B0061QB04W EBOK

by Reyna Grande

  “What are we going to do about a present?” Carlos asked. Christmas was the following day, and we still didn’t have anything for Papi. I glanced at the Christmas tree Mila bought at Pic ’n’ Save. It wasn’t real, but it was the most beautiful tree we’d ever owned. I thought about the branch Tío Crece painted back in Mexico. Though we did a good job decorating it, nothing could compare to that six-foot-tall green beauty shining with colorful lights and glittering with silver garlands.

  Mila sent us to Barney’s to buy a bottle of Mazola oil because she had just run out. As we neared the store, Mago stopped and said, “We’re going to do something we have never done before. But at this point, we have no choice.”

  “What?” Carlos and I asked. Then Mago shared her plan, which involved stealing. Back in Mexico, we had stolen fruit from people’s property, but we had never stolen anything from a store. The liquor store had mirrors on the walls, and the Koreans who owned it would never take their eyes off the customers. I’d been there enough times to know that.

  “What if we get caught?” I asked, already thinking about the spanking we would get. By then Papi had made it clear what his favorite form of discipline was.

  “We won’t,” Mago said as she pulled us into the store. We split up. Mago said she would distract the owner while Carlos and I took whatever we thought would make good gifts. The thing was that I wished we had discussed what exactly a good gift was. The liquor store didn’t have much. As I walked around, my stomach churned from fear of getting caught. The Korean lady kept looking at us. Our images were reflected in the mirrors up above. Luckily, her husband wasn’t there, and she couldn’t keep her eyes on all three of us, could she? Could she tell we were up to no good?

  Nothing seemed good enough for Papi. Canned food, laundry items, diapers, sanitary napkins, toilet paper, soda bottles, chips. What do I take, what do I take? I glanced at Carlos. He was by the front looking at the bottles of tequila displayed behind the counter. What does he think he is doing? I thought. Those bottles are totally unreachable, and even if he could steal a bottle, why would we want Papi getting more drunk than he already gets?

  Mago picked up the bottle of Mazola oil and took it to the counter. There, she knocked over the newspaper rack and the Korean lady yelled at Mago and hurried to pick up the newspapers. I didn’t waste any time. I grabbed an item and hurried out of the store. Carlos came out next, and Mago was last. We rushed up Avenue 50 as fast as we could, our hearts beating faster than when we trespassed into El Cuervo’s mango grove. If we got caught, we wouldn’t be shot at. We would get deported by Papi.

  “So what did you guys get?” Mago asked as we neared the house.

  Carlos took a can of Aquanet hairspray from underneath his shirt. “They didn’t have much to choose from,” he said when Mago laughed.

  “And you?” she asked.

  I showed her what I grabbed, a bottle of Trés Flores Brilliantine.

  “When have you seen Papi use hair polish?” she asked.

  “Never,” I said. “But Tío Crece uses it. And so does Tía Güera’s husband.”

  Mago groaned.

  “It was the only thing for men I could see!” I said, defending myself.

  “I can’t believe you guys,” Mago said as we turned the corner. “We went through all this trouble for those lousy gifts?”

  The next day, we ended up giving the bottle of brilliantine to Papi and the hairspray to Mila. Their presents for us were much better, although they weren’t what we had asked Santa for. I got a pair of new Pro Wings tennis shoes. Mago got a pretty peach dress, and Carlos a yellow Tonka truck.

  Santa never came. I kept waking up at night and glancing at the fireplace by our sofa bed. I was wondering if he was running late. I would tell myself he had many deliveries to make, and that was why he was taking so long. But what if he knew we had stolen things from the store? What if he decided we weren’t good kids and didn’t deserve his presents?

  Two weeks later, there was still no sign of Santa. Papi called us over to the kitchen where he and Mila were going through their mail. “What’s this?” Papi said, holding a bill in his hand. “Who in the world did you call? Why is the bill so high?”

  Mago, Carlos, and I looked at each other. We never used the phone. We didn’t know anyone here, so who would we call?

  “We haven’t called anyone,” Mago said.

  “Are you sure?” Mila said.

  “Well, a few weeks ago we did call Santa,” Mago confessed.

  “You did what?” Mila said, taking the bill from Papi to look at the number.

  “He was on TV, and he said to call him,” Carlos said.

  “And we asked him for things, but he didn’t bring them,” I said.

  “I can’t believe you kids!” Papi yelled, standing up. We took a step back.

  “We didn’t know we would get charged for the call,” Mago said. “We’re sorry, Papi.”

  “And he didn’t bring them,” I said again.

  “I’m still not done paying my friends back the money they let me borrow for the smuggler,” Papi said, one hand on his belt buckle. “Otherwise, I would put you all on the bus back to Mexico this very night!” He took off his belt and gave us a few lashes with it before grabbing his keys and storming out of the house.

  “Don’t ever do that again,” Mila said, writing out a check and putting it inside the return envelope. “Those are just scam artists trying to make money.”

