Lessons

2. HERITAGE

When we got home from school Paps was in the kitchen, cooking and listening to music and feeling fine. He whiffed the steam coming off a pot, then clapped his hands together and rubbed them briskly. His eyes were wet and sparkled with giddy life. He turned up the volume on the stereo and it was mambo, it was Tito Puente.

‘Watch out,’ he said, and spun, with grace, on one slippered foot, his bathrobe twirling out around him. In his fist was a glistening, greasy metal spatula, which he pumped in the air to the beat of the bongo drums.

My brothers and I, the three of us, stood in the entrance to the kitchen, laughing, eager to join in, but waiting for our cue. He staked staccato steps across the linoleum to where we stood and whipped Joel and Manny on to the dance floor, grabbing their wimpy arms and jerking them behind him. Me he took by the hands and slid between his legs and I popped up on the other side of him. Then we wiggled around the kitchen, following behind him in a line, like baby geese. We rolled our tiny clenched fists in front of us and snapped our hips to the trumpet blasts.

There were hot things on the stove, pork chops frying in their own fat, and Spanish rice foaming up and rattling its lid. The air was thick with steam and spice and noise, and the one little window above the sink was fogged over.

Paps turned the stereo even louder, so loud that if I screamed no one would have heard me, so loud that my brothers felt very far away and hard to get to, even though they were right there in front of me. Then Paps grabbed a can of beer from the fridge and our eyes followed the path of the can to his lips. We took in the empties stacked up on the counter behind him, then we looked at each other. Manny rolled his eyes and kept dancing, and so we got in line and kept dancing too, except now Manny was the Papa Goose, it was him we were following.

‘Now shake it like you’re rich,’ Paps shouted, his powerful voice booming out over the music. We danced on tiptoes, sticking up our noses and poking the air above us with our pinkies.

‘You ain’t rich,’ Papi said, ‘Now shake it like you’re poor.’

We got low on our knees, clenched our fists and stretched our arms out on our sides; we shook our shoulders and threw our heads back, wild and loose and free.

‘You ain’t poor neither. Now shake it like you’re white.’

We moved like robots, stiff and angled, not even smiling. Joel was the most convincing, I’d see him practising in his room sometimes.

‘You ain’t white,’ Paps shouted. ‘Now shake it like a Puerto Rican.’

There was a pause as we gathered ourselves. Then we mamboed as best we could, trying to be smooth and serious and to feel the beat in our feet and beyond the beat to feel the rhythm. Paps watched us for a while, leaning against the counter and taking long draws from his beer.

‘Mutts,’ he said. ‘You ain’t white and you ain’t Puerto Rican. Watch how a purebred dances, watch how we dance in the ghetto.’ Every word was shouted over the music, so it was hard to tell if he was mad or just making fun.

He danced and we tried to see what separated him from us. He pursed his lips and kept one hand on his stomach. His elbow was bent, his back was straight, but somehow there was looseness and freedom and confidence in every move. I tried to watch his feet but something about the way they twisted and stepped over each other, something about the line of his torso, kept pulling my eyes up to his face, to his broad nose and dark, half-shut eyes and his pursed lips, which snarled and smiled both.

‘This is your heritage,’ he said, as if from this dance we could know about his own childhood, about the flavour and grit of tenement buildings in Spanish Harlem, and projects in Red Hook, and dance halls, and city parks, and about his own Papi, how he beat him, how he taught him to dance, as if we could hear Spanish in his movements, as if Puerto Rico was a man in a bathrobe, grabbing another beer from the fridge and raising it to drink, his head back, still dancing, still stepping and snapping perfectly in time.