B0061QB04W EBOK

by Reyna Grande

  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.

  “What are you doing? It’s gross!” I said, pushing her off me. I turned my back on her, wiping her saliva off my earlobe. “What’s wrong with you?”

  “Forget it,” she said. She turned her back to me. Then in the darkness, I heard her say, “I’m going on fifteen and I haven’t ever been kissed.”

  “It’s not a big deal.”

  “You’re not even eleven. What do you know? I want someone to like me. I want a boyfriend.”

  “You’re not allowed.”

  “And what if no one ever loves me? What if my scars gross them out?”

  “You can hardly see them.”

  “That’s what you think.”

  “I hope Papi throws you a quinceañera,” I said as I wrapped my arms around her. “You’d look like a princess with your pink dress.”

  Mago didn’t say anything for a while. I thought she had fallen asleep, but then she said, “There’s a boy.”

  I turned to face her again. “Don’t tell me you have a boyfriend?” I asked, a little too loud. Mago hit me with her elbow to be quiet. Carlos didn’t wake up, even though he was sleeping on the floor near our bed. I hoped Papi hadn’t heard me, either.

  “No. He doesn’t even know I exist,” she said. She went on to tell me about a guy named Pepe she had a crush on. But he didn’t notice her because she was an ESL student, whereas he was a pocho. Even though his parents were Mexican, he had been born in this country and didn’t speak a word of Spanish. He hung out with the popular kids, unlike Mago, who, because she was an ESL student, did not.

  “Have you tried talking to him?” I asked.

  “Are you stupid? He doesn’t speak Spanish, didn’t you hear me?”

  “Speak to him in English then.”

  “My English isn’t good enough. It’ll never be good enough,” she said.

  On Saturday morning, Papi woke us up at eight as he always did, even though it was the weekend and we begged him to let us sleep in. Instead, he put Los Tigres del Norte on the stereo and blasted the volume. No matter how many pillows we put over our ears, nothing could keep the music out. “¡Ya levántense, huevones!” Papi called out over the music. Carlos was up and ready to go help Papi with chores before I could rub the sleep from my eyes.

  As we were cleaning the bathroom, Mago stopped scrubbing the toilet and said, “I know what I have to do!” She got up and went to the yard where Papi and Carlos were mowing the lawn. “Papi, can you take us to church tomorrow?”

  Papi looked at her as if she were crazy. When we first arrived in the U.S., we missed Abuelita Chinta so much that we asked Papi to take us to church because that was what we had done with her. Papi said he didn’t believe in religion. “This is my God,” he said as he raised his Budweiser, and then took a drink from it. We had not asked again.

  Papi looked at Mago and wiped the sweat off his forehead. “If you kids want to go to church, you can go, but I’m not taking you.” Then he started the lawn mower and continued his work.

  The following day, Mago and I set out to go to church. She wouldn’t tell us why she was going, but I had a pretty good idea. Abuelita Chinta taught us to pray, especially when you want something really badly. There was not a single saint, statue of La Virgen de Guadalupe, or picture of Jesus Christ anywhere at home to pray to. So I knew this was why Mago now wanted to go to church. I wanted to go to church to remember my grandmother and to ask God to give me the chance to make my father proud.

  The closest Catholic church was St. Ignatius, which was on Monte Vista Street, but all the way by Avenue 61. Papi wouldn’t be bothered with driving us there because he wanted to enjoy his Sunday drinking and watching basketball on the television, and Mila had gone to visit her children. Papi never went with her. Mila’s family hated my father and would never welcome him into their home. Carlos wanted to stay with Papi, so just as we had done in Mexico, Mago and I walked to church. It took us forty minutes to get there, and we were out of breath, but we did find what we were looking for.

  As soon as we opened the door, I became intoxicated with the smells of incense, melted wax
, and flowers. All of a sudden, I was back in Iguala. I was back with my sweet grandmother.

  We took a seat in the back pew and listened to mass while surrounded by the saints and Christ, wondering if Abuelita Chinta was at church in Iguala at that very minute, looking up at the face of Jesus, as we were doing now.

