B0061QB04W EBOK (34 page)

I clutched my sister’s hand and looked at the angry welts. “Why
didn’t you tell him?” I asked Mago as I sat next to her on the couch.

“I was too embarrassed, Nena. You just don’t go telling men you’re on your period. Especially a father you haven’t seen in eight years!”

“But, but, he wouldn’t have hit you.”

Mago looked out the window. “It doesn’t matter,” she said.

“Of course it matters,” Carlos said. “And I can’t believe he hit
you
. I mean, you’re his favorite.”

On hearing that, Mago started to cry. I punched Carlos in the arm even though I was thinking the same thing myself. Mago was Papi’s “Negra,” after all.

When Mila came back with the sanitary napkins, Mago took one from the bag and gave it to me.

“Here, Nena. I know it isn’t your special one, I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay. It was just a napkin,” I told her. “This one will be just as special to me.” I put it in my drawer to save it for that day when I would become a little woman. I glanced at my father’s bedroom door and hoped that my rite of passage wouldn’t be as painful as my sister’s.

7

M
RS.
A
NDERSON ANNOUNCED
that the school nurse would be coming in shortly to check the students for hygiene problems. I was surprised at that. Everyone around me looked clean and healthy. All the students had nice clothes on, shoes that were practically new. Nobody was barefoot. No one looked as if they hadn’t bathed in days.
Why would we need to be inspected?
I wondered.

When the nurse came, we were asked to form a single file. When it was my turn, I was told to keep my head down while the nurse parted my hair with a wooden stick. When she was done inspecting me, she wrote down something on a paper and told me I couldn’t return to school until the lice were gone.

“Lice? What lice? No, you’re wrong. I can’t have lice!” I told her, shaking my head.

As my eyes began to water, I wanted to tell the nurse I had been in the U.S. long enough to know my hygiene problems were a thing of the past. Back in Mexico, I wanted to say, my head was a nesting ground for lice. My belly was home to worms. Three times a week, Abuelita Chinta would send us to the canal to bathe in its muddy waters, and I often went around barefoot. But here in El Otro Lado, I had tennis shoes. I showered almost every day, and the water that sprinkled down from the showerhead was so clean I could lift up my head and stick out my tongue and catch the water drops that tasted of rain. We no longer had to wash our clothes in the dirty canal water, nor scrape our knuckles raw from scrubbing our dresses on the washing stones. And we didn’t have to lay our wet clothes on tops of rocks until they were hard and stiffened by the sun, which left them smelling and feeling like cardboard.

No, here in the U.S. we went to the laundromat down the street, where we didn’t have to do anything but load the clothes and then sit on a bench and listen to the machine hum and vibrate as it did the work for us. Then off the clothes went into the dryer, where I then stood and watched them spin around and around in colorful circles. When the dryer beeped, I would open the door, and the clothes would tumble out into my arms, so soft and warm and smelling of flowers, sky, and sunshine. How amazing, I wanted to tell the nurse, that this is how clothes smelled even though they hadn’t been touched by a single ray of the sun!

I had never been so clean in my life, and yet here she was telling me I had lice.

How can there be lice in the U.S.?
I wanted to ask.
Did they sneak across the border, like me?

I walked home holding the nurse’s note, wondering what to do.
What will Papi do when he finds out I can’t return to class until he takes care of the lice problem? What if he finally decides to send me back to Mexico—never mind that he still hasn’t finished paying his debt—at learning that I am still the dirty girl he once left behind?

I spent the afternoon crying. I imagined Papi putting me on a bus to Mexico, me waving goodbye to Mago and Carlos from the window. And how could I ever hope to make Papi proud of me when I came home with news such as this?

When Papi got home, I forced myself to walk up to him and give him the note. I stared at the hand in which he held the note. One of his fingernails had dried blood in it, and I wondered if he had hit himself with a hammer. I wanted to touch his hand, ask him if it hurt. Instead, I wrapped my arms around myself, preparing for the beating I was sure would come. But I was ready to take as many beatings as he wanted to give me, as long as he didn’t send me away. “I’m sorry, Papi. I don’t know how I got them.”

“From other kids at school, I’m sure,” he said, hanging up his keys. “It’s not your fault.”

“You mean, you aren’t going to hit me?”

“Just be careful who you’re friends with, Chata. Maybe one of them gave you lice.” To my surprise, Papi wasn’t angry with me. Instead, he spent the rest of the afternoon parting my hair and looking for lice, removing the white nits very carefully so as not to pull out the hair strands. My father, the one who inflicted pain with his belt or his words, the one who had shown little tenderness toward us, who had hands hardened and callused from so many years of hard manual labor, was very gentle when delousing my hair. For the first time since I’d been in this country, Papi devoted a full two hours to me. Only me.

