American Chica

by Marie Arana

  We trudged up the gray dirt, staring down at our feet, scouring the trail for evidence of a benevolent apu. The mountain was barren, a sullen hump of dust and stone. A futile walk, I thought. No trophies here, no tooth or bone. But I was wrong.

  “Look over there!” George sang. “A skull!” He clambered after it, grinding stones as he tore up the steep incline. I swiveled around to see if I could spot a skull of my own. In the distance, I saw a glint of white. I decided to cut my own path after it.

  I shinnied up the bald scarp with nothing to hold on to, no frazzled bush, no craggy rock. The ground was dry, and as I ascended, cascades of tiny stones crunched under my shoes and spilled behind. Dust puffed, circled my head, invaded my nostrils. I could taste grit on my tongue.

  We didn’t need to go far to find what we were looking for: a finger bone here, a link of spine there. I grabbed a protrusion as I passed, pulled out a jaw, wrenched out its teeth, and stuffed them into the pockets of my new yellow dress. “George! Three teeth!” I boomed. Dientes! Then I saw how high I’d come.

  George was so far away he seemed to be on another mountain. He was small as a bluebottle, spindly black. He did not hear me call out.

  He was almost at the top of his ridge. If I could just scrabble a little higher, I would reach mine first, peer over Olympus to the other side. I grew dizzy with the height, the dust, the sun at the back of my head, but I finally came to within feet of the crest. I turned to check George, could not find him, then scaled ahead, anxious to see.

  I mounted the peak and looked over. No more than twenty feet away, rising out of the earth, was a white plaster Virgin, her hands spread out in welcome, a grave at her feet. There was a hole in her chest, and inside that, a heart pulsing blue. I staggered. Black stones shifted under me. One foot slid out. I pulled it back.

  I turned to where La Granja Azul lay, as neat and as tidy as the scene in my father’s garage. I could see the garden, I could see tables, but I couldn’t see my parents. I leaned out to find them. Then the world started to spin.

  I was falling. Tossed from that summit like a boned cat, I slid, bounced, plummeted, flipped onto my head, and skipped down the slope, skull against skulls, spraying bone into air. Halfway down, I landed on a ledge, flapping my arms helplessly, desperately scanning the garden below. My parents stood by their table, looking up at me, rigid as statues. But my footing was not firm, and, as I reeled again, I saw my mother’s face for a fleeting instant. She turned her back and her gold head whirled from view.

  There is little I recall after that. I know that Cito bounded up to lift my body out. I know Georgie screamed that it wasn’t his fault. I know my father sped into Lima, swinging around to look at me again and again with tears sliding out of his eyes. I know my mother was bending over me when the anodyne lifted. “Look what you’ve done, Marisi,” she said. “You’ve gone and ruined your dress.”

  I blinked and came to. I was in what looked to be a hospital room, wrapped like a mummy, skin tingling. I reached up to touch my head. It was clean as a cue ball, a swatch of gauze on top. My mother held up a scrap of yellow dress. It was shredded, brown with blood. “Look what you did,” she said.

  “The apu,” I said, my tongue thick with narcotic. “And the Virgin Mary.”

  She tilted her head and focused her eyes on mine. “What do you mean?”

  “George and I were hunting for teeth and bones. That’s why the apu got angry. He made me fall.” My legs ached; my head was throbbing.

  Mother smiled and dropped the dress on the gurney. “So. Good. The doctor said you might have had a concussion, but I can see you’re all there. If you’re talking about George and bones and apus, you’re the child I remember. Your noggin’s working fine.”

  She paused, put one hand on my shoulder, and looked into my face earnestly. Even now, almost four decades later, I remember her words. She would repeat them again and again later: “Look, Marisi. That was no ghost. No evil spirit of the mountain. It was God: God did it. And, while we’re on the subject, there’s nothing wrong with your hunting for bones. Don’t misunderstand me, I don’t like it one bit. But there’s a difference between my not liking what you do and what you do being wrong. It’s what we creatures do, go digging in the dirt. What we’ve always done. We do it because we’re part of it. You, me, your father, the doctor who put bandages on you, the birds in the trees, this hank of yellow dress. We’ve all come from a mountain, one way or another, and it’s back to a mountain we’ll go.”

