Betty, Shorty and everyone else became obsessed with bras right after the PE coach showed us that video about our bodies changing. For the second year in a row, we watched a mother and daughter talking about “the changes” while they made pancakes.
I started feeling like one of those bugs inside a jumping bean. There was nowhere to run. One or two girls started to fidget in their seats and said they actually talked to their mothers about that. That same day, school turned into “Everything you ever wondered about—shhh you can’t say those things out loud!” as told by the sixth grade girls.
I didn’t tell any of them about my bra or that insane itch under my shirt. I didn’t tell the cholas that the summer before, my amá came home from her day of paying bills with a present for me.
“I got a surprise for you,” she said. “Son copas.” Cups? I thought she was talking about a tea set. And, even though I was already eleven by then, I was excited. Only, when Amá opened her bag, she pulled out a bra. I never let on what I really expected. Only Nora knew.
After the thing with the “cups,” I told Amá to give all of my tight-fitting T-shirts to my younger cousins. I only wore baggy T-shirts and jeans. I wasn’t coming out of my shirts or anything, but I was more visible than girls like Nora and Camila. I hated thinking that someone might notice.
It made me remember this girl I knew when I was four named Heather. Heather was four too. She came from Nebraska and the dry heat just about did her in. The days the sun shone so bright the birds would fall from the sky, Heather ripped off her shirt and ran around like the boys. She wasn’t embarrassed. When I told my mom, she got mad at me and told me I couldn’t play with Heather anymore.
“Only cochinas take off their shirts! Pigs!” she said.
When Betty and Shorty came up to me in the PE line and asked about my bra, I hugged my arms tight around my chest. I wondered what would happen if I just took a deep breath, acted like I was looking for something in my backpack and never looked up. I could count my pens and pencils and ignore them.
Their questions embarrassed me, and I wasn’t even scared that Shorty might turn red and ask me to meet her in the alley after school to fight me for not answering.
Of course, I never turned the other way, and Shorty never beat me up. I was nice to anyone who talked to me. That’s the way my dad had taught us to be. But it was getting harder and harder to cover up what I was hiding.
The day my sister invited me to go swimming with her at Armijo Park’s heated pool, I almost said no. I was terrified of walking around in a wet swimsuit. Amá and Apá wouldn’t let Silvia go by herself, so she begged. I said yes, only because I wanted her to like me like when we were kids.
I just had to find something to wear that wouldn’t reveal my secrets. I tried on a bunch of things and left a mess of clothes all over my bed. I chose a dark shirt and shorts. I planned to keep them on over my swimsuit even when I jumped in the water.
On Saturday morning, Apá gave us a ride to the swimming pool. Camila was there with Brenda. She wore the same bathing suit I wore, but no cover-up. She wasn’t the type to hide. Besides, her body hadn’t changed. She pretended not to see me, and I did the same.
I stayed close to Silvia’s side when we got in the pool. Two junior-high boys from Silvia’s school swam up next to us. I recognized one of them from the Dairy Queen. He started talking to Silvia. I’d never seen the other one before.
“Are you one of Silvia’s new friends?” the other boy asked while he treaded water next to me. He had curly hair, and his green eyes stared straight at my chest.
“No.”
“The water is deep over there. You want to swim with me?” He smiled with all his teeth.
“No. I have to go,” I told him. I didn’t stick around long enough to hear him say anything else. I swam even closer to Silvia. She was leaning up against the edge, waiting for the boy from the Dairy Queen to make his move. I nudged her.
“What’s wrong? What’s up with you?” Silvia asked.
“He was looking at me funny,” I told her, and pointed at the green-eyed boy. Silvia turned and told him that he was a pervert and that he better leave me alone, or she was going to tell Angel Jr.
I knew she didn’t want me getting down and wanting to go home. She’d have to go home too. The boy from the Dairy Queen went over to talk to his friend and came back telling us how sorry he was that his buddy was such a goober. He flirted with Silvia a little, and I could tell she forgot all about the friend.
