No Matter How Much You Promise Read online

  After the baby was born, Elsa had turned Vidamía over to her mother. Unconcerned with the consequences of her attitude, she went back to hanging out. She and her homegirls stopped singing and playing games, deciding the behavior was for little kids. But then the following summer a record came out and they developed a game around which they sang the Alegre All Stars’ “Estoy Buscando a Kako,” meaning “I’m looking for Kako,” the band calling out each member’s name. She and the other girls would go through all the names of the boys each girl liked, pointing at her and singing. Like pointing at Delia Campos, who liked Eddie Cruz, and singing. Estoy buscando a Eddie, Eddie, Eddie, Eddie, estoy buscando a Eddie, Eddie, Eddie, dónde está? all of them singing, and as soon as they pointed at the girl she had to get up and dance while they were singing, and then whoever was dancing got to point at somebody else and they began calling out the name of the boy she liked.

  Sometimes a girl liked two or three boys and then they wouldn’t repeat the boy’s name, but strung one name after the other like in the case of Lizzie Delgado, who had a wild reputation and had boys after her all the time. All the homegirls knew Lizzie was still a virgin and later realized in their last year of high school that she liked girls when she began talking about this girl named Veronica who was a dancer from Greenwich Village. Right after graduation Lizzie ran off with her dancer, which was cool because, you know, whatever turns you on and, like, she’s one of our homegirls so don’t be saying nothing nasty, okay? So when they pointed at Lizzie, they’d say: Estoy buscando a Bobby, Ralphie, Louis, Carlos, estoy buscando a Jimmy, Néstor, Henry, dónde están? and then they’d all goof and accuse each other of being a bollo loco, which meant literally “crazy bun” but in P.R. slang meant “crazy pussy,” meaning a girl who gave it away to anybody.

  After a while Elsa felt that she didn’t belong because they wouldn’t call out her name in the game. She felt it was her own fault, because she had given it away to Billy Farrell and none of the boys were interested in her because her reputation was that she only dug white boys. And now she had this baby who was cute and white, with curly blond hair and real bright blue eyes, which, to her distress, turned green later, perhaps signaling an upcoming dilution of her daughter’s whiteness because of her own connection to Africa. Her homegirls made a big fuss about her and wanted to hold her, calling out Vidamía, Vidamía, Vidamía constantly like it was such a cool name, telling her how gorgeous her daughter was, so that she felt that they liked the baby more than they liked her; talking constantly about her so that it was like everyone on the Lower East Side knew that she had spread her legs with this gringo white boy and they had this kid with a weird name.

  When the baby was three months old, her sister Milagros, who had also gone to Seward Park High School and now studied at Lehman College at night, went to the school and spoke with Mrs. Kantrowitz, who had taught Milagros and her other sisters. Mrs. Kantrowitz then spoke to the principal on Elsa’s behalf and they let her back into the school. Although almost everyone knew what had happened, no one ever brought up the pregnancy. Nevertheless, she felt she was treated differently, even by her friends. Everything made her angry, and the only respite from the constant shame was studying. As much as she enjoyed school, she felt like she was stuck, even if her mother took care of the baby most of the time. She felt excluded, even though she and her homegirls still hung out in the summer and did crazy things and still rode the subway up to Pelham Bay, laughing at every little thing. If anyone said anything critical to them they still acted all bad like that one time when they got up to Zerega Avenue and about ten tough Italian girls with beehive hairdos and weird lipstick that glowed got on the train and Mandy Lugo had her eyes closed because they were playing the game where they had to remember what station they were at and Mandy shouted out “Buhre Avenue” and Denise Aguayo said, “Wrong, retard, it’s Zerega Avenue,” and this Italian girl with all kinds of eye shadow and glowing copper lipstick came over to Denise.

  “Who you calling a retard, you spic bitch?” she said.

  Carmen Texidor, who was the biggest of them all and already at sixteen wore dresses two sizes bigger than her mother and was named Wonder Woman by some of the boys in the playground around Rivington Street because at thirteen she’d fought a boy and broken his jaw and who wasn’t only real bad but was Papucho Texidor’s cousin and everybody knew Papucho dealt big time and rode around in a big car and sometimes you saw him down on Mulberry talking to the Italians, stood up in the middle of the train and challenged the Italian girl.

