I wasn’t so sure I was a lady, but I listened carefully as he described the basic mechanics of a combustion engine and how it ran. After that, we put on coveralls and took turns changing air filters and spark plugs in a car. Before we left, he promised us that next week, we would learn how to change the oil.
I was surprised that the older women were so enthusiastic. I expected them to complain about having to wear the ugly coveralls and get dirty. One or two of them made a face, but then someone said, “Knowing how to do this will save us so much money. If my husband won’t do it, then I will!” All the other women nodded, and I grinned.
Leaving the class, I felt the way I had when I’d learned how to pass the scissors at my very first Brownie meeting. There was a proper way to take care of cars, and I could learn to do it, even if I wasn’t old enough to drive. Even if Mami thought the maintenance of cars was men’s work, that didn’t have to be the case. Just ask my grown-up classmates at the car dealership!
On another evening, our instructor brought out a collection of handbooks. “These are car maintenance manuals,” he said. We all flipped through them as he pointed out the diagrams that showed where everything was inside the engine and the directions that told how to keep the car in good shape.
“Where can I get one?” I asked him.
“Check your car’s glove box,” he said. “Most people keep them there.”
I sped home on my green Western Flyer bicycle, propelled by my newly acquired knowledge. Jumping off my bike on the front lawn, I pulled open the passenger door of our Pontiac, popping open the glove box, where the thick owner’s manual sat, unopened and unread. Inside was the maintenance schedule, just where the instructor had said it would be.
“Cars don’t have to break down,” he’d told us. “Keep them on a schedule of regular maintenance, and they’ll run well for a long time.”
I took the manual up to my bedroom, and I read it straight through.
From that moment until I left for college, I put our car on a maintenance schedule. Every few months, I’d change the oil. I bought car stands with my own money and would raise the car with a jack and drop it in place on the stands. I would unscrew the oil drain plug with a wrench and empty the oil into a plastic bucket. While the reservoir was emptying, I checked the air filter and the water levels in the radiator. Replacing the oil drain plug, I made sure I had it nice and snug—I didn’t want any oil drips or leaks! Once I started doing this, we never again were stranded by a broken fan belt or anything else.
It was just as the Girl Scouts had taught me: be prepared, and you can take control of your life. Cars and furnaces don’t have to break down, and people don’t have to be stranded in the desert.
Chapter 16
Beating the Drums into High School
I don’t know why I chose the drums. Everyone knew I loved the loud, brassy, bouncy music of Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass, so when I had the chance to join the school band in seventh grade, my family thought I’d pick up the trumpet. But something about the percussion instruments just fit. Although I didn’t have a drum set at home, I practiced as much as I could at school. And when I was home, I’d pull out my drumsticks and beat a rhythm on any handy surface.
To play the drums well, you have to count, and by now, this was something I excelled at. By counting and keeping time in my head, I could provide a beat for the whole band. I loved that feeling.
I played drums in band all through junior high school, and in ninth grade I entered a statewide music competition for high school students. I was allowed to enter since ninth grade was considered high school in some school districts, even though it was still junior high for us. I practiced a timpani solo, “Carmen Miranda,” with a piano accompanist, and when it was time for my audition, I played with a flourish and didn’t make any mistakes at all.
A day or two later, the principal called me into his office. He told me that I had won the competition for best musical percussion soloist, and he announced it to the whole school over the loudspeaker. I was the first junior high student ever to win this statewide high school competition.
My parents didn’t seem all that excited by my news. Papá and I were not on good terms, but we’d reached a standoff, ignoring each other rather than clashing. He wasn’t very supportive of my interest in band—sometimes he’d “forget” I had a concert and be off with the car, so I’d be late. That would embarrass me and make Mami mad, but Papá kept doing it.
My parents were pleased by my award, but they didn’t really understand why the drums were such a big deal or why the award mattered so much to me. As far as Mami was concerned, music was melody and song. But I loved being the timekeeper, breaking musical moments into beats for everyone in the band to follow.
Mario tried to tell them how important the award was. “It’s a big deal,” he told them. “You should be proud.” My parents’ friends even came over and tried to explain, but I didn’t think Mami and Papá ever really understood what winning that competition meant to me. I had to be excited for myself. And I was.
Winning the award meant that when I started high school, in tenth grade, I was automatically made the first chair percussion player. At that time, very few girls were encouraged to play percussion. And when they did, they were given melodics, such as xylophone or glockenspiel, to play, not a drum set or timpani. But I didn’t care. I’d earned my place in the band, and I loved it. And I loved playing the drums.
That year, I played snare drum in the marching band and timpani in the concert band. Then, in the spring, the school received a set of timbales for the marching band. These were three drums that the player wore with a harness that went around the player’s back. They were loud!
Since I was already the first chair, I assumed I’d be playing the timbales in the marching band that fall. But when I mentioned this to the band director, Mr. Ramsey, he said they were too heavy for me. They were thirty or thirty-five pounds, a third of my weight. I was a girl, and he couldn’t take the chance that I could hurt myself while playing them.
