After a few facts about her had been established, the mean-faced cop with the big voice and the pad asked her if she would answer a few questions. Not knowing she could refuse, Carla nodded meekly, on the verge of tears.
“Could you describe the vehicle the suspect was driving?”
She wasn’t sure what a vehicle was or a suspect, for that matter. Her mother translated into simpler English, “What car was the man driving, Carla?”
“A big green car,” Carla mumbled.
As if she hadn’t answered in English, her mother repeated for the officers, “A big green car.”
“What make?” the officer wanted to know.
“Make?” Carla asked.
“You know, Ford, Chrysler, Plymouth.” The man ended his catalogue with a sigh. Carla and her mother were wasting his time.
“¡Que clase de carrot!” her mother asked in Spanish, but of course she knew Carla wouldn’t know the make of a car. Carla shook her head, and her mother explained to the officer, helping her save face, “She doesn’t remember.”
“Can’t she talk?” the gruff cop snapped. The boyish-looking one now asked Carla a question. “Carla,” he began, pronouncing her name so that Carla felt herself coated all over with something warm and too sweet. “Carla,” he coaxed, “can you please describe the man you saw?”
All memory of the man’s face fled. She remembered only the bruised smile and a few strands of dirty blond hair laid carefully over a bald pate. But she could not remember the word for bald and so she said, “He had almost nothing on his head.”
“You mean no hat?” the gentle cop suggested.
“Almost no hair,” Carla explained, looking up as if she had taken a guess and wanted to know if she was wrong or right.
“Bald?” The gruff cop pointed first to a hairy stretch of wrist beyond his uniform’s cuff, then to his pink, hairless palm.
“Bald, yes.” Carla nodded. The sight of the man’s few dark hairs had disgusted her. She thought of her own legs sprouting dark hairs, of the changes going on in secret in her body, turning her into one of these grownup persons. No wonder the high-voiced boys with smooth, hairless cheeks hated her. They could see that her body was already betraying her.
The interrogation proceeded through a description of the man’s appearance, and then the dreaded question came.
“What did you see?” the boy-faced cop asked.
Carla looked down at the cops’ feet. The black tips of their shoes poked out from under their cuffs like the snouts of wily animals. “The man was naked all down here.” She gestured with her hand. “And he had a string around his waist.”
“A string?” The man’s voice was like a hand trying to lift her chin to make her look up, which is precisely what her mother did when the man repeated, “A string?”
Carla was forced to confront the cop’s face. It was indeed an adult version of the sickly white faces of the boys in the playground. This is what they would look like once they grew up. There was no meanness in this face, no kindness either. No recognition of the difficulty she was having in trying to describe what she had seen with her tiny English vocabulary. It was the face of someone in a movie Carla was watching ask her, “What was he doing with the string?”
She shrugged, tears peeping at the corners of her eyes.
Her mother intervened. “The string was holding up this man’s—”
“Please, ma’am,” the cop who was writing said. “Let your daughter describe what she saw.”
Carla thought hard for what could be the name of a man’s genitals. They had come to this country before she had reached puberty in Spanish, so a lot of the key words she would have been picking up in the last year, she had missed. Now, she was learning English in a Catholic classroom, where no nun had ever mentioned the words she was needing. “He had a string around his waist,” Carla explained. By the ease with which the man was writing, she could tell she was now making perfect sense.
“And it came up to the front”—she showed on herself—“and here it was tied in a—” She held up her fingers and made the sign for zero.
“A noose?” the gentle cop offered.
“A noose, and his thing—” Carla pointed to the policeman’s crotch. The cop writing scowled. “His thing was inside that noose and it got bigger and bigger,” she blurted, her voice wobbling.
The friendly cop lifted his eyebrows and pushed his cap back on his head. His big hand wiped the small beads of sweat that had accumulated on his brow.
Carla prayed without prayer that this interview would stop now. What she had begun fearing was that her picture—but who was there to take a picture?—would appear in the paper the next day and the gang of mean boys would torment her with what she had seen. She wondered if she could report them now to these young officers. “By the way,” she could say, and the gruff one would begin to take notes. She would have the words to describe them: their mean, snickering faces she knew by heart. Their pale look-alike sickly bodies. Their high voices squealing with delight when Carla mispronounced some word they coaxed her to repeat.
But soon after her description of the incident, the interview ended. The cop snapped his pad closed, and each officer gave Carla and her mother a salute of farewell. They drove off in their squad car, and all down the block, drapes fell back to rest, half-opened shades closed like eyes that saw no evil.
For the next two months before Carla’s mother moved her to the public school close to home for the second half of her seventh grade, she took Carla on the bus to school and was there at the end of the day to pick her up. The tauntings and chasings stopped. The boys must have thought Carla had complained, and so her mother was along to defend her. Even during class times, when her mother was not around, they now ignored her, their sharp, clear eyes roaming the classroom for another victim, someone too fat, too ugly, too poor, too different. Carla had faded into the walls.
But their faces did not fade as fast from Carla’s life. They trespassed in her dreams and in her waking moments. Some-times when she woke in the dark, they were perched at the foot of her bed, a grim chorus of urchin faces, boys without bodies, chanting without words, “Go back! Go back!”
So as not to see them, Carla would close her eyes and wish them gone. In that dark she created by keeping her eyes shut, she would pray, beginning with the names of her own sisters, for all those she wanted God to especially care for, here and back home. The seemingly endless list of familiar names would coax her back to sleep with a feeling of safety, of a world still peopled by those who loved her.
Snow
Yolanda
Our first year in New York we rented a small apartment with a Catholic school nearby, taught by the Sisters of Charity, hefty women in long black gowns and bonnets that made them look peculiar, like dolls in mourning. I liked them a lot, especially my grandmotherly fourth grade teacher, Sister Zoe. I had a lovely name, she said, and she had me teach the whole class how to pronounce it. Yo-lan-da. As the only immigrant in my class, I was put in a special seat in the first row by the window, apart from the other children so that Sister Zoe could tutor me without disturbing them. Slowly, she enunciated the new words I was to repeat: laundromat, corn flakes, subway, snow.
Soon I picked up enough English to understand holocaust was in the air. Sister Zoe explained to a wide-eyed classroom what was happening in Cuba. Russian missiles were being assembled, trained supposedly on New York City. President Kennedy, looking worried too, was on the television at home, explaining we might have to go to war against the Communists. At school, we had air-raid drills: an ominous bell would go off and we’d file into the hall, fall to the floor, cover our heads with our coats, and imagine our hair falling out, the bones in our arms going soft. At home, Mami and my sisters and I said a rosary for world peace. I heard new vocabulary: nuclear bomb, radioactive fallout, bomb shelter. Sister Zoe explained how it would happen. She drew a