After the Hurricane(10)
She learned her Spanish in the classroom, over a summer in Spain, and lately, on her phone. She rarely speaks it with anyone. She worries what might fall out of her mouth, how quickly she will be judged as not good enough. Not Puerto Rican enough, as she is and isn’t supposed to be.
Who is a Puerto Rican? What is a Puerto Rican? Elena will be damned if she knows. Is it a nationality? A cultural identity? A piece of both? Is it defined by skin tone or language or food or religion or how good an oversize T-shirt spray-painted with the Puerto Rican flag looks on her body? Does it mean hoop earrings or cornrows or sleek waves or a taste for mofongo? Elena has been to the island many times in her life, but trips back and forth have not strengthened her assurance or her denial of what she might be. She wonders if her cultural identity is like a video game, if she gets points for this and has points taken away for that, half a player’s life’s worth of points gone for a non–Puerto Rican mother, ten points for each trip to the island, three for every time she tells people she is Puerto Rican, minus two for every time she doesn’t. But the game is not fully realized in her mind. She has so many questions about how it would be played.
If you know a lot about the island, if you have relatives on the island, do you get to be more Puerto Rican than someone else who doesn’t have knowledge or humans? If you are only half, but you’ve been to the island a lot, does that make you as Puerto Rican as someone who is whole, but has never been? If you are dark but can’t speak Spanish, if you are light but can speak Spanish, if you are a blonde but you can cook arroz con pollo, if you have a full-on glorious Latino-fro but you can’t cook anything, if you have a really Spanish name, if you don’t, if you roll your r’s correctly, if you can’t stand the taste of rum, if you like “Despacito,” if you can’t dance, which one earns you the highest standing, the best score?
If someone would just explain the rules to Elena, she could tell these women next to her what she is, she could know herself. But no one has given her a set of instructions to herself, to what she is, and what she fears most is declaring herself only to be contradicted, to be proven wrong, to be told she has no right to make any kind of claim to that identity. And so she sits in silence, saying nothing to them at all.
All of them, the chatting women, the quiet couple, Elena, the handful of other people at the gate, are waiting. Flights to the island have been canceled left and right, air travel virtually shut down for months, and while flights are now available, they are cautious, one a day from Newark, a stark contrast to the previous seven options Elena used to see.
The plane is delayed, just an hour, but they all sit on the edges of their seats, tension humming, worried that it will be canceled for good. People who want to go somewhere, either onward, to their destination, a bright little island torn by an angry sea, or back where they came from, their homes, to put away their bathing suits and shorts, their sunscreen and their straw fedoras, sad but settled. It is this in-between, the waiting, that drives men mad. And women. Purgatory.
Elena stretches, trying not to disturb the people around her who have no qualms about doing the same in reverse. The male member of the couple has already spread his legs into her space and commandeered the elbow rest, while the Puerto Rican women have, in Spanish, commented on her body, confirming her decision not to wear white pants, and asked her, in English, to guard their kingdom of objects as they take bathroom breaks and survey the Spanish-language magazine options in the sparse Hudson News. She checks her purse for the hundredth time, noting the position of the spare key to her father’s house that her mother had sent her, amazing that Rosalind had it after all this time; her cell phone, her wallet, her computer, her passport, which she does not need but travels with everywhere anyway; the book she has opened and shut over and over again, unable to read a word of it with her brain buzzing and eyes itching as they are. Nothing has moved since she last looked, nothing has gone mysteriously missing. Everything is just as she left it, and this troubles her more than it might if everything had been turned around. Everything she owns is ready for her to go to Puerto Rico. Why won’t her body fall in line?
Her work is flexible, her company understanding. They admit that she can do her job from anywhere in the world, really, with the exception of showing apartments, which only impacts her own commission, really. The company has more than enough people eager to step into that role for Elena. She could see the hungry light in their eyes in the meeting she had held to tell them about the open units. They are all, like her, master’s degree holders, sure this job will be a temporary one, but their eagerness to take on her work belies their intentions. It is so easy to get caught up in something in New York, for the things you do to make money to become the only things you do, Elena thinks to herself. When was the last time she applied for a job at a museum, or a historic site? A year ago, maybe two, after receiving rejection emails for volunteer positions, neatly worded apologies kindly explaining to Elena that she is not qualified to give her labor away for free.
Time away from her work will cost little to anyone except Elena herself. She will have to respond to emails, schedule repairs, run background checks on renters, nothing more. She had gone in to the office fearful, anyway, concerned that they might find her delinquent, that one of the young hungry people would be waiting for her job wholesale. She sat with her boss, Terrance, over coffee, the day after she got the call from Rosalind, after one of their scheduled meetings, unsure how to begin. She planned to lie, to say that her father was ill. People understood illness, when the concern was something in the body, but when it came to the mind, Elena had learned that no matter how well versed they were in the concept of mental health, no matter the things they said, most people she had met in her life, at their core, believed that anything mental was self-indulgence, weakness.