Read Online Almost a Woman : A Memoir (9780306821110) by Esmeralda Santiago - Free Book Online Page A

unfamiliar hallway knocking on a door I wasn’t sure was hers. There was no answer. I knocked again, waited a while, pressed my ear to the door to listen for a radio or a television or a reason why no one heard my knock. All was silent, but the door across the hall opened a crack.
    â€œWho’s there?” asked a frail voice in Spanish, and when I turned, one eye and half a shrivelled old face peered under the chain stop.
    â€œI’m looking for Natalia Pons. I think she lives here.”
    â€œThey moved.”
    â€œBut that’s impossible. I just saw her, she didn’t say anything.”
    â€œThey’re gone, that’s all I know. Nobody has moved in yet, but someone will.” She closed the door. Several bolts caught and the woman shuffled deep into her apartment.
    I didn’t believe her. Natalia hadn’t told me she was moving. When I asked Mr. Barone why Natalia wasn’t in school, he said the family had returned to Puerto Rico.
    â€œBut she never bean there,” I said.
    He shrugged his shoulders. “Her mother is sick.”
    Mami found out that Mrs. Pons had had an accident at work and that Natalia’s uncle had come to take the girls back to Puerto Rico. It made no sense, but that’s the way things happened in our neighborhood. People came and went with no warning, no farewells. My own family moved five times in one year, and there was never a goodbye or a backward glance. Each move was supposed to be for the better, and I wanted to believe that for Natalia, a move to Puerto Rico was good. But I also knew that Natalia’s Spanish was really Spanglish, a mixture of English and Spanish that got the job done but was understood only by people who spoke both languages. What would happen to her in Puerto Rico? Would she still be able to study medicine? If she were accepted to the Bronx High School of Science, would she go?
    I felt sorry for her, and for myself. The thing I wanted most, a return to Puerto Rico, came true for her. But her dream was the opposite of mine. She wanted to stay in New York, to be a success
American-style, surrounded by the things we thought would make us happy: the apartment on Park Avenue, the luxury car, the clothes and dinners out and nights at the theater. I curled into myself much the way Mami did, afraid to dream—no, afraid to speak my dreams aloud, because look at what had happened to Natalia’s.

    The candy store in front of JHS 33 was owned by an old couple. They lived behind the store, in a room on the other side of a door that was split in the middle, so that the owner’s wife could talk to him as she sat at a round table before stacks of fabric scraps that she stitched into colorful quilts. The man’s hands were mottled and swollen, his fingers round and unwrinkled, like hard sausages. Kids said that he was contagious, so we never touched him when he made change. He placed the coins inside a plastic bowl on the counter, and I picked mine up, threw them in my pocket, rubbed my hands against my skirt to get rid of his germs.
    On the sidewalk in front of the candy store there was a metal bench for newspapers. The old man took the money for them through a small window in the storefront. Mornings, he sat by the window, watching the students go into school, vigilant of the rowdies who liked to run off with armloads of his newspapers.
    If the gangs were acting up, I often ran into the store, browsed through a magazine, or took a long time to buy a candy bar—all the while peering over the counter to make sure the kids were gone. The man behind the counter knew that his store was a haven for those of us neither strong nor brave enough to stand up to the tough kids. If one of us came in and took a long time to choose a purchase, he leaned out the window over the newspaper bench and looked to the right and left along the sidewalk. With a gruff “What’s taking so long?” he waved us over, growled the price