But the girls giggled and said that we were island girls and “things happen” on a Caribbean island. Those guys came towards us, suddenly weird and nasty-eyed, but also staggering a little. They said they had a way of telling if girls were sisters. We were scared! We stood up real slow like we were in a room with a colicky baby who had finally fallen asleep, and all five of us gave each other the eye, and a little nod towards the door, a gesture reminiscent of my mother’s García girls head-jerk. One-two-three—it was like we were one person breathing in unison—then Yo cried out, “¡Vámonos!” and we flew out the door, clattered down the stairs, and didn’t stop running until we were eight blocks away and two flights down at our subway stop.
On the ride home, Carla asked me and Fifi how we felt about what had happened, and Sandi said if we breathed a word about what had happened we would all be in a shitload of trouble. But that Yo kept wondering out loud how those guys could tell if girls were sisters or not.
“Please stop!” Carla finally yelled at her—and it was a yell that could be heard above the rumble of the train. People looked up at us. “You’re going to give me nightmares.”
“You sound like you need a shrink, Carla,” Yo said, so sharp and clever. No one could have the last word with her around, which is why her mother was always threatening to put Tabasco sauce in her mouth—to burn off her quick tongue. There were some sad scenes in that family.
Anyhow, that was the last of our secret trips to the city. In a week, the summer was over. The three oldest García girls were packed off to their colleges, Fifi to her boarding school, and I was left alone with the three grown-ups as if I were the one and only García girl in that family.
If it hadn’t been for school, I would have died of loneliness in that empty house. The life there was so isolated compared to the island. Even when I lived out in the campo, Abuela and I woke up in the morning and went outside until it was time to go to bed. Our living room was three rocking chairs under the almond tree facing our neighbors’ rocking chairs. The kitchen was a palm roof over a counter of carbon fires where a bunch of women cooked and gossiped together. The toilet was a field on the far side of the river, and the public bath was in that river. And in all these places there were plenty of other people.
But in that fancy area of the Bronx, everyone was locked up in a house that had a burglar alarm system and heavy drapes at the windows. Mamá had been there five years, and she said she still didn’t know anyone in the houses around ours. The only people Mamá ever saw were the patients that came next door to see the psychologist, who had an office in her house. There was a lady in dark glasses and a kerchief looking over her shoulder, a woman and her skinny teenage daughter screaming at each other as they came up the walk (Mamá shook her head at them just like she did at the García girls), a man with a twisted body and horrible limp (Mamá imitated him to show me how bad), and a bunch of others. I felt all the more grateful to Mamá for what she’d been through for five lonely years, imprisoned—that’s the way I thought of it—in that house with only Sundays off. I know I couldn’t have stood it. But like I said, I had school to break the lonely monotony.
The public school was a bus ride away in a not-so-good area of the Bronx. Most of the kids there were American blacks along with some Puerto Ricans and a few Irish kids who’d gotten thrown out of the Catholic school. At first Mamá was going to send me to Sacred Heart, but she would have had to pay tuition, and the uniforms cost money. Also, the García girls had gone to that Catholic school before they went off to boarding school, and I believe Mamá knew that Mrs. García would think the maid was giving herself airs if she sent her daughter there.
Before I started at the public school, Mamá lectured me backwards and forwards on the whys and wherefores of what I could and couldn’t do. I was to get no phone calls or bring anyone over as this wasn’t our house. I was to go directly to school on the bus and promptly at the close of school I was to come back on that bus. Mamá always walked me to the stop in the morning, and she was waiting for me there, dressed in her uniform, every afternoon about four o’clock.
Stories spread at school. I was fairly light-skinned and rather pretty—all the García girls said so. In fact, most people guessed I was Italian or Greek. I had a fancy address on my report card. Kids on the bus reported that a maid in a uniform waited for me—on rainy days she carried an umbrella. When I finally knew enough English, I explained in a faltering voice that my parents (yes, I had created a legitimate family for myself) did not allow me to receive phone calls or visitors. I became the mysterious, rich girl from an island that my father owned . . . near Italy or Greece.
These were their misinterpretations, and I didn’t have enough English to catch them in time. For all I knew, my father could well be a rich Italian or a toad-faced Greek like the Onassis guy who had married the beautiful Jackie Kennedy. So I let these lies ride, and they became the official story of my life. Who was there to set them straight?
I’ll tell you who. Yolanda García. My second year at that school, she came home for the month of January. At her college, students had to do an internship or a research project off campus once during their four years. Yolanda had planned to write a report on her family in the Dominican Republic, but the political situation turned ugly, and Dr. García wouldn’t let her go. She threatened to go anyhow, hijack a plane if need be, but Yo’s mouth was always bigger than her courage, so of course, she stayed put and looked around for something else she could spend a month studying.
Her eye landed on me.
This was her proposal, which her parents were glad she came up with because she finally quit nagging them that if Shakespeare’s parents had kept him from going to London, he never would have written his thirty-eight plays. What she proposed to do was observe my acculturation—I’d never heard of such a thing—as a way of understanding her own immigrant experience.