  She paused a bit to let it sink in. “The mountain didn’t do this to you, honey. The indios might tell you that, but it’s not true. They say the duendes this, the pishtacos that. Listen to me: You fell because it was the will of God. Sometimes God knocks us back a bit to remind us we’re not as big and mighty as we think.”

  I studied her face. “Señor Gonzalez said the apus would be mad if we dug up the dead. And Grandpa Doc said there were injuns on Elk Mountain who believed the same thing.”

  “Well, sometimes people say that for very good reasons. ‘Don’t touch the bones,’ they say, ‘or spirits will punish you.’ The truth is that if I died, and you saw someone picking the teeth out of my head, you probably wouldn’t like it very much. So we say, No, don’t do that. And to make people really pay attention, we make threats. Shout it.”

  “Is that what you and Papi do?”

  “Why?”

  “Because you shout at each other all the time.”

  She looked at me hard. Then she bent down and kissed my forehead.

  “I shout because something is bugging me. I’m not sure what. Your father drinks because he thinks it’s macho. He’s actually a very good man. We have trouble understanding each other sometimes, Mareezie. We’re different people, with different heads.”

  “But you just said you’re from the same mountain, and to the same mountain you’ll go.”

  “Yes.” And then she tipped back her head and laughed, her eyes like periwinkle petals. “That is true, my precious angel. We are. And we will.”

  Much after my fall, thirty years to the month to be exact, a gringo archaeologist dug an Inca princess out of the Nevado Ampato, a snowy peak twenty thousand feet high and one hundred thirty miles south of Cusco. The mummy was five hundred years old, but the girl had been no more than twelve when her family had carried her up and offered her to the mountain apu. She had long black hair, according to the man who found her, a ballerina’s neck, a sun-dried brain. They found the frozen remains of a chicken lunch and chicha in her stomach. She was wearing a yellow aksu.

  Juanita the Ice Maiden, they called her. Her flesh was freeze-dried to her bones. The gringo archaeologist brought her down, thawed her out, and one day she showed up under glass in Washington, D.C. Surely this would provoke the gods.

  But nothing happened. The sun rose, the sun fell, moons came and went, and no retribution occurred. If ghosts were at work, they were taking their time. If God was at work, His mill hadn’t finished the job. The girl was feeding museum revenues, not buds on the slope. God and the duendes were playing a game. Something had changed the course.

  Lying in that hospital bed, looking at the ceiling, I understood my fall exactly in that way. Something had interfered; something had changed the course: The apu had caught sight of my mother probably at the very instant she had given me up for dead. I had flapped my arms like a rag doll; she had turned her back. But it was that very motion, her whirling around, that had stopped the apu cold.

  He saw her hair spin out like a pinwheel. Presented with that evidence, he realized I was not some ordinary child whose sacrifice would have no consequence. I was special; I had power. He could see that from the light that radiated from my mother like a cloudless morning. Inca gods had always found the color of the sun irresistible, as yellow-haired Pizarro came to know so well. If, between God and the apu, I had been rolling toward some serious blood payment, Mother’s gold had just bought me time.

  LIES. I WAS getting very good at them. M
aking up stories to explain what I couldn’t possibly know. Inventing excuses for my troubles in life. There is, after all, something indescribably rewarding in telling a good lie. You create your own truth. It is the essence of power. You do what you can.

  I went back to school after a week’s convalescence, attending Nutcracker rehearsals with black stitches sprouting from my pate. “Maybe you can do something other than dance,” said the English ballet mistress, eyeing my head with dismay. “Maybe you can play the piano?”

  “I want to dance,” I said adamantly. “I want to be onstage. I want to wear my costume.”

  “Then you shall,” she said, and patted me on the head. “Fine.”

  “You can play the piano?” said a ball of a girl, her face filled with admiration. Tocas?

  “Yes,” I said grandly. “Call me and I’ll play for you over the phone.”

