On September 5, 2009, I was in Washington National Airport waiting for a plane to Boston.
Text message on my cell: “Happy birthday, Jonathan! Hope you weren’t too lonely, far away from home. Miss you a lot. College starts in ten more days. Talk soon. XOXOXOX, Pineapple.”
Two weeks later: an e-mail from Pineapple. “Hey Jonathan! Back at college. Here are the classes that I’m taking this semester. Anthropology (Non-western Worlds). We’re studying Nigeria and its different cultures. Also taking Intro to Psychology and in this class I’m learning of the workings of the mind and our behaviors. I’m also in a dance class, which I’d like to say is just because I need a daily workout. And I’m in a singing class to improve my voice. I also have an English class, plus tutorial in writing since you know that this has been my weakness.
“I want to thank you and your assistant for sending me a laptop. I’m able now to type my papers on my own time and not have to count on the computers in the library, which closes way too early. …”
September 30: “Hey Jonathan! I heard you’re coming to Rhode Island next month for a lecture. Can we do lunch while you’re here?”
October 20: She and Lara met me in the lobby of a much-too-fancy old hotel where my hosts in Providence had put me up the night before. I found them sitting on a sofa near the registration desk, looking around them at the huge bouquets of flowers on the tables and an imposing chandelier that hung down from the ceiling.
The hotel had a dining room, a little on the formal side, with dark wood panels and deep leather chairs; but it wasn’t crowded and the waitress led us to a semiprivate booth that looked out on a courtyard. I worried that the two of them, whose financial situation didn’t ordinarily allow them many luxuries, might feel ill at ease in this elaborate setting; but this was a needless worry. They seemed relaxed and comfortable and were looking through their menus before I opened mine.
They ordered shrimp and scallops with linguine. When the waitress asked what they would like to drink, they asked for passion fruit and mango juice with lime, which sounded awfully sweet to me but which Lara recommended, so I ordered it as well.
They asked me if I liked it.
“Very good. Something new to me,” I said.
“It’s good for you to try new things,” Pineapple said.
At one moment during lunch she noticed that there was an ink stain on my shirt where I’d put a black pen in my pocket, but without the top attached. She leaned across the table so that she could take the fabric in her hands. “It’s going to be hard to get that out. You need to be more careful.”
After we’d eaten, we stayed there for an hour. It turned out they had waited until now to bring up something serious that was weighing on their minds. Pineapple told me that the immigration service, for reasons neither of them knew, had denied their father’s application for renewal of his green card. If this ruling could not be reversed, it would terminate his status as a legal immigrant. A lawyer in Providence was helping him to file an appeal.
In the interim, he could not continue working in the restaurant of the hotel, which could no longer legally employ him. Compounding the difficulties that the family now would face, their mother had been laid off from the job she had enjoyed, working with the elderly, and had since been working as a housekeeper at one of the chain motels.
“She’s struggling,” Lara said. “She’s on her knees, scrubbing floors, working full-time-plus.” This was all the harder, she explained, because her mother, although she was only forty-two, had premature arthritis. “She can barely make a fist, but the hotel has this rule. You’re not allowed to use a mop to clean the floors. You have to get down on your knees and scrub the bathroom tiles with a cloth.” Her mother, she said, was also getting stomach pains and headaches, which may have been occasioned by her nervousness about their father’s situation.
Both girls told me they were praying for their mother and their father. Both said they believed in God, but, as they explained this, in rather different ways. Lara said that she considered herself Catholic, but she added that she had no close attachment to “any special church” and went to “different churches” with her friends from college. She hadn’t found one yet “that fits with my beliefs, where I feel that I belong.”
Pineapple did not go to church at all. She told me that she prayed but did not believe in God “as somebody like Jesus—I mean, like a person”—but as “something like a power,” “something good,” “something that protects you and looks over you.” She said that when she spoke of God, however, “I keep on saying ‘him’ or ‘he’—you know? As if it was my father or grandfather.”
