American Chica (39 page)

“So she has children by another marriage?” she said.

“Unh, yeah. I dunno.”

“You don’t know? You don’t know whether or not you have sisters or brothers somewhere else?”

“I dunno,” I repeated.

“You mean they could be walking around and you wouldn’t have any idea they’re there?”

I hadn’t thought of that. Now I genuinely tried to squeeze that possibility into my brain. “No idea,” I responded.

“Jee-zee-kew-zee. They do things crazy in Pay-roo,” Suzi said. She laughed merrily, a tinkly, high titter as sweet as a canary’s. Freckly Sara flashed her big, buck teeth and put out a hand. “Friends?”

“Yip. Sure.”

While George and I were running up and down the driveway behind those apartments, working to seal a friendship with these girls, Mother was humming through our rooms, settling into the life she had dreamed of for so long. She’d whisk outside from
time to time, smoothing her hair, trotting to a cab, pointing to our big sister’s face in the window. “You mind Vicki, you hear?” When we asked where she was going, she’d reply, “To Summit Food Market!” Or “Off to your school!” Or “Off to see about the house!” Off!

She seemed enraptured with her new life, was a bundle of energy. I watched her cook meals, wash dishes, scrub floors—do tasks I had never seen her do before—but she dug in with relish, singing as she went, looking up joyfully when I walked in, pushing the hair from her eyes.

If it had never been clear before, it was crystal clear now: My mother had been a sad woman in Peru. There was nothing sad about her now. It didn’t seem to matter that she wasn’t with the Clapps. She did not visit them, nor did she call or write them, as far as I knew. She didn’t seem to need them at all. It began to dawn on me that it wasn’t
them
she had missed in Peru; she’d missed these American streets and her freedom to roam around in them.

Papi was another story: He dragged out to the train station earlier and earlier in the morning, shuffled home beat at the end of the day. He grew more and more disengaged. He missed his Peruvian family and his
compadres.
You could see it in the way he slumped through the door, headed for his chair, heaved himself down with a sigh. “Write to your abuelita,” he’d tell me day after day, pointing to the stack of letters from her. “She wants to know how you are.”

In town, he had trouble understanding the fast-talking, slang-slinging suburbanites; he’d cast a weary look my way to signal me to translate. At first, I was as puzzled by accents as he was. But his reliance on me made an impression. In Peru I had always thought he and I were similar, that Mother was the different one. But here in Summit, I felt more kinship with my mother,
my father the odd one out. “You kids are turning into gringos,” he’d say, staring at us in amazement. But I knew our mother was the only gringo among us; she was it a full hundred percent. My father was the only Peruvian; he, too, was one hundred percent. They were wholes. They were complete. They were who they were. They would never
become
anything like the other. We children, on the other hand, were becoming others all the time, shuttling back and forth. We were the fifty-fifties. We were the cobbled ones.

SUMMIT WAS NOTHING
like Mother, really, nor was it anything like the American school in Lima, nor like Rawlins, Wyoming, whose lingo we heard in our dreams. At first, we swaggered around, George and I, like cowboys, a-yawin’ and a-struttin’, thinking we knew what America was. But when Easterners looked at us, they drew their chins into their necks, pocketed their hands, and sidled away. We trotted down Springfield Avenue, hiking our jeans, jiggling our heels, only to find that the places that drew these gringos were Roots haberdashery and Summit Athletic. Not bars with decapitated fauna. Not general stores with buckshot and beans. There were men in hats, plenty of them, but they were scurrying out of the Summit train station with their faces pulled down and their collars pulled up, repairing to Brookdale Liquors, then tearing home with their wives behind the wheel. On weekends, a different breed swept down Main Street: in pastel cardigans, with bags of charcoal briquets, golf clubs, and Roots merchandise dangling from their hands, pennies winking out of their shoes.

It was the way they spoke that was most puzzling. Why didn’t it sound like English we’d heard before? It certainly didn’t sound like Nub, or Grandpa Doc, or Old Joe Krozier. “Ah’ll
take a pack uh this here Juicy Fruit, mister,” I drawled to Summit’s version of a corner-store Wong, a scrubbed little man in a white jacket and spectacles behind the counter at Liss Pharmacy.

“Beg your pardon, miss?”

I cleared my throat and tried again, raising my voice this time. “This here Jee-you-see Fah-root, mister. How much yew want?”

“Oh, ho! No need to shout, my dear. That’ll cost you … a nickel.”

“Nekel?
Qué quiere decir
nekel?” I whispered to George.

“That big
moneda
there,” he hissed, pointing into my palm. “The five-cent one.”

“Oh.” I surrendered it to the man. He pursed his lips.

“Y’ever chaw weed?” I asked Suzi, sitting on the stair step of our apartment, looking out at the pristine grass where children were not to go.

“Chaw weed?”

“Yip. My cousin Nub, he’s a cowboy, and he larned me how.”

“Taught me how.”

“O-keh, o-keh. Taught me how. Have you ever done it?”

“No, I haven’t. Gee, Marie, you gotta stop talking weird. You say things all wrong. And I don’t know why. I hear your mother talking just like everybody else. If you don’t talk right you’ll never fit in school. Kids are gonna make fun of you, for sure.”

Suzi and Sara became our tutors, whiling away summer days until fireflies bumped our faces, teaching us what to say. You said
okay,
not
o-keh.
You went to a
movie,
not a
cinema.
You caught
colds,
not
constipations.
You wrote on a clean, spanking new
sheet
of paper. Not a fresh
shit.
It was clear we had entered a new phase, far from our dirt-lot hankerings on
Avenida Angamos. We weren’t hoping to be thought of as better. We just hoped we wouldn’t be made “fun of.” We hoped not to be noticed at all.

