Almost a Woman : A Memoir (9780306821110) Read Free Page B

for the party. Luigi escorted La Muda from the apartment. His pale fingers pressed against her waist, his too-big suit flapped around his scarecrow frame. As they walked out, the adults exchanged mysterious smiles.
    Tío Chico and his sons were the last to leave. Tata and Don Julio went into her room and drew the curtain that separated their part of the apartment from ours. “It’s time for bed,” Mami reminded us. We got ready, Delsa and I on the top bunk, Norma and Alicia on the bottom, Hector on the sofa, Raymond in the upholstered chairs pushed together, Edna and Mami in the double bed. She turned out the light, and the soft rustles of my sisters and brothers settling into their first night in Brooklyn filled me with a secret joy, which I never admitted but which soothed and reassured me in a way nothing had since we’d left Puerto Rico.

“I don’t care what American girls do.”

    Like every other Puerto Rican mother I knew, Mami was strict. The reason she had brought me to New York with the younger kids was that I was casi señorita, and she didn’t want to leave me in Puerto Rico during what she said was a critical stage in my life. Mami told her friend Minga that a girl my age should be watched by her mother and protected from men who were sure to take advantage of a child in a woman’s body.
    While my body wasn’t exactly womanly, I knew what Mami meant. Years of eavesdropping on her conversations had taught me that men were not to be trusted. They deceived with pocavergüenzas, shameless acts that included drinking, gambling, and squandering money on women not their wives while their children went hungry. To cover up their pocavergüenzas, men lied. A man would call his wife “ mi amor ,” while looking over her shoulder at another woman passing by.
    â€œA girl is smart to be suspicious of any man who talks sweet to her,” Minga declared. “To her, his words are the most beautiful things she’s heard. She has no idea he’s said them a thousand times before . . . and will keep on saying them as long as there’s some pendeja to listen.”
    According to Mami and her friends, women committed po cavergüenzas too. They flirted with men who were taken by more worthy women and lured those feckless men astray.
    Having heard countless stories of deceitful men and wily
women, I decided never to become one of those calculating putas, but neither would I become a pendeja, who believed everything a man told her, or looked the other way while he betrayed her. There was a midpoint between a puta and a pendeja that I was trying to figure out, a safe space in which decent women lived and thrived and raised their families. Mami belonged there, as did her friends and female relatives. Her lectures, and the pointed conversations I was supposed to overhear, were meant to help me distinguish between a puta and a pendeja. But there was always a warning. One false move, and I ran the risk of becoming one or being perceived as the other.

    I made a friend in school, Yolanda, a girl who spoke good English but spoke Spanish with me. Yolanda was the only Puerto Rican I’d met who was an only child. She was curious about what it was like to have six sisters and brothers, and I asked what she did all day with no one to play or fight with.
    â€œOh, you know, watch television, read, and I have my albums.”
    She collected pictures in three-ring binders, organized by type. “These are flowers,” she said, pulling down a fat binder from a shelf over her bed. She opened it to a page cluttered with flowers from the Carnation milk can label. “And over here are lips.” Pages and pages of lips, male and female, some with mustaches over them, others the disembodied smiles of movie stars. “This one is letters.” Arranged alphabetically, hundreds of letters were pasted on the pages, uppercase letters sprinkled on the left side, lowercase on