The Smell of Old Lady Perfume

by Claudia Guadalupe Martinez

  Nora was obsessed with kissing boys ever since she saw her sister making out with her boyfriend. Camila talked about kissing boys all the time too. She and Nora were going to make great friends.

  I walked home alone and didn’t tell anyone about the bad stuff that happened that day. It nagged at me, but Silvia had said not to worry Apá. Maybe I didn’t want to believe it was true either—that Nora meant to embarrass me, that Nora meant to forget about me, that Nora had already forgotten about me.

  CHAPTER

  11

  Hunger

  I decided I hated lunch.

  I didn’t hate food. I just hated going to the school cafeteria alone.

  The very little kids at my school, like Clark, ate lunch inside their classrooms. Maybe they did it that way so they wouldn’t get lost, like sheep. I halfway wished our class did that too. Those kids didn’t have to worry about who they were going to sit with. They just sat at their regular desks. That’s where they drank their milk and ate their chicken nuggets or fought with their teachers about what they didn’t want to eat. Then they went back to their classwork.

  Older kids ate in the cafeteria, at tables assigned by class, and we had to pick who to sit next to.

  At midday the next day, Ms. Hamlin asked us to put our heads down. I hoped that she’d forget me again or that my dad would come back for another picnic. Ms. Hamlin began calling students to stand in line. She called out my name and nodded eagerly when I got my book bag and stood up. It was like she was proud of having remembered me.

  I stayed as close to the end of the line as possible. I imagined ducking into the bathroom and hiding so I didn’t have to sit alone. I’d have no one to sit with since Nora had traded me in. I clutched my book bag close to my chest and hoped that catching up on the work I’d missed while I ate would help me not look or feel so alone. I wasn’t sure how I was going to get through lunch period that day.

  Ms. Hamlin walked us to the counter and watched us load our trays with meatloaf, milk and juice boxes. She guided us to our table. When another teacher walked by, they started talking.

  Nora was already sitting with Camila, Brenda, and Toña. She’d stopped wearing her glasses. She picked at her food and her naked eyes avoided me. “It would be terrible to have no friends. I’m glad we all have each other,” Camila said as I walked by.

  Nora and I used to have each other.

  Nora had said she didn’t know why Camila disliked me. I didn’t understand either, but Camila hated me so much that she’d taken my best friend. She already had her group. Brenda and Toña, the other two girls she was always with, were carbon copies of their leader. They were like all the other girls in our school who wanted to be like Camila, but Brenda and Toña had known Camila longer and better. They came closer to being like her than anyone else with their long hair and Barbie clothes.

  Now Nora was one of them too. She had mutated into a popular girl.

  I sat alone at the faraway end of the table. I tried to eat, but my tongue was dry and unwilling to push anything down. I sipped my juice and tossed the rest of the food away.

  All of the other kids in my grade ran out into the school yard as soon as they finished eating. I looked out past the double row of windows that reached up to the cafeteria’s ceiling. The boys played kickball or marbles. The girls sat around in groups and talked. Maybe they talked about which boys they liked this year. I didn’t go out there. I sat in the cafeteria and worked on my math word problems until the bell rang.

  Catching up on the homework I missed those first weeks of school wasn’t hard. I concentrated more on my work than ever before. I had no one to distract me, during lunch or any time. I had no one to whisper to in class or to sit with and trade notes. I didn’t have anyone to walk home with either.

  That’s why I decided to wait outside of Silvia’s school and follow her home. She was with one of her friends and pretty annoyed that I was hanging around. She walked very fast and a few steps in front of me, like she didn’t know me.

  I might as well have walked home alone. That’s exactly what I’d go back to doing the next day.

  My dad asked us how school went. I smiled and tried to say as little as possible without lying. I told him they served meatloaf, and carefully avoided saying I had eaten it. “But I’m still hungry,” I added.