  “Yo, who you calling a spic bitch, you guinea scumbag?” Carmen Texidor said.

  “Yeah,” Lily Betancourt, nicknamed Pygmy, because she was so small, said, jumping up and standing next to Carmen, shaking her shoulders and her finger pointing down at the ground and letting go like she always did with this big, loud voice, the words pouring out of her with not only astonishing regularity but unbelievable nastiness. “Don’t be calling us no spics. You understand what I’m saying to you? That ain’t right you talking to us like we dirt and whatnot. We Puerto Ricans, and we proud, you low-class guinea butana,” she said, substituting a B for the P and affecting a perfect New York Italian accent from being friends with Barbara Sacco, who wrote for the paper in school.

  “Big deal,” another Italian girl said. “Same thing.”

  “Hey, fuck you, okay?” Pygmy Betancourt said.

  “No, fuck you,” the first Italian girl said. “And watch that ‘guinea’ shit. Your friend called my friend a retard. Right, Tina?” she said turning back to one of the girls.

  “Right, Connie,” Tina said, a little scared and not really wanting to get into it.

  “Oh, you’re fulla shit, girl,” Pygmy said, coming back to a Puerto Rican accent. “Whyn’tcha take all that plastic hair you got on your head and trade it in for some clothes. You look like a old lady dressed like that,” she threw in for good measure and turned around and stuck out her hand to get fives from the other girls, so that they were all now goofing on the Italian girls.

  “Oh, yeah?” Connie Beehive said.

  “Yeah,” Carmen Texidor said.

  And boom! This Connie Beehive does it.

  “Hey, fuck you and your mother,” she said.

  That was all that was needed for them to go totally crazy. San Juan versus Naples for the World Cup in hair pulling. They all began screaming and scratching, hitting with their bags, which carried suntan lotion, thermos bottles, sandwiches, hair rollers and who knew what else, and talking about “Don’t talk about my mother, okay, you puta, you bitch, you guinea cunt,” slapping wildly at each other, and Denise Aguayo telling Gloria Puente, Li’l Louie Puente’s sister, to “put away your nail file, okay?” cause, like her brother, she was ready to do someone, because, “Homegirl, for less than that my brother took this guy out.” Later on, talking about the encounter and Gloria Puente putting everything in perspective. “I smacked the bitch and told her never talk about my mother, mothafucka. Because, homegirl, you could almost kill a Rican, but don’t talk about his mother, no le menten la madre, coño, because that’s it.”

  This all happened real quick and people emptied out from the subway car except for these two Rican homeboys who looked on at the occurrence all steely-eyed, their arms crossed and their heads turned sideways, one of them with a kerchief on his head so that he looked like a pirate and the other one with his hand in his jacket, which they later found out contained a small, silver-plated, white-handled, automatic pistola. At Westchester Square a couple of policemen came into the train and everybody cooled out, the Italian girls sitting down on one side of the subway car, doing their nails and looking at magazines, and Elsa and Carmen and Pygmy Betancourt and the rest sitting on the other side, busying themselves with whatever until the train reached Pelham Bay and the Italian girls, glaring back, got off the train, went downstairs, and took the bus. Carmen Texidor decided it was better if they went on foot so they started walking and the two Rican boys came alongside and
said they’d go with them.

  “Yeah, we be along for protection,” José said.

  “Dig it,” said his friend Victor, his hand still in his jacket. “Yeah, cause you did the righteous thing. The bitch be talking about spic this and spic that. Who she think we is, man? Is a good thing they didn’t have their fellas with them or there woulda been some serious bloodshed, you understand what I’m saying?”

  “Check it out,” Victor said.

  So they went on talking like that, twelve girls and these two fine papis with their hair long, and eventually they got to the beach and had a wonderful day and the net outcome was that Pygmy Betancourt fell totally in love with Victor, while she and José started talking, and even though Elsa didn’t like him that much she staked out a claim to him and said, “Oh, wow, that was my brother’s name, he got killed in Vietnam.” José would come down to the Lower East Side from East Harlem and they’d go to the movies and hold hands and kiss and she’d let him feel her breasts, but that was it, resisting his advances when he’d bring her home.

