The Things We Didn't Know

by Elba Iris Pérez

Genres: Coming of Age; Literary Fiction

Synopsis

The inaugural winner of Simon & Schuster’s Books Like Us contest, Elba Iris Pérez’s lyrical, cross-cultural coming-of-age debut novel explores a young girl’s childhood between 1950s Puerto Rico and a small Massachusetts factory town.

Andrea Rodríguez is nine years old when her mother whisks her and her brother, Pablo, away from Woronoco, the tiny Massachusetts factory town that is the only home they’ve known. With no plan and no money, she leaves them with family in the mountainside villages of Puerto Rico and promises to return.

Months later, when Andrea and Pablo are brought back to Massachusetts, they find their hometown significantly changed. As they navigate the rifts between their family’s values and all-American culture and face the harsh realities of growing up, they must embrace both the triumphs and heartache that mark the journey to adulthood.

A heartfelt, evocative portrait of another side of life in 1950s America, The Things We Didn’t Know establishes Elba Iris Pérez as a sensational new literary voice.

Release date: February 6, 2024

Publisher: Gallery Books

Print pages: 319

Sample

one

I was half asleep when Mamá dressed my brother, Pablo, and me, hurried the two of us into the car, and cranked the starter. She backed out of the garage and hit the pedal, and minutes later the whole front end of the car dangled off a cliff.

Pablo got out of the back seat, screaming in Spanish so that our mother could understand. “Get out, it’s going down!”

I stumbled out, dazed and seeking solid ground, pebbles slipping under my feet all the way down a ravine layered in massive white mica slates. We stood at the ledge, speechless, a river gushing over boulders below as hawks pierced the clear morning air with their screeches. The front of the car balanced over the edge, clumps of soil falling from the right wheel.

Pablo panted. “We just made it, Ma.”

My mother sighed the way you do when everything goes wrong. “Dios mío, I don’t know how that happened,” she said in Spanish.

“Aren’t you going to back it out?”

Mamá looked bewildered.

“Where were we going, anyway?” I asked.

Mamá’s black eyebrows drew in. She slammed the car doors shut, grumbling as if my brother and I had had no reason to leave them open in the first place. She opened the trunk, hauled out a brown leather suitcase that had been in the closet for the four years we’d lived in Woronoco, and tossed it to the ground. “Well, we’re not going anywhere now, that’s for sure. Andrea, help your brother take this upstairs.” She slammed the trunk lid as if she wanted to send the car tumbling down.

She’d never wanted my father to buy that car, anyway.

I watched my mother inch her way back to the street, a black leather box purse she never took out of the closet dangling from her elbow. I was only seven years old and knew she’d had it with the Beehive.

She brushed off the musty white linen suit she hadn’t worn since the day we came from Puerto Rico in 1954, when I was three years old. Of course, I couldn’t remember the trip to the United States, but she’d told me about it many times.

The story always began with the day she received the plane fares Papá had sent from Massachusetts, and then she told me about the moment she first walked into our apartment and said, “This is it? This is where we’re going to live?” There was always a heavy sigh.

She looked stunning in that suit as she tiptoed over new summer weeds. She stomped on the asphalt pavement, knocking mud off her patent leather heels. “Qué remedio. Might as well put all these clothes back in the closet.”

And she was right, there was no place for her Puerto Rican city fashion in the Woronoco company town. No need for the cute black curls she’d sprayed in place earlier that morning, the heavy makeup and dark red lipstick, the nylons and heels she wore as she’d hurried us through breakfast after Papá left for the paper mill. That wasn’t necessary in the Massachusetts wilderness.

“Nothing happened here, now let’s go. And when he comes home, anything he asks, just say you don’t know.”

Pablo and I grabbed the overstuffed suitcase and lugged it across the two rows of houses on Tekoa Avenue, the street we lived on, known as the Beehive. The cul-de-sac, shaded by dense forests, was one of four streets in the Woronoco company town, which no longer exists but was home to workers of Strathmore Paper Company, like my father, for decades.