  When she called that night, I was ready. “Hola, Cristina. I’m walking over to the piano now. I’m sitting down on the bench. I’m adjusting the sheet music. Chopin. Valse, opus 64. I’m flexing my fingers. Ready?”

  “Ready,” she squealed.

  A record spun on our turntable. I lowered the arm. Arthur Rubenstein began to play.

  “Hear me?” I said.

  A brief silence in the receiver, and then her amazement gushed through the wire. “You can talk and play at the same time?”

  “Sure. The teléfono is tucked in my shoulder. I do this all the time for my cousins in America.”

  “Caramba, Marisi. I had no idea you were so good.”

  I turned the dial up slightly, made the music più mosso. And then I lifted the arm off the album. “There, I can’t play for long,” I said. “My injuries, you know.”

  Lies. I was so good at them. More to the point, I loved them so. Why not? If I could slip from English to Spanish, from boys to ballet, from pledging American allegiance to swearing on life I was a Peruvian, from church to church, from Campbell to Clapp—why not from role to role, truth to truth? Lies. Thank you, God. You gave me a skill.

  “My mother is pregnant,” I told Señora Arellano’s class. Espera bebe. Margarita had just announced that her mother was expecting, and the teacher was making happy cooing noises in her direction.

  “Really?” Señora Arellano’s sweet face turned to me and she leaned a large bosom into her desk. “Qué maravilla. We’re expecting not just one baby in this class. But two.”

  The next Saturday morning, Margarita banged her skinny little fist against our door and my father answered.

  “Buenos días, señor,” she said, her eyes big as Ping-Pong balls. “Is the señora having a baby?”

  “Buenos días, Margarita. Who told you that?”

  “Marisi. She told us in school the other day. She said so in class.”

  “Well, then, Marisi did not tell you the truth.”

  “She lied?”

  “If that’s what she said, she lied.”

  After a stern lecture, Papi took me outside, called our friends over, and denounced me right there in our lot. “Listen, all of you. Marisi’s mother is not having a baby, and I’ll thank you to say so in school. When Marisi tells you something in the future, I want you to be skeptical. Tell her she can’t be trusted. Tell her you’re aware of her reputation. She needs to learn that lying doesn’t pay.”

  I became the leper of Avenida Angamos. At first I was furious with Papi, but with the passing of every day I cared less. “See my sister?” Vicki announced to her friends in the school playground. “She lies. Don’t you, Marisi? Isn’t it so?”

  “Yip,” I said, and giggled inside, imagining I’d just told a lie. But no one else was laughing.

  “That over there is not our only house,” I whispered to the ambassador’s son, standing under his fuchsia gateway and pointing down the street. “We have houses all over the world. One in Cartavio, one in the United States of America, one in a little village in Switzerland. With swans. We just don’t like to show off.”

  “Liar!” he screamed, and slammed the door.

  “Marisita,” my abuelita said, “what part are you dancing in The Nutcracker? I’m coming to see it, you know.”

  “The star,” I said recklessly. “Clara.” She’d bustle into the Teatro Municipal with red roses and a fancy box of chocolates and learn the truth soon enough.

  I didn’t see Abuelita as often as I wanted to. She and Mother were hardly on speaking terms, and Mother no longer attended family gatherings. After my grandfather had descended the staircase to pose his question about whether or not he was despicable, Abuelita had decided the gringa’s presence was too hard on his nerves. But one day, after we’d been in the Lima house for almost two years, Abuelita showed up for George’s birthday.

  She appeared in a belted navy blue dress, a single strand of pearls around her neck. Her shoes were pointed and high, her nails a deep claret. She walked in on a cloud of jasmine, handed Georgie her present, dropped into the chair closest to Mother, slipped her dark glasses into her purse, and squeezed the clasp shut with an annunciatory snap.

  “You know,” she said in a low voice to Mother, “a woman I know got into a brawl with her husband. He’d been out having drinks with his friends. (Men are like that, Marie. Especially if they have sangre ligera. Especially if they’re people of a certain class, accustomed to light hearts and a certain gregariousness. Even Alexander the Great got a little borracho between the wars.) Well, the woman was unreasonably angry, frustrated with her marriage, fed up hasta aquí. So she threw a plate across the room. You know what happened? It hit him in the head. The next thing she knew, her husband was dead.” Abuelita opened her purse and rummaged around in it. “All because of a few nips,” she added. Unas copitas.

