Wild Child: Girlhoods in the Counterculture (7 page)

At the small store by the river Senora Bobadia sold cubes of frozen sugar water, colored red, orange, blue and green, called ‘Ideals.’

These came in a clear plastic wrapper which you chewed open to get at the sweetened ice. All the colors tasted exactly the same, a sweet, faintly chemical taste. On the day we got our ears pierced we were allowed two Ideals each. We took them to old Dona Donatila’s house and held them against our ears until the skin went numb. Dona Donatila was a tiny, toothless woman with a tenacious grip. She poked a threaded needle through our ears and tied the thread into loops. Shelly didn’t cry at all. On the way home we ate our softened Ideals, our hands reaching up of their own accord to touch our cold ears. We left the loops of white thread in our ears for two weeks, turning them twice a day. My first real earrings were a tiny pair of straw sandals, painted pink, that my mother bought in Orange Walk.

After my uncle and his family returned to Minnesota for the spring semester, my mother worked in the cane fields. She was the only woman who did, except for the occasional wife or daughter who helped out for an afternoon. My mother got up before dawn and waited by the general store with the other workers for a cane truck to come by. Whoever had rented a truck and needed to get cane in that day would pay to have it cut and loaded. My mother started out cutting cane but eventually switched to loading it. She stood on a board over the back wheel of the truck and passed great bundles over her head. Sometimes, she told me, there’d be ants swarming on the cane. She made maybe six dollars a week. Now, when I ask her why she did it, she shrugs. ‘I wanted to make a little money. I wanted to see what it was like.’

No one had much money in San Antonio. Two families were rich enough to own generators. There was one television, run off one of the generators. It belonged to the Castillo family, and they watched it religiously in spite of the fact that the picture on the screen was barely visible. Froylan and Balbina refused to take anything my mother gave them toward food. One night as they sat around the table in the lamplight, my mother slipped a twenty-dollar bill into Balbina’s hand. They sat and talked, and later the three of them walked down the hill to visit friends. While they walked, Balbina, unaware of what it was, absentmindedly shredded the paper; the scraps dropped from her hand and fell to the ground, leaving a trail like a line of leaf-cutter ants. Twenty dollars was a shocking amount of money and Balbina was scandalized. Later it became a great joke and the mention of it would make all three laugh uproariously.

We went to Orange Walk with Balbina a few weeks before Easter. Balbina was there to buy Easter dresses for Mirna and Teti, and we followed her into shops packed tight with children’s white dresses, bolts of red velvet, display cases overflowing with lace and ribbons. Balbina wore her leather shoes with the raised heels. She bartered fervently in her soft Spanish. Shelly and I had never had new clothes for Easter before, but our mother let us pick out matching dresses with short, tightly pleated skirts and lace on the bodices. In another store we got new earrings, gold hoops with three gold beads. Later, the gold paint wore away and the beads turned the milky white of sugar candy that’s been sucked on.

Outside, the sun was very bright. Along the sides of the wide, dirty street people hawked tamales and shaved ice from colored carts. My mother bought an orange, cut in half and sprinkled with salt. On one corner an old woman without teeth sat by a pile of oranges, which she peeled on a dented, treadle-worked machine. A stake skewered the orange and a blade peeled it concentrically; the bright rind snaked to the ground.

That evening we went to a circus. Around us crowded women with children on their hips and men who smelled of cane smoke. Two clowns came out from behind the striped curtain with an antique camera, and a trained donkey answered questions from the audience by pawing the ground with his hoof. A woman in a short skirt twirled eleven hula hoops at once, on different parts of her body.

The finale began with a small box in the center of the makeshift stage. The lights dimmed and the audience grew quiet. Then a spotlight shone on a human hand, rising out of the box. It was a small hand, pinkish brown. Another hand followed, then a head, and then a whole girl appeared, swelling out of the glass box like an expanding sponge. She wore a blue leotard and her hair was pulled back in a tight braid tied with a blue ribbon. She stood without smiling, then made a low bow that became a somersault and then a series of rippling rolls. Next she stretched on her stomach on the spangled cloth and slowly lifted her feet and legs, until she was curled in a circle, holding her ankles with her hands and staring out between her legs into the crowd. Shifting the weight to her feet, she rolled herself upright, still with that blank look, and turned her back to us. There was a rose I hadn’t noticed before at her heels.

