American Chica

by Marie Arana

  Hours after I went to bed, I awoke to the sounds of Mother moving from door to door, securing the latches from the inside. Thwock. Thwock. Thwock. I figured Papi had come home, and so I pulled up my alpaca blanket and nuzzled into its warmth. In truth, at that very moment, he was riding into the station. The Erie-Lackawanna’s last train chugged in from Hoboken, disgorged him and a few stragglers, then hissed off into the black.

  It was still dark when I reawoke to a howl that sounded as if it were rising from a vault under my floorboards. Bah-eeeee! High and urgent, like the wail of a snared animal. Or a loco on the far side of loose.

  I shot out of bed and ran to my window. The back-porch light was on, and a yellow bulb threw its lemon glow over the snow. Out where the apple trees marked the frontiers of our garden, out by the hand-wringers of Fair Oaks, there was no trace of a footprint. If a loco were under my room, he had flown there. I peered at the big brown house on my left: No sign of movement there. Then I checked the one on the other side: pitch dark.

  Whonk! Whonk! Two loud bangs shook my room and shivered out along the walls of the corridor. I grabbed the sides of my window frame. Was an earthquake shaking the bedrock of New Jersey? I strained to see over the peaked gable, but it blocked my view of the porch. Nothing trembled. Nothing stirred. There was only a terrible silence, and a sulfurous light, like the gleam of a feral eye.

  Suddenly, something gray bobbed out from under the gable and pulled in again. It was fast, small, quiet, like the hindquarter of an animal. I hiked myself up to get a better angle, but the overhang prevented me from seeing more. All I could make out were three porch steps, the packed snow on the driveway, the round white shoulder where the laboratory lamb heart lay, and the still of the garden beyond.

  Then came a sight that will never leave me. The gray object slid out from under the gable again. All at once, I was looking down at my father, moving in the dreamy glissade of a dancer, as if I were watching from the rafters of a stage. His feet were skating on ice, and the calves of his gray wool pants legs were sliding out from under him. Back and forth, back and forth, struggling for purchase on that one treacherous step. His head hovered beneath me: a dark crest, black as a winter’s crow.

  It was a simple thing. Over soon. He must have grabbed hold of something, for I no longer saw him. There was a long pause, and then the whack of fists against the door.

  “Hoh-nee!” he bellowed. His voice reverberated through my toes, up my legs, and into my gut. “Oh-pen the door!” He took hold of the knob, pulled at it, and shook the door so that the tiny panes of glass rattled in their frames.

  “Hoh-nee bay-bee!” he yelled, and then staggered back to give me a bird’s-eye perspective on his head.

  I looked out beyond him, into the night. One by one, lights were going on in our neighbors’ houses. I imagined their faces at the windows, talking over their shoulders. No dear, it’s fine, nothing serious. Only the alien next door.

  HE WENT OFF to Peru after that. It was to be a single trip, a field visit to Paramonga, just like the visits the New York gringos made when we lived in that hacienda, putting up at the guest house for months at a time. He left in February and said he’d be back in early April, when buds were jutting from trees. Mother seemed to carry on fine without him. There was little the woman couldn’t do. She shoveled the driveway, drove me to play rehearsals, stayed long into the night reading with Vicki. She was reveling in freedom now, as if she didn’t need a man.

  As for us children, we were Americans now. We hardly thought of our pasts; we hardly spoke Spanish. As the months went by, I shucked Peru entirely, referring to it only when I thought it would give me a moment’s advantage, a teacher’s attention. When Papi returned, I wished he wouldn’t speak Spanish to me in front of the neighbors; I hoped he wouldn’t reveal to my friends that I was a faker; I prayed he wouldn’t show up on our door stoop high.

  But he went off more and more after that. It began with two months, and then, before we knew it, it was six. By the time summer warmed our apple trees to life again, Papi was off on a long-term engineering project somewhere in Colombia. Then it was eight months in Mexico. He would leave Mother presigned checks so that she could handle the family finances; he would sign off complete power of attorney. By the time my own frame pushed forth cautious blossoms, he was gone nine months at a time, returning only long enough to gasp at us as we mutated into other forms of life.