One row of apartments faced south, overlooking the cliff, with Old Woronoco Road in the distance. From their windows at night, you could see car lights moving between the trees in the forests on the other side of the Westfield River. But there wasn’t anything romantic about the apartments across the cul-de-sac facing north, where we lived.

Our back porch overlooked the railroad tracks. With every passing train, our windows rattled, from daybreak to four o’clock in the afternoon, when the last caboose left.

The fragrance of peach blossoms in our backyard followed us while Pablo and I took turns bumping the suitcase up the rickety stairs to our second-floor back porch. Pablo covered his mouth to hide his words from our mother.

“Papá’s gonna be really, really mad.”

Mad was putting it lightly. Encabrona’o was more like it. Anyone who knew my father could tell you how he bragged about that car. You’d think it was the only Oldsmobile in the world and he was the only Puerto Rican who’d ever bought a new car.

The ground reverberated with the rumbles of an approaching train. Mamá used her key to the apartment and slammed the door.

---

It had been four years since our father, Luis José Rodríguez, brought us from Puerto Rico to Massachusetts. He had come to New Jersey as a seasonal farmworker, leaving us behind in Puerto Rico until he had a home for us. When the farming season ended, he accepted an invitation from an acquaintance who lived in Northampton, Massachusetts. A few weeks later, he found a job at the H.B. Smith Foundry in Westfield and took a room in a house owned by a woman from Spain. When he complained about the hard work the foundry required, she introduced him to a man who had been to Strathmore Paper Company in Woronoco, a company that rented homes for its employees at low rates, only seven miles away.

Papá often bragged about how he got the job at Strathmore and saved money to send for us in only a few months. His plan was to live in Woronoco only long enough to save up for a car and then rent a house in the nearby town of Westfield, where a small Hispanic community gathered at church on Sundays with a gringo priest who said Mass in Spanish. After he bought the new Oldsmobile, my parents set out looking for a house.

But he had a problem with every house she liked. It was too old, or not in the best neighborhood, or too expensive, or too far for him to drive back and forth to the paper mill. Papá was spoiled. He walked to work. We lived next to the mill, which is why our street was called the Beehive.

From the day we arrived, Mamá complained that Woronoco was too isolated. Sure, her husband had a secure job and provided us with a home, but there were no stores, no restaurants, no public transportation. The only place you could walk to was a small post office on Old Woronoco Road. The closest towns were Westfield on one side and Russell on the other, and you needed a car to get to either. Mamá didn’t know how to drive, and Papá didn’t want to teach her or allow her to use his car.

She argued that if we weren’t moving to Westfield, she wanted to return to Puerto Rico. But as far as our father was concerned, we already had a perfect life. She didn’t have to talk to anyone or go anywhere, anyway. Women were meant for the house, and houses were meant for women, and she already had a house, and that was that, he’d say.

After dinner on weekends, he did what hardworking men deserved to do, according to him. He took off in that shiny new car wearing a freshly starched shirt, his black hair greased to one side, smelling of aftershave.

Strathmore gave him a life he couldn’t have in Puerto Rico, and he wasn’t planning on leaving that job and lifestyle. He’d grown up on a tobacco farm in Utuado. When he married my mother, they moved to Caguas, where he worked in construction. But the jobs were few and temporary and the pay miserable. He liked the fact that work in a paper mill wasn’t dirty like work on a farm. “I don’t have to take a shower before I kiss my kids every night,” he said.

The foreman at Strathmore had offered to hire his entire family—the men, of course. And there were plenty of empty apartments on Tekoa Avenue in the company town known as the Beehive for Papá’s whole family to rent.

Gone were the days when he drove home with his brother Felipe in a jeep full of plátanos they couldn’t sell. Papá and his family believed farming no longer had a future in the Puerto Rico of the 1950s. His entire family accepted the offer to work at Strathmore, and in a few years’ time, they would all arrive in the Woronoco Beehive.

