by Reyna Grande
I heard the front door open and close. My father was home, and I hadn’t done my chores. I rushed out to the kitchen to wash the dishes. My hands shook as I picked them up to lather them. My eyes burned from crying.
He came into the kitchen and grabbed a beer, not saying anything to me. I’d gotten used to him ignoring me. And honestly, I preferred that to the times when he did pay attention, because when he did, it was only to insult me or reprimand me for something or other. But that day I knew I had to break the silence. I just didn’t know how to tell him that Mago was gone. I waited until he took a drink from his beer, and before he disappeared into his bedroom, I blurted out the news.
“Mago se fue,” I said.
He turned around to look at me. I shut off the faucet and dried my hands with a towel.
“What?”
“She’s gone.”
He turned around and headed to my bedroom. He stood there in the middle, just as I had done earlier, and looked at the empty closet, the empty dresser drawers. He glanced at Mago’s posters on the wall, the only reminder that she had lived there.
“You’re not allowed to see your sister anymore. If she wants to leave, que se vaya. But you,” he said as he pointed a finger at me, “will have nothing to do with her.” I stood in the room, listening to him say that my sister was an ungrateful daughter. “After everything I’ve done for her, this is how she repays me? If she wants to go and live a corrupted life, then I’ll start thinking of her as being dead to me,” he said. He talked about Carlos, about how disappointed he was in him, and now, in Mago. He looked at me and shook his head. He looked at me as if I had disappointed him, too, even though I was still there, with him.
I wanted to tell him that I would be different, that I had seen with my own eyes the poverty he had helped us escape. I had seen with my own eyes the reason he had been such a tyrant about school. I wanted to tell him that I would do what Mago and Carlos hadn’t done. I would go to UC Irvine, and get my degree. I would be somebody he could be proud of.
But he said to me, “You can forget all about going to that university. You’re going to be a failure, too, just like them, so don’t even bother.” Then he walked away.
“No, Papi, please!” I begged. But he slammed his bedroom door shut.
I went back to my room. A room which was now only mine. He isn’t serious, I told myself. He’s just angry with Mago. He’ll change his mind tomorrow. He will. He knows how important this is for me, for the family. He will let me go. I got under the covers of my sister’s bed and buried my nose in the pillow, trying to drown myself in her favorite scent—Beautiful by Estée Lauder. I thought about Abuelita Chinta, my mother, and now my sister. The void inside me became bigger and bigger, as I realized that the women I loved most in my life were far away.
My graduation came and went, and true to his word, Papi wouldn’t allow me to send in my paperwork to UC Irvine. Since I was still underage, it required his personal and financial information, and his signature, which he refused to give me. I was too much of a coward to falsify his signature. I was too much of a coward to fight him on it. I fought him instead about Mago. I couldn’t win two fights, but maybe, I might win the one that mattered to me more. Papi threatened to beat me if I dared to step out of the house to go see her. I hoped with time he would change his mind about that, too.
Then the news broke that Carlos’s wife was pregnant, and a month later, Mago confessed that she, too, was expecting. This pushed my father over the edge. And it terrified me to the core. Now that Mago was going to have her own baby to hold and cherish, there would be no room for me in her life.
“You’ll always be my Nena,” Mago said to me over the phone. When I didn’t say anything she said, “I’m going to go pick you up and take you somewhere. You tell your father that I’m going to go visit you, and he can’t do anything about it.”
“You know he’ll get angry,” I said.
“Who gives a damn?” she said.
Several times during the week I approached my father to tell him Mago was coming to pick me up on Sunday, and that I was going out with her whether he liked it or not. But just as I was about to say it, I would get choked up with fear, and I would turn around and go back to my room.
