Growing Up Ethnic in America: Contemporary Fiction About Learning to Be American (22 page)

In direct proportion to my shame, I was pleased to be assimilated. In our home we ate rice pilaf rather than noodle pudding. When we gathered round the piano it was more
likely to sing “In the Good Old Summertime” than “Sunrise, Sunset.” At school assemblies I soloed “Edelweiss” on my clarinet. I was known to be one of the fastest hunters at neighborhood Easter egg hunts. I did not care to know the difference between Purim and Sukkos, and only remembered that the year in Hebrew chronology was 57-something because Heinz had 57 varieties of ketchup. I could read a few lines of Hebrew but only with the vowels added, beginner style, not like real Jews who could skim through text without the aid of such training wheels. And though I was barmitzvahed and it meant something to me, my girlfriends were blond and blue-eyed as a matter of course. Jewish girls, though beautiful in a heartbreaking way, seemed too sisterly; the notion of kissing them raised in my mind the specter of incest.

I turned to the Christian world for the sex appeal I found lacking in Judaism. I found my parents’ hard-drinking Christian friends glamorous, friends like the old
New York Times
Moscow bureau chief who would drive up from Manhattan in his convertible Spitfire and twirl his fiery Italian countess wife out of the passenger seat on the driveway—he was very light on his feet, in his faded seersucker suit and those pallid eyelashes of his—and the two of them would waltz to the back of the car and pop the trunk revealing a tumbler of martinis, nicely shaken by the drive up the Connecticut Turnpike upon which one in six drivers were said to be rip-roaringly smashed out of their gourds. To be a drinker was to proclaim one’s non-Jewishness loud and clear, it seemed to me, and I was glad about the hard-drinking Rowayton social whirl that my parents were in the thick of, my mother so very gay, in the ‘50s sense of the word, at the loud jazz parties they would throw where I as bartender would serve fisherman’s punch and Scotch-and-sodas. Rowayton was a series of fizzy fascinating cocktail parties
where world-renowned psychoanalysts in Fijian shirts would stuff the bathroom floor to ceiling full of balloons so no one could squeeze in, and middle-aged heiresses would plunk down on the floor next to the Labrador retriever and teach the dumb mutt to beg, and famous TV news anchors would pass out on the Castro Convertible in my bedroom, which doubled as the guest room. They were giddy, racy, boisterous parties and my parents would let my sister and me have a glass or two and encourage us to mingle, to mingle, then afterward report how Mrs. McKissock declared us to be charming; and we were, we were charming in the Connecticut manner, despite or as a result of the fact that I wore that earphone, and the whole time I was mingling I was listening to Cousin Brucie and the Good Guys.

I was living in a WASP town and going to WASP debutante parties—not so much assimilated, perhaps, as completely and thoroughly
mingled
—but at the same time I also had these righteous great-uncles forty miles away on 47th Street named Yudl and Velvl. To these gentle souls, worldly diamond dealer brothers of my grandparents from Belgium, we were Connecticut outlaws. They didn’t care how many celebrities and professionals we showcased, to them we were rabble rousers, we were Christmas carolers, we were that most unforgivable goyim thing: glitzy. Once or twice these great-uncles would show up at one of the parties we’d invite them to, a wedding, say, or a graduation. They didn’t drive, it was out of the question, but every so often they took the New Haven Railroad and the somber expression on their faces when they emerged at the Darien station, hot and dusty, said what they thought. They thought: this was the Wild West. They thought they had taken the stagecoach and here they were in Dodge City. The suburban split-levels and cardboard
palaces of Darien and Rowayton were Red River Gulch to them. Where were the sidewalks? Where was Lord & Taylor? When they got to the house they stood there stiff and sober in their gray flannel pants, fidgeting the diamonds in their pockets, and they would look out from the foyer at the balloons filling the bathrooms and the heiress barking on the floor and the news anchor giving me a noogie behind the bar because I had put tonic in his Scotch instead of soda, and my great-uncles would think,
For this we escaped Hitler’s Europe?

