The Fresh New Face of Griselda

by Jennifer Torres

  Thwap, thwap. The door rattled when she knocked.

  “Geez, get out. Right now.”

  G.Z. for Griselda Zaragoza.

  Gee Zee, only the more Maribel said it, the more she slurred the initials, and the more it came out as Geez, so that she sounded annoyed every time she said my name.

  As if she were asking, Oh, geez, what now? Oh, geez, what were you thinking?

  As if she were rolling her eyes.

  As if she were tearing her hair out.

  Even when she had no reason to. Only that day, I guess, she kind of did.

  “Geez, come on. Open the door. I’m missing math, you know.” It was her first day of seventh grade. Mom had told her to look out for me, but she probably wasn’t expecting that Maribel would have to leave class to rescue me from a bathroom stall.

  Ms. Encinas interrupted. “Maybe you should take it a little easier on her, Maribel. First days can be tough for anyone.”

  “Geez, come out!”

  “Can’t,” I croaked.

  “What?”

  I cupped my hands around my mouth and yelled into the bathroom door, “I can’t!”

  “What do you mean, you can’t?”

  “It’s locked.”

  “So unlock it.”

  I held my breath. The faucet drip, drip, dripped, and finally, I admitted, “Don’t know how.”

  The first day of kindergarten was also the first time I had ever spent more than a few hours apart from my mom. All summer long, she had been preparing me to tie my shoelaces by myself, to punch a straw through a juice box by myself, to make friends by myself.

  But until that morning at recess, I had never been inside a bathroom stall by myself. It seemed easy enough, and it was—at first. I figured out how to lock the door behind me. But not how to get back out again. I didn’t know what to do and was too embarrassed to say so.

  Maribel groaned and the door shivered again as she hit her head against it.

  “Oh, Geez. Okay, fine. So just crawl under.”

  No way. I shook my head, even though Maribel couldn’t see me. The floor looked too dirty and damp, and I didn’t want to ruin my first-day-of-school dress.

  Suddenly, Maribel’s head appeared under the door. I yelped and jumped backward, nearly falling into the toilet. Seconds later, she had slithered into the stall and was standing with her hands on my shoulders.

  “Geez,” she said. “When are you going to stop being such a baby?”

  “Easy, Maribel,” Ms. Encinas warned.

  Maribel flipped open the lock and nudged the door open with her hip. I started to step out, but before I could, she closed and locked the door again.

  “Huh?”

  “Like this,” Maribel said, demonstrating. Flip open and nudge.

  The door swung open. She pulled it closed and locked it. “Try it.”

  Flip open and nudge.

  “Again.”

  I unlocked the door and pushed it open with my shoulder.

  “That’s it. You got it now?”

  I sniffed and nodded and swiped my hand across my eyes.

  When the two of us emerged for the last time, Maribel smoothed her skirt and checked her hair in the mirror, tucking a loose strand behind her ear. She stepped over to the sink, yanked two paper towels from the dispenser, and dampened them under the faucet.

  “Come on,” she said. “You’re fine.” She dabbed my face and straightened my headband.

  “I mean it, Geez. You’re fine,” she said again in a whisper, squeezing my hand. “I’m going back to class now.”

  Ms. Encinas patted my head.

  “Geez? Is that what your family calls you?” She shrugged. “Well, Griselda is an awfully big name for such a little girl, I suppose,” she said, taking my hand and leading me out of the bathroom. “Let’s get you back to kindergarten, Geez.”

  I kept expecting Maribel to complain to our parents about what a baby I had been, how she had to miss class because of me. But she never told them one single thing about it.

  CHAPTER TWO

  I have been very happy with my homes, but homes really are no more than the people who live in them.

  —NANCY REAGAN

  There are two ways back to the house, and all I want right now is for Maribel to choose the longer one—the one that won’t take us down West Mariposa Avenue, the street we used to live on. The street we don’t live on anymore. But Maribel is not the sort of person who wastes any time taking the scenic route, not without a good reason.

  “Didn’t Mom tell us to pick up some milk?” I ask, hoping to give her one.

