Honorable
Mention 2017 Brooklyn Non-Fiction Prize
"GIRL FROM SUNSET"
By
Connie Pertuz-Meza
In the
fall of 1987, I was ten, and Sunset Park was known as Gunset. Latin Kings used building
stoops as their thrones. Police sirens and Tears
May Fall by TKA punctured the air. Old men posted on every corner, catcalls
spilled out of their mouths, interrupted by sips of Budweiser, hidden in brown paper
bags. Displayed on the windows of most bodegas were signs that WIC and Food
Stamps were accepted. It was the only Brooklyn I knew. A section in South
Brooklyn, named after the park in its center. I wondered how something so
beautiful, like a sunset, could also bare the name of my neighborhood.
“Camina
rapido.” Mami pulled my hand.
Afraid that Mami would walk away with my arm, I raced to
catch up. The sky had faded to navy blue, and turned black, unlike any I had
ever seen. I craned my neck, and wondered how a sky that looked like a melted
rainbow ice from Charles’ Pizzeria one minute, could bruise, and turn ugly and
dark.
“It’s late,” Mami looked down at me. Two brown shopping
bags, like the ones from Conway’s, flung over her shoulder.
I looked
ahead. We were far from home. My library copy of Are You There God? It’s Me
Margaret left on my bed ready to be read, seemed miles away. The
Forty-fourth and Fifth Avenue street signs were spray-painted; tagged by Las
Nietas, the Latin Kings’ rivals. But, it didn’t matter, if left blindfolded in
Sunset Park I’d find my way home. My feet knew every crack, bump, and dip of
the streets. Constant trips to La Quinta, the heart beat of Sunset, made sure
of that.
La
Quinta, was lined with shops, a series of blocks, starting from Thirty-Sixth
Street to Sixty-Third. Lerner’s, Mini Max, Jason’s, Flamingo Furniture, La Gran
Via Bakery, and Georges Diner, as well as the shoe stores that sold the latest
kicks. The ones Mami and Papi couldn’t afford, and Joann and I ended up with
the bootleg LA Gears sold in discount store bins.
“Ugh,” I
groaned. My feet ached. It felt like we walked Sunset Park twice.
“Keep walking,” Mami tugged at my arm, but this time
softer.
Joann,
two and a half years older than me, kept to Mami’s pace, motivated by her desire
to watch Full House and I Married Dora.
Mami had
a hustle, and every Friday was the same. Mami sold clothes throughout Sunset
Park. She counted neighbors, friends, and friends of friends, among her
clients. Mami’s business model included women’s accessories and clothes bought
at wholesale prices on the Lower East Side and later marked up to make a modest
profit. A layaway system made Mami’s on-the-go boutique marketable. Friday was
payday. At the first of the month when the welfare checks were cashed, Mami
could expect more money. Some clients even paid with food stamps.
Our
route never deviated, and like the maze page of a coloring book, we zigzagged,
each block its own world. On Forty-ninth Street, between sixth and seventh
avenues, a mental health clinic that prospered according to Mami because Sunset
was full of locos y las drogas. Not to far away, Forty-second and Third Avenue
was the abortion clinic where Mami recited a few Ave Marias y Padre Nuestros,
in name of those murdered little souls whenever we walked past. A collision,
under the Gowanus, somewhere between Fifty-ninth and Sixty-third, where Sunset
Park and Bay Ridge bordered, a division of race and class. Later, we made our
way towards the park, only to find ourselves back to Eighth Avenue. Where we
had begun.
Jobita
was Mami’s longtime client, and lived in a building by the park. The hallways
were narrow, the smell of fried platanos permeated the air, and merengue pulsed
between the apartments. Because Jobita lived only a few blocks from home, Mami
left her for last. But, this time we left Jobita’s late. She was to blame for
the darkness now over us. Proud of her new faja, Jobita took her time trying on
every pair of jeans, and the same for the sweaters. The smooth silhouette created
by her latest girdle, tacked an extra thirty minutes to our stop at Jobita’s.
Another half hour added as Jobita offered Mami a cup of Café Bustelo. Jobita
doled out round tea biscuits that tasted of sugar and coconut called Marias,
which Joann and I took small bites from, between sips of Hawaiian Punch. I
watched her slide a ten-dollar bill in Mami’s direction, and knew Mami would
complain the whole walk home. Jobita owed so much more than the lousy ten bucks
she given. Yet, she never paid a penny more on any given Friday. I glared, and
wondered if Judy Blume’s Margaret followed her mother around for hours on
Fridays to collect money that people owed her, from a traveling clothing
boutique.
Once
outside Mami let out a string of profanity. Aimed at no one, but at the same
time everyone. She cursed the nighttime. Mami hated the park during the
daytime, flung words at it like, cochino parque, and peligroso parque. At
night, Mami refused to be near the park. It was filled with what she called,
gente mala clase. As a ten year old, I envisioned the park crawling with big-clawed
monsters. Later, I realized those monsters were not monsters at all. They were
the displaced, the dejected, the unnoticed, and the unwanted. The ugly. They
like us were invisible, and called Sunset Park home.
Aware of
the absence of light, but left with no choice we marched alongside the park. The
rustle of the brown shopping bags against Mami’s jacket, and the crunch of
fallen leaves were the only noise we heard. I worried about Mami’s hands. The
bags were heavy. Filled to the brim with the neat squares of jeans, sweaters,
blouses, and smaller squares of scarves. She was older than my friends’ moms
and complained about the ache and stiffness that inflamed the joint of her
fingers and wrists. Mami often held her hands up to Joann and me, like evidence
in the court of law. Everyday exhibits for what not to do with our lives.
