Facts of Life

by Gary Soto

  Kneeling at the edge of the lake, Lisa quickly added to her penciled scene and noted the colors that she would employ later. As the light faded, the rainbow began to die. The calf turned and moved away in slow, plodding steps. The egrets unfolded their wings and spread them like accordions; they leaped into the air, their departure rippling the surface of the lake. The geese treaded out of the water, throwing hateful looks at the chickens in the yard. The chickens pecked the ground.

  The moment, Lisa knew, was over. "Don't go!" she screamed to the egrets. She rose to her feet. "Don't go! Stay!"

  But the egrets were soon dark commas on the western sky. Lisa watched until they were no longer visible. She shivered, and when she turned back to the lake of rainwater, the rainbow had vanished. The calf had ambled off to the pasture across the country road, where it nibbled on grass. In a few minutes it would blend into the dusk.

  Lisa stood for a moment in the gathering dark. Daylight began to pull west, and the lake began to ripple in the breeze. The geese remained, ripping angrily at the grass and clacking their yellowish bills. Unsatisfied, they honked at Lisa, as if it were her fault that the grass was so meager, and lifted themselves into the air.

  "Ay," Lisa chirped as she stepped back, frightened by their beating wings. She watched the geese until they, too, disappeared, lost somewhere between the pale stars that had emerged.

  Lisa returned inside to do her chores: vacuum, mop, fold laundry, and wash the breakfast dishes in the sink.

  When her mother suddenly pulled open the door, Lisa was ironing a pair of her father's pants. She jumped. "You scared me," Lisa said, a hand on her heart. "Who brought you home?"

  Her mother ignored Lisa's question and announced breathlessly, "I got me one." She held up a card. For a moment Lisa imagined that her mother had become a citizen, but it was a library card that her mother flashed at her. Tucked under her arm were three books in Spanish: a novel and two books about flowers.

  "Estoy orgulloso de ti, Mami. I'm proud of you," Lisa said. She opened one of the books on flowers. It was full of color and Lisa sniffed for a scent. "Mom, I'm surprised!" After all, her mother was shy in public places. She would enter the post office with her head bowed or push Lisa in front of her as they entered a medical clinic. When her mother had to make a call, Lisa dialed and spoke to the person on the other end. Now her first library card! Wasn't that a good first step toward becoming a citizen? Lisa was proud of her mother's big adventure to the library.

  After dinner Lisa positioned herself at the kitchen table. She had placed her colored pencils in a coffee cup and opened her sketch pad. Her drawing of the scene in her yard was in lead pencil, but she only had to close her eyes to reassemble it into a magical moment full of vivid colors. She spent an hour on the drawing, looking up now and then at her parents, who had settled in front of the television. Lisa felt tenderness for them. In her mother's lap was one of the library books about flowers, and in her father's hand an English grammar book—both, she realized, were looking to the future.

  They want something better, Lisa told herself. They want to move away from this trailer. Cold wind whispered through the cracks, gutters dripped with the last of the rain, Pecas bumped somewhere under the trailer, and the floor seemed to lurch like a ship. Were they on a wide dusty sea in the middle of nowhere? Lisa knew that if she went outside onto the small porch, the night would be black, a color she seldom used in her drawings because she had enough of it in life.

  Still, the trailer was home, a home shared by her family and Pecas, a dog she would hug like a pillow because she loved him so much.

  The next day at school, Lisa showed Mrs. Mann, her English teacher, the completed drawing. Lisa had imagined that her teacher would assess her deft execution, and, perhaps, be left with a sense of happiness and good fortune—what else was a rainbow over a body of water but something cheerful? And the egrets? Her teacher would coo pleasant words, and Lisa would say, "Yes, aren't they beautiful—and right in my yard! Plus the geese and the calf—all of them."

  "Nice," Mrs. Mann concluded after a brief moment. "Is it symbolic? I like what you did with the light."

  Symbolic? Lisa wondered. What does she mean by that?

  The teacher asked, "Does the drawing stand for something? Does it have another meaning?"

  "No, it's realistic. You know it rained yesterday? It didn't seem to rain a lot here at school, but there was like a lake by my house." My house? Lisa thought. I mean, my trailer.