  “We’re sorry, Mila,” we said, wiping our teary eyes and massaging the stings on our arms. As we headed back to the living room, I wondered what Mila had meant. Why would Santa want to make money off of us, when he has so much money he gives away toys to hundreds and thousands of kids? I wondered.

  Papi returned half an hour later and headed straight to the phone. He worked on it for a few minutes, and we didn’t know what he was doing until he was done and said, “There, now you can’t call anymore.” We walked up to the phone and saw the lock on it, so now we couldn’t turn the little wheel to dial unless we put in a key.

  “What if there’s an emergency?” Mago asked. “How are we going to call you?”

  But Papi was unmoved.

  6

  Reyna and Mago

  AT ALDAMA, THE girls in fifth and sixth grade were taken to the auditorium and shown a video about puberty. The girls around me kept giggling while watching the video, but I didn’t. I couldn’t understand the words much, but I could understand the meaning of the images on the screen just fine. Besides, I already knew about menstruation because Mago had told me all about it back in Mexico.

  Mago still hadn’t become a señorita. Mila said it was because we were so undernourished in Mexico that Mago’s body didn’t do what it was supposed to do. Now that we’d been in the U.S. for eight months and had better food to eat, Mago prayed her period would come soon. I hoped mine would, too. Even though I was ten and a half, I couldn’t wait to become a señorita.

  After the assembly, I was given a booklet with a picture of a girl on it. I was also given a sanitary napkin wrapped in cellophane. My very first sanitary napkin! I showed it to Mago as soon as she came home from school.

  “Look, look!” I said. “I am going to become a señorita very soon!” I stored my sanitary napkin in my dresser drawer where I kept my underwear.

  Every day after Mago picked me up at Mrs. Giuliano’s, I would rush home and take my sanitary napkin out to look at it. I had also tried to read the little booklet I was given. There were many words I didn’t yet understand, and I had to keep looking them up in the dictionary. My favorite was “rite of passage.” It sounded important.

  I was confused by this sentence: “Changes take place in a girl pretty fast.” For the life of me I couldn’t understand why the word “pretty” was there, after the word “girl.” Mr. López had taught me that an adjective goes before the noun, so it should have read “pretty girl.” But if that was so, I wondered if only pretty girls got their periods and not ugly one
s. I stood in the mirror and looked at myself, wondering which category I was in. I was not pretty like Mago. Even Betty, as little as she was, was prettier than me. Cindy was way prettier than any of us.

  “Am I ugly?” I asked Mago.

  “Of course not!” she would say, but she’s my sister, so I knew she had to say that.

  The following week, Carlos came to pick me up at Mrs. Giuliano’s instead of Mago. He said that Mago wasn’t feeling well, and she had ended up not going to school. She’d gotten off the bus in front of Burbank, turned around, and come back home.

  When we got home, I did what I had always done, open my drawer to look at my sanitary napkin. But it was gone. I took out the drawer and looked behind the dresser wondering if it had fallen out, but it wasn’t there. Mago came out of the bathroom looking very pale.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked her.

  She went to lie down on the couch, clutching her stomach.

  “I have a fever and really bad cramps,” she said.

  I felt bad for her, but I wanted to know where my sanitary napkin was. I asked her if she had seen it. “I’m sorry, Nena,” she said. “I took it.”

  “But why?” I yelled. “That was my sanitary napkin. It was mine!”

  “It’s just that I got my period this morning, Nena. I couldn’t find any pads here so I didn’t know what else to do.”

  “I hate you!” I yelled, and then I ran outside into the yard to cry.

  When Papi came home, he already knew that Mago had missed school because he got a call from Burbank at work. I had never seen my father so furious. He came barging into the house, and without asking for an explanation, he took off his belt and gave my sister the biggest lashing any of us had gotten thus far, right there on the couch where she had been writhing in pain all day.

  “Papi, stop!” Carlos said, but Papi didn’t listen and the belt kept whistling through the air. What was worse was that Mago wouldn’t tell him what was wrong with her. She just said, “I’m not feeling well, Papi.” But those past months we had learned that according to Papi, being sick was no excuse to miss school. But this isn’t a common cold! I thought. Mago put her arms up to cover her face. Suddenly, I couldn’t take it anymore. I forgot I was supposed to be angry at my sister, and I rushed at him and pushed him.

  “Don’t hit her!” I yelled. “She’s menstruating. She’s become a señorita. Stop it. Stop it!”

  Then Papi steadied his belt and put it down. He looked at the three of us, and for a moment it was as if he had just awakened, as if that person who had just beat up my sister wasn’t the one who was now in the room with us. He blinked once, twice, then went into his room and didn’t come out.

  Mila arrived half an hour later. She’d stopped at her mother’s house after work to visit her children. When we told her what Papi had done, she said, “Your father didn’t mean to. He doesn’t know any better. It’s the way he was raised.” She went to the store to buy Mago a package of sanitary napkins.

  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

  Reyna and Papi

  MRS. ANDERSON 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

  Carlos, Mago, and Reyna

  EVEN 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.