“You probably don’t remember this,” Papi said as he parted my hair with his fingers. “But when you were little, before I came here, you liked it when I gave you baths. You wouldn’t let anyone bathe you except me. When I came home for lunch, you would be standing by the door, and as soon as you saw me, you would come running out to me saying ‘Agua. Agua.’ Then I would take you to the patio and sit you on the washing stone next to the water tank to bathe you. Sometimes I didn’t even have time to eat my lunch. But you wouldn’t have it any other way.”

I closed my eyes and listened to his story about an event in my life I didn’t remember, but that I would treasure from that moment on.

8

E
VEN BEFORE BECOMING
a señorita, Mago had been changing in many ways. Throughout the past months I had seen the way she looked at boys whenever we accompanied Mila on her errands to the market, the laundromat, or other places. Papi was very clear about that, though. No boyfriends allowed. The month before, Mago had asked him to buy her a makeup set, but Papi was very clear on that also—she could wear only lipstick. He thought she was too old for Barbies but too young for makeup. Mago would say his backward thinking was very frustrating. “This is the United States,” she would say, “not Mexico.”

On Valentine’s Day, I returned to school free of lice—just in time to exchange cards with my classmates. I got lots of good candy. Mago
and Carlos didn’t really get anything because junior high students don’t exchange Valentine Day’s cards like they do in elementary school. Mago said, “We’re beyond that nonsense,” while popping one of my chocolate hearts into her mouth. I told her that was too bad, and I took away my goodies. Then I went to play with my dolls.

It wasn’t much fun playing alone. I begged Mago to come play with me. She wasn’t as interested in my Barbie as she had been just two months before, which made me sad because that was the only thing Mago had envied me for. Usually, it was me doing the envying. After I pestered her relentlessly, she finally put her notebook down and came over to me.

“Fine, I’ll play with you,” she said. She picked up Barbie and Ken and took off their clothes. Although I didn’t know much about sex, back in Mexico I had seen enough dogs, and sometimes donkeys or pigs, doing what Mago was making Barbie and Ken do.

“What kind of game is that?” I said, grabbing my dolls from her. “You’re such a marrana,” I said.

She went back to her notebook where she was writing a letter to Mami, Betty, and Abuelita Chinta.

Mago had been writing Mami letters once a month, and she would send them to Abuelita Chinta’s shack. In the letter, we always included photographs we would take with Papi’s Polaroid camera. There were pictures of us wearing our new clothes from Kmart, of Carlos riding the used bicycle Papi bought him, of us playing baseball in the yard. We would take pictures of us posing on Papi’s red Mustang, of us celebrating holidays like Halloween and Christmas. Always in the pictures, we were smiling, as if life was more than we could ever have hoped for in this perfect place.

Through the pictures, we wanted Mami to see we were doing great and that she shouldn’t worry. We would never tell her about the dark side of Papi, in part so that she wouldn’t worry about us, and also because we didn’t want to admit we now understood her fear when he had come after her with a gun. There was something about Papi that could frighten us to the core, gun or no gun. In the white area of the pictures, Mago would always write:
“To our beloved mother, whom we love and adore—despite everything. Your children, Mago, Carlos, and Reyna.”

Mami had never written back. But once in a while we would get a letter from Tía Emperatriz. This is how we learned that our cousin Élida had run off with a man in the neighborhood. Mago was actually quite jealous that Élida had found someone she loved and who loved her back. But half a year later, a letter from Tía Emperatriz said that Élida’s lover had brought her back to Abuela Evila’s house saying that Élida couldn’t have babies and was therefore useless as a woman and wife. It was the talk of the neighborhood, Tía Emperatriz said. In her most recent letter, we had learned that Tía María Félix had kept her promise and had finally brought Élida to the U.S. so that Abuela Evila’s neighbors would stop talking about her daughter.

Back then we hadn’t known where in Los Angeles Tía María Félix lived, and even if we had known, we probably wouldn’t have gone to visit Élida. We just didn’t have that kind of relationship with our cousin. My father wasn’t close to his sister, either, and he never talked about visiting Tía María Félix, and for years we knew nothing about her. It wasn’t until he was in stage four of his cancer that he and Tía María Félix were finally reunited. My aunt would visit him daily, and they would spend hours reminiscing about times gone by and lamenting their broken relationships with their children. While my siblings and I had been struggling to overcome the gap that was created between us and our father when he’d left us behind, Élida had been doing the same thing with her mother. And like us, they had also failed to repair their relationship.

Immigration took a toll on us all.

Mago finished her letter and gave it to Mila so that she could send it off the next time she went to the post office. At night, as we were lying in our sofa bed, Mago said she wanted us to play a game.

“What kind of game?” I asked.

“Mamá y Papá,” she said.

“How do you play that?”

“Here, I’ll show you.” Then she leaned over and started to touch me in a weird way. Her fingers slid down my body. In the darkness, I felt her lips on my neck. Then I felt something wet on my earlobe.