“Would it be okay, Primi?” she asked my mother, after she’d set up the whole thing over the phone with her advisor.
“My child, we are here at your service, you know that,” Mamá said. This was her standard response to anything the Garcías asked for.
“Thanks, thanks so much!” Yo threw her arms around me. I closed my eyes, heartsick. My whole fantasy world was about to come crashing down around me.
Yo and I walked to the bus stop the next morning, Yo yakking away about what it was like for her family that first year in this country. I took a deep breath of that frosty air and let it out so I could see something of myself in this alien world of bare trees, gray sky, brick houses, side by side. Then I told Yo my little secret. I had pretended to my teachers and classmates to be part of the García family. I kept my eyes fixed on the ground as I spoke. I could have taken a test on all the cracks, doggie poo, and graffiti on our walk to the bus stop and gotten an A+ for sure.
When I finished confessing, I expected some kind of judgment.
Instead Yolanda said, “How’d you get away with it?”
“What do you mean?”
“You have a different last name, for one thing.”
“I don’t mean I told them I was a García. I . . . I —” This was hard. “I just made believe I live in your house with my own father and a mother who’s not the maid.” I could feel that tingling in my nostrils that meant tears were coming.
“Ay, Sarita.” Yo had stopped walking. Her face was full of delight as if I had made up this story to please her. “You are my little sister of affection, and that’s all anybody has to know about it!”
Why is it that if you hope for something with all your heart, and it’s granted, you suddenly have this empty feeling? Or maybe it was just that relief made me feel a hundred pounds lighter, floating on air. She slipped her hand into mine. A gloved hand in a gloved hand—even a human touch was different in this country.
Every day for two whole weeks Yo went to school with me—well, almost every day. She did play hooky a couple of times when her hippy boyfriend hitchhiked down f
rom western Massachusetts, and they snuck away for the day together. Like Mamá, Dr. García didn’t believe in dating for his girls. One time when Yo got a call from this guy, Dr. García came on the line and challenged him to a duel!
At school, Yo sat in on all my classes, taking notes, talking to my teachers about my progress. Of course, they wanted to know more about me and about the family. “Sarita’s our mystery student!” they said, laughing as if I weren’t there. Yo would launch right in, turning my little fibs into the high art of fiction.
I think that’s when I lost my joy in making believe I was someone I wasn’t. I saw there was a way you could get further and further away from yourself like those García girls, who had become American girls sneaking off with boys who were more interested in getting high than in getting to know them. And did the García girls themselves really know who they were? Hippy girls or nice girls? American or Dominican? English or Spanish? Pobrecitas.
I suppose if I had had Mamá’s strength of character I would have stayed in the same school and told the truth. Instead I spoke to Mamá, and after days of my badgering, she finally gave me permission to talk to Mrs. García.
That weekend while I was helping Doña Laura take down the Christmas decorations, I asked if she would mind if I went to the same school as her daughters.
She thought at first I was asking if I could go to Fifi’s boarding school. “No, no,” I said, “I mean Sacred Heart. I’ll get a much better education,” I said, which was true enough.
“Why, of course I wouldn’t mind,” she said, looking at me curiously. “I thought maybe your mother wanted you to be in a school with kids who . . .” I knew what she didn’t want to say, in a school with black kids so I wouldn’t feel so out of it.
“She says I can go if you say I can,” I said, and then, quickly, I added, “but we’ll need your help with the tuition.” I bowed my head, ashamed to have to ask for this help.
She came down a few steps on the ladder, smiling that sweet smile you see on a mother’s face when she looks down at her child. “Of course, you can count on me!” she said. “All I ask is that you keep up your grades.” For a second time in two years, I reached for her hand and kissed it. “May la Virgencita be with you and each of your daughters.”
She got a faraway, sad look in her eyes—like maybe the only person who might be of some help with her girls was the Virgin Mary. Then she climbed back up the ladder and handed me the psychedelic purple-orange-green papier-mâché star the girls had made for the top of the Christmas tree.
At the end of her two weeks, Yo stopped coming to school. Then it was pound, pound, pound upstairs on the typewriter her father had given her that she didn’t let anyone else use, not even her mother to fill out Dr. García’s Workman’s Compensation forms. “That’s a selfish way to be with that typewriter,” Mrs. García accused her.
“It’s my one and only special thing,” Yo fought back. Just that would have gotten me a slap on the mouth. But Yo didn’t know when to stop. “Would you let someone sleep with Papi?” Out came the Tabasco sauce. My mother gave me a jerk of her head, meaning, Go downstairs. I don’t want you to see this.
But all in all, it was a relatively peaceful time, except for the continual pounding upstairs as if the house now had a heartbeat. I have to hand it to Yo—she worked day and night on that report. She had already interviewed Mamá and me, of course, and her parents, and other maids whose phone numbers Mamá had given her who worked in Dominican homes in Brooklyn and Queens. Sometimes I asked her about what she was writing, but it was like she was caught up in a dream or something. Her mother had to snap her fingers to get her attention. Her father would cup his hands at his mouth and call across the dining room table, “How is our little Shakespeare?”