They had to leave at 3:00 p.m. because Pineapple had a seminar at four. Lara decided they should take a taxi in order to be sure Pineapple wasn’t late for class. The doorman stepped out on the street and whistled at the line of cabs. Before I could think of it, Lara handed him a tip. “Thank you for lunch,” Pineapple said. Poised and polite, they got into the taxi and headed back to school.
Virgilio’s attorney, as I had expected, had no success with his appeal. Pineapple told me, just before Thanksgiving, that he would be leaving in another week to return to Guatemala. Their mother would remain behind to provide a home for Miguel and Mosquito. She and Lara, living in their college dorms, would carry on as they had done before. Their tuition, room and board, and related college costs would continue to be met by their financial packages and the help they were receiving from the people at the church. And they still were earning money from the jobs they did under their work-study grants, some of which they said that they would try to use to help their mother.
If their mother should decide at a later time to follow her husband back to Guatemala, Lara and Pineapple said they had found out they could be their brother’s legal guardians, if their parents would agree, so that he could keep on at his school here in Rhode Island. Lara was in her senior year and would graduate in the spring. She wanted to go on and obtain a graduate degree in order to be certified as a classroom teacher. “But if it’s just impossible,” she said, “I would put it off a year, or maybe two years, so that I could work full-time” and earn enough to function as a back-up for the other members of the family.
After Virgilio left for Guatemala, Pineapple told me that he phoned them or their mother almost every night. Even at a distance, his affectionate protectiveness continued to be comforting, a steady source of consolation for the miles and the border that divided them. Some of the people in Rhode Island, nonetheless, were very harsh in speaking of Virgilio, according to Pineapple. They had not believed him when he said his green card had been non-renewed, or else condemned him retroactively for not taking measures to prevent its cancellation, which they regarded as an indication that he was neglectful in caring for his family.
Pineapple and Lara defended him with fierceness. Lara made the observation that many otherwise enlightened people in the white community tended to be sympathetic to the mothers of black and Hispanic children, but looked upon the fathers, almost automatically, through a lens of stereotype, as lacking in responsibility. These assumptions, Lara said, according to a book she’d read the year before, “have deep roots in history.”
February 21, 2010: Mosquito, who was in her final year of high school and would graduate in May in almost the same week as Lara’s college graduation, sent me an e-mail about the college that she planned to go to. She had been awarded a financial package of $40,000 by a private college in Connecticut of which I knew very little other than the fact that it was widely known for its athletic programs but, as a friend informed me, was not thought to be especially distinguished in its academic offerings.
I wrote to her, “I know I have no right butting in,” but I said that, with her nearly perfect academic record, I thought she ought to think this through a little more before she came to a decision.
She replied the next day, “You have every right to butt in, but this is the school I want to go to. They have a department of criminal justice, which is very good and is what I plan to major in. Also, if you’re doing studies in the honors program, you get to work with teachers in tutorial relationships, which is something that I like because it’s not impersonal. I feel the school fits perfectly with my ambitions and I’ve been there and love everything about it.”
Good, I thought! She knows exactly what she wants. She told me that she wasn’t angry with me for intruding. “I know,” she said, “you only wanted what you thought was best for me. …”
Pineapple wrote to me at the start of April: “Heyyyy Jonathan!! I did not forget you. I’m a little stressed because I’m taking harder classes this semester. Sociology 208. Math 139. Allied Studies, which is s’posed to help me to stay organized. English 100. History of Greece and Rome and the rest of Europe up to something like the Middle Ages. … Doing well, but hoping to do better.”
She told me Lara’s graduation was coming up in May—“May 22,” she said.
A month later she reminded me again about the graduation. “We’re going to have a barbecue in the afternoon. Starts at two. I hope that you can come. XOXOXOX, Pineapple.”
I had to be in Boston the morning of the graduation, so I drove directly to their home and ended up arriving early for the party in the afternoon. There were only about a dozen people who’d arrived before me, relatives who’d driven up with Pineapple’s uncle from New York the night before, and a few of Lara’s closest friends who were in the kitchen with her mother.
The big surprise for me (Pineapple purposely had not told me to expect this) was that Virgilio was there. He was in the backyard setting up the barbecue when I came up the driveway. He gave me a hug and a terrific smile, like someone who had just performed a magic trick, outwitting all the forces of the immigration service that had kept him from his children. He took off the long white apron he was wearing and we sat together at a table in a corner of the garden so he could explain to me how he had been able to get across the border, and across the country, without any papers.