  Apá had lost a few pounds at the hospital and told me he could relate. There was a lot of home cooking he couldn’t eat anymore so he always felt hungry. “I miss the mole, enchiladas, gorditas, chiles rellenos and menudo,” he said. He missed all the spicy sauces, fried foods, and forbidden pork.

  “When I first came to the United States,” he told me, “I was barely older than Angel Jr. I traveled all over the Southwest and lived in half a dozen pueblitos before getting out to California where your aunt lived. Some of those towns had never even seen a burrito. They served up salted sliced meat, white bread, and unbuttered mashed potatoes runny with water. I’d never seen food like that, and I was afraid to eat it. I walked around on empty. Eventually, I got hungry enough that I had no choice but to eat it. Eventually, even food you don’t like satisfies you.”

  That wasn’t exactly what I had meant. I didn’t mind the cafeteria food.

  “Oh, meatloaf isn’t so bad,” I told him. “Besides, my teacher says eating makes you taller.” Of course, what she’d said was that we needed to eat because we were growing.

  “Okay, I always believe a teacher. Let’s make you something,” he said. We walked into the kitchen. I stood up next to him and measured with my hand how I reached up to his chin. I was almost as tall as Silvia. “You’ll see. I’ll be your size by the time we finish eating,” I said. We laughed.

  Apá and I sat and talked about all the things they were teaching in sixth grade. There were ratios, volume, areas, animal cells, Confucius and the Greek gods. Meanwhile, he made me a strawberry licuado. We chugged the cold strawberry smoothies. It wasn’t exactly enchiladas or gorditas, but after that I didn’t feel so empty.

  CHAPTER

  12

  America

  Amá made dinner and an announcement. Her friend had offered her a job at a place taking care of old people. Apá asked her if it was something like what she did with him. “You’re not old!” she told him.

  My mom married my father when she was nineteen and he was thirty. She’d never worked a job outside of being the boss of our home. “I know you don’t want me to work, but we have things to pay. I want to help,” Amá said.

  Then Apá made his own announcement. Mrs. Ortega, one of his oldest clients, was paying him money that she owed him with land. Apá said that he was going to sell part of it and build a house for us on the other part. The lot of land was only two blocks from the house we were renting—the house that wasn’t ours.

  “You’re not well enough to work on something like that,” Amá told him. But my father declared he was never one to live or die by someone else’s predictions.

  “I’m not dead yet,” he told her. “You would have me be one of those viejitos you’re going to take care of. This is something that I should’ve done long ago when we had all the time in the world. This was what we always planned. This is why we decided to stay here. I can do this.”

  What he meant was that it was the reason they had put in the paperwork to become American citizens. I didn’t understand it when they first told us about American citizenship. Maybe nothing would really change. We already lit firecrackers on the Fourth of July and barbequed our carne asada.

  Before the paperwork, when the migra told Apá that he wasn’t allowed to be someplace and asked him his citizenship, he was already telling them, American. To Apá, that wasn’t a lie. It wasn’t a lie to ever call himself American because the Americas were two continents.

  “I was born on one of them,” he said. “Besides, Texas used to be part of Mexico.” I didn’t blame the border patrol guy for not knowing. Up until the first day of kindergarten when they taught us the Pledge of Allegi
ance, I thought Texas was still just a part of Mexico.

  One of the first things Apá found out when he settled in El Paso was that almost everyone was Mexican, so people couldn’t tease you about that, about being Mexican. The thing they would tease you about was being born on the other side. People born in Juarez were like third graders, maybe worse. People born in the U.S. were like sixth graders. They felt bigger and more important, so they bullied the third graders.

  Being born on the other side didn’t make Apá feel ashamed or wish he were born in the United States. That wasn’t why he eventually became a citizen. He didn’t want us to be ashamed that he had come from El Florido and then crossed through Juarez, either. He made it a point to help us be proud no matter what. He taught us about Mexican role models like Benito Juarez, Mexico’s greatest president. He wanted us to know as much about him as we did about George Washington.