That summer was when my father’s drinking worsened. Following my mother’s suggestion, I’d been selling my father’s empty beer cans at the recycling center. I could always tell how much he’d drunk that week by the money I would get. The previous week, I had gotten thirty dollars. That was the most I’d ever gotten. Lately, in the morning, I would wake to the sound of a beer can being opened. My father had now started to drink before he left for work, and when he returned, he would drink all evening before going to bed. He argued with Mila over everything, even about her weekly visits to her children. He would tell her that her place was here, at home. Mila’s older son was legally blind, and Mila had to make sure he got the help he needed. Her second son and Cindy had troubles of their own. I couldn’t blame Mila for always wanting to be over there, by their side. My father didn’t see it that way. He hated her family because they had never accepted him. They had always blamed him for breaking up Mila’s first marriage. Although I had never seen him hit Mila, there were times when I could almost see the urge inside him. He would hit me instead.
True to her word, Mago came over on Sunday. I told Mila that Mago was downstairs, and she didn’t think it was a good idea. “Your dad’s going to get mad,” she said as she watched me head toward their bedroom.
When he didn’t open the door, I mustered the nerve to open it myself. He was sitting on a chair looking out the window with a beer in his hand. I went in with hesitant steps. This was foreign territory to me, having never been allowed to spend much time in their bedroom. He was listening to his favorite song by Los Tigres del Norte, “La Jaula de Oro.”
Even though the music wasn’t too loud, he acted as if he hadn’t heard me coming in.
“¿Qué quieres?” he said when I came to stand right next to him.
“Mago is downstairs. She wants to take me out.”
“Tell her to leave. I already told you that I don’t want her coming here. I don’t want her seeing you.”
“But she’s my sister!”
“She chose to leave, didn’t she? If she really cared about you, she wouldn’t have left.”
I started to cry then, like I always did with him. He always knew how to say things that would hurt me to the core. I hated crying. I hated letting him see how much power he had over me. To make me cry just like that, without even laying a finger on me. “She’s my sister and I want to see her,” I said.
“¡Ya te dije que no!”
I started walking away, determined to disobey him. “Well, I’m going anyway. She’s all I have, and you can’t keep me away from her!”
Just as I got to the door, he called my name. I stopped and turned around. “If you go out with her,” he said, “don’t you ever come back here.”
“Fine!”
I rushed out of the room, past the dining room, the kitchen, out the back door. This is what I needed! Now that he’s kicked me out, Mago will be forced to take me with her. I can finally be with her! I was halfway down the stairs, and I could see Mago’s green Tercel parked in front of the apartments. Suddenly, I felt as if my hair was tearing right out of my scalp. “You aren’t going anywhere!” Papi yelled, yanking my hair so hard I fell over backward. I reached up to hold on to my hair. He tightened his grip on it and dragged me up the stairs. I screamed for Mago. The last thing I saw before he dragged me into the apartment was Mago getting out of the car.
“Mago! Mago!” I yelled over and over again. My father slammed me against the kitchen wall and began to beat me with his fists. Mila stood by the door of the living room. “Get my sister,” I yelled to her. “Get my sister!” She turned and ran out of the house.
The beating continued and his fist connected with my nose. I covered my face, trying to protect myself. I looked d
own at my shirt and saw drops of blood landing on it. Where is she? Why won’t she come and stop him? Take me away from him? “Mago! Mago!” I yelled. There was a rushing in my ear as his fists fell on me, hard as rocks.
“¡Ya déjála!” a voice said. Suddenly, the blows stopped.
I opened my eyes. I was on the floor, crying. My father stood above me. Mila walked back into the kitchen, and I asked her where Mago was. It wasn’t her voice that I had heard. “Why won’t she come?” I said.
“She left,” Mila said.
I shook my head, unable to believe what Mila had said. It couldn’t be true. How could Mago have left when she knew he was hitting me? No, no. There has to be a mistake. “Mago!” I yelled at the top of my lungs. “Mago!”
But no one answered.
