Lori Toppel

 Word Count 1446

1

In San Juan, in the bedroom where I spent most of my early childhood, a full-length mirror hung on the inside of the closet door. 

Our family had moved from Puerto Rico to New York City a few years earlier, but we kept the apartment on Joffre Street. My sister and I were down there on a school break, and I sat alone, cross-legged on the tile floor staring at my reflection, trying to separate my younger, mischievous self from my now shy and uncertain one. I was thirteen. Blue, for the first time, was a feeling throughout my body rather than a color to behold, and I painted a self-portrait. 

I used a small set of watercolors I'd found in one of the forgotten toy drawers. I wasn’t an artist––my sister was––but I could follow the lines and hollows of my face with a brush. I never showed the painting to anyone, yet having completed it, I felt more self-assured as if soon I might not feel so split between my childhood home and my new life in New York. 

2 

I used to walk down Joffre Street alone. I was seven or eight. I waited for the light to change and crossed Ashford Avenue to linger on the beaches of the hotels. My mother trusted that I wouldn’t wander far or swim in the ocean. I dragged my feet through the shallow water where minnows slipped around my ankles. The sea was sacred, I decided on one of those visits, and I swore I wouldn’t eat anything that lived in the ocean. When I later discovered I was allergic to seafood, I was relieved. 

In time, I told others about my pact with the ocean, but I never showed the painting to anyone. 

3

Where there’s unrest in childhood, there are sharp pieces of memory. My parents, for years, were trapped in a stormy bond. That time my father pushed my mother against the wall, and my mother called her best friend to come over. I might have been nine years old. The best friend must have called the police. I knew my father as a gentleman, and I was shocked, scared. 

Other memories pull at me. Once my father came home too drunk to walk. I’d never seen him like that. I remember, too, the family breakfasts and dinners where my mother called him spineless. I turned off my parents’ fighting by listening to the ocean when the light rose and the coquis when the darkness came. 

My sister and I also fought. She would try to upset me, say I was the mailman’s daughter, I was adopted. Her skin was fair, like that of my parents, and she was blond. My skin was olive-toned, and my hair, brown. 

4

My father was from New Jersey and my mother from England. 

I was born in Rio Piedras, Puerto Rico, at the Auxilio Mutuo Hospital. My birth certificate has the wrong date on it, one day late. My parents never had it corrected. The bureaucratic tape at the time was too frustrating. My father thought the mistake was funny, an anecdote to tell at dinner. I’ve had to go along with the date on the certificate, my primary proof of my beginnings, but I celebrate my birthday a day earlier. 

I was born a blue baby, a condition caused by contaminated water, often found in developing countries. My mother blamed the hospital, the tropics. She’d tell the story as if she’d been responsible for getting the oxygen back into my blood. 

5 

My father and I used to talk on the terrace in the middle of the night. We were erratic sleepers. He sipped his cognac, and I drank my cup of orange juice, the lagoon before us. He’d admire the cruise ships docked in Old San Juan and the lit planes passing over us, while I’d glance at the pale striations of the sea. He told me about his days as an aeronautical engineer, explained the grace of ascending. 

He told me, too, about the militant nationalists who threatened to kidnap the children of American businessmen. He told me about the young Americans fighting for our country in Vietnam. I worried about the war and told him so. Stop worrying, he said. You’re too young. I worried about being kidnapped and never told him. 

6

I had no idea how shielded I was, how blind I was to what lay beyond the windows my parents showed me. On the way to his country club, my father commented on the beauty of the sugar cane fields but never talked about the American companies that had taken control of them long ago. 

His company, a chain of supermarkets, was Puerto Rican in his mind, founded for Puerto Ricans. He viewed his employees as family, as friends, loyal and hard-working. They had made the business a success. Enchanted by the gifts of progress, he never chose the words “colonize” or “invade” when talking about the American takeover in 1898.

 I think of my father as a piston in the machinery of industrialization. I think of him as a kind man who helped others and admonished me whenever I used the word “hate.” Was he oblivious to the island’s sordid history, or was progress always the key in his mind? Let’s tuck that glitchy ignorance under his love for the business he’d learned from his father, who, after having emigrated from Russia, opened his own small grocery store in New Jersey, where his three sons worked after school. 

7

We moved to Manhattan when I was ten. My classmates welcomed me as the new girl from somewhere else, and when we played dodgeball, the team captain picked me first so I wouldn’t feel left out. One day, a boy called me a “spic,” and the insult bounced off me. What did he know about Puerto Rico? 

My parents’ fighting escalated, and my father returned to San Juan. For business, he said. But he filed for divorce. From then on, my sister and I spent every holiday with him.

 8

After my father remarried, he and his new wife remained in the Joffre Street apartment. My fiancé came with me to visit and fell under the spell of the weather, the culture, the food, and my contentment, my ease. He wanted to go back soon.

We didn’t return until long after we were married and my mother-in-law planned a trip. Our twin boys were eight. We stayed at the resort where my father used to play golf, and where my sister and I used to hang out all day waiting for him. A restless kid, I’d ride my bicycle around the property, and when my sister wanted to lie in the sun, I’d walk to the end of the beach where rocks formed a cliff by the ocean. I’d stand on the brink between earth and sea. The rush I’d feel. The clash of elements, of species. 

But my mother-in-law was disappointed. The towels were thin, the service was slow. On our first night there, I was walking back from dinner with my sons when they told me how much they liked Puerto Rico. The coquis were loud, and I described the tiny frogs and how their song was one of my favorite melodies. The next day my mother-in-law moved us to another hotel, a place that didn’t know my past. The place of my past soon went bankrupt and was reborn as a Ritz-Carlton Resort, a capable employer of hundreds, a generous employer, like my father’s supermarkets had once been.

Since then, my husband and I have gone to the island with our sons, and on our own. Our contentment, our ease. We hope to make the trip a family tradition.

Our little family, with its scant traditions. 

9

Home is the weather of identity, a bearer of heat or cold, wind or stillness. Identity, a barometer of the interior.

I live an hour outside of New York City with my husband, in a house surrounded by woods, where we raised our sons. Often, I take the train into the city to see a friend, go to a museum, play, or dance performance. I swim through the city’s texture, my senses heightened. 

I live a half-hour away from a YMCA where I dance four times a week to salsa, merengue, and other Latin styles. Many of the women in my class speak Spanish––they’re from Colombia, Peru, and Puerto Rico. At times, I, too, speak Spanish. 

When it’s quiet, I stare out the window at the woods, the dogs, the birds, the light, and I think we will try to keep this house, this home.

Lori is the author of the novella The Word Next to the One I Want, the collaborative memoir Still Here Thinking of You, and the novel Three Children. Her stories and essays have appeared in literary journals including Inkwell Journal, The Antioch Review, and The Del Sol Review. Toppel, the mother of twin sons, grew up in Puerto Rico and lives in New York with her husband. More at loritoppel.com.