Pablo and I had no recollection of the island we had come from. We knew our life in Woronoco wasn’t the same as it was for the kids around us, but we wanted to blend in. All of our family conversations at home were in Spanish. My father spoke very little English, and my mother didn’t speak it, nor did she want to learn.

Pablo and I didn’t know anything about living in Russell or Westfield. We knew nothing of Puerto Rico and Utuado or Juncos, where our parents were from. We didn’t know that we were Americans. We only knew that we were Puerto Rican and wanted to be considered American like everyone else around us, to be accepted by the kids in our neighborhood. But we had a huge problem. Our mother prohibited us from staying out after school. She said the American women made fun of her. So, because of her refusal to connect with anyone in the neighborhood, our time after school was spent kneeling on the living room sofa, watching the other kids play outdoors. It was torture.

The summer of 1958 would be different, though. Our father had bought us two new bikes: a blue one for Pablo, a pink one for me. More than anything in the world, we wanted to ride our bikes up and down the street. But as soon as we started summer vacation, Mamá said, “Why waste time making friends? We’re not going to be here long. You don’t need to practice your English; you’ve learned enough at school. You won’t need it in Puerto Rico, anyway.” And I remember thinking, Papá says we’re never going back, doesn’t she get it?

---

After Mamá drove the car to the cliff, we heard dresser drawers, windows, doors going bam, bam, bam! The train chugged by as I hung up the frilly yellow dress she’d laid out for me that morning, a dress I didn’t want any of the neighborhood kids to see me wearing, because what second grader going on third wore princess-style dresses?

Pablo folded his dress pants and dropped onto his bed, across from mine. “Why’s she so mad?”

I dressed in pedal pushers.

He swung his feet, bumping the foot of the bed. “Do you think she’ll let us take our bikes outside? Papá said we could ride them on summer vacation.”

Dishes rattled in the kitchen and the stove ignited. My brother was right. But our father wasn’t there to make his point.

“Let’s go get them from the garage, Andrea, come on.”

“We have to ask,” I said.

Outside our bedroom window, a solitary dog barked. It was too early for Sally and Mark to be outdoors, everyone was sleeping in. I dreaded another summer day of waiting for nothing to happen. We had no choice but to ask our mother’s permission.

“Well, go on,” Pablo said.

We sat at the red Formica table while she prepared Café Bustelo. She had changed into a light-pink, button-down housedress and had a cigarette dangling out the side of her mouth. She poured coffee through a cloth colander she’d used hundreds of times, the one she’d bought at the Plaza del Mercado in Caguas just before we moved to Woronoco. “Want coffee?”

“No,” I said.

Pablo fake-coughed and urged me forward with his eyes.

She sat next to me with a cup of coffee, and I was about to speak when she lowered her head into her hands. At first I thought she was coughing, but then she whimpered, her body heaving. Pablo looked stunned. Her grief ripped into my chest.

I went over and embraced her. “¿Qué te pasa, Mamá?”

An approaching train whistled. “That maldito train,” she screamed in Spanish, her eyes on the window. “You can’t even talk in here. Why do they have to tell everyone they’re coming? We can hear you, we can hear you.”

All I wanted was to see her smile, like when we came home from school and she greeted us with glasses of chocolate milk. I stroked her hair, the rumbling wheels reverberating in my chest as the train took its time, hissing by our house until it stopped at the docks.

Mamá wiped her face on her flowered half apron and lit another Pall Mall cigarette. “Go make yourself some toast.”

Soothing bird songs from the breezy forests of Tekoa Mountain came in through the pantry window. I opened a jar of peanut butter.

Pablo came in behind me. “When are you going to ask?”

“Why don’t you ask? Nobody’s out there, anyway.”

