American Chica (10 page)

Abuelito speaks English, as do some of the others, but he rarely appears, and besides, a clear proclamation has been made in the house: The only way she’ll learn Spanish is if she’s made to speak it, by everyone, all day. An exception is made the day the United States claims victory over the Japanese emperor, bringing the war to a close: They congratulate her in her own language. She excuses herself, ducks into the bedroom, sits on the bed, and cries.

VICTORIA IS BORN
in Lima’s Clínica Franco. My grandmother had expressed a preference for that hospital, where they allow long visits from the family, as Peruvians are accustomed to having. When Vicki enters this world, she enters it as a princess during the Conquista might have, with family courtiers in an adjoining room.

Abuelita sits by Mother’s bedside, holds her hand, and as the contractions intensify, so do the festivities on the other side of the wall. The birth of an Arana Cisneros is no private affair. More like a family extravaganza. It’s 1945, a decade before women’s suffrage comes to Peru, and the principal duty of a woman is to bear and raise children. The responsibility of her relatives is to see that she gets it done. A child is the finest expression, the ultimate bond of an extended family. To that end, courtships need to be vetted, the union of two families consecrated, and when the fruit of that marriage drops, the family attends as if it’s a party. It’s as simple as that.

These things may make all the sense in the world to a
Peruvian mother, but to mine—an Anglo-American of free-spirited pioneer stock—they are more vocabulary she doesn’t have. It doesn’t occur to her that an act she considers private will be a spectacle for people she’s only just met.

From the instant Vicki exits her mother’s womb, she is family property. The Arana Cisneroses break out the champagne. Abuelita longs to hold her, teach my mother all she’s learned about babies in having six of her own. Mother, on the other hand, is nervous: wary as a feline dam. In her mind, this child is not the cumulative handiwork of a complicated Peruvian family. It’s her only blood relative in a bewildering land.

She digs in, marks her turf.

When Papi brings Mother back to my grandparents’ bedroom, the struggle begins in earnest. The Aranas may not realize it. There’s no reason for them to suspect a new calculus at work: They’re in their own country, their own culture, their own home. But there’s an American card in the game now. Mother, too, does not reason through differences. She only knows she wants what her instincts tell her she has every right to have: both hands on her infant child.

As days wear on, the tug-of-war becomes more evident. In the mornings, my grandmother asks for the child. Mother reluctantly hands her over. By week’s end Abuelita delegates her daughters to carry the babe out to her. Mother’s face twists into a snarl. By month’s end, the household is sending in the squealing
ama: La señora de la casa is anxious! She wants the baby right now!

My grandfather’s sister, Tía Carmen, visits. She’s a serious woman who fancies herself a writer but is, in my grandmother’s view, a weird little crone with a meddlesome side.

That gringa is the very picture of sadness,
Tía Carmen pipes up.
Her little face breaks my heart.

One day, months into the ground battle, when Vicki is already cooing and crawling, Mother decides she’s had enough. The
women in the family are playing with the baby in the other room. Their laughter tinkles through corridors, brittle as mockery, skittering under the door like shards. When she hears it, she glowers into a corner where her maidservant huddles. The girl stares back at her, fighting the tears.

Qué pasa, Concepción?
my mother asks.

Your eyes, señora. They make me want to cry.

That’s the thing that begins it. Mother bangs out of the room, shuttles down the corridor, hell-bent for the laughter. She swings the door open and stands there, large, in the frame.

Le toca?
Feeding time? Abuelita asks her, and the faces all turn up to see. She is a mammary gland, a biological necessity. That is all.

It’s an account she recites over and over, like the bead of a penitent’s rosary, like the point where a frayed string is broken: They have no gauge on her feelings. It’s a family of strangers. Her child is Peruvian. And a gringa in this country always stands at the door.

She is old now. She sits at a wooden table my father has made for her in their sunny kitchen in Maryland, recounting a moment that is more than half a century, half a world away, and yet her voice is shaking with indignation. Her account involves far more than woman and mother-in-law. Whole cultures are in dispute. My gringa mother had assumed that her baby was something between her, her husband, and God. My abuelita had assumed that her grandchild was the first of a new generation, the next row in the family cloth, an offering to the family matriarch. Hers.

They say that motherhood everywhere is the same. That mothers give birth and mothers give milk, and up and down the animal kingdom real differences do not exist. I know it isn’t so.

I once met a Mexican woman who returned to Monterrey with her three children after many years as a migrant laborer along the southeastern United States. She had picked apples,
strawberries, tomatoes for years alongside her husband, borne him three healthy children, followed him wherever their hands were wanted. That she was a loving mother, loyal wife, was never questioned by anyone. Until one spring day, when she found herself on the steps of a school in Danville, Virginia, listening to some wattled gringo tell her that if she were a better mother she would understand that her fourteen-year-old boy shouldn’t be so worried about the family coffers. He shouldn’t be working the orchards after school, helping her harvest peaches, minding his baby sister. He should be on the soccer field, playing with boys his age. It was the American way, he said, and her boy was an American boy.
Lady, you must raise these children up. Make them walk. Be somebody.
The mother looked down and saw her son slumped on the school lawn, cradling his sister between his knees, tears sliding down his cheeks. He was a good boy, an honor to his mother, and the man was misunderstanding everything, twisting her motives and her family traditions into something they were not. She was not taking advantage of her son, exploiting him to pick a few more peaches, enslaving him to another child; she was teaching him a responsibility to something greater than himself. The next year, she and the children stayed in Mexico. Her husband hit the migrant road alone.

