I Am Not Your Perfect Mexican Daughter

by Erika L. Sánchez

  Angie looks up at the ceiling, as if she’s trying not to cry. I’ve done that a million times. I’m the master of keeping my tears inside my ducts.

  “I found some weird underwear and a hotel key,” I say. “The Continental.”

  Angie tightens her robe and looks down at her chipped pink toenails. “And?”

  “What do you mean, and? Call me crazy, but that’s pretty strange.”

  “Julia, you’re always exaggerating. I don’t know what you mean by ‘weird’ underwear.”

  “Weird as in ‘skanky.’ ” I’m starting to lose my patience. “And a hotel key? When did Olga ever go anywhere? Why would she have that?”

  “How would I know?” Angie rolls her eyes, which pisses me off.

  “Because you were her best friend, duh.”

  “You know, Julia, you’re always causing trouble, creating problems for your family. Now that she’s dead, all of a sudden you want to know everything about her? You hardly even spoke to her. Why didn’t you ask her anything when she was alive? Maybe you wouldn’t have to be here, asking me questions about her love life.”

  “Love life? So you’re telling me she was dating someone?”

  “No, that’s not what I’m saying. You’re putting words in my mouth.”

  “But you just said—”

  “Julia, you need to get going. I have things to do.” Angie gets up and opens the door.

  If I weren’t so dark, my face would be a dazzling red. It feels as if someone dumped a bucket of boiling water over my head. Angie doesn’t understand how hard it’s been for me to speak to anyone in my family. She hasn’t seen how the silence and tension have been smothering us for years. She doesn’t get that I feel like a three-headed alien in my own home. And why is Angie so defensive? Something isn’t right, but I don’t know what to say. What exactly should I demand? I just keep sitting in her grimy room, with the taste of chile lodged in my throat, while the guilt and anger spread through me like lava.

  “Okay, this is pointless,” I say. “Thank you so much, Angie. Thank you for being so nice and supportive.”

  “Julia, stop. Look, I’m sorry. This has been hard for me. I feel like I’m falling apart.” Angie puts her head in her hands.

  “You lost your best friend, but I lost my sister. You think I’m just some selfish, narcissistic kid, but my life fucking sucks right now. Every night I expect Olga to come home, and she doesn’t. I just stare at the door like a fool.”

  Angie doesn’t respond. As I leave her room, Doña Ramona comes rushing toward me, her slippers flap-flap-flapping on the linoleum. That has to be one of the most irritating noises I’ve ever heard.

  “Aren’t you going to eat, mija? Come, sit. I’m making sopes,” she insists.

  “No gracias, señora. I’m not hungry.”

  Her worn brown face crumples with worry. “What’s wrong, criatura? Are you crying?”

  “No, the chiles are burning my eyes,” I lie.

  FIVE

  After school, Lorena and I go to her house to do some Internet snooping, so I call Amá and tell her that I’ll be home late because we’re working on a project. At first, she says no, because she’s still mad about me ditching school, but when I explain to her that my (imaginary) group assignment is due tomorrow, she gives in. Amá doesn’t let me go anywhere unless I have a specific reason. If I tell her that I want to spend some time with a friend, she asks me what for and says she doesn’t want me in other people’s cocinas, which is stupid. First, I don’t understand why she thinks it’s so scandalous to be in other people’s kitchens. Second, most of the time we’re not even in the kitchen—we’re in the living room.

  Amá doesn’t have any friends and sees no point to having any. She says all a woman needs is her family. According to her, only orphans and whores run around in the streets by themselves. If Amá isn’t working, shopping for groceries, or cooking and cleaning at home, she’s usually with my aunts or her comadre, Juanita, who is also her cousin. Oh, and on Saturdays and Sundays, she’s at church. She hardly leaves our neighborhood. Her world seems small, in my opinion, but that’s how she wants it. Maybe it runs in the family, because Olga was like that, too, and Apá’s favorite place is our couch.

  Instead of trying to convince Amá that I need to go out and talk to people I’m not related to, I often make up homework assignments. Sometimes it works. Sometimes it doesn’t.

