My Beloved World (20 page)

I CAME TO ACCEPT
during my freshman year that many of the gaps in my knowledge and understanding were simply limits of class and cultural background, not lack of aptitude or application as I’d feared. That acceptance, though, didn’t make me feel less self-conscious and unschooled in the company of classmates who’d had the benefit of much more worldly experience. Until I arrived at Princeton, I had no idea how circumscribed my life had been, confined to a community that was essentially a village in the shadow of a great metropolis with so much to offer, of which I’d tasted almost nothing. I was enough of a realist not to fret about having missed summer camp, or travel abroad, or a casual familiarity with the language of wealth. I honestly felt no envy or resentment, only astonishment at how much of a world there was out there and how much of it others already knew. The agenda for self-cultivation that had been set for my classmates by their teachers and parents was something I’d have to develop for myself. And meanwhile, there could come at any moment the chagrin of discovering something else I was supposed to know. Once, I was trying to explain to my friend and later roommate Mary Cadette how out of place I sometimes felt at Princeton.

“It must be like Alice in Wonderland,” she said sympathetically.

“Alice who?”

She was kind enough to salvage the moment with a quick grace: “It’s a wonderful book, Sonia, you must read it!” In fact, she would guide me
thoughtfully toward a long list of classics she had read while I’d been perusing
Reader’s Digest
. What did my mother know of
Huckleberry Finn
or
Pride and Prejudice
?

Later, at the Computer Center, I would enter data for a project that Judith Rowe described as a study of how people paid for college. My fingers froze on the keys as I read what I was typing: financial figures of the most well-off at Princeton. This was my first glimpse of trust funds; tax write-offs and loopholes; summer jobs at Daddy’s firm that paid the equivalent of a year’s tuition; incomes in the millions, disbursed a half million here, a few hundred thousand for that poor guy there. Between her own salary from Prospect Hospital and her survivors’ benefits, which would end very soon, my mother’s income was never more than five thousand dollars a year. Nothing could have clarified as starkly where I stood in relation to some of the people among whom I was now living and learning.

I never deluded myself that I could fill in everything I had missed growing up. Nor did I fail to appreciate that I’d had experiences of my own to prize or that I’d seen some aspects of life of which my classmates were sometimes naively unaware. Suffice it to say that Princeton made me feel that long after those summers spent first discovering the world’s great books, I’d have to remain a student for life. It has been my pleasure to be one, actually, long after the virtue has ceased to be such a necessity.

E
VERY WEEK
, like clockwork, a small, square envelope arrived in the mail, addressed in a familiar, scratchy hand. Inside the envelope was a paper napkin and inside that a dollar bill. Abuelita wasn’t much of a correspondent. She might sign the napkin, or not, but the loving gesture was reliable and steadfast. It meant a lot to know she was thinking of me, and a dollar was no small thing, for her or for me. Once in a rare while she would send a five-dollar bill, and I could see her smiling from seventy miles away.

Kevin came to visit with an equally reliable regularity. Driving down to Princeton from SUNY at Stony Brook every single weekend, he would make a detour through Co-op City to pick up a care package of fruits and juice from my mother. He would arrive around midnight frazzled and exhausted, still not accustomed to freeway driving, but as the weeks passed, he became more confident at the wheel.

When I asked my roommate, Dolores, if she would mind Kevin sleeping on our floor, she offered to spend weekends in a friend’s room. I thought that was so generous of her, so graciously thoughtful. She meanwhile was thinking I was incorrigibly wild. She never let on, but later, after we’d gradually warmed to each other and become good friends, we’d have occasion to laugh about our first impressions of each other.

Actually, I wasn’t wild at all: Kevin and I spent our wild weekends studying side by side. Stony Brook was a party scene, and he was glad of the chance to catch up on work. I offered many a time to come visit
him there and save him the drive, but I don’t think he wanted me to see just what a party scene it was. Only once did he accept, and that was on a holiday weekend when the campus was deserted. I could see why he preferred Princeton to the institutional, nondescript concrete of Stony Brook. He fell in love with the environment the same way that I had; later he would find his way back there for graduate school.

My mother came to visit me on campus once or twice each year. The first time, my cousin Charlie drove her and Junior down, along with Charlie’s girlfriend. Kevin came too, of course. Nassau Inn, where many of my classmates’ families would stay, was unimaginably expensive, so we had a slumber party. I gave Mami my bed and borrowed sleeping bags, mattresses, blankets, and pillows to make the rest of us comfortable on the floor. Charlie had a moment of profound shock in the bathroom, having forgotten that this was a girls’ dorm. I sent him over to the male dorm next door, but their informal policy of sharing the showers with girlfriends was even more shocking to him. He’s talked about it ever since.

If you happened to visit Princeton on a weekend, the cafeteria food in the commons was a crapshoot. Most of the regular staff was off duty, and students cooked. They laid on steak when there was a football game, but there was no game when my family first came to visit. My mother was aghast at what was on her plate, afraid that I might starve to death, a very bland death, before I could graduate. “I have to take you out tonight, Sonia,” she said grimly after her first bite. I didn’t know what to suggest. The hoagie shop on Nassau Street was the only place in town I could routinely afford. Advice from friends sent us ten miles out on Route 27, to the A-Kitchen and the beginning of a tradition. Just reading the menu downwind from the kitchen, I was jumping out of my skin with excitement, my mouth watering at descriptions of ginger, garlic, and chilies. The prices were right, and judging by the crowd, the fare was authentic. Chinese food of that quality and spiciness was new to me, a far cry from the spareribs and egg foo yong of the Bronx.

WHEN I CAME HOME
from Princeton for a midterm break in my first year, Mami was panicking. She was in the final stretch of getting her
nursing degree. The bilingual program at Hostos Community College included an English writing requirement. It wasn’t as terrifying to her as the math, but it was onerous and she was struggling with it. She conceived the insane plan that I should write her paper for her.

“No way! That’s cheating!” Facing dire threats that she would quit, I compromised. I agreed to look at what she had written and give her advice. We spent untold hours of my brief vacation at the kitchen table poring over her sentences. “There’s no structure here, Mami. It wanders.”

“I don’t know, Sonia, I’m not good at embellishing.”

“Forget about embellishing. What’s the story you’re trying to tell? What’s your theme?”

“Ay, Sonia, please just write it for me!”

I didn’t say it out loud, but I thought: Please, Mami, I don’t have time for your insecurities. I have my own to deal with.

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 pass,” she moaned. I reassured 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 pass. 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 passed 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 passed all five of her qualifying exams on the first try, which doesn’t happen very often.

——

LATE IN THE FALL SEMESTER
of my sophomore 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 blustering 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 Flower–Fifth 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 passing 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. Titi 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 Manatí 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 superstition 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 passed 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.
“Bendición, 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 assumed 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 class 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.