Growing Up Ethnic in America: Contemporary Fiction About Learning to Be American

by Maria Mazziotti Gillan

  Such was our life. So that morning, while doing in the train of ants which arrived each day, I decided to become wealthy, and right away! After downing a bowl of cereal, I took a rake from the garage and started up the block to look for work.

  We lived on an ordinary block of mostly working-class people: warehousemen, egg candlers, welders, mechanics, and a union plumber. And there were many retired people who kept their lawns green and the gutters uncluttered of the chewing gum wrappers we dropped as we rode by on our bikes. They bent down to gather our litter, muttering at our evilness.

  At the corner house I rapped the screen door and a very large woman in a muu-muu answered. She sized me up and then asked what I could do.

  “Rake leaves,” I answered, smiling.

  “It’s summer, and there ain’t no leaves,” she countered. Her face was pinched with lines; fat jiggled under her chin. She pointed to the lawn, then the flower bed, and said: “You see any leaves there—or there?” I followed her pointing arm, stupidly. But she had a job for me and that was to get her a Coke at the liquor store. She gave me twenty cents, and after ditching my rake in a bush, off I ran. I returned with an unbagged Pepsi, for which she thanked me and gave me a nickel from her apron.

  I skipped off her porch, fetched my rake, and crossed the street to the next block where Mrs. Moore, mother of Earl the retarded man, let me weed a flower bed. She handed me a trowel and for a good part of the morning my fingers dipped into the moist dirt, ripping up runners of Bermuda grass. Worms surfaced in my search for deep roots, and I cut them in halves, tossing them to Mrs. Moore’s cat who pawed them playfully as they dried in the sun. I made out Earl whose face was pressed to the back window of the house, and although he was calling to me I couldn’t understand what he was trying to say. Embarrassed, I worked without looking up, but I imagined his contorted mouth and the ring of keys attached to his belt—keys that jingled with each palsied step. He scared me and I worked quickly to finish the flower bed. When I did finish Mrs. Moore gave me a quarter and two peaches from her tree, which I washed there but ate in the alley behind my house.

  I was sucking on the second one, a bit of juice staining the front of my T-shirt, when Little John, my best friend, came walking down the alley with a baseball bat over his shoulder, knocking over trash cans as he made his way toward me.

  Little John and I went to St. John’s Catholic School, where we sat among the “stupids.” Miss Marino, our teacher, alternated the rows of good students with the bad, hoping that by sitting side-by-side with the bright students the stupids might become more intelligent, as though intelligence were contagious. But we didn’t progress as she had hoped. She grew frustrated when one day, while dismissing class for recess, Little John couldn’t get up because his arms were stuck in the slats of the chair’s backrest. She scolded us with a shaking finger when we knocked over the globe, denting the already troubled Africa. She muttered curses when Leroy White, a real stupid but a great softball player with the gift to hit to all fields, openly chewed his host when he made his First Communion; his hands swung at his sides as he returned to the pew looking around with a big smile.

  Little John asked what I was doing, and I told him that I was taking a break from work, as I sat comfortably among high weeds. He wanted to join me, but I reminded him that the last time he’d gone door-to-door asking for work his mother had whipped him. I was with him when his mother, a New Jersey Italian who could rise up in anger one moment and love the next, told me in a polite but matter-of-fact voice that I had to leave because she was going to beat her son. She gave me a homemade popsicle, ushered me to the door, and said that I could see Little John the next day. But it was sooner than that. I went around to his bedroom window to suck my popsicle and watch Little John dodge his mother’s blows, a few hitting their mark but many whirring air.

  It was midday when Little John and I converged in the alley, the sun blazing in the high nineties, and he suggested that we go to Roosevelt High School to swim. He needed five cents to make fifteen, the cost of admission, and I lent him a nickel. We ran home for my bike and when my sister found out that we were going swimming, she started to cry because she didn’t have the fifteen cents but only an empty Coke bottle. I waved for her to come and three of us mounted the bike—Debra on the crossbar, Little John on the handlebars and holding the Coke bottle which we would cash for a nickel and make up the difference that would allow all of us to get in, and me pumping up the crooked streets, dodging cars and pot holes. We spent the day swimming under the afternoon sun, so that when we got home our mom asked us what was darker, the floor or us? She feigned a stern posture, her hands on her hips and her mouth puckered. We played along. Looking down, Debbie and I said in unison, “Us.”

