B0061QB04W EBOK (52 page)

To my surprise, when I went to drop off Betty, my mother offered to take me in. She said, “He’s gotten what he deserved. I’ll never forget all the beatings he gave me when we were married.” That was the first time my mother and I had ever talked about the abuse we had both suffered at the hands of my father. It made me feel closer to her than I had in years. I decided to take her up on her offer because I knew that I couldn’t live with Mila and my father anymore. Mila had returned from the hospital black and blue from head to toe. It shamed me to look at her.

I took my few belongings to my mother’s tiny apartment. That night, I slept on the floor, wedged against the dining table. My mother, Betty, and Leonardo slept sideways on the bed, with their feet hanging over the edge. Rey slept on the floor, right against the entertainment center. If I reached out, I could touch him. That’s how small the room was.

By the second night, I knew I could not stay there. My last class at PCC ended at 7:00
PM.
It took me nearly three hours on the bus to get from Pasadena to downtown L.A. It was almost ten when I found myself walking alone down Seventh Street. Homeless people, reeking of pee, littered the sidewalks, and I had to step over them. Drunks pushed their shopping carts. Prostitutes stood on corners. Men drove by and whistled at me. I walked so fast my side was hurting, my legs were burning. When a group of men turned the corner and started to head toward me, I took off running and didn’t look back.

“Why don’t you drop that last class?” my mother said when I got to her house. I tried to catch my breath, but it was coming in gasps. I shook
my head, horrified at her suggestion.
That’s how it starts
, I wanted to tell her.
Once you drop one class, it makes it easier to drop them all.

I went to see Diana during her office hours. I needed someone to talk to and the only person I could trust was her. I knocked on Diana’s office door, and for a moment I thought about turning around and leaving.
Why should I burden someone else with my worries?
As soon as she opened the door and said “Reynita!” in that high-pitched voice of hers, I felt that I had made the right decision to come and see her.

I told Diana about what had happened over the weekend and the past three days I’d been at my mother’s. I couldn’t stop the tears from coming even though I had told myself not to cry, that Diana didn’t need my drama. I didn’t want to burden her with my problems. Diana grabbed my hand and said, “Reynita, you can’t be in that situation any longer. You have to think about school, that’s all you should worry about.” We were quiet after that, and I wiped the tears from my eyes. How could I not worry? How could I escape all of this? I had nowhere to go.

“Would you like to come stay at my house?” Diana asked.

“What?” I asked, rubbing my eyes.

“I live across the street in a house owned by PCC, and it’s got three bedrooms.”

“But Diana, I don’t want to trouble you. I just couldn’t—” Then I stopped myself, took a deep breath and mustered up the nerve to say what I really wanted to say. “Yes, I’ll come live with you, Diana.”

“From now on, Reynita, my home will be your home,” she said.

Diana was originally from the Midwest. She’d come out to Los Angeles to teach at UCLA. Later, she had left her job to get a PhD and became a self-supporting student. She had no family in Los Angeles and she had forged her way alone. She was thirty-nine when I came to live with her. I didn’t know then that Diana had seen in me a resemblance to herself, a young woman trying to find her way in this big city, all alone, but with a huge desire to accomplish her goals. It was that, and especially the thought of me walking the dark, dangerous
streets of Skid Row if I stayed at my mother’s, that had made Diana want to take me in.

At first, it was awkward for me to be in Diana’s house. My instinct was to lock myself up in the guest room, and keep out of her way, giving her as little trouble as possible. At my father’s house, I had learned to be invisible.

But a few days later Diana knocked on the door. She poked her head into the room and asked me if I wanted to join her in the living room. Since I didn’t want her to mistake my survival skills for ungratefulness, I accepted her invitation.

By then, Mila had dropped the charges, and my father had come home. They told me I could return, but I knew that I could not. Something told me things were only going to get worse between them. I left them to fight their own battles. I was glad my father was not in trouble with the law, but at the same time, I was disappointed in Mila for dropping the charges and staying. I thought she was a different kind of woman.

