Ordinary Girls

by Jaquira Díaz

  In Abuela’s kitchen, I forgot how much I missed climbing the flamboyanes in El Caserío, shooting hoops in the middle of the afternoon, how much I missed Eggy.

  Our white grandmother, Mercy, hated that my hair was a tangle of dry frizzy curls like my father’s. Bad hair, she called it.

  The summer I turned six, Mercy had decided I needed a haircut so that I’d look like a decent young lady and not a street urchin. “Look at you,” she said. “You look like you belong to a clan of bandoleros.” And she knew hair, because she’d gone to cosmetology school. She’d also gone to school to become a phlebotomist and an EKG technician. Mercy collected certifications but never had a job. She collected other things, too: unemployment, food stamps, disability, welfare, Social Security, settlements from multiple slip-and-fall lawsuits. She collected eviction notices, moving twelve times in ten years. She collected husbands and daughters—seven daughters and twice as many husbands. And when the husbands all left, she sent the daughters away to be raised by a sister in Patagonia, an aunt in El Caserío.

  The day before my sixth birthday, Mercy sat me down in my mother’s kitchen and spread her beauty supplies on the table: combs and hairclips and scissors and hand mirrors and a hair pick. She draped a towel over my shoulders the way I’d seen stylists do to Mami.

  Mercy spritzed my hair with water, and went to work with a fine-toothed comb. I flinched each time she yanked my hair, cried out as the comb got tangled in it. She smacked the top of my head with the comb, told me to stop flinching. It wasn’t her fault I took after my father. Mercy never wasted a chance to complain about “those people.” Her worst nightmare, she’d say, had been that her white daughters would end up marrying negros. So, of course, what had my mother done first chance she got? She married my father, un negro.

  Mercy started cutting, back to front. The strands tickled my neck as they fell. She talked and snipped, and I sat quietly so I wouldn’t get whacked again.

  “Your brother got lucky,” she said. “He turned out like me.” But no matter how much Anthony looked like Mercy, he was nothing like her. My brother adored Abuela, could not stand Mercy, refused to be around her, even if she was Mami’s mother.

  After she finished combing and cutting, Mercy pulled the towel from my shoulders with a dramatic swoop and announced that she was done. I looked down at all the brown hair at my feet. She took my chin in her hand, lifted my face, and got a good look at me. Then she handed me a mirror.

  My hair was gone. She’d cut off all my curls, leaving me with a close-cropped Afro like my father’s. I ran a hand over my head, shocked. I was hideous.

  It wasn’t the haircut, she said, chuckling, it was my bad hair.

  It would be that way my entire childhood. Your father’s fault. Your father and his black family. Your black grandmother. Your black uncle. I would never look like my mother, or like Mercy, and she would never let me forget it.

  At school, Anthony would laugh his ass off and introduce me to his friends: “Have you met my brother? His name is Jaquir-o!” It was the first time in my young life I actually wished I were more like a girl. Other girls wore their hair in ponytails or pigtails or braids, or let it fall loose so the wind could sweep it in front of their faces. Now I hated those girls. I thought about how good it would feel to cut off one of those pigtails, just one.

  Now they came up to me and asked, “Why do you look like a boy?” I tried to ignore them, until one day in the cafeteria, Tammy—who had long blond hair and perfect bangs—called me a boy. I punched her in the stomach and said the worst thing I could think to say, something I’d seen scrawled on the window of my yellow school bus: “Fuck you, bitch.”

  Over the next few years, Mercy would cut my hair off many times, as if trying to teach me something about who I was, who I was supposed to be: my grandmother was the first person to ever call me nigger.

  Abuela could usually sense when I was down. One afternoon, after a hard day at school, I got to her house and sat at the kitchen table silently, waiting for her to start dinner. When she saw that something was wrong, she called me over to help. She set a cutting board on the counter for me, then set a thick slice of cooking ham on it, and a small knife next to it.

  “Wash your hands first,” she said.

  I washed my hands, dried them on the towel she kept hanging from a hook by the sink. I wasn’t as tall as Abuela, so I had to get on my tiptoes to reach it.