He had come across the border from Mexico to Arizona, not far from Nogales—not at the legal crossing point but at another spot where people crossed at night illegally. From there, he took a bus to San Diego, where he used his U.S. driver’s license to get on a plane for New York City, and then drove here to Rhode Island in a rental car so that he’d arrive before his relatives. In spite of all the condemnation he’d incurred from his critics in Rhode Island who persisted in believing that he’d left his family of his own volition, with the implication that he was deficient in his love for his own children, he had been prepared to undergo arrest—or, given the vigilante atmosphere along the Arizona border, even greater dangers—in order to attend his daughter’s graduation.
He said that he intended to remain until he could learn more about the reasons for Isabella’s headaches and her worsening arthritis, and then figure out the implications for the children if Isabella did decide, which he said was still uncertain, to return with him to Guatemala. He was less concerned about the girls, who, he knew, were capable of handling themselves in their parents’ absence since they’d have each other to rely upon, than he was about their brother.
He didn’t want to interrupt the schooling Miguel was receiving but he also said that he did not believe a child who was only ten was old enough to live without his mother. In regard to Lara’s and Pineapple’s wish to keep him here and function as his guardians, Virgilio, speaking in his measured English syllables, questioned whether they were truly able to assume so much responsibility. As mature as they appeared—and, in the case of Lara, as judicious in her thinking as he considered her to be—he said he wasn’t confident that they could fill a parent’s role or whether it was fair for him to let them even try to take on that position.
The more he spoke, the more I sensed how carefully and searchingly he’d been thinking through a set of questions he could not resolve but which saddened him tremendously. He reached out and put his hand around my arm and pressed it hard—his hand was strong—and when he spoke about Miguel, I could see his eyes were glistening slightly. It seemed as if he hoped I might have the right advice. But I did not, because I’d never faced a situation like this in the past. I was ashamed of the United States for placing any father in this situation and for the rigidity of policies that would penalize a child, only ten years old, born here in our nation and a citizen by right, by rendering his father an illegal.
Pineapple stepped out on the porch. Seeing that her father had begun to start the barbecue, she came across the yard and sat down at the table. I asked if she would like to stay outside and talk with me a while until the other guests, most of whom were Lara’s friends, had started to arrive.
“I’m in the mood to walk,” she said. “Would that be okay with you?”
I said that I’d enjoy that too.
There was, as I’ve said, a biking trail that started just beyond the garden. So we went off along the path and soon came to the wooden bridge that crossed a broad expanse of water. Families were fishing from the bridge. Young people pedaled past. Older folks were strolling with their children or grandchildren.
“If we walk a little ways, there’s a place where we can get a lemonade, or lemon ices, if you want.”
“Would you like one?”
“Yes,” she said.
I asked if they were like the “icies” that we used to get when she came out of school in the South Bronx.
“Not exactly,” she replied. “More like frozen lemonade.”
“Can you get real icies anywhere in town?”
“Coconut icies?”
“Yes,” I said.
“They’re real hard to find. They do have them, but not in this part of town. They sell them in some neighborhoods. …”
The shop where they sold lemonade and lemon ices was, I discovered, a good distance from her home. I asked her if she minded if we stopped and rested on one of the benches by the path.
“Jonathan, we can turn back anytime you want. I don’t want you getting overheated.”
I assured her I was fine.
Pineapple had told me, back in early April, that she had been feeling “stressed” because she was taking harder courses than the year before. While we sat there resting in the shade, I asked her if she’d fill me in some more.
The truth, she said, now that I raised the point, was not so much the difficulty of the work. “The problem is I’m still not organized—you know? The way I need to be?” And she gave me an example of something she had done at the start of the semester, which, however, I was glad to see that she reported, even at her own expense, with a sense of humor.
“I came into one of my classes on the first day of the term and after I’d been sitting there for maybe fifteen minutes I looked around the classroom at the other students and I said to myself, ‘These are the wrong students. I know it’s my professor but it isn’t the right class.’ ”
“What did the professor say?”