BRAYTON WAS A
school fit for giants. Its bricks rose high as the Rawlins Penitentiary’s that first Monday in September when Mother shooed us up the concrete stairs into the principal’s office. He was bending over the windowsill, clanking metal with a ruler, talking to himself.

“Mr. Nelson?” my mother ventured.

The man whirled around with his ruler in the air. He was large, bald, like the lumbergog at Big Boy, with a face as bright as a toy’s. “Come in! Come in! Day one, and this thingamajig’s giving me trouble. Whew! Hot in here, don’t you think?”

“What
is
it?” I whispered to George.

“Heater,” he whispered back. “For when it gets cold.” I studied the iron serpent. I’d never seen anything quite like it before.

This world is filled with all manner of signs, Antonio once taught me. If we only have the wisdom to see them. The ruler on the radiator was one. I was going to be colder than I’d ever thought possible, an arctic wind piercing my bones. I’d freeze by the time I had a best friend, before my teacher thought to look at me, before I’d counted forty days at my desk. Fall rolled in like a torrent, tempering leaves with frost. Freezing them hard so that branches disowned them and they clicked to earth one by one. George and I scampered down Tulip Street like two caracaras in an ice storm, shivering and chattering all the way to Mr. Nelson’s overworked coils.

There were no other Latinos at school. Nor were there any as far as we could see in the whole of that leafless town in the fall
of ‘59. Vicki was the junior-high Hispanic. The only face like mine in the elementary school’s corridors was my brother’s round, sunny one.

My first best friend was Kit, a pale, black-Irish beauty, wan as the tragic heroine that hung on my grandmother’s wall. She was big-brained and cameo-delicate. Musical. Wicked. And she shared my passion for a scare.

“Have you read Poe?” she asked me, leaning her chair toward mine in Mr. Schwartz’s fifth-grade English class.

“Only once upon a midnight dreary,” I replied, sealing a fiendish bond.

We staged catatonic fits, saw apparitions in the windows, channeled spirits in the playground, held witches’ séances, plotted to steal Johnny Britt’s soul. Before long, Suzi and Sara Hess were eyeing me nervously, crossing the street to walk on the other side.

One winter day, as I strolled home alone, I heard the sound of feet smacking the pavement behind me. I turned and saw gangly Kelly O’Neill coming at me, face red, hair whipping her splotchy cheeks. I stopped and waited.

“You know what you are?” she said, puffing and panting her way toward me.

“What?”

“You’re a pain. You’ve brought nothing but trouble.”

“Trouble?”

“Yes, trouble. All that voodoo. You’ve poisoned Kit, and now you’re trying to poison everybody else. Devil worshiper! You’re disgusting!”

“I’m not … I’m a … You mean on the playground? Our games? It’s just fun, Kelly. We do it for fun.”

“You’re gonna burn in purgatory, you are, you … Spic! You call yourselves Christians? My dad says you’re a buncha dirty creeps. You come here with your—”

“Hey!” I said in a thin little voice. “I’m an American! My grandpa has a—”

“You are
not
an American. Don’t lie!” she screeched at me. “No American talks the way you do. You say words all wrong. Don’t you see us laughing at you? You make me vomit! Didn’t you hear what we were saying about you this morning?” She stopped and put her finger to her lip, trying to remember what it was. “Meat man,” she said finally, enunciating each syllable sharply and wagging her hand like a metronome. “How do you say the word for the man who sells the meat?”

I frowned at her, but decided to take the test. “You mean botcher?”

“Baw-tcher! Ha!” she exploded. “Do you hear how you say that? Baw-tcher! It’s butcher, you idiot. Buh-buh-buh-tcher!”

“Baw-baw-baw-tcher,” I said, nodding my head in agreement. It sounded the same to me.

“Wait …” she said, putting her finger to her lip again, and then she barked out another command: “How do you say the thing you read from? The thing like the ones you’re carrying there—the stuff you check out of a library?”

“Bucks!” I yelled triumphantly.

“Bucks!” she yelled back. “Listen to you! It’s
books!
Buh-buh-buh-book!”

“Kelly,” I said in a tiny, trembly voice, my chin shaking uncontrollably. “You listen to me … you listen to …”

But Kelly was not listening. She was snarling, her spittle flicking the cold air between us. “That dopey way you talk! And all your
stoo
-pid witch stuff. You know what you do? You make this neighborhood
stink.
Stink!” She pulled her books into her chest and stomped past me, her red kilt swinging about her big red knees. Then she whirled around and …
Squeet!
A gob of foamy saliva hit my coat and hung there, heavy as a question.

I wanted to throw my books down, march up, grab her by
her greasy yellow hair and pull out her brain. But I stood my ground and felt my face quiver. My eyes began to fill. Against all instincts, I lowered my head and felt heat rise to my ears.

“So,” she said. “You’re a crybaby.” Then she turned on her heel and took herself down the road.

I watched her lumber away, my throat tight with the effort to keep from bawling. Then I drew myself up and stormed home, plotting revenge. How had she dared talk to me like that? I was just as American as anyone; my mother had told me so. Spit at me? I fumed. But then the thought of her spittle made me stop in my tracks. Spit. I knew something about that. I recognized a sign when I saw one. The next day—my fortieth at an American government desk, and Halloween Day besides—I swiped a Peruvian blow dart from our wall, smeared green paint on my cheeks, put feathers in my hair, and ran to school in an improvised costume. The instant O’Neill sat down in the front of the class, I shot a wet spitball into the back of her skull.
Thwap,
you die. The giant shrieked. My little green face sniggered. Mr. Schwartz’s head jerked up and saw me.