“Home, by way of Crown Heights”
By
Tania Acosta Pabon
They say it takes seven years for an outsider to become a New Yorker. I reached the milestone in 2012 and that same year I had to move back home to Puerto Rico. By the time I returned to New York in 2015 for an MFA in Westchester, diagnosis of bipolar I under my belt, all of my friends had moved to Brooklyn. Single and employed, from my studio apartment in Mount Vernon, I lived a stable, routine life. It never occurred to me that in the future I would move to Brooklyn too. It wasn’t until I met Josh amid a global pandemic, that I started envisioning any kind of future at all.
A born-and-raised New Yorker, hailing from Long Island and having completed his BFA at Pratt, Josh was an illustrator with a genuine heart. We spent time upstate, in the Hudson Valley, in Long Island. My eyes opened to new scapes in the state, and they widened at the new love. After our two-year anniversary, we began the hunt for an apartment we could share to start on a future. We chose Brooklyn for both its familiarity and newness. The grueling hunt jaded us, but when we entered our apartment the first time we knew it was ours.
We moved into a two-bedroom on the quieter side of Crown Heights, me first and Josh a week later. We were situated on a block that comes alive after school, with kids yelling “You’re it!” and the ice cream truck jingle ebbing closer and further away as it completes its route. There are four delis within a block and a half of us, and it took me a week to decide which one makes the best chicken cutlet.
Monday, my first day alone at the apartment, I found myself in Google Maps and scoped the area for the closest deli. The top four were on Ralph, two toward Prospect and two toward Sterling. I stepped outside of our building, a three-unit townhouse, and paused at the top of the stoop. Summer was heavy in the air, heat sticking to my arms and face. From somewhere not too close but not too far, came the voice of Marc Anthony singing “Preciosa.” I made my way down the steps, out through the gate and to the left. As I approached the corner, I came upon the source of the music— an aging man in a wheelchair, pushed by a short woman with a tight bun and a soft, weathered face, with a small radio tied to one of the handles.
The short woman led the seated man to a group of older women sitting in a row outside of the building on the corner. She pulled him over next to the women’s lawn chairs and they all greeted each other in Spanish, “Hola, como estamos?” As I approached them, they seemed to recognize the tropical sun on my skin and the women smiled politely as I walked past. “Buenos días,” I said, as if addressing my grandmother’s friends, grandmothers to others.
On the phone that night, after a day of wetting my feet in this new pool, I told Josh about the matriarchs of our block and the man who travels with salsa. “You should introduce yourself to them!” he urged excitedly. “I’m sure they would love to know they can talk to you!”
I hesitated, “I don’t know, I already can’t deal with my own Puerto Rican mother. Not sure I should expose myself to three more?”
Josh laughed and dismissed me. “Come on, they’ll love you.” The truth was, I was intimidated by how much they reminded me of the women of my youth; their presence was more comforting than I could ever expect.
I began calling the chatty women and salsa man “The Cool Kids,” alluding to the fact that I really wanted them to like me. It was an inherent reaction bred from years of cultural indoctrination. Few figures held as much power in Puerto Rican culture as a judgmental grandmother. Pair her with two others and they form a critical clique. The chatty women’s Spanish sounded like the one I used to hear over my grandmother’s fence, from neighbor to neighbor asking for salt or milk or the latest gossip.
On Tuesday, as I made my way to Ralph to try the second deli on my list, I greeted the group with “Buenos dias,” Then, relaxing a bit, I exhaled, “que calor!”
“¡Que si que!” and “¡Ay Dios mío!” exclaimed the women in agreement, their shoulders visibly relaxing.
I reported the development to Josh that night, to which he responded, “See? Like they’ve known you forever.”
On Wednesday, it rained and I put my chicken cutlet research on pause. On Thursday, the pavement still dark from yesterday’s water, I made my way out to try the third deli. As I walked by the corner, The Cool Kids waved an enthusiastic hello, and I waved back, “¡Hola!” “¡No te mojes que viene lluvia!” called one of the women after me, warning me not to get caught in the coming rain. Her instinctual concern brought back my grandmother, a voice of wisdom, part of a generation that can smell brewing storms. To be cared for by such women is nothing short of home.
On Friday, as I walked back from the fourth and final deli with a chicken sandwich in tow, I saw a warehouse truck parked near the corner on Park Place. Two young men unloaded boxes from the back, one of them placing a rectangular package on a dolly and pushing it toward the apartment building The Cool Kids guard. Salsa blared loud and joyful from salsa man's wheelchair. As he maneuvered the dolly, the young man called out, “Turn it up que está bueno!”
Salsa man perked up, “¿Tú eres Boricua?” I heard the eagerness in his voice, the excitement at potentially meeting a fellow countryman.
“No,” answered the young man. “Soy Mexicano, pero I love salsa.”
“Ah.” It was a disappointment I too had tried to feign not feeling before, the reminder that you were not in the company of your people.
As I walked by The Cool Kids, I slowed my pace. Salsa man looked at me, and with a proud smile I stated, “¡Yo soy Boricua!” His eyes lit up as the chatty women turned into young school girls, squealing in surprise and bursting into giggles. I let out a laugh and carried on down the block, on my way home.