“He didn’t say a word.”
Finally, she said, “I just got up and took my books and I started heading for the door. When the teacher saw me leaving, he began to smile. He knew I had my schedule wrong.
“I said, ‘Oops! Right teacher—wrong class!’
“He thought that it was funny, since I did exactly the same thing the first semester—and with the same professor!”
“Did you feel embarrassed?”
“Nope!” she said. “I just told myself: ‘You still have a ways to go before this part up here’ ”—she pointed to her forehead—“ ‘learns to get you where you’re s’posed to go and when you’re s’posed to be there.’ ”
We headed onward to the store to get our lemon ices, which had lime in them, with pulp, and were cool and tasty. As we were walking back, she told me more about the situation with her family. Her mother, she said, had made a definite decision. “She’s made her plans. She’s going back to Guatemala by the end of June.”
“Is Miguel going with her?”
“Yes,” she said.
I told her that her father didn’t say that it was settled yet, but she said, “It’s settled for my mother. She wants my brother with her.”
According to the plan she and her sisters had been making, “we’ll be moving out of here and looking for a less expensive place where we can live, probably one closer to my college.” All three of them were going to get summer jobs, as she and Lara had been doing all along, which would help with moving costs and with the rent deposit and fixing up the new apartment. “It’s important to us. We need to stay together as a family. Where there’s a will … , we’ve always found the will before. We’ve been doing it a long time now.”
I told her that I wondered whether all of this was going to distract her from her studies. But she was not concerned by this. “I’ve struggled for so many years nothing’s going to stop me now unless I get sick and die.”
We stopped again on the way back, maybe a quarter-mile from her home, and sat in the shade again and watched a freighter moving very slowly toward the ocean. The setting was so pleasant and, despite the news that she had given me, she seemed so much at ease, so utterly serene and happy, that I asked her if she’d ever felt the same kind of serenity when she was living in New York.
“Truthfully? Some of the time I did,” she said. “Not at P.S. 65, but when I was with my friends, or at home, or at St. Ann’s. I was happy most of the time. A lot of things breezed past me.
“The only times that I got scared were, you know, if there was a shooting? Something like that? Something that was dangerous? I don’t think I ever told you that Mosquito once was shot. It happened in our courtyard.”
“I didn’t know that.”
“Yes,” she said. “It wasn’t with a bullet. It was from a BB gun. They shot her in the eye. She still has the mark there.”
“Do you know who did it?”
“It was just a boy is all I know.”
“Did he mean to do it? Or was it an accident?”
“Probably an accident. She had just come home from school and was almost at our door. You remember where we lived?”
“Yes, I do.”
“And these boys, we didn’t know their names or who they were. They were up there on the roof. She didn’t feel the pain at first. All she felt was something warm coming down her face. When she put her hand up it was blood. It was coming out right here, just underneath the corner of her eye.
“She had to have surgery. They had to cut it out of her. That’s why she has that scar. So that’s one thing that scared me. …
“But there were shootings all the time—I mean, with real bullets—when I was that age. All the way along our street from St. Ann’s up to Cypress Ave, right next to the school. It didn’t really get to me until they hurt my sister.
“You see, back then, I guess I thought that this was normal because it was all I knew. I had nothing to compare it to. I didn’t know when I was ten that it wasn’t like this for most other children. I didn’t start to think about this kind of thing until I was older, when I went to private school.
“Now I understand it more because I’ve seen it from both sides and I’ve read a lot of stuff and I talk about it with my sisters. We understand there needs to be a whole lot of improvement. But for that to happen, other things, bigger things, would have to happen first. The entire attitude of white superiority would have to be attacked. You would have to start again from scratch.”
“Meaning what?”