  "Yes, it did rain," the teacher remarked absently.

  Lisa wasn't sure how to respond, except with the truth. "That's what I saw in my yard. See those birds? Those are egrets. I have an Audubon book, and they're in it." She pointed to the geese. "They're called snow geese. They make a lot of noise when they fly away."

  Mrs. Mann nodded and handed the drawing back to Lisa, who could tell that her teacher didn't believe her. Mrs. Mann walked away to put an end to a commotion caused by two boys who were shoving each other.

  The bell rang for fourth period. Students slowly found their seats. Lisa was at first confused, then hurt, by the time Mrs. Mann began to interpret a Robert Frost poem about walking in snow. Why didn't her teacher believe what she'd seen?

  In fifth-period math Lisa shared her drawing with Guadalupe Reyes, a friend whose father also worked at the dairy. "Where is this?" Guadalupe asked. Her breath smelled of chocolate.

  "My house." Lisa spied a candy wrapper tucked in the sleeve of her friends sweater.

  Guadalupe knew Lisa's trailer house and the bare patch of earth where it stood. She knew the rusty tractors, the piles of tires, lumber, scraps of aluminum, the skinny chickens, the makeshift clothesline, the garbage pile, the desolation.

  "Your house?" she asked. "It looks different, so pretty." Guadalupe winced at her thoughtless remark, and offered, "Oh, what a dumb thing to say. I'm so sorry."

  After school, while hordes waited for the school buses, Lisa appraised her drawing. She didn't mind when someone critiqued her artwork. She anticipated it, longed for it. But this time she was hurt. The scene in the drawing was real. True, she lived in a trailer in the middle of nowhere, but beauty could happen anywhere. She only had to think of the thrush that lived in a junkyard off Highway 99. The thrush was beautiful in spite of it's habitat. It only had to chirp it's two-note song to convince anyone that it belonged in the world.

  The bus ride became rowdy when a boy stole Gaby Lopez's cap and tossed it to another boy. Girls and boys began to shout and tease. Back and forth the cap went until someone tossed it out the window.

  "That's mean!" Gaby Lopez screamed. She turned and hollered, "Mr. Baker! It's going to be all dirty."

  The bus driver, who seemed to pull back the steering wheel like the horns of a bull, forced the bus to come to a halt. He raised his eyes to the rearview mirror, his eyebrows like hairy tarantulas. "Who did that? Every day it's like this!"

  The boys—five of them smirking—looked at their feet. No one answered.

  "Who did it?" The driver, breathing hard, unbuckled his seat belt, hitched up his pants as he rose, and walked down the narrow aisle.

  "I'll get it, Mr. Baker," Lisa volunteered as she rose from her seat. "I'm just right there." Her trailer house was fifty feet up the road.

  "Who did it?" Mr. Baker roared, the tarantulas bristling on his face.

  Lisa squeezed around the bus driver to the front door, and descended the steps. She retrieved the hat from the mud and handed it back to Gaby through the open window. "See you tomorrow!" Gaby screamed, her voice happy. Lisa wondered whether Gaby, who was applying lip gloss, liked the boy who had tossed her cap from the bus window. She could imagine them secretly holding hands on a bus ride home.

  The bus pulled away, coughing black smoke that made Lisa cover her face with the sleeve of her jacket and mutter a muffled, "Fuchi. Stinky."

  She started down the road, thinking of the chores and homework she had to do, but she turned when she heard the caw-caw of a blackbi
rd and, in the corner of her eye, spotted the calf. It was in the far field, staring at her.

  "Cow," she moaned. "Poor cow."

  Lisa raced into the field, the mud sucking at her shoes, and thought of how her mother had to trudge in the fields. The earth, Lisa realized, was heavier than she'd thought.

  "Don't go," Lisa urged in a low voice as she approached the calf, whose hooves were as muddy as her shoes. "Please don't go."

  The calf swung it's body around, as if it had heard her plea. It seemed to want to stay.

  Lisa slowly trudged through the muddy field, disgusted by the earthy slop stuck to her shoes. Poor thing, she thought. Poor, poor thing. You have nowhere to go. They'll take you back and you'll have to live in dirty straw.

