Chapter Four
St. Louis, Missouri
1978
Ruth had only been to St. Louis once before, when she was four years old. Grandpa Pete wore a straw hat, and took her to the county fair. He smelled of Rolaids and Old Spice, and she knew this because he carried her on his shoulders, her little arms wrapped around the brim of his hat, the heels of her sandals tucked into his armpits. He stood beside her on the carousel and looped his arms around her waist, making himself a human seat belt to keep her safe. The pony she chose had a turquoise mane and a studded golden saddle. She’d never had cotton candy before. And even though she didn’t speak English then, Grandpa Pete communicated easily with her. He used funny faces and elaborate gestures. He crossed his eyes and made her laugh. So when her parents told her they were moving to Missouri, it sounded to Ruth like a great place to live. Not as good as San Juan, maybe. But carousels, cotton candy, her other nice grandpa? All good.
Ruth was three weeks shy of her seventh birthday when they moved from Puerto Rico to St. Louis, and later she would have no memories of the move at all. She wouldn’t remember packing her toys and books into cardboard boxes, or emptying the white dresser with the painted-on roses in her room, or stacking her clothes into neat rows in her suitcase: socks, undershirts, shorts, skirts. She wouldn’t remember her mother pleading with her father to delay the move just one more month so they could celebrate Ruth’s birthday in San Juan with friends and family. “There’s always another reason to put it off,” she wouldn’t remember Dad saying. All the preparation, and any feelings that may have been attached to it, would become an insistent blank in Ruth’s memory. Yet the days and weeks immediately following that void would be vivid.
The very first morning she woke up in their new bungalow, in their new subdivision in North County, to the familiar scent of coffee and bacon. Ruth was glad to have that recognizable aroma to cover the new house smell of lumber and fresh paint. Her room was smaller here than the one she’d had in San Juan, but also painted yellow, and in the center of the ceiling it had a pretty little chandelier with pink flowers and green leaves. The sunlight coming through her morning curtains was dim and shadowy, causing Ruth to wonder on that first morning whether perhaps her room sat beneath the shade of a spreading tree she hadn’t noticed the evening before. But when she opened the curtains to look outside, she realized she was not in shade at all. The sun was simply different here. A different angle, a different distance.
She had three more weeks to be six years old, and though Ruth did not remember feeling sad before moving away from San Juan, she was melancholy then upon discovering the unreliability of the sun’s position in the sky, which she had never questioned before. She felt that this was a thing she should’ve been able to avoid knowing until at least her seventh birthday. She felt it was an injustice that a six-year-old child should be exposed to such a discovery. She could hear her parents talking and laughing in the kitchen. Ruth frowned at her reflection in the not-very-bright glass of her new window and shut her curtains.
Benny was nine then, and it was worse for him because he’d been in school longer and had more friends to leave behind. They hadn’t been able to bring his bike to St. Louis either, so Benny had given the bike to his best friend, Tiago, and their dad had promised to buy Benny an even better one when they got to St. Louis—any color he wanted.
On Monday, Dad walked them to the bus stop, and the four other children who were already waiting there started talking to Ruth and Benny all at once. Their words were garbled and loud, and Ruth thought they all sounded like they had trumpets in their mouths. Ruth and Benny were already accustomed to hearing English because back in San Juan, their father had spoken to them frequently in his native tongue. If asked, Ruth and Benny would both have answered that, yes, they spoke English. They spoke quiet, careful, precise, slow English in the manner of their father back home in San Juan, the style of English he used when he read their bedtime stories, his finger following the words along the page. They knew how to say, “May I please have a glass of water” and “This hamburger is delicious” and “The Yankees are overrated.” They knew what action to perform when their father said, “It’s bedtime now” or “Please pass the salt” or “Go find your shoes.” But these children at the bus stop spoke an entirely different English from the one Ruth and Benny knew. All their wordsrantogetherlikeonebigword and the kids never even breathed between their twangy sentences. Ruth could feel her eyes getting bigger, gaping in an effort to contain all the noise. She was wearing her new turquoise backpack with the red-and-white stripes. She’d chosen a pink seersucker romper, which her mother thought would be fine for September, until they had a chance to go shopping and buy some warmer clothes. But Ruth already felt cold, so she leaned down to hoist her socks over the knobs of her kneecaps. She wished for a cardigan. Dad was in his shirtsleeves and didn’t seem to notice the chill in the air. He laughed at something one of the children said, and then answered in his own trumpet voice. He placed a hand on each of their heads in turn, saying their names.