  George had shot up well past him: a confident, lanky boy. Vicki had chewed through whole libraries, feeding her polymathic brain. Marisi had become Marie, a molting I first saw in a mirror on the sixth floor of the Carnegie Hall building, where my body had metamorphosed under the spandex of leotards. I was twelve years old, taking ballet classes in New York two afternoons every week now, catching the bus to Port Authority at Forty-second Street, or taking a train to Grand Central, skipping through midtown past the Biltmore Hotel, navigating my way to Carnegie Hall. “There’s nothing you can’t do, Mareezie,” Mother would tell me. “Decide what you want, don’t be afraid, go after it. There is nothing you cannot do.”

  When Mother’s car wended its way down Tulip Street to pick me up after school one day, I looked across the playground and saw a black head of hair sitting where she should be. Could it be? My father had not been home in almost a year. I ran to the fence to be sure. He got out of the car and stood by the gringos, searching for his offspring in the crowded field. His eyes swept past me three times before I leapt up and screamed out, “Papi! Papi! Aquí!”

  “You’ve changed,” he said to me, laughing. “I hardly know you anymore,” and then he handed me a fuzzy white llama toy, stuffed and smiling, with a spangle around its neck.

  Mornings would come and I would wake to the sound of my parents’ voices, chatting on the other side of my wall. They were scrolling through lives each was living, sharing events after the fact. He had his subjects. She had hers.

  “Papi,” I said to him, during one of his longer visits, “I’m writing a report on the Andes, for my seventh-grade social studies class.”

  “On the Andes? Why?” He looked up from the living room sofa and lowered The New York Times.

  “Because.” I stopped there, stymied. His face was awaiting my answer, open in genuine surprise. “Because I’m Peruana, Papi,” I said.

  “You?” he said. “A Peruvian?” And then he laughed, shaking his head, long and hard. “No, Marisi. You’re a gringa, like your mother. You’re not a Peruvian anymore.”

  I went off and thought about that, my heart a little smaller for his words. Had Peru fallen out of me? Like a leaf in a winter wind?

  What of my language, my patrimony, the power of my qosqo? Was that gone, too? I looked down at the copper money winking out from my loafers. I loved my mother’s country, pledged it allegiance every day, dreamed its golden dreams, bought its daily lotteries of the soul. But I was sure that somewhere inside me I was also Peruvian.

  It was Lucilla who reminded me of that.

  Lucilla was black as Antonio’s stone, a cocky, junior-high-school girl who chose her friends by the color of their skin. She was sassy, funny, filled with dislike for much about Summit, and part of that much was me.

  “Hurry up, girl!” she’d yell as we scooted from one class to another, and then she’d give me a kick in the can.

  “Git! Git! Can’t be late!” And then—foomp!—her pointy shoe would connect with my tail.

  It had started in gym class, where the lineup put her behind me. She was ahead of me in one significant way: superior in every sinew of her body. If I could pound out a hundred sit-ups, she could pound out a hundred fifty-five. One day—who knew why?—she decided to stick her foot into my life. She tripped me on the playing fields, kicked me down corridors, slapped a boot up against the door of my bathroom stall and kept me there until the bell rang, until I begged her for mercy. Then Lucilla and her girls would holler and slap their knees as I flitted, panicked, down the hall.

  Once, when she was st
anding alone on the hockey field, away from her gang of girls, I decided to risk the question. “Lucilla,” I said, “why do you want to get me in trouble?”

  “You’re already there, girl,” she said, and bugged her eyes.

  “What?”

  “You a wiggle-butt wetback,” she added. “You nothing but trouble. You oughta go back where you belong.”

  There it was. Lucilla’s proof. The Truth, whether or not my father could factor it. His children had not gone from any first thing to a second. We were the “neither-here-nor-there people”: one thing when here, the other when there. Or forever from some other place. We were neither; we were both.

