A Bronx Girl Goes Home

The murder of a cousin takes Conducive editor Heather Tirado Gilligan back to her home in the Bronx, and back to the childhood and experiences that continue to shape her.

A Bronx Girl

Goes Home

By Heather Tirado Gilligan

FEBRUARY/MARCH 2010 CONDUCIVE

My mother emailed me when my cousin died, perhaps forgetting for a moment that the news would upset me as much as it did her. “Papo died yesterday,” she wrote. “If you want to go to the funeral I will go otherwise I will send flowers from us all.” I opened the message at my part-time job, and when I called her, she confirmed the news in a still voice that pitched neither up nor down, steadied by the blandness of shock.

Papo had been shot two days before, execution-style—kneeling forward, forehead to the ground, bullet at the base of the head—and found on a street in the Bronx, not terribly far away from our old home. We all used to live in the same public housing that was not quite the projects. The buildings were small, four stories, and our mothers had to put their names on a list and wait for a place to open up. The floors were wood parquet and the windows were paned and opened with a crank. Our mothers, sisters who emigrated from Puerto Rico as teenagers, lived across the street from each other in their twenties, both divorced single mothers.

My mother, my sister, and I eventually moved to different cities on the east coast, little scattered seeds of upward mobility. My mother remained in the distant suburb of DC where she moved us after leaving the Bronx; my sister lived in the District and I lived in Philadelphia. After she told me how Papo was shot, I arranged for her to collect us and ferry us both back to the Bronx for the funeral.

Childhood is long; even as ghetto kids we had vast expanses of free time that I now look back on with some disbelief.

I hung up and left the basement office where I worked as a secretary. Every time I left I liked leaving, even that time. I’m expert in departures. I’ve dropped entire cities, careers, and relationships in quick blinks. I have an ex-boyfriend who’s still shocked that I walked out on him one Christmas day after we lived together for a year, even though that was fifteen years ago, and I was twenty, and we had been given a blender as a gift when we were too young for blenders. I went directly to a relationship with a woman, and have since turned my back on straight life without so much as an over-the-shoulder glance. But there are things that I never drop, too: Nikki, my cat, my sister, and my mother, and Nikki’s family, who loves me still. I don’t drop things that are right, but still for some reason, my exits never lighten my load, and I’ve yet to come to a Zen-like understanding of why I only ever seem to exchange my old burdens for new ones.

I knew I would leave the secretary job soon. A few other Ph.D. students in my English department worked and taught, but I’d taken a job at fourteen because I needed the money. I never liked the parallel lives I lead working menial, admin, and sales jobs while an honors student in high school and college. I liked it even less in graduate school, when I was old enough to appreciate the mirroring of my mother’s life in mine. Six days a week I taught and read for my exams, and on the seventh I filed for eight hours in a dark room in a distant and depressed suburb of Philadelphia, neatly arranging endless piles of paper like my mother had for most of her life.

Nikki had left early in the day to visit one of the graduate programs that had recently admitted her, and I couldn’t imagine calling anyone else to meet me at the train, not that there were very many people who would. I always seemed foreign at best to the people I met in graduate school. Most of them thought I was a joke of a student, a minority candidate who looks white. And I always feel out of place, which is easily mistaken for a middle-class type, shy and sweet and so good, someone who’s never suffered a day in her soft world. My looks compounded the confusion. Aside from the pale skin I have big eyes, a small nose and mouth, all apparently adding up to an angelic cast, which once lead a close friend to describe me as a cherub, an aspect of myself I don’t see at all. I’m not sure I would have made a lot of friends in graduate school anyway, but this constant misunderstanding didn’t help matters. Expecting minority students to be loud and dark seemed pretty dense to me, but everyone else thought I was some kind of cheat.

So I rode the train home with the night shift of factory workers on work release from Holmsburg prison as my company. Usually I saw the day shift getting off in the afternoon. I eased into my own vinyl two-seater, comfortable and uncomfortable as a voyeur. Not many people who took the suburban train would understand what they were talking about as they worried about being late to the halfway house. The creaky old Septa train was running on a delay, as it often did.

I don’t look like I know people who’ve been in prison. The truth is, I don’t really know very many. My mother moved us out of the Bronx early, and even when we lived there, she shipped us daily to a private school paid for with her student loan money. She went to night classes at Lehman when City College was still free. My sister and I left long before we could make friends with people who were put away.

But my mother’s boyfriend was arrested for dealing drugs while he worked for the NYPD as a narcotics officer. When he was still in the city jail, before he was shipped to prison in Texas, my mother would take us with her to visit him. We liked him, but we never talked to him in the visting room. He and my mother kissed as the COs watched, and then we left. It was the same way every time we visited.