So I found myself sitting in the living room in the safety of Diana’s house, and it was a rare feeling to be out in the living room and not be afraid that someone would yell at me, beat me, or put me down. Diana graded papers, and I did my homework while we listened to melancholy Greek music. I didn’t understand the words, but the rhythm reminded me of the songs Tía Emperatriz liked to listen to.

Diana wasn’t married and didn’t have children, but she had four small dogs who kept her company. The third bedroom had been converted into a library, and she had cases and cases full of books, so many books that some of them spilled into the living room. I had never been in a house that had books. I thought I was in Heaven. During a break from grading she went into that room and came back with a book. She handed it to me and said, “Here, have you read this?”

I took the book from her and read the title,
The House on Mango Street
. I shook my head. I had never even heard of Sandra Cisneros.

“Reynita, you have to read this book. It’s wonderful.”

I grabbed the book and found a comfortable spot on the couch, where I read
The House on Mango Street
while Diana kept grading papers. It’s difficult to describe the impact the book had on me. It
was absolutely beautiful, the poetic language, the beautiful images, the way the words flowed together. But there was more to the book than Cisneros’s writing talent that made me love it. When I got to the chapter titled “Sally,” I broke down. I shook with an intense sadness and helplessness, and tears burned my eyes. That chapter was about a young girl who lived with an abusive father. Every day she rushed home after school and then she wasn’t allowed to go out.
Sally, do you sometimes wish you didn’t have to go home? Do you wish your feet would one day keep walking and take you far away from Mango Street, far away
… How did Cisneros know that was exactly how I had felt for many years? Just wishing my feet could keep walking, keep walking to another place, to a beautiful home where I was loved and wanted. I reread the chapter and with every word I felt that Cisneros was reaching out and talking to me. I felt a connection to this author, this person, whom I had never met. Suddenly, I wanted to meet her and ask her,
How did you know? How did you know this is how I felt?

Diana began to encourage me to write more. She also gave me other books written by Latina authors such as Isabel Allende, Julia Alvarez, and Laura Esquivel, Latina writers who were writing about the things I liked to write about. I began to understand why Diana said I should be a writer. I hadn’t been exposed to Chicano/Latino literature before. I had spent too many years reading the wrong kind of books, like
Sweet Valley High
and the Harlequin romance novels I got addicted to in high school, which Mila brought home in paper bags from Kingsley Manor because she knew I liked to read. It was a kind gesture for Mila to bring me those books the old ladies had discarded, but now I wished I hadn’t wasted all those years reading Harlequin romances when I could have been reading something more powerful, more meaningful. But I hadn’t even known, until then, that Chicano/Latino literature existed.

Those books, like
The House on Mango Street,
proved a revelation. There were people out there who understood, who experienced the things I was going through. Diana planted a seed inside me, and through those books, the seed soon began to grow.

She exposed me to things I had never been exposed to before. She
took me to Greek restaurants, teaching me about other cultures besides my own. She showed me foreign films that she liked, and sometimes in the evening we would sit in her backyard and plan my future while throwing balls for her dogs to catch.

One day, I heard about a writing competition from the Townsend Press Scholarship Program, and at Diana’s encouragement, I decided to enter. I rewrote the personal essay I had written in her class, and with her help, I polished it and made it as good as it could be. Out of a thousand entries, my essay was a winner. This time, the prize was money, one hundred dollars.

“You have to be a writer, Reynita,” Diana would say to me. “You have to transfer to a good school, Reynita.” Over and over she repeated this like a chant. “If Alvarez, Cisneros, and Viramontes can publish their stories, so can you, Reynita.”

Neither Diana nor I could have known that seventeen years later, I would find myself sitting in Sandra Cisneros’s dining room drinking champagne and eating carrot cake. That I would share a car ride with Julia Alvarez. That I would share the stage with Helena María Viramontes at a book reading.

I couldn’t have known what the future held for me. All I could do back then was to allow myself to dream.