  That evening at dinner we all sat down in our bathing suits to eat our beans, laughing and chewing loudly. Our mom was in a good mood, so I took a risk and asked her if sometime we could have turtle soup. A few days before I had watched a television program in which a Polynesian tribe killed a large turtle, gutted it, and then stewed it over an open fire. The turtle, basted in a sugary sauce, looked delicious as I ate an afternoon bowl of cereal, but my sister, who was watching the program with a glass of Kool-Aid between her knees, said, “Caca.”

  My mother looked at me in bewilderment. “Boy, are you a crazy Mexican. Where did you get the idea that people eat turtles?”

  “On television,” I said, explaining the program. Then I took it a step further. “Mom, do you think we could get dressed up for dinner one of these days? David King does.”

  “Ay, Dios,” my mother laughed. She started collecting the dinner plates, but my brother wouldn’t let go of his. He was still drawing a picture in the bean sauce. Giggling, he said it was me, but I didn’t want to listen because I wanted an answer from Mom. This was the summer when I spent the mornings in front of the television that showed the comfortable lives of white kids. There were no beatings, no rifts in the family. They wore bright clothes; toys tumbled from their closets. They hopped into bed with kisses and woke to glasses of fresh orange juice, and to a father sitting before his morning coffee while the mother buttered his toast. They hurried through the day making friends and gobs of money, returning home to a warmly lit living room, and then dinner. Leave It to Beaver was the program I replayed in my mind:

  “May I have the mashed potatoes?” asks Beaver with a smile.

  “Sure, Beav,” replies Wally as he taps the corners of his mouth with a starched napkin.

  The father looks on in his suit. The mother, decked out in earrings and a pearl necklace, cuts into her steak and blushes. Their conversation is politely clipped.

  “Swell,” says Beaver, his cheeks puffed with food.

  Our own talk at dinner was loud with belly laughs and marked by our pointing forks at one another. The subjects were commonplace.

  “Gary, let’s go to the ditch tomorrow,” my brother suggests. He explains that he has made a life preserver out of four empty detergent bottles strung together with twine and that he will make me one if I can find more bottles. “No way are we going to drown.”

  “Yeah, then we could have a dirt clod fight,” I reply, so happy to be alive.

  Whereas the Beaver’s family enjoyed dessert in dishes at the table, our mom sent us outside, and more often than not I went into the alley to peek over the neighbor’s fences and spy out fruit, apricot or peaches.

  I had asked my mom and again she laughed that I was a crazy chavalo as she stood in front of the sink, her arms rising and falling with suds, face glistening from the heat. She sent me outside where my brother and sister were sitting in the shade that the fence threw out like a blanket. They were talking about me when I plopped down next to them. They looked at one another and then Debbie, my eight-year-old sister, started in.

  “What’s this crap about getting dressed up?”

  She had entered her profanity stage. A year later she would give up such words and slip into her Catholic uniform, and into
squealing on my brother and me when we “cussed this” and “cussed that.”

  I tried to convince them that if we improved the way we looked we might get along better in life. White people would like us more. They might invite us to places, like their homes or front yards. They might not hate us so much.

  My sister called me a “craphead,” and got up to leave with a stalk of grass dangling from her mouth. “They’ll never like us.”

  My brother’s mood lightened as he talked about the ditch—the white water, the broken pieces of glass, and the rusted car fenders that awaited our knees. There would be toads, and rocks to smash them.

