by Reyna Grande
“But, but …”
“Hey, what do you think models do all day? They take off their clothes and have their picture taken.”
I put my water glass down and started to unbutton my dress. Suddenly, I hated that dress. They stared at me as I began to take it off. I slid the top of my dress off my shoulders, down to my waist. Then, I couldn’t go any further.
“Come on, you can do it,” they said. Even though the men were blurry, I knew that they were staring at my exposed breasts.
What the hell are you doing? a voice inside me said. I didn’t recognize that voice. Get out of there, now! the voice said again. And I knew who it was. It was the other me—the other Reyna, the one who still believed in that bright future my father had once said I could have.
“I’m sorry, I’ve made a mistake,” I said. I rushed out the door as I struggled to put my dress back on.
“Hey, come back here!” the men yelled. I ran out of the building, down Wilshire Boulevard, my heart beating hard against my chest. I didn’t look back. I was afraid to look back. I pictured them running after me, dragging me back to their office, forcing me to do things I didn’t want to do, forcing me into a path where there would be no turning back. Finally, I couldn’t run any longer and stopped, my side hurting me, my lungs screaming for air. I turned around, and the street was empty. No one was chasing me. Forget the job, Reyna. Forget the horny boyfriend. Focus on school, I heard the other me say. As I sat at the bus stop waiting to go home, I took my glasses out of my purse and everything came back into focus.
I called Steve to come over, and when he arrived, I told him I wanted to break up. He agreed it was for the best. We were playing with fire. We were having unprotected sex, and we knew that there would be consequences if we didn’t stop. I didn’t think things would go as smoothly with my father. When he came home, I didn’t hide in my bedroom. Instead, I went out to the kitchen and said, “Tomorrow I’m going to Pasadena City College to enroll.” I waited for him to say no. I was ready for a fight. But my father looked at me, and whatever he saw in my eyes made him keep quiet. I turned around, and as I headed back to my room, he started to talk.
“You know, Chata, when my father took me to the fields to work, my job was to guide the oxen in a straight line. My father gave me a rod and said that if the oxen didn’t listen to me, to hit them as hard as I could. I was nine years old, Chata. Do you understand?”
I took a deep breath, unable to say anything. I wanted to say something. I was still too angry to forgive all that he had done to me, but I wanted to understand what he was trying to tell me. But too soon, he had turned away from me. Too soon, he was opening the refrigerator door, taking out a Budweiser, and I knew that the father who had spoken just a minute ago was gone.
22
Reyna and Diana at a scholarship dinner, 1996
IN THE SUMMER of 1994, I enrolled in an English class at Pasadena City College that was part of the requirements to transfer to a four-year college. My teacher’s name was Diana Savas. When I walked into the classroom, my first thought was that she was Latina. She had short black hair and brown eyes framed by glasses. She was not too tall nor too short, and full-figured—“llenita,” as we say in Spanish. It turned out that she was a Greek-American who, to my surprise, spoke excellent Spanish. The thought that a non-Latina took the time to learn my native tongue pleased me and impressed me.
A couple of weeks into the summer semester, Dr. Savas assigned us an expository essay about the groups to which we belonged (racial, economic, religious, and so on). I went home to work on my essay, but it was difficult for me to do it. What group did I belong to? I had no idea. I’d never thought of myself belonging anywhere outside of my family. So that is what I wrote, about my family and the place I had come from.
A few days after turning in my essay, Dr. Savas asked me to come to her office. “You wrote an autobiographical essay,” she said. “I need you to do the essay again, but,” she added, “I think you’re a very good writer.”
When she handed me back my paper, I felt different. With those words, it was as if she had opened my eyes to something I could not yet see. When the summer ended, I passed the class with an A, but I was sad that I would no longer have Dr. Savas as a teacher.
When the fall semester began, I stopped by her office to say hello. It was my nineteenth birthday, and I shyly mentioned it to her because there was no one to celebrate my birthday with. She picked up a book she had on her desk and said, “I went to see a panel of Latino writers this weekend and bought this book. I think you’ll like it.” She handed it to me, and I looked down at the cover to read the title. The Moths and Other Stories, by Helena María Viramontes. I’d never heard of it before. Latino literature wasn’t something I was familiar with.
“I want you to have it,” she said with a smile. That was another thing I liked about her, her honest smile. She took it from me and wrote Happy Birthday, Reynita, on the title page and handed it back to me. No one had ever called me Reynita. Not even my mother.
I thanked her for the book. She was shocked to find out that it was the very first book I’d ever been given, one that I could keep and not have to return to the library.
I went home and read The Moths. For the first time since I’d become an avid reader, I found myself reading about characters that lived in a world similar to my own, characters with the same color skin as mine. With the same heartaches and dreams.
