Becoming Maria

by Sonia Manzano

  My arms dangle at my sides and I brace them against the chair and lift my whole body up. Up and down, and up and down. I could be an acrobat in the circus, and in my mind I am flipping through the air, demonstrating great feats of strength and endurance like I saw in a favorite movie, Trapeze. I even lift my feet straight out in front of me, and notice I am no longer wearing imaginary ballet slippers but imaginary nude-colored slippers and fishnet tights with tiny bits of glitter on them. Suddenly the babysitter stirs and I leap with joy and hope nap time is over and I can get out of this chair, but she just peers at me with one eye and goes back to sleep. Sinking back, I let my head drop and I listen to myself breathe.

  Finally she is up and I am released and home with yet another neighbor on this day of relay-race babysitters watching over me until Ma gets home. I am so bored I could cry until Cousin Eddie comes over and my feeling is mixed—glad to see him but jealous of the freedom he has to come and go. Immediately he points out a pile of oak tag paper peeking out of Aurea’s room.

  “Look at the paper,” he says

  I look at it but know not to touch it. Aurea would kill me.

  “You can have it, you know,” he says.

  “No …”

  “Yes,” he insists. “You can draw something.”

  I think of all the things I would draw: a house, with a tree and the sun shining down, birds flying, kids playing.

  “Look, I’ll even get you some crayons.” And he goes into my sister’s room and comes out with a box full of crayons. I can’t believe it.

  “That’s Aurea’s and I’m not supposed to touch it,” I say. But it would be so wonderful to touch it.

  “She said it was okay.”

  “What?”

  “Really, I just saw her and she said it was okay to have the paper and crayons so you can draw.”

  Suddenly Little Eddie, the room, the sounds, everything disappears. The only things in the world are the oak tag, the crayons, and me. Opening the package I take one sheet of paper out and spread it on the floor. It is a beautiful, delicious cream color with a little bit of shine. What can I draw? Should I draw a mermaid or a flamenco dancer? I think this project deserves some thought.

  But suddenly my sister swoops in.

  “What are you doing?” she yells.

  I’m dumbfounded.

  “You can’t have that!”

  “But Eddie said …”

  “I don’t care what Eddie said. That paper is expensive. Are you crazy!” And she snatches up the oak tag and crayons and storms into her room, slamming the door.

  A white-hot fury washes over me, making me pick up a piece of wood with a nail in it that my father had left lying around and fling it at Eddie—the nail catches him at the shins, piercing his freedom, almost fixing him down to the ground as steadfastly as I felt nailed.

  He howls in pain, and limps around as my sister pulls the nail out, all the while yelling at my meanness, even as she runs into the bathroom to get the brownish-red Mercurochrome that makes him howl even louder when she swabs it on. I don’t cry. I just look out the window until the white-hot fury fades and I stop trembling.

  The next day Little Eddie comes over. He smiles and laughs like I hadn’t thrown a board with a nail in it at him. Once again, he finds everything I do hilarious and good and I am not ugly and mean after all, and before I know it I’m riding on the handlebars of his ten-speed bicycle. We fly down Crotona Parkway onto Third Avenue—I am scared, but his laughter in my ear makes it a good kind of scared and as we fly faster and faster under the El, the slats of sun coming through the tracks are like what I’ll know much later to be a strobe effect, but at that perfect moment of power and freedom I’m sure that no one in the whole world could possibly be as happy as me.

  Our teacher Mr. Gitterman is reading to us from Charlotte’s Web. It’s a magic book that makes everyone settle down, even the kids who can never sit still. Marion cups her chin in her hands and twirls her hair. I forget about myself and sit with my knees apart and my mouth open.

  Mr. Gitterman is all one color of sand as he sits on a student desk facing us. He reads slowly, letting the words wash over us like rain, sometimes stopping to look past us and out the window, as if he might be thinking about something that had happened to him. Sometimes he scratches his ankle.