  Oh, please, tell her we miss her, I said to Jesus. Tell her how much we love her.

  The next day, I kept wondering if Mago had gotten her prayer answered. When she finally picked me up at Mrs. Giuliano’s house, I demanded that she tell me, tell me, tell me.

  Mago said, “When Carlos and I were walking down to the bus stop today after school, I noticed that Pepe and his friends were walking right in front of us. Pepe turned around and saw me. He slowed down until I had caught up to him, and he asked me what my name was.”

  “And? And?” I said, grabbing her arm. I closed my eyes and listened to her story, which was better than the soap operas Mila watched.

  “All I managed to say was ‘Maggie,’” she said. Maggie? It took me a second to remember she had changed her name at school because even back then she hadn’t liked being called Mago by strangers. She also claimed that her teachers had trouble saying her real name, Magloria, and her history teacher had started calling her Maggie. So now she was known as Maggie everywhere but at home. But there was more to the story than that. It was the beginning of her assimilation.

  Mago continued her story: “After I told him my name, Pepe started asking me more questions, and very soon he figured out I don’t speak English well. He caught up to his friends and didn’t look at me again.”

  “I’m sorry, Mago,” I said.

  “I could understand his questions,” Mago told me. “I just couldn’t answer them. And I was so nervous.” She was close to tears.

  “Don’t worry, Mago. I’m sure he’ll talk to you again, you’ll see. You’ll get another chance to make a good impression.”

  But a few days later, Mago told me that as she and Carlos were walking home along the train tracks that run parallel to Figueroa Street, they ran into Pepe and his friends. To Mago’s surprise, the boys started throwing gravel at them from the other side of the tracks, yelling, “Wetbacks! Wetbacks!”

  Mago told me her heart broke at the sight of Pepe laughing and pointing at her and Carlos. She was so mad she had yelled one of the few cuss words she knew in English, “You maderfockers!”

  “Ay, Nena. You don’t know how much I wished today that I knew every bad word in English,” Mago said between tears. “And there was no point in cussing them out in Spanish. They wouldn’t have understood the words anyway. And worse, they would have laughed even harder.”

  Mago wasn’t the only one who was in love with someone at Luther Burbank Junior High School. Not even a week had gone by after the final episode of Mago’s love story when she and Carlos came home from school and I found out about a girl named María that Carlos was drooling over on the bus. Now Carlos was very upset, and he and Mago were still arguing about it.

  “You didn’t have to be so mean to her,” Carlos told Mago.

  “What happened?” I asked.

  Carlos said, “There’s a girl named María I like a lot. Her last name is González, so I get to sit behind her in the three classes we share.”

  Carlos in seventh grade

  “But she doesn’t even know he exists,” Mago said. Carlos looked away and his cheeks turned red. I knew Carlos didn’t have much luck with girls because of his teeth, which was really sad because my brother wasn’t ugly. But his upper lip was too thick and once he opened his mouth, and you could see his teeth—the two big front teeth and the tiny, tiny tooth in the middle—well, then that was all you would look at. “You should have seen him today on the bus,” Mago said as she dropped down onto the couch. “There he is, staring at María from across the aisle, drooling like a cow. It was embarrassing. And finally, this girl comes up to him, really pissed off, and says, ‘What are you staring at me for?’”

  “And you didn’t have to be so mean!” Carlos said again.

  “What did you tell her?” I asked Mago as I sat next to her.

  “Well, what else? I said, ‘You should be grateful my brother is looking at you, since you’re so damn ugly.’”

  “And she’s not!” Carlos said.

  “I was trying to defend you, pendejo,” Mago said. We all jumped up from the couch when the doorbell rang.

  Carlos went and opened the door. Then he turned to look at Mago, his eyes opened wide in surprise.

  “Tell your sister to come out,” I heard a girl say in Spanish through the screen door.

  “It’s her,” Carlos said. “How did she know where we live?”

  “How would I know?” Mago said. She went to the door and opened it. “What do you want, girl? You want my brother to stare at you some more?”

  “I came to teach you a lesson,” the girl said.

