Becoming Maria

by Sonia Manzano

  “What?”

  “Sonia! ¡Salte del baño! Tenemos que llevar a Joe al hospital.”

  Joe’s asthma has gotten worse and he has to be taken to the hospital. I get out of the bathroom.

  “AveMaríaPurísima, what were you doing in there?” Ma’s eyes bug out but I still think about my own face. The minute they are gone I go back to my self-examination. My hair is thick and wavy and considered “good hair,” but still I set it on rollers all the time so it will be straighter.

  Holding up my hands I quickly flip them—palms, back of hands, palms, back of hands, palms, back of hands, palms, back of hands—looking for a big, shocking difference in color.

  A worry I’ve had since Martin Luther King, Jr., comes up—if I was in the South with light-skinned Little Eddie, would we be separated at a bus stop? Would I have to sit in the back and him in the front? Do strangers think I am a pretty black girl or an ugly white one?

  “Go to bed,” I yell at Petey, thinking about my purple gums and my fat nose, and I remember a story Ma had heard from her own grandmother about how black people came to be:

  In the beginning all people were black because God had made them from the black earth. Then, as a final touch, He made a pool for everyone to dip in and turn white. But there were so many people the water got shallower and shallower, until there were only a few inches of water left. The people at the end of the line had to settle for whitening the soles of their feet, and bending down to place their flat palms in the water, to whiten them, too.

  Will I always be at the back of the line?

  I fall asleep on the sofa thinking that if Vanessa and I ever blended together we’d make the perfect white girl.

  Vanessa is back at our door first thing the next morning.

  “Mami is sleeping so we have to be very quiet, but do you want to come over?” she asks. We run over to the other side of the building.

  Her mother’s apartment is white and gold; white walls and carpeting, white curvy furniture with gold trim—and mirrors everywhere.

  “Shhh. Michi …” Vanessa shushes a stupid-looking little French poodle named Michelle wearing a diaper.

  “Why is she wearing a diaper?”

  “Because she has her period.”

  Does everybody in this house have their period all the time? Vanessa looks like a dark smudge in all that whiteness. We fit better in her room, which is an explosion of color with bright clothes everywhere.

  “Do you like this dress?” she says, holding up what looks like a ripped T-shirt. “I made it myself. I can make a lot of clothes. Look.” And we pick through her wardrobe and try on long T-shirts and add bandanas or scarves as belts. Or we take large kerchiefs and twist them around to make halter tops. Sheets make great wraparound skirts, or evening dresses if we pull them up under our armpits.

  “When do you clean this room?” I ask her.

  She looks at me solemnly and says, “When I can’t see the furniture anymore.” Then an explosive laugh pops out of her, which makes me laugh, which makes her laugh until we have to throw ourselves on the bed to smother our eruptions and not wake her mother—but it’s too late. Irena comes into the room in a white nightgown with feathers around the neck, and on her feet a pair of tight little golden mules.

  “¿Qué está pasando?” She is immediately bored with us. Vanessa looks around before answering, “Nothing.” Vanessa’s mom click-clacks into the kitchen to make coffee, her mules slapping her heels warningly. The sound she makes walking makes us want to laugh even harder; when we try to contain ourselves we explode into giggles then choke on them; and that becomes the way we are with each other. Every day we try to make dresses out of kerchiefs and T-shirts.

  “Just cut the sleeves off of that T-shirt,” she orders.

  “Then what?” I ask her.

  “Then we wrap it around our heads …”

  “Like African ladies?”

  “Yes, African lady pirates!”

  And this makes us fall out laughing and pushing and trying to knock each other over.

  When we hang out in the street I see Larry coming and going and avoiding my look. I decide Vanessa and Larry would make a wonderful couple because I want the three of us to be together.

  “I think Larry likes you!”

  “That pendejo?”

  “No, really …”

  When Larry and I are at our windows I twist up.

  “I think Vanessa likes you.”

  He looks surprised, starts to say something, and then stops.

  I invite them both to the roof, and then duck out when they get there, or I push her into the hallway when I know he is coming home from school.