  Funny that it was a black who reminded me of that. I’ve often thought of Lucilla as I sit in my corner of Washington now, seeing how this country has changed since I was a girl. There were days I felt George, Vicki, and I were the only Latinos in the United States; I certainly did not see any others around. I knew we were the only ones in the Summit school system. But I’ve returned to Summit often over the years and watched its subtle transformations. Today, you cannot walk down a main street in New Jersey and not hear Spanish, or pass a Latin grocery, or see a Latino face. The last time I checked, there was a child with my surname—no relation—in the corridors of Summit High School. There are thousands of families with Spanish surnames in the American capital. There are nearly forty million of us in your country now, Lucilla. We belong here. Just like you.

  BY THE TIME I settled into junior high school, my parents had bought into North American soil for good. We never imagined they wouldn’t stay together. They cared for each other deeply, that much was written on their faces every time Papi walked through the front door and they saw each other for the first time. She would wait for him nervously, running upstairs to fix her makeup, spraying perfume under her blouse. Somehow, as years went by, the separations became the norm for us. We learned to live without our father; we were happy to see him when he came back, happy to be handed so many presents, and then, as he grew restless to return to Lima, we were happy to see him go.

  We moved from the rental on Tulip Street to ownership on Parkview Terrace. The new house was crawling with vines. Creepers sprang from the flower beds, working their way up brick. The sun would vault the sky, and Mother would still be outside, hacking back foliage, digging into the loam. I would sit and watch her work silently, wondering why she wouldn’t talk to me about herself. Why was she so unwilling to tell me the details of her childhood, pour out her stories to me as Antonio the gardener had done? I marveled that I had watched Antonio’s hands do the same labor. My mother’s violinist fingers were just as strong.

  Antonio: I remembered every historia he’d taught me, but the man seemed like ancient history now. “What were those belly button stories you used to tell?” my mother would ask me. I’d shrug my shoulders and grin. My qosqo was powerless now. Unplugged. Deactivated. Dead.

  I laughed when I recalled the bruja’s prophesy. A vine was to mount my house and grab me by the throat? It seemed so foolish now in my Episcopalian maturity, in my confirmed membership in the Calvary Church. Mother’s faith had won my soul. No talk about black light, no sorcery from a crone in braids could bobble my God or the machinery of an observable world.

  Trees did not mourn. Skies did not weep. Vines did not leap through your window in revenge.

  “WHY DO YOUR mother and father live apart?” asked Kit one day. “Are they divorced?” She was polite when she said it, quaint and Victorian, as she tended to be.

  “No. They’re not divorced,” I said. “My father lives in Peru, my mother lives in the United States, that’s all. He lives there because he works there. She lives here because we go to school here.” It made all the sense in the world to me.

  “Oh,” said Kit, and ended it there. Her father was a scientist; her mother, a viola player. They were functional versions of my parents, but they lived in one house, spoke one language, visited their in-laws within one hundred miles of one another, stared at each other’s faces every day.

  “Why do your mother and father live apart?” A German girl who lived behind our new house asked the same question on another day.

  I gave her the same answer. “Oh,” she said, but her reaction was more interesting than Kit’s. “That makes things better, doesn’t it? That way you have two homes, not one. Two languages. Two totally different lives.” Her name was Erika, and she’d been born in Frankfurt during the Allied Occupation. Her mother had been a dancer; her father, a British military man. Erika had never seen her father except in a photograph album. He was in England somewhere, alive. On paper, he seemed a stiff man, oddly handsome, with Erika’s blond locks and her dimple in his chin. He’d been posted to Germany to help piece the country together, but he’d clearly left chaos behind. Unanswered questions hovered over Erika. Questions about names, marriages, nationalities. Her mother had left Germany to escape them. We had our alien origins in common, but there was something else, too, about our mothers, about their burdens from the past.

  “Heil Hitler!” the boys would shout as we strolled down to Memorial Field arm in arm.

  “Hey, cut it out!” I’d call back over my shoulder. “I’m not German!”