Papo was arrested once, and sent to jail, though never to prison. Crack spilled out of his pocket while he was playing a video game in an arcade. He was twenty, and it was about three years before he died.

I was arrested once too, over a traffic ticket paid too late, but it was more of a farce than a life-altering event. I was pulled over for a broken headlight on my way back to graduate school after Thanksgiving break, with my cat in her box in the backseat, and I didn’t have the papers to prove I’d paid the ticket in the car with me. The officers cuffed me on the side of the highway and carefully bundled my cat and me into the back of a patrol car. Forty-five minutes later my sister arrived at the police station, frightened for me and exasperated, and took me back to her house. Two months later, a judge dismissed the case, openly laughing along with the rag-tag collection of drunk and reckless drivers there to be sentenced, at the sight of my tiny sweet face in his courtroom.

So these are the sum of my experiences: three small ugly splotches, and yet they mark me. I wonder how Papo, never removed from the Bronx, must have felt about his arrest at age twenty. I’m sure it wasn’t seen as a slapstick conflusion of events, like mine was, so it’s hard for me to imagine exactly how he felt. But I’m sure he was afraid, as I was, with my hands tied behind my back on the side of the road, utterly, submissively defenseless.

Even my numbed walk home from the train the morning I heard that Papo died—that was shaped by my Bronx days too.

I know also that Papo wanted to leave the Bronx, because he called my sister and told her so. I answered the phone when he called—the first time I’d spoken to him in years and the last time I would talk to him before he died—and he said hello and asked to speak to my sister, just like this: “Hi, Heather. Is Leilah there?” Then he told her he wanted to move to Maryland too, a plan never set in any real motion.

Papo and I were never friends or enemies, a strange state of things for two children who spent lots of time together.  He and my sister, the sociable two, spent time outside with the neighborhood kids.  Nervous and shy, I sat inside, mostly in Abuela’s bedroom, watching reruns on her small black and white TV of “I Love Lucy” and “Little House on the Prairie.” Sucked into the stories, I preferred to be alone, but I worried that the other kids thought me strange, and they did, but in a gentle way, treating me as more of a curiosity than an oddity when I did venture out.

Papo and Leilah were fast and fine friends, despite the five year age difference between them. They ran up and down the street and jumped the fence that separated Abuela’s back yard from the abandoned lot next door. They played in six-foot weeds there, and the mulberry bushes that grew wild, and once they used pilfered matches to set afire an abandoned car that had rested there among the greenery for as long as we could remember.

Childhood is long; even as ghetto kids we had vast expanses of free time that I now look back on with some disbelief. Despite my solitary hours our summers stretched to include long streaks of time we spent together. All of us had summer birthdays marked with cakes from the same Italian bakery. Five aunts and uncles and eleven first cousins—and these were the ones that lived within driving distance; there were more—gathered at my grandmother’s house for barbeques. The backyard was paved with concrete and my grandfather kept a coop full of chickens there, but we didn’t think that was strange. We lived in identical cramped project apartments; Abuela’s two-story house was freedom. Our favorite place to play was the steps of the house between the first and second floors, and we skidded up and down them like our backsides were sleds and the stairs a snow-covered hill. Eventually my grandfather would curse us for all of the noise and my mother would take the three of us home. We would carefully watch Papo make his lonely way across the street to his mother’s before we went upstairs to our own house.

My father would come by our grandmother’s and sometimes take us out together too. He lived in the Bronx for forty years, and he knew how to make our small section of the city sing: thick ham and cheese sandwiches from the best deli, trips to City Island, and visits to the Bronx Zoo, where we were sometimes rewarded with pink and green oversized lollipops that looked like they’d been transported directly to Southern Boulevard from the land of Oz.

So odd how all of this that seemed so endless, and what I couldn’t wait to escape, marks me still. Even my numbed walk home from the train the morning I heard that Papo died—that was shaped by my Bronx days too. I walked the shortest way home, past the ugly houses, which I usually avoided by walking only down the renovated streets. Gentrification was a block-by-block thing in my Philadelphia neighborhood, and the ugly houses reminded me of the Bronx. They had the same awnings, shading the windows on a treeless street. Someone once told me that trees were torn out in poorer neighborhoods because they were too expensive to maintain, but I’m not sure if that’s true. People tried to spruce up their houses on the treeless blocks, with Irish flags flying and statuettes of angels arranged in tableaus in living room windows fronting the street, all alien and repulsive to me. My father is Irish, but I’d never seen anything like that before.