  No matter what I do, though, Larry always looks bewildered, and Vanessa gets sick of going along with me. And it is all over after I set them up to meet in the courtyard and Larry’s father comes upon them, and Larry begins playing handball as if Vanessa isn’t there. She is furious and mimics him unable to hit the wall because his knees were quaking: “… I tole joo he wuz a fuckin’ pendejo!”

  That summer Larry gets sent away to the Catskills.

  It’s a long summer with nothing to do so when I don’t make clothes with Vanessa, I dig through bins for hot-pink padded bras at discount stores with Yvonne. When the weather finally gets cool, Yvonne and I switch to wearing long pants, and sit on parked cars. Sitting next to her, we look up and down the street looking for something to say.

  “There he comes. There he comes!” she says suddenly.

  “Who?”

  “Mikey … it’s Mikey … we used to date … don’t look at him.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t want him to think I still like him.”

  “What?”

  “Don’t look!”

  “Do you?”

  “Yes, but his father didn’t like me so we had to break up.”

  “But …”

  “He loves me but has to make believe he doesn’t.”

  “Why?”

  “Shush …”

  Yvonne never gets Mikey back, and when a young man from Puerto Rico named Luis moves into the neighborhood she starts to go with him.

  “Luis is so funny,” she says. “The other day we were walking and he took my hand and farted on it.”

  When I tell Ma about it later I am out on the fire escape and she is at the window having a smoke. “If that’s what he does while they are dating, I wonder what he’ll do if they get married?” I had not thought of that and it makes me think about the ways of love. Ma’s laughing brings Mercedes to her window. Ma rolls her eyes, points to her cigarette, and ducks inside. I sit there awhile, ignoring Mercedes, when the bus pulls up and Larry gets off. He looks stronger, his waist narrow, his legs long, and his shoulders wider. He throws a duffle bag over his shoulder and I get so excited I jump up and down on the fire escape and shake the bars like I am a monkey in a cage.

  “Look,” I say to Mercedes, “Larry has come back. Larry has come back. Vanessa is going to be so glad to see him!”

  “Are you sure you are not the one that is so glad to see him?” she says.

  Her statement cools me like ice water thrown in my face, and I want to take it all back, but settle for deflating myself and slinking back into the apartment, hoping Larry didn’t see.

  I’m at the window wondering if Larry will appear, and what do I care anyway?—there was no way we could’ve been friends—when I hear my sister’s voice at the door. Running out to greet her, I see that she and Ma are already gushing all over with talk and I’m still wondering about whether or not I could ever be friends with Larry, so I sneak back to my window to think.

  Suddenly I hear my father’s strident voice. A flare goes up in my heart and I know to stay frozen right where I am, stuck between the open window with a view of the street and my life. The front door slams and still I wait, immobilized, until out of the corner of my eye I see my sister, shoulders shaking, fleeing down the street and away toward the train. That’s my cue t
o rush toward the kitchen. On my way I spy Petey curling up in the bottom of a closet and Joe rolling under a bed with a baseball bat. In the kitchen Ma is trying to placate my father, and I look to see if she’s had time to hide the knives in the oven. She hasn’t because this time he has caught her so off guard. Instead, she is heating up a can of peas for dinner like everything is normal. My father is raging, red eyes bugging out, spittle in the corners of his mouth, his anger a notch higher than usual. I block out what he is saying and focus on how the boiling pot of peas could be used as a weapon. Does she know? Would she use it? Would she fling the hot, bubbling peas at him? I telepathically command her to do it while wondering if I could do it myself.

  But no matter—my father strikes first by upturning the kitchen table, bending off a leg, and striking her with it. I must have grabbed the black ceramic panther off the television on my way into the fray because it seems to appear in my hand as I bring it up and smash it onto my father’s head. It stuns him. Ma takes this second to escape. As she runs past me, my father turns around, graceful as a ballerina, and peers at me and I am sure that he will kill me but he doesn’t seem to see me. He looks past me as if I am invisible, then shudders involuntarily like a horse before heading out the door. I lock the door after him but not before seeing our neighbor Mercedes with her mop in hand, peering in. I put up as many pieces of furniture against the door as I can, including the now three-legged kitchen table.

