Becoming Maria

by Sonia Manzano

  “How come you know when to pick me up?” I say.

  “When I see all you morons coming out,” she answers.

  We go home and Ma makes breakfast. Eggs fried in bacon and big cups of coffee, but Ma is so irritated and throws the food around with such disgust, globs of grease fall into the coffee.

  “I don’t know if we should go,” says Ma.

  “Why not?” says Pops.

  “I don’t know … so sad … Linda gone …”

  My ears perk up. “What happened to Linda … ?”

  “Shhh …” says Ma.

  “Let’s go!” my father announces.

  “I’m not going,” says my sister.

  Time stops. Who will win?

  “She has to stay here and defrost the refrigerator,” says my mother nervously, and it’s like a bell ringing at a boxing match. My father and sister go back into their own corners. After that we pile into the car and ride to Grandmother’s house.

  The house doesn’t sparkle anymore. It is neat but dull, and dirt is now embedded in the corners of the kitchen floor. I notice roaches in the cabinets. Were they always there? No one is home but La Boba and Grandmother.

  “Échame la bendición.” “Pour your blessing on me,” says my father, bowing his head. I give the shorter version.

  “Bendición,” I say to Grandmother.

  “Dios te bendiga,” she answers solemnly.

  After a while my father gets up.

  “I have to go see somebody about a job … I’ll be back soon.” He leaves, promising to pick us up later.

  “Perate, perate, perate …” Grandmother starts to motor around the kitchen making coffee. She heats up the milk until it almost boils over, pours it into two cups, and then darkens them with coffee. She and Ma talk and I try to blend into the scenery so I can hear what happened to Linda.

  “Linda took off her wedding ring to use Ajax to clean the toilet,” begins Grandmother.

  “Really …”

  “Sí … Virginia saw her without her wedding band. When Ángel came home, Virginia said, ‘Ay, Dios mío—your wife took her ring off to deny her marriage!’ ”

  “Deny her marriage? I thought she took her ring off to clean the toilet!” says Ma.

  Grandmother nods but says nothing. I listen to the grandfather clock ticking away in the silence.

  “What could Ángel do but throw her out?”

  I try to make sense of what they are saying but it’s hard.

  “Three months later Linda came back with Christmas gifts for Evelyn and Peter.”

  “Pobrecita.”

  “Ángel threw the gifts down the steps.”

  “Ay, bendito …”

  “We never saw Linda again.”

  They sit quietly for a moment before Grandmother continues. “Then Virginia thought it would be best if Peter lived with her. You know—to help out …”

  I think the story is so sad and I wonder where my cousin Evelyn is, even as I hear this tale about her mother being banished, like a princess from a castle, and her brother being taken away by the evil witch. But then they go on to talk about another of Pops’s brothers.

  “What happened to Miguel’s wife?”

  “Loca, Miguel came home and there she was, dead.”

  “Oh my God …”

  “Dead with their two children. She dressed them up in white, dragged the cots into the kitchen, lay down with them, and turned on the gas.”

  “Horrible,” my mother agrees.

  Later, in our apartment in the Bronx, Ma irons a white shirt for me because I am to be in the color guard in school on Monday. White shirt, blue pleated skirt, and red kerchief must be gotten ready. I watch the hot iron steam away wrinkles and make the shirt smooth and sharp, and the smell of cleanness is good. Ma speaks—her words shooting out like hot chips.

  “Linda must have died. What mother would leave her kids on account of a stupid-ass jealous husband—and poor Miguel’s wife? She kept complaining of the beatings Miguel gave her but no one believed her. I would’ve killed myself, too, if I had married that lunatic.”

  I go to sleep with banishment in my mind like I had heard it in some fairy tale, not in my own family. And suicide is as far away from me as a story in the Daily News—or is it? Ma still hides all the kitchen knives in the oven when it gets dark and my father isn’t home yet. Does she think he will stab her? Us? If two of my father’s brothers have driven their wives away, could my father somehow cause my own mother’s disappearance?

  We visit Little Eddie and his family in Brooklyn.

  “Bendición,” I sing out to my uncle as I look for my cousin.