We prepared peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and returned to the table. I felt sorry for my mother, but was tired of her negativity. Why couldn’t she be like all the mothers around us who allowed their kids to go play?

She flicked her cigarette on the ashtray, her fingers shaking. “Luis is going to be so mad when he comes home and finds that damned car over there. Ever since he bought that thing, he doesn’t want us to leave this hole in the world. But of course, he has no problem going wherever he wants.”

“I thought you didn’t know how to drive,” Pablo said.

She went back to the table, put her head down, and whimpered again. “I thought I could but… los nervios… I hit the brakes and it…” She wailed. “The devil pushed the car. Dios mío… I can still hear you screaming.”

The memory of what had happened in the car struck me as funny in a way and I didn’t want her to see me holding back laughter, so I cleaned up the table and carried the breakfast dishes to the sink—the white porcelain sink with two buckets underneath to catch the leaks that she complained about every day. Pablo wiped off the table.

“I don’t know why he bought those bicycles. You can’t take those to Puerto Rico. That’s money down the drain. I’m not going outside to watch you. Those gringas are always talking about me. You’re not going to be out there all by yourselves either.”

“They’re not talking about you, Ma,” Pablo said.

“You don’t have to watch us,” I said.

“Sure I do. Anything happens to you, he blames me.”

“But he said we could ride the bikes on summer vacation, and summer vacation started today,” Pablo said.

I chimed in with my brother. “Nothing’s going to hap—”

“You’re the last one that should be talking. That day you fell on the sidewalk and scraped your knees, who did he yell at?”

“But Mamá, that was years ago.”

“You’re not going. Señor Jesucristo, I thought he’d slap me that day. One problem is enough for today.”

She put her cigarette out and stood up.

“Now go watch TV and forget about those bicycles.”

Pablo ran to the living room and knelt on the sofa, facing the window. Kids had come out. Their voices drifted in through the windows. Tears rolled down his cheeks.

I knelt on the sofa next to him.

“That’s Kevin,” he mumbled.

I couldn’t bear to watch the kids playing. “I know.”

Kevin Martin, his older brother David, Sally Nowak, and Mark Abbot. They took the school bus and walked home with us every day. They were free to be whatever they wanted to be. Free to be outdoors without an adult watching, commenting, criticizing, scolding, ordering, or stopping them from doing anything.

There we sat, staring out the window again, looking away from the stale, limiting world behind us. The green jungle leaves on the wallpaper, the pink flamingos on the upholstery, brown squares on the linoleum floor, and a television. Our home was no match for the vast outdoors, for the smiles and laughter of our friends, for the excitement of a game. The nicotine stench in our kitchen would never compare to the splendor of the woods, air so crisp you wanted to be out there forever.

“He’s in my grade. That’s the new family, the one with those two big kids,” Pablo said.

I heard my brother, but I wasn’t listening. I wanted to open the door to the front hall, grab his hand, run downstairs, and never return. I wanted to roll down the grassy little hill under the elm trees, sleep under the towering maple tree at the bottom of the railroad tracks, and play on the Tarzan swing, listening to the train go by, staring into the sun.

I’d had enough of Captain Kangaroo, Roy Rogers, and Mamá’s bad moods. When she wasn’t sniffling and tearing up, she was dancing cha-cha to records on her Victrola.

I hated my mother’s records from Puerto Rico. They had songs nobody else had ever heard. That Felipe Rodríguez always sounded like he was crying about something. Why couldn’t she listen to the music on the radio instead? Why couldn’t she say hello and be polite to our neighbors?

She came into the living room and sighed, the kind of sigh that says you’re tired of being alive, the kind that doesn’t go over well with a seven-year-old going on eight with enough energy to explode out into the world.

“Why are you two always talking in English now?” she asked.

“Mamá, we’ve always talked to each other in English,” I said.

“Well, stop it. I don’t want you speaking English in this house.”

