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

by Maria Mazziotti Gillan

  Then there stood the many houses of no-names-known-to-us people which Lena and her brother and friends passed as they walked up the hill to school and down the hill home. The crooked-drainpipes house and the house of yellow shutters and the house with three broken station wagons and men sticking out from under them and the house with the crazy dog that bit Lena under the eye once and had to be taken to the dog pound for observation. They were people who could have been Lena’s friends too, but were not because of the mystery of streets and blocks and knowing only some people while others belong to the quiet backdrop of trees.

  Nobody had too much money. Almost everybody saved things. Lena’s mother saved the little boxes strawberries came in and used them to hold her bills and spools of thread. Norma’s mother saved the scraps of yarn from all the sweaters she knitted, then knitted a tiny striped sweater for their dachshund. The Canadians saved paper advertisements and let their children draw and paint on the backs of them. Only Annie’s mother threw away the last little mound of mashed potato. Only Annie’s mother did not darn Annie’s socks. But it was nothing to do with money, more with style. Most people had a saving style in those days and nobody locked their cars when they got out of them. There wouldn’t have been much to steal but an ashtray anyway.

  Lena never thought twice about answering the front door if somebody knocked. It might be one of her friends or it might be a fireman selling tickets to the fish fry. Once it was a man complimenting the radiant rows of red tulips bordering their front yard. He seemed very dramatic. He stretched his arms out wide toward the sidewalk and driveway and said, “These are the most beautiful tulips in St. Louis! These are the most beautiful tulips in the whole world!” Lena’s mother came out of the kitchen with her spoon to see who was making such a racket. They said thank you and he went away. Later they thought they should have given him a bouquet of them, at least, but they weren’t in the habit of picking the tulips. They just left them alone and their petals slipped down the same way as old loose socks.

  Once Lena dreamed two gypsies came to the front door and tried to drag her off with them. The man gypsy had a silk suit and a top hat like Abraham Lincoln and the woman gypsy had a chicken in her purse. She woke up in a sweat and went to stand beside her mother’s bed until her mother, startled, sat upright. “What’s going on?”

  “I had a bad dream,” Lena said. She was eleven already and felt a little foolish to get scared from a dream. She did not want to say someone was trying to steal her.

  “What about?”

  “About—the unknown.”

  Her mother said sleepily, “Every bad dream is about the unknown. Probably every good dream too. You want me to crawl over or you want to go back to your own room?” Lena’s father was snoring his snipping-scissors snore. Lena said, “I’ll go back.” Now the shadows casting their bony fingers across the top of the wall in her room seemed to point at her. Ha, ha, ha.

  So the next afternoon before dinner when a loud knocking came at the front door as she was deep inside a book on her bed, she didn’t run to answer. Her little brother did. She could hear the big door creaking open and him saying, “Who?” Then a long pause. She could hear mumbling.

  She peeked around the corner. Two children she had never seen before stood there awkwardly. The taller one, a girl, said, “Is anybody else home?” and Lena stepped forward.

  “May I help you?” she spoke like the lady in the ticket booth at the theater on Saturday afternoons.

  The girl said, “We heard … well, we wondered …” and stopped.

  Behind her, the floating lady was floating home with a basket full of groceries to hold her down to earth. She ate mushroom soup and marshmallows. She ate meringue and puffy muffins.

  “You wondered what?” Lena asked.

  “If we could see the Arab.”

  Another floating moment. In this long space Beverly next door would be pulling three long hairs out of her pink plastic comb. Annie would bounce a rubber ball up against the side of her house and feel the hard ping of it back into her hands.

  “What Arab?”

  “The one we heard lived here.”

  Lena looked around her living room. Piano, blue painting of candles, a lamp. Her mother was in the kitchen peeling apples for applesauce. Her father was in the backyard pitching twigs and dried leaves into a barrel and burning them. He thought it might be illegal, but was taking a chance.

  “We don’t have one,” Lena said, and the girl and boy looked disappointed.