  Maribel shakes her head. “What? No, she said she’d get some later tonight. She was going to stop at the grocery store anyway, remember?”

  We drive a few more blocks, and I try again.

  “Shouldn’t we get some gas, though? Mom’s going to be mad if you bring the car back empty.”

  “There’s still half a tank, and anyway it’s still my car.”

  I should have known better. Bringing up the car was a mistake. There’s no coming back from, not with someone as stubborn as Maribel. All I can do now is tell her the truth. “I don’t want to see the house, Maribel. Can we go the other way? Please?”

  “Geez,” she says, pulling down her sun visor. “You have to get over it.”

  Minutes later, like I knew she would, my sister turns onto West Mariposa Avenue. I don’t slap my hands over my eyes, but I want to. Instead, I open the Alma rewards booklet again, not really focusing on the pictures, just concentrating hard on not noticing the houses on either side of the ash-lined street. Especially one house. My house. The house that used to be mine, I mean, from the time I was born until last spring when we lost it.

  I know what that means, of course—that we had to move out of our house because Dad’s landscaping company went out of business and my parents couldn’t make the payments anymore. But lost still seems like the wrong word. It doesn’t make sense that a house can be lost when it’s still right there at the very edge of my vision.

  “It’s weird,” Maribel says quietly, after making the last turn on our way to Nana’s house, where we’ve been living for the past four months. “How it looks exactly the same, you know? From the outside, I mean. All your roses are still there and everything. Looks like someone’s taking care of them.”

  I nod but don’t lift my eyes just yet, worried I might accidentally look into the rearview mirror and see my old garden. Seeing it makes me feel the way I did that time a soccer ball flew into my stomach during PE. Stunned and gasping. I know the house isn’t ours anymore. But I only feel that when I see it.

  I turn to the back cover of the prize booklet. The Spirit of Success! it screams in bold, swooping, purple letters.

  Are you between the ages of 12 and 19? Join Alma as a Junior Associate and help us celebrate the Fairytale Collection, our new makeup line especially for teens and tweens. Just sell 500 tubes of Fairytale Collection lip gloss, and you could win $5,000, plus the chance to become the Fresh New Face of Alma Cosmetics!

  Under the words is a picture of a girl—older than me but younger than Maribel—holding a bouquet of purple balloons, enough balloons to lift her off the ground and carry her far, far away. From the giggling look on her face, I’d guess she had been skipping along, not a worry in the world, when she found the balloons just floating there. And the longer I stare, the more I think she looks exactly like the kind of girl who is always finding stuff and never, ever losing it.

  I set the booklet on top of the shoebox and fold my hands. It doesn’t matter what Maribel says. I know our house can’t possibly look the same anymore, not without us living in it.

  Mom and Dad had said things would be back to normal soon. That we would live with Nana only long enough for Maribel to finish high school. That we’d find a place of our own before I started sixth grade. I believed them. Like I always did.

  But Maribel’s graduation was months ago, and unless we moved into a new house ton
ight, my parents weren’t going to be able to keep their promise. With Dad living six hours away, trying to find a new job in Los Angeles, it seems even more unlikely that they ever will.

  Maribel pulls into Nana’s driveway and parks next to an overgrown riot of a camellia bush. Brittle brown petals from last year’s flowers flutter down onto the windshield. This season’s buds are already fattening on the branches, about to explode into pink blossoms.

  Convincing Nana to prune the bush back was impossible, but I had tried to explain to her about raking up the dead blooms at least. How they could spread petal blight if you don’t.

  But she didn’t care if there were brown spots on her flowers.

  “That tree isn’t entering any beauty pageants,” she had said. “It’ll do just fine on its own. Always has.”

  That’s exactly how she feels about everything else in her garden. If you can even call it one. A garden means order. A garden is a long-term plan. Nana’s yard is random and wild. She buries all her kitchen scraps out there: eggshells and apple cores, coffee grounds and carrot tops.

  “No, no, no,” she said once, when she caught me about to throw away a banana peel. “Save it for the garden.”