  “Dios te bendiga,” he replies, but he’s really looking at my mother, who wants to know this new way Bon Bon has lost her mind.

  “¿Qué está pasando?” says Ma.

  “¡Esta mujer se ha vuelto loca!”

  I pass Zoraida curled up in bed on her side with her hands between her knees looking so sorry and lonely. I suppress a desire to throw a comforting blanket on her and go off to find Little Eddie when I hear my mother say, “Gold? In the basement? ¡No me digas!”

  “Yes!”

  I find him. We’re excited, laughing.

  “What’s so funny?”

  “How should I know?”

  We follow everybody down to the basement.

  It looks like a Con Ed work site. Bon Bon, wild-eyed, whacks away at a hole in the ground, sure that her next strike will reveal the buried treasure. My mother looks down the hole suspiciously, my uncle Eddie rolls his eyes, and my father grins.

  After watching her bring up wet rubble and chunks of concrete for a while, Cousin Eddie and I go upstairs.

  “Look, here’s what you gotta know …” And he beats five counts on his knees. “It’s called a clave beat.”

  “A what?”

  “A clave beat. Now you try it.”

  I do. And he shows me different accents. We beat different rhythms on our knees until we fall over laughing because we think we are drummers.

  “What are you two doing?”

  It is my mother checking up on us.

  “Come—we have a cup of coffee and then we go …”

  Bon Bon shakes Zoraida awake.

  “Make coffee.”

  “Leave that child alone,” says Ma.

  Bon Bon wakes her anyway.

  After Zoraida cleans up after us, we gather ourselves to leave but not before I see Bon Bon scurry back to the basement and hear my uncle mutter “Fucking nut” before going back to reading the sports page.

  Days later the phone rings. “What?” says Ma. “Spirits made chairs in the basement start spinning around? You think it’s a sign to move out and come live near us?”

  “I think a clearer ‘sign’ was probably the landlord seeing the hole she made in the basement,” says Aurea. “She’s nuts.”

  But all I can think about is that Little Eddie is going to live near us, and I am so happy I can burst. They move into Bathgate Avenue, so now with Uncle Franco and the cousins already on Fulton Avenue north of me, and Uncle Eddie on Bathgate Avenue south of me, and the Third Avenue El and me in the middle, and family gatherings every Friday, I feel I’ve had a dream come true.

  I’m mooning around the apartment the Friday before Marion Uble’s birthday party. I’ve been thinking about it for weeks, stroking the festive party invitation, gently touching the gaily wrapped box of hankies Ma and I had bought on Bathgate Avenue. Every day I play in my mind how it is going to be when I get there and how Marion will react when she sees my fabulous gift to her.

  Soon the uncles arrive with their families. The men drink beer and talk loud, arguing about the best way to fix a car. Little Eddie tries to get my attention, but all I can think about is the party I will go to the next day. Somehow Bon Bon gets wind of it and, like we are friends, she pulls me aside. “Does your father know you are going?” she asks me.

  What? I’m speechless. I hadn’t thought of him. My mother knew. Sh
e helped me pick the present.

  “Pepe,” I overhear Uncle Eddie say, “if you did that to a car you’d junk it for sure …”

  “No, I think it would work,” Pops says lamely.

  “Ask him now,” Bon Bon goads. “With all of us here he would never think of saying no to you. Go ahead …”

  “Naw,” scoffs Uncle Frank. “You better leave car fixing to us.”

  “I used to fix cars in Puerto Rico …” says my father, trying to get back in the conversation.

  Bon Bon winks at me and gives me encouraging looks.

  My father is in the middle of defending himself but I blurt out anyway …

  “Papi … tomorrow is my friend’s birthday party …”

  “¿Qué … ?” He zeroes in on me.

  “… can I go?”

  And he makes a definitive statement no one can argue with: “You are not going to any party …”

  I can’t believe I’ve heard right! Not going to the party? But I was going to go! I have a present and everything … the handkerchiefs. I’m stunned and look to Ma, who turns away. Even Bon Bon looks chastised. In one second—no, less than one second—my world spins from light to darkness and a lump of disappointment lodges in my throat.