  “Yo, baby, I understand you’re a virgin and whatnot, but give a fella a break. Like I got good intentions and I’m taking the test for being a corrections officer.”

  “I can’t, honey,” she’d say and play coy, even crying one time, which made him apologize profusely and agree that they had to wait.

  But then, whenever they’d play the Estoy Buscando game, they’d point at her, but because “José” didn’t work with the song, that made the whole thing weird. And they couldn’t say “Joey,” because they all knew that her brother, Joey Santiago, had died in Vietnam, so they didn’t include her, but she knew it was just an excuse and had to do more with the baby than anything else. One day José stopped coming around. Baby Contreras said she thought Tita from the Baruch projects had told José that Elsa had a baby because she liked him and wanted to steal him away from her. Elsa breathed a sigh of relief. After a while when they played the game they’d use different guys’ names and kid her because older boys who knew she’d had a baby were always rapping to her, offering her all kinds of outrageous pleasures because the myth was that once you did it and had a baby, you couldn’t live without it.

  She’d laugh, relishing the attention, and brush her suitors off coquettishly. Eventually, the song, like everything about their lives—the fads, the music, the clothes, the words they used—disappeared and something else took its place. Within a year after Vidamía was born it seemed like all the homegirls were pregnant. There were six weddings one summer. Then, instead of running free all over the place, having fun and listening to records and dancing, they were changing diapers and pushing baby carriages and bragging about what their baby was doing and how much they ate. “Girl, this baby’s going to be enormous, mami. Gaw, he eats everything. And he’s healthy and good. Ain’t you, papito?” cuchicooing the baby. They seemed happy, but deep inside they were dead and complained about everything and Elsa felt like she was responsible for starting a fad and every pregnancy was her fault. Although she often felt guilty, she knew she had done the right thing in breaking up with Billy and sending him away. Otherwise, she’d end up having a baby every year and she’d be stuck like her mother. She knew she had to get away from the neighborhood and the life of making babies and taking care of children.

  One day as she stood watching her pregnant friends who were dropping out of school, their baby faces bloated and their eyes glazed over so that she was reminded of watching cows chewing their cuds, she flipped her lid.

  9. Sanity and Insanity

  A week later, at the end of the schoolday, Elsa had gone looking for Mrs. Kantrowitz and told her that she felt like she was going crazy and wanted to kill her baby. Mrs. Kantrowitz suggested she see the guidance counselor, but Elsa shook her head and began crying. Mrs. Kantrowitz arranged for her to see a therapist friend up on Park Avenue at around Seventieth Street. Every Tuesday and Thursday after school she rode the subway up to Sixty-eighth Street and sat in a red leather chair and talked to Dr. Gelfand, who was a beautiful, delicate woman about the age of fifty with very thin blond hair and skin so white and fragile that in the light from the lamps in the room it appeared almost transparent. There, in an atmosphere of clinical acceptance, Elsa began talking about herself and her fears and dreams, and, eventually, between those sessions and academic counseling at school, she decided that she would enter Hunter College under the Open Admissions Program, the trips up to Sixty-eighth Street becoming therapeutic in and of themselves, so that it was natural that she should attend college there as part of her treatment. The trips uptown seemed to her like vacations away from the oppressiveness and sameness of her life on the Lower East Side. Here, uptown in this wealthy neighborhood, she was not just another Puerto Rican girl, anonymous and without substance, a ghostly presence that blended with the others in a brown haze of insignificance. Here, in this American world, she was visible, she stood out, she was different. Years later while reading The Invisible Man, she laughed at the contrast between her view and that of the author, for it was in the bigger world that she found substance to her being, not in invisibility. It was in that larger world that she saw her worth.

