Part 14 (1/2)

Her final exams were a torture worse than the English papers. Studying was not the problem. She had been doing that relentlessly for two years; she was used to it. But when exams loomed, the tension rose to a pitch higher than human ears could bear, the whips and chains came out, and the self-flagellation began in earnest. ”I'm never going to pa.s.s,” she moaned. I rea.s.sured her. She knew the material inside out. She had been doing these same procedures at Prospect Hospital for years.

”No, Sonia. I must have had some brain damage when I was small. Nothing stays in my memory.”

”Don't be ridiculous! You're going to pa.s.s. Do you want to bet on it?”

”Yeah, I bet I'll fail.”

We wagered a trip to Puerto Rico and shook hands on the stupidest wager I'd ever heard of: The winner would be the bigger loser. If she pa.s.sed the exams, she would buy me a plane ticket. If she failed, I would pay for her trip.

I don't know if the bet was reverse psychology or a perverse good luck charm, but it seemed to steady her resolve. In the end, of course, I won: my mother pa.s.sed all five of her qualifying exams on the first try, which doesn't happen very often.

LATE IN THE FALL SEMESTER of my soph.o.m.ore year, I sensed that something wasn't right. For two weeks in a row, no envelope had arrived in the mail. I was worried and phoned my mother: ”Where's Abuelita? Why haven't I heard from her?”

There was a long silence before Mami finally spoke. A tone of bl.u.s.tering hesitation in her voice told me that I was the last to hear the news. No one had the courage to tell me. Abuelita was in the hospital, at FlowerFifth Avenue. She had ovarian cancer. Like so many older women, she had stopped seeing a gynecologist long before. She thought-and she was sadly wrong, I want to stress-that routine checkups were pointless since she was past having children. And so the cancer was far advanced when they found it. I was ready to get on the next bus, but Mami said, ”No, wait till you come for Christmas. Hopefully, she'll be home by then.”

That was a few weeks away. I had no experience with cancer of any kind then, no point of reference, no way to guess at how serious it might be. All I knew was that winter had set in and the sky hung lower with each pa.s.sing day.

By the time I got there, Abuelita was delirious and hallucinating. I spent the days at her side, just being there, studying while she slept. Aunts and uncles and cousins squeezed into her hospital room, and then at some point on Christmas Eve the crowd vanished. People were anxious because the oil embargo meant hour-long lines at every gas station and they needed to fill up before the pumps closed for the holiday. t.i.ti Gloria said, ”Come, you'll get stuck here.” My cousin Charlie and I looked at each other: no way were we leaving.

We decided to go get a Christmas tree for Abuelita; Charlie was the one who always decorated her apartment for the holidays, just as I had done our tree ever since Papi died. It started to snow as we walked down Lexington Avenue in the fading light. We'd gone all the way to Ninety-Sixth Street before finding a florist that was open. We picked out a small tabletop tree that was beautifully decorated and took turns carrying it back, our hands freezing. The snow was already sticking; it was that cold.

”Do you remember ...?” The whole way there and back, Charlie talked. His voice is gentle, musical; just the sound of it was a comfort. He had so many memories of Abuelita, many from before I was even born. He was very close to Gallego too and had stories to tell from when they all lived in Puerto Rico, some he'd heard others tell. When Abuelita was just twelve years old, the parish priest in Manati recognized that she could heal people who were suffering mentally. He used to bring her to the asylum to exorcise their demons. She couldn't help with physical ailments, but if an unclean spirit possessed someone's mind, she could order it to leave. Even the patients she couldn't cure found a sense of peace in her presence.

Charlie has always had complete faith in Abuelita's spiritual powers. I'm too rational for that. You don't need to credit any superst.i.tion to feel how Abuelita protected the people she loved. Charlie confided in me a particular experience, his eyes getting bigger and bigger as he told the tale: One time, he had walked his girlfriend home to her place in Brooklyn, only to fall asleep on the train back up to the Bronx. Suddenly he woke, the sound of Abuelita's voice calling to him urgently, and he jumped off at the next station, just in time for the doors to close on three men who were about to mug him. The next day he saw Abuelita in person, and without any prompt the first thing she said was that he'd better give up that girl in Brooklyn!