  “Remember the Alamo, then!”

  They’d yuk about that, pumping their shoulders like vultures.

  It was the idea of Erika’s two-ness that attracted me. Half German, half English. She was an exotic in the suburban landscape, an indisputably eccentric girl. The idiom we shared was ballet. There was not much else we had in common. She was plump, whereas I had grown scrawny. She was honey, where I was mahogany. Her mother made pastries and sewed fancy dresses, whereas mine knew only the rudiments of housekeeping. I sat in her family room watching Adolf Eichmann on trial, hearing her mother spit German in his face. I looked at the stacks of magazines with inexplicable photographs of mass graves, my friend’s fingers dancing across pages, pointing out heart-stopping details. I played piano when she and her mother asked me, Beethoven after Mozart after Brahms, until they leaned back and stared at the ceiling like dolls.

  Erika’s mother, Minna, had been rounded up during the war and made to work in a Frankfurt munitions plant. That bit of information sprang from her lips one day as she taught me to make sauerbraten. It wasn’t clear—she couldn’t say—why the Nazis had singled her out on the street and marched her to the machines. (Was she Jewish, like the dead in the photographs? She was dark-haired, dark-eyed, nothing like Erika. But she wore crosses and kept a rosary in her purse.) As bombers climbed the air from the runways of Germany, she polished steel instruments, dancing away nights in a cabaret on the lively side of town.

  Unbidden admissions would spring from her as we sat, heads down, rolling dough or pinning a pattern onto cloth. These were things she did not tell her own daughter, but she would blurt them to me, unpacking the burdens of her heart, as if I were a priest in a confessional.

  Erika would be somewhere else, belting a song into a mirror or shimmying to some idiocy in the box, and Minna would pour her history into my twelve-year-old ears, doing what I longed for my mother to do. There was much about our families that was different: They had a television, whereas my parents most intentionally did not. They were willfully frivolous—in dress, entertainments, and dreams—whereas my family most assuredly was not. There was a Pentecostalist stepfather, Minna’s husband: a rangy, red-haired American who had taken in the immigrants the way a vestryman takes up a cause. He came and went, consuming his meals in silence, hardly denting a pillow, hardly touching their lives. Going to visit Erika and Minna was like flying into foreign territory. There was always something new there: When I studied my hands like a gringo, another secret would come my way.

  Minna had spent a lifetime pulling her mother’s head out of an oven. It had started when she was a girl of six. One gray winter weekend, as we puttered about her sewing room, she received a telephone call from Frankfurt: The mother was at it again.

  That was har
dly the half of it. If Minna knew who her father was, she never said so. Her world was staunchly female, and the males—even the fathers and husbands—in it incidental. They were largely incomprehensible, sometimes irresistible, but ultimately expendable. In Minna’s life story, they came and went like brisk winds.

  During the war, she had lived in a Bohemian quarter of Frankfurt. Prostitutes lived in the apartments above. Night after night, she could hear the clump of Nazi boots as officers made their bibulous way upstairs to savor the retail charms. They were twisted, those Nazis, perpetrators of the unnatural, forcing the women to treat them like animals, roaring their pleasure through walls. One day, as I carefully pinned a facing to a perfectly round collar, she told me about one of them—one of Hitler’s generals, no less—who demanded to be served his hostess’s feces in Dresden porcelain, with her urine in crystal on the side. How Minna had extracted that information from the upstairs neighbor, it did not occur to me to ask.

  I staggered from those confessions into the glare of a suburban landscape, hopping the fence, into my tidy brick house. “Mareezie?” my mother called as I came in the back door. “Did you finish your sewing?” When she noted my pale face slipping past to my room, her voice would rise in alarm: “What goes on in that house anyway?”

  I was afraid to tell Minna’s stories, just as I’d been afraid to tell about Antonio’s spirit world. These were tales of dark forces, best kept to myself. Minna was of another dimension, from another side, a bruja who spoke terrible truths. If I relayed her words to my mother, she would surely be swept from my life.