  Even when we know that he will soon stop because it’s almost time to get our coats and go home, we wait, long and quietly, so we can squeeze a few more sentences out of him. One day we groan so loudly when he stops he tells us that our parents should read to us every day, just like he does.

  “Mr. Gitterman says you should read to me every day,” I say to Ma later.

  “Like I don’t got enough to do?”

  “That’s what he said.”

  “We don’t have any books,” she says.

  I ask him the next day, “What do we do if we don’t have any books?”

  “You don’t need to have books. Your parents can just tell you stories about their lives.”

  I wait until Ma is dyeing her gray hair before I ask her for a true story about her life because she has to sit perfectly still as she pours black Loving Care hair dye onto her head and cover it over with a clear plastic bag. She sits with a wad of tissue to keep the black goop from dripping down onto her face.

  “Tell me the story you and Bon Bon were talking about,” I say.

  She looks at me blankly.

  “The story about the guy who threw the coconuts at his wife’s head.”

  “What about him?”

  “Did he change?”

  “Who?”

  “The man who threw coconuts at his wife’s head.”

  “No. He was a mean sinvergüenza, and mean, shameless men never change.”

  “And she never moved out of the way?”

  “No.”

  “Why?”

  “Because she was a good person.”

  “But why does letting someone bounce coconuts off your head make you a good person?”

  “She was a good person, not like a person, but like a saint.” By this time Ma misses a few drips of dye and begins to resemble Christ wearing His crown of thorns at the church, with blood dripping down His forehead. She leans toward me, raises both eyebrows, and says, “Get it?”

  I don’t but I want to hear the rest of the story. “What happened to her?”

  “She took it, and took it, and took it, until her children grew up and saved her by taking her away from him.”

  I think that by that time the woman probably wouldn’t have a head or a body left to take away. My mother lights a Kent cigarette while I think the woman is like Charlotte in Charlotte’s Web, who mostly suffers for a pig named Wilbur.

  “Tell me about your mother,” I say. Often I have to light a candle in Abuela’s name at church, but all I really know is her name, Encarnación Falcon, and that she died when Ma was five years old.

  “Now she was a real saint. Poor thing … she was so good she died of a broken heart.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Someday you will understand.”

  “Tell me now …”

  “My father broke her heart by having other women, and by the time she had five children she couldn’t take it anymore and just died. She left Cristina, Eduardo, and me, Francisco, and Félix. There was one more, Felipe, but he lived such a short time I don’t count him. You know, I think she came back for him …”

  I imagine Encarnación Falcon swooping down from heaven to get her last baby, and telling Ma and her siblings to look out for each other.

  “I remember our little bohío when she died …”

  “What’s a bohío?”

  “A little wooden house. It was in Aguas Buenas, full of people crying and drinking rum. There were people from the town, and relatives I didn’t know. One of them put his hand inside my dress, and my aunt kept saying, ‘¡Cállense la boca!’ and ‘Stop crying.’ I was all confused and didn’t know what was going to happen to us.�
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  “You still had a father, Dionisio,” I say.

  “He was a man and men didn’t take care of children. And anyway, there were five of us and there was no food or money. Terrible. La pobreza. He gave us away.”

  “What? He gave you away?”

  “So we could work for people for food. It was the only way.”

  I think of all the five-year-old kids that I know running around the neighborhood. They couldn’t be on their own. One kid is always sticking beans up his nose. My cousin Mickey can’t wipe his nose. How would it be if they had to take care of themselves?

  Ma continues. “I had to go away with a family that needed me to take care of two babies. They say they could make more money if I took care of the children. But they left me alone in a house full of holes in the floor and under the house were mongoose …”

  “What’s a mongoose?”

