“Navidad in California wasn’t that much different than here,” was all that Apá said when he finally came back inside. Christmases in El Paso weren’t exactly warm even though we lived in the desert. Sometimes it snowed and the snow melted before it hit the ground. Sometimes we got enough snow to build a snowman. More times the sun shone, but the air was still cold enough to wear a heavy coat and scarf.
“Can we spend Christmas in California one day?” Silvia asked him.
“One day, mija,” Apá answered, and I knew he really wanted to by the way he got happy again.
At midnight, Apá began pulling the presents out into the living room, and Amá told us to wake up Clark. We took turns opening presents from youngest to oldest. First we got a bunch of sweaters for school. Next came the good gifts. Clark got his mitt, and then it was my turn. I ripped into the paper to find the most perfect brown teddy bear I’d ever seen.
I hugged my dad and kissed my mom. Silvia’s bear was almost like mine, except white and bigger. Angel Jr. got his videogame thing. Amá got her earrings, and Apá got a watch heavy-duty enough to wear when he was building. Amá kissed him on the cheek and told us that our real present would be the new house.
We were all exhausted and went to bed right away. Silvia put her white bear on the shelf so that it wouldn’t get dirty. I put my bear next to it, and we both stood there for a minute. I loved mine. “I’m going to name him Murray,” I told her. It was the first thing that popped into my head. I’d never named anything before or talked to imaginary friends. It was something only kids on TV and in books did.
“You can’t name him that, your bear is Mexican because it’s brown,” Silvia said, trying to be funny. I didn’t laugh. I didn’t pay attention. His name was Murray. I hugged him and climbed into bed.
Murray, Murray was soft and furry, and he was mine.
CHAPTER
22
The Job
Old people needed taking care of every day. That meant Amá was on the roster to work during most of our break.
“Those Christmas gifts didn’t pay for themselves,” she said. We had to stay at home all day by ourselves. No one out; no one in. Angel Jr. and Silvia protested for a minute. They’d made plans to hang out with their friends. In the end, Silvia came up with the idea of going to work with Apá instead. Apá agreed.
Apá had been working on the house for a couple of months and wanted to finish in the spring. He was on a tight schedule. Amá warned us about getting in his hair. No one complained. Working with Apá was the best.
When he began building, Apá no longer had full-time help. He had a lot of material, a lot of experience, and just a little help from Tomás. Tómas dropped in once in a while and helped Apá with the major stuff.
There were a couple of other guys who owed him favors too. Apá had done work for them, and they were paying him back with the same. They’d built houses together before, if only in pieces. They helped him pour down the cement foundation and put up the wall supports. They helped him lay down the water and sewer pipes. They helped him place the bricks and fit the ceiling. That was the shell of our home. Then Apá wired the electricity and phone.
Now he was going to finish the walls, the tiles, and the rest of the house’s innards and we’d get to help.
Apá made us honorary workers. He handed me a hammer and a jar full of bent-up nails to straighten. I sat there all morning with my jar. If we did a good job, he’d pay us with potato chip money.
Angel Jr. lent a hand with the tiles on the floors and the shower walls. Silvia picked out paint colors. Clark and I mostly did what we’d done before when we stayed home from school with Apá. We sorted his tools and handed them to him. He never asked for anything sharp or electric. He didn’t want us getting hurt.
“How about school? Is school better now?” Apá asked me.
“No,” I told him. “I still don’t have a lot of friends.”
“Well, you don’t need many friends, you just need good ones,” he told me. I guess my parents didn’t have a whole lot of friends either. There were tons of people on the street who always said “hi” to my dad. That made it seem like he knew everybody. But if I really thought about it, the only grown ups who had always been around were my mom’s sisters who were kind of like her best friends. And Tomás.
“I just wish I had a best friend, like you and Tomás,” I told Apá.
“Well, Tomás is a good friend, but your amá is my best friend,” he corrected. Family came first.
“You have us,” he added. I thought about Silvia. She wasn’t going to be my best friend. I guess my dad was my best friend just like he was Amá’s.
For lunch, we chopped up jalapenos, tomatoes, and onions. Apá threw them in a skillet with leftover turkey, and Silvia warmed up flour tortillas. It was mostly white meat. Even my dad dug in. It was okay as long as he didn’t eat too many tortillas. We polished off the last of the leftover Christmas food in no time.
After we ate, we sat around and talked like old friends. “If your mother and I separated, who would you go with?” he joked. I smiled. I loved being there with Apá. No answer was necessary. I loved my mom, but my dad never made us eat vegetable stew or got on us for sitting too close to the television. Sometimes, feeling a little guilty for playing favorites, I told him that it didn’t matter because he and my mom were going to be together always and forever.
After Apá finished the bathroom tiles, he let me caulk the bathtub. I squeezed stuff that looked like toothpaste onto the corners of the tub so that the water didn’t leak out.
“I don’t mind the old house,” I told him. But Apá wanted something that belonged to us.
