My Grandma Isabel, or Izzy, was my father’s mother. She was also from Puerto Rico, from Cabo Rojo, a resort city on the island’s southwest coast. The name means Red Tip or Red Cape. On an island where every coastal town claims to have the most beautiful beach, this one really does. It’s called El Buye. Like Grandma Mari, Grandma Izzy also came to New York City as a newlywed. I have a photograph of her with my grandfather Ezekiel, circa 1928, in which you can tell she’s just a teenager by the look on her round moon face. Her expression is free of frustration, resignation, and grief—the failed businesses, unfaithful husband, and five sons all still ahead of her.
Both of my abuelas were there for me the day I was born. According to my mother, it was the hottest day of the year when she unexpectedly went into labor. She was only eight months pregnant and wasn’t prepared for it. When she started to feel pains, my father was driving a forklift at a construction site somewhere in Queens; my mother’s half sisters, Carmen, Ofelia, and Dulce, all still teenagers, were out with their friends; and her one best friend, Daisy, was on her honeymoon. She called her mother, but she wasn’t home either. Her stepfather, Papa Julio, worked nights and was annoyed by the early afternoon phone call, but agreed to leave his wife, Grandma Mari, a note. As usual, my mother was on her own.
My mother grabbed her already packed little suitcase and jumped into a taxi. “Columbia-Presbyterian/Sloane Hospital, 168th Street and Broadway, please.” She leaned back against the seat and rolled down the window. Lucy had been warned about the horrors of childbirth, but she took pride in her ability to withstand pain.
By the time she arrived at the hospital, the pains subsided. The resident who examined her said, “Your water hasn’t broken, the contractions have stopped and you’re not due till the end of the month? False alarm. Go home, take two aspirins and take a nap.” Back then people listened to doctors, and my mother left to do just that.
Except in the taxi home, her water broke and the contractions resumed. Violently. She told the driver to turn around and go back, quick! “Hold it in,” he said. “No babies in my cab!”
When she got to the hospital again, she was immediately rushed into an operating room; her little suitcase was left behind.
“Breech!”
“Caesarian!”
“Stat!”
Lucy felt a mask over her face, heard the tang of what she guessed to be a scalpel, and thought, “After all I have been through, I do not want to feel this.” She inhaled the anesthesia as deeply as she could.
As my mother went under, Grandma Mari burst into the hospital waiting room. Upon finding the note left by her husband, she ran the twelve blocks from her apartment, with asthma and in high heels, to get to her daughter. There is never a guagua, bus, or un taxi when you need one (or when she needed one). She sensed something had gone wrong with either my mother, but no one would tell her exactly what. She knew exactly what she had to do.
As people streamed in and out of the waiting room, they beheld Grandma Mari, with her salt-and-pepper hair streaming out of two real tortoiseshell combs and her beaded straw summer handbag at her feet, leading a charismatic prayer. Many of the visitors joined in, although in support of what exactly, they weren’t sure. It was a multigenerational, multiethnic congregation of minds, hearts and Espiritu Santo, the Holy Spirit.
A couple of hours into the prayer session, breathless from an hour-long bus ride from The Bronx, burst in Grandma Izzy. She was also in heels. Her bouffant was damp and collapsed, and her green patent leather pocketbook hung open. Bracelets jangled up and down her arms, and a crumpled pack of Belairs was in her hand. Her keen hazel eyes scanned Grandma Mari and the prayer group as she asked, “Por favor, does anyone have a light?”
The last thing Grandma Izzy expected to find at the hospital was a mini iglesia revival. The phone call she received from Grandma Mari only said, “Lucy is having the baby. Come now.” Grandma Izzy wasn’t particularly religious and wasn’t what you would call a joiner, but she did have cojones: nerve. She also had a good command of the English language and the inability to take “maybe” for an answer.
While Grandma Mari continued to pray, Grandma Izzy, who realized that something had gone very very wrong, canvassed the hospital floor until at last she found a doctor who told her that my mother would live, but I might not. By this time my father had arrived (going straight to the ICU and my soundly sleeping mother) along with the balance of both families (minus the nightshift-working Papa Julio).
I was cut free in that late afternoon, cold and blue, with no guarantee of surviving. I had turned in the womb multiple times, and became stuck, butt first and strangled by my own umbilical cord. It was a talent I would repeat in many variations, many times later in my life. To my family’s relief though, the doctors resuscitated me and placed me in an oxygen pressure incubator—the rare and latest technology for treating infant asphyxia.
I’m not sure if they stayed at the hospital that night, but the next morning both of my grandmothers stood in front of a glass window that separated them from my incubator. The doctors warned them that even though I’d lived, I was without oxygen for almost four minutes and there was a 50 percent chance that I’d be “mentally compromised,” blind, or both. My grandmothers were prepared for this as much as anyone can be.
But they weren’t prepared for a thrashing, squalling, carrot-topped bundle. As they stared at me through the glass pane, their conversation probably went like this:
GRANDMA MARI: “El Señor will decide if she lives.”
GRANDMA IZZY: “No, she will decide.”
GRANDMA MARI: “She will need us to protect her and guide her.”
GRANDMA IZZY: “She will learn the only one you can depend on is yourself. Por favor, Mari, do you have a light?”
GRANDMA MARI: “Mija, no puedes fumar aqui. Let’s go get un café.”
Thirty-six hours after the two longest taxi rides of her life, my mother woke up with her jet-black hair slowly turning white and a healthy baby girl to bring home. Even Grandma Izzy had to admit it was un milagro, a miracle—one that both of my grandmothers would always take full credit for.
From Grandma Mari, I’d learn to find hope in things both unexpected and unseen. From Grandma Izzy, I’d learn that when you want something, you must try for it as hard as you can, pretty much any way you can, and when you think that you can’t possibly go any farther, take just one more step because that’s when the door will open.
2
THE ILLUMINATION OF ST. LUCY
The day after my mother arrived in New York City, she woke up to find the world had turned blanco. White things had taken over the sky, swirling over the ground, the running boards of cars, and the limbs of what she thought were dead trees (she had only known the Caribbean’s eternal summer). Barefoot, with her short braids sticking out behind her, she ran out of the apartment into the magic street, and bolted, just as quickly, back inside.
“It burns. It burns! I want to go home.”
“You are home,” her mother said.
Running innocently into unfamiliar and hurtful things was the story of my mother’s entire childhood. What I know, what I’ve been told is this: Grandma Marisol’s first husband, my mother’s father, was a man named Beltran. He was a musician who went back and forth between Corozal, the rural town where my mother and Grandma Mari lived, to New York City. “I’ll come back