  While Abuela set the caldero on the stove, I picked up the knife.

  “Be careful,” she said. “Just take it slow.”

  I got to work cutting, slowly, just like Abuela had taught me. She watched me closely as I cut the ham into cubes, sliding them over on the board as I worked, exactly like I’d seen her do so many times.

  Abuela poured a little oil into the caldero, and when it was hot enough, she set the heat to medium-low.

  “Can I do it?” I asked.

  She smiled. “Go ’head,” she said, and watched me as I picked up the cutting board, then used the knife to slide the cubed ham into the caldero, just like Abuela always did.

  We continued like this all afternoon, making arroz con gandules, reheating half of a pernil in the oven, shredding repollo, onions, and carrots for slaw, adding sugar, then drizzling it with olive oil and vinegar. Abuela let me do whatever I asked to do, trusting me with the heavy roasting pan as I slid it into the oven by myself, trusting me with the knife, letting me turn the rice when it was ready.

  “You like to cook?” Abuela asked me.

  I shrugged. “Yeah.”

  For Abuela, cooking had been like a balm. She had worked long hours as a nurse when Papi and Tío were kids, and hadn’t had much time with them. Often she’d come home late at night, with just enough time to fry them some chicken and potatoes, and that would have to do. Because Abuelo had died when they were little, she’d had to work long hours just to keep a roof over their heads. She felt she’d missed most of their childhoods—they’d spent so many hours sitting in the hospital waiting room, doing their homework, while they waited for her to get off. She was determined to make that up with us, her grandchildren, and cooking for us, making these elaborate meals, was one way she knew she could take care of us. Even when we were poor, as long as we had some rice and beans, Abuela could perform miracles in her kitchen.

  One night, after closing up the liquor store, Papi came home with us. Mami’s car had a flat, so we all climbed into Papi’s truck. My father drove, Mami in the middle with Alaina on her lap, and I sat in the passenger side, my head resting against the window.

  We pulled up to the big yellow house late that night, after all the other kids on the block had stopped riding their bikes on the street, after all the other families in the neighborhood had turned off their lights. Papi parked the truck in our driveway, and as soon as he got out, there was a man on him, pushing him toward the house, the driver’s side door wide open.

  Mami slid over, got out of the car, holding a sleeping Alaina against her, calling after him, “¡Cano! Dios mío. ¡Cano!” And on the passenger’s side, my door swung open, and a man’s hand was on my arm, pulling me out of the truck, my mother’s screaming piercing the night.

  My father and the man disappeared inside our house, my mother standing in front of me, my sister crying in her arms, a stranger’s hand gripping my forearm, pulling me close, and suddenly, finally, my mother was silent.

  Later, whenever Mami told this story, she would always start with the guns. A revolver, the man pressing it against the side of my head, another pistol aimed at my father, the stranger’s hand trembling with its weight. How she had tried to reason with them, how she kept saying, Don’t do this. You can’t do this. How outside, standing by the truck with Alaina in her arms, she kept looking at that gun pressed against my head, the man’s face, how he was just a kid, and where was my father, where, while this son of a bitch held his children at gunpoint, her babies, her little girls. How she had told my father this would happen, told him not to ke
ep all that money in the house. How this man, this stranger, knew her name, her children’s names. How they knew about the flat tire. They knew so much about our lives, she said.

  She would describe the man that grabbed me, held me in front of her. Look at your mother, he said. Don’t look at me.

  I don’t remember the gun, or how he didn’t let me go until we were inside the house, the phones ripped from the walls, my father’s guns pulled from his safe, deposited into a pillowcase. I remember my mother’s face. Alaina in her arms. How we stood in our parents’ bedroom, all of us watching as Papi handed over money, jewelry, car keys. How they walked us from room to room, opening drawers and turning over mattresses and searching closets. Don’t look at me.

