Becoming Maria

by Sonia Manzano

  “What are you doing cleaning on Sunday?” she chastises Linda. “It’s the day of the Lord!”

  “We made such a mess with Christmas …” says Linda lamely, putting away her magic cleaning cloths. “I thought …” But she is cut off by Virginia’s holiness.

  “It’s a day to relax and be thankful for all the good He has done for us.”

  “Sí …”

  Ma makes believe she is not in the room and Pops decides to step out for a minute. My doll’s beautiful blonde curls mesmerize me.

  “Sonia …”

  The curls are thick and springy.

  “Sonia …”

  I finally realize Virginia is talking to me and I stare at her.

  “Have you accepted Jesus Cristo into your heart?”

  My heart? I look at Ma.

  “Come to Sunday school for a little while. I was just on my way.”

  “School?” I thought we were supposed to rest today.

  “Come, come with me!”

  I look at Ma, who does nothing, leaving me hanging out in the wind.

  “I’ll have her back before la comida!” And Virginia starts to help me on with my coat. My doll’s head gets caught in the sleeve.

  “Put her down. She’ll be here when you get back.” And I am whisked away, abandoning Shirley Temple on the sofa with her legs up in the air.

  I end up at a storefront church down the street. There is nothing pretty or dark and scary like at Our Lady of Victory Church. I take my seat with a bunch of other kids. Virginia and the other woman running the church look alike in their plainness. Neither wears makeup; both wear long skirts and ugly shoes. Why don’t they wear sexy shoes like Iris, or even shoes like my own ma’s pointy ones? They give us paper and crayon. I decide to draw a princess and just when I’m getting to drawing in a golden crown Virginia asks us to put down our crayons. She says it’s time to confess our sins. One kid after another gets up and tells everyone what rotten kids they are. When it’s my turn I just sit in my chair.

  “Come, Sonia, accept Christ into your heart.”

  I don’t make a move.

  “It’s time to tell your sins.”

  I sit there and recite my sins in my head in case God’s really listening. I don’t like this woman. I don’t like the gold in her teeth or her dry chapped lips, and that she doesn’t wear nail polish, or tweeze her eyebrows, or smear red colorete on her cheeks like women are supposed to do. I especially don’t like how “good” she is.

  “Sonia … ?”

  I make my face stone and still, like my dolls.

  Finally she gives up and takes me back to Grandmother’s, where my beautiful doll greets me. Later, on our way home, I tell Ma about what happened.

  “You did the right thing. Catholics confess to priests and that’s it.” And I can tell from the way she said it that she doesn’t like Virginia, either, but the whole thing makes her decide that I should finally become a full member of the Catholic Church.

  Two weeks later she grabs my birth certificate and takes me to the parish of Our Lady of Victory Church on Webster Avenue. We knock on the parish house door and an old, dusty, papery-white woman answers the door and I know she is Irish.

  “Yes?”

  She looks like she has a toothache or maybe it just pains her to look at us. Ma presents my birth certificate and says she wants to sign me up. We wait in a neat room with dark furniture and a reddish rug and a big green plant and wooden bookcases, and as we sit I notice that the plant is dusty, as is every other thing in the room.

  After a few minutes the old Irish maid is back, and she escorts us into Father Fitzgerald’s office. I catch a glimpse of him before he sees us and he is holding his big, bony head in his hands and looking as sad as the Virgin Mary’s statue does holding her dead son in the church. There are shafts of light coming in behind him through the stained glass windows, dense with specks of dust flying all around, and I wonder about a priest who is so sad in a place that is so neat and dusty.

  Father Fitzgerald comes out of his depression long enough to sign me up for classes. The next Tuesday he picks us Catholic kids up at school for religious instruction, which is supposed to be from two forty-five to three thirty. We get to the church at three and before we know it it’s three thirty and time to go home. Still, Father Fitzgerald is never in a hurry. He is like a tall, skinny stick in a skirt that we run out in front and in back of and all around, like he is a maypole and we are holding ribbons attached to the top of his head. Sometimes we make him laugh and he is not so sad.

