looked slimy and no way was I going to touch them. I can’t fathom why Ma thought we’d want turtles as our first pet but there you go. After that we were, at one time or another, the proud owners of gerbils, a rabbit, a stray cat and a dog.
The cat, which we named Cathy, was a beauty. She was a white cat and that’s all I remember. My fear of animals kept me from even wanting to touch, pet or develop any fondness for her but she was memorable because she became the object of a stray tomcat’s affection. For about a week or so, that tomcat began appearing at the window in our living room and would bang on the window with its paw. It was a big cat too and we were scared of it. Of course, the window was kept tightly closed but after a few days, my mom decided we had to get rid of Cathy and where she went, I don’t know. One day she was there, the next day she wasn’t.
Pancho was the rabbit. He was blind in one eye and my mom insisted on keeping him in the bathroom. As you can well imagine, bath time was a nightmare for me. My mom would have to carry me into the bathroom and place me in the bathtub because no way was I going to set foot anywhere near that rabbit. Well, one day, as I was soaking in my bubble bath, guess who decides to put his paws on the edge of the tub and stare at me while I’m bathing? That stupid rabbit scared the bejesus out of me and I screamed like a banshee. My mom ran in the bathroom to find me standing up in the bathtub, shrieking hysterically. She thought my moment of extreme panic was hilarious but I found no humor in it at all. Eventually Pancho suffered a terrible demise that even I couldn’t have wished on him. On a trip to Puerto Rico, my mother left Pancho with the building’s superintendent. Her intention was that he should take care of our rabbit while we were away and he thought we had given him the rabbit to keep so he ate him in a fricassee.
We had gerbils once too. My classmate and neighbor, Wanda invited me over to her home one afternoon and next thing I know I’m carrying a box home with two little gerbils in it. Never mind they looked like rats and I didn’t dare touch them. I took them home, gave them to my mom and she went out and bought them a cage and other gerbil accessories. Her only mandate to me was that since I brought them home it was my responsibility to clean their cages. I said sure as long as I didn’t have to touch the creatures. So at first they were small and Ma would take them out one at a time and put them in a bucket whenever I had to clean the cage. This went on for a while and one day Ma did her thing so I could do mine and then proceeded to leave and do some shopping. I’d been left alone before so it was no big deal and as long as the gerbils were in the bucket, no problem. So there I am cleaning the cage when all of a sudden I peek down at the bucket and…no gerbils! Of course, I hadn’t noticed because I barely paid them any attention to them but they had grown and somehow managed to jump out of the bucket so here I am, alone in our tiny apartment with two large gerbils on the loose. They may as well have been enormous Gambian pouch rats for all the commotion I caused when I realized that fact. I managed to climb on top of our refrigerator and screamed and screamed and screamed myself raw until my mom came home. I stayed on top of the fridge until she found and captured both gerbils and then I begged her to give them away. She said okay and went to talk to our neighbor two doors down. She agreed to take them and later I find out that she promptly threw them down the building dumbwaiter. Basically she threw them away like garbage because that’s what usually went down the dumbwaiter. Can’t say I was sorry to see them go.
I was eleven when we got our last pet. My mom’s friend was given a mixed breed puppy and she couldn’t keep him. She offered him to my mom and because the puppy was only a few weeks old, he needed a lot of attention. He wouldn’t drink unless he was fed from a bottle and cried all night long the first week he was with us. I spent each of those nights with my head underneath my pillow trying to drown out the cries of a puppy that obviously had been taken away from his mother way too soon. I have to admit the puppy was cute (we named him Sandy) but I still wouldn’t touch him. A couple of months after he came to live with us, we were getting ready to take a trip to Indiana to visit family. My mom had bought me some brand new white Pro-Keds. They were my pride and joy and I had them nicely laid out in the floor of my bedroom ready for the day of our big trip. One afternoon I walk into my bedroom and what do I see? A nice big pile of puppy poop that Sandy had left all over my new Keds! And right next to it sat the culprit! I was furious and I grabbed Sandy under his chest, and gingerly took him to my mom, all the while bawling my eyes out. I admit I probably overreacted with this because my mom washed my Keds and pretty soon they were good as new but still…In any event, I now admit I missed his whole puppyhood because of my irrational fear. At the very least I outgrew my fear of dogs but I still don’t like most animals and at this point in my life, I’m pretty much allergic to all animals, including dogs so the point is moot.