As the weeks went by, I visited Dr. Savas—or Diana, as she said I should call her—at her office between classes. I never told her about life at home. We talked instead about books and writing. She was always asking me about my latest story, my latest poem. Sometimes I wanted to tell her about all the problems at home, about the increasing arguments between Mila and my father. Lately, they’d been fighting over a woman. Mila had discovered my father was having an affair with someone at work. He denied it. I could hear them yelling in their bedroom. When I got home from school, sometimes they would be in the living room screaming at each other. I would walk by them and head to my bedroom. It was better if I stayed out of their way and didn’t take sides, but I couldn’t help thinking that now Mila knew how my mother had felt when my father was cheating on her with Mila.
One evening, I heard Mila screaming my name. I had brought Betty over for the weekend because by then she had gotten into gangs. She was in the habit of stealing my mother’s rent money and was driving her crazy. I wanted to help my thirteen-year-old sister, but I would bring her over for another reason, too. I was lonely.
Mila screamed again, and Betty and I went running into the living room. My father had shoved Mila onto the couch and was on top of her, punching her. Mila had her arms up to her face, trying to block his fists. Then, with his right hand on her face, he pushed her head into the couch. Mila squirmed beneath him, but she wasn’t able to get him off. Betty glanced at me, as if waiting to see what I would do. I put my arm around her and pulled her close. I wished she wasn’t seeing this. I wished I hadn’t brought her over that weekend. I couldn’t believe he was hitting Mila. All those years I had been on the receiving end of his fists. Not her. Never her.
I got over my shock and ran to help my stepmother. I pushed Papi hard, but he wouldn’t budge. “Leave her alone!” I said again, pushing against him, but he was like a boulder.
Finally, I managed to get him off Mila. She stood up from the couch and ran out the door, down the stairs. He followed behind her, cursing at her. I heard the sounds of metal falling, and my stepmother crying out: “Natalio. Stop it! Stop it!” Then I heard my cousin Lola and her husband yelling at my father to leave Mila alone.
When Betty and I rushed downstairs, Mila was sobbing in Lola’s arms, and my father was being restrained by Lola’s husband, Chente. My father broke loose from Chente’s grasp, and for a second it seemed as if he was going to pounce on Mila again. Instead, he rushed toward the stairs. It took me a second to realize he was heading my way, and I quickly moved myself and Bet
ty out of the way to let him pass. I was so relieved when he didn’t notice us. He just went into the apartment without a word.
Mila was bleeding from her leg. My father had pushed her onto the gardening tools he had beneath the stairwell, and she had cut herself on the spikes of the rake when it fell on top of her.
“Come on, Mila, you need to go to the hospital,” Lola said. Her husband helped Mila to the car, and I stood there not knowing what to do. Should I go with her? Should I stay with him?
“Stay with your father,” Lola said, making the choice for me. “Go keep an eye on him.”
I stood there on the first step, and I couldn’t get myself to take the next step up, and the next step up, to go back to the apartment. Betty and I looked at each other, not knowing what to do. Her eyebrows were plucked thin, like a typical chola, and her eyes were rimmed with too much black liner. But at the moment, she wasn’t putting on her tough-girl chola mask. She was a frightened teenage girl. I wished I were like Mago. She would have known how to protect us. I didn’t know how to be a little mother to my sister.
“Jesus,” Betty said, shaking her head at what had just happened.
Eventually, I found the courage to take Betty and myself back upstairs. We went through the back door, tiptoed across the kitchen, and I poked my head into the living room. Papi had turned off the light and was sitting there on the couch, motionless. I wondered if he had fallen asleep. We went into my room and stayed there.
Sometime later, someone was shaking me to wake me up. I opened my eyes and saw a female police officer standing over me. She shined a flashlight into my eyes. “What’s going on?” I said.
She took me and Betty into the living room, and there I saw two other police officers putting handcuffs on my father. Then they walked him out the door. I stood there while they made their way down the stairs. I couldn’t take my eyes off the handcuffs. I couldn’t believe my father was being arrested. I glanced at Betty, and I wished she weren’t here to see him like that. Since our mother was always telling Betty bad things about him, she didn’t like him very much to begin with. What would she think of him now, to see her father turned into a criminal?
When they put him in the car, he looked up at us for a brief moment before the car door closed and the police took him away.
The female cop told us to go back inside, and we sat in the living room. She wanted to know everything that had happened between him and Mila. I found that I couldn’t speak. How could I tell her about all the abuse? How could I tell her that I was ashamed of what he had done, as if I were just as guilty because of the fact that I was his daughter? How could I say that even though I knew he’d gotten what he deserved, I was still afraid for him? I didn’t want anything to happen to him. I didn’t want him to be in jail. What’s going to happen to him? I wanted to ask her. To me? To all of us?
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 ro
om. 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.