  My mother watched the older woman draw out a handkerchief, unfold it, shake it into the air like a frail wing, refold it, and set it on her lap.

  “That will not happen to your son,” Mother assured her. “I might throw a dish at a wall if he makes me angry, I might leave him, I might take the children and run away, I might do a million things. But I am not a stupid woman, Rosa. I will not kill him.”

  My grandmother looked into her eyes for a very long time, sighed deeply, and shook her head up and down, indicating that she believed her.

  Less than a week later—after I forced Margarita to snitch a can of ham from Sandra’s bomb shelter, after a skinny brown Santa Claus ran by sweating in the December heat, after Drosselmeyer tucked a nutcracker under his arm and went to a party, after the Mouse King was chased across stage at the Teatro Municipal, after I waltzed through the starring girl’s dreams in my blue petal costume—Mother proved that what she had told Abuelita was true.

  Her arsenal was not pointing at my father. It was pointed away.

  It happened like this: Papi stumbled in after an all-night bender with the hombres. Mother took her battle station by the Christmas tree, a flashing, revolving colossus of electrical wizardry he had fashioned from graduated Hula Hoops. At the very moment when porcelain might otherwise fly, she drew back and kicked the thing over. When the twenty-five hoops scattered their red and green across the floor—when the crash-bang clitterclatter had won his undivided attention—she set down her terms. “That’s it, Jorge. I’ve been in your country fourteen long years. No more. I’m going home.”

  10

  —

  INDEPENDENCE

  Sueños Norteños

  IT WASN’T UNTIL I’d been in the United States awhile that I understood how stifling Peru had been for my mother: a closed world, our mundo mesquino, which, as a Peruvian, I thrived in and loved. There were family rules I’d always understood instinctively: Mind tradition, go into business with siblings, give preferential treatment to relatives, stay in the neighborhood, call on your grandparents every Sunday for tea. Eccentrics were forgiven—sword fighters, recluses, extroverts, wayward sons with illegitimate children. But neglect was inexcusable. A wife was supposed to look up to her mother-in-law, seek advice about childr
en, plead for assistance if her man became unruly. Not mark her own turf, as my mother had done.

  Crossing to Mother’s side of America, on the other hand, we encountered no family at all. The Clapps, Brooks, Reeds, and Adamses were nowhere to be seen when we flew into Miami that spring of 1959. They were not alerted, and they were not there. They stayed in far corners of the country, unmindful of our existence. If I had arrived on these shores expecting warm ties to my northern relations, I’d soon discover how different family life could be. I would never set foot on Grandpa Doc’s land again. I would never set eyes on Mother’s sisters again. I would never meet the full complement of her siblings, never really know who the gringo half of my family were. We emigrated to America in quintessentially American fashion: declaring our independence, reshuffling the deck.

  Papi had yielded to Mother entirely. “The señora is making him do it,” I heard Nora say to the maid upstairs as the movers took our things from Avenida Angamos. Men were trooping to the curb with our furniture on their heads. The blond dining room table, the carved consoles, the portraits by Sir Joshua Reynolds copied by indigenous hands: All our worldly goods promenaded by for the United States ambassador, the next-door soldier, and the upstairs electrocutioner to see. Mother’s piano, an antique too delicate for sea voyage, was hauled to my grandparents’ house and wedged into the sala. All that was left of our material Peru was packed and wrapped and fitted into a wooden container, then nailed shut and ferried away.

  Tío Víctor and Tío Pedro came around to watch the enormous crate lurch away in a flat truck. They stood on the avenida, wrinkling their foreheads, rubbing their temples, chewing on cigarettes, wondering how Techo Rex would survive. “Don’t worry,” my father told them. “I’ll do what I can from there.” But there meant New York City. He had gone back to his bosses at W. R. Grace, taken a job in Manhattan. He’d be planning large-scale engineering projects for a number of Latin American countries, but he’d be sitting a hemisphere away.