  “Oh, but we heard …”

  Lena closed the door as quietly as she could without saying good-bye. There was a small clicking sound instead of the usual swoosh. Her brother was looking at her. She went outside and sat on the back step next to the broom. She stared at her father in his white undershirt and square blue jeans. He was standing back from the spiraling smoke. He was tipping his head to one side as if he were hypnotized.

  Oh, she knew where he had come from all right. She knew he came from Jerusalem, Palestine, the Holy Land, the land of Jesus, the land of camels and donkeys and olive trees, the land of her grandmother whom she had never seen. She knew the stories of Joha, the wise fool, which their father told them every night before they went to bed, and she knew about the pilgrims walking from the Old City to Bethlehem. When her father was a boy, he asked his mother if he could walk with the pilgrims, even though his family was Muslim, not Christian. “My mother said yes. She said, Be polite.”

  Lena had never been to her father’s old home yet, but she was going, someday, one big day when the horizon opened up.

  But he wasn’t An Arab, the way that girl had said it. He was Daddy. He was Aziz to his friends and their mother. He was a funny tipped laugh and a red-and-white headdress folded up in his bottom dresser drawer. He was worried too, about money, same as everybody was. He didn’t want Lena to do things she would regret. Should she tell him what those children asked for and what she said?

  In the next neighborhood over from their neighborhood lived the Collins boys and the Parker boys that Lena knew from their jobs together working on the berry-picking farm and the Emerson girls who spent every Saturday morning at the library like Lena did and sometimes they all traded favorite books and the big grandmother with the high hair that Lena’s mother stared at once in the grocery checkout line. “I should have been her,” she whispered to Lena, which Lena found very strange. How could anybody be anyone else? But Lena would never go to their houses and ask to see the Africans.

  Because once you knew Billy Collins, you knew about his lizard collection and his turquoise stone that he kept in a pouch inside an egg carton with old pennies worth ten dollars each and the rusted key he dug out of the ground one day while they were plucking the berries. You knew his voice and shirts. You did not think A Group of Different People, when you were thinking of friends.

  Maybe the Robitailles weren’t even like any other French-Canadians at all. Maybe Annie’s grandfather who snapped his suspenders and brought them a fancy cold dessert called Tiramisu which he carried on ice cubes in his green car was just himself more than An Italian. In those days not many people talked about being half-and-half, but years later Lena would know it was one of the richest kinds of milk.

  So her father burned the dry leaves and a bat flew over him. Lena called out, “Bat! Daddy! Look, it’s not a bird!” and he looked up. “Ahlan wa sahlan,” he called out, which meant “Welcome” in his own first language of Arabic, and she laughed as the bat dipped and rose in graceful arcs. He did not say, Get away. He did not say, I wish you were something else. He said “Welcome” and the bat seemed to understand by circling close above his head.

  Then she took a deep breath and called out to him. “Daddy, some children came to the door. They wanted to see the Arab and I said we didn’t have one. I never saw them on this street before. I never saw them at school either. But they might be from school. Are you mad at me?”

  And her father came and sat beside her and took her hand
in his own hand.

  He sat between her and the broom and the night.

  Inside the kitchen window her mother was reaching for a stack of four white plates with sheaves of golden wheat bowing around their edges. Her brother was turning the bathroom faucet off and on so the whole house shook a little bit.

  Her father said, “The world asks us all a lot of questions, doesn’t it,” and stared off into a strip of pink sky.

  Then there was a long slow calling of a dog from out in the field beyond the houses.

  Then there was the clatter-bang muffler sound of Peter’s father turning into his driveway next door.

  Lena thought his feelings might be hurt. She said, “I’m sorry,” and her daddy laughed so loudly he startled her. He stood up again and waved his hands in the air.

  “You could have said Yes, but you were also right in saying No! All the questions have more than one good answer, don’t you think?”

  Lena felt gloomy. “That’s not what they tell us at school.”

  “I could have put on my headdress for them! You could have pretended I didn’t speak English. Maybe they’ll come back and we can make them happy.”

  Lena’s brother stepped outside, banging the green screen door of their back porch, and pitched his ball high into the air. He said, “Daddy, catch?” And their daddy was catching. He had stepped off against the nearly dark sky, so Lena could see him from a distance again and he could have been anybody from any place in the world. Without the long shafts of light from the windows of their house, they wouldn’t have been able to see the ball very well by now.