  Lorena dumps the hot chips we bought at the corner store into a big bowl and squeezes lime juice over them until they’re completely drenched. We eat them quickly, as if it’s some sort of race. Our fingers are stained red and our noses are runny by the time we’re finished. Even though I eat half a giant bag, I still want more. I ask Lorena if she has any more food, but she says no. My stomach grunts.

  I can only eat junk food in secret because it’s forbidden in our house. I guess it’s ironic that Apá works at a candy factory. Amá says Americans eat nothing but garbage, which is why everyone here is so fat and ugly. She has the perfect body and expects everyone to be as lucky as she is. She’s never taken us to McDonald’s, not even once, but no one ever believes me. Sometimes, when I walk home from school, I buy a dollar cheeseburger and eat it in three bites before I get to our door. That’s probably why I’ve been getting kind of porky. My boobs keep getting heavier and heavier, and sometimes hurt my back. Amá says there’s no need for burgers and fries when we have a pot of beans and packets of tortillas at home. Whenever I ask her if we can order pizza or Chinese food, she says I’m spoiled and tells me to make myself a quesadilla. Other times she pinches my stomach and walks away from me without saying anything.

  “So, what do you want to look for?” Lorena takes a pitcher of water from the fridge.

  “I’m not sure, to be honest. I haven’t told you, but I went through her things the other day.”

  “And?”

  “I found some underwear. Like, hooker underwear.”

  “What are you even talking about?” Lorena seems annoyed. She says I exaggerate everything.

  “They were scandalous. Thongs and this lingerie-type thing.”

  “Hello? I wear thongs, too.” Lorena rolls her eyes.

  “But this is Olga we’re talking about. She didn’t even swear. Amá would’ve snapped if she’d found them. She hates stuff like that. She doesn’t even like it when women wear shorts.”

  “So what if she wanted to feel sexy? She was a grown woman.”

  “Okay, well, how would you explain the hotel key I found?” I pull it out of my backpack. “This,” I say, and I throw it on the table.

  “I don’t know. Maybe she used it as a bookmark or something. Doesn’t Angie work at a hotel?”

  “Yeah, but not this one. Something’s not right, I’m telling you.”

  “I think you’re probably wasting your time.” Lorena walks to her room and brings me her laptop from her bedroom. It weighs about a hundred pounds. It was a hand-me-down from her cousin, and it’s old as hell.

  “What do you want to look for?”

  “I don’t know. Facebook, I guess, but I don’t know if Olga even used it. I’m telling you, she was an old lady trapped in a twenty-two-year-old’s body.”

  “You’re not on it, either.”

  “Yeah, because it’s stupid. People are boring enough in real life without having to see how boring they are online. Plus, I don’t have Internet, so what’s the point? I’m not about to go to the library to use it.”

  Lorena shakes her head and enters her password.

  I search for Olga’s name, but there are twelve Olga Reyeses. I click on each one, but none of them resemble my sister.

  “Maybe she used a different name?”

  “How would I know what name she used?”

  “I don’t know. Why don’t you look through Angie’s page and see if you can find her or go through her pictures or something?”

  We find Angie, but when we click on her profile, everything is private. All we see is the profile pi
cture of her and Olga when they were kids. The caption says, I miss you, friend.

  “Damn it, Angie’s useless.”

  “Do you know any other friends, like, from work or something?”

  “Not really. She used to have lunch with this girl sometimes. Denise, I think. But I don’t know her last name.” Defeated, I close the laptop.

  While Lorena fiddles with her phone and begins playing her horribly sexist rap songs, I walk over to the altar her mom has set up in the corner of the living room. I like to see the way it changes every time I come over. Lorena’s mom worships Santa Muerte, the scary skeleton saint, and if Amá knew about this, she’d never let me see Lorena again in my life. She already dislikes her mom because she thinks she wears way too much makeup and dresses like a teenager. I guess she’s right—Lorena’s mom’s eye shadow is heavy, and her eyeliner curls up from the corners of her eyes. She kind of looks like a homely Cleopatra. Most of the time, she wears skintight spandex dresses that make her body resemble a soft-serve ice cream cone. Not at all flattering.

