The magazine was open to a big picture of a man and woman. The man looked sleepy. The woman had a lot of blue eye makeup on, even more than Titi Ofelia or Dulce ever wore. Their faces were very close together. I pretended that instead of sitting next to my father, I was sitting on my mother’s lap and looked closer to sound out the words.
“E-liz-a-beth Tay-lor…Ri-Ri-Rich-ard Bur-ton…Naked…Lust…”
The woman snapped the magazine shut and the bus driver whirled around. “Pay your fare!” he boomed.
“What?” my father said. “She ain’t gonna be six till July, I swear.”
“No five-year-old reads ‘naked lust.’ Shame on her. And shame on you. Pay your fare!”
I remember this entire conversation happened with the bus driver looking straight at my father and me. I only hope the bus was not also moving. My father didn’t pay. It was the principle, after all. He slung me gently over his shoulder as we got off the bus, but not before getting one last swipe at the driver. “I bet your kids don’t read.”
But when he put me on my feet he said, “I told you, no reading on the bus! Now come on, before it gets dark.”
We walked up a lot of stairs to a train. I ducked under the turnstile as my father dropped in his token. When we got up to the platform, he smiled and pointed to a sign. “You can read now if you want. What does that say?”
“Up-town. Pel-ham Bay…Park. Park?”
But there was no park when we got off the train, only the elevated train tracks, which we walked under for a couple of blocks. We passed an old-looking church that took up an entire block: a huge, weathered, gray stone building in between two gray graveyards with bare-limbed trees—everything gray in the late winter sun. It wasn’t like the iglesias my abuelita and Titi Carmen had taken me to, not at all. In fact, the entire neighborhood looked different. The streets didn’t have as much garbage in them—especially dog doo-doo—and it was a lot quieter. There weren’t as many people walking in the street, and no one was playing dominoes or leaning against the walls in front of the buildings, drinking out of brown paper bags.
We crossed the street and walked along a long block of apartment buildings lined up side by side. Where were we going? Were we going to visit someone? I went through my entire family in my head, but couldn’t think of who it could be. I looked at my father. He’d stopped whistling and looked like he was thinking very hard about something. When we got to the building on the corner, he pushed open the door and we went in. There was a big open hallway with stairs going to the right and to the left. We went to the right and walked up more stairs. Now there was music, loud music coming from behind a few of the closed doors. Some of the floors smelled bad, like the time when abuelita had a tummyache and Titi Ofelia came over to cook, but the food had to be thrown out and we all had to eat Rice Krispies for dinner. Where were we going? Who lived here? My father had dropped my hand and started to go into his jacket pocket. He climbed faster and told me to hurry up.
Finally, we stopped in front of a door. It said 5C. My father fumbled in his jacket pockets again, then his shirt, and finally in his pants. Soon there was a small pile of stuff tossed onto the tile floor. I sat down to inspect everything: wallet, pack of Camels, lighter, handkerchief, a rubber band, half a roll of five-flavor LifeSavers, peppermint Chiclets, and, what I was hoping to find, Chuckles. I popped the sugar-sprinkled orange jelly candy in my mouth.
“Hold on…goddamnsonuvabitch,” I heard him mutter. I knew grown-ups were allowed to say bad words when they lost things, but kids weren’t.
A couple of more bad words later, he squatted down next to me turning over each object he’d tossed on the floor, looking at each thing again before he stuffed it back into a pocket. Had he lost something? His face was red, and he looked as if he was mad at something or someone, but I knew it wasn’t me. He let out a long breath that was kind of like a whistle; only there was no music in it.
“Well…” he said. “The surprise is…we’re getting ice cream.”
We went back downstairs and down the block to an ice-cream parlor under the El. It was wide and bright, with dark polished wood, shiny green marble, and gleaming brass. We sat at the counter on red stools that twirled around, which I did until my father stopped me by gently placing one of his hands on the top of my head and shaking the index finger of his other. He looked as if he was about to tell me something, but a man wearing a white jacket and hat appeared and smiled at us. Then a train came by and my dad had to yell over it to be heard.
“This is my little girl I was telling you about. She don’t go to school yet but she can read.”
“Naw, really?” the counterman yelled back. He smiled again and handed me the menu.
My father let me order the black-and-white ice-cream sodas. When the man went off to make them, my father turned to me and said, “That building we were in…that’s our new building. That apartment we were at…that’s where we’re going to live. Next week. But I wanted to show you first.”
The ice-cream sodas came and I started mine right away. This was the second time I was having ice cream in one day, and I was going to finish it before my father realized it and took it away. He wasn’t paying any attention though. He kept talking.
“I don’t know what happened. I must have left the keys somewhere. Don’t tell anyone I brought you here today. It’s our secret, right?” And he started drinking his ice-cream soda.
My father had finally done it. Whether by hitting the number, finding a bag of cash that fell off a truck, or creating some other urban legend, my dad had finally managed to get Kevin and me out of abuelita’s. The apartment he’d misplaced the keys for was ours. That was so like him. He always tried to do stuff, but it hardly ever turned out right. But he’d always smile or make a joke and hardly anyone could stay mad at him. At least I couldn’t. Not today anyway, when I had double ice creams in my belly. And this was a good secret. I could keep this and it wouldn’t feel bad. Not at all.
As we finished our sodas, it was starting to get dark. We got back on the train and he took me back to Grandma Mari’s, but it would be for the last time. My mother had finally come home for good. In exactly one week, we would all be together again—at last—on St. Peter’s Avenue, in a no-name neighborhood between Parkchester and Pelham Bay Park, a few stops from the end of the number 6 train in The Bronx. It was a neighborhood I would call home for the next twenty-one years.
This wasn’t going to be like living at abuelita’s. And this wasn’t anywhere near the neighborhoods we’d lived before my mother became ill. One thing I’d noticed was that everyone spoke English. The other was—as I remembered the sparse orange scruff on top of the counterman’s head—there were people who looked like me. Would I have friends? Would there be more ice cream? And what was my mother going to say? Was it going to be a surprise for her too? I hoped she would like it. I thought I would. I couldn’t wait for us all to be together again. Like a real family.
9
KITTENWORLD
The girl was pulling my ponytail. She pulled it again and called me Whitey.
The girl did this to me a lot, every day in fact, in that kindergarten, that escuela I was going to, P.S. 28M on Amsterdam Avenue because I was living at 555 West 157th Street, apartment 6B, with my abuelita and Papa Julio.
I hated school. I wanted to stay home and draw and play with my brother Kevin, even though sometimes Papa Julio catches me. And he gets mad, always mad, and sometimes he yells at me and sometimes he hits me and sometimes he does something else which I’m not supposed to tell about and maybe someone has to hurt me, but not her. Not this girl.
So I whirled my head around and the three metal barrettes in my long, bushy ponytail whacked the girl in the mouth. I heard the crack of metal against tooth. I smelled blood.
I