Free When I Was Puerto Rican by Esmeralda Santiago Page B

to carry Edna all the way home while I dragged one of the bags full of cans, jars, and bright cartons.
    At home Mami gave each of us a toothbrush and told us we were to clean our teeth every morning and every evening. She set a tube of paste and a cup by the door, next to Papi’s shaving things. Then she emptied the bags.
    “I don’t understand why they didn’t just give us a sack of rice and a bag of beans. It would keep this family fed for a month.”
    She took out a five-pound tin of peanut butter, two boxes of cornflakes, cans of fruit cocktail, peaches in heavy syrup, beets, and tuna fish, jars of grape jelly and pickles and put everything on a high shelf.
    “We’ll save this,” she said, “so that we can eat like Americanos cuando el hambre apriete.” She kept them there for a long time but took them down one by one so that, as she promised, we ate like Americans when hunger cramped our bellies.

    One morning I woke up with something wiggling inside my panties. When I looked, there was a long worm inside. I screamed, and Mami came running. I pointed to my bottom, and she pulled down my panties and saw. She sat me in a basin of warm water with salt, because she thought that might draw more worms out. I squatted, my bottom half in, half out, expecting that a solitaria would crawl out of my body and swim around and when it realized it had come out, try to bite me down there and crawl back in. I kept looking into the basin, but nothing happened, and after a long time, Mami let me get up. That night she gave us only a thin broth for supper.
    “Tonight you all get a purgante,” she said.
    “But why,” Delsa whined. “I’m not the one with worms.”
    “If one of you has worms, you all have worms,” Mami said, and we knew better than to argue with her logic. “Now go wash up, and come get your medicine.”
    The purgante was her own concoction, a mixture of cod-liver oil and mugwort, milk of magnesia, and green papaya juice, sweetened to disguise the fishy, bitter, chalky taste. It worked on our bellies overnight, and in the morning, Delsa, Norma, Hector, and I woke up with cramps and took turns at the latrine, joining the end of the line almost as soon as we’d finished. Mami fed us broths, and in the evening, a bland, watery boiled rice that at least stuck to our bellies and calmed the roiling inside.
     
     
    “Today,” Miss Jiménez said, “you will be vaccinated by the school nurse.”
    There had never been a school nurse at Macún Elementary School, but lately a woman dressed in white, with a tall, stiff cap atop her short cropped hair, had set up an infirmary in a corner of the lunchroom. Forms had been sent home, and Mami had told me and Delsa that we would be receiving polio vaccines.
    “What’s polio?” I asked, imagining another parasite in my belly.
    “It’s a very bad disease that makes you crippled,” she said.
    “Is it like meningitis?” Delsa asked. A brother of one of her friends had that disease; his arms and hands were twisted into his body, his legs splayed out at the knees, so that he walked as if he were about to kneel.
    “No,” Mami said, “it’s worse. If you get polio, you die, or you spend the rest of your life in a wheelchair or inside an iron lung.”
    “An iron lung!?!?” It was impossible. There could not be such a thing.
    “It’s not like a real lung, silly,” Mami laughed. “It’s a machine that breathes for you.”
    “¡ Ay Dios Mío!” Polio was worse than solitaria.
    “But how can it do that?” Delsa’s eyes opened and shut as if she were testing to see whether she was asleep or awake.
    “I don’t know how it works,” Mami said. “Ask your father.”
    Delsa and I puzzled over how you could have an iron lung, and that night, when Papi came home from work, we made him draw one for us and show us how a machine could do what people couldn’t. He drew a long tube and at one end made a stick figure face.
    “It looks like a can,” Delsa said, and