting me. She wouldn't say it to my face, but the message came through with a tightening of the lips, a slant of the eyebrow, a slam of the door. She would have been happier if I were Irish, or at least not Puerto Rican. I'd seen this before. One guy I'd dated before Kevin had ducked a teacup thrown at his head when his mother found out I was Puerto Rican. Kevin's mom was not so kinetic about her distress, seeking the counsel of her priest. He either shared her opinion of my people or else lacked the backbone to tell her that it was not a very Christian view. Kevin defended him. The parish in Yonkers was 100 percent Irish, he rationalized, and the priest had no choice but to affirm his community's values. I disagreed. Bigotry is not a value.
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