Pablo shook his head and then yelled in Spanish, “First you won’t let us go play, now you don’t want us to speak in English? Mami, I don’t understand you.”

“You’re both too young to understand,” she said.

Pablo ran to our bedroom and slammed the door. She was darn right. We sure as hell didn’t understand. She didn’t understand either. The Woronoco company town was the only home my brother and I knew, and we loved everything about it, including the trains. Our father, who everyone called Louie, was the only Puerto Rican at the mill, but that wasn’t a problem for him. The neighborhood kids were always asking us how to say things in Spanish. They seemed to think it was cool that we spoke another language. All the men worked at the paper mill. All the women stayed home. And all the kids in the Beehive played in the cul-de-sac. The only one who had problems with the Woronoco Beehive was my mother.

---

Pablo was the first one to see our father coming down the hill with some workers that evening, the shiny black curl on his head in sharp contrast to the blond crew cuts the other guys wore. They saw the car.

My brother grabbed the car keys and took off down the back staircase, and I followed as fast as I could.

Faint rays of sunlight took their last peeks between the trees while the perplexed men, all dressed in dark-blue uniforms and steel-toe boots, inspected the Oldsmobile. Papá stood there with his mouth open. Before taking the keys from Pablo’s hands, he was asking questions.

“What happen to my car? Who move my car?”

He handed me his black metallic lunch box. His bright-green eyes met mine, expecting an answer. He always wanted explanations from me because I was the eldest. And I always told him what he wanted to know, but that day I was torn. Our mother had warned us not to say anything. Luckily, with all the men talking to him at the same time, he didn’t wait for a response. But I knew my father. He was perfectly aware that we were holding back what had happened, and later, when all the men were gone, we’d have to respond.

How to back up a car with half its wheels dangling in midair, that’s all they cared about. Some of the guys thought an attempt to back it up could be dangerous. The wheels could wear off the ledge just enough to send it down the cliff. Someone suggested calling a tow truck. But my father insisted he could back it out.

He started the car, and the back wheels skidded. We all watched him shake his head. Then he gave it another go. The wheels skidded again. The car roared, grabbed onto the ground, and rolled backward, over the weeds and onto the street. The guys cheered as he backed into the garage.

Neighbors, mainly the wives, had come out by then, asking how the car had gotten to the edge of the cliff to begin with, and it was the new kids’ mom who pointed to us and said she saw us with our mother in the car.

Papá nodded and thanked her, then he called my brother and me over and pointed to the cliff. “How’d this car get over there?” he asked in Spanish.

My stomach knotted. People didn’t have to speak Spanish to understand his question. Pablo faced the tracks, dug his hands into his dungarees, kicked up dirt, and never lifted his eyes from the ground.

“Stop getting those shoes dirty,” Papá said. Then he zeroed in on me.

“That’s not where I left my car when I went to work this morning at the break of dawn. I left it In. My. Garage. Where I leave it Every. Single. Day. Who moved it?”

Everyone looked at me for an answer, even though none of them understood Spanish. The pit of my stomach became a huge hole.

“Answer the goddamned question.”

He wasn’t camouflaging his body language. Anyone who saw him could tell he was pissed as hell, and I didn’t want the big kids to see him scolding me. Our father had never placed a finger on us, but I wasn’t sure what he was capable of doing on account of that car.

His shoulders fell, he let out a sarcastic smirk, and went back to his broken English. “Nobady know anyting now. The vehicle drove ober der to dat precipicio all alone.”

His coworkers chuckled.

Luckily, as soon as the guys saw Mamá approaching us, they shook hands with our father and took off with their wives.

Mamá walked with her head high, wearing a cotton dress, old slippers, and a scarf wrapped around bobby-pinned ringlets. Pablo and I leaned against the Cyclone fence in the front lawn. All the big kids passed by on their way home. Some smiled, others called Pablo and me the usual funny names, “Andrew and Pah-blee-toe,” trying to add humor to the situation. Most of them avoided eye contact, to spare us the embarrassment, I guess.