  Our teacher is Sister Trinitos and she gets us ready for our first communion by telling us all this other stuff besides the one about babies in mangers that I’ve learned from songs. She says the Father and the Son and the Holy Ghost are one thing, not three things standing next to each other, or on top of each other’s heads, but one thing. I am more interested in seeing if she is bald behind her wimple, and fantasize what she’d look like in a dress with a bra underneath until she talks about “original sin.” She says that means that though babies look cute outside, inside they are stained black with original sin until they are baptized. That doesn’t seem fair: to be marked with somebody else’s sins and labeled a sinner before you even have the fun of doing anything bad yourself. I see older kids getting ready to be baptized so I know their insides are black, though they look okay to me.

  I try to understand but I can’t.

  Summer. Ma is the only mother who looks like somebody died. The school has convinced her to let me go away to a Police Athletic League camp for a week, and I can’t wait to get away from home. Port Authority Bus Terminal is crammed with kids and parents. Some kids have their things in backpacks or suitcases and even just plain paper bags. My suitcase is brown cardboard with satiny pockets inside.

  Ma doesn’t even smile when I get on the bus. I’m afraid she’s changed her mind about letting me go. I thought she was happy she wouldn’t have to worry about babysitting for a week—but now I think she is sorry. Too late! I’m going!

  I fall asleep and after four hours wake up when we stop. My sick tooth has leaked and there is wetness down my shirt. Wiping my chin with the back of my arm I gasp at the wildness of where we’ve come to. There is no lawn like Crotona Park, only really tall trees so close together only strips of light come through. Teachers called counselors greet the bus and they divide us into groups of four. The counselors look like they could all be sisters, cream-colored girls with light-brown hair wearing beige pants and green boots and white shirts. Our counselor is named Lynn and she has long, thick hair and I think they must all have boyfriends.

  We head toward the tents in the distance. There are short winding paths so the place looks like a little village in the woods. We don’t speak but all four of us campers peek at each other when we can. There’s a brown-haired girl with a big nose, there’s a black girl with a pointy nose, there’s me, and there’s a super-skinny girl with hair so blonde it looks as white as her skin. The tents have wooden floors, canvas roofs, and no bathrooms. Before we even put our suitcases down the big-nosed girl has to go to the bathroom.

  “Where do we go?” she asks.

  “Right this way, ladies,” says Lynn.

  She shows us to a row of closets with seats with holes in them! “Just do your business in there and don’t even worry about flushing.” She grins. “This is called an outhouse,” she says, and all us girls fall over laughing.

  When we are back in the tent we have to say where we are from.

  “Bronx,” I say.

  “Brooklyn,” says the black girl.

  “Queens,” says the brown-haired girl.

  “Staten Island,” says the white girl.

  We pick out our bunks. The minute the brown-haired girl puts her pink suitcase on a bunk, the girl from Staten Island runs over to it and puts her paper bag of clothes on it.

  “I want to sleep in this one!” she screeches.

  “But I already picked this one,” says the
big-nosed brown-haired girl.

  “I don’t care, I want it!”

  Lynn comes in before a fight breaks out. She takes the blonde girl outside and talks to her. The next day the angry white-haired girl finds a bullfrog and puts it in a jar. It is so loud it fills the tent with its croaking.

  “I can’t sleep!” screams the big-nosed brown-haired girl.

  All the girls are afraid of it. Again, the camp counselor comes into the tent. She picks up the jar.

  “I want my frog!” screams the angry white girl.

  Lynn takes the croaking frog and the screaming girl out of the tent. The girl comes back with an empty jar and an angry look on her face.

  One day the mail comes and all the girls, except the angry white girl and me, get boxes of chocolates, or crackers, and funny cards from home. Every girl who got a package begins to cry. The angry white girl and I are confused. Shouldn’t we be crying because we didn’t get anything?

  “Why do they cry?” I ask a counselor.

