Read Online My Beloved World by Sonia Sotomayor - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Sonia Sotomayor
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the release and relief I felt from the end of the fighting gave way to anxious puzzlement. At nine, I was equipped to understand loss, even sadness, but not grief, not someone else’s and certainly not my own. I couldn’t figure out what was wrong with Mami, and it scared me.
Every day Junior and I came home from school to find the apartment quiet and dark, with the curtains drawn. Mami would come out just long enough to cook dinner, leaving the back bedroom, where she passed hour after hour with the door closed and the lights out. (Junior and I shared the front bedroom in the new apartment on Watson Avenue, using the twin beds that had been in Papi’s room in the old place.) After serving dinner like a zombie, hardly saying a word, she would go right back into her room. So even though she was working the early shift now and getting home in the afternoon before us, we saw no more of her than when she’d been working late. We did homework. We watched TV. We did homework and watched TV.
On weekends, I was able to rouse Mami to go grocery shopping, retracing my father’s steps. I remembered what Papi used to buy, and that’s what I put in the basket, though I wasn’t sure Mami would know what to do with everything. I missed Papi’s cooking. I missed Papi. Somehow, when he died, I had taken it for granted that our lives would be better. I hadn’t counted on this gloom.
I wasn’t the only one who was worried about my mother. I overheardsome of her friends talking to Ana, and they decided one of them would pay a call at Blessed Sacrament to ask Father Dolan to come visit Celina. His refusal, as reported over coffee at Ana’s, enraged me, all the more so because of the reason: my mother didn’t go to church on Sunday.
It was true, but she did send her kids to church and always with money for the offering basket. And she worked long hours at the hospital so we could go to school at Blessed Sacrament. Shouldn’t Father Dolan be forgiving if she needed help? Even if he thought she wasn’t Christian enough, I reasoned, shouldn’t he be more Christian? My reaction was of a piece with the frustration I felt when he stood there at the altar during the Mass, with his back turned to us, as priests did in those days before Vatican II. Show us what you’re doing up there! I always thought. Now when he turned his back on us, it felt like just what it appeared to be: rejection. I was delighted when, a few years later under Pope Paul VI, the Church turned its priests around to face the congregants.
Another week passed in darkness and silence. Another friend of my mother’s, Cristina, asked the pastor at her church to visit Mami. He’d never even met her before, and of course she’d never been to his church, which was Baptist. But that didn’t stop him from coming. They talked quietly together for hours. I was impressed that he spoke Spanish; whether or not he had anything to say that could help, at least he cared enough to try. That I respected.
As spring turned to summer, Mami stayed shut in her darkened room, and I found myself on summer vacation longing for school to start. I didn’t feel like playing outside. I couldn’t articulate exactly what I feared, but I knew I should stay close by and keep an eye on things.
My solace and only distraction that summer was reading. I discovered the pleasure of chapter books and devoured a big stack of them. The Parkchester Library was my haven. To thumb through the card catalog was to touch an infinite bounty, more books than I could ever possibly exhaust. My choices were more or less random. There was no one in my family who could point me toward children’s classics, no teacher who took an interest, and it never occurred to me to ask the librarian for guidance. My mother had subscribed to
Highlights
for Junior and me, and
Reader’s Digest
for herself, but by now I was reading whole issuesof the
Digest
myself, cover to cover. “Laughter, the Best Medicine,” was what I
Every day Junior and I came home from school to find the apartment quiet and dark, with the curtains drawn. Mami would come out just long enough to cook dinner, leaving the back bedroom, where she passed hour after hour with the door closed and the lights out. (Junior and I shared the front bedroom in the new apartment on Watson Avenue, using the twin beds that had been in Papi’s room in the old place.) After serving dinner like a zombie, hardly saying a word, she would go right back into her room. So even though she was working the early shift now and getting home in the afternoon before us, we saw no more of her than when she’d been working late. We did homework. We watched TV. We did homework and watched TV.
On weekends, I was able to rouse Mami to go grocery shopping, retracing my father’s steps. I remembered what Papi used to buy, and that’s what I put in the basket, though I wasn’t sure Mami would know what to do with everything. I missed Papi’s cooking. I missed Papi. Somehow, when he died, I had taken it for granted that our lives would be better. I hadn’t counted on this gloom.
I wasn’t the only one who was worried about my mother. I overheardsome of her friends talking to Ana, and they decided one of them would pay a call at Blessed Sacrament to ask Father Dolan to come visit Celina. His refusal, as reported over coffee at Ana’s, enraged me, all the more so because of the reason: my mother didn’t go to church on Sunday.
It was true, but she did send her kids to church and always with money for the offering basket. And she worked long hours at the hospital so we could go to school at Blessed Sacrament. Shouldn’t Father Dolan be forgiving if she needed help? Even if he thought she wasn’t Christian enough, I reasoned, shouldn’t he be more Christian? My reaction was of a piece with the frustration I felt when he stood there at the altar during the Mass, with his back turned to us, as priests did in those days before Vatican II. Show us what you’re doing up there! I always thought. Now when he turned his back on us, it felt like just what it appeared to be: rejection. I was delighted when, a few years later under Pope Paul VI, the Church turned its priests around to face the congregants.
Another week passed in darkness and silence. Another friend of my mother’s, Cristina, asked the pastor at her church to visit Mami. He’d never even met her before, and of course she’d never been to his church, which was Baptist. But that didn’t stop him from coming. They talked quietly together for hours. I was impressed that he spoke Spanish; whether or not he had anything to say that could help, at least he cared enough to try. That I respected.
As spring turned to summer, Mami stayed shut in her darkened room, and I found myself on summer vacation longing for school to start. I didn’t feel like playing outside. I couldn’t articulate exactly what I feared, but I knew I should stay close by and keep an eye on things.
My solace and only distraction that summer was reading. I discovered the pleasure of chapter books and devoured a big stack of them. The Parkchester Library was my haven. To thumb through the card catalog was to touch an infinite bounty, more books than I could ever possibly exhaust. My choices were more or less random. There was no one in my family who could point me toward children’s classics, no teacher who took an interest, and it never occurred to me to ask the librarian for guidance. My mother had subscribed to
Highlights
for Junior and me, and
Reader’s Digest
for herself, but by now I was reading whole issuesof the
Digest
myself, cover to cover. “Laughter, the Best Medicine,” was what I
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