That was not an answer I could accept. I was a girl, and I was looking after our car. I was a girl, and I was getting good grades in math and science and planning to go to college. I was going to play the timbales in the fall, and I knew I had to convince Mr. Ramsey that I could do it.
But instead of arguing, I made a plan. A few days later, school let out for the summer. The next day, I rode my bike to the high school. Even though it was June and the sun beat down on me, I was wearing a heavy coat, with weights in the pockets. I’d brought more weights in my bike basket, pieces of metal and heavy stones that I’d found around our house and yard. I parked my bike and went to the back, onto the football field. Then I marched around the track, carrying those weights in my arms, determined to build up the muscles in my legs, arms, and back.
At the end of an hour, I was hot, sweaty, and tired. But the next day, I did it again, and the day after that, too. For an hour, every single day that summer, I marched around the track. Mario told me I was weird for training this way, but by the end of August, I was ready.
On the first day of school, I found the music director in the band room and told him I wanted to play the timbales in the marching band. Mr. Ramsey started to protest, and I told him that I’d show him, then and there, that I could do it.
The harness for the timbales buckled on with a wide leather hip strap and shoulder straps. The drums were easy to lift into the harness. I could tell I’d gotten strong over the summer.
When you were marching with the timbales during the halftime show at a football game, you had to stop on each line marker and then rock back. To do that, you had to have strong muscles, especially in your legs.
We went outside to the football field, where the players were warming up. I strapped on the timbales. I began to march up and down the sideline, turning, twisting, rocking back, while playing the timbales. My summer work had paid off, and I barely felt the weight of the drums.
; After a few minutes, Mr. Ramsey shook his head. “Okay, you can play the timbales,” he said, “but people will be mad at me for letting a girl carry these heavy drums.” He told me he would start me in the timbales position in the marching band. If I couldn’t handle it, he warned me, he would replace me—and fast. And he made one of the tallest and largest boys in the band, who played the smallest instrument, the piccolo, march beside me in case I fell down.
Of course I never fell down or needed any help with the timbales. I made sure of that—that is, after I figured out how to handle them. They really were big and bulky, and if I swung around too quickly, I could hit someone.
But once I understood how to move with the drums strapped in place, they gave me tremendous power. With the timbales, you could control the band, even control the stadium by starting cheers. You could do a drumroll and get everybody’s attention. I loved playing the timbales! I couldn’t always control what was happening at home, but with the music, I was in charge.
* * *
Even before I started high school, I felt pulled between different worlds: home and school, Spanish and English, traditional and modern. At home, we spoke Spanish and lived in a culture where girls like me respected their parents, learned to keep house, and planned to marry soon after graduating from high school. When I saw my old friends from Bradley Elementary School, who still lived in our old neighborhood, they talked about boys they had crushes on, about older girls who had gotten married. They wore pretty dresses and talked a lot about hairstyles and makeup. They looked forward to their quinceañeras, and they almost never talked about school.
I cared about those friends—after all, I’d known them all my life. Sometimes I saw them in the teen group that Mami ran at our church. But by the time I was in middle school, I felt like a weird, nerdy girl when I was with them. Because we’d left Griggs Street for a home in a different neighborhood so many years earlier, I was used to moving in a world where most of the people I saw every day were Anglo, not Mexican.
Starting when I was in second grade and enrolled at Alameda Elementary School, many of the girls I knew were from homes that weren’t quite as traditional as mine. Still, most of them didn’t plan to go to college. Even many of my Girl Scout friends didn’t think about going to college. It wasn’t until junior high that I met other girls like me, girls who liked math and thought it would be fun to work at a job and earn a living. They reminded me of the girls I sometimes saw on television, who had adventures. I liked having friends who thought the way I did, and their confidence reinforced my own.
By the time I was in high school, I was making steady progress toward my goal of college. When I could, I worked at odd jobs and saved my pay. I had good grades and money in the bank, and I’d never forgotten my fourth-grade teacher’s words when I’d told her I wanted to go to Stanford University. “You’re a smart girl. If you want to go there, you can.” These days, I looked forward to my schoolwork and enjoyed mastering new concepts and ideas and showing what I could do.
I still spent time with my family, but in junior high and high school, I had a lot of homework. Some weekends, there’d be a fiesta in the park. My whole family would go, and I was expected to go with them, even though I had homework. The fiesta would last for hours, but after a while, Mami would let me sit in the car and read. Sometimes Papá would complain and say I should be with the family, but Mami always supported me.
When I was in eleventh grade, Mario left home. He’d been accepted to the West Point military academy, far away in New York. And while he was adjusting to life as a cadet, I was still having a running battle with Papá.
Over the years, Papá had left most of the day-to-day decisions about raising us to Mami. He cared that we got good grades in school, but he paid much more attention to Mario and Armando than he did to Laura and me. With his high standards for education, he encouraged me to think about college, but at the same time, he seemed to expect that I would get married right after graduating high school, like most of the women around us. And as if that was not confusing enough, he also expected that when I turned fifteen, I would have a quinceañera.
