Ivelisse Rodriguez
The Light in the Sky
We board a boat, one I don’t think I would step into in the U.S., but I am on vacation and like all the other tourists crowded on a creaky dock in La Parguera, I trust. La Parguera is a small tourist town on the southern coast of Puerto Rico known for its phosphorescent bay. Tour companies run trips of $5 per person and on moonless nights you can see how the water burns. My mother hasn’t noticed that I’m pregnant, and I haven’t told her. Why speak of things that will never come to fruition? Instead of being at an abortion clinic, I came to Puerto Rico. Every day when I was home, I said I was going to do something. To make a decision. But the only move I made was to get on a plane to come here. At the last minute I told my mother I wanted to go to Puerto Rico, and my mother, just reaching retirement, quickly agreed. I let her plan the rest of our vacation, but La Parguera is the one place I had to come to. Everyone I see on this dock is Puerto Rican; the white or Asian tourists don’t make it this far south into the Island. They like to stay near San Juan where the policemen are everywhere, making sure they don’t make a wrong turn into La Perla. Even though everyone in Puerto Rico says there is crime everywhere, everyone still leaves their doors open. We go from house to house and sometimes have to wait minutes before seeing a human face. But, I wanted to come here because everything about Puerto Rico makes me feel safe.
There are about ten of us this late at night — I think we are the last boat of the night — and the small boat seems just right. This is not the ferry going to Oak Bluffs where we are 10 million miles above the water. Leaning over with one knee on my seat, I am confident I could touch these black waters. I don’t know how to swim, and I am sure that I am not the only one. A pile of life jackets that have lost their orange luster rests in the back of the boat. No one so much as looks at them, except for me, and I am keenly aware that I will look like a jibara if I put one on. So I hope for the best as the engine turns on and we slowly start to descend into the bay.
As soon as we are a few feet from the dock, my mother pats my leg and points to the sky. This woman who sits next to me is not the woman I know on U.S. soil. This woman in Puerto Rico peels fruit with her bare teeth, picks fruit off the ground and checks it for edibility, even though it seems like anything she picks up she deems edible, while I cast a wary glance on all the fruit put before me. Some of the fruit I have never seen and can’t name in English. She can’t translate it into English, so I don’t have a comprehension of what the fruit is. I have to take her word for it.
Tonight she surprises me again: this normally sound woman points at the sky and says, “Look, I think there is a UFO.” Something that she would never entertain in her sleepy town in Massachusetts. I look up at the sky, never having thought about UFOs. I have been prone to irrationality all my life, believing in the impossible, the seldom, or the other. I know it is not a plane because the position of the light is steady. The light in the sky blinks and blinks. So, the longer I look, the more UFO seems like the only sensible option. I think that if this were several hundred years ago, and I were a religious peasant always on the lookout for an apparition of the Virgin Mary in any incarnation, I would believe that this was some sort of sign from God. I don’t normally believe in the Virgin Mary or God, but because I am three months pregnant and the last thing I want is to be pregnant, I wish this time only that the Virgin Mary would come and take my baby. I feel none of those inklings toward motherhood. I side with those post-partum mothers who drive their children into the water. Give them over to Yemaya. Let her have those children.
There is a young mother on the boat with her boyfriend or husband or whatever who sits next to us — she could be 18 or she could be 24. I notice her because she is unremarkable. She is the girl my mother warned me against being all my life — the girl who gets pregnant. Her man is loud and bombastic; in short, an asshole, and an asshole on vacation must be unbearable in real life. His voice overtakes her, and the baby starts wailing. She tries to rock the baby within its carriage before she realizes she has to hold the baby so that it will stop crying. When she starts to pull the baby out, her man starts to yell, “Watch what you’re doing. Damn, be careful with the baby.” This breaks everyone’s merriment, even my mother turns from her UFO conspiracy babbling to turn and look at him. She whispers ueeewww to me. I whisper ummhmmm to her. I can imagine the years ahead for this young mother. Dismal years of being overshadowed, sullen, on the verge of death and having someone else telling you what to do. As soon as I found out I was pregnant, I broke up with my boyfriend. All of a sudden, I turned him over in my head and found him wanting and didn’t want my life to be irrevocably linked with his.
My mother pulls on my arm, so we get back to the UFO. My mother starts speculating that maybe when we get to the phosphorescent part of the bay there will be a UFO there ready to take us away. She starts to recount every story of UFO sightings that she has heard of in Puerto Rico. Even though we were in El Yunque last week, known for alien abductions, at least for those people who seem incapable of staying on a hiking trail, and there wasn’t a UFO in sight. The more that she talks, the more her case is solidified. And I start to think that if the Virgin Mary doesn’t come to take my baby, maybe the next best thing will be an alien abduction.