  The next day I follow Ma around the apartment asking her questions, trying to loosen the lump that won’t go away.

  “I wonder what they are doing now. Do you think they are playing with her dollhouse? Do you think they are playing pin the tail on the donkey? Is it time for them to cut the cake or open the presents?”

  Ma doesn’t answer me, and no matter how many questions I ask, the lump does not dissolve—it hardens and turns into a part of me.

  Suddenly I am old enough to walk around the neighborhood by myself, which is good, except I have to take small, tiresome, budding breasts with me, which is bad. Everybody noticed them before me: the boys who followed me into the water at Crotona Pool to feel them up, the stranger who stared and smiled at me from the train platform in such a familiar way I thought I knew him; even the parks worker stopped picking up litter so he could lick his lips and stare. Every morning I wake up and look around for my new worry before it finds me, and it’s my breasts.

  It is early September—time to drool over getting new school supplies. Visions of pencil kits and notebooks and erasers dance in my head as the days cool. Too impatient to wait until the weekend when we would shop on Bathgate Avenue, I badger Ma into letting me buy at least one composition notebook at the drugstore.

  “It’s just downstairs, Ma. I can go by myself.”

  She says okay and gives me some money.

  After I longingly caress the packages of three-by-five cards, the boxes of crayons, and the number-two pencils and notebooks, I pick out a composition notebook and examine it. I never tire of looking at the multiplication table in the back. So neat and even, it never lets you down. I take it up to the pharmacist. He smiles and asks if I want a free box of crayons. Crayons. I think quickly; I don’t have any construction paper to draw on, but that’s okay, I can figure out how to get that later and I can draw in my notebook in the meantime.

  “Yes!” I say. “Thank you.”

  He comes out from behind the counter, picks up a box from the display, hands it to me, and manages to let his hands stray to my chest, where he fingers my breasts. My grateful feelings for the crayons twist into something else. Then he offers me a giant box of crayons, the kind that has a sharpener built right in, and my mouth waters. I almost stop breathing, deciding what do. Should I let him feel me up for a box of crayons?

  A red-faced cop on his beat breaks the devil mood.

  “Hey!” he yells, sticking his head in the door and rapping his nightstick on the doorjamb.

  The sound of the nightstick sends the rat-faced pharmacist scurrying back behind the counter so fast it is as if he flew. I think of the expression of someone running with “their tail between their legs,” because it looks like his pants got sucked right up into his ass. I drag myself up the stairs and enter our apartment with my new notebook pressed against my chest.

  “You got it!”

  “Huh?”

  “La libreta …”

  “Oh yes, the notebook—yes, I got it.” That’s all I say. I don’t want to tell her what happened in case it had, in some way, been my fault, and I want to make sure I will still be allowed to go out.

  Balancing a covered plate of food, I am careful going up the steps to the cousins’ apartment on Fulton Avenue. Mickey and Chaty wrestle in front of the television set. The horizontal hold has been fixed and now it’s got color since my uncle has pressed a plastic screen on it that is blue at the top for sky, green at the bottom for grass, and yellow in the middle for air; it kind of works if you are watching a western. Every now and then Mickey manages to sit on Chaty’s head and fart.

  Uncle Frank and Aunt Iris have a different way of fighting from Ma and Pops. Iris shows her anger by humming a tuneless song as she stares out onto Crotona Park at the trees her sons have managed to destroy, while Uncle Frank teases her for being fussy by calling her a name only she knows the meaning of.

  “Siiikaaa …”

  After leaving the food in the kitchen I go right past them into Mimi’s room. She has blossomed into the real name I never knew she had—Carmen—and has become the precious girl of the house, and my uncle and Iris will do almost anything for her. On her bed are at least fifty pretty and perfect dolls. Right now she’s dressing to meet her boyfriend, Manny, slipping more and more white petticoats on over her head. Her friends from upstairs, sisters Divina, Blanca, and Lucy, perfume the room. Lucy is pale white with black hair and her red lips pop.

  “Let me have some of that red lipstick,” says Divina, who is ginger-colored with freckles.