“Meaning—when you go into an inner-city school, you see so many children in a class that some of them don’t even have a textbook? Or, like me at P.S. 65, you’re not allowed to take your textbook home to do your lessons or to study for exams? Meaning books should be distributed more fairly. Meaning schools should look like schools and not like jails and not be smelly places like the one I had to go to. Meaning inner cities should not have been built and need to be eliminated. That’s what I mean by ‘scratch.’ ”
I thought to myself: “The entire attitude of white superiority would have to be attacked”!! She was still so very sweet and innocent in almost every way. But she was looking back upon her own experience with a new perspective now. She had been immersed in questions about politics in her college classes. One of her teachers in a course on sociology—“an African-American, a woman who I love,” she said—“was really smart about this stuff.”
But more important, certainly, as she’d pointed out, was that she’d been living now for several years in a place and a milieu so different from the one in which she spent her childhood. She saw the world through different eyes and, when she spoke to me about these matters now, there was an assertiveness and sharpness in her choice of words I had never heard her use in speaking about anything that went beyond the personal. The bluntness that was very much a part of her delightful personality when she was a little girl, as in her criticism of the clothes I wore, had by no means disappeared, but it was directed more and more to matters that went far beyond her own amusements and concerns.
As we sat there on the bench, it occurred to me to ask her something I’d been asking other students of her age since Barack Obama was elected in 2008. I started to say, “Now we have a president—” but she cut me off—“who,” she said, knowing right away where I must be heading, “happens to be black.”
“Doesn’t that mean something might be going on?” Something in that “attitude of white superiority” she had just described?
“Not really,” she replied.
“You don’t think it means we’re getting closer to a point where we can start to find solutions to at least a couple of the problems you described?”
“Nope,” she said. “Because that’s not the reason we elected him. And if he did the things he should, a lot of people who elected him, from what I understand, wouldn’t be behind him anymore. A lot of people aren’t behind him even now, and he hasn’t done a thing that I can see that will make a difference to poor children and the schools we have to go to and the places where they almost always put us, you know, in the neighborhoods, not just in New York. …”
Once she got her teeth into a big and meaty chunk of obvious injustice she’d experienced first-hand, Pineapple clearly wasn’t going to hold back. “President Obama didn’t have to go to inner-city schools. You know? Where everyone is poor? And everyone’s Hispanic or everybody’s black? Why does he think it’s good enough for other kids, like children in the Bronx?”
Hearing the indignation in her voice, I was reminded of other students I had known—black and Latino students mostly, but conscientious young white people too—who became so wrathful or seemed to be so overwhelmed by the sheer dimensions of the problems they perceived that they tended to give up on many good and useful things they could have done right here and now within the social system as it stands. I recalled a piece of practical advice and helpful exhortation I had heard from someone older than myself some years before: “Look for battles big enough to matter but, at the same time, small enough to win some realistic victories.”
“Oooh! I like that!” she replied when I said it to her, and she asked if I would write it down before I left, which I promised I would do.
“You see? That’s the whole thing that’s been in my mind. That’s why I’m sticking to my social work,” she said. “I’m going to do whatever I can with my own two hands. Comfort people after something has gone wrong. Help them when they’ve made mistakes. Help them make decisions that they won’t regret. …
“I was given so much help when I came here to Rhode Island. One person in particular”—I think it was the teacher that she liked, the young woman who had lived on campus at her school—“made a gigantic difference in my life. Now I want to be that person in another student’s life. That’s the reason why I picked my major. That’s what keeps me going, you know? Even when I make some of the dumb mistakes I make? It’s my way of paying back.”
I asked her if she’d given any thought up to this time as to where she’d like to work.
“I want to say I’d like to do it in New York, most likely in the Bronx. I think that’s where they need it most. But I’m still nowheres near to being sure. I haven’t seen the worst of the United States. Well, I don’t know. I’ve never lived in any place except New York and here. I’d have to go and look around before I could decide. …
“There’s one more thing I’d like to say. I’ve talked about this with my sisters too, and I know that they agree with me. I believe we have a major disadvantage—‘we’ as in minorities—because we start our lives in debt. And we dig a bigger hole if we stay in college long enough to graduate.
“Like—my parents had no money? So they couldn’t help me. Other people helped me, but I know that I’ll be starting my career with heavy bills I’ll have to pay long after I get out of school. Some kids at my college? Their parents have so much that they don’t even need financial aid and don’t have to borrow for tuition. So they’re starting out a big, big step ahead of me.