“This is Benny.” Dad’s palm was flat on top of Benny’s head, lightly squishing down his boisterous black hair so it pushed over his forehead and crept toward his eyebrows. Benny looked aghast. He frowned at Ruth. Then it was her turn, but her black curls were tightly braided into two ropes that hung down her back. Her father’s hand felt warm against the part on her scalp. “And this is Ruth. Say hello, Ruth!”
“Hello, Ruth!” she said. Her first English joke.
All the kids laughed, and Ruth felt a little warmer.
Whatever volume the children had employed at the bus stop was amplified by a factor of a thousand once they got on the bus. Benny, who always left for school five minutes early back home so he could walk with Tiago and pretend he didn’t have a little sister at all, nestled in beside Ruth and leaned his forehead on the seat in front.
In the first-grade classroom though, Ruth had an easier time following the words of the teacher, who spoke more carefully than the children. Within a few days, Ruth was able to recite her shapes and colors in English; she could sing the alphabet and count to one hundred. And she quickly identified her mortal enemies in the classroom: Timmy O’Brien, who had a broad, pink face and blond hair that was always damp around the front, and laughed every time Ruth tried to pronounce a word with an r in it. Their classroom was fraught with squares, triangles, green trees, red roses, her own name, for God’s sake—a veritable minefield of r’ s. And Alice García, who Ruth initially mistook as a potential friend because of her black hair and her last name, but who eagerly disabused Ruth of this notion by flipping her hair literally into Ruth’s face whenever Ruth had the misfortune of being behind her on the walking line. Nevertheless, by the end of the first week, Ruth already felt less shy speaking English, and she had made three sweet friends: Kathy, Jennifer, and Jenny. On the playground, they skipped rope together and admired Ruth’s braids. The questions they asked about her life before St. Louis were minimal and inoffensive. Their interests tended more toward hopscotch and cookies than intimate personal history.
But Benny still sat beside Ruth every afternoon on the bus, and even began insisting on the window seat, using Ruth as a human shield between him and the other kids. She tried asking him how it was going, how he liked third grade, if there were any boys like Tiago who liked baseball, but Benny wouldn’t respond to her English efforts. So she switched to the comfort of Spanish, to see if she could draw him out and soothe him, but he shushed her sharply, looking quickly around the bus to determine whether anyone had heard her.
By the end of their second week, it was clear that Benny was not adjusting well. Their parents were summoned. Mama wore a lime-green linen dress with a slim belt at her waist and high heels, and Dad wore a suit. It didn’t help.
It was a Friday afternoon, and class had been dismissed for the week, but Ruth and Benny stayed behind to await their parents’ meeting with the principal, Mr. Parnacki. They sat on chairs just outside the closed door of Mr. Parnacki’s office, but they could hear every word the grown-ups exchanged inside. The principal felt that Benny needed to move back a year, to the second grade.
“He’s such a smart kid, though,” Dad insisted. “He was a top student at his school in San Juan.”
“Well, I don’t know what their curriculum is like over there,” Mr. Parnacki said, “but he’s way behind his third-grade classmates here.”
Their mother was uncharacteristically quiet.
“But he’s already one of the older kids in the grade. If you move him back, he’ll be more than a year older than his classmates.” Their father’s voice was grim behind the door. “That would be mortifying for him.”
“Well, perhaps a little embarrassment will provide the motivation he needs then,” Mr. Parnacki said, “to learn English.”
Benny leaned over nervously, elbows on knees. “What are they saying?” he whispered to Ruth in Spanish.
She paused. Then shrugged.
In the car on the way home, Benny fiddled with the roll-down knob on the window handle, flicking it repeatedly with his finger. Ruth watched the black plastic wheel spin, and wondered how much Benny understood of what their parents were discussing in the front seat. She wondered if he was even listening, or if he was really as entranced by the window’s mechanics as he seemed to be.
“I know it’s difficult, Rafaela,” Dad was saying, “but you have to learn English too.”
“I already know English,” their mother snapped. “I am speaking to you in English right now, am I not? Is this not English?”
The light ahead was about to turn red, and their father stepped on the brakes harder than he needed to. Ruth noticed his fingers grow paler as he gripped the steering wheel.
“You know what I mean, Rafaela! Damn, I’m not your enemy. I’m not trying to make you miserable.”
Their mother sighed loudly, and the noise of her breath was almost a shape in the small Datsun. It crowded the car.