  “Because they are homesick.”

  “What’s ‘homesick’?”

  The counselor takes a moment before she answers. “It means the packages they’ve received have reminded them of home and they miss being there.”

  The angry white girl and I look at each other and I know what we are both thinking. Why would anybody want to be home? After dinner, at night, we all sit around the campfire and sing the song “If I Had a Hammer.”

  It’s the most beautiful song I’ve ever heard. What a great idea, to sing about “danger” and “justice” and “love between my brothers and my sisters, all over this land”—though I can’t say I really “love” my brother and my sister—maybe my sister but not my brother. Every night we sing this really sad song that reminds me of songs I’ve heard in war movies when somebody dies. But it’s a good sad, the kind of sad that makes you think of things, not the kind of sad that chokes you.

  We are asked to name our tents and we decide to call ourselves the Bears Tent. The counselors ask for suggestions for names for their tent. “How about the Deer Tent?” says one girl. “Or the Tree Tent?” says another. But I think of how the counselors look like princesses in a fairy tale—and that I’m sure they have boyfriends.

  “How about the Love Tent?” I say.

  “Yes, perfect,” says Lynn.

  I am so happy they liked my idea.

  I love everything about camp, especially the swimming on my back.

  “Legs up, arms up, and sweep the water away. Legs up, arms up, and sweep the water away.” I do as I’m told and it works. Yippee! We go on a scavenger hunt. One of the items we have to find is a four-leaf clover.

  “What the fuck!” screams the white girl when we find out four-leaf clovers are really hard to find. “That’s not fair!”

  We have relay races and get to toss a ball and have art class where we usually have our food, which is great, even though I never get enough to eat. The milk is creamy and a beautiful color white in a shapely pitcher. The only days I am really, really hungry as opposed to just a little hungry are Sundays when it is the cook’s day off. On those days we have the beautiful milk and donuts for breakfast. When I see kids at other tables not drinking all the milk I ask Lynn for it.

  “You guys having that milk … ?” Lynn asks.

  Suddenly all the kids at the table with the extra milk get thirsty and suck it all up.

  “Sorry,” says Lynn, patting my leg.

  But I forget my hunger when we sing songs around the campfire about an old lady who swallowed a fly, chariots swinging low, and even Greensleeves, whatever they are. I always liked the music my family played and sang, but that was a part of me, like breathing. This new music and words is outside of me. I decide to like it, and suddenly I wonder what other things outside of me I’ll like.

  The morning of our last day the counselor comes in to check our bunks. My pillow has yellow streaks all over it.

  “It’s from a tooth,” I tell her. “That always happens.”

  She looks at me very closely before saying, “I think you should ask your mother to take you to the dentist.”

  “But it doesn’t hurt yet,” I tell her.

  “Still—maybe you should go before it starts to hurt.”

  Lynn doesn’t say anything else. She just throws the stained pillow-case with the other dirty things I am to take home.

  Ma gasps the minute she sees me step off the bus at Port Authority. “What happened to you?”

  “The counselor says you should take me to the dentist.”

  “You are so skinny!”

  “What?”

  “Skinny, and you are covered in bumps and cuts and scratches!”

  “Did you know that four-leaf clovers hardly exist?”

  “AveMaríaPurísima.”

  “I learned how to swim …”

  “What kind of camp was that, anyway?”

  “And we went on something called a scavenger hunt …”

  “Starvation camp?”

  “No—scavenger hunts and …”

  “You’ll never go away to camp again! ¡Se acabó!”

  And we go back to the boring Bronx where Aurea has to take care of Joe and me for the rest of the summer.

  Splat! Aurea is flinging oatmeal at my face. Splat! Here comes another one! But she misses and the oatmeal lands on my neck. She is feeding Joe, and in the meantime aims food at me. I don’t like being the target but at least I’m being looked at. Soon she gets tired of that game.

  “Clean up,” she yells. “We’re going someplace.”

  “Where?”

  “Just clean up!”