Mamá scrubbed her nervous fingers on her apron.

“Are you almost done? Dinner is ready and waiting. Close that garage and let’s go warm up your stomach.”

Papá let go of the garage door, spun around, and spoke in Spanish.

“Before we go anywhere, I want you to tell me what the hell happened to my car today.”

“All you had to do was back it out, right?”

Papá shifted the weight of his body to another boot, cocked his head to one side, and bore his eyes into her. “What kind of an answer is that? How did this car go from here to that abyss?”

“I wanted to surprise you—”

“Answer my question. How did this car move from this garage to that cliff?”

The fire coming out of my father’s eyes could’ve fueled ten of those Olds-mobiles all the way across the United States. I wanted to run inside but didn’t dare.

My father stared at Pablo for a while. Then he glared into my eyes, his head bobbing up and down.

“What do you think of that?” he asked me. “ ‘Surprise me,’ she says.”

His eyes made direct contact with mine, and he leaned toward me as if I was his accomplice.

“I’ve given her one driving practice and she thinks it’s enough to drive an automobile.”

He pointed at my brother. “Were you with these two?”

Then he pointed at me. “What the hell is wrong? Why aren’t you answering my questions?”

Pablo stared at the ground. I clung to the chain-link fence and stared at the forest on the opposite side of the cul-de-sac, where the car had stopped just shy of the cliff. And that was a big mistake, because all the images of our pathetic morning drive resurfaced.

I remembered my excitement going out with Mamá so early. When she chose the frilly dress, I thought we were headed somewhere special. I remembered her foot going up and down on the brakes as she drove it out of the garage, the car jerking and springing forward like a mountain lion.

And now, I couldn’t help myself from cracking up in front of my father. I bit my lips, and some of the impulse to laugh relaxed. But more images swamped me. How the car came to a powerful stop, the three of us bumped around, I banged into the dashboard, fell to the floor, grabbed onto the door anticipating we’d flip down the precipice. Then I remembered her face, the color drained, her wide eyes fixed on the cliff, her nostrils flared.

It was awful. And it was hilarious. I shied away from my father’s eyes and covered my mouth, but quivering laughter blurted out.

My mother turned to me. “Stop that laughing, I’m telling you… his belt stings like a bee. Mija, cálmate.”

And I did calm down. But before I could catch my breath, Papá’s eyes fumed at me. He was on fire, and I was out of control. Everything inside of me poured out in laughter.

Every time I glanced at Pablo, he dismissed me with his hand and covered his face, trying to maintain control, until he too exploded. I whirled around and pushed my face into the chain-link fence, sucked on my lips and cheeks, took in deep breaths.

“Tell those kids to shut up,” Papá said.

“Don’t pay attention to her,” Mamá said. “You know that mal de risa attacks when the devil gets into her. And the other one. It doesn’t take much to get him started.”

Papá looked at her with angry eyes. He was not done. “Why did you tell the kids not to tell me anything?”

Mamá locked eyes with me. “Cucha, I didn’t tell you to hide anything from your father, did I? Tell him.” She spun around and pounded up the staircase.

For a moment, my brother and I stood there, frozen. Then, Pablo ran after her. This was one of the things that most bothered me about my mother. She strayed from the truth, and I was caught in the middle, not knowing which direction to take. I suppose this was her way of dealing with a toxic relationship, but it sure spread the heat on my brother and me.

Papá bolted the garage door and returned to the back of the house. “That woman told you not to say anything, right? I’ll find out where she was going.”

Later that evening, my brother and I gobbled down supper without lifting our eyes from the plates, then exited the kitchen while our parents ate in silence. Pablo had just finished adjusting the television antenna when Mamá screamed, “Hit me! Go ahead, cabrón!”

I ran over in time to see my father standing next to the kitchen sink, struggling with her. ...