Free Handbook for an Unpredictable Life: How I Survived Sister Renata and My Crazy Mother, and Still Came Out Smiling (with Great Hair) by Rosie Perez Page A

carried me into her bedroom. Gosh, that felt so good, to be held like that. Nuns never held us, not ever. When I saw the French doors again, a smile began to form at the corner of my mouth. I looked down at the peach bedspread with the little puffy balls as she set me on it. I laid my head down, ran my hands over it, stuck my thumb in my mouth, and drifted off to sleep. I was home, even if I didn’t know it. I was home.
    •   •   •
    After the third day or so, things started to become more familiar, and I was happy to be there. I still couldn’t shake the feeling of being left out, of not being with my mother and my new siblings. But since I had learned to keep my feelings to myself at the Home, I tried not to let on how it was affecting me.
    On Saturday my cousins and I gathered around the TV set and watched Stevie Wonder or someone like that lip-synch on
American Bandstand
while Tia went to work, under the table, for the Jews, selling the irregulars from the dress factory door to door throughout the neighborhood. I think she got 20 percent of each sale.
    Titi, Millie, and Cookie, with their hair all in big-ass rollers wrapped in a fake silk scarf, got up and tried out the new dances the
Bandstand
dancers were doing. All of them knew how to dance, and they’d criticize all the white people for dancing so corny and would show off how they knew how to do the dances correctly. “Nah, nah, you doin’ it wrong. That’s not how it goes,” Titi, who was the coolest chick on the block, said to Millie. “Lemme show youse. It goes like this,” and she would do the steps. “
Perate! Perate!
[Wait! Wait!]
Mira
. [Look.] Ahhh!” answered Millie, who was the jokester, trying to outshine her older sister. “Both of ya’ll look stupid,” interjected Cookie—who had the best wit—as she did her thing, killing them both. I sat there with a smile on my face watching my sister-cousins dazzle and shine.
    Saturday was housecleaning day. A holiday party was happening that night so the house had to be extra clean, which meant it was going to take all day. Since Tia was always working and too tired to tidy up and my cousins were lazy—except Cookie, who was a neat freak—by Friday the house was a cluttered mess. There were always dishes piled up and clothes thrown all over the beds. That was shocking for me to see since the Nazi nuns kept everything spotless and in its place at the Home. Tia and all her kids except Cookie, of course, would take off their street clothes as soon as they came in the door—including Tia’s “American Express” (her girdle: she never left home without it … get it? I know, corny, but true)—fling them on their beds, and put on a
bata
, also referred to as a
bata de casa
, which literally means “housedress.” All
batas
looked pretty much alike—a sleeveless, semi-baby-doll-looking, plain dress, often with a paisley print, that hit at the knee. Therewas no zipper, but the head opening was large enough that you could just whip it on. Every Latin female has or has had a relative who’s worn one.
    So, after Bandstand, the cleanup started, and it seemed like nothing had changed in the six months that I’d been away. On Saturdays Cookie was always the anal housecleaning sergeant, ordering everyone around with a broom in her hand, a joint—yes, folks, a joint—dangling from her lip, wearing a
bata
or shorts and a tank, with her fake silk scarf wrapped around her big pink-and-blue hair rollers that she wore from when she got up until she went to hang at night. The record player or radio was always blaring, and it had to be her choice of music. If anyone dared to change it, she’d scream at the top of her lungs in her husky, low-octave voice, “Leave iiiittttt!” And it would take her hours to clean because if one of her favorite songs was playing, like “Grazing in the Grass” by the Friends of Distinction, she’d start singing, then dancing, then the other girls would join in, and