  Lisa envisioned the dairy where her father worked. There were hundreds of cows and calves there. She wondered if they did head counts of the cows at the end of the day. Would they know that one was missing?

  The calf remained calm when Lisa began wiping mud from it's face and yuck from it's small eyes. "I wish I could take you home," she whispered to the calf. "You want to come home with me, huh? We have carrots. You like carrots?" She considered hiding the calf between the rusty tractors, but what kind of life would that be?

  She petted the calf, muttered, "I drew you." Her drawing of the scene that occurred in her yard was in her backpack. She could envision it—it was real, it had happened. Lisa realized she had tears on her face. She petted the calf and turned away, no longer mad when the mud sucked her left shoe from her foot. She just whacked the mud from the shoe and fit it back onto her foot.

  "I'm going to have to stay here," she uttered. Her parents were old. Their skin was leathery from work, their brows pleated from years of sunlight. Would she have to stay with them in a trailer when they were really old? And on this little rancho, which was just a patch of forgotten land?

  When she returned to her trailer, the lake of water had disappeared. Only a puddle the shape of Florida remained. On that puddle floated an oily rainbow. Lisa tossed her backpack onto the porch and ruffled Pecas's scruff. How did the lake disappear in one day? she wondered. Was the earth that thirsty? Is there a hole below the yard? Maybe I didn't really see it. Maybe it was all made up, like what I see when I draw and paint.

  Lisa pounded her muddy shoe against the railing of the porch. She cursed the wet landing that made her socks wet. She scanned her yard: The lake was gone, really gone. What right did a pair of egrets have to settle in her yard briefly, tease her with beauty and hope, and then fly away?

  Identity Theft

  THE DAY AFTER Valentine's Day Ana Hernandez arrived at school early intending to sort through her batch of cards. They read BE MINE, YOU'RE THE MOST, SWEETIE, CUTIE-PIE. If only they were true. No one had ever said, "Be mine," or called her "cutie-pie," an expression from her grandmother's generation. These days, the bolder sixth-grade boys would scream, "You like me, huh?" Still, Ana felt popular as she sorted through her cards, her mouth sweetened by the cinnamon candy a boy had dropped into one of the envelopes. She suspected it was from Peter, but she couldn't be sure.

  She was still reading her valentines when her teacher entered the classroom with a new girl. The teacher's smile made Ana curious—was it possible that Ms. Welty had received a valentines card from another teacher? There were rumors that she and Mr. Saks, the third-grade teacher, liked each other.

  "Ana," Ms. Welty called. "Ana, I want you to meet..." The teacher stalled, then smiled, a little color flushing her cheeks. "I want you to meet Ana Hernandez."

  Confused, Ana put down a large valentine.

  "What I mean," Ms. Welty started to explain, "is that this is Ana Hernandez. You two have the same name!"

  The original Ana Hernandez glared at the imitation Ana Hernandez. She didn't like it: someone else with her name. Also, she had to admit that the other Ana Hernandez was pretty, an inch or two taller, and nicely dressed. And was that a cell phone tucked in the pocket of her Tommy Hilfiger jeans? And were those real Steve Madden shoes?

  But the original Ana quickly replaced the glare in her eyes with something like indifference.

  "You got so many valentines," the new Ana sang. She picked one up and sniffed it, her pretty little nose wrinkling in a cute way.

  Dang, even her voice is nicer than mine, the original Ana thought spitefully. "These are some of them," she explained. "Most of them I had to carry home in a sack yesterday." She wished she could bite her tongue off and let it crawl away like a snake. That was such an obvious lie!

  The new Ana smiled, and the original Ana wondered, Is she laughing at me?

  It was a weird experience, like looking at a twin sister you had never seen before. The original Ana Hernandez pondered her ill will toward this new girl, and felt that she was being unfair. She can't help it, Ana figured, that she has my name.

  The new Ana fit right into school life. She volunteered to be a crossing guard and helped raise the flag. She helped at a fund-raising car wash and was rumored to have played her flute at an assisted living complex across the street from school. Within a week she was chosen to say the Pledge of Allegiance on the intercom, a special honor usually assigned to students with good grades. She recited it so well that she was assigned to read the school bulletin, which always started with the menu for the day.