  My mother kept looking, kept searching their faces, trying to figure out if she knew them, and if she did, how. And then his hand on my arm again, grabbing me as he said to my mother, Stop. Don’t look at me. Look at Jaqui. But she couldn’t stop looking, couldn’t be still, no matter how much they told her to stop, stop fidgeting, stop talking, stop. And afterward, they walked us into the guest bathroom, Mami and Papi and Alaina and me, all of us sitting cross-legged on the floor, and even after they had closed the door behind us, his hand still on my skin, his voice locked in that room with us, Don’t look at me, look at Jaqui. My name, in his voice, like a knife.

  On the television in my parents’ bedroom, Glinda the Good Witch of the North gifts Dorothy her sister’s ruby slippers. Later she will tell her, “Home is a place we all must find, child.”

  At sea, eyes on the North Star, the pirate girl decides: she’ll be a pirate, but never a thief.

  At sea, so far from home, she will lose her mother again and again.

  We were happy once. But after the big yellow house, we were runaways. We took only the essentials—toothbrushes, some school uniforms in my backpack, a fistful of Alaina’s clothes shoved in there with my own. Papi carried Alaina, Mami held my hand, and we took off into the night, walking a few houses down to a neighbor’s, where Papi made a phone call.

  And then we were back at Abuela’s house, all of us sitting at her dining table, my father on the phone again, and Alaina, brave, so brave, telling Abuela the whole story. “They opened all of our drawers and threw our clothes on the floor,” she said. “They had a gun,” she said.

  Abuela wrapped her arms around her, kissed the top of her head. “Se quedan aquí,” she said. “You can sleep in the second bedroom. As long as you want.” She gave Alaina another squeeze.

  Sitting next to Papi, my mother cradled herself, her eyes somewhere else, already gone. “I need the phone,” she told Papi.

  Before daybreak, my grandma Mercy would arrive at Abuela’s house. She would blame my father, demand that he take care of us, that he take care of this.

  Abuela would boil water for manzanilla, tell Anthony to sleep in her bed.

  We would stay in Abuela’s house for the next week, until Papi found us another place. We would never go back to the big yellow house.

  That year, we moved to Luquillo, to a small house on a hill a few minutes from the beach, where Alaina and I rode our bikes downhill to the candy store or the playground, or uphill to the Baptist church’s parking lot, where we threw breadcrumbs at pigeons then rolled back down, hands on our handlebars, feet in the air. Mami brought home a brown Pekingese she called Peggy, a tiny dog who was all bark and even more bite, who we all thought needed an exorcism.

  On Saturday mornings we hopped into Mami’s RX-7, and she peeled out of our driveway, flew down the expressway with the radio blasting, racing other cars, Peggy yapping in the back, Alaina and I holding on for our lives, both our bodies squeezed into the single passenger seat, nobody wearing a seatbelt.

  We woke up one morning to find the front door wide open, Peggy gone, no sign of her anywhere. We listened to Mami on the phone, telling a story about a man she’d been seeing in the backyard, in the front yard, waiting by her car, looking in our windows, and how he was probably the one who took Peggy. We rode our bikes all over the neighborhood, flagging down other kids to ask if they’d seen our crazy brown dog, rode to the park, the candy store, the church, looked down into ditches and potholes, calling her name into the night.

  That year, when our titis and primos came to visit from Miami, we climbed a ladder onto the roof, then sat on the edge watching our feet dangle, sucking on lollipops and singing Menudo songs, me and Alaina and Tanisha, Mami’s youngest sister. Tanisha was only four years older than me, and she was brown, with black hair as straight as Mami’s that she let grow all the way down to her butt. She had a wicked sense of humor and lived for breaking rules and I adored her. We climbed that ladder every day, took Popsicles and popcorn up there, took cans of Cola Champagne and Coco Rico up there, and when we were done with them, we crushed them and flung them off the roof like grenades. We watched the blue sky turn dark on that rooftop, day after day, and every night I asked when Papi would be coming home.

  That year, we moved from the house on the hill back to Fajardo, to an oceanfront high-rise apartment complex, Dos Marinas. From our balcony overlooking the marina, we watched dozens of moored boats, thieving gaviotas hovering above them, wings extended, their angled bodies tilting in flight, plunge-diving for prey.