The renovated streets were crowded with newly polished brownstones and overflowing window boxes, and trees too. I lived on a mixed block, halfway renovated, where the children of old-timers sometimes mocked me, yelling “yuppie!” when I walked by, which maybe was a fair assessment. I did have my own box of flowers outside of my apartment’s bank of bay windows, bright pink petunias that grew in full waves by midsummer, and I was proud of them, and of the basil that I grew as well. I shopped at the Whole Foods too, a marker that distinguished me from the older residents who lived there. I compulsively stacked the store label brand into neat rows in my cart: canned whole tomatoes, organic penne, and fair trade coffee. I felt like I’d accomplished something when I unpacked my groceries and saw the lovely and full uniformity of the cabinet we used to store food.

After I walked home the day that I learned that Papo died I waited for Nikki. She was visiting the state school even though she’d been admitted to the Ivy League, which I thought was silly, but she hadn’t wanted to apply to the elite school in the first place, so I didn’t complain too much when she left for the campus tour. She didn’t believe that she would get in to either school, but I knew differently. I learned how to make my childhood poverty pay dividends as an adult, and Nikki’s life was only a slightly better mirror of mine. Her mother is Jewish and her father is black, her family had less money than most, and she lived in a mostly black neighborhood in middle New Jersey, where her father bought a house with the GI Bill. Together we faced a lifetime of the same question: Puerto Rican and Irish, where did that happen? Black and Jewish, where did that happen? The answer was the same for both of us: In New York City in the 1970s.

I wonder too if our parents thought that this is what life would like for us when they got married, free for the first time to chose someone outside of their race, if not free to make this choice without consequence.

Papo’s father is Jamaican, and Nikki looks more like my cousin than I ever did. Sometimes when we go out together, people speak to her in Spanish. The last time it happened we were at the cheese shop, sampling $20 a pound Parmesan as we watched our purchase disappear into wax paper — inexpensive smoked Gouda, but still good cheese. And I loved the small shop, with trays of roasted peppers and cookies in tall glass jars.

“Hable Espanol?” It was a tentative question to Nikki, posed as he handed over the cheese, like hoping for like. She tried to clear up the confusion, telling him that I was Puerto Rican, and she spoke not a word of Spanish. He passed back out our change and a skeptical look at me before we left. I couldn’t correct him in a way that would make him understand his mistake because I don’t speak Spanish either.

And I wondered when I became so very specific, so clearly defined and singularly different, that the act of securing a chunk of cheap cheese became laden with painful meaning. And when, and where, if ever, I would find my fit. Surely as I felt connected to Nikki the twining brought me pain then too. She fits so fluidly wherever she goes, and is loved with a uniformity that she finds embarrassing. She used to quip that she was everyone’s one black friend, a joke she retired when she turned thirty and it was still true, but no longer funny. Still she was beloved, and meanwhile I was nothing but angles, rubbing coarsely against everyday life. I wonder still how much of my life is my fault and how much is an accident of birth.

I wonder too if our parents thought that this is what life would be like for us when they got married, free for the first time to chose someone outside of their race, if not free to make this choice without consequence. They could divorce or stay married and move to the suburbs from the city. Did they recognize an untethered child like me as a possible outcome of the new openness that allowed their relationships to happen? Or did they think in making their children of difference that difference would, at some point in the near future, cease to matter? I wasn’t sure then, at age 27, that they thought through what they were doing at all.

When Nikki came home I was in bed. I don’t think that she realized that the news of Papo’s death would leave me struggling home and crawling between our sheets, because I had never mentioned him to her before, not once in two years. She crawled into bed with me still and said “I’m sorry.”

When we arrived at the funeral home in the Bronx my mother dropped us off and left us to walk in by ourselves as she looked for parking. We were late, typically late, but I think she wanted to put off going in to see Papo.

We didn’t arrange the funeral, no one in my family had. Papo was close to his stepfather’s family, and had been adopted as one of their own before he died. I didn’t pick or know this particular street where my sister and I were deposited, but it was familiar, not too far from Fordham road, where we sometimes shopped as children, and Fordham University, lovely and green. The funeral parlor was just one of many businesses on this street of industry, where storefronts sold fried meat patties and plantains, clothes and gold jewelry, and people spoke Spanish and English, mixed and intermittent.

The gravediggers attached pulleys to the coffin. Go on now, one of them said. His eyes didn’t distinguish among the group of people at my cousin’s gravesite. Those of us who went to college and those of us who didn’t, those of us who left the Bronx and those who stayed were lumped together: an annoyance.

I’d only been to one funeral before and I was still surprised by how everything is commonplace still. You say hello to the people you haven’t seen in a while and it’s awkward, because you don’t know them really, just like it would be at a wedding, or a reunion. Papo’s father was there and he was happy to see us. Sylvia ignored us because she’s had a fight with my mother and no matter that her son was dead—they hadn’t made up.

