“Aishia! Vente pa ca! Ya estas listo la comida!”

My mother’s voice, sharp and brassy cut through the calm air of our apartment into the silence of my bedroom. Having been torn from my studies and summoned to the kitchen by my mother’s battle cry, I slammed by textbooks shut, threw on my chanclas and shuffled out to collect my dinner plate. My father beat me to food as he often did, towering over my mother twirling a spoon in his hand and speaking only to instruct her as she filled his plate. “More rice, mami. Not so much sauce. Give me more meat.” He often spoke in orders. She piled on mounds of fluffy white rice, savory and steaming and dressed the grains with jugito from her famous habichuelas rojas. Nodding in approval and with his plate in hand he walked back into their bedroom. I was next in line. Mami always served herself last.

“How much rice you want baby?” she asked as she fluffed up the rice in the caldero with her favorite massive metal spoon, making sure not to scrape any pegao off of the bottom.

Plopping a pile of arroz blanco on my plate she used the back of her serving spoon to carve out a well in its center that she filled with habichuelas, each red bean covered in thick sauce, studded with chucks of pumpkin, green olives, potatoes. I giggled as we carried out our tradition, splitting the whole onion she nestled into the pot of beans. It was our favorite part. Translucent and sopping in juices she freed the onion from the pot, wisps of its gorgeous sweet scent trilled into the kitchen air like smoke from a candle that’s just been put out or some other magical thing that was sensed more than it was seen and missed the second it vanished. She gently placed it on a cutting board and used a spoon to cut it soft flesh exactly in half, my share to be sandwiched between my beans and a fat, seared pork chop.

She handed me the plate with a smile that faded just as quickly as it apeared. “Here baby, y no empieces con ese ‘I’m full I can’t finish’ I don’t wanna see nothing left on that damn plate, you hear me?”

Love isn’t expressed with kindness in this house without immediately being followed by a threat, a warning, reminding you to stay in your place, be obedient, to never question. I had my half of the onion and she hers but only I was getting my ass whopped if I didn’t finish each one of its layers.

I took my plate and my warning and walked across the apartment to my spot on the couch being careful not to drop anything or let the fear in my face show.

I passed our dining room table that stood empty, lonely every evening without us to fill its chairs, without laughter or conversation. My mother ate in the kitchen. She stood at the kitchen counter with a fork in one hand and our cordless phone in the other. This was her ritual. The fourth daughter of ten children she used her dinner time to call her sisters, catch up, become herself again. I guess with all of her siblings spread out so far across state lines and time zones she felt like our dining room table. I could hear her from the couch, over the television whose volume I was never allowed to adjust without feeling the swift sting of my parents palm cut across the back of my neck. My mother’s voice did nothing but carry. “That’s right!” she said into the phone receiver between strong belly laughs that made her gold hoop earrings sway and catch the reflection of the kitchen lights. ”The only thing we gotta do in this life is stay Puerto Rican and die girl!” Her laugh filled up the air in the apartment during these conversations so much so that there wasn’t room for anyone to feel anything else but her joy. She was always more of herself when she was talking to her sisters but I never understood what that phrase meant.

“The only thing we have to do in this life is stay Puerto Rican and die.” I kicked off my chanclas and sawed a piece of chuleta off of its fried bone, speared it with my fork and stacked my half of the mother daughter cebolla onto it and swiftly into my mouth. Chewing over that sentence I asked myself “is that the only thing we get to do?”. And what does it even mean to be Puerto Rican.

I grabbed another spoonful of habichuelas and onion layers and sat in silence as I used my tongue to smush them into a paste on the roof of my mouth. What if I didn’t want to just “stay Puerto Rican and die?” I thought.

I could hear my parents laughing in separate rooms until my father swung his bedroom door open sucking his teeth. He handed me his empty dinner plate. “hey, give this to your mother.

He glanced down at me, rubbing his stomach underneath his tanktop.

“You shouldn’t eat that much nena, you’re gonna get fat.”

He leaned down to softly slap my check before he vanished back into bed.

Staring at the stack of plates in my lap, scraped clean and speckled with abandoned grains of rice, I put my chanclas back on and headed back into the kitchen.

Aishia Martinez

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