The first phrase I learned in English was “I’m sorry, so sorry,” the only words I could make out in a song then popular on the radio. The rest of the ballad was a garble in a female voice quavering with remorse. I was 13 and about to learn that love meant having to say you’re sorry over and over again.
That summer Mami decided to leave Puerto Rico for the United States. As Papi drove us to the airport, he sang along with Brenda Lee on the radio.
“What does the song say?” I asked.
“Lo siento,” Papi said. “Lo siento tanto.”
Mami sat next to him, lips taut. She’d spent two weeks in New York before deciding to move there. Did she understand what Brenda Lee was helping my father say to her? Papi had chosen to send us away rather than marry her. After we waved goodbye that afternoon, neither Mami, nor I, nor my six sisters and brothers would see him again for eight years.
Brooklyn was a reader’s delight. The streets were labeled, the buildings numbered. Neon signs hissed and flashed over storefronts. Shadowed letters curved across plate glass windows: OPEN, CLOSED, CHECKS CASHED. Messages were scrawled over the mailboxes in the lobby of our apartment building: FOR RENT, FOR SALE, KEEP DOOR CLOSED. Posters stretched across the sides of buses, billboards loomed over roofs while smaller ones slid into channels over the seats of subway cars. COME TO MARLBORO COUNTRY, DO NOT LEAN ON THIS DOOR, NO ANIMALS ALLOWED.
But for the occasional SE HABLA ESPANOL, most of the signs were a jumble of advertising, warnings and, sometimes, necessary information. NO STANDING, NO LOITERING, NO ENTRY, PULL HERE FOR EMERGENCY BRAKE. More mysterious were the graffiti sprayed on walls, scratched through layers of paint on the steel beams holding up the tracks of the elevated train, or carved in deep furrows on wooden school desks. I eventually learned they were curses.
The brick building near our school was a public library. The librarian, a rosy-cheeked woman with a platinum beehive, took down the address from the electric and gas bills sent to Mami that proved we lived in the neighborhood.
“Your name?”
“Esmeralda Santiago.”
“I’m sorry?”
I spoke slowly, but she didn’t understand. She handed me a scrap of paper, and I wrote in the looped cursive taught in Puerto Rico’s public schools.
She printed my name on a card. The 17 letters marched across in increasingly smaller blocks until the final “o” was punctuation. Library cards, I thought, were designed for people with short, American names like Dick, Jane and Sally.
I ambled up and down the aisles, but none of the books was in Spanish. In the children’s reading room, a group had gathered at the feet of another librarian, who read and then turned the book so that the children could see the illustrations. I knelt at the back and listened to the story and saw that the drawings explained the text. This is how American children learn English, I thought, by looking at picture books.
After the reading, I borrowed as many alphabet books as I was allowed. At home, I studied the drawings and memorized the names of things. “A” was for Apple, “B” for Boy, “C” for Car, “D” for Dog, “E” for Elephant. In my favorite books, all the words were related to each other. Apple, Banana, Carrot were in the book about Fruits. Doctor, Entertainer, Fireman were in Jobs. “Z” was almost always Zebra, even in the book about fruits, although in the one about jobs it was for Zookeeper.
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