“My Last Name is Not Con Edison”
My mother was not a penny pincher, per say but she was frugal. Her limited income made her keenly aware of where and when she needed to save money, which was pretty much all the time. As a result, growing up, my siblings and I were always reminded that orange juice was an “expensive” breakfast drink and therefore we could only have one serving per day, if that. That went for any beverage in the fridge that was not water but of course, we’d ask for permission to drink some water just to bother her.
Leaving the lights or any electrical object on was also a no-no because obviously, as she loved to state again and again, her last name was not “Con Edison”. This was most forcefully enforced when one late night my brother, a novice musician at the time, was lying on his back on our living room floor playing his bass guitar. His head down, eyes closed, and knees up with guitar bass in hand, my brother was happily plucking away (he thought quietly). As he was playing his instrument, he was also listening to music with some huge head phones on. The rest of the family had settled in for the night but from our bedrooms we could hear him tapping, slapping, and thumping his bass with frenzied fervor to that music only he could hear. I realized it was beginning to annoy my mom to an extent that I could hear her muttering under her breath. A few moments later, she got up out of bed, marched out of her bedroom and headed to the living room where my brother was. I wanted to see what she was going to do so I followed her into the darkened room and as she walked towards my brother, I realized he couldn’t see or hear her coming. The music was intensely loud and he was totally engrossed in it as he played his bass. All of a sudden I saw Ma approach my brother and with her arms outstretched, she bent toward him and placed her hands on both sides of his head. Suddenly she pulled them back and in one fell swoop she brought her arms together and banged my brother’s headphones, while they were still on his head! Imagine my brother’s shock as he cried out in pain after my mom’s surprise attack! Taking off his head phones off, he heard the classic line, “Oye, ¡apaga eso ya! (Turn that off!) ¡Yo no soy apellido Con Edison!” Needless to say, it was both a hysterical and truly memorable moment.
“Dime con quien andas y te diré quién eres.”
As far back as I can remember my mother liked to intersperse her sentences with refranes or sayings. She would say things like “los barberos comen” or “barbers need to eat” whenever one of our husbands needed a haircut or “mejor es estar solo que mal acompañao”, which meant it was better to be single than in a bad relationship. We used to call this particular adage an indirecta or a gibe she liked to frequently throw our way to remind us that we didn’t need to stay with our spouses if she even caught a whiff of a rift in our own personal relationships.
Her favorite saying though was “dime con quien andas y te diré quién eres”, which translated means “tell me with whom you walk and I will tell you who you are”. If I had to count how many times she said this in our lifetime, I couldn’t even begin to put a number on it but it was plenty. When we were very young, Ma was very strict. She was raising two girls all by herself and so there was a rule in our home that no boys were allowed in the hou
se if they were our age or older. This was strictly enforced and I know now that she meant to protect us from prepubescent boys in our neighborhood on the verge of sexual discovery. “Not with my girls”, she reasoned and she made sure it was never going to happen.
As we got older, she became tougher and more restrictive. It wasn’t a problem for me because I was the goody-two shoes of the family but I know it was hard for my sister. By middle school, she was making questionable decisions and developing problematic friendships. I figured out much later that Ma was a pretty good judge of character when it came to our friends but during our adolescence it felt as if she were painting all our friends with the same broad brush. It felt to us that she thought our friends were all capable of malice and so it meant we’d be judged by others the same way. If our friends smoked cigarettes, whether or not we smoked, to my mother, it did not matter. Somebody was going to say that Ma’s daughters were smoking too! If our friends did drugs or committed crimes, it didn’t matter that we didn’t do these things. We were