Once every few months, Estelle called from Puerto Rico.

Mom knew about the calls before any of us, so she’d pick up on the first ring anticipating the long-distance operator’s requests.

“Yes,” she’d say, then “Hola, Estelle!” and they’d talk about weather or school until Mom told Estelle to put Titi Moncé on the line. Once Titi got on the phone, mom’s broken Spanish spilled out, along with gossip about Tati and Johnny and Titi Cruz. Chris would be next to chat since he knew everyone and had even summered in Old San Juan.

That wasn’t such a strange thing back then, for a kid to fly alone. Decades ago parents could walk their children into the airport all the way up to the terminal and wait with them until the plane boarded. Security checks did not involve hand swabs. There was a global understanding that the child would be kept safe until landing.

The last time Chris went to Puerto Rico, the rules over here began changing. When we arrived at the airport for Chris’s return flight, Dad was told he couldn’t stand by the gate and that he’d have to wait with everyone else, farther away, some type of “waiting area.” Dad, naturally, wouldn’t have it. It had been close to a month since he’d seen his son, and he had picked him up plenty of other times exactly this way. Dad found no reason why he couldn’t wait where he usually waited and watch the plane pull in from the window, so he knelt down and pretended to tie my shoes, whispering to me: “run.” Run fast, he said, pointing where he wanted me to go. “Don’t stop until you hear me say stop.” Gleeful at the chance to break some rules, I ran and ran and ran—I didn’t stop running. Even when I heard “Abe, Stop!”

I was three. I was free! If Chris were watching from the plane, he’d have seen my face smashing against the plexiglass, my father’s arms flailing in the background.

Chris had stopped summering in Old San Juan because of a summer job, and would talk to Estelle all about it on the phone. After Chris and Estelle stopped chatting, Chantele would get on to practice the little Spanish she knew (she preferred French), and after her, it was my turn. As I remember it, I’d just breathe on the line, mesmerized at the ability to listen to a person in my family I never met, someone who lived amongst the banyan trees and cliff-lodged homes, family so different from mine, still family none the less.

Mom loves to tell the story of the summer she was shipped off to Titi Monce because Grandma was scared she’d get pregnant by Dad. When she should have been packing, she was making out in the hallway, so when it was time to leave, she’d forgotten her suitcase. No underwear. No bathing suits.

“That’s what you get!” she says my grandma said in the car on the way to the airport. “That’s what you get for making out with Dolor instead of behaving! You’ll wear the same outfit every day for all I care.”

Mom got on that plane anyway, lack of underwear and all. Somehow, when she landed, her suitcase was there, too. (Someone raced home to pack one, then drop it off. You could do that back then, too.)

Back then, everything seemed easier to fix.

Back then, I’d take any opportunity to talk about my family in Puerto Rico.  I’d mouth “Estelle” aloud while daydreaming in school, a name that sounded to me like music but meant the stars; I’d tell anyone I could that when she came to New York, she promised to teach me how to sew and how to bomba.

We made monthly visits to Titi Cruz in her apartment in East New York where there were always R-rated movies in the living room and pink beans simmering in a pot on the stove. Every so often swift wafts of sofrito found their way between rooms. One night, Tio Johnny somehow got access to a VHS-bootleg of Speed and all of the men in the family sat glued to the big-boxed-antenna television.

I loved going to Titi’s house and I loved talking to Estelle long distance and I loved being Puerto Rican. Whenever I was asked what “I was”, I puffed proud and answered: Puerto Rican and Jewish.

There was only one slight problem.

When she was growing up, my mom lived across the hall from Titi Cruz and Titi Monce, who spoke Spanish. My grandparents were immigrants, Holocaust survivors. Grandma spoke Yiddish, Hebrew, German, and a little bit of French, but not Spanish. Together, these women stumbled along in broken English, trading survival tips.

Dad was a mix of French, Norwegian, Scottish. Mom’s family fled Morocco and Spain during the Inquisition just to wind up in 1930’s Poland.

Man oh man did I love to tell everyone that I was Puerto Rican and Jewish. The moment I said it, whoever I was speaking with would size me up: my twiggy body, my stereotypical Jewish nose, my very, very obvious whiteness. Where was the proof, they’d wonder, and sometimes ask.

But there was no “proof.” And there was very little truth. My only connection to the culture was Titi’s house, those phone calls from Estelle. Was I lying every time I claimed Puerto Rico as part of me? It wasn’t a part of me, was it?

By the time I reached middle school I stopped claiming myself boricua. When my friends would ask: “What are you?”

“A mutt,” I’d answer, but what I really meant was “I don’t know.” 

Change comes like lightning. Some seek it with anticipation. Others meet it with shock.

In 2018, after Hurricane Maria, Estelle moved to Texas to practice medicine. Titi Monce passed away a few years before the storm. No one calls from Puerto Rico anymore.