  Dr. Gelfand spoke with what Elsa later learned was a German accent. She often heard her speaking what she also learned was Yiddish, recognizing words from shopping along Orchard, Essex, and Delancey streets while her mother haggled artfully with the shop owners in her Spanish-accented English. She remembered clearly her mother shaking her head and dismissing a price as too expensive, and the merchant shrugging his shoulders and saying: Onkuken kost nit kein gelt. While talking about living on the Lower East Side, Elsa once asked Dr. Gelfand what the phrase meant. Dr. Gelfand smiled and said it meant that it doesn’t cost anything to look. But Elsa’s favorite phrase, which she memorized and used liberally with her Jewish friends, was: Kush meer in toches, which meant “Kiss my ass,” though she never used it in Dr. Gelfand’s presence. She loved being able to say things like: Bist du meshuge? “Are you crazy?” She would have liked to follow that up with “Better that you should grow upside down in the ground like an onion,” but she could never remember the Yiddish for the saying.

  Eventually, when Elsa matured sufficiently and began to attend college and through study became aware of what had taken place in Europe during the thirties and forties, she discovered that her doctor had been one of the people who were persecuted by the Nazis. One afternoon while she was talking absently, watching the rain outside the window, she told Dr. Gelfand that she hated being what she was—meaning Puerto Rican—and that she often wished she were white. She began sobbing and couldn’t stop crying for nearly fifteen minutes. Then she told Dr. Gelfand that she wished her parents were dead. The doctor got up and went to the window and stood there for a while. When she came back, there were tears in her eyes, but she said nothing. Years later, after Elsa had received her Ph.D. and was a practicing psychologist and therapist, but still making weekly visits for her therapy sessions, she asked Dr. Gelfand why there had been tears in her eyes that day. The older woman, grown even more fragile and ethereal, sat behind her desk and explained.

  Barbara Gelfand had lived in Nürnberg as a young girl. She explained to Elsa how at this time Nürnberg had become the center for the activities of the National Socialists and that every year in late summer Hitler held rallies there that included enormous shows of military might, and hundreds of thousands of people came to the city to celebrate their Aryan roots, since Nürnberg was supposedly the center of Aryan culture. In 1938, after the approval of the infamous “Blood Protection Laws,” her father, himself a physician, grew worried because his wife was Jewish. The following year, when the laws began to take effect, fewer and fewer of her father’s German patients came to be treated. It was early July, and already there were more than 20,000 soldiers in the city. One Saturday, he gathered the children—Barbara, her older sisters, Anna and Karin, her little brother, Uwe, and Gretchen, her youngest sister. Their mother packed a large wic
ker picnic basket, and they took the train, ostensibly to visit their grandparents in Frankfurt. In the basket’s top layer were sandwiches, a large apple strudel, and some kugel. Beneath that layer were napkins, and beneath the napkins a family photo album. A false bottom had been constructed, and under it her father had stashed the family jewelry, their passports, birth certificates, and a few stocks. A similar false bottom had been constructed for her father’s medical bag, which carried nearly ten thousand dollars in marks, and another ten thousand dollars or so in English pounds. Barbara was fourteen years old at the time, studying the piano at the conservatory and reading French literature.

  Uwe, only five years old, and Gretchen, three, were restless. Eventually they ate and their father entertained them until they fell asleep. Anna, nineteen, a student of history and languages at the University of Erlangen, and Karin, sixteen, who was studying science, sat stoically, looking out of the train windows at the countryside. When the train entered the station in Frankfurt, Barbara started to rise, but her mother held her back and put a finger to her lips. And then she saw on the train platform her grandparents Joshua and Rachel, her mother’s parents, carrying a smaller picnic basket. Their father helped them get on the train, and Barbara remembered they looked small and scared, but her father, who was very strong, patted their cheeks and made sure they were comfortable even though Grandma Rachel’s hands were shaking.

  When the train started moving again it began to rain. It rained all the way to Köln as they traveled along the Rhine, the villages of neat houses and the castles up on the hills like the miniature landscapes of the train sets displayed in store windows during holidays. Barbara knew that they would never return home to Nürnberg, and that she’d never again see Dietrich Meyer, who played the cello so beautifully and whom she loved so much even though he was nearly twenty years old. She knew also that their poor little dachshund, Fogel, who had barked and whined, running back and forth behind the fence of their garden as if he knew he’d never see them again, would eventually die of sorrow. The rain had stopped falling when they got off the train at a small town—she recalled vividly that it was Kaldenkirchen, near the Dutch border.