Or we would drive them to a barbecue at the beach. We would pick them up at the station in their pin stripes and ties and they’d sit in the back, leaving the passenger seat empty, as if they were riding in a cab. It wasn’t rudeness—they just didn’t know suburban car etiquette, that you fill up the front first. We’d drive them to the beach and it would be like out of Tolstoy, the urban dwellers coming by locomotive from St. Petersburg to visit country cousins in their provincial dacha, getting bundled in muffs and wraps to travel miles in a sleigh over snow-covered barrens. We would plunk them on the sand and they would look on in horror as we played touch football with the hot dog rolls between the picnic tables. Disdaining the
shmutz
beneath their soles, staking their claim to the beach blanket and not venturing off it except to make an occasional foray to the snack bar, they would tramp delicately across the wasteland in their leather sandals (
barefoot?
go naked in front of strangers?!) to order a Sanka and produce blank stares from the high school help who knew how to process orders only for Creamsicles and frozen Milky Ways. An impasse. There at the snack bar the Cossacks would stand staring at the Jews with their shirttails tucked inside their baggy bathing suits, their black socks pulled halfway up their hairless celery-white calves, and the Jews would stare back at the Cossacks with their necks sunburned leather-red around their dirty T-shirts, and eventually the first camp might
loosen up enough to chuck them a Coors, and the second camp might let their hair down enough to
sip
the Coors, while munching on a roasted shrimp or a lobster tail with two fingers only, the other three fingers remaining kosher in the air, figuring perhaps that they were already transgressing by finding themselves so deeply among the goyim, a little two-finger transgression wouldn’t hurt …

And yet they were my conscience. Yudl and Velvl would look at me mingling with my fisherman’s punch and know me for what I was. Reading me with one glance, they would know the awful truth, that I was infected with a malignancy of self-loathing. The look from my righteous New York relatives told me what I already knew, that deep down I was neither one nor the other, neither a wild Connecticut kid with no blood history of persecution, nor a New York Jew with a sense of sobriety that wouldn’t allow me to frolic. After the party would be over and the news anchor would be poured into the back of his Mercedes to go home, I would collapse on my bed with the whirlies only to realize that he had puked in my wastebasket. That’s when it would stink to me, all that glitz, his celebrity puke mixed in with the furtive cigarette ashes I had deposited there; I would know it all for the shameful emptiness it was, and I would be sickeningly aware that I had nothing whatever in my teenage life to hold on to. There was a hole right in the center, a gaping lack where there should have been bedrock. Writhing nauseated on my bed, peering up at my bookshelves upon which my bar mitzvah books entitled
Views of the Holy Land
were overlaid with
Playboy
magazines, I would try to cling to the image of my parents, my family, some center that I could grab hold of. But there was no center there. In my center there was a desperate mingling of too many conflicted selves instead of any true sense of self—a frantic fraternizing instead of a deep and systematic knowing who I was. I was rooting around for social
acceptance instead of driving my roots deep. What roots? I had no roots, no code, no key to understanding myself. I was indecipherable to myself, not able to sound out the words of my life, as unpronounceable as the vowel-less Hebrew words I’d struggled with as a boy. What was I? I had no cont*xt. I had no c*re.

SANDRA CISNEROS

We’re waiting for the awful grandmother who is inside dropping pesos into
la ofrenda
box before the altar to La Divina Providencia. Lighting votive candles and genuflecting. Blessing herself and kissing her thumb. Running a crystal rosary between her fingers. Mumbling, mumbling mumbling.

There are so many prayers and promises and thanks-be-to-God to be given in the name of the husband and the sons and the only daughter who never attend mass. It doesn’t matter: Like La Virgen de Guadalupe, the awful grandmother intercedes on their behalf. For the grandfather who hasn’t believed in anything since the first PRI elections. For my father, El Periquín, so skinny he needs his sleep. For Auntie Light-Skin, who only a few hours before was breakfasting on brain and goat tacos after dancing all night in the pink zone. For Uncle Fat-Face, the blackest of the black sheep—
Always remember your Uncle Fat-Face in your prayers.
And Uncle Baby—
You go for me, Mama—God listens to you.