  No sooner does he leave than my father starts to try to break back in—smashing his body against the door rhythmically and methodically. I meet Ma in the living room. There is blood running down her face. My brothers have taken up the good hiding places so I put her in the only room with a lock—the bathroom. Once she is so obviously hidden, I pick up the very weapon he had hit her with, the table leg, and stand in the hallway, waiting for him to come crashing through.

  Focusing on the rose pattern printed on the linoleum floor I notice how a big, lush, red flower opens up to a stem, which leads to another flower. In my head, I follow a pattern of sight and sound: the roses and the thuds my father makes against the door. Hear a thud, see a rose, hear a thud, and see a rose, until the rose pattern crashes against the wall as my father comes bursting through the door. But two big Irish cops come rushing in right after him. Mercedes is in the hallway peering in, and I don’t mind because I figure it was she who called the cops.

  “Okay, calm down … that’s it …” says one cop, looking at my father but really looking at his partner.

  “She no suppose to do what she want,” my father says, stumbling around, shaking like a horse trying to clear its head.

  “That’s all right now,” answers the other cop.

  I get my mother out of the bathroom.

  “Arrest him,” she says. “Look what that abusador did!” She points to her head and the broken furniture.

  “Lady, we can’t arrest him. We didn’t see him commit any acts of violence. Now look, why don’t you get a restraining order … ?”

  What? I can’t believe it. They go back and forth about a restraining order, and how they can’t arrest him because they didn’t see him committing any acts of violence, and how much trouble it would be to press charges, and why doesn’t everybody just calm down, and I start to shake, and continue to shake and begin to cry, but no sound comes out so nobody notices. The cops take him out, insisting he clear his head, and I must’ve attended to Ma’s wound but I can’t be sure. I only know that time passed.

  Over the next few days the family settles down around me. My father fixes the leg back onto the table. Joe wheezes asthma and Petey weeps, and Ma yells at us to come to dinner—everyone gets back to normal, except for me. I cannot stop crying and even sit at the dinner table, tears streaming down my face, with Ma looking away and Pops looking at my forehead until they both get sick of me.

  “¿Qué diablo te pasa?” they finally ask.

  “I can’t!” I sob. “I can’t take this anymore!”

  My parents look at each other like I’ve lost my mind.

  “Can’t take what?” my mother asks, rolling her eyes.

  Did I hear right? Does she not know what I’m talking about? Is she joking? Has she forgotten what had happened? The cops! The broken kitchen table! The bump on the head! Christ. My mouth moves as I try to talk but I am so flabbergasted nothing comes out. Besides, I would explode with words if I could figure out what to say to her.

  She looks to Pops, who seems like he just got amnesia, too. Then she turns back to me. “Oh, that—that had nothing to do with you,” she says with great exasperation. My father scratches his head like he has no idea what either one of us is talking about.

  They are in cahoots and leave the room, taking the air with them. I deflate but then inflate, thinking, Screw them. I’m going to run away like kids do on television. That’ll show ’em. But where to? I know—I’ll go to my sister’s. I can be safe there. No, not my sister’s. I don’t know this but I feel it as sure as I can feel an undertow in the ocean—her relationship with my father does not make her place neutral territory. I hide the fact that I’m too much of a coward to put her between my parents and me, and decide to run away to my grandmother’s house in El Barrio.

  “Perate, perate, perate,” says my grandmother, motoring around the apartment. I follow her into the kitchen. Using her calloused fingers as pot holders she shoves the lid off a pot of rice. It falls to the side with a clatter. I expect her to ask me what I am doing there but she doesn’t; instead she stirs the rice, flips the lid up in the air with her knuckles, and coaxes it back onto the pot.

  We sit in the dining room. Me with a tragic look on my face and hoping she asks me for details as to why I’ve shown up, but she doesn’t. After her smoke she decides to check if the beans are hot.