She tilted her head back and began to bend, until she was staring at us upside down. I remember the way her black braid slithered down her blue leotard and down her legs and finally hit the floor. And I remember seeing her teeth appear, bright and unexpected, to bite the stem of the rose.

On Palm Sunday Shelly and I wore our new dresses to watch the procession of the Virgin around the village. The women wore flowered hats; the men’s white shirts shone in the sun. Shelly and I followed the crowd to church. The church was at the other end of the village, a long, whitewashed building with a wooden roof. Palm fronds and flowers lined the path to the door. Inside, the church was hushed and cool, lit by the high windows and the candles on the floor where Jesus Christ lay, nailed to the cross. His wooden body was gruesomely pale, except where blood darkened his wounds. Shelly and I waited in the doorway, holding hands. We watched Balbina, and then we approached together and placed our sweaty coins in the collection tray, and bent to kiss his cold feet.

My mother had been working in the cane fields for about a month when she turned yellow. This was just after the dead man turned up in the Rio Hondo; people teased her, saying he must have been a relative. Her arms were yellow, her legs, her belly, her face, even the whites of her eyes. She crawled into her hammock and stayed there. Shelly and I brought her bottles of fresh water. Balbina placed steaming bowls of chicken broth into our hands and we carried them carefully down the hill to our house. ‘It’s hepatitis,’ our mother told us. But though neither Shelly nor I said a word, we were thinking the same thing: She had turned the color of the only dead person we’d ever seen.

Eventually, my grandmother in New York found out that my mother was sick. There were no telephones in San Antonio and no real way to reach someone in an emergency. My grandmother got on a plane, flew to Miami, changed to another plane. She flew into Belize back when the landing strip for an international flight was a clearing in the jungle. The airport was a two-room building where customs officers in khaki uniforms opened her bags and poked through them, then nodded. My grandmother rode in the back of an army truck over bumpy dirt roads, past trees hung with vines. She arrived at San Antonio in one of the cane trucks and took the ferry across the river. A group of people stood at the ferry dock, waiting to cross, and my grandmother accosted them. ‘I’m looking for my daughter, Jennifer. Where is Jennifer?’ They smiled back at her. ‘Ah, su hija! Yeni!’ They pointed up the Rio Hondo. ‘She’s out swimming in the river.’

Nostalgia is a funny thing. I remember vividly the very air of San Antonio, the warm, sweet, almost rotten smell of the river and the jungle, the feel of green clay between my fingers. I remember the taste of ripe guava and the taste of guava not quite ripe but eaten anyway. I remember all the words to ‘Springtime in the Rockies,’ a sentimental song our friend Lohinos played, the light of the kerosene lantern shining on his polished guitar. Everything from the language to the air was new to me, and so I noticed everything, without knowing I noticed it. I learned to see the way I learned Spanish, unaware, and it was in Belize that I learned it.

Now, twenty-two years later, I travel when I can, looking for amazement, for a girl in a blue leotard who seems to have no bones, for plants that wilt at the touch of a finger and then come back to life. Those months in Belize were among the most vivid in my life and I remember them with an ache of longing. But at the time it was a world too raw, too strong for me. And when my mother announced the following year that we were returning to San Antonio, I shook my eight-year-old head and refused to go.

Paola Bilbrough

Canvastown

That spring we lived in Canvastown there were mushrooms the size of dinner plates in the fields, frayed at the gills with lice.

My mother wore a feather in her hair, naked in profile, always painting.

My father, stringy ponytail, pink shirt, threw pots in a cow shed.

I wanted to be the neighbour’s child.

She, fat and breathless, would seat me on top of their enormous freezer, a mortuary of animal carcasses, feed me bright yellow pickle, doughy bread.

The odour of basset hounds, mutton gristle and hot vinyl.

She created nothing, sat indoors eating melted cheese from a dented frying pan.