“Just ignore him,” she said.
We swam until they closed the pool. We didn’t bother taking off our wet clothes. We just pulled our sweats over them. It was getting dark so we hurried home. I opened the front door and walked straight up the stairs, leaving invisible chlorine footprints behind.
I stood in front of the mirror. My clothes were still damp and clung even after the walk home. The PE coach told us that growing out of our bodies wouldn’t be so bad. She lied. For me it was hard enough being the odd one out without changing bodies at the same time. I was some sort of ugly caterpillar turning into an even uglier moth. I prayed quietly for my chest to stop mutating, at least until Camila’s started doing something. Everyone looked up to her even if she’d stolen my best friend. Camila was built like a tamal, and maybe secretly prayed her own “shhhhs” would grow in.
When Camila finally got a bra, she made sure she was the first one in line for Betty and Shorty’s inspection. She told the story over and over again about her sister taking her to Penney’s. She ran off the list of how many colors and kinds of “brassieres” they bought. It was practically on the morning announcements. Everyone unlucky enough to listen quickly became desperate to move on to the next thing.
By the end of two weeks, even she and her clones were bored with it. Then the talking about the other things that happen only to girls got louder.
CHAPTER
19
Ketchup
Even though my mom had gotten me those “cups,” we didn’t talk about any of those things at home—bodies, bras, or boys. We just avoided them, even when they were looking us straight in the face, waiting.
Take the first time I really paid attention to one of those commercials for lady products on TV. I imagined it was for something good. The women in the ad wore white robes and danced to flute music as if they hadn’t a worry in the world. We sat on the living room couch watching it, and I asked Silvia and my cousin Mary why the women seemed so happy. They looked at each other and laughed. It wasn’t a cruel laugh. It was uncomfortable like when someone tells a joke that’s not funny.
They laughed because they didn’t know what else to do. They didn’t explain to me what they were selling in the commercial. All they said was, “You don’t need to think about that yet.” So I never asked again. When I finally did find out, it was at school when we saw the video in PE class.
Not too long after that, I found Clark sitting in front of the bathroom sink with his dwarf back to the door. His skinny little head was inspecting something. The cabinet under the sink was wide open, and there was a blue cardboard box on the linoleum tile whose label I couldn’t make out.
I snuck up close enough to lean over him and peek. Like a good spy, I held my breath, and my feet almost floated above the ground as I tiptoed. He didn’t see or hear me.
There was a pile of pink on the floor. He held a soft pink plastic pouch in his hand. He unwrapped it, making all that noise that plastic makes. He brought it up to his nose. He looked it over and sniffed at it.
“Silvia!” I yelled to my sister, breaking him out of his spell. He gave me an angry look but didn’t stop what he was doing.
Silvia walked in, and her jaw dropped open as if that would make the words come out. I just shook my head from side to side. She looked at me as if asking why I hadn’t stopped him from making that huge mess in the first place.
“I just got here,” I said. She reached over him and snatched the blue box from him.
&nb
sp; “Hey! That’s mine,” he screamed.
“It’s not yours!” she screamed back.
“Yes. I found them.”
“No. They’re not yours.”
“Well, are they yours?” he asked her mockingly.
The blood rushed to her face, and she took a deep breath. “They’re our abuelita’s diapers. Stop playing with them,” she hissed.
She returned a few unopened pink pouches to their place. She picked up the rest and chucked them into the trash can. She closed the box up and pushed it far back into the cabinet. She closed the cabinet door.
That’s when Amá walked in to see what all the yelling was about. Amá saw what Clark had in his hand. I pointed to the trash can, so she could see there was more where that came from. She inspected the rest of the bathroom.
“Did you open them all?” Amá asked.
“Yes. The other day you told me they were cookies,” he answered. “I was looking for the cookies.”
“Since when do we hide cookies in the bathroom? Do we also keep milk in the toilet tank? Boy, you’ll believe anything,” Silvia said.