  “No,” says Lucy. “You look better in coral lipstick.”

  “Baloney, she looks better in like a burgundy color,” says Blanca.

  They giggle and their petticoats float all over, and I wonder how Blanca’s parents knew to name her “White.” What if she had turned out dark?

  “I wonder who is going to be at the party.”

  They all turn to Lucy, who has dared to bring up what is on everybody’s mind—a party.

  “Well, Manny is taking me. He wouldn’t let me go alone,” Carmen answers proudly, playing a 45 record on her little pink portable player.

  The girls’ sudden squealing drowns out the song’s beginning, and then, just as suddenly, they bow their heads and somberly sing along like it’s a church hymn. Their faces glow with hotness and little shiny beads of sweat pop up, decorating their upper lips as they move and press their shins against the bed frame, grinding with imaginary boys just out of their reach.

  They sing out the last line of the song and aren’t even embarrassed about singing and all that goes with it. After the song plays, Carmen finishes teasing her hair and smoothing out just the top of it, then hardening the whole thing in place with hair spray. Then she leads them, like a line of princesses, out of the apartment.

  “Bendición. Adiós,” they all sing out.

  The TV, with Mickey resting his head on Chaty’s thigh, still mesmerizes the boys, and my uncle and Iris have made up. She is making coffee for him as he listens to a baseball game on two radios set to two different stations in order to not miss a thing.

  Outside the girls fill the stoop with their dresses. They are quiet as they look up and down the street. Suddenly a small man appears. My cousin’s friends tense up. As he gets closer I see that he has very fierce blue eyes in his bony head.

  “Bendición, Papá …” says Lucy nervously.

  “What are you all doing out here?” he threatens hotly.

  “There’s a little party,” offers Divina weakly.

  “A little party?” He gasps as if he’s never heard of a “party” in his life.

  “It’s just for a little while,” adds Blanca.

  “Get upstairs! All of you!”

  And in a micros
econd three skirts switch in an about-face and scurry into the building like birds that suddenly take flight. I stare at Carmen.

  “He never lets them go anywhere,” she says.

  “But they were all dressed up.”

  “They think if he sees them all dressed up he’ll feel sorry for them and let them go … but he never does.”

  “Oh …”

  Carmen looks up and down the street again and spies a dark man with sinewy arms. It’s her boyfriend, Manny, and I love his Indian look. They kiss when he reaches her and their eyes shut down to dreamy, his chest just touching her breasts, both of them forgetting I am there.

  “Bye,” I say, turning home toward Third Avenue.

  They smile, heading in the opposite direction, and I can’t wait to be a teenager like they are even if it means having bigger breasts than I have now. After a while the whole family is in love with their love affair and always sigh and smile when they say, “Carmen and Manny this …” and “Carman and Manny that …”

  But Carmen is always fainting and nobody knows why—it seems the more they date the more she faints and the doctors can never find anything wrong with her. The family becomes more and more grateful that Manny is always there to catch her—as a matter of fact, Manny is always there! On Saturday mornings he accompanies Iris to the supermarket so he can carry her groceries, and on Saturday nights she convinces him to chaperone Uncle Frank to keep him out of bars!

  “Just tell her we have to go see about a job …” my uncle begs, suggesting an alternate plan.

  “But, Frank,” says Manny. “I don’t want to lie to your wife …”

  “It’s not a lie … we will go see about a job … we’ll just have a few drinks on the way …”

  Manny is with them so much I’m surprised he has time for Carmen at all. But he does, and I hope I become the precious girl of the house someday like Carmen and get a boyfriend like Manny so the whole family sighs and swoons when they think of us.

  Carmen is sixteen and they decide to get married when she finishes high school. My uncle insists Manny propose and give her the ring publicly, at a family party. The apartment on Fulton Avenue is full of relatives on Iris’s side of the family, seldom seen by me. I imagine dating Iris’s two beautiful nephews Gilbert and Nelson—Gilbert is white and Nelson is Indian-looking. If I got engaged to them would they hold me tight and grind against me like Carmen’s friends grind their shins against the bed frame?