“Of course you already speak English.” Dad’s voice was softer now, the best version of her father, who Ruth recognized from the bedtime stories. “You speak English very beautifully,” he said in Spanish. He lifted her mother’s hand and kissed her knuckles. Then he returned to English. “But you haven’t practiced in years. And the kids are struggling, Benny especially. You heard what the principal said. They need more practice, we all need to practice if we’re going to make this work.”
Mama did not respond, but Ruth watched her swivel her face away from their father and toward the window. The car radio was off and Benny was still spinning the plastic wheel. Click. Whirr. Click. Whirr . Their father glanced into the rearview mirror and lifted his voice to address all three of them.
“So that’s it,” he said, “I have to put my foot down, it’s the only way everyone is going to learn, okay? No more Spanish at home. From now on, we all speak English. Solamente inglés, Benny, ?me entiendes?”
Click. Whirr . “What about the bike you promised me?” Benny said in Spanish.
Their mother leaned forward and rolled her window down, propping her elbow on the ledge. “I have a headache,” she said, her English clipped and precise.
Ruth felt something like a strangulation in her throat, but she knew it was only sadness. Even at six years, fifty-one weeks, and three days old, Ruth was a pragmatist. She knew that tight, uncomfortable feeling she had when she swallowed wasn’t actually going to kill her.
Ruth enjoyed her seventh birthday party very much despite its overarching social failure. They held it at a nearby park on a sunny Saturday afternoon, and Kathy, Jennifer, and Jenny all showed up on time. But in a confusing twist, they all piled out of the same station wagon, and Jenny’s mom waved goodbye from the parking lot, beeping her horn twice before pulling away.
“Where is she going?” Ruth’s mother wondered aloud while the three girls scampered across the grass in a cloud of excitement to embrace the birthday girl. They deposited their brightly wrapped gifts on the crowded picnic table and dragged Ruth away to the monkey bars without greeting Ruth’s parents. Ruth stole glances at Mama and Dad while she hung upside down by her knees, her braids sweeping the mulch beneath her. Ruth’s father stood at the grill holding a spatula, staring into the meat and pretending not to notice her mother’s growing turbulence behind him. He tipped a brown bottle into his mouth and took a swig. Meanwhile, her mother turned in circles, fussing around the table, attempting to disguise the fact that she’d prepared way too much food. She rearranged some of the bowls and platters on the table, hid a few things away in the shopping bags and a cooler that sat in the shade nearby. Then she called Benny over and loaded him down with items to return to the car. Benny, who’d been kicking his soccer ball against the fence at the tennis court, did not complain because doing so would have required him to speak English.
Ruth watched while Benny walked back to the car with his arms full. Behind him, their mother folded her own arms tightly and began talking to Ruth’s father, whose only response was to take another sip from his brown bottle. Ruth’s mother gathered more words and ejected them through the upturned line of her mouth, shaking her head, and gesturing tightly from the knot of her folded arms. Ruth was glad the monkey bars were far enough away that she and her friends could not hear what was being said, though Ruth suspected from her mother’s body language that the words were being spoken in Spanish anyway. Ruth’s father finally turned and shrugged, said something in response, causing Ruth’s mother to renew her attack on the bowls and platters across the table, and this time, the sounds of slamming and banging did carry to where Kathy and Jennifer were now taking turns spinning on one knee, whirling impossibly around the parallel bar like the second hand of a clock. Ruth returned her attention to her friends because how could she not? It seemed impossible to spin like that, seemed to flout the laws of gravity, that neither of them flew off and slammed their head into the ground, fastened onto the bar only by one crooked knee. Ruth was awestruck. She righted herself and dropped down into the mulch, bouncing on her toes.
“Teach me!” she said, climbing up and cocking one bent leg over the bar like her friends.
Jenny’s mother returned promptly at five o’clock, and Ruth’s three friends all hugged her, wished her a happy birthday, thanked her parents, and then scrambled back across the grass and into the waiting station wagon at the curb. The mother honked and waved again, and Ruth’s mother managed to lift her own hand in salute, but did not manage to fix the appropriate expression of friendliness onto her face when she did so. Once the guests were gone, Mama was finally free to give liberal expression to the dismay she’d been attempting (failing) to conceal all afternoon.
“I’ve never seen anything like it,” Mama said. “Who drops their small children to a party without even coming in for a drink or a bite to eat? Without even coming over to say hello? She’s never even met us!”