I tell this as if I agree with that mother. The truth is: I do not know. The principal may have been right. The Mexican woman may have been right. As I sit in my mother’s kitchen in Maryland listening to her angry recollections of my grandmother, I do not know what to think about the two of them. I’m on my mother’s side one minute. I’m on my abuelita’s side the next. I am an ark of confusion.

In the Lima house, my mother issues a letter of grievances. She sits down with her worn dictionary and composes—in ridiculous Spanish—a declaration of her rights.
If I say something to you,
she writes to her mother-in-law,
I’m doing the best I can. I say it as an American. Don’t take my words at face value. They may not say what I mean. Allow me to make mistakes.

As for the baby, she is Jorge’s and mine. I want her with me at all times. Not just for feedings. I am not a cow.

I had always sensed the antagonism between my mother and my grandmother. I knew there were variances in the ways they lived, things they believed. But only in later accounts—told by both of them—did I understand the gulf of their divide. My grandmother was wary of my mother’s independence, of her unwillingness to have her life pried into, of the utter rigidity in her upper lip. My mother was caught off guard by the family, surprised to find it commandeered by a matriarch, taken aback by her rein on so many lives. Abuelita drew her clan with a magical charisma, funneling their energy toward her, deep into the sanctum of that hearth. Not out, not away, not in the typical vector of a Yank.

Mother’s list of grievances is received like a low-grade detonation. Abuelita shows it to others, then folds it into a drawer. She has tried to make the gringa feel welcome: She has given up her bedroom, moved her estimable husband into a side room, given the woman advice on her disastrous ways:
For God’s sake,
hijita,
I don’t care what you did during the war in Boston. You can’t slather your calves with makeup and go out bare-legged in Peru. People will assume you’re something you’re not.

She has, above all, tried to initiate her into the art of motherhood. She has given the gringa everything and has had it flung back in a coolly penned note.

The letter begins a standoff Peruvians call
pleito:
that inching toward fury, that lingering grudge to the grave. There’s no word for it in English. It’s more than a simple resentment, less than an all-out war. It’s coal fire beneath a prairie, hell under the vista. You come, you go, you chat in the
sala
—the exterior looks perfectly normal—but a fire is reaming your gut.

Mother asks that dinners be sent to her room, sends kind regards through her maid. Abuelita sews dresses for Vicki, sets them out for everyone to see. But unless etiquette demands it, the two do not talk at all. They bristle, walk wide arcs around each other, scowl from behind beatific smiles.

I can’t play this charade much longer,
says my mother to my father one night.
I can’t fake it like she can.

It’s late July. They’ve been there for almost a year.

My mother doesn’t fake anything,
my father responds.
She’s an honorable woman.

A cable tightens. She’s expressed pique. So has he. There are more words along these lines. Her anger escalates. So does his. She is barefoot, in nightclothes, in no condition to leave their room, but she snatches Vicki and heads for the door.
Where on earth do you think you’re going?
he says, the first time he’s ever used that tone with her.

Out, she says.
The hell out.
Parrying with a new tone of her own.

Out.
The direction she knows best. As in
out
for all those other Americans like her, who reach thresholds, vault fences, hurl themselves out, out, out, in a centripetal rush away.

She bolts down the stairs with the baby
(thwap, thwap, thwap)
on pink feet, and my father follows. Past his parents’ door, past the eyes of his mother’s ancestors peering from canvases, trammeled to walls. She opens the front door and hesitates in the frame; the baby looks back at him, rubs her eyes under a curl of golden hair. He rushes up, spins his wife around by her shoulders, and slaps her across the face.

When she tells me this part, she says,
He spun me around by the shoulders.
When he tells it to me later, the story acquires a detail—the smack on the head. He is full of old anger about it. Not against her, not even against himself, but against the wavering in the bridgework, the tic in the colonnades. I doddle my head at the both of them.
I know what you mean,
I say.

He manages to get her back up to their room again. He makes her some promises, vows the situation will change. The next day he secures an invitation from prim Tía Carmen.
I can see what you’re going through, Jorge,
she tells him.
Look, I spend so much time on my hacienda. Why don’t you move into my Lima house?

Mother goes about my grandparents’ rooms quietly, retrieving her things: a toy here, a teacup there. Abuelita is heard intoning from another room,
La gente tiene boca para hablar!
Mouths are for speaking! But neither says a word.

The next night, my father inaugurates a protest all his own: He staggers in well after midnight. High as a spire.

THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN
my mother and my grandmother—I know it now after all these years—was not one between woman and woman. It was the difference between an Anglo’s daughter and the mother of a Latin male. It was a difference between men and men.