  David King, the only person we knew who resembled the middle class, called from over the fence. David was Catholic, of Armenian and French descent, and his closet was filled with toys. A bear-shaped cookie jar, like the ones on television, sat on the kitchen counter. His mother was remarkably kind while she put up with the racket we made on the street. Evenings, she often watered the front yard and it must have upset her to see us—my brother and I and others—jump from trees laughing, the unkillable kids of the very poor, who got up unshaken, brushed off, and climbed into another one to try again.

  David called again. Rick got up and slapped grass from his pants. When I asked if I could come along he said no. David said no. They were two years older so their affairs were different from mine. They greeted one another with foul names and took off down the alley to look for trouble.

  I went inside the house, turned on the television, and was about to sit down with a glass of Kool-Aid when Mom shooed me outside.

  “It’s still light,” she said. “Later you’ll bug me to let you stay out longer. So go on.”

  I downed my Kool-Aid and went outside to the front yard. No one was around. The day had cooled and a breeze rustled the trees. Mr. Jackson, the plumber, was watering his lawn and when he saw me he turned away to wash off his front steps. There was more than an hour of light left, so I took advantage of it and decided to look for work. I felt suddenly alive as I skipped down the block in search of an overgrown flower bed and the dime that would end the day right.

  The Best Deal in America

  BEBE MOORE CAMPBELL

  The money is yours until you give it away. The credo was Maxine’s mama’s, honed over half a century of parsimonious dealings and painstakingly passed on to her youngest daughter during the formative years of her improverished childhood. Neither the potency of the lesson nor the uncontrollable yearning to decorate her life with shiny new things had diminished over the years.

  As Maxine waited at the counter of World of Linens, she “read” the saleslady, just the way her mama had taught her to: the emotional type. Her slim fingers inched the sheets toward the woman, like a blind beggar extending her cup. “See?” she said, pointing to a small mark. “There’s a stain right here.”

  “Well, Miss, did you try to find another set?” the saleslady asked.

  “This is the last one.” Maxine made her lips tremble.

  “Well, gee, I’m really sorry.” The saleslady watched as the young black woman lowered her glance, then heard the deep sigh and saw the spasms shuddering through her body. “Is there anything I can do, Honey?” she asked, putting her hand on top of her customer’s. Maxine counted to three in her head, then lifted her eyes just slightly. “I really need them, I’ve got guests coming. Do you think I could get a little discount?” she asked.

  “What did you have in mind?” The woman still held her hand.

  “Oh, 15 percent.” Ten. Ten. Ten.

  “We’re only allowed to give 10.”

  “Ten will be fine,” Maxine said, swallowing her smile.

  Maxine was the Bargain Queen. She knew where she could haggle for Giorgio, Poison and Obsession—not knock-offs, the real stuff—and pay $10 a bottle. At a little shop in Chinatown, when the owner wasn’t around, she could get a full set of silk-wrapped fingernails for just $9. Jewelry? That would be Virgilio’s on Los Angeles Street: the best gold for the lowest prices. The man to ask for was Salvador; Maxine knew his shift.

  “The discount diva strikes again,” Denise, her roommate, said when she brought home the sheets. Sitting at the kitchen table, she looked up from the California bar review book she was poring over. Denise was a wiry girl, with skin the color of Kentucky bourbon. “How much did you save this time?”

  “Four eighty-seven,” Maxine said, ignoring Denise’s sarcasm.

  Denise rolled her eyes. Why anyone would grovel—and she’d seen Maxine do just that—over a few bucks was beyond her. She thought of the hardball the lawyers played at the firm where she worked. That was deal-making. “You need to expand your vision,” she said, turning back to her workbook.

  Maxine climbed the stairs and threw the sheets into the linen closet, slammed the door, then pressed her forehead against the cool wood for a moment and waited for yet another fit of inexplicable rage to subside. Lately, when she finished shopping, anger crept around her neck like a pearl choker, and she’d remember the times her mama begged the neighborhood grocer to sell her peaches for 10 cents a pound, all of them rotten. When she turned around, Denise was standing in front of her. “Listen,” she said. “I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings, but you don’t even use half the stuff you buy. You waste so much money.”

  “You didn’t come up like I did,” Maxine said in a low voice.