Cleaning houses and carrying bags of clothes were how and why Mami paid for
Catholic school. No vayan a vivir la vida que yo llevo, Mami warned us to live
a life unlike the one she lived.
Joann
and me were Mami’s bookkeepers, on account that Mami never went to school back
in Colombia, and didn’t know how to read nor write. As children, it was easier to
fill the black ledger with the red margins and blue squares, with our own
handwriting, and not Mami’s broken twig letters. The names of each client
written on top, and one side listed items purchased and at what cost, while the
other side noted their payment and transaction.
“If we cut through the park, we would get there faster,”
Joann said. Though darkness enveloped our faces, I imagined Joann’s eyes rolled
all the way to the back of her skull. Both Joann and I knew that a short cut
through the park cut our walk in half. Arriving home earlier meant a television
show for Joann, and for me, a book.
“That
place is filled with rapists and gang members,” Mami hissed.
My eyes drifted towards main steps that led to the park
entrance on Fifth Avenue. A big square
of land, perched high on elevated ground, it ran along Sixth Avenue, and up to
Seventh Avenue, and across Forty-first Street thru Forty-Fourth Street. I never
stepped foot in that park, close, but no. Not even during hot summer months
when both Joann and I begged Mami to let us go to the public pool there. Our
pleas only grew stronger when we caught sight of the kids and teenagers walking
to the park with towels on their shoulders, or walking away from the park with
the towels draped over their backs. Mami insisted that the pool was filled with
diseases, and that perverts lurked in every corner. She shook her head at us, disgusted.
And, after awhile we stopped asking. The only thing more off limits than the pool
was the park playground. Gang members congregated under the monkey bars and
next to the seesaw. Time on the swings in Sunset Park was no different than a prison
yard walk. Dangerous, I quickened my step, and shuddered in my corduroy jacket.
“Have you ever been inside?” I asked Mami. I knew the
answer to this question, but worried that Mami was annoyed at Joann for
suggesting a short cut, I hoped to distract her.
“When I first got
here, but that was a long time ago. It was before I had you girls, and I would
sit on the bench near the swings to hear the kids. The noise.” Mami’s voice
became small and quiet.
Mami told us countless times, how much she wanted kids, but
as thirty-six year old bride she was scared, her dream of motherhood was a mere
flicker of hope. Mami had Joann two years after she wed Papi, and I was born a
few weeks after her forty-first birthday.
“That’s
how I met your madrina in this park. I was looking for a friend, and she was
too. Nancy was a baby.”
“That’s one good thing, about the park.” I looked up at
Mami. Eyebrows furrowed, her thin lips set in a straight line, and eyes
distant. When her face was twisted up like that I knew that she was thinking
about her childhood in Colombia. Or Papi. Mami was born in poverty, in rural Colombia,
where eggs were a luxury. And people rode on donkeys, not cars. A life filled
with struggle since her first breath, Mami learned to survive from an early age,
not live. But, desperate to have kids she married a drunk, despite that he
proposed in a drunken stupor. Mami served these bits of her life to us, and no
different than when she made us strawberry milk at night. Matter of fact.
Mami adjusted
the bags across her back.
“I can help you,” I reached for a bag.
“No, it will slow you down, and we need to get home.” Mami
orbited around us, let go of my arm, switched the bag to her other side, and
walked around me. Joann moved too as if following some unrehearsed dance of the
eldest child.
It was always the three of us. Mami took turns lying on our
beds at night, one night Joann’s, next mine, and like a braid, we became
intertwined. Mami would whisper in the dark that she was both our mother and
father. Lying next to Mami, I listened to the sound of her breath, unaware that
Mami listened for something too, the door to open, and Papi to call out. Papi
always came home, late, when night blended to dawn. Never a precise time, just
a shade of blue across the sky.
The walk up from La Quinta was slow for everyone on foot.
Hills made it hard to walk fast, and not be out of breath. At school the year
before, I wrote a report on Sunset Park, the Dutch purchased the land from the Canarsee
Indians. I liked to imagine it the way it was back then. Wild. Not dangerous.
No sneakers strung up on lampposts, or guys on bodega corners with their hands
buried in their pockets and eyes darting back and forth. Grassy knolls, not
buildings with lobbies that smelled like piss, and broken light bulbs
shattered, leaving one staircase after the other in the dark.
Almost
home, Public School 169 our landmark that told us we were close.
“Sometimes,
I just want to keep walking.” Mami whispered. “And never stop.”
My heart
closed like a fist.
“Do you
know that it’s harder to stand in one place than it is to just walk a lot,”
Mami slowed down.
I fought
the urge not to yank her arm. While Joann and I wanted nothing more than to get
home, Mami now dragged her feet.
While
Joann and I were focused on our separates wants, I never considered Mami’s.
The park
was now behind us. Now, close to home. I
wanted nothing more than to lie on my bed and read, so that Sunset Park
disappeared between the chapters. Escape to be sought in plots that transported
me from Mami’s rages, and the insults she hurled at Papi, for being a useless drunk.
Caught in the cross fire, the sting of her words threatened to tear me wide
open. I clutched my book and sat by the ledge of my bedroom window, where Sunset
Park, and I fell into a trance, and I stared at the world beneath me.
Once
upon a time I thought Sunset Park the most beautiful place in the world. But,
that changed, that Fall of 1987. On that walk home I saw what Mami saw. How
living in a beat up and broken part of Brooklyn made you feel those things,
despite how pretty the sunset can be.