  Lorena takes after her mom when it comes to makeup. She also dyes and highlights her hair, so it ends up a mixture of yellow, orange, and red. The colors remind me of flames, and when she wears her hair in a ponytail, she almost looks like a torch. She’s prettier with dark hair, but she doesn’t listen to me. She says I don’t know what the hell I’m talking about, that why should she listen to me when I dress like a homeless lesbian? She ignores me about her hazel contacts, too. Anyway, Lorena and her mom make questionable choices when it comes to their looks, and Amá always feels the need to point them out, as if I didn’t already notice. “That old lady shouldn’t be running around like a quinceañera. She has no shame,” Amá whispers to me. Although Lorena’s mother isn’t the best parent, and she looks lumpy and nuts, she’s always been nice to me, feeding me cookies or cake whenever I see her. A few days after Olga died, she took Lorena and me out for ice cream.

  Today Santa Muerta is wearing a red satin dress. Last time she wore a black cloak, which wasn’t as scary, because what else would a skeleton wear? In front of the doll, there are three fresh candles, a pack of cheap cigarettes, an open can of Tecate, a bowl of apples, and a white rose starting to brown at the edges. There’s also a new framed picture of Lorena’s dad riding a brown horse. Lorena looks exactly like him when she smiles. Even though Lorena’s mom has been with her boyfriend, José Luis, for years now, she still has her dead husband’s pictures hanging everywhere. When Olga died, Lorena’s mom asked for a picture of her so she could pray for her soul, but I thought it was too bizarre, so I pretended I forgot.

  Lorena never talks about her dad, and I never ask about him, because it’s really none of my business. It’s up to her if she wants to talk about him. I don’t like to pry. The only reason I know what happened to him is because, a few months ago, she and I got shit-faced after school, and it spilled out like a sack of fallen beans.

  After about the fourth glass of Alizé, which her cousin had bought for us, Lorena started crying out of nowhere. Maybe it was the mariachi song with the sad trumpets that was playing on the radio, I don’t know. I asked her what was wrong, and between sobs and gulps of the syrupy booze, she told me that she missed her dad. She was crying so hard that I could barely understand her. Her mascara started streaming down her face, which made her look like a grotesque clown. It would’ve been funny under different circumstances, like the time we got caught in the rain and her makeup smeared like a gasoline rainbow and we had to go back to her house to fix it.

  I didn’t know what to say, so I kept rubbing her back and smoothing her hair. After she calmed down a little, she was able to tell me the story, but I think I missed some bits and pieces because of the crying. Lorena said that when she was seven years old, her dad went back to Mexico for his mother’s funeral, even though everyone told him not to. He had lived in Chicago for ten years, but still didn’t have his papers. In order for him to return to the U.S., he had to cross the border with a coyote, just like he had the first time. Lorena’s mom even dreamt about it the night before he left, so she knew something bad was going to happen. In the dream, an eagle pecked at his heart while he sat there watching it. She begged him not to go, told him he’d die, but he didn’t listen. He said he loved his madrecita too much.

  After his mother’s funeral, Lorena’s dad took the bus from Guerrero all the way to the Arizona border, where he met a man from his hometown who everyone had recommended. This coyote took all their money and then abandoned the entire group of mojados while they walked through the desert. They got lost for two days, and the seven in the group, including a baby, eventually died of thirst. Border Patrol found them all two weeks after they were supposed to arrive on the other side, and shipped his decomposed body to his hometown in Mexico, where they buried him. Lorena and her mom never got to see him again. That’s when I started to understand why Lorena is so fucked up. My parents crossed the border like that, too, and even got robbed, but at least they made it here alive.

  As I study her dad’s pictures in the living room, Lorena starts rolling a joint at the kitchen table. She’s so much better at it than I am, basically a professional.

  “What are you doing?” she asks, without looking up. “Why do you keep staring at pictures of my dad?”

  I don’t know how to answer because I’m not sure why—curiosity, I suppose. “Doesn’t José Luis feel weird about all of these pictures still here?” I finally ask.

  “I don’t care what that motherfucker thinks,” Lorena says, and licks the joint. “You want some or what?” She hands it to me.