  She says all that trash is good for the soil, and every so often, some of what she buries grows. Garlic shoots sprout near a pineapple crown. Potatoes have taken root next to a leafy head of celery. And a patch of mint is slowly devouring the whole yard, inches at a time. Some mornings the smell of it, cool and clean, drifts in through the kitchen window.

  Nana’s always telling us not to stand too still out there, that the mint might swallow us, too. It’s a silly joke, and I’ve heard it about a million times. But when I look at that mint patch, growing thicker and greener, the idea doesn’t exactly seem impossible.

  Yet, even though it’s nothing like the one Dad and I had planted at our old house, Nana’s garden wouldn’t bother me so much if it weren’t for the toilets.

  There are six of them: two on the front porch, the rest standing in a row along the fence. Some people choose flower beds or flower pots. But Nana chose toilets. Most of them started off inside her house, hauled outside only when they cracked or she couldn’t scrub the porcelain clean anymore.

  One came from a neighbor. “You’re not throwing that away, are you?” Nana had yelled across the street when she saw them carrying it to the curb for the garbage collector.

  She hates to see a thing go to waste if it might be even a little useful, and to her, almost anything is at least a little useful—whether it’s a brown banana peel or an old toilet.

  So the neighbors brought theirs to Nana’s garden, where she filled it with soil and geraniums.

  I can’t stand those toilets.

  But I can’t ignore Nana’s geraniums, wilting under the scorching sun. They can’t help where they’re planted, after all. I set down the shoebox and lip gloss and unwind the hose while Maribel gathers her makeup bag, her blazer, and all those Alma booklets and brochures.

  Next door, Logan Johnson is lifting grocery bags out of his mom’s trunk. He’s in my grade at school, and I have known him since always.

  “Hey,” he says, saluting me with a gallon-size jug of milk. Logan has curly, blackish-brown hair that’s always falling over his forehead and into his eyes.

  “Hey,” I say, lifting the hose nozzle back at him.

  He blows a puff of air up at his forehead, and I can see his face clearly for just a moment before his hair flutters down again. “Ready for school tomorrow? Your mom said you have Ms. Ramos, too.”

  I nod. I used to spend almost every weekend with Logan—playing handball against his garage door, or practicing free throws, or feeding Magdalena, his pet garter snake—when we went to Nana’s house for Sunday breakfast. But ever since we moved in with her, I hardly ever see Logan except for times like this, when we just sort of run into each other.

  “We could walk to school together?” He says it like a question.

  Maribel whistles, just loud enough to send a warm flush across my cheeks.

  I try to ignore her. “Maybe. But my mom might drive me.” She usually does on the first day of school. One of her little traditions.

  Logan shrugs. “Okay. See you there.” He reaches into the back of his mom’s car to grab another shopping bag.

  “We could walk to school together,” Maribel repeats in singsong on her way up Nana’s front porch steps. “How cute. Good thing I gave you that lip gloss, huh?”

  I look over my shoulder to see if Logan has heard her. His back is to us, on his way inside with the groceries.

  I twist the faucet, aim the hose at Maribel’s sandals, put my thumb over the nozzle, and spray.

  “Geez!” Maribel screeches, hopping on one foot to avoid the rush of water. Then she stops, squeezes her eyes shut, and breathes out slowly. She shakes a few droplets off her hand and steps through Nana’s door as if nothing has touched her at all.

  Behind me, I hear Logan’s laugh and then the clatter of his screen door closing. After I water the geraniums and pull a few dead flowers off the old camellia, I coil the hose, dry my hands on my shorts, and gather my things to go inside, too.

  Mom is sitting at Nana’s kitchen table reading a magazine. She puts it down when I come in and looks up with big, hopeful eyes. “There she is.” She sees the shoebox. “Soooo… let’s see! What’d we pick out?”

  Pick doesn’t seem like the right word. The shoe store didn’t have much of a selection, at least not in our price range. I shouldn’t complain. I know that. But I don’t feel like showing off the shoes for Mom as if Maribel and I had just come home from a shopping spree.

  “Just shoes,” I mumble.