“She told me they’re diapers. Are these really diapers?” he asked Amá, ignoring Silvia. He still held the one pad. He quickly dropped it on the floor as if someone had peed on it.
“No, those are napkins,” Amá told him honestly. She meant sanitary napkins. That’s what they’d called them in her time.
Clark didn’t know what Amá meant by napkins. I pictured him, age sixteen. He’s sitting at the movies with a girl on their first date. He eats a movie-theater hotdog and fries. Ketchup dribbles down his chin. He pulls a maxi pad out of her purse and wipes the ketchup off his face.
I only hoped he’d watch that video at school before anything like that happened.
“Just wait until I tell your father,” Amá said.
Apá’d been working on the new house. No one told him anything though, probably because we were all too embarrassed. I don’t know what my dad would have done, but I turned red just thinking about it.
I must’ve been walking home from school when “it” finally happened to me. I got home, and there it was. I didn’t tell anyone—not Amá, not my sister, not any of the cholas at school, and not the girl who had been my best friend.
I wondered if Nora had gotten it yet. Other girls wished for it to happen. Some of them changed when it did. They cared about different things. I hoped I hadn’t transformed in any way people could tell.
But just like I said nothing to anyone, no one said anything to me.
CHAPTER
20
The World
The morning of our Christmas party, the desk aisles doubled as fashion runways for the enemy girls to show off their holiday clothes. I rolled my eyes, followed the boys, and walked the other way. Ms. Hamlin had cleared a space for all the goodies in our snack potluck. I placed my three-liter orange soda on the window shelf with the other drinks, cookies, cupcakes, chips, hot sauce, dips, and veggie sticks.
Our plan for the day was: board buses to attend high school Christmas program, return to our own school for lunch, have class Christmas party, open class gifts, and finally, go home for two weeks.
The Christmas program was even better than the year before. The high school dance squad moved to “I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus” in really cute elf costumes. All the girls in our class wished they could dance like that. Camila said she wished she was an elf, and one of the boys told her she already had the ears for it. Camila took it as a compliment and giggled.
At lunch, we ate thin slices of pizza. It was just enough. It left plenty of room for the party food. Ms. Hamlin had set up everything by the time we returned to class. We attacked the shelf as if we hadn’t eaten anything at all. I sat in the corner with a plate of potato chips, and kept to myself.
Some of the boys dared Roy to drink a bottle of Tabasco sauce while Ms. Hamlin wasn’t looking. He chugged half, then ran to the bathroom with the emergency pass hanging from the chalkboard. Would he be okay? Would he have to go to the hospital and get his stomach pumped? And maybe he should go home early. Everyone wondered these things in a nervous whisper. But Roy came back and told Ms. Hamlin he just had a little belly ache. It was nothing. He’d be okay.
An hour before school let out, Ms. Hamlin opened the supply closet, unveiling a pile of presents carefully wrapped in baby blue butcher paper and homemade ribbons. Most classes had gift exchanges for Christmas. Ms. Hamlin, coming from a different place and having different ideas, did things differently. She asked our parents for five dollars each. She posted a list on the bulletin board that included: books, fashion school accessories, posters, and basically anything from the book fair catalog that cost about that much. She then asked us to write letters in essay form telling her about our top three choices and why. I picked all books. One was fun reading, one was for learning, and one was a journal.
Some kids guessed what they were getting by the shape of the butcher paper. I knew mine was a book, but I just didn’t know which one.
On the count of three, we tore away the butcher paper. The boys found things like trading cards, wristbands, magnifying glasses, and insect jars. The girls found things like posters of their favorite pop stars, calendars of puppies, charm bracelets, and bead kits.
That is, except for me. Beneath the blue paper in my hands lay A Night Alone in the Universe. I knew it was the book Nora would’ve picked if she’d had the courage. It was the type of book that made science okay, but still not good enough for a clone.