“And I think I ought to say it isn’t just minorities. So I should correct myself. It’s everyone who’s very poor and wants to get a college education. And I think the president should change that.”
“Do you think he will?”
“Nope,” she said. “I just want to say I think he ought to.”
A boy in a biking helmet pedaled past us very fast. A group of younger children—it seemed as if Pineapple knew them—waved at us and stopped to say hello. The sun was hot, reflecting on the water.
She asked if I was hungry.
“Yes,” I said.
“I am too.”
“That walk was longer than we planned.”
“It was a good one though,” she said. “I’m glad we had this chance to talk. We’ve never had a talk like this before. … Tell me the truth. Were you surprised by what I said?”
“Only a tiny bit,” I replied. “Well, actually, more than a tiny bit! It’s because, when we’re having fun together, I still think of you as someone very young.”
“I am young!” Pineapple said. “Well, you know, compared to you!” Then: “Whoops! That didn’t come out like I meant.”
“It’s okay,” I said. “I am old compared to you.”
But she felt bad at what she’d said. “Jonathan, remember this. If you ever tell me that you need me, I’ll be there beside you in a heartbeat. Even when you’re really old? Don’t forget. You’ll never be more than a cell-phone call away from me.”
She gave my hand a little pat. Then we got up and went back to the party.
On May 30, there was a text message from Pineapple on my phone: “My mother’s going back to Guatemala with my father in three weeks. My brother will go with them. More later. Talk soon. Luv, P.”
Ten days later, the pieces of a new arrangement of the children’s lives were falling into place. The house by the water was going to be vacated by the end of June. They were planning to move into Providence, where they would live together in the year ahead, so Pineapple wouldn’t need to pay for room and board at college anymore. Mosquito would be there with them until the end of summer and then come and stay with them on holidays and weekends once the school year had begun.
Before their parents left, however, there was one last confrontation between their father and one of the people who continued to distrust him.
The altercation took place at Mosquito’s graduation, which followed Lara’s party by only a few weeks. One of the women who disliked her father, Pineapple reported, stopped him in his tracks close to the commencement stage after graduation, while he was chatting with the parents of Mosquito’s friends.
“I could tell she was going to upset him. I was standing next to him. She told him that he wasn’t a good father because he was ‘abandoning’ his children, and when he tried to answer her, he began to stutter and I saw that he was trembling. We tried to get away from her, but she kept right on and followed us until we got into the car.
“As soon as we got home he went into his bedroom. He was sitting on the bed with his hands over his eyes and he was still trembling. We could see that he was crying. He kept repeating what the woman said to him, that he wasn’t a good father. We told him, ‘No. It isn’t true. We love you.’ But he kept on crying.”
In her recollection of this incident, which she didn’t talk about until her parents and her brother had gone back to Guatemala, she went into detail to explain to me why she looked upon her father as a man of dignity who would never willingly have done harm to his children. “Since they’ve been gone he’s spoken to us almost every night. He taught himself to work on a computer, so we can see each other when we talk. The only nights that we don’t talk are when they have a bad storm, because it’s the rainy season down in Guatemala now and when it’s raining very hard there’s no electric power in the town.”
She also said that, in the years when they were living in the Bronx, her father periodically went back to Guatemala because “he needed to check up on a house that still belongs to us.” Every time one of the children had been born, she said, he would scrape together all the money that he had to buy them each a plot of land adjacent to the house, “so each of us would know we had a little piece of something of our own. Something to connect us. … So, if we ever wanted, we would have a place we could return to.”
As purely symbolic as this may appear, it struck me as consistent with their father’s longing to be certain that the children wouldn’t lose all sense of contact with their place of origin. Since they were young, Pineapple said, he had told them many stories of the village where he had been born, to keep alive that feeling of connectedness. In the winter after he and Isabella had returned to Guatemala, Pineapple went there for a Christmas visit. She told me that the village felt familiar. “I didn’t feel as if I was a stranger.”
