I met Maria on a blistering summer day in the early 1970s. My mother had just moved my siblings and me to Brooklyn from Greenville, South Carolina, where we had lived with my grandparents since I was two months old. Maria’s parents were from Puerto Rico, a place I had never heard of, and her apartment was only three buildings down the block from my own.
My mother worked full-time. Maria’s was a stay-at-home mom, first keeping a keen eye on Maria and her sister, then later on me as well. But before Maria and I became friends, my siblings and I relied on the care of a teenage babysitter who often took us across the street to the park where city volunteers handed out bags of free lunch. Inside was a cold-cut sandwich—bologna, turkey, or ham, depending on the day—a small container of milk, a plastic cup of juice with a foil lid, a packet of mustard or mayo, and, always, a piece of fruit.
In the evenings, when my mother returned home, we gathered around our kitchen table for dinner. My mother had not yet learned to cook and what I missed most were my grandmother’s meals—cornbread, roast chicken, cheese grits, collards from my grandfather’s garden, biscuits slathered with butter and jam, homemade ice cream. Here in this new place, my grandmother’s cooking had been replaced by canned vegetables, boiled chicken and noodles, and city lunches.
That day, as the temperature climbed, Maria and her younger sister sat on their stoop working freeze pops up through their sheaths of clear plastic—a neighborhood favorite, sold at the bodega around the corner for a dime and slurped on by kids all summer long.
I don’t remember whether Maria and I even exchanged names when we met. But eventually, I learned she was called Googoo and her little sister, Ija. It would be months before I knew her real name and years before she dropped Googoo (only allowing her mother to call her this). But back then she was still Googoo, a little shorter than I was, with a thick braid that rested on the stairstep behind her and fell to the back of her knees when she stood.
“You can sit on my stoop if you want,” Maria said before turning her gaze across the street. “Look, they’re moving.”
In those days, the Bushwick section of Brooklyn was changing. White folks were moving out because Black and brown folks were moving in.
Sitting on the stoop, Maria and I saw moving trucks load up the belongings of our Polish, German, and Italian neighbors. We didn’t know they were leaving because families like ours were moving in. We watched them go.
Maria’s mother raised their top floor window, leaned out, and called, “¡Ven a comer!”
“I gotta go eat,” Maria said. She and her sister headed into the building. But after a moment, I heard Maria’s mother again.
“Tell your friend she can come eat too.”
I bolted up the stairs two at a time, into the world of Maria’s mother’s kitchen—a small sunlit room where pots bubbled and steamed. Under the guidance of Maria’s mother’s deft hands, orange circles of dough became meat-filled pastelillos fried golden and crisp. I sat down at their Formica table with its padded yellow chairs and tasted the food of a new world, a world that would in the decades to follow become as much a part of me as my own name.
As that first day melted into years, Maria and I became best friends, running up to her apartment for mounds of mofongo with bits of chicken, yellow rice and red beans with cubes of calabaza squash, and fried plantains—both the sweet and the saltwater-dipped green ones. As my mother’s cooking skills improved, Maria began eating at our house, our predinner question to each other becoming, “Whatchu eating?”
In the summers we brought our dinners out to Maria’s stoop and traded: foil-wrapped plates of my mother’s fried chicken, cornbread, and mashed potatoes (lumpy, but Maria didn’t mind) exchanged for her mother’s pollo guisado, a thick stew of chicken, tomato, olives, and onions served over white rice.
Though it has become my favorite dish of all time, I have yet to make this stew quite the way Maria’s mother did—the spices perfectly melding into the broth, the chicken nearly melting in the mouth, the olives so much a part of the dish and yet holding a space of their own. Still each time I pull out the ingredients to start a new batch of sofrito, I think, This time I’ll nail it!
As the years passed, Maria and I grew closer, the lunches and dinners turning into sleepovers and the sleepovers turning into trips to her grandparents’ apartment in the Marcy Houses, a public housing complex in Bed-Stuy where we rode the elevators from floor to floor just for the fun of it and sat in the window eating crisp bacalaitos while watching the kids in the playground below line up for bags of free lunch. I had long ago forgotten the taste of these lunches and promised myself that my own kids would never know cold cuts, white bread, packets of yellow mustard, or foil-covered cups of juice.
“We’re going to be two viejitas in rocking chairs,” Maria said one day as we sat on her stoop, sucking frosty bottles of Malta.
My kids would know the taste of this Caribbean soft drink, of arroz con habichuelas and pollo guisado. They would know that new people coming to a place was not a signal to pack up and move away.
“Take the stairs two at a time,” I’d tell them. “The way I did, up to Maria’s house.”
At 18 I left Bushwick for college, and from there life took me so many other places. Maria married the man I introduced her to when we were teenagers. I returned home to be part of her wedding, then again to welcome the birth of her first daughter.
Years later she moved to Florida and had two more children. I had a daughter, then a son. Our children grew up. We grew older. Life moved on.
This past August, as always, I called Maria on her birthday. She had just turned 58.
“Hola, viejita,” I said.
Across the miles and time, Maria’s laughter came soft and clear as always.
“Hola, amiga mejor. Whatchu eating?”