  “Ahhhhhgggggg!”

  They’re hot. I run in as she soaks her burned hand in cool water. When she pulls her hand out, I impulsively kiss the burned part. This surprises her almost as much as my action surprises me. She pulls her hand away in shock and looks at me suspiciously. That night I bed down with La Boba, whose serene smile helps me sleep.

  When I get back to the block days later I know Vanessa knows everything without me even telling her. Not only that, she’s come up with a plan.

  “Don’t worry, I can make him stop drinking!” She grins.

  “How?” I ask.

  “Santería …”

  I know of this spiritual practice of putting spells on people and other voodoo stuff. Bon Bon always leaves food or shots of whiskey out for her spirits and slaps babies to ward off the evil eye, so we go to a botánica, half seriously and half not, and look over the prayers that are set up on a rack like greeting cards.

  “Here, this one will make someone fall in love with you,” she says in a deadpan voice, shoving me. “Here is one that will make you rich, and this one will make you famous.” The silliness of buying something to make me rich and famous makes me laugh so hard the owner, who is all dressed in white, comes out from the back.

  “What’s so funny?” she says.

  Vanessa seriously explains that we want a prayer to make my father stop drinking. The owner pulls a box out from behind the counter, leafs through it, and pulls out a flyer and a candle. “You have to buy this candle, too,” she says sternly. We buy what we need and wait until we get outside to laugh.

  The prayers and candle don’t work.

  But our attempt gives me an idea. The back pages of True Confessions feature lots of advertisements. You could send away for “Frownies” to take away wrinkles just like movie stars do, or you can send away for vitamins to make you stop being a ninety-five-pound weakling, or, what really catches my eye, pills you can secretly put in your husband’s drink to make him stop drinking. I show Vanessa.

  “Let’s send for everything,” she says. “We can take away his wrinkles, make him get fat and stop drinking, too!”

  “No, just the anti-drinking stuff,” I say. And laughing and knoc
king each other over we send away for it. When it arrives we show Ma in the kitchen.

  “What do you think, Ma? Let’s try it in coffee; he always drinks coffee.”

  We make coffee with sugar and milk just the way he likes it, and put the pills in and wait. Though doubtful, even Ma looks over. Everything looks okay until the cup starts to bubble over like an Alka-Seltzer. Ma sniffs and goes back to what she was doing, and Vanessa and I laugh until our eyes tear.

  “We can go back to the botánica and ask about sacrificing a chicken,” Vanessa suggests.

  “AveMaríaPurísima,” says Ma.

  We look to each other for what to do next and go to a running joke between us—which one of us might have more African ancestors. A sure sign is having purplish gums. We examine hers first.

  “Now yours,” she says, giggling.

  We do. Then we examine our hair, our skin, our features, and laughing so hard about a forbidden topic makes everything bad go away for a while.

  The trip to the Catskills has made Larry bolder. Not even afraid to talk to Puerto Ricans in public, so I am not so shocked to see him at a party on Fox Street with Vanessa. There’s lots of couples dancing and drinking beer and I am dancing with a boy named Johnny who is Spanish and tall and Indian-looking with long, thin hair.

  Suddenly a guy throws up near us. Everybody screams in disgust, but the guy’s girlfriend rushes to clean up the vomit, proving to everyone that she is his woman and he is her man. When she is done cleaning and helping her man out the door, Johnny pulls me back into his arms and we dance and out of the corner of my eye I see Vanessa and Larry dancing, too. Larry has one hand on the small of her back, and the other hand squeezes her breast as she yawns in his face. They are excluding Johnny and me even though they are not really with each other. Suddenly I want to leave the party.

  “Hey, wait, don’t go,” says Johnny.

  But I want to go.

  “I’ll walk you home then.”

  Johnny walks me home more and more often, and he becomes my boyfriend because he is just tall enough to make me feel cute. He comes to visit me when I am alone in the apartment, but I am afraid. Not because he will kiss me or touch me or want me to touch him, but because of who I turn into whenever he comes over.