This, then, was the man who did not love his children and deserved to be humiliated and insulted in their presence on a day that should have been a happy celebration. Pineapple said the woman who had hounded him into the parking lot, and then to the car in which he’d taken refuge, had never been somebody with whom she and Lara felt entirely comfortable. Especially as they grew old enough to tell her when they disagreed with some advice she’d given them, the woman would get “very cranky and impatient” with them. “She didn’t really ‘give advice,’ you know? It was more like—giving us ‘instructions’? You know, like we weren’t supposed to use our little brains to make decisions of our own?”
I don’t know enough about the to-and-fro between them to be certain this is fair, but I wondered if this person had perhaps unconsciously arrogated to herself the privilege of judging them according to the values of her class and culture, but without regard for theirs. Most of the people in Rhode Island who had been defenders of the children since they had arrived were too enlightened to deny the girls a sense of their autonomy and too sensitive to make the kinds of statements that no child wants to hear about her father or her mother. These were the people, by and large, who seemed to be the most aware of the dynamics between benefactors and their beneficiaries and most willing, as a consequence, to examine those inevitable biases that none of us can totally avoid.
Lara and Pineapple showed a lot of ingenuity and practicality in making the transition from the house where they’d been living to the new apartment they had found in Providence. In order to raise money for the rental and the furnishings, they organized a yard sale for belongings they would not be taking with them. Members of the church donated items too. In a single afternoon, they raised $3,000.
“We got the apartment for a good price,” Lara told me. “I used $2,000 from the yard sale to pay the landlord in advance toward the first year’s rent, which cuts the monthly payments to about $500.”
The apartment was small: kitchen, living room, bath, and bedroom. But it had two beds and a pull-out bed and, she said, there were cabinets between them that functioned as dividers and also as bed tables. “We used the money we had left to pick out linens, quilts, and curtains and, you know, all the stuff we needed for the kitchen.”
Lara began working at a day care center in July—“ten dollars an hour, until I get more training. I’m putting off my master’s for two years because we’ll need as much as I can earn. Once Pineapple’s done with college, I’ll go back to grad school so I can be certified.” She still intended to become a teacher.
Mosquito, meanwhile, had been hired as a counselor at the prep school she and Miguel and Pineapple had attended. “Good pay,” Pineapple noted. “Next year, she’ll be co-director.”
Pineapple’s job did not pay as well, “but it was the best that I could find, being as I waited for too long.” She was doing check-out at a local supermarket. “You know, we need every bit of money we can get.”
She sent me e-mails in July and August, most of them light-hearted. “Heyyyy, Jonathan! Lara had a party for her friends last night. Stayed up with them really late. Definitely do need sleep. Luckily, it’s Sunday.” She said her mother’s health was “good”—she wasn’t having headaches anymore and her arthritis seemed to be less painful than before, perhaps because of warmer weather. Her father was “good.” Her brother was “good.” But she missed them badly.
Mosquito’s job, she told me, would be ending in mid-August, after which she’d be heading off to college since the freshmen had to be there early. “You know? Orientation? Anyway, she wants to be there soon enough to get a single room and there aren’t too many. I wish I’d had a single room when I was a freshman.”
In September Lara was promoted. “They made her the ‘lead teacher’ for the younger children,” Pineapple said, “so she’s making better money than before.” Pineapple was getting ready for her junior year. …
She kept in touch with me throughout the fall and winter. I saw her once in Providence when I returned there for a teacher meeting. She also came to Cambridge once—it was in the first week of December—to spend a weekend at the house in which my assistant lived and where student interns often stayed a few months at a time. It was a big old-fashioned house, big enough for me to isolate myself when I was immersed in writing, and there was a long and narrow stairway from the second floor to a garret where there were two extra bedrooms for our visitors.
As soon as she walked in, she wanted to check out the house, examine all the decorations and the pictures on the walls, take a peek at every room, and look at all the messages (like “more cheese and brownie mix”) taped to the refrigerator door. She was disappointed to observe that I was using wooden crates, turned upside down, for tables in the living room, since I hadn’t had the time to furnish it completely. She said that she’d be “more than glad” to go to the store with me anytime I asked to help me find a comfortable sofa and end tables.