  The Mexican city across the border was named after President Juarez. The only other person who ever taught us about that was my second-grade teacher, Ms. Juarez. Whenever our class let out, the other classes yelled, “Here come the kids from Juarez!” They also called us Juareños, which was an insult. They called us Juareños like they were calling us dogs. “The right word for people from Juarez is Juarenses,” my dad said.

  When our second-grade teacher overheard kids making fun of Juarez and making fun of her name too, she told us to not pay attention. She told us about how Juarez was a hero. “He fought for Mexico’s independence from France. He fought for equal rights for everyone, better doctors and schools. He also did a lot to help the poor,” she said.

  I already knew about Juarez because of my dad. Juarez had been born the son of full-blooded Zapotec Indians. His parents had died when he was a baby. He had grown up poor, and his life had been tough. But he hadn’t given up. He’d gone on to become president of his country.

  Sometimes Ms. Juarez asked us to think about nice memories of Ciudad Juarez, because everyone living in El Paso had been there or at least visited. We drew pictures of whatever we thought up, and she put happy face stickers on our work. Sometimes I drew pictures of my dad buying us pistachio ice cream pops or fresh-made corn tortillas rolled up with salt. Sometimes I drew a picture of visiting my tías Tere and Belen, my mom’s sisters, who lived there now.

  The night of the big announcements, I sat down next to Apá after dinner and asked him if he missed pistachio ice cream pops. “We’ll go to Juarez soon and have a cone, mija,” my dad said.

  My mom scolded me when my dad left the room. She told me not to eat bread in front of the poor. I told her that I only ate what she gave me and that I was done eating. She said she meant I shouldn’t talk to my dad about pistachio ice cream and make him want things he couldn’t have. In a loud whisper, my mom reminded me that my dad wasn’t exactly the same.

  But Apá was trying hard to prove he was the same. That night, I listened to him setting up his work table outside. I heard the conversation he had with his table saw. He stood out there with his thick waist leaned up against his table, his newly grown peppered beard lost in the smoke of a secret cigarette. He sang his heartbroken Pedro Infante song. That was how Apá started building our house.

  CHAPTER

  13

  Chiple

  Apá offered to take me to the library the following weekend. It was one of his favorite places, and it would give me something to do. I’d caught up on my school work in just a few days, and the daily assignments went by so fast that missing Nora was getting harder and harder. I still wanted to talk to her, but she wouldn’t even look at me. Camila ruled 6-A. No girl in class would get close to me unless Camila did. She might take away their friends too.

  I’d had plenty of friends the year before. Angelica, Bianca, Clarissa, Yaretzi, Nora and I made fun of the 5-A girls behind their backs when we were in 5-B. We played soccer, basketball, and kickball together in PE class. We also ate lunch together and hung out for a few minutes after school talking about our homework.

  I wasn’t sure why we weren’t friends anymore, but people from different classes never really hung out with each other at school. It might’ve been different if any of them lived near me, because then we might’ve spent time together after school. But all of those girls lived on the other side of the Cotton Street Bridge. I wasn’t allowed to wander that way by myself.

  I needed to find something else to do with my free time, so I found a book in the kid’s section of Armijo Library that looked like it was three hundred pages long. It was probably the fattest book there. It didn’t have pictures inside or on the cover. It didn’t have a book jacket. The librarian, a broom of a lady, looked at it with a raised eyebrow when I checked it out. Right before she scanned it, she told me the book was too “big” for me. Never mind that I found it in the kid’s section.

  I took it from the counter and didn’t say anything. I sat down in their reading room with my dad and tried it for a while. It wasn’t easy to read, but I grabbed a dictionary and copied the words I didn’t know and wanted to understand. It was a sad story about an immigrant girl during the time of the pioneers.

  When I got home, I carried the book and our house dictionary with me to the living room, then to my bed that night. I read it with a flashlight underneath my blankets.