The next few days of working with my dad weren’t at all what I thought real work would be. It wasn’t like doing chores or schoolwork. Helping Apá made me feel important. He joked around and told us stories about adventures on his job. He told us he had found a nest of snakes once. Another time he got to meet the owner of a Whataburger who was a close friend of a client. We were having so much fun that I didn’t even tell Silvia or Amá about the dozens of cigarette butts I found in an upturned flower pot at the new house. I didn’t want things to get serious.
Those days with Apá made me want to stay home sick for the rest of the school year. I’d do anything and put up with anything to stay with my apá. One day, I sat up against a freshly painted wall wearing one of my favorite outfits. It was a red running suit with white stripes along the sides and later a big paint stain on the leg. I didn’t cry about the stain. I didn’t even complain. Staying home from school with Apá was worth it.
I asked Apá if I could help him for the next few months. The teacher could send home my reading with Clark.
“I love having you kids around too, mija,” Apá said. “I miss you when you’re at school, but I can’t let you stay home. I didn’t have the same opportunities as you kids. You need to make the most of them.”
So we made a pact, just him and me. I’d return to school, and Apá would let me help him after school on the days I didn’t have GT.
CHAPTER
23
Good Ball
Once the second half of the school year got going, I had a routine that didn’t include worrying about hateful girls. The school year would end in a few months, and I worked hard at ignoring how the enemy group acted toward me.
When I didn’t have GT, I walked the short distance to where my dad was working on our new house. He was working later and longer, sometimes until sundown and sometimes on weekends. I helped him sweep up and put away tools.
If it was still light out when my dad finished for the day, we piled bricks at each end of the construction site and used them as soccer goals. It made me think of summer when our whole family went to the park and played for hours.
Back then, when we got tired, my dad drove away and came back with buckets of delicious greasy chicken for a picnic. Now, we just went just home.
There were other ways playing socce
r after-school was different. We played for shorter periods, and mostly one-on-one. Sometimes my brothers or sister joined us. Other times they did things with their friends or stayed home. Apá and I still had fun. He let me win, but made me work hard. That’s how my kick got stronger and stronger.
By the time the big school tournament started, I was breathing soccer thanks to my afternoons with Apá. I couldn’t think about anything else. I concentrated on those balls zooming by on the dry yellow grass that didn’t break when we ran through it—grass that bent and sprung back up. Everything around us stopped in the middle of that soccer field when we played.
The enemy girls probably wanted nothing more than to see me warming the bench. Only, it didn’t work that way. Their popularity couldn’t keep me from playing.
We didn’t pick our soccer teams. The teams were divided by class and grade. Girls only played girls. Boys only played boys. Sixth graders only played sixth graders. All of the classes played against each other. We practiced regularly and played one official game each week. We played again for places according to how many games we won by the end of the season. Each grade got its own championship tournament that way.
To us, winning the tournament was like winning the World Cup. It was the one time when it didn’t matter if a kid spoke funny English, got bad grades or had an A-class pedigree. A kid just had to want it bad enough to try really hard. In a tournament like this, a person didn’t have to be liked either. She or he could be the most hated kid in the world. And if they were good, everyone started liking them.
The girls on my school team still didn’t talk to me much, but some of the girls from the other classes called out things to me when we weren’t playing against them, like, “Good shot. Go Chela!” It was Angelica, Bianca, Clarissa, and Yaretzi, the girls from my fifth grade class. My dad said that meant I still had their respect.
I wanted to say that Nora and them were no good at the game. That would’ve been a lie. Most of the girls on our team were good for some reason or another. Nora used to go to the park with my family. She was smaller than many of us, and faster. She hadn’t grown or changed much, except for getting rid of the glasses.
It was also true that Camila and her clones went to soccer camp the summer before. Every time something went right on the field for her, Camila made sure to mention that when she was in soccer camp she did something even more spectacular. Soccer camp happened through the Boys and Girls Club. I hadn’t been allowed to go because of the cholos and cholas that sometimes hung around their building throwing gang signs.
By the end of the tournament, our class was up for first place. We lost only one game. We held the same record as 6-C, the team we would play for the championship. Their girls looked like eighth graders. Some of them actually should’ve been eighth graders but flunked a couple of grades somewhere along the line.
The day of the big championship game, everyone was nervous. I had to remind myself to breathe. We tried to create chances early on, quickly switching the ball right and left using both wings while trying to find a kink in 6-C’s defense. We were weaker, but faster.
Nora, who was a midfielder, hit a shot off the left post and missed. 6-C responded immediately. We were deadlocked. Camila gained control of the ball, but there were too many defenders on her. She needed to pass. She looked up and saw only me. Who knows what she was thinking. Probably that she had no choice. She delivered the ball to me as I shrugged off a 6-C girl and ran close to the goal. I headed the ball into the net.
Zooooom! Gooooooooooooolaso!
One to zero 6-A! We were the new champions! Everyone was cheering, even Camila and Nora. We jumped and cheered so hard that I sweated more than when we played.
As we got ready to go back to class, it happened. The queen of our grade said something nice to me for the first time ever outside of class. “Good game,” she said. I nodded my head and walked back to our classroom.
At lunch, Camila came over to me and said, “So I was thinking that maybe we can be friends. We’ll see you after school at GT!”