  “Okay, give me one minute.” Mago headed to our dresser and took out a pair of sweatpants and a sweatshirt. She went into the bathroom and changed out of her jeans and blouse.

  “Mago, don’t go outside,” Carlos said. “I don’t need you to defend me. I’m not a little kid anymore.”

  “This is no longer about you,” Mago said as she bent down to retie her tennis shoes.

  I walked over to the door, and there I saw the girl that had my brother drooling like a cow. Behind her were three other girls. María was very pretty. Her skin was light and she had a few freckles sprinkled on her cheeks. She was wearing white jeans and a black shirt with a hot pink image of Hello Kitty, and white sandals. I instantly envied her Hello Kitty shirt. It had been almost a year since Mila had taken us to Kmart to buy us clothes. She’d been bringing us bags of clothes from the old ladies at Kingsley Manor. Mago said those were dead people’s clothes. I didn’t know if the old ladies were dead or not, all I knew was that there was no way I would ever find a Hello Kitty shirt in the bags Mila brought us.

  “Look, I’m sorry, María. I won’t look at you again, but you don’t need to fight my sister,” Carlos said.

  María pushed him aside and called him a sissy. She and her friends followed Mago to the parking lot of the fourplexes.

  María didn’t know that Carlos wasn’t trying to protect Mago. She didn’t know that the previous week Mago’s heart had gotten broken, and ever since then she had been itching to punch something or someone. She didn’t know that only the day before, Mago had hit me because I had taken her rubber band without permission to put my hair up in a ponytail. She didn’t know that Mago had punched Carlos in the stomach because he spilled water on her math homework. But she soon found out.

  A second after they reached the parking lot, the fight broke out, and Mago had her fingers wrapped in María’s long brown hair and was punching her in that way she had perfected after years of hitting me and Carlos. This time, Mago didn’t hold her cuss words back. María spoke Spanish and because of that Mago fired off her cuss words faster than a machine gun. Soon, she had María on the ground and María’s pretty, white pants were turning gray. But the worst part came when Mago dragged the girl to the space where Papi always parked the old Ford truck he drove to work. Mago rolled María around and around in the puddle of motor oil from Papi’s truck and soon María’s white pants were completely black and her friends were rushing over to pull Mago off.

  “Enough, enough!” the girls said as they formed a barricade to protect María.

  Mago wiped the sweat off her forehead and looked at the girl who was still lying in the puddle of motor oil. “When my brother looks at you again, you better be happy about it, pendeja.”

  Mago walked back to the apartment, and Carlos and I followed behind her. Carlos turned to look one more time at the girl he sat behind in class. She was on her feet now, trying to smooth out her messy hair. Only Hello Kitty had escaped, unscathed.

  Carlos said, “You aren’t ugly, María. I am.” And then with his head hanging down, he went inside.
/>   I stood there in the parking lot feeling terrified. What was going to happen to me when I fell in love? I wondered. Would I have the same rotten luck as my brother and sister?

  9

  Reyna and her new doll

  MRS. ANDERSON ANNOUNCED there was something important she had to tell us. Through Mr. López, I learned there was going to be a schoolwide competition. That week, every student in each class would be writing their very own books, and the teachers would select the best ones in their classes. From there, the selected books would be judged and three lucky winners chosen.

  I will finally get my chance to make Papi proud!

  For the rest of the week we spent a lot of time working on our projects. Mr. López said we could write our stories in Spanish since that was the language we knew best. At first, I didn’t know what to write. I’d never written my very own story before. I’d always liked to read in Mexico, but here in this country, books for kids my age were very difficult for me to read because of my limited English. The books Mr. López gave me were those for kindergarteners—books with big letters and lots of pictures. I loved looking at the pictures, but the stories weren’t very interesting. See Spot Run!

  I missed the literature books I left behind in Mexico, the ones I was given at school. I loved the stories in those books. My favorite one was of a little pine tree that wished his needles were made of gold. He got his wish and his needles turned to gold, but a robber came at night and stole them. Then he wished for his leaves to be made of glass, but they broke when a strong wind came. Then he wished his needles to be big glossy leaves, but the next day goats came and ate them. The little pine tree then learned to like himself as he was.