And then, one night, Yo came racing down the stairs with her report in hand to show to us. “I’m done! I’m done!” She made Mamá touch the stack of pages for good luck, and then she read us the first page where it said that this report was dedicated to all those who had lost their native land, and especially dedicated to Sarita y Primitiva, parte de mi familia.
Mamá didn’t know what to do with a dedication. “Thank you,” she said at last, reaching for that report like it was ours.
“No, no,” Yo laughed. “I have to hand this in. A dedication is just, well, a dedication.”
I knew exactly what I wanted to do with that dedication. I wanted to write it over, using Mamá’s rightful name. More than once, I had tried to get my mother to go back to her real name, María Trinidad. But Mamá refused. The de la Torres had given her that nickname when she was a young wild girl just hired out of the campo. “I’m used to it now, mi’ja. At this point, I’d get all confused if someone changed it. Lord knows my old head has enough trouble remembering who I am as it is.” She had spent her whole life working for the de la Torres, and it showed. If you stood them side by side—Mrs. García with her pale skin kept moist with expensive creams and her hair fixed up in the beauty parlor every week; Mamá with her unraveling gray bun and maid’s uniform and mouth still waiting for the winning lottery ticket to get replacement teeth—why Mamá looked ten years older than Mrs. García, though they were both the same age, forty-three.
That weekend, the Garcías went off to visit Fifi in her boarding school, and Yo went along to say hi to her old high school teachers. Mamá and I were going to leave early on Saturday afternoon to spend the night with her friend in Brooklyn. So while she did the laundry downstairs, I was finishing up the upstairs. In Yo’s room, right next to her typewriter, I spotted the fancy black binder. I turned past that dedication page, and I began to read.
I don’t know what I can compare it to. Everything was set down more or less straight, for once. But I still felt as if something had been stolen from me. Later, in an anthropology course I took in college, we read about how certain primitive (how I hate that word!) tribes won’t allow themselves to be photographed because they feel their spirits have been taken from them. Well, that’s the way I felt. Those pages were like those little pieces of herself Mamá had sprinkled in the suitcases of traveling de la Torres—a part of me.
I put that binder in my bucket of cleaning materials, and when Mamá wasn’t looking, I slipped it in my bookbag. My plan was to take that report to school and hide it in my desk until I had decided what I wanted to do with it.
Late Sunday night—Mamá always waited till the last minute to come back from her day off—the two of us walked up from the subway. It was a snowy night, and at each street lamp, we could see thick flakes coming down, thousands upon thousands, like something there is plenty of for everyone. It put Mamá in a good mood, even though she was on her way back to grinding the yucca, as she called her hard work.
She had stopped at a street lamp, and like a child, she was sticking out her tongue and laughing as the flakes pelted her face. “Ay, Gran Poder de Dios” she said. “I hope your abuela sees this before she dies.”
I couldn’t bring myself to second a wish for my grandmother to come to such a cold and lonely country. “Why?” I asked Mamá, a challenge in my voice. The habits of the García girls were catching.
I thought maybe Mamá would strike me for the rude tone in my voice, but instead she looked directly at me. In the light from the street lamp I saw her face wet with melted snowflakes. “You are not happy here, mi’ja, is that it?”
“I’m always happy at your side, Mamá,” I lied.
“The girls, they treat you well. Doña Laura has a special place in her heart for you.”
“I know, Mamá, but they’re not our family.”
She was quiet a moment as if she were going to tell me something but then thought better of it. “What is it you want, mi’ja?” she asked finally.
I hesitated. I did not want to hurt her. I wanted her to believe she had given me everything I could ask for. “I want you and Abuela to have a nice house. For you not to have to work so hard.”
My mother touched my face in the old way f
rom when I was a child. “You keep working hard in school, and someday you’ll make something of yourself, and help us out.”
I felt my heart sink down to the bottom of my cold feet. I had ruined our one chance in the United States! I would not get away with what I had done. The Garcías would never believe a burglar had broken into the house just to steal Yo’s report. And as my mother had once told me, one wrong move and both of us would be on a plane home to poverty and hard work.
That short block before the turn on the corner to the García house, I think I prayed the hardest I had prayed up to that point in my life. Please God, don’t let the Garcías be home yet! Please don’t let me be found out! But when the house came into view, I saw lights beaming in the second-floor bedrooms.
We let ourselves quietly in the side door, and I braced myself, but no Yo came running down the stairs to report her stolen work. No Dr. García asked my mother to try and remember who might have been in the house besides the two of us. No Doña Laura queried us on where we might have put things that had been left lying around. A miracle, I thought, a miracle has happened.
Before I went to bed, I guess I felt that thief’s impulse that supposedly sends them back to the scene of the crime. When Mamá was tucked in her cot, I slipped out of mine. Inside our closet, I reached in my bookbag. The folder was gone.
The next day Yo came running down the stairs as we were going out the door. “I’ll walk her, Primi,” she said to Mamá.
On the sidewalk, out of earshot, she let me have it. “Why, Sarita? Just tell me why?”
I shrugged. Mamá had already told me not to insult any of the Garcías, or we would be in hot water. What could I say?
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