Then she walked away, just like that.
CHAPTER
24
Normal
Camila invited me to walk with them after GT. Then she invited me to walk home with them every day and hang out. When I told Roy, he said he didn’t mind. He was doing better in school and said he’d just ride his bike home.
That evening, I told Apá all about the soccer game and the change of heart in my classmates. I was glad he hadn’t let me stay home sick for the rest of the school year. I was glad the girls in my class finally wanted to be my friends, but I’d promised to help him with the house.
“Don’t worry about me,” Apá said. “The house will be finished soon enough. Then you’ll be sorry you gave up the chance to be around kids your own age.”
“But I want to be with you too,” I told him.
“You can come with me on the weekend,” he said.
I thought about the next day until I was too tired to think. I was the most excited about talking to Nora again.
The first thing the girls told me at school the following morning was the set of rules for being in their group.
“You can’t change your look in a big way or wear something we haven’t seen, unless we say it’s okay,” Toña said.
“You can’t talk to anyone we don’t talk to, and you can’t talk to anyone of us more than the others,” Camila added.
“You can’t like any boys without telling the rest of us,” Brenda threw in.
“For example, Brenda likes Aaron,” Camila blurted.
“Hey!” Brenda protested. “You can’t tell her that. Tell her who YOU like!”
“We’ll tell her who everyone likes once she tells us who she likes,” Camila said.
“I don’t like anyone,” I told them. It wasn’t a lie.
Camila smiled like a cat. “Well, when you do, we have to be the first ones you tell. Then we’ll tell you who we all like. When you’re popular, you just have to be careful who you let in,” she said, matter-of-factly.
Those were their rules.
Nora didn’t say much of anything until later. Since there was no GT, we helped the librarian shelve books after school.
Nora tried to tell me something about the beginning of the school year. “I’m glad we get to talk again,” she said. She was very sorry and wanted to explain. But the librarian told us to keep it down. I whispered to Nora that she didn’t need to explain. Someone shushed us again.
I was actually glad that the librarian wanted us to zip it. The truth was I just wanted to forget about before. If I stopped to remember, it might all come back: the silence, the mean jokes, the snickering. I wanted to enjoy just being a normal kid again.
The next day Camila gave us little pink heart-shaped pins to wear. Nora said that she did nice things like that every now and again. Camila’s talking to me made it okay for other girls in our class to follow. When it was time to study for our spelling test, a couple of girls even asked to partner up with me. I picked Nora, of course. Even then, we only really did things as a group. That was the rule.
Our first week of being friends, Camila called me on the telephone at home and told me we would all wear khakis to school on Friday. I would’ve worn a paper bag over my head if she had asked. It was the same every Friday. That became our group thing.
“Those girls aren’t really your friends,” Silvia said to me one afternoon. But hers were the words of someone who’d never had to eat lunch or walk home alone. At night I stared at the ceiling of our bedroom for a long time before I fell asleep. I didn’t feel so small.
CHAPTER
25
House of Prayers
Apá worked on the house alone and I hung out with Nora, Camila and the others. I didn’t help him as much, even though we’d agreed. While I felt guilty about it, I told myself that he’d worked all alone even before me. He’d be fine. He had said so himself.
Besides, I still helped him
on the weekends. And when the house he called our dream home was finished—just as Apá predicted—I didn’t feel so bad.
After the bare bones of its frame were dressed and all the dangling wires tucked away, it looked like many houses in our neighborhood, only new and bright. All on one floor, there were three bedrooms, two bathrooms, a fireplace, and a driveway paved smooth. My favorite part was the slippery marble that squeaked under the rubber soles of our shoes as we walked.
Maybe it wasn’t anything extraordinary, but to me it was absolutely beautiful. Our sweat had gone into it. My dad had built it. We had helped at least a little.
We moved in one weekend, piling everything into my dad’s truck. Silvia and I moved all the small stuff from our room ourselves. Apá and Angel Jr. loaded the beds. Apá’s friend Tomás and some of the other men he’d worked with helped with the really heavy stuff, like the stove, the refrigerator, and the washing machine. After they finished, they sat outside grilling steaks and telling stories in the dark. Apá wasn’t supposed to eat red meat, but it was a special occasion.
Inside, there were toys, books and other things scattered everywhere. The house looked lived in, in a good way. It was like we had always been there. We promised to pick up the following day. Amá didn’t seem upset about it.
That night I found her and Apá sitting on the couch. I said goodnight before I went to bed. I listened to Amá thank Apá as I walked away. He whispered to her that he was a man filled with pride to be able to give his family a real home. It was what he’d always wanted. The house was ours, not someone else’s, not a bank’s. It was ours. He probably fell asleep on my mom’s shoulder whispering those things.
Our first morning officially in the house, I pulled out the soccer ball and asked Clark if he wanted to play. “You keep it down, and no soccer inside the house,” my mom told us as she passed by on her way to the kitchen. We didn’t want her getting mad and taking off her chancla. That’s why, when she was gone, we started a game of indoor basketball instead.
The Smell of Old Lady Perfume Page 7