  A few days later a package arrived from the old country for Lena. Inside it was a red velvet dress, sewn by her grandmother and aunts in the village overseas, stitched with figures of children playing and two angels and birds and interlocking vines, all in different bright colors. At first Lena’s mother said it would be a dress-up dress, but Lena didn’t dress up that much and it seemed a shame just to let it hang in the closet. So Lena wore it to school. Her mother tied the long velvet ribbons in the back at the waist. She said, “Look at you! You look so elegant I almost don’t recognize you!”

  At school her girlfriends took deep breaths over her dress. They rubbed the velvet between their fingers. “Where did you get this?” they whispered.

  Lena said, “It is my Arab dress from my Arab relatives far across the sea.”

  Some people said, “We never knew you were an Arab!” and she said, “Oh yes.” But she was also thinking about the German words inside the dreams of her grandparents on her mother’s side—they had told her they still had dreams in German even though they hadn’t really spoken the language since they were children—and all the people on her block. What other country did Margaret’s mother in the wheelchair belong to? The country of long quiet hours. The country of Slow and Ramps and Wait Till Everybody Else Comes Home. But Lena had also heard her singing.

  The only problem about the red velvet dress was Lena wanted to wear it every day. It felt so smooth, and comforting. It fit just perfectly around the neck. Not tight, not pulling. All her other dresses and blouses and skirts seemed shabby beside it. Down the street, Norma asked her mother if she could make her a blue velvet dress. She didn’t want to copy Lena, but if Lena wouldn’t mind …

  Something had changed. Now Lena thought about her faraway relatives more. She imagined what her world would look like to them. What would they think of the art wagon at school and the tornado drills when everybody rushed down to the school basement to crouch on the floor and cover their heads with their arms? She wondered if her cousins would be able to climb the rope in PE. Now she thought of their faraway fingers pulling threads through velvet for her, thinking of her, and what that meant. It meant they were connected, just as she felt connected to all the people on her block and her friends lining their lunch sacks up beside her own. Now when she pledged allegiance, it was secretly to everywhere.

  Grandpa’s “Chicaudies”

  FRED L. GARDAPHÉ

  The sun sits screened by a layer of gray clouds. It looks like the thumbprint of one who had been rubbing his thumb in the yellow pollen of the dandelion flower. The air is thick with the humidity of late spring. Even with the windows rolled down, the inside of the car is heavy with moist air. “The sky is sweating,” thinks Frankie, who sits in the backseat of his mother’s station wagon. In the front seat, next to his mother, sits Grandpa. It is early Saturday morning. Frankie wants to be home in bed, waiting to wake for the late-morning ball game that he plays when there is no school, but today Grandpa has summoned him to pick “chicaudies,” the dirty, bitter greens that he hates to eat. Everyone, it seems, but Grandpa knows they’re not really cicoria, but dandelions, yet the old man insists on calling them “chicaudies.”

  Grandpa is wearing his baggy work pants and a coat that is the color of today’s sky. Squeezed over his head is a gray wool cap, the kind the newsboys wear in the old movies. The car turns off the busy street and slows as it reaches the open field in the forest preserves. As far as Frankie’s eyes can see the field is flooded with yellow dandelion flowers. Even Frankie knows that it is too late to pick the weeds; once they’ve flowered, the greens have beome tough and bitter and only the old people will eat them.

  At Grandpa’s command the car stops and Frankie grabs five empty potato sacks and slides across the seat, out of the car. Angela leans to kiss her father. He tells her they will be finished before sunset. Frankie stretches and yawns. His eyes wander and he wonders how much of the yellow will be gone by the time his mother rescues him. Over the treetops he can see the Ferris wheel of Kiddieland. It is motionless. Grandpa grunts as he lifts himself out of the car. He softly shuts the door and Angela has to lean over and pull it closed. The white wagon pulls away leaving the two alone in the vacant field. The horn beeps and Frankie follows it until he can see only its blue roof moving into the stream of early morning shopping-center traffic.