“¿Ya ves?” Papi said. “That’s how much she cares.” I glanced at the door, waiting for my sister to come, but she didn’t. I looked up at my father, at his fists, and at that moment I just wanted him to keep going, to keep beating me and beating me with those hands that were the same shape as my own. Beat me until I could no longer think anymore, until they made me disappear, cease to exist. She left. She left. She left.
He went back to his room with another beer in his hand. Mila helped me to stand up.
“You should understand,” Mila said to me as I headed to my bedroom. “Your sister is pregnant. If she had come up here to defend you, who knows what he would have done to her. He could have hurt the baby.”
I left her in the kitchen and made my way to my room to lock myself in.
21
Reyna in her senior year
MY BEDROOM WAS my prison.
No, my bedroom was my haven. From the door in, I was safe. From the door out, the demons would come with their mocking faces. I stayed in my room and suffered from hunger, picturing Mila cooking, she and Papi eating dinner, watching TV in the living room. I waited and waited, trying not to think of the way my stomach seemed to chew on itself to appease its hunger. I peed in a bucket I had taken from my father’s shed and kept in the corner of the room. I lay in bed and waited. I was afraid that if I came out of the room to eat or go to the bathroom, he’d come down on me like a vulture. Little by little he pecked away at my soul. I was afraid, sometimes, that one day there would be nothing left.
Finally, the television would get shut off. Finally, I would hear their footsteps fading into their bedroom. Finally, they would fall asleep. I tiptoed out of the room and dumped the pee in the bucket into the toilet. Then I rushed to the kitchen and grabbed whatever Mila had made for dinner. I didn’t bother heating it up. He might come out, and I didn’t want to see him. I gobbled down the food in my room and hid the dirty plate under the bed. I breathed in relief, my stomach finally pacified.
I tossed and turned in bed. I knew sleep wouldn’t come. It was yet another thing I had lost. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d had a good night’s sleep. I lay awake, wondering what my sister and brother were doing, what my mother was doing, what the whole world was doing while I was there, a prisoner in my own room.
I turned on the TV and kept the volume as low as possible. I stuffed the cracks in the door with my underwear so that he wouldn’t see the light from the TV. This was as close as I could come to making myself disappear from his sight.
Then I discovered my hero, there on the TV. Dr. Sam Beckett. He was a physicist who traveled in time to fix the lives of other people in a show called Quantum Leap. Oh, how I wished Dr. Sam Beckett could jump into my life! Come and live it for me. Make things right in a way I could not, in a way I might never be able to.
During the day I would move my furniture around. One day the bed was in the north corner of the room. The next day it would be in the south or east or west corner. I called Steve and asked him to come over. He helped me move the TV and the dresser to the other side of the room. “Why are you always moving your furniture?” he asked as he sat down on my bed.
I shrugged, not knowing how to tell him that it helped me feel as if I had just moved elsewhere. As if I lived anywhere but here.
I was jealous of him. Franklin was back in session, so he had somewhere to go, something to do. I didn’t have a job, and since Papi had not allowed me to go to UC Irvine, or to a community college, as I had asked, what was there for me to do but to move my furniture around? I sat next to Steve on my bed, and I let him pull me down with him.
He wasn’t supposed to be there. My cousin Lola and her family had moved to the unit downstairs, and if she saw him, or if the neighbors saw him and told my father, there would be hell to pay. But I held him tight as I remembered there wasn’t anything else my father could do to me anymore. Besides, Steve was all I had left.
He tugged on my pants, as he always did. I put my hand over his to keep him from pulling down my zipper, as I always did. I knew what he wanted from me. I thought about Mago. She had a life of her own now. She was going to be a mother. She was making a family of her own. What did I have except for this horny Italian boy with hazel eyes who only wanted one thing from me? And what if I lost him, too?
“Okay,” I sighed, letting go of his hand.
“Okay? You mean—? Really?” he asked.
I heard the sound of the zipper. I felt my pants being clumsily pulled down. I felt his weight on me, and for a moment I felt as if I was not as meaningless as I had thought. For a second, I felt that I still mattered.
