It’s Not like Now, Nobody Knows You

The music from the kitchen seeped under Cristina’s bedroom door. “One two three, five six seven.” Her hand tapped back and forth. “One two three,” her ribcage jerked side to side, “five six seven.” Her feet moved under her desk. There was no hope for concentration on the story she was writing. She got out of her chair and clumsily sashayed across 7 counts worth of floor to let the music in as if it were a cat scratching at her door.

It was Saturday morning. Cristina had been writing a story about her grandmother for a scholarship contest her creative writing teacher had announced a few weeks prior. The winner would receive $20,000 dollars towards university tuition. She didn’t tell her grandmother that the story was about her, she wanted it to be a surprise.

Her grandmother was visiting that morning from El Yunque 30 minutes outside of San Juan, where Cristina lived with her mother. The two women sat at the kitchen table drinking coffee. Chicken cutlets for a 12pm lunch sizzled in oil. There were few ways that Cristina’s grandmother showed affection, and cooking for Cristina and her mother when she visited was one of them.

Cristina danced into the kitchen and announced, “I’m going to the plaza!”

“I don’t know why you just let her go into the city like this,” her grandmother said to Cristina’s mother who reached into her pocket for a few dollars to give her daughter for a treat or two.

“It’s not like when I was a child. Living in the city, you practically knew everyone; the neighbors watched over you. You knew a lot of people. I remember there was a gentleman, who used to come to the front door, bring flowers, just because. You don’t see that anymore.”

Cristina took the money from her mother. Her grandmother was always telling stories about better times. Cristina enjoyed her grandmother’s stories but she just didn’t always trust the nostalgia of them: nostalgia will have you convinced the bee kissed you.

“Not like now, you don’t know anyone,” her grandmother continued. “People stay in their home locked up. It used to be very free, a lot of music, good people. You knew practically everyone. ‘Oh yes, you’re the daughter of so and so,’ ‘Oh I know your family.’ It’s not like now, nobody knows you.”

Cristina kissed them both on the cheek and left. The music followed her out the door until it could no longer keep up. One two three, five six seven. Nobody knows you; nobody knows you.

Cristina went to the plaza most Saturday afternoons to get the coveted coconut pops from the corner store—the ones with the little shreds of coconut inside—and sit on the plaza steps to observe people, guess what their stories were, and race against the sun’s pop-melting heat before the sticky treat oozed all over her fingers. Little did her grandmother know, Cristina thought, the bodega owner knew her by name. Not many people did.

“Little girl, little girl!”

Not considering herself little, though still curious, Cristina looked around and caught the eye of the Viejo who sold souvenirs to the tourists. He waved her over. With a Puerto Rican flag in hand, he continued, “Little girl, how is your English? This woman wants to buy this,” he waved the flag in the air, “but she doesn’t know Spanish so I can’t tell her the price. Can you translate for me?”

She could.

“Well,” she said and took another lick at her pop, then used it as a pointer, “he says it’s 15 dollars,” jolting her pop his direction. When Cristina spoke English, each word swelled with her Puerto Rican accent like the limbs of a well-watered aloe. The pop dripped. The woman took the flag, paid the man, and left.

That next Saturday, Cristina sat on steps of the plaza and commenced with her coconut pop ritual.

“Little girl, little girl!”

Cristina looked around and met eyes with the Viejo. She popped up from the concrete steps and went over. Today, music played from a little radio on his souvenir table. One to three, five six seven.

“I knew you’d be back; I always see you around here. I have a little something for you.”

He rummaged through a little bag and concealed the item he took from it behind his back.

He smiled and said, “This is for you, a thank you,” as if he knew her, he handed her a little black notebook. “Write your little wishes into this notebook. You never know which one of them might come true.” Cristina shook the popsicle juice from her hand, wiped the rest on the back of her pants, took the little notebook from him, and thanked him for the gift. She wondered if he was someone’s grandfather, and if he was, suspected that he’d be a good one.

Cristina couldn’t stay at the plaza as long as she usually would. She and her mother had plans to visit her grandmother in El Yunque that afternoon. Not many family members visited her grandmother anymore. It used to be that around Christmas time, practically the whole family would visit the farm. Now, it was just the three of them.

The grandmother would tell Cristina and her mother about the Christmas “assaults.”

“We’d have ‘musical assaults!’ The people would come to visit you at any time. You had to be prepared to have food to feed them. But they didn’t just knock at your door: they’d have guitars and other instruments. Yes, you had to have food for them. And we always did. And they would sing us special Christmas songs. It was good; it was a good life.”