Furrows on her husband’s brow plowed deep, skin red as raw beef.

He could listen with the trees, make a willow stick dance to the song of an underground stream.

The flick of my mother’s brush on canvas, buzz of mason bees building clay houses, the dull roar of my father’s kiln.

Across the road, the weaver at his loom, weaving a poltergeist’s footfalls into a vermilion carpet.

Sound gradually drinking in all its listeners.

The fat woman and I didn’t listen.

She was bored with the water diviner.

Resplendent in a green chenille housecoat, she turned afternoon into evening by watching
Bewitched
on TV.

I liked to lie in her overgrown garden, watch crab apples pull malevolent faces from the tree, poke out their wormy tongues at passersby.

Appetites

Sara said her father had been a thief; she remembered other people’s fruit lighting up the bushes, oranges like planets, old sweet apples falling into her father’s flour-bag shirt. She ate nasturtiums, waxy honey. Sugar was forbidden.

Dan would gut Sunday loaves, the colour and texture of kapok. After school, mouth stained green; jelly crystals straight from the packet. Every night chocolate pudding thick and dark as estuary mud flats.

He had a milk run, drank from scratched glass bottles, cream coating his throat when he swallowed.

Sara was allowed goat’s milk, thistle milk, any milk but cow’s. That’s what separated them, she said, his complacent suburban appetites.

She thought of milk from the top of the bottle as she fingered the satin skin of his inside wrist.

Kanji

My father and I slept in a Japanese car case, kanji printed on the wall in place of family portraits.

Nights I lay awake, the black characters assumed flesh.

Clothes rustling as they changed posture.

Every morning a walk through macrocarpa to a household of stained armrests, chapatis and chipped enamel mugs.

Only chopsticks lay in our drawers, Hand-whittled and oiled.

In spring we made elderflower lemonade, white star flowers fizzing to the surface.

The elderflower a witch among trees, its character more disturbing than the kanji on our walls.

A tree whose shadow could make the mind curdle like milk.

In summer, cherry wine: each of us scrubbed calloused heels, crushed fruit in the belly of the bath, feet beating out a warlike rhythm.

A dense, sweet, almost rotten smell. Legs covered with red-black juice, the blood of summer.

Membrane 1

I was a festival child.

Cherry picking season we endured unwashed hair, scant meals.

My father was a puppeteer,

I remember sunken eyes, bruised cheeks, empty glove bodies.

In the front row of Punch and Judy

I held a stranger’s baby, its heartbeat filling the whole head.

The fontanel before the bones knit: a frog’s throat as it swallows.

Dancers knotted up baling twine hair. Rain.

And mud warm between the toes.

Seven-year-old skin gossamer between myself and the world.

In Dublin, your mother cooked Sunday roast, her stretch-suit vivid hydrangea pink.

Your father argued about the Pope over tea. All I knew of Ireland was our plow horse, Connemara.

Membrane 2

Rain, pale Irish skin, the band screaming

‘Insane in the membrane…’

You call me ‘Homegirl’ America spread over you like fake tan.

I want to take your head, smooth it off with impatient thumb.

Later, the sheet curls from a stained mattress. Your bones move apart sounding of a forest.

Trying to sleep in a fluorescent-lit garage, each of us consumed by separate pasts.

Tepee

I wore only a tight necklace, shoes the colour of a rabbit’s inside ear, buttoned over instep.

Sometimes a painted apron with flowers unfurling, spark-eyed heads in profile.

I carried my father’s offerings: pallid, hasty omelets my mother would not touch,

lemon and mint she drank in noisy gulps, painting in the midday sun.

Clay-smudged,

I sat in a manuka tepee.

Voices in my skull, boats bobbing on a river.

When my father left, we made gingerbread people, molasses-dark and crumbling, ate them slowly; an arm or leg, week by week.

I wore my shoes to bed, fell asleep to the noise of hens roosting in the pear tree.

I dreamt my mother was a statue, that I followed her to all the world’s cities, watched her in
piazzas
,

pigeons pecking grain from her naked shoulders.

Nearby, an old violinist whose music I couldn’t hear.