  “Oh.” She droops like the geraniums.

  “I mean, they’re fine. Sorry. I’m just… sweaty. And tired. Thanks for the money. Do you want the change back?” There isn’t much of it.

  Mom smiles a sad half-smile and shakes her head, so I take the coins with me to the bedroom I’m sharing with Maribel.

  The room had been Mom’s when she was growing up—hers and Tía Carla’s. I almost can’t believe Mom was the one who had chosen the daisy-chain wallpaper or the lavender curtains. That she had picked out the matching lamps, with their polka-dot shades and white ruffle trim. What’s not so hard to believe is that Nana hadn’t changed a thing after all these years.

  I leave the lip gloss on my nightstand with the school supplies Mom and I bought at the dollar store last week and drop the shoebox against the wall, next to my open suitcase.

  As soon as we moved in, Maribel had decorated her side of the room with photos of her friends and pictures she’d clipped from magazines. The dried-up corsage from her junior prom rests on top of the desk next to her graduation tassel and the twinkling tiara from her quinceañera.

  She had left two dresser drawers and half the closet empty for me to put away my clothes. But since Mom and Dad had promised we wouldn’t be staying very long, I never unpacked.

  Then, the longer we stayed, the sooner I thought we must be leaving. Now I can’t help feeling as though if I finally do unpack, it means we’ve given up. Nana’s house is really where we live now, not just a place we’re staying for a little while. So every week, after Maribel and I do the laundry, I fold my clothes and put them right back in my suitcase, ready to move to our real home whenever my parents figure out where that is.

  Most of my stuff—my books and music, my nail polish and gardening gloves, the rainbow tangle of thread that my best friend, Sophia Arong, and I used to braid and knot into bracelets—is still packed away in cardboard boxes, somewhere in Nana’s garage.

  Besides my clothes, all I’ve brought inside from my old bedroom is my collection of First Ladies of the United States teacups. I wasn’t sure they’d be safe in the garage. So, cushioned in bubble wrap and crumpled-up tissue paper, they’re packed inside a box and stashed under the bed. All except for one of them. That one, the first in my collection, sits on the windowsill, the onl
y clue that this room is mine.

  I’ve had that cup since Nana and I found it at a yard sale when I was four. It’s the color of the heavy cream Mom pours into her coffee, and I remember thinking when Nana bought it for me that, even with its chipped gold rim, it was the most elegant thing I had ever held. Like something a princess would sip tea out of.

  On one side of the cup, in an oval frame, is a portrait of a woman who looks as if she could be a queen. Or at least she did to me, when I was four. Her hair is thick and cinnamon brown like mine, but it’s teased into a cloud around her face. She wears diamond earrings and a golden dress with sleeves that fall over her shoulders like lily petals. Her smile is warm but faraway.

  On the walk home, Nana had told me that woman’s name was Lady Bird Johnson and her husband was the thirty-sixth president of the United States.

  From then on, every yard sale with Nana became a quest. We never knew where—or when—the next piece in my collection might turn up. We found Nancy Reagan in a bargain bin full of souvenir ashtrays and coffee mugs. Abigail Adams buried under a pile of tea towels and oven mitts. My point is, sometimes you have to search.

  I have eighteen teacups so far. Lady Bird Johnson is not the most valuable in my collection, or even the prettiest. But it reminds me of home, of that feeling I used to have with Nana, that beautiful things could be anywhere—hiding where I least expected, waiting to be discovered.

  I take the teacup and spill the change from the shoe store inside. Then I hold it between my palms for a few moments before putting it back on the windowsill for the night.

  CHAPTER THREE

  I am who I am, and I will continue to be.

  —PAT NIXON

  Sunlight peeks through the gap between Mom’s lavender curtains. It glints off the gold rim of my Lady Bird Johnson teacup. The first day of sixth grade. I had woken up on my own, without the alarm clock, like I always do on days when something important is going to happen. But I don’t get out of bed right away. Serving us breakfast in bed on the first day of school is another one of Mom’s traditions—although Maribel always says it wasn’t a tradition until I started school.