  I’ve smoked weed a total of five times now, and every single time, I start worrying about the stupidest things. The last time we smoked I thought the police were knocking on the door. The time before that, Lorena was on her phone and I was convinced she was texting mean things about me. But I keep smoking because I’m hoping that one day it will feel good, that I’ll be all floaty and calm, like everyone says.

  “I wonder if Olga ever smoked weed,” I say.

  “Olga? Are you kidding me? No way. That girl was practically a nun.”

  “Yeah, I’m not sure about that anymore.” I take a hit, and it makes me cough so hard my eyes water. I run to the kitchen for a drink. Lorena laughs and throws a couch pillow at my face as I walk back to the living room. It nearly knocks the glass out of my hands. I start laughing, too, and dump the rest of my water on her head.

  “You’re such a bitch!” Lorena screams. “You wet the couch!” She’s still kinda smiling, though, so I know she’s not really mad.

  “You started it!”

  Lorena walks to her room and comes back wearing a different shirt. She changes the music to narcocorridos, those horrible Mexican songs about drug traffickers who buy diamond-encrusted guns and cut each other’s heads off.

  When the first song winds down, the feeling suddenly clicks inside me—everything is in slow motion, and my body is light and heavy at the same time. It’s different from the times before. I’m not paranoid, just a little confused and unfocused. My contacts are so dry it’s hard to keep my eyes open.

  Lorena takes a few hits before passing it back to me. I shake my head no.

  “That’s it?”

  “I can’t.”

  “You can’t be high already.”

  “I am, so leave me alone, and if I go home like this, my mom is going to ship me to Mexico for the rest of my life….Goddamn it, this quinceañera. What a pain in the ass.”

  “Oh my God, get over it. I wish I could’ve had one, but my mom is always broke as hell.”

  “I don’t even know where they’re getting the money. All they ever do is complain about how poor we are. It’s like they want to pretend everything is fine. They just want to put on a show for the rest of the family.”

  “I can’t imagine you in one of those dresses.” Lorena laughs. “I don’t know what your mom is thinking. It’s like she doesn’t know you at all. Or she doesn’
t care.”

  “I know. The party isn’t for me; it’s for my sister. It’s not even my freaking birthday. Can you believe that?”

  “Come on, let’s look at some dresses. Maybe you’ll find one you like,” she says, and reaches for her laptop.

  “Doubt it.”

  Lorena pulls up some websites and begins scrolling through dresses. All of them are atrocious, a few even rainbow-colored. When we get to a ladybug-pattern abomination, I’m done. I just can’t. They should be classified as crimes against humanity. They should be tried in a court of law. “Stop, please. Before I vomit my chips.”

  Lorena sighs and begins plucking her eyebrows in front of a small hand mirror. I close my eyes for what feels like minutes, and when I open them again, I become hypnotized by the cheetah-print pattern on her leggings, which I hadn’t noticed before. I am soooooo high. The more I look, the more shapes I see—faces, cars, flowers, trees, babies, clowns—and then, for some reason, I start imagining Lorena as a cheetah running through a forest. It’s her same head but on a cheetah’s body. This weed must be excellent. I laugh so hard I can hardly speak. It hurts but feels good to finally laugh again.

  “What is it? Why are you laughing?” Lorena is confused. I try to explain, but I can’t catch my breath. Tears are streaming down my face. “What is wrong with you?”

  I try to tell her, but I can’t get the words out. My face is hot, and my stomach muscles are aching. “You’re a cheetah,” I finally manage to say, gasping for air.

  “A what?”

  “A cheetah!”

  “I don’t know what you’re saying!”

  “A cheetah!” I say.

  Maybe the laughter is contagious or Lorena is high now, too, because she starts laughing harder than I am. I try to think of things that are not funny—socks, cancer, sports, genocide, my dead sister—anything to get me to calm down before I pee my pants. Lorena puts a pillow over her face to control herself and muffle the noise, but it’s no use. She’s silent for a moment, and then a loud cackle escapes from her, which gets me going again. I cross my legs hard. I hope I can make it to the bathroom.