I lost my virginity in my bedroom, in my father’s house. Right under your nose. I felt the pain between my legs, and I bit my lips to keep from crying out. I don’t need to leave this house to be a loose woman, I thought, as I held on to Steve with all my might. No, I’ll do it here, in your house, and see if I care.
A few weeks later, as I was waiting for the bus to go see my mother, I saw an ad taped to the bus stop. It read “Do You Want to Be in the Movies?” I put the flyer in my purse. Maybe I could be a movie extra and make money so that I could rent my own place. What kind of skills does one need to just walk around or sit around and blend in with the background? I’m excellent at that.
When I got to my mom’s apartment on San Pedro Street, I asked her to take me to the Alley and buy me a dress to wear to the talent agency. She bought me a canary-yellow dress with bell-shaped sleeves and big golden buttons. She said it was so bright, for sure I would stand out in a crowd and get hired.
The next day I took the bus to the agency, which was on Wilshire Boulevard, not too far from Beverly Hills. I felt so good in my bright yellow dress that my mother had bought for me. It was one of the few things I owned purchased by her. There were other people waiting in the lobby, and they all had leather folders or manila envelopes with them. I wondered what was inside. Nobody but me was wearing glasses, so I took them off, even though everything looked blurry. They were cheap, thick-rimmed glasses that made me look like a nerd, and I didn’t want to look like a band geek today. I wanted to look glamorous. I thought of Mago. If she were still living at home, she would have done my hair up really nicely. She would have made me look like a movie star with her magic makeup brush. Then I realized that I probably wouldn’t be sitting there if Mago were still at home. She would have protected me, instead of me now trying to fend for myself.
When I was called in, the first thing the woman said was, “Do you have your portfolio?”
“What’s that?” I asked.
“Your pictures. We need professional photos of you.”
“I—ah—no, I don’t have any photos.”
She went on to explain that I needed to bring eight-by-ten-inch photos, in color and black and white. She also said the agency charged a fee in order to put me in their system.
I had barely managed to get the money I needed to pay for the bus fare, let alone to pay the agency to get me a job. I walked out of there feeling disappointed. I didn’t even put my glasses back on. I wanted to hide in my blindness a little longer and not face the real world that awaited me. How could I leave my father’s house if I had no job?
I wondered.
While I sat at the bus stop to go back home—still jobless—a car pulled over. The two guys in the car looked like Italian mobsters, wearing black suits and ties. The one in the passenger seat called out to me.
“Hey, are you a model?”
“Me? No,” I said, feeling my cheeks get hot from embarrassment. Me? A model? I wish …
“Well, you should be. Do you want to be a model?”
I wanted to tell them that they were the ones who needed glasses, more than me. Surely they could see that I was not pretty enough to be a model. Nowhere near that. And couldn’t they see my body? Couldn’t they see how short I was?
But I needed a job, and when they asked me again if I wanted to be a model, I thought about my favorite telenovela Cristal, of how she had met her handsome rich love at the modeling place where she worked. I said, “Yeah, I guess.”
“Well, get in the car and we’ll take you to our office. We’re agents, and we can help you.”
I hesitated as I took a step toward their car. They were complete strangers. I shouldn’t trust anything they said. What if they were lying and did something to me? But I needed money. I got in the backseat.
They drove me to a building farther up Wilshire, which was similar to the six-story building where the other agency was. When they pulled over, I breathed a sigh of relief. If their office was in that fancy place, then maybe they were who they said they were.
They took me to a huge office with a large desk and two leather sofas and offered me some water. They didn’t tell me to sit, so I stood there in the middle of the office, looking at them without squinting, so that they wouldn’t notice that I needed glasses. They sat on the leather couch and one of them said, “Okay, take off your dress.”
“Excuse me?” I said.
“Take off your dress,” the other one said. “If you want to be a model, we have to see what you’ve got.”