She wasn’t in a serious state of mind at all. For her it was a holiday. My assistant, Lily, who is only three years older than Pineapple, took to her immediately. The first idea that came into their minds was to take off to a store—Target, of course—that both of them, for reasons I can’t understand, regarded as an ideal destination for an early afternoon. They insisted that I come with them but when we walked into the store, they behaved at first as if they had forgotten I was there.
Heading for the section of the store where women’s clothes were sold, Pineapple went to work picking out some sporty-looking skirts and jerseys she thought Lily ought to buy. “This one would look cute on you,” she’d say. Lily looked at dresses she thought Pineapple might like. They took things down, held them up against each other, and then put them back. Neither of them could make up their minds.
Once we had escaped the women’s section, Pineapple took me by the arm and steered me from one aisle to the next as she examined kitchenware and DVDs and table lamps and picture frames and sweet-smelling lotions and bath towels and small scented candles, and then, swerving back into a section for young ladies’ wear, she looked at slacks and sweaters and a long bright-colored coat. But when I asked her, “Would you like to buy that?” she kept saying, “No. It’s not exactly what I had in mind.” And, in the end, neither she nor Lily purchased anything! In the car, I asked if she was disappointed. She said, “Not at all.” The whole idea of going to the store wasn’t to buy anything particular, as she explained this patiently to me, but simply “to hang out there.”
The following day, while I was sleeping late, she and Lily went back to exactly the same store. The only thing Pineapple bought was a set of linen napkins for the kitchen table of our house, Irish linen, lime-colored, “to go with the yellow walls,” she said. It was a gracious thing for her to do—she had very little money, and she had bought nothing for herself.
The first night she was there, Lily took her up into the garret, where she’d made a bed for her with new sheets and pillows and a comforter. Pineapple seemed pleased at first, but five minutes later she came down and said it was “too spooky” to sleep up there all alone. So Lily spent the night, and the next one, sleeping on the other bed to keep her company.
On Sunday night, after we had dinner at the kitchen table, she was in a thoughtful mood and talked a little more about her hopes for her career. She reminded me that when she was in elementary school, she used to think she’d “like to be a baby doctor”—or, as she worded it tonight, “go into pediatrics.” She said the idea “kind of stuck with me” until she was in boarding school. But when she talked about this with her counselor, he told her that he wasn’t sure her science skills were strong enough to do a pre-med major when she went to college. “It was not like he was ‘downing’ me. If I wanted, he said I should try.
“Then I thought about it more and I explained to him that all I really wanted was to be in a career where I could do something to change the lives of children, to be of help to children. And people always used to say I should be a social worker. Long ago! People used to say this when I was a little kid. Back there at St. Ann’s. …” The counselor, she said, encouraged her in this, and by the time she was in her senior year she’d made up her mind.
I repeated something she had said when we were walking by the water on the day of Lara’s graduation. She’d told me that she thought of this as a way of paying back the people who had helped her through the years. But she answered that she’d thought about this more.
“I realize now that I can never pay back everyone who helped me. You can’t pay back for something in the past. What I want to do is be able to pay forward. Like, you know, Dr. King said this? Or somebody said this. Or something like this? ‘Pass the torch along’? That’s kind of what I mean: Do it for the younger ones. The ones I left behind. …
“So that’s what I decided. That’s how I settled on my major. And you know it hasn’t been too easy. I have to study harder than most students in my class. It’s the truth. I’m not embarrassed. It’s been that way for me all along. But I know that I can do it. Like I told you, I don’t think there’s anything that can slow me down.”
In the spring she reported that her little brother would be coming back to go to school in Providence. “We’re looking for a school that’s close to our apartment. We’re going to make sure it’s a really good one. You know? He’s a whole lot smarter than I am. I can say it. He’s my brother. I’ve already told him that he has to go to college.”
She also told me she’d be coming back to visit us in Cambridge for another weekend soon. “Heyyyy Jonathan!” she said in one of her e-mails. “Don’t be worried. I won’t make you go to Target with me this time. There’s other things I’d like to see. Like we’re reading Walden now? Is that little house still there? By the way, my grades are gooood!! I can’t wait to see you guys.
“Lots of luvvvvv! Pineapple.”