This was story was always jarring to Cristina.

Night’s on the farm felt lonelier than in the city. Even though Cristina didn’t have many friends to begin with, at least in the city, you knew that there were people on either side of you, in their homes, perhaps playing games, perhaps having dinner, perhaps performing rituals or some kind of magic.

That night in bed, a mango hit the roof making a sound so loud it was as if a whole man fell, and she wondered if a man had actually made his way to the roof. Or maybe the man wasn’t a man at all, but a boy. Maybe he was climbing for mangoes because he loved them, and he saw the mango tree, salivated, and just had to have one of those juicy treats. So, he climbed the tree, but mis-stepped and there he went! Right on her roof. Maybe, in other circumstances, they would have been friends. If she wasn’t there, trying to sleep. And he wasn’t on the other side of the ceiling. If he was a boy at all, not a mango. And she remembered that she was alone. Nobody knows you; nobody knows you. She remembered her little black notebook from the Viejo. She hopped up from her bed and took the notebook from her bag and went back under the covers.

Every time her grandmother shared an anecdote, it reminded Cristina that there was so much she didn’t know about her family history, what stories she hadn’t been told. The stories she wanted to know mostly were those of her grandfather, may he rest in peace. Cristina never met her grandfather. Never even saw a picture. He was the one person her grandmother didn’t tell stories about. She had tried asking her mother once, to no avail.

“Wash the dishes, Cristina.” And Cristina never asked again after that.

Eyes tracing the contours of the room, Cristina wondered about her grandfather. She’d been wondering since she’d met the Viejo. What he looked like, the timber of his voice. Maybe he was like the Viejo: kind, gentle, with a thin but pronounced unibrow that rested delicately above the bridge of his nose. Cristina made up her own stories about him. The little intimate moments he and her grandmother may have had together. Maybe in their younger years, her grandfather and grandmother danced salsa together in the kitchen. One two three, five six seven. Maybe during Christmas one year, she had lipstick on her cheek from the aunts and cousins who had lined at the door to say goodbye and when they all were gone, he looked at her and laughed, and she looked in the mirror and they both laughed together as he gently wiped the red and pink and salmon colored spots from her face. No, Cristina didn’t know these stories. She wanted to know if her grandmother was sometimes was lonely like she was.

She wrote in her little notebook from the Viejo what would become her story for the scholarship contest. She wrote about the ‘musical assaults,’ how she found it unsettling that strangers would enter your home, but she made one of those strangers her grandfather. Gave him the Viejo’s voice and brow. Wrote how lively her grandmother was that night. How she danced to the grandfather’s song. That the next time they saw each other was 30 minutes away in the plaza. That they sat on the steps, where Cristina sat, and talked until night. She wrote from the life she knew about the lives she wanted to know. She wrote about the strange ways people come into your life. From the roof or through the front door, loneliness makes way for strangers to enter in and we give them our affections: a dance, a meal. One two three, five six seven. She wrote until 4am.

Months later, Cristina got the news that she did win that $20,000 scholarship. Her family celebrated as if Jesus himself was returning. Her mother invited cousins, aunts, and of course, her grandmother, for a celebratory dinner, the first time the whole of them were gathered in years. Cristina was to read the story to the family after they ate. At the end of the night, Cristina finished the final words of her story and looked to her grandmother.

“You might as well return the money,” her grandmother said after a silence and with a softness Cristina hadn’t heard from her before.

Her grandmother pushed out her chair and left the kitchen.

No one knew what to say. Her mother tried to comfort her, but Cristina went to her room to be alone and cry.

Her grandmother didn’t talk to her for several weeks. On the days she visited, when Cristina entered a room she was in, her grandmother would leave.

“Please talk to her,” Cristina’s mother advocated on her behalf. It would be another week before she did.

“Who are you to tell these stories? They are mine.” Her grandmother abruptly entered Cristina’s room one evening as she worked on her homework.

“It’s my story, too,” Cristina had thought. The story wasn’t just about her grandmother and grandfather; it had Cristina’s life and desire to know her history, too. How could the narrative not also be hers, she reasoned? Besides, no one would know the story was about them. Nobody knew her grandparents.

Cristina looked at her grandmother. She noticed what she couldn’t see: her grandmother’s left hand that always rested on the small of her back. Cristina’s eyes began to swell. There was so much she didn’t know.

“Niña, let me tell you a story about the real night I met your grandfather. This time, keep it between us.”

From the kitchen, Cristina could hear the crackling of oil.