  Denise looked into her friend’s face, saw the tense jaw, the anger in her dark eyes, and stepped back. “I know you used to be poor,” she said, remembering the time she visited Maxine’s mother’s house in Louisiana. Clean, but Lord …

  “No. You just think you know.”

  But all her scrimping would soon be worthwhile, Maxine thought a week later as she stared through the plate-glass window of the new-car showroom. Her gaze settled on the gleaming blue convertible parked in the center of the floor. No one in her family had ever owned a car, let alone a new one. She’d been saving for a car for three years and finally had enough money, if she could strike the right deal. Oblivious to the people walking past her on the street, she closed her eyes and saw herself tooling around L.A., her head thrown back in raucous laughter, the summer breeze blowing through her hair, the sun kissing her chocolate skin, the music on the radio loud and vibrant. She opened her eyes, and what she saw was a party on four wheels.

  But looming just ahead of her windblown future, plastered to the car window, was the sticker price: $17,500. Maxine studied the numbers for a moment, rolling them around in her mind like a pair of dice. She’d pay $16,800 and not a cent more.

  The showroom felt frigid after the heat of the summer day. Maxine stepped over to the convertible, opened the door, and sat down. Then she looked out the window, studying the faces of the three men and one woman on the floor. They were all white and somber-looking, except for one smiling young man she judged to be the flirtatious type.

  Ted took her for a test-drive and described the many wonderful features the car possessed. As she whipped around corner after corner, Maxine told cute little jokes in a Diana Ross voice, Mahogany vintage, setting him up for the kill.

  “You sure look great in that car, Maxine,” Ted said with a grin when she was seated across from him in his office. “I can write up the papers now.” He leaned forward eagerly, giving off a light scent of Drakkar Noir, then picked up a pen. “Let’s see, $17,500 at …”

  Maxine cleared her throat. Ted looked up. “I was hoping you could give me a little better deal than that.”

  The small man leaned back in his chair. His polished nails gleamed. “What did you have in mind?”

  Careful. Careful. “I was thinking of $16,650,” she said. It was a good place to start, according to the books she’d read.

  Ted dropped his pen. “No way.”

  She’d never seen eyes turn so hard so fast. Diana Ross and the Supremes couldn’t help her out. “What’s your best offer?” she asked, her voice businesslike.

  He took out a form from his desk dr
awer and wrote quickly, then slid the paper toward her. She read $17,300 with dismay.

  “What about …” Maxine began.

  Ted said evenly, “That’s my final offer.” His eyes wandered to the plate-glass partition, then became suddenly alert; he stood up. “Would you excuse me for a second?” he asked, grabbing papers on his desk, leaving yellow copies behind. “I have to see a customer.”

  Through the partition, Maxine watched as Ted shook hands with a lanky blond man and handed him the papers. Without hesitating, Maxine picked up the copies on the desk and examined them. She held in her hand a bill of sale for the convertible. Scanning to the bottom line, she almost dropped the papers. $16,700. She looked again and saw the men grinning at each other. Heat flared up in her chest, just enough to make her sway. Maxine folded her offer and slid it in her purse. As she passed Ted in the showroom, she said, “I’ll get back to you.”

  Denise was sitting on her bed when Maxine came in, the stock market pages of the stock market pages of the paper spread all around her. On television, black South Africans waited to vote in lines that stretched for miles. Their raised fists seemed to cut through the air.

  “I don’t know whether this is a race thing or a gender thing,” Maxine said quietly after she explained to Denise what had happened. Her roommate didn’t respond, but the crease between her eyebrows kept getting deeper.

  “The kids in my neighborhood used to laugh because my mother always gave us rotten peaches to eat. She’d try to cut away the bad spots, but …” Maxine lifted up her hands, and when they dropped back into her lap, she was crying. Each sob seemed to send up a ray of light, illuminating her for Denise.

  “You’re not a poor little girl anymore,” Denise said, putting one arm around her friend and picking up the telephone with her other hand. “You need a lawyer.”