  I clean up as she struggles helping Joe with his shoes.

  “Where are we going?”

  “We are going to buy a giant record!” Suddenly she is so excited her eyes are bright.

  “Where do they have that?”

  “Way downtown around First Avenue where I used to live—and what do you think about a giant square french fry?

  “A what?”

  “A giant square french fry! That comes with or without mustard.”

  “I don’t know …”

  “You’ll see,” she teases.

  I can’t imagine this food. We get on the train and sit on the woven rattan seats or hang from the leather straps all the way to Orchard Street.

  “Don’t stare at the people when we get there,” she says.

  But it’s hard to take my eyes off the men all dressed in black with long curls falling down in front of their ears and long, white, thin strings hanging from underneath their shirts. We go into a dark store. There are barrels of more kinds of pickles than I ever even knew existed. Aurea asks for an extra-sour one for her and a regular one for Joe and me. She picks out two of the potato squares that are called knishes; the one with mustard is hers, and we find a park bench to eat them on. The food is wondrous. Then we go into a record store and buy a huge record called LP for long playing. Imagine that! Twelve songs on a record is like magic. Back on the train the newness of camp and those people and the knish makes me bold enough to ask her a question.

  “Hey, Aurea, what does that say?”

  “What?”

  I point to all the ads in the train.

  “All that up there, on the signs. What does it all say?”

  But she has grown tired of taking care of two little kids, I think, because she switches.

  “Oh … why don’t you try reading them yourself? Can’t you read yet? Christ.”

  Now this idea makes me stop. I have only read Dick and Jane books out loud in school with the rest of the class, the teacher insisting we all stay on the same page. I always wanted to read on to see what Dick and Jane did next, but was afraid to peek until the teacher said it was okay. So I’d count the windowpanes, or watch the leaves switching around outside until everyone in the class caught up with me. Now Aurea is telling me to read all by myself.

  I look at the letters in the signs and in one split second the words
fall into place and I am reading. I’m reading! I read, “For a smooth taste smoke Chesterfield cigarettes.” “Don’t eat that cake, light up instead.” “Most doctors agree Bayer aspirin will make your headache go away.” “Winston tastes good like a cigarette should.” I focus on a picture of three pretty girls. “Arlene Singer—Brooklyn. Danette Di Napoli—Manhattan. Kersey Ann O’Reilly—the Bronx. Vote for Miss Rheingold Beer today.”

  “Hurry up!” We have gotten to our stop. “What’s the matter with you?”

  But I don’t say anything to Aurea. I can read and I don’t want anyone to know about my secret weapon, and suddenly I can’t wait for summer to end and second grade to begin.

  “Wake up!” says Ma. “Or you’ll be late for school.”

  Yippee, another school day. Right away I knew I was the smartest girl in class. My penmanship was perfect. I wrote in the lines. I always raised my hand and had the right answer, which means I got to clean the erasers and run errands for the teacher. “What’s wrong with you? Go brush your teeth!”

  I brush my teeth while singing a commercial I’d seen on TV: “You’ll wonder where the yellow went when you brush your teeth with Pepsodent!”

  “What are you doing in there? Hurry up! Get dressed! I have to take Joe to the sitter’s house before work. Put your socks on! Get your sweater.”

  Get my sweater? I get an idea to make Ma laugh. I’ll go in the closet to get my sweater and make believe I have fallen asleep! Ma will wonder where I am and look in the closet and laugh at how funny my sleepiness is—she will giggle as hard as she does when she watches Jackie Gleason on the TV show The Honeymooners.

  I get to the closet and close my eyes and wait for her to come and find me. But before I know it …

  “What are you doing? ¡AveMaríaPurísima! PACIENCIA.”

  … I really did fall asleep!

  She is angry and spreads her fingers out and up in front of her face while saying “Paciencia” with such force I think, this time, she’s actually going to touch the sky with her fingertips. She practically tosses me a cup of milky sweet coffee and a piece of Italian bread with butter and sends me to school with Genoveva. Damn.