  “AveMaríaPurísima! Like long, skinny rats. And they were wild and screamed from hunger even more than the babies did. I was afraid to go outside. I was supposed to feed the children rice, but I couldn’t take the children crying for more rice and the mongooses screaming under the house. I thought they wanted a baby to fall through so they could eat it. So one morning I fed the kids, and I didn’t even take my share, and I put some chairs over the holes in the floor and waited until I could jump over the mongooses, and then I ran away to find my father. I found him working at a bakery and I remember the tip of his belt swaying as he made frosting.”

  How could a man who gave away his children make frosting?

  “I just sat in the doorway and waited for him to notice me.”

  I almost don’t want to know but ask anyway. “And then what happened?”

  “He found me a place in Fajardo, a town near the beach. AveMaríaPurísima, that family was crazy. I had to sweep and make sure not even one grain of sand would get in the house. I was afraid they would spackle me into a wall if I missed any.”

  “You thought they would do that? Really?”

  By this time Ma is tired.

  “I don’t know,” she says. “It seemed so …” She lights another cigarette and goes on.

  “So when I got such a fever I was freezing in the burning sun I ran away again. But I didn’t have any shoes that fit so I found a pair that was too big and stuffed them with socks to keep them on and found my Mama Santa …”

  Another saint?

  “… my mother’s mother, who was taking care of the baby, Félix …”

  “Why didn’t she take care of you, too?”

  “Muchacha, there were too many of us. I walked for miles in those shoes and finally got to her house, but there was nobody home. I took off my shoes and my socks peeled away the first layer of skin on both heels. But I was happy to be able to lean back against the door to let the sun sweat my fever out.”

  This is like the tropical version of the story of “The Little Match Girl,” who had to sell matches on a freezing Christmas Eve or risk being beaten by her father. I think of the Match Girl lighting matches to stay warm, then jump to an image of my poor ma, sick and baking in the sun. I don’t know where to put my sadness for my mother. Ma rinses out her hair at the kitchen sink. I watch the black dye swirl around and go down the drain.

  Ma suddenly laughs ruefully.

  “What?” I ask.

  “Months later I had a stomachache. Mama Santa had me drink my baby brother Félix’s urine.”

  “Eeeew! That’s disgusting!”

  “It made my stomachache go away.”

  “How?”

  “I threw up, and I never complained about an upset stomach again.”

  I have had enough of true stories.

  “Now tell me a made-up story.”

  “AveMaríaPurísima—another one?” Her eyes bug out on purpose, making me laugh as she wraps her head in a towel.

  “A woman lives with her four children in Crotona Park and …”

  “In the winter?”

  “Don’t interrupt. A woman lives with her four children in Crotona Park in the winter and her husband beats her and beats her until her children grow up and save her. The end.”

  I don’t say anything.

  Her made-up story was sad, but not as sad as the real-life story she’d had in Puerto Rico—and the fear and sorrow she must’ve felt when she was a kid stays with me.

  I am watching my favorite show, Queen for a Day. “Would you like to be queen for a day?” the announcer asks the contestants at the beginning of each show, and I think, yes, because if anyone qualifies for being queen for a day it’s my mother. “Tell us about yourself,” the announcer asks a tired-looking white woman. She doesn’t look like the white women on Father Knows Best or on The Donna Reed Show. She looks dumpy. I study her and place my mother between her and television moms. My mother could look beautiful and beat-up at the same time.

  “We live in Kentucky and my child had polio and can’t get around and just when we had saved up enough money to buy a wheelchair my husband lost his job at the coal mine and … and …”

  She can’t go on she’s crying so much. The announcer pats her on the back.

  “Well, do you have any other children?”

  “Yes, we have a little girl, four years old …”

  “Does she have polio?”

  The woman is a little shocked at this question. “Why, no …”

  “Now, you should be thankful for that, shouldn’t you be?”

  “Yes, I …”

  He cuts her off. “Why do you think you should be queen for a day?”

  “Because my boy … has to crawl around the house, pullin’ himself on his arms … and we could use a wheelchair.”