  The original Ana steamed. She had recited the Pledge of Allegiance on the intercom before, but she had never been asked to read the bulletin. Boldly she approached the principal in the hallway outside the office.

  "Mr. Ortiz," she asked, "when can I read the bulletin?"

  "But you just did," he countered in surprise.

  They soon discovered the error. The reader was supposed to have been the original Ana, not the new Ana. The secretary, they guessed, had made a mistake. When Mr. Ortiz offered the original Ana the chance to read the school bulletin, she grabbed the opportunity. But she felt slighted, and the bulletin she read to the entire school was unimportant. She reported two missing basketballs and a restroom that was going to be closed for the week.

  Original Ana observed that new Ana received lots of attention. Ms. Welty would call, "Okay, who can remember when President Lincoln—" and before the teacher could finish her sentence, new Ana would fling her arm up, bracelets jangling. The new Ana didn't do this all the time, only at moments when the original Ana knew the answers.

  One day when soccer teams were chosen during recess, Becky Ramirez, the star athlete of the school, said, "I'll take Ana Hernandez." The original Ana stepped forward, and Becky snapped, "No, not you—the other Ana. The new girl!" That day Ana was chosen last, and on the field the ball was never passed to her.

  In a classroom spelling bee the original Ana had to sit down almost immediately, after she stumbled on rhinoceros. The spelling bee became hotly contested between the new Ana and Peter, the boy the original Ana had hoped sent her a special valentine.

  "Spell triangular;" Ms. Welty called to Peter.

  He spelled it, wincing as he struggled to get the letters in the proper order. He clenched his fists in victory when Ms. Welty said, "That's correct." In turn, the new Ana eased through the word magnetic.

  The battle lasted ten minutes. The boys rooted for Peter, and the girls screamed their heads off for the new Ana. In the end Peter prevailed, but the new Ana clapped for the victor and even held up his hand like a champ.

  This made the original Ana mad. She, the newcomer, a fraud, a mere imitation—how dare she touch the hand that put the cinnamon candy in my valentine card! Ana fumed.

  Ana confided in her mother while they were in the kitchen peeling potatoes at the sink. Two onions that would bring tears to their eyes sat on the counter. The daughter was ready for tears, even if they were forced to her eyes by big bloated onions.

  "There's nothing wrong," her mother argued softly. Her lined brow expressed her concern for her daughter. "When I was at school, there was another Beatriz Mendoza."

  Mendoza was her mothers maiden name,
and Beatriz her childhood name. Now she was known as Betty, though some of her friends called her Lu-Lu. Why, Ana could never figure out, but it was a name that her mother responded to.

  The original Ana considered being called "Annie." She then thought about using her middle name, Maria. But there were two Marias in the other sixth-grade class, and a third, Ana felt, would be one too many. She then decided, "I'll change my name," and considered Michelle, a pretty name, one that sounded French.

  "Michelle Hernandez," she said to her mirror. "My name is Michelle." She giggled and then remembered that her grandmother had a Chihuahua named Michelle, a frighteningly ugly dog with bulging eyes and crooked teeth.

  In class Ms. Welty would call, "Ana," and both girls would answer yes. Most times Ms. Welty was seeking out the new Ana.

  Then the original Ana concluded, "I shouldn't be stuck-up. I should be friends with her." But by the time the original Ana decided to warm up to the new Ana, she discovered that the newcomer was so popular that they couldn't hang. She just couldn't manage to establish a friendship with the new Ana, even when the original Ana confided, "You know, I have a birthmark on my thigh."

  Then a new fad—jangling bracelets first worn by the new Ana—spread throughout the school. "I don't want to wear them," the original Ana fumed, but in the end she, too, wore bracelets and was not above jangling them for no reason except to show she was one of the crowd.

  As spring advanced, bringing flowers and freshness to the air, the original Ana drifted away from her classmates. She spent time alone, eating her sandwich, potato chips, and cookies by herself. She began to revel in this quiet time, though occasionally she would look up and see the new Ana at the center of activity. There she was playing four-square or soccer, and escorting guests around school. She was responsible for starting a school garden—tomato and eggplant seeds were first planted in egg cartons. After they'd sprouted, mothers and fathers came to dig up the soil on a Saturday morning. That day the original Ana saw a television crew approaching the new girl.