B0061QB04W EBOK (51 page)

I called Steve to come over, and when he arrived, I told him I wanted to break up. He agreed it was for the best. We were playing with fire. We were having unprotected sex, and we knew that there would be consequences if we didn’t stop. I didn’t think things would go as smoothly with my father. When he came home, I didn’t hide in my bedroom. Instead, I went out to the kitchen and said, “Tomorrow I’m going to Pasadena City College to enroll.” I waited for him to say no. I was ready for a fight. But my father looked at me, and whatever he saw in my eyes made him keep quiet. I turned around, and as I headed back to my room, he started to talk.

“You know, Chata, when my father took me to the fields to work, my job was to guide the oxen in a straight line. My father gave me a rod and said that if the oxen didn’t listen to me, to hit them as hard as I could. I was nine years old, Chata. Do you understand?”

I took a deep breath, unable to say anything. I wanted to say something. I was still too angry to forgive all that he had done to me, but I wanted to understand what he was trying to tell me. But too soon, he had turned away from me. Too soon, he was opening the refrigerator door, taking out a Budweiser, and I knew that the father who had spoken just a minute ago was gone.

22

I
N THE SUMMER
of 1994, I enrolled in an English class at Pasadena City College that was part of the requirements to transfer to a four-year college. My teacher’s name was Diana Savas. When I walked into the classroom, my first thought was that she was Latina. She had short black hair and brown eyes framed by glasses. She was not too tall nor too short, and full-figured—“llenita,” as we say in Spanish. It turned out that she was a Greek-American who, to my surprise, spoke excellent Spanish. The thought that a non-Latina took the time to learn my native tongue pleased me and impressed me.

A couple of weeks into the summer semester, Dr. Savas assigned us an expository essay about the groups to which we belonged (racial, economic, religious, and so on). I went home to work on my essay, but it was difficult for me to do it. What group did I belong to? I had no idea. I’d never thought of myself belonging anywhere outside of
my family. So that is what I wrote, about my family and the place I had come from.

A few days after turning in my essay, Dr. Savas asked me to come to her office. “You wrote an autobiographical essay,” she said. “I need you to do the essay again, but,” she added, “I think you’re a very good writer.”

When she handed me back my paper, I felt different. With those words, it was as if she had opened my eyes to something I could not yet see. When the summer ended, I passed the class with an A, but I was sad that I would no longer have Dr. Savas as a teacher.

When the fall semester began, I stopped by her office to say hello. It was my nineteenth birthday, and I shyly mentioned it to her because there was no one to celebrate my birthday with. She picked up a book she had on her desk and said, “I went to see a panel of Latino writers this weekend and bought this book. I think you’ll like it.” She handed it to me, and I looked down at the cover to read the title.
The Moths and Other Stories
, by Helena María Viramontes. I’d never heard of it before. Latino literature wasn’t something I was familiar with.

“I want you to have it,” she said with a smile. That was another thing I liked about her, her honest smile. She took it from me and wrote
Happy Birthday, Reynita,
on the title page and handed it back to me. No one had ever called me Reynita. Not even my mother.

I thanked her for the book. She was shocked to find out that it was the very first book I’d ever been given, one that I could keep and not have to return to the library.

I went home and read
The Moths
. For the first time since I’d become an avid reader, I found myself reading about characters that lived in a world similar to my own, characters with the same color skin as mine. With the same heartaches and dreams.

As the weeks went by, I visited Dr. Savas—or Diana, as she said I should call her—at her office between classes. I never told her about life at home. We talked instead about books and writing. She was always asking me about my latest story, my latest poem. Sometimes I wanted to tell her about all the problems at home, about the increasing
arguments between Mila and my father. Lately, they’d been fighting over a woman. Mila had discovered my father was having an affair with someone at work. He denied it. I could hear them yelling in their bedroom. When I got home from school, sometimes they would be in the living room screaming at each other. I would walk by them and head to my bedroom. It was better if I stayed out of their way and didn’t take sides, but I couldn’t help thinking that now Mila knew how my mother had felt when my father was cheating on her with Mila.