  She might win. I think hard. Mothers with crippled kids always get a lot of applause and that’s how the winner is chosen, by how much applause they get. But I’m not crippled. Damn.

  “Well, that’s just fine,” says the announcer as he slides over to the next contestant. “Tell us your story.”

  The next woman says she lost her husband in a mud slide. When he went back into the house to rescue the family dog, the house slid down right out from under him. Husband, house, dog—all lost to her. And now she’s been left with four children and wants a washing machine so she can take in laundry.

  There are no stories about women who work. My mother works in a sewing factory. At the commercial break I run to the window to look out for her.

  A train pulls in and out with no mother, so I run back to the television set and watch the third contestant. She has twins and is pregnant with what may be more. Her husband has run out on her with a country-western singer who was coming through town. Now she has to raise twin two-year-olds, and whatever babies she’s carrying. The announcer tells her how lucky she is to be blessed with children.

  “What would you like if you were queen for a day?”

  “Some clothes for my children …”

  Okay, now it’s getting exciting for me. I see my mother in that category. Not the pregnant or clothes part, but the part about escaping the cruelty of a mean husband. That could work. That woman doesn’t even have black-and-blue marks on her. Ma would beat her for sure.

  Finally it’s time to pick the winner. They bring out an applause meter. The announcer stands over the woman who needs a wheelchair. The audience goes nuts. Their enthusiasm makes the dial go all the way up to ten!

  Then he slides over to the woman who wants a washing machine. She gets some applause but not much, just up to number six. Then he slinks over to the contestant who wants clothes. She gets the least amount of applause. He goes back to the wheelchair woman. They pan to the audience going wild, then back to her. Now she really starts to cry. I knew it. I knew she was going to be the winner.

  I make believe I see them put a crown on my mother’s head, and a fur cape like Old King Cole wore, over her shoulders.

  Then I make believe they give her everything she wants … and more. A washing machine, and a refrigerator, pots and pans, dishes
. My mother on TV looks dramatic, tears welling in her eyes like an actress in an old movie. I know she would win if she could just get on that show, and that makes me feel good and hopeful because it would be just like TV where everything is fine.

  We are going to church, but my sister heads in the opposite direction.

  “Where are you going?” I ask.

  “To the park.”

  She continues across the street to St. Mary’s Park. Father Fitzgerald sees me coming.

  “Hello, Sonia,” he says sadly.

  “Hi, Father …”

  Then he forces a smile and says, “Buenos días, qué bueno que viniste a la misa hoy,” and doesn’t mind that I laugh at his accent. I go into church adjusting a tissue I have bobby-pinned on my head because I don’t have a mantilla. The church is dark and somber and beautiful and when the father starts speaking Latin my mind wanders. I wonder what hurts more, the stab wound in Christ’s side or the real chip in His plaster toe?

  Sister Trinitos had told us of a little girl who loved God so much and prayed so hard at church He finally granted her wish and took her away so she could be with Him in heaven. When Mass was over and everybody got up to leave she just fell over dead like a sack of potatoes.

  I start to think that if He could hear her good thoughts, He can probably hear my bad ones—the ones that come into my head the minute I try to stop thinking of them. Shit! Oh no! Did God hear me think shit? Oh fuck. Oh no, now He heard me think fuck and … that other one. Goddamn it. Great … now He heard me think Goddamn it. At the rate I’m going, I’m sure to rot in hell. Oh wait, isn’t hell a bad word, too? I close my eyes and think that I can’t take it anymore and if I am going to die I want to be taken now! So I let every bad word I know float through my mind, in English and Spanish: carajo, pendejo, coño, hijo de puta, snot! I open my eyes and see Father Fitzgerald is right near me! He must’ve heard me, too!

  Finally Mass is over and I run away with my life until next week. Gasping for fresh air I find Aurea in the crowd, waiting for me with a smirk on her face. She’s always right on time.