  That night the universe was dark, even with a sliver of moon and my small beam. I read until my heavy eyelids pulled me somewhere else. I was halfway finished when I carried it into the bathroom in the morning to brush my teeth. I walked with it in one hand and my toothbrush in the other.

  “Reading is good. That book can be your new best friend,” Apá said.

  “That’s for sure. She has no other friends,” Silvia told him and laughed.

  Of course, he had no idea. He knew I’d been sitting around the house a lot, but I hadn’t told him about Nora. Silvia was the one who had ordered us not to worry him, but Silvia was careless with the truth.

  “That’s none of your business,” I told her with a mouth full of toothpaste. I pushed past her to spit in the sink. I walked back to the living room fully dressed. My dad stopped me and asked if I was okay.

  I needed to talk to someone so I finally told Apá that the girls at school hated me. I told him Silvia was right. I told him I felt like those dogs at the pound we saw that time that he, Silvia and I went there. All those orphan eyes said, “Pick me.” With hot tears welling up in my eyes, I told him I wanted someone to hurry up and pick me.

  “I pick you,” Apá told me and squeezed my shoulder as if we were going into a soccer game. He smiled. Some people might think it was a lame thing for him to say, but he’d lifted something dark and heavy that’d been pushing me down. Then I smiled back. I hugged him and tried to get my short arms around his entire belly. I told him I loved him.

  Apá went to get dressed. When I heard him come near the door, I rubbed my ear and said, “Apá, I have an earache.” I wanted him to remember how he let me miss school when I was very little. I wanted him to say I could stay home and go help him with our new house. With an occasional helping hand from Tomás, he worked on the house all day until we came home from school. Then he watched us in the afternoon until Amá got home from her new job.

  I complained about my ear, but Amá heard first. She snapped at me for always being chiple with my dad.

  We did act pretty spoiled. She made sure my dad wasn’t listening and went in for the kill. “If it hurts that much, I’ll let you miss one day of school,” she said. “We’ll put some Vicks on a cotton ball inside your ear. You can lie in bed all day. But don’t even THINK about bothering your apá. He can’t be worrying about you. Go bring me the Vicks from the cabinet in the bathroom.”

  She pulled a Silvia on me and made me feel guilty. I took the cotton ball, got dressed, picked up my fat book, and followed Silvia to school. I didn’t want to bother Apá.

  CHAPTER

  14

  The Street

  After school, Silvia asked Apá if she could dar
una vuelta a la manzana—take a walk. He gave her permission with the condition that she take me.

  The only way my parents would let either of us go anywhere other than school and farther than three blocks was to take each other. She was only going down the street this time, but it was Apá’s way of teaching her a lesson for being mean to me that morning.

  “You need to learn to get along,” Apá told her.

  “Put on your shoes and let’s go,” Silvia snapped when she walked into our room. Then, when she looked over her back and saw that Apá was still watching, she smiled plastic and even helped me find my shoes.

  We walked past the old-people apartments and the San Jacinto building that used to be a school. We walked two blocks in the direction of the Dairy Queen. A giant red billboard, with pinned-on numbers and letters, announced banana splits on special for ninety-nine cents.

  My mouth watered. We never went there. The only ice cream we ate out was the pistachio in Juarez. If we wanted banana splits, we made them ourselves with ice cream from the grocery store gallon tub, bananas, chocolate syrup and strawberry marmalade.

  We walked into the Dairy Queen, and Silvia pulled out her monedero. She pushed her face down close to the coin wallet in her palm. She put on her sometimes-glasses, counted, and quickly took them off when she was done. She slapped a dollar in dimes on the counter.

  “I only have enough for one,” she told me. “We’re gonna share.”

  I thought her sharing meant maybe we might start doing more things together. Maybe she actually did feel guilty about being bossy and making fun of me. But I had a dollar too. I pulled the bill from the back pocket of my jeans and showed her.