The awful grandmother has been gone a long time. She disappeared behind the heavy leather outer curtain and the dusty velvet inner. We must stay near the church entrance. We must not wander over to the balloon and punch-ball vendors. We cannot spend our allowance on fried cookies or Familia Burrón comic books or those clear cone-shaped suckers that make everything look like a rainbow when you look through them. We cannot run off and have our picture taken
on the wooden ponies. We must not climb the steps up the hill behind the church and chase each other through the cemetery. We have promised to stay right where the awful grandmother left us until she returns.

There are those walking to church on their knees. Some with fat rags tied around their legs and others with pillows, one to kneel on and one to flop ahead. There are women with black shawls crossing and uncrossing themselves. There are armies of penitents carrying banners and flowered arches while musicians play tinny trumpets and tinny drums.

La Virgen de Guadalupe is waiting inside behind a plate of thick glass. There’s also a gold crucifix bent crooked as a mesquite tree when someone once threw a bomb. La Virgen de Guadalupe on the main altar because she’s a big miracle, the crooked crucifix on a side altar because that’s a little miracle.

But we’re outside in the sun. My big brother Junior hunkered against the wall with his eyes shut. My little brother Keeks running around in circles.

Maybe and most probably my little brother is imagining he’s a flying feather dancer, like the ones we saw swinging high up from a pole on the Virgin’s birthday. I want to be a flying feather dancer too, but when he circles past me he shouts, “I’m a B-fifty-two bomber, you’re a German,” and shoots me with an invisible machine gun. I’d rather play flying feather dancers, but if I tell my brother this, he might not play with me at all.

“
Girl.
We can’t play with a
girl.
”
Girl.
It’s my brothers’ favorite insult now instead of “sissy.” “You
girl
,” they yell at each other. “You throw that ball like a
girl.
”

I’ve already made up my mind to be a German when Keeks swoops past again, this time yelling, “I’m Flash Gordon. You’re Ming the Merciless and the Mud People.” I don’t
mind being Ming the Merciless, but I don’t like being the Mud People. Something wants to come out of the corners of my eyes, but I don’t let it. Crying is what
girls
do.

I leave Keeks running around in circles—”I’m the Lone Ranger, you’re Tonto.” I leave Junior squatting on his ankles and go look for the awful grandmother.

Why do churches smell like the inside of an ear? Like incense and the dark and candles in blue glass? And why does holy water smell of tears? The awful grandmother makes me kneel and fold my hands. The ceiling high and everyone’s prayers bumping up there like balloons.

If I stare at the eyes of the saints long enough, they move and wink at me, which makes me a sort of saint too. When I get tired of winking saints, I count the awful grandmother’s mustache hairs while she prays for Uncle Old, sick from the worm, and Auntie Cuca, suffering from a life of troubles that left half her face crooked and the other half sad.

There must be a long, long list of relatives who haven’t gone to church. The awful grandmother knits the names of the dead and the living into one long prayer fringed with the grandchildren born in that barbaric country with its barbarian ways.

I put my weight on one knee, then the other, and when they both grow fat as a mattress of pins, I slap them each awake.
Micaela, you may wait outside with Alfredito and Enrique.
The awful grandmother says it all in Spanish, which I understand when I’m paying attention. “What?” I say, though it’s neither proper nor polite. “What?” which the awful grandmother hears as “
¿Güat?
” But she only gives me a look and shoves me toward the door.

After all that dust and dark, the light from the plaza makes me squinch my eyes like if I just came out of the movies. My brother Keeks is drawing squiggly lines on the concrete with a wedge of glass and the heel of his shoe. My
brother Junior squatting against the entrance, talking to a lady and man.

They’re not from here. Ladies don’t come to church dressed in pants. And everybody knows men aren’t supposed to wear shorts.

“
¿Quieres chicle?
” the lady asks in a Spanish too big for her mouth.

“
Gracias.
” The lady gives him a whole handful of gum for free, little cellophane cubes of Chiclets, cinnamon and aqua and the white ones that don’t taste like anything but are good for pretend buck teeth.

“
Por favor
,” says the lady. “
¿Un foto?
” pointing to her camera.

“
Sí.
”

She’s so busy taking Junior’s picture, she doesn’t notice me and Keeks.

“Hey, Michele, Keeks. You guys want gum?”

“But you speak English!”

“Yeah,” my brother says, “we’re Mericans.”

We’re Mericans, we’re Mericans, and inside the awful grandmother prays.