Eventually I made my way up to the coffin because I had to, trailing behind my sister like a child. And as I looked down at Papo from behind her shoulder, I wished and I wondered: I wished they hadn’t dressed Papo in an oversized orange sports jersey, and that he had a tie around his neck rather than a gold chain, and that he wasn’t wearing jeans, like he was going to the corner store for milk. And I wondered what he would want to look like. Not dead, I supposed is how he’d most like to look, so I guessed anything beyond that wish was irrelevant.

I stepped away from the coffin a slight second before my sister did and turned away to find my mother, and was caught up instead in a surf of relatives. There were only twenty people there altogether. We stopped to talk to my cousin Tanya, who sat in one of the rows of folding chairs facing the coffin holding her son, aged two, who had curly blonde hair on his head like I did when I was a baby.

I heard her mother, my aunt Isabel, gently chiding Nancy, the mother of Papo’s children, a few rows of folding chairs back. “You have got to get those kids out of the projects,” she said, and Nancy nodded obediently, holding their son, nine months, and the hand of one of her daughters, a child with the characteristically curly hair, but a shade darker than mine. Isabel, having seen several of her sisters do just that, pick up their children and leave, seemed to take it as a personal failing when someone could not. Sylvia, Papo’s mother, she never left—and now look at what happened.

Eventually Isabel let Nancy be, but she caught me, and scolded me for failing to apply for national fellowships to support my graduate work. Isabel lived in the Bronx only briefly as a teenager, leaving for California after finishing at Hunter College and returning ten years later to live in Manhattan with a doctorate from Berkeley and Tanya. She wanted me to do well, as did my second cousin Edwin, an economics professor in the city, who came to say goodbye to Papo too. He stood by me as Isabel talked, and gave me his business card before he left, telling me to call, if I needed anything. We did not see this branch of the family very much, the ones who handed business cards to relatives, but I understood that Edwin meant well. And I kept his card for years in my desk drawer, my small paper talisman, not throwing it out until I moved to California four years later with Nikki, to work at a university that had offered us both jobs.

Finally I caught my mother, and we left to go outside and smoke together, Edwin’s card pushed absently into my pants pocket. We stood to the left of the awning, out of the path of people using the other rooms in the funeral parlor, silent in our smokers’ exile, surrounded by the sounds of the streets. I’d quit smoking a year before, but I was still addicted to the urge to leave. I had always liked the irrefutable excuse to exit more than the cigarettes themselves, and I didn’t try to resist that day.

Eventually we left the funeral parlor and drove south to get to the graveyard in New Jersey. I didn’t know many of the people at the graveside service, the friends of my cousin’s, or even the priest who handed us red roses after his short talk, to throw on the coffin before it descended. I didn’t know that we were supposed to leave as the coffin sank, but neither did anyone else; we all stood still.

The gravediggers attached pulleys to the coffin. Go on now, one of them said. His eyes didn’t distinguish among the group of people at my cousin’s gravesite. Those of us who went to college and those of us who didn’t, those of us who left the Bronx and those who stayed were lumped together: an annoyance. Another family, brown-skinned, waited behind us for a funeral at the adjacent plot and we needed to move, now, so another body could be lowered into the ground on schedule. We all stepped backed away from the grave as if we really were one undifferentiated mass, and then we left.

My mother drove my sister and me home afterwards. We drove by my university on the way back, and it seemed like an alien place, not because I was disliked, but because I didn’t understand why I went there, why I went there for years and years, to read nineteenth century American literature. And I’d had the feeling before. It was only amplified by Papo’s death, making me feel doubly stupid that I would go to a class and talk about Henry James two days after his funeral. It was the last class I needed to finish my graduate coursework.

I always knew that I went because for me, going to school was no harder than walking in a straight line. Graduate school is where my circumstances carried me. And as much as I like to think of myself as making bold escapes, I stayed with it long after I wanted to, finishing my Ph.D. and taking a faculty position even though I hated it, and leaving only when I couldn’t stand it anymore, so topped up with hating it that I ran away. And after that I didn’t know what to do, and was utterly unable to think of anything else to do that mattered, trapped as surely by my lack of choices as I was when I stood at the side of the highway, aged twenty-five, with my hands clamped together behind my back.

We stopped at my neighborhood pub for dinner before my mother and my sister continued on without me. Nikki and I drank Belgian beer; we were beer nerds then, like we are now. When I walked into the bar and the wait-staff greeted me by name—Hi, Heather—I was relieved. I looked at the daily beer offerings and chose a triple, sweet like caramel and served in a goblet. I took it to a table when we were called to be seated and I ate with my mother and my sister, and then they dropped me off in front of my house on my tree-lined street, and watched as I walked up the stairs to Nikki, who I knew was waiting up for me.

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