Model Ricans

Uprooted Nuyoricans

1987

Our brown station wagon speeds across the Williamsburg Bridge, away from the only home I've ever known. My chest collapses. A single tear slides down my left cheek. Surrounded by baggage in the fold-up backseat, my hands grasping my Cabbage Patch Kid, I am completely powerless as I watch New York taxi cabs and banged up cars race behind and around my backwards ride to a future I do not want.

A silver car with an "Outtatime," license plate swerves into our lane, reminding me of the movie Back to the Future. A time machine would be perfect right now. I could go back in time and be with my friends again. If only my life were a movie.

I hear Dad say, "Get awff my ass," before the silver car finally passes. 

The station wagon bounces up and down on the potholed road. The radio plays I wonder if I take you home by Lisa Lisa and the Cult Jam until the DJ hollers, "From the Top of the World Trade Center! H-H-H-H-ot! 103!"

Dad turns the volume down. He is facing the other direction. He is driving like Doc Brown toward a future he's been dreaming about for decades. But I'm looking backwards to the future I had been dreaming about since he interviewed me with his video camera a couple years ago.

"What do you want to be when you grow up, Desiree?"

"An actress and a lawyer," I said in a hoity toity voice because I thought I was the Queen of New York.

"Just because you were born in Queens doesn't mean you can be anything," Big Sister yelled while me and Dad laughed.

That's the last time Dad and I laughed. Together.

Since he announced we are moving to Florida, we haven't spoken. I'm trapped in this brown station wagon for the next two days with no air conditioning in August. I want to yell, Stop...before you break my heart! But that would be melodramatic. And I'm not the only passenger.

Mom, unlike me, seems happy about this move, even though she told me on my birthday that I was destined to conquer Nueva Yol. "Because females can now," she would say as we jumped up and down to Jane Fonda's workout. Now she sits up front, in the passenger side, using her handy tray to make us sandwiches to eat inside the car. "So we can make good time," she says in unison with Dad.

Big Sister faces forward listening to Jodi Watley on her gray walkman. She doesn't care about leaving New York. She's got her Pat Benetar haircut and college ahead of her. No one in our family has ever gone to college. And no one in our family, boy or girl, has ever said they were going to be an astronaut. She's gonna have so much fun in outer space while we're stuck in Orlando Borelando.

Lil Bro isn't looking backwards or forwards. He's busy writing down his weekly list of Casey's Top 40 hits. He is seven so geography is irrelevant.

Me? I'm the only one silently kicking and screaming in the backseat, my legs dangling like roots pulled up from the soil that had been nurturing the person I was becoming. I wish I could drive myself and control our direction. Twelve isn't too young for a License to Drive.

"When you're 18, you're outta heayah!" That's what Dad said after packing up the moving truck and our brown station wagon for the long ride down I-95.

"But I could stay with one of my friends until I finish school," I insisted, trying hard to make my case like a lawyer on TV. "I know which way I wanna go and it's NOT tah ta Flahrida."

Back-talk is close to sacrilege in our family. But I couldn't help it. I kept fighting him. There was a lot of crying and yelling. When Dad yells the conversation is over. "No twelve-year-old is gonna ruin my retirement," he said like a final exclamation point. 

That's when I'm supposed to keep my mouth shut.

Can't bring it up again.

Case closed.

I want to cry. I'll make a terrible lawyer.

Tears blur my view.

New York is fading. Empire State Building shrinking. World Trade Center going, going gone. No skyline. The sound is getting choppy. Staticky. I can faintly hear Richard Marx breaking in with his cheesy lyrics that somehow still make me sad... "time was all we had until the day we said goodbye..."

Ugggg. I hate this. I don't want to be facing the future backwards, watching the road we've already covered, and I don't want to my last scene of New York to be ruined by this song--

Dad changes the radio station.
Disconnected, we are.

My stomach lurches. Is that the last time I'll hear Hot 103.5 FM?

I want to cry. I think of the tree at the end of my street after Hurricane Gloria in 1985. Toppled over.

"Uprooted" was the word everyone kept saying.

Dad was all, "Did you see that tree at the end of the street? Completely uprooted!" His Brooklyn accent was always stronger at the end of a sentence.

And then Mom would say in her sing-song way, "We leave Puerto Rico, and the hurricanes still find us." The first part of the sentence would always be an octave higher than the second part, like she's speaking Spanish to her sisters. Spanish is the "secret language" she uses with her sisters, her mom, her cousins, and sometimes Dad, so the kids don't understand. Fine by me. Everyone at school speaks English, anyways.

Now that the radio station isn't playing music, Mom turns the knobs trying to find a new station. But all I can hear are chainsaws chopping the uprooted tree at the end of the street into a million pieces. All I can see when I close my eyes is the huge, gaping hole left in the ground afterwards. Ick. I feel nauseous. I can't take all this sadness. I put my pink walkman headphones in my ears. My Janet Jackson tape. She sings to me about control.

I let my father drive
I let him think he owns me
Hmm...
but Imma come right BACK.

Control! To get what I want.

The New York skyline disappears beyond the horizon. My voice fades with it as the station wagon swishes past trees on I-95 heading into New Jersey. I think of all the friends I left behind, singing Never Say Goodbye with Bon Jovi on the gravel-covered playground, ugggg, why is every song so cheesy when I am sad? "This is the last time we'll ever see Great Adventure," I whine.

"Don't be so dramatic, Desiree, it's not like we're moving to Timbuktu," says Sister.

"Orlando has Disney World," says Mom with her positive sing-song spin.

"Pffft," I mutter. "Great Adventure is better." The least we can do is stop and have some fun on the way to hell. I blow a kiss at my favorite theme park as it fades away of the back window.

"Flahhhrida has all kinds of theme parks that are better than Great Adventure," says Dad. "Flahhhrida has palm trees and beaches and warm weather. Flahhhrida, Flahhhrida, Flahhhrida..."

Every time I hear him say the word "Florida" I go into some kind of zombie state. All I can hear is the buzz-buzz of chainsaws chopping the uprooted tree on our street into a million pieces, and the hum-hum of generators. It was the soundtrack of our neighborhood — for a week — until our electricity was restored, and everything went back to "normal."

Before we moved, I kept walking back to the huge, gaping hole in the ground, as if it was some kind of tourist attraction. It called to me for some reason. The same day we packed up the station wagon, I escaped to look inside it for one last time. leaned forward, as if I could see down deeper. But it was just a mess of leftover roots, tangled up like the cables behind our TV. And then the hole echoed my dad's heavy New York accent.

"Weah movin ta Flahrida-da-da-da!"

Suddenly the hole sucks me and Brother down as fast as the spinning Gravitron at Adventureland. 

Ew. Someone threw up on that ride during the fifth grade field trip. I feel nauseous. What's happening? Where are we going?