The other girls I knew from Mexican families looked forward for years to their quinceañeras. This party celebrated a girl’s passage into womanhood. She wore a white dress—almost like a wedding dress—jewelry, makeup, and a glamorous hairstyle. She was presented on the arm of an eligible young man, and she was expected to dance and have a wonderful time.
Papá knew I was more interested in getting good grades and planning for college than in finding a husband. But he still thought I should have a quinceañera. And I thought I should not. By now, I identified much more strongly with the world of school, college, and achievement, even though I knew that some married women, like my Tía Alma, a teacher, had been to college and had good jobs.
In my mind, I was a nerdy girl who shot off rockets in the desert, and I dreamed of walking on lush green lawns between the red-roofed, tan, and arched buildings of Stanford University. To me, a quinceañera represented a traditional world that had no place for me. So my father and I would argue, and I would retreat to my bedroom and do math problems to calm myself down. Then I would try to figure out a way around Papá’s objections.
Meanwhile, when my older brother returned from his first semester in college, he brought us all extravagant Christmas presents.
He gave my father moleskin pants from L.L.Bean. Papá wore them so much, my mother called them his second skin. Mario gave Mami a beautiful alpaca wool cloak. In the winter, she loved to wrap herself in it.
And Mario gave me real leather athletic shoes from Puma. When I opened the gift, I was speechless. They were the kind of shoes professional athletes wore. I had never told my brother how much sports meant to me, but it was as if he somehow knew.
Mario and I had been so competitive as children, and over the years, I had learned to tune out his teasing. He never let me forget the time I added too much salt to the peanut butter cookies when I was working on my Cooking badge. And we’d bickered many times about other things. Not only that, but in our household and culture, where boys were favored, things came easily to Mario, while I had to find my own way to get what I wanted. My family loved me, but they didn’t understand me, and I often felt like an outsider in my own home.
On that Christmas morning, holding that remarkable gift, I understood that I no longer had to compete with Mario. My brother was on my side. Mario had been exposed to so many new things at West Point, and he wanted to share them with us. But that wasn’t all. The very first check he ever wrote was to me, for seventy-five dollars. He wanted a better life for me.
And in the end, with Mami’s help, I figured out what to do about the quinceañera. Mami might have preferred that I be a more traditional daughter, but she supported me when I said I would not have the party. Instead, to placate Papá, she bought me a special purple dress. She made me put on makeup and had my hair styled, and we arranged to have a professional photograph taken. And I gave that photograph to my father. He would have to be proud of it, because that was all I would do.
A photograph for Papá
With the timbales in marching band
Chapter 17
Against Expectations
Even if Papá expected me to get married, he and Mami still wanted my brother and me to go to college, but they didn’t have the money to send us. I was just finishing tenth grade when Mario graduated from high school. With his acceptance to West Point, the United States Army would be paying for his education. I wasn’t interested in joining the army, and West Point, like the other military academies, didn’t accept women at the time. I knew I would have to find a way to pay for college myself.
During all the years since I’d first started my savings account with the eight dollars in my cat bank, my balance had grown significantly. I didn’t have the full cost of a college education, but I had a couple of thousand dollars, a fortune in those days. I was on my way.
It had been
a long time since I’d had to rely on finding pennies, nickels, and dimes behind sofa cushions or in the coin-return slots of pay phones. These days, I was earning the money I deposited into my bank account. During the summer between tenth and eleventh grades, my friend Cynthia and I worked as paid baseball umpires. I also took on another job stocking inventory in a store.
But that wasn’t all. Whenever Cynthia and I had a free moment, we rode our bikes around Las Cruces, collecting aluminum cans. We knew that the grocery store would pay us a dime for every three cans we turned in. We soon learned which parks to hit, especially after the weekends, when the ground was littered with soda and beer cans.
I deposited everything I earned into the bank. Cynthia and I were both determined to go to college, and we often compared notes about our growing savings accounts.
Between earning money, schoolwork, band, and my friends, I was busy. In addition, while I had not been involved with a Girl Scout troop myself for a few years, I still assisted Mami with Laura’s troop. I loved helping Laura and her friends earn a few of the badges that I had earned in Juniors. It took them longer than the girls in my troop to master all the steps, but they learned they could do it, just as I had. Laura was proudest of her Cooking badge and the spaghetti she made for our family.
And when Laura sewed a badge onto her sash, she was like any other Girl Scout. She fit right in!
I tried to find time for Armando too. He was a high-spirited, playful little boy who liked to run around, just as I had when I was his age. I would shoot hoops with him in our driveway, on the court I’d built myself. Over the years, I’d discovered baseball, and I loved to throw a ball against a cinder-block wall, fielding it on the rebound. Armando and I would play catch, challenging each other to harder or higher throws in our backyard.
Path to the Stars Page 15