At home, I showed Apá what I got for a gift. They didn’t do gifts at the junior high so the twins had nothing to show. Clark had gotten a box of chocolates and already eaten half.
That night, after I read some of my book, I slept cradled by a universe that was large and mostly empty all around me. It made me feel even smaller and more alone. But maybe that wasn’t my world. Maybe what lay beyond those four walls didn’t matter.
My family was a solar system. My father was the sun, and the rest of us were planets rotating all around him. This world of mine was small, but it was the only thing that fit or maybe it was the only one I fit in.
CHAPTER
21
Special
What do you want from Santa?” Apá asked. Christmas was a few days away. I wasn’t sure what I wanted. I wanted something fun, but I was growing up. I waited for everyone else to say first. Clark asked for a baseball mitt. Angel Jr. asked for a videogame joystick. Sly Silvia whispered hers in Apá’s ear.
I told him, “I don’t know. What do you want?”
“Love,” he said. Love. That was all. That was easy enough. I loved him every minute of every day. No, every second of every minute of every day.
On the night of the twenty-third, Silvia and Apá snuck away to Super Wal-Mart. They came back with a giant turkey and several mysterious bags. They put the turkey in a sink full of ice to thaw and stashed the bags in my parents’ bedroom.
That night, Silvia didn’t drown me out of her sleep with her headphones. The gravel of her nighttime voice found me and whispered secrets in the dark. “I know what everyone is getting for Christmas,” she said. “Amá is getting hoop earrings. Clark is getting a baseball mitt. Angel Jr. is getting a videogame controller. I’m getting a giant stuffed animal to sit on my bed. Everyone is getting exactly what they asked for, but you didn’t ask for anything.”
I listened for more, but it was quiet. Silvia had drifted asleep or she wanted me to think I wasn’t getting anything. I knew Apá would get me something special. I didn’t need to tell him anything. I’d love whatever it was. These were the thoughts unraveling inside my head. I got up and walked to my parents’ room. I slowly turned the knob, but the door wouldn’t budge.
“We’re wrapping presents!” Apá hollered from the other side.
The following morning, Amá took advantage of the last few hours of holiday shopping and picked up a present for Apá. She spent the rest of the day at home with u
s.
After the sun set, Apá turned the space heater up to its hottest setting. It got colder. He described the fireplace in the new house to Amá as he did so. “You’ll see. I ordered some really nice grey marble tiles for the trim. This time next year we’re going to be sitting in front of a fire.”
We ate dinner late. Clark fell asleep. It was just as well because he was the type to try and wait up for Santa. After dinner, Amá and Apá told stories about their Christmases growing up.
Amá told us how they didn’t eat turkey for Christmas dinner like us. They ate spicy pork tamales instead. She and my aunts snuggled in blankets in front of my grandma’s cast iron stove late into the night waiting for my abuelita to stir the leftover corn mix into homemade champurrado. It was a thick and delicious hot chocolate drink.
“The champurrado from Juarez is mud in comparison,” she told us. “Warm blankets and champurrado was our Christmas. There were no presents. You kids have it good. Our presents didn’t come until El Día de los Reyes Magos. The Three Kings came two weeks later and brought us socks and oranges. Those little things were luxuries. I waited for them all year long.”
“You should make us champurrado,” Angel Jr. said. We burst into laughter. Our bellies were full, and he was still asking for food.
Apá told us about the warm Christmases in California. “We decorated palm trees,” he joked and didn’t say much else. He got up and went outside to smoke a cigarette. Amá didn’t stop him. She told us that thinking of his sister in California sometimes made him sad because she was his only other family, and she was so far away.
My aunt had been too young to be a mother and too old to be a sister when their parents died, but he had followed her to California anyway. They had become close back then. He only saw her once a year now. It was too expensive and crowded in the truck for us all to visit, so Apá and Angel Jr. traveled on the Conejo Express. The rest of the year, Apá settled for a phone call.
The Smell of Old Lady Perfume Page 6
