This happened late into the year so that I had only a few months of schooling at that level. It was just as well — I’d felt terrified and not at all used to being around other children, let alone such an ethnic mix, for the kids in that school, just as in the neighborhood, included blacks and Puerto Ricans and Cubans, as well as Irish and Italians, among others. I felt, from the start, with my mother by my side, tremendously self-conscious and uncomfortable, not just because I’d been apart from normal kids for so long, but because of the way I’d come to believe that there was something wrong with me, for not a day had gone by when my mother hadn’t reminded me that my body, like the world, was filled with poisons.
Just being out of the apartment on a regular basis threw me, and in my social awkwardness, I must have struck most of those kids as something of a lost soul. Though I had enjoyed the odd outing with my family into someone’s home, going to school scared me, and my face must have shown it. I can recall always feeling out of sorts. In my quietude, I just seemed different from the other kids, down to my unusual last name, Hijuelos, and the face and complexion that didn’t seem to go with it. Neither the Irish nor the Spanish-speaking kids knew what to make of me. Given my timidity, as if I’d have preferred to disappear into the walls like a ghost, and, as well, the fact that I didn’t have any real inkling how to read, my situation wasn’t helped by my mother, who made sure that everyone knew about my condition. While the other kids were dropped off by the entryway doors below, she not only walked me up to my classroom each morning, on those days when the weather permitted me to go to school at all, but, in her broken English, told my first teacher — I believe her name was Sister Mary Pierce — that I was still a very sick child and that I had to be watched over carefully. My fellow students would have probably noticed this without the two cents she’d deliver by the doorway: “My son, he is not so good in the kidneys.” And when I had gotten upset one day because the sister asked that we come to class with a ten-cent box of Crayolas, which my mother claimed she could not afford because we were “poor,” as I sat forlornly in the classroom, later that morning, my mother, having changed her mind, turned up with a box of those crayons in hand. These she delivered at the door, but not without cheerfully announcing to everyone, “Mi niño, Oscarito, he was crying and crying for them.” (I remember feeling stunned with embarrassment and wishing that I could turn into a bird and fly from that room.)
I still missed days, especially if it rained or snowed or if I showed the slightest signs of any fatigue. That my mother refused to let me out of the apartment in the bad weather must have seemed pathetic to some of the kids, but the sisters were more forgiving. (Maybe they thought she was a little troubled and felt sorry for me.) As I got around to becoming, more or less, a full-time student, my mind always wandering, I would feel confused about whatever the nuns were teaching us, as if some part of me deep inside couldn’t help but cling to a notion that I was stupid, mainly because I couldn’t get my mother’s voice out of my head. It took me a while to fall into stride there, having already turned into an overly cautious and suspicious child, somewhat rigid in my ways. For the first few years, I preferred to be quiet during our classes, which began after we’d recited our morning prayers (an “Our Father,” a “Hail Mary,” and the Credo) and the pledge of allegiance, whose words I could never quite get straight. Having started out later than most kids, I lived in dread of being called on, and lacking self-confidence, I always felt that I had to play catch-up when it came to reading and writing, over which I agonized, all the while thinking that I wasn’t very smart. And not just because I was often too distracted by my own anxieties to concentrate well, but out of some sense that my mother and father’s limitations, when it came to English, had become my own: Just attempting to read — anything really — I’d feel as if I had to swim a long distance through murky water to fathom the meaning, and, at the same time, though I eventually improved, shell-shocked though I was, I always had the sense that the language was verboten to me, as if I needed special permission from someone to take it seriously. No matter how hard I tried, or how well I did on the tests, I secretly believed that my mind was essentially second-rate — all the other kids just seemed brighter than me.
Told to paint a picture of a house in a field during the sessions that passed as art class, I tended toward using a single color, like green, as if to venture into a variety of colors, like the other kids, remained somehow beyond me. My brushstrokes were clumsy, too wide and sloppy, which was particularly vexing to me, since my brother, José, had not only always possessed an artistic temperament but had already, as a somewhat worldly streetwise teen, begun drawing quite well — for he was already getting locally known as an artist. I also lacked his fine singing voice, having failed to please our well-known choirmaster, a certain Mr. MacDonald, who during an afternoon audition turned me away with disappointment. And as I mentioned in passing before, I couldn’t see very well, already squinting and barely making out what the nuns wrote in chalk on the board. It took a while for anyone to notice my nearsightedness, and once my mother began to suspect that something was wrong with my vision, she, holistically minded, or believing in the old wives’ tale, resorted to feeding me a bag of carrots a day for months, before finally taking me down to a union optometrist on Twenty-seventh Street, who, for five dollars (upon presentation of a union card), fitted me with my first pair of awfully thick-lensed eyeglasses, my vision so far gone by then that just seeing things as they really were seemed a revelation.
Nevertheless, those eyeglasses, however helpful, added another unwelcome dimension to my self-image: four-eyes. I already had to live with kids calling me an Oscar Mayer Wiener, and though my name would later invite more pleasant permutations among my friends, like Oscar Wilde, Oscar Petersen, and Oscar Robinson, among others, I could never stand it: The name that now seems far more elegant because of my uncle’s importance to my family in Cuba, which I wasn’t even really aware of back then, became something I never felt proud about as a kid. In fact, I can recall feeling envious over a cowboy’s name on Rawhide, a show my father liked to watch at night on one of the second- or third-hand television sets he’d buy from a used appliance shop in Harlem. The show’s main character was called Sugarfoot, and I suffered greatly that my parents hadn’t named me something that wonderful. (Years later, when I first thought I might publish somewhere, I seriously considered adopting the nom du plume Oliver Wells, and to jump even farther ahead, during the kind of journey I could never have imagined making as a child, I signed my name on the guest registry of the archeological museum in Ankara, Turkey, as Alexander Nevsky, the kind of thing I’d do from time to time.)
I never dallied in front of mirrors for long, and when I did, the face staring back at me through the half-moon wells of distorting glass seemed as if it should belong to someone else, not an Hijuelos. (I hated looking at myself: Once, after I’d somehow gotten hold of a water gun, I went around the apartment shooting out any lightbulbs that happened to be near a mirror — oh, but the beating I got for that.) That feeling used to hit me particularly hard when, during the rare outing with both my mother and father into the outside world — a trip by subway to Queens to see my cousin Jimmy and his beautiful wife, María, or up to the Bronx, where my papi liked to hang out with his fun-loving friends on evenings so long they drove my mother into fits of despair — I always felt dismayed and vaguely saddened by seeing our reflections in any sun-drenched window: For while I could “read” my parents’ faces easily, their dark features so clearly defined, my own, whitewashed by light, seemed barely discernible. Put that idiosyncrasy together with the fact that I was too aware of my body, that cumbersome thing that had gotten all messed up and needed special care and medicines, I sat in the classrooms of Corpus with such self-consciousness that I hardly ever relaxed or felt at ease like the others.