I wonder if this couple is from here or there, Puerto Rico or the U.S., but I don’t know if that will make much of a difference, if her lot in life somehow improves. This is a place where a man will build you a house with his bare hands. Every piece of the wall, every piece of the floor you touch will be built by his hands. This is the loveliest of reality. When I go into these houses built by these men, I wonder what it is like to live your life indoors, tending to the house that your man built and the kids your man made. I sometimes imagine this as the easier life, doing what you are supposed to do — getting married and having kids. But like any place, this is a place of contradiction, this is also a place where men beat their wives, not different from the U.S., but on an island so small, the stories are packed in.
But these same wives ask me when will I get married, when will I have kids. My answer is never to both. And after they have asked me what they have asked — and each woman who I have run into has asked me the same two questions, and to each I have given the same answer — each one has said: good, don’t do it. Not one has advocated it and gone on to tell me about a life of happiness. And I think the only way to be happy is to be alone. A life without compromising, without having to share. I wish someone had told this young mother that. Instead, she will be one of those women, after she has divorced, who will tell girls like me not to do it. Of course most won’t listen, opting to not notice her unhappiness or anyone else’s and think her unhappiness is a rarity in the same vein that the grand love they will have is also a rarity.
My mother and I turn our attention to the other couple, the teenagers. We comment on how they haven’t taken their lips off each other since we were on the dock. I wonder on which side this girl will end once the desire to kiss for hours has fizzled. Which rarity will she ultimately believe in?
A speedboat passes by us and makes our rickety boat wiggle in the water. The people in the speedboat hoop and holler as they race away. And my mother starts to follow another line of speculation: “You know, this boat was late to pick us up, but there wasn’t anyone on the boat when it arrived. So, if there wasn’t anyone on it, why was it late? I don’t know, what if that speedboat is full of thieves and they’re going to kill us all. I mean I’m just saying.” My mother was raised in Puerto Rico, but for some reason she does not feel the safety I feel here. It’s like we have switched places once we disembarked — she is now the authoritative one. She speaks fluent Spanish and only a few words of English and somehow she has become the irrational one. While I find this amusing, I do my best to show concern. I respect fear. I know what it’s like to be scared. So, I employ logic to calm her down, while in my head, I relish her theories. There will either be a UFO. Or the speedboat that has passed us is part of a murderous theft ring. These people on the boat will meet us, steal our money, and dump us in the water. Maybe that is the best end for me after all. This wouldn’t be such a bad place to die. My mother looks from the UFO that is still hovering above us, to the fleeting light of the speedboat. I ponder this choice against the UFO option. The speedboat seems like the most viable option. There is a human face at the other end of this. Human hands that can alleviate my ambivalence. I feel the boat start to slow down and I want to stand up to get a glimpse of what is indeed ahead of me.
The boat comes to a stop and the captain announces that a crew member will jump in the water and swim around to stir up what makes the water phosphorescent. The captain explains that due to pollution the phosphorescence has become harder to detect. All the people on the right side of the boat dangerously rush to my side of the boat to see the water shimmer. They are enraptured with the lights. But I am not. I can hear the people from the speedboat and one of them is in the water and it looks like she or he is walking on water. Me and my mother watch and watch, finally seeing a miracle, but then my other senses kick in and it becomes clear they are just out here partying. Then I overhear someone ask the captain about the light in the sky, and my heart lightens. But he says, “Oh that light, it’s a blimp put up by the Coast Guard. It’s to catch drug dealers coming in from the Dominican Republic.”
My mother exhales relief.
One by one, as the lights turn off, I grab a life jacket and decide to swim toward, to catch, that last image. In the dark, I see him walking back towards me. He knows I’m coming.
Ivelisse Rodriguez has published or has work forthcoming in the Boston Review, Vandal, Kweli, and the Bilingual Review. She has received fellowships to attend the Writers of Americas Conference in Cuba, Voices of America (VONA) workshop, and the Summer Literary Seminar in Kenya. She holds a Ph.D. in English-Creative Writing from the University of Illinois at Chicago and an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from Emerson College. She has finished a collection of short stories titled “Love War Stories”. Ivelisse is currently working on a novel about the African Diaspora and a novella about Salsa music. She is an Assistant Professor of English at Borough of Manhattan Community College.