  By now Grandpa is standing in the high grass and looks like a tramp searching for a cigarette butt. Frankie sighs; the connection to his world is gone. Now he must follow the old man into the Old World. He pulls the brim of his blue baseball cap down and heads toward Grandpa. Frankie’s world will return only when the station wagon returns, only after all five sacks have been stuffed full of chicaudies.

  Without taking off his coat Grandpa bends down and pulls a leaf up to his mouth. He bites it in half and chews it slowly. He nods and turns to say, “Franco! Whoa-aye! Franco! Ova ‘ere we start.” Frankie drags the sacks behind him and jogs to where Grandpa is bent down. Grandpa takes a sack, hooks it over the middle button of his coat, reaches into his pocket, and grabs the small curved knife that is always in his pocket. With the knife in his right hand he poises it above his left hand which has made a fist around the leaves of one flower. Without looking, he slices the bunch just under the base of his hand, tosses the severed leaves into the sack, and reaches for the next plant. Frankie watches until the old man twists his neck and as though in pain calls out, “Whoa-aye! Doan you know how to pick the chicaudies?”

  Frankie responds by pulling out his pocket knife, then imitating his grandfather. He loops a sack over his belt buckle. They work face to face a few feet apart. For every bunch that Frankie picks the old man picks four. Soon Grandpa is a good distance away, working rhythmically, sliding sidestep from plant to plant. After an hour Frankie’s back aches and he thinks only of the many hours he had yet to spend in this field. He stops to watch Grandpa.

  The old man is still bent, head even with his broad backside. Occasionally he pulls a bunch to his mouth. His tobacco-stained teeth part to make way for the muddy greens that he quickly stuffs into his mouth. He tastes the weeds to tell his next direction. Now sweating, he rubs his muddied wrist against his dripping forehead as though his wrist was a matchstick and his forehead the striking surface.

  The friction leaves a red impression on his already sunburned skin. Under the cap, behind the sweatband, head causes h
air to itch and itch causes eyes to wince. Soon his hands stop picking and with knife yet in hand he pulls back the woolen cap. Out pours more sweat in thin streams. The silvered hair is matted with oily sweat. He runs his fingers through the thick hair, scratching vigorously with his fingernails. He replaces the cap; all the while his eyes have not left the field he works in. Sweat puddles the ridge where his glasses usually rest. It is a thick sweat that deposits grime deep into the honey-colored glasses that ride the tip of his nose, like a loose saddle on a cantering horse. The glasses’ frames wedge red rims into the sunburned cheeks and the old man’s eyes puff with moisture that seeps from irritated tear ducts. He takes out a handkerchief and rubs it across his face, his glasses still on. He returns to work, not noticing that Frankie has stopped and is watching him from more than ten yards away. As Grandpa retakes his straddling stance Frankie returns to his picking.

  Hours pass. The old man still wears his thick jacket. The sky remains unchanged, still sweating into the air of late morning.

  Grandpa never stops and his pace leaves Frankie far behind. He is now just over the side of a small hill. Only his cap is visible, bobbing into and then peeking over the tips of golden grass. Frankie looks up and sees only the gray cap. He hurries to catch up. He can’t move as quickly as Grandpa can in this bent position. He crouches and hops plant to plant, like a throb as though it was a bat that repeatedly bounces against his spine. A cold sweat pours. Patience battles pain, pride wages war with passivity. To shorten the distance between him and the General he skips yards of plants, squishing the unpicked flowers underfoot so that Grandpa won’t see that he’s missed them. He hears Grandpa wheezing as he sucks in air with emphysematic lungs. He returns to picking only when he feels he is within Grandpa’s sight. He cuts, throws, digs, cuts, and throws the leaves into his sack. The half-full sack slows him down. “Francino, bring me a nudder sacco. Whoa-aye Francino, hurr’ up!” Frankie hobbles to Grandpa and the exchange is made without eye contact. “Grandpa is so serious. He doesn’t talk. He stops swinging his knife only to chew more chicaudies. That’s okay though. What could we talk about anyway? He embarrasses me. Hope no one sees me here, like some beggar.” And he remembers the time that his friend Pickles tried to chase Grandpa from left field.