Her fierce protectiveness also showed itself in ways that had nothing to do with spirits. She was wildly jealous of Gallego. Once at a party, he was dancing a slow merengue with the wrong woman. Abuelita grabbed the record from the Victrola and smashed it on the floor; then she kicked off her shoes and chased the woman down the stairs screaming. That was before my time, but I can imagine it easily. Mercedes was famously impulsive: joyrides at midnight, picnics on the highway median ...

At her bedside, Charlie was trying to feed Abuelita a few spoonfuls of Jell-O, but she wouldn't take any. She kept asking for her clothes, as if she were going home. I was sitting in the chair by the door, and she looked right through me, talking to someone who wasn't there. ”Angelina,” she said. A chill went down my spine. I recognized the name: her sister, who'd pa.s.sed away years ago. Charlie left the room for some reason, and then Abuelita said to me, ”Sonia, dame un cigarrillo.”

It was the first time she'd said my name since I'd arrived from Princeton. ”Abuelita, this is a hospital,” I said gently, hating to deny her. ”You can't smoke in here.”

She said it again, imperiously: ”Sonia, give me a cigarette!” The voice of the matriarch. I found my purse, pulled out a cigarette, lit it. I held it to her lips. She took a puff and gave a little cough. Then, as I watched, the life left her face.

I gave her a hug. ”Bendicion, Abuelita.” And then I yelled for the nurse. People came running, shooed me out of the room. It was just as well. I didn't go back in. I needed to be alone.

At the funeral, Charlie in his grief a.s.sumed an irrational added burden of guilt. He remembered Abuelita's having told him the year before that she wouldn't live to see another Christmas. ”We should never have bought that tree, Sonia,” he said, shaking his head. ”We should have kept Christmas out of that room.” My own sorrow flared into rage when I saw Nelson appear briefly, a spectral presence on the fringe of the mourners. I hadn't set eyes on him for three years, and now here he was, nodding in a doped-up daze. It was disrespectful of him to show up in that state, I fumed in silence. And it was desperately sad, sadder than I could bear just then. Nelson had got himself addicted to heroin while he was still in high school and then flunked out of half a dozen colleges while his father refused to accept the reality right before his eyes. His test scores were stellar, off the charts, so he'd get in the door easily enough, but he couldn't bring himself to show up for cla.s.s or do the work. He slipped away from the funeral before we could say anything to each other, and I wouldn't see him again for several more years.

In the weeks that followed, I understood for the first time Abuelita's devastation when Papi died, how it had cut into her spirit. Her death did the same to me. A piece of me perilously close to my heart had been amputated. The sense of loss was startling, physically disorienting. It occurs to me that FlowerFifth Avenue is the same hospital where I was born. ”Full circle” is the phrase that pops into my mind, as if we were one person. ”Mercedes chiquita.” I can still hear her voice sometimes, all these years later. ”Don't worry, mi'jita,” she says, and I feel her protection.

CHAPTER Seventeen

I MET MARGARITA ROSA a few weeks after arriving at Princeton, and we soon became fast friends. Coming from a poor neighborhood of Brooklyn and a traditionally conservative Puerto Rican family herself, Margarita understood instinctively the path I had traveled to Princeton. We rarely needed to talk about the incongruities of our being there, and so our rapport progressed quickly to more urgent matters.

”Three guys for every girl, and I can't get a date! What's wrong with this picture?”

”Don't take it personally,” I'd say. ”They didn't want to let women in the door, and now that we're here, they don't know what to do with us.” Princeton had turned coed just three years before, and the presence of women on campus was still a thorn in the side of many old-school diehards.