My Beloved World Read Online Free Page A
Author: Sonia Sotomayor
Tags: Personal Memoirs, Biography & Autobiography, Lawyers & Judges, Women
resonance that sometimes seemed telepathic. We were so much alike, in fact, that people called me Mercedita—little Mercedes—which was a source of great pride for me.
Nelson, who among my many cousins was closest to me in age as well as my inseparable co-conspirator in every adventure, also had a special connection with Abuelita. But even Nelson never wanted to go with Abuelita to the
vivero
on Saturday mornings because of the smell. It wasn’t just the chickens that smelled. They had baby goats in pens and pigeons and ducks and rabbits in cages stacked up against a long wall. The cages were stacked so high that Abuelita would climb up a ladderon wheels to see into the top rows. The birds would all be squawking and clucking and flapping and screeching. There were feathers in the air and sticking to the wet floor, which was slippery when they hosed it down, and there were turkeys with mean eyes watching you. Abuelita inspected all the chickens to find a plump and lively one.
“
Mira
, Sonia, see that one in the corner just sitting there with droopy eyes?”
“He looks like he’s falling asleep.”
“That’s a bad sign. But this one, see how he’s ready to fight the others when they come close? He’s feisty and fat, and I promise you he’s tasty.”
After Abuelita picked out the very best chicken, it was my job to watch them butcher it while she waited in line for eggs. In a room all closed up in glass, a man stood breaking necks, one after another, and a machine plucked the feathers. Another man cleaned the birds, and another weighed each one and wrapped it up in paper. It was a fast-moving line, as in a factory. I had to watch carefully to make sure that the chicken we’d chosen was the one we got in the end. I was supposed to tell Abuelita if they mixed them up, but it never happened.
We would walk back under the crisscrossed shadows of the train tracks overhead, up Westchester Avenue toward Southern Boulevard and home—which is what Abuelita’s house felt like to me. Of course Abuelita’s house wasn’t a real house like the one her daughter Titi Gloria lived in, in the far northern part of the Bronx, with a front porch and rosebushes. Abuelita lived in a five-story tenement, three apartments to a floor, with a fire escape that zigzagged up the front, like our old building on Kelly Street, where we lived before moving to the projects.
As we walked back, Abuelita would stop to choose vegetables from the crates that were lined up on the sidewalk. For almost every meal she fried
tostones
, so we’d buy green plantains, and also peppers, some green ones and some little sweet ones, and onions, tomatoes,
recao
, and garlic to make
sofrito
. She would always haggle, and though she made it sound as if she were complaining about the quality and how expensive everything was, by the end she’d be laughing with the
vendedor
. All these years later, an open market still stirs in me the urge to haggle the way I learned from Abuelita.
“¿Sonia, quieres una china?”
Abuelita loved oranges, but they were expensive most of the year, so we would buy just one to share as a treat, and she’d ask me to choose. My father taught me how to choose fruit—how to make sure it’s ripe by smelling its sweetness. My father had shown me how to choose good meat too, with enough fat for flavor, and how to recognize if it’s not fresh. I went grocery shopping with Papi on Fridays, which was payday. Those shopping trips were the best times of the week for me, not counting my days at Abuelita’s. Papi and I would walk to the new Pathmark that was built on the empty lot near our projects and come home with our cart filled. I’d pull the cart while Papi toted the extra bags that didn’t fit.
I could tell we were almost back at Abuelita’s when I saw the marquee across the street, though we never went to see movies there because of the prostitutes standing around. When my cousin Miriam—Nelson’s sister and Titi Carmen’s
Nelson, who among my many cousins was closest to me in age as well as my inseparable co-conspirator in every adventure, also had a special connection with Abuelita. But even Nelson never wanted to go with Abuelita to the
vivero
on Saturday mornings because of the smell. It wasn’t just the chickens that smelled. They had baby goats in pens and pigeons and ducks and rabbits in cages stacked up against a long wall. The cages were stacked so high that Abuelita would climb up a ladderon wheels to see into the top rows. The birds would all be squawking and clucking and flapping and screeching. There were feathers in the air and sticking to the wet floor, which was slippery when they hosed it down, and there were turkeys with mean eyes watching you. Abuelita inspected all the chickens to find a plump and lively one.
“
Mira
, Sonia, see that one in the corner just sitting there with droopy eyes?”
“He looks like he’s falling asleep.”
“That’s a bad sign. But this one, see how he’s ready to fight the others when they come close? He’s feisty and fat, and I promise you he’s tasty.”
After Abuelita picked out the very best chicken, it was my job to watch them butcher it while she waited in line for eggs. In a room all closed up in glass, a man stood breaking necks, one after another, and a machine plucked the feathers. Another man cleaned the birds, and another weighed each one and wrapped it up in paper. It was a fast-moving line, as in a factory. I had to watch carefully to make sure that the chicken we’d chosen was the one we got in the end. I was supposed to tell Abuelita if they mixed them up, but it never happened.
We would walk back under the crisscrossed shadows of the train tracks overhead, up Westchester Avenue toward Southern Boulevard and home—which is what Abuelita’s house felt like to me. Of course Abuelita’s house wasn’t a real house like the one her daughter Titi Gloria lived in, in the far northern part of the Bronx, with a front porch and rosebushes. Abuelita lived in a five-story tenement, three apartments to a floor, with a fire escape that zigzagged up the front, like our old building on Kelly Street, where we lived before moving to the projects.
As we walked back, Abuelita would stop to choose vegetables from the crates that were lined up on the sidewalk. For almost every meal she fried
tostones
, so we’d buy green plantains, and also peppers, some green ones and some little sweet ones, and onions, tomatoes,
recao
, and garlic to make
sofrito
. She would always haggle, and though she made it sound as if she were complaining about the quality and how expensive everything was, by the end she’d be laughing with the
vendedor
. All these years later, an open market still stirs in me the urge to haggle the way I learned from Abuelita.
“¿Sonia, quieres una china?”
Abuelita loved oranges, but they were expensive most of the year, so we would buy just one to share as a treat, and she’d ask me to choose. My father taught me how to choose fruit—how to make sure it’s ripe by smelling its sweetness. My father had shown me how to choose good meat too, with enough fat for flavor, and how to recognize if it’s not fresh. I went grocery shopping with Papi on Fridays, which was payday. Those shopping trips were the best times of the week for me, not counting my days at Abuelita’s. Papi and I would walk to the new Pathmark that was built on the empty lot near our projects and come home with our cart filled. I’d pull the cart while Papi toted the extra bags that didn’t fit.
I could tell we were almost back at Abuelita’s when I saw the marquee across the street, though we never went to see movies there because of the prostitutes standing around. When my cousin Miriam—Nelson’s sister and Titi Carmen’s