After spending a week alone in a barely-furnished apartment, Josh arrived on Saturday prepared to fill the space. The day was a blur of moving boxes, putting away clothes, allocating spots to things, then moving those things as we continued to uncover more things. There was too much to do to pause and take in the landmark moment. We busied ourselves until our bodies begged for food and water, and then sleep. The following day, our first morning together in the apartment, we cuddled in silence for a while, enjoying the start of a new life.
For breakfast, Josh embarked on a mission to obtain two bacon-egg-and-cheeses, on a roll, toasted. I gave him strict instructions to make a left on Ralph, walk up one block, and go to the deli on the far side of the street. “Do not go to the one on your corner,” I tell him sternly. “Go to the one with the black and red awning. That first one doesn’t have Boar’s Head.”
Upon his return, he said sadly, “I didn’t see The Cool Kids.”
“It’s Sunday, they’re at church,” I answered matter of factly, though it was a wild guess. I thought of my grandmother, how she never missed Sunday mass. And when she could no longer attend because her legs would not take her, the priest came to her.
⬩
The first flashback happened our second week in Crown Heights, while chopping carrots for dinner. Something about the layout of the kitchen and how I navigated it, with the corner to my right and the stove just off to the side. Something about me making a meal in precisely this position in this grid took me back to the kitchen I grew up in, in Puerto Rico. I continued to slice the carrot mechanically as I tried to identify where this feeling came from. It was as if nostalgia met a deja vu. For a split moment, I felt I was cooking in my parents’ kitchen, prepping the ingredients for when my mother got home from work. I had been transported back ten years, to living back at home to receive treatment for an episode of psychosis. I was that 25 year old again, trying to start a new life despite not knowing how. And she embodied me, too, in the present. A girl trying to build a new home with someone, taking a chance never taken before. Both of us finding solace in the kitchen. My heart compressed, my cheeks flushed and quickly, on cue, the tears came. I was overwhelmed not by the memory itself, but by its intensity and power. To gather myself, I stepped out of the kitchen and into the bathroom to splash water on my face.
This was the opening of a portal, either within me or outside of me. Every so often I would be working on something in the kitchen and sudden visions of my mother moving in the same way would flood me, bringing me to tears. One quiet weekday, a month into our moving, I sat at my desk focused on a spreadsheet, when I became startled at sudden and jabbing honking. Like the flashbacks in the kitchen, it wasn’t the car horns themselves that startled me, but rather how quickly and harshly the honking transported me again to my childhood home. Perhaps it was the direction from where the sound came, or the way it hit my eardrum, just so. Whatever the trigger, I felt myself transplanted to the countless moments of horns suddenly blasting outside as I sat in the living room on my laptop trying to write or study or work. Our family room windows faced a two-way main street that led either into the heart of downtown or to the highway exit. On a given Friday night the loud symphony of car horns blasting off tune would be going in both directions. Late at night, there would be a somewhat less common but even louder crash that would pierce through the air— usually a drunk driver trying to get home ramming their car into something. Once, a car crushed its nose against our building’s parking garage gate. A wobbly man stepped out of the driver’s side, took a look at the damage and threw his hands up and onto his head like a distressed cartoon. My father called the cops. As with all flashbacks, a loud cabinet slamming in the kitchen startled me back to the present.
“Sorry!” I heard Josh yell automatically from the other room. It was the same each time. I’d be caught in my own living ghost until Josh either entered the room or called my name or flushed the toilet or otherwise made his presence known, pulling me back into this reality. Later, I would walk to the deli just for a dose of the cool kids, a home remedy.
At first, the flashbacks choked me from the inside. But, the longer I lived in Brooklyn, the more I felt reminded of the things core to me rather than haunted by the things I hated in myself. When El Grand Combo would blare from salsa man’s radio, when the ladies of the court called me “linda,” I would become grounded in something not only familiar but necessary. Like sustenance, I was brought back to who I was before Josh, before treatment, before New York, before psychosis.
I was diagnosed with Bipolar I eleven years ago, at the age of 25, but my doctor could identify related behaviors as early as my teen years. The Puerto Rico I experienced while growing up was partially imagined and informed by the symptoms bubbling inside me— hallucinations, mania, and depression. My wanting to run was in itself a symptom. Going to NYU had been a way to escape a small island I felt too odd for, a way to deny who I was in favor of anything else. Now, in this pocket of Brooklyn, I was surprised at how the Spanish outside, rhythmic like the lingering music, stirred in me the same warmth I felt each time I dug my feet in familiar sand.
Manhattan and San Juan were both plagued with honking cars and sirens, so the stillness on our Crown Heights street caught me by surprise. It was a quality like this, the suburban peace, like the fact we had a car and a parking spot, that made me feel I was living in a new personal era. Anchored by the chit chat women and salsa man, I could allow myself to be immersed in this new place. That is, not the new apartment, but the new streets, the new deli, the new love.
One usual morning, as we sipped coffee and contemplated our neighborhood from the living room window sill, I said to Josh, “It doesn’t quite sound like New York.”
“It’s not New York,” he answered with a playful smile, “it’s Brooklyn.” I smiled at the sentiment, and agreed. In New York I had grown into adulthood, but in Brooklyn I was fully realized.
No comments:
Post a Comment