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Elizabeth opened her presents in front of the class; there was soap, candy, a zippered prayer book, a box of stationery, and then therewas Papi’s present. Inside the box was a ruler. And not an ordinary wooden or plastic ruler, but a ruler made of some indestructible metal alloy no doubt invented to build rocket ships or bank safes—the Ruler of the Future, likely fabricated at the factory where Papi worked.
    The sight of it was like a punch in the stomach, and actual ones came my way at recess, as I had predicted from the daggers of hatred being shot from every pair of eyes in the class. Pleading ignorance won me no mercy, and I cried all the way home. Fortunately, the hatred eventually died down, because the ruler was never to reappear, either for measurement or for punishment. Sister Elizabeth had her merciful side, too.
    Discipline was what made Catholic school a good investment in my mother’s eyes, worth the heavy burden of the tuition fees. The Bronx public schools of the 1960s were not yet as severely troubled as they would become, though they struggled with de facto segregation and a chronic lack of funding and offered a rough environment compared with the parochial alternative. Still, none of my uncles and aunts chose the sacrifice of sending my cousins to Catholic schools.
    Among the black-bonneted nuns who managed classrooms of forty or fifty kids in my school, discipline was virtually an eighth sacrament. It might mean my copying a prayer in my clumsy cursive however many times it took to get every loop perfect or submitting to slaps and blows for some infraction. I often stewed with righteous anger over physical punishments—my own or others’—especially when they seemed disproportionate to the crime. I accepted what the Sisters taught in religion class: that God is loving, merciful, charitable, forgiving. That message didn’t jibe with adults smacking kids. I remember watching as Sister continued to slap one boy who’d disrupted class even after the braces in his mouth drew blood that ran down his chin. Many of my classmates have happier memories of Blessed Sacrament, and in time I would find my own satisfaction in the classroom. My first years there, however, I met with little warmth. In part, it was that the nuns were critical of working mothers, and their disapproval was felt by latchkey kids. The irony of course was that my mother wouldn’t have been working such long hours if not to pay for that education she believed was the key to any aspirations for a better life.
    ——
    AFTER WE ’ D FINISHED saying good-bye to everyone we could think of, Gilmar and I went back to say our good-byes to the concrete pipe and to each other. Lying inside, all we could see was the circle of bright sky. Our voices bounced around in the hollow of the concrete. We shouted and stretched the words out long and loud to get a really good echo.
    “Good-bye, Gilmar!”
    “Good-bye, Sonia!”
    “I’ll miss you!”
    “Write me a letter!”
    “Write me a letter, too!”
    “From the palm trees?”
    “From the palm trees!”
    I WOULDN ’ T GET to see California until my second summer at law school. I remember driving the freeways with palm trees in view and thinking of Gilmar, among other friends I’ve lost touch with who may never know what memories they’ve left behind in my keeping.

Four
    T HIS IS my mother, Sonia, your
bisabuela
,” said Abuelita. “Give her a kiss.” The cheek that was my target was wrinkled and translucent, so fragile that I feared my lips would bruise it. Her eyes were blank. As I leaned in to kiss her, she seemed to pull away, but it was just the rocking chair easing back from my weight. There was no spark of awareness or curiosity. I don’t know if I was more disturbed by this absence that gave no hint of how I should relate to her or by the shadow of Abuelita’s features that I could see arranged inanimately on her mother’s face.
    Bisabuela Ciriata was in her nineties, though she