One evening, I heard Mila screaming my name. I had brought Betty over for the weekend because by then she had gotten into gangs. She was in the habit of stealing my mother’s rent money and was driving her crazy. I wanted to help my thirteen-year-old sister, but I would bring her over for another reason, too. I was lonely.

Mila screamed again, and Betty and I went running into the living room. My father had shoved Mila onto the couch and was on top of her, punching her. Mila had her arms up to her face, trying to block his fists. Then, with his right hand on her face, he pushed her head into the couch. Mila squirmed beneath him, but she wasn’t able to get him off. Betty glanced at me, as if waiting to see what I would do. I put my arm around her and pulled her close. I wished she wasn’t seeing this. I wished I hadn’t brought her over that weekend. I couldn’t believe he was hitting Mila. All those years I had been on the receiving end of his fists. Not her. Never her.

I got over my shock and ran to help my stepmother. I pushed Papi hard, but he wouldn’t budge. “Leave her alone!” I said again, pushing against him, but he was like a boulder.

Finally, I managed to get him off Mila. She stood up from the couch and ran out the door, down the stairs. He followed behind her, cursing at her. I heard the sounds of metal falling, and my stepmother crying out: “Natalio. Stop it! Stop it!” Then I heard my cousin Lola and her husband yelling at my father to leave Mila alone.

When Betty and I rushed downstairs, Mila was sobbing in Lola’s arms, and my father was being restrained by Lola’s husband, Chente. My father broke loose from Chente’s grasp, and for a second it seemed as if he was going to pounce on Mila again. Instead, he rushed toward the stairs. It took me a second to realize he was heading my way, and I quickly moved myself and Betty out of the way to let him
pass. I was so relieved when he didn’t notice us. He just went into the apartment without a word.

Mila was bleeding from her leg. My father had pushed her onto the gardening tools he had beneath the stairwell, and she had cut herself on the spikes of the rake when it fell on top of her.

“Come on, Mila, you need to go to the hospital,” Lola said. Her husband helped Mila to the car, and I stood there not knowing what to do.
Should I go with her? Should I stay with him?

“Stay with your father,” Lola said, making the choice for me. “Go keep an eye on him.”

I stood there on the first step, and I couldn’t get myself to take the next step up, and the next step up, to go back to the apartment. Betty and I looked at each other, not knowing what to do. Her eyebrows were plucked thin, like a typical chola, and her eyes were rimmed with too much black liner. But at the moment, she wasn’t putting on her tough-girl chola mask. She was a frightened teenage girl. I wished I were like Mago. She would have known how to protect us. I didn’t know how to be a little mother to my sister.

“Jesus,” Betty said, shaking her head at what had just happened.

Eventually, I found the courage to take Betty and myself back upstairs. We went through the back door, tiptoed across the kitchen, and I poked my head into the living room. Papi had turned off the light and was sitting there on the couch, motionless. I wondered if he had fallen asleep. We went into my room and stayed there.

Sometime later, someone was shaking me to wake me up. I opened my eyes and saw a female police officer standing over me. She shined a flashlight into my eyes. “What’s going on?” I said.

She took me and Betty into the living room, and there I saw two other police officers putting handcuffs on my father. Then they walked him out the door. I stood there while they made their way down the stairs. I couldn’t take my eyes off the handcuffs. I couldn’t believe my father was being arrested. I glanced at Betty, and I wished she weren’t here to see him like that. Since our mother was always telling Betty bad things about him, she didn’t like him very much to begin with. What would she think of him now, to see her father turned into a criminal?

When they put him in the car, he looked up at us for a brief moment before the car door closed and the police took him away.

The female cop told us to go back inside, and we sat in the living room. She wanted to know everything that had happened between him and Mila. I found that I couldn’t speak. How could I tell her about all the abuse? How could I tell her that I was ashamed of what he had done, as if I were just as guilty because of the fact that I was his daughter? How could I say that even though I knew he’d gotten what he deserved, I was still afraid for him? I didn’t want anything to happen to him. I didn’t want him to be in jail.
What’s going to happen to him?
I wanted to ask her.
To me? To all of us?