  We spent entire days in the pool, our bodies browner than they’d ever been, our curls getting lighter, dried out by the sun and salt and chlorine. We morphed into mermaid creatures—part dolphin, part ordinary girl—fins and tails covered in scales, prepared to live out our lives in some underwater reef world, surfacing only to sun ourselves on the rocks along the sea wall.

  We begged and begged Mami for another dog, not a crazy one this time, promised we’d take care of her, but Mami would not budge. We locked ourselves in our room when Mami insisted that there was a man at the door, the same man she’d seen at our house in Luquillo. When Tanisha and Xiomara came over, we told them about the man, and we looked over our shoulders as we walked down the hallway to the elevator, as we walked from the pool to the tennis courts, from the tennis courts to the docks, as we played Ms. Pac-Man in the game room. On the swings, our feet bare, me and Tanisha and Alaina kicking up sand, we listened to Mami telling Titi Xiomara about Papi’s new life, his new penthouse apartment, his new girlfriend, the divorce papers, and instead of asking questions, we swung higher, wind in our faces, bodies flying flying flying through the air.

  Titi Xiomara was a year younger than Mami, but she knew something about love. She had been married to our uncle Junior since she was seventeen.

  “Forget him,” Xiomara told Mami. “You have your whole life ahead of you, and as long as he keeps taking care of the kids, you’ll be okay. Enjoy your life!”

  Weeks later, Mami announced that we were moving again, and we packed our clothes and books and toys, went back to the house in Luquillo as if we’d never left.

  That year, back in the house on the hill, we stopped asking when Papi would come home. We sat around on beach chairs in the living room, our furniture left behind in Dos Marinas, lit candles to San Judas Tadeo, the patron saint of lost causes. We listened to Mercy as she told stories about aliens and their spaceships landing in El Yunque, about men who had seen ghost women, hitchhikers, dragging their long skirts along the side of the road in the pitch black of night. We listened and listened as her stories turned darker: How black people like Abuela were known to be brujas. How everybody knew they sacrificed animals, and lord knows if that’s what happened to poor Peggy. How we needed to be watchful, say our prayers before going to sleep, because now that Mami and Papi were not together anymore, we could be in danger.

  That year, in that house on the hill, I prayed and prayed for our parents to get back together, I prayed to be back in Abuela’s kitchen, the two of us grating canela for tembleque, I prayed for the man who was terrorizing Mami to go away, I prayed for Peggy to come home, and every hour and every minute in every room in that house, I was afraid.

  Then one day in the middle of
the afternoon, as Alaina and I tossed around a Frisbee out front, there she was. Dirty, her long hair matted, and—we’d find out later—pregnant. Peggy, waddling up the hill toward our house.

  Later that year, in the summer, Mami and Alaina and I would see El Caserío one last time before moving to Miami Beach. We would park Mami’s RX-7 right in front of our old building, and Mami would visit our extended family, all her old friends, stopping by each apartment to say goodbye. We were moving to Miami, she would tell them, sparing them none of the details.

  We would run around our old neighborhood for hours. Alaina and I would play hopscotch, and I’d sit on our old front steps, waiting for Eggy to come around, riding his bike up the street or dribbling a basketball on the sidewalk. Other kids would walk by on their way to the candy store. Kids I knew. They’d take one look at us, then keep walking, like they didn’t even see us, like we didn’t belong there anymore. I would want to call out after them, make them see me. But I wouldn’t have the words.

  I would wait, and wait, and wait. Until the sun went down, until the other street kids picked up their skateboards and headed home, until our titis and neighbors and Mami’s friends hugged us goodbye, wiping tears from their eyes, until my mother called out to me from the car where Alaina was already sitting in the passenger seat, waiting for me. But Eggy would never turn up. I wouldn’t be able to recall the last time we saw each other, but I knew, as I opened the door and slid into the passenger seat next to my little sister: we would move to some foreign place, learn a foreign language, go to school with strangers, and Eggy would be here. Eggy would always be here.