Ruth’s father held the black garbage bag open while Benny collected paper plates and cups from the table and tumbled them in. Dad tossed his empty bottle in too. No one answered Mama because they understood that her questions were not meant to be answered.
“For all that woman knows, we could be axe murderers,” Mama said. “They might have returned to find their daughters had been axe-murdered on the playground!”
Ruth wondered whether all four of them were axe murderers in this scenario, but she kept the question to herself. She knew from experience that she might be able to short-circuit some portion of her mother’s outburst if she made herself excessively helpful and asked for nothing in return. So she scampered all around the table, snapping lids onto Tupperware, screwing tops onto glass bottles. She drained her own cup of orange soda before tossing it. Ruth’s mother directed the operation using only one finger to point here and there. She did so while packing up the enormous leftover supply of napkins and plates, and without taking a break from her rant.
“But at least this woman came close enough to observe that her child was in fact attending a birthday party!” Mama said. “What about the other mothers? Did they even know where their children were today, or who they were with?”
“I’m going to need another beer,” Dad said quietly to Benny, who set down the cooler he was hauling to the car so Dad could retrieve another bottle.
“You knew about this!” Mama finally articulated the accusation that had been simmering just beneath her words.
“I what?” Dad used a contraption from his keychain to pop the lid off his beer.
“You knew! You must have known that this is what birthday parties are like here.”
Dad flicked the bottle cap toward the nearby garbage bag.
“Rafaela,” he said, in a tone that indicated the exhaustion of his patience. “All birthday parties are different. Just the way not every party in Puerto Rico is the same, not every party in St. Louis is the same either. Sometimes the families come, sometimes it’s just the kids. Did you tell the mothers? That they were all invited, to bring the whole family? Or did you just assume?”
Ruth and Benny both stopped moving because they could sense the shift their father had just incited, and they knew that when Mama was enraged, she was like a pterodactyl, laser-focused on her target, but also highly attuned to any peripheral movement. Mama closed her lips tightly for a moment, as if she might wish to stop the words that were gathering like a storm in her mouth, but really she was only giving them a moment to amass strength.
“Oh,” she said after a beat. “So this is my fault? I should have known? That these crazy people send their children off to spend whole afternoons alone in the park with strangers? How would I know that, why would anyone know that?”
“Christ, Rafaela, I’m not blaming you. It’s no one’s fault, there’s no fault here. Calm down.”
Ruth closed her eyes. Never, ever tell Mama to calm down , she silently admonished her father.
“Calm down?!” Mama’s voice now could only be described as a shriek. “You dragged me away from my home, brought me to this ugly place, failed to help me adjust, failed to warn me about the simplest, most idiotic things. You watched me cook for the last three days—you knew I was making enough food for two dozen people, and you didn’t think to warn me that the families wouldn’t come, that we might only have three guests? You let me humiliate myself, Peter! And now you tell me to calm down ?”
Benny broke his frozen posture just enough to swivel his head around, to see if anyone else was close enough to witness this domestic carnage. There were two blond teenagers lobbing a ball back and forth on the tennis court, but they didn’t seem to notice the warfare in the picnic area. Dad slung a hand into the pocket of his jeans, tipped his head back, and drained his beer in one long gulp. Then he tossed it with a clank into the bag.
“All right, that’s enough,” he said quietly. “You’re being ridiculous.” He leaned down to tie the handles of the bag. “It’s one thing to feel confused, but it’s another thing to blame me. The party was great. Right, pumpkin?” He looked at Ruth, who attempted to freeze even deeper into her body. “You had fun?”
Ruth moved her head perhaps an inch, though she couldn’t say herself whether the movement constituted a shake or a nod. She’d had so much fun. It was the best day she’d had since they left San Juan. In fact it was the best day she could remember. But wasn’t it some kind of betrayal to admit that in this context?
“Grab those two bags, Benny, let’s pack up the car.” Her father pointed to the remaining shopping bags on the table. “I’ll bring the cooler. Ruth, bring those beautiful presents from your friends. We’ll get ’em home and open ’em.”
Their father took the garbage bag and cooler, turned, and headed for the Datsun, but Benny and Ruth did not move. They waited for Mama to sanction their father’s instructions. The beat expanded into a few seconds, and Ruth felt herself stretching toward the three colorful packages on the table. She would not step toward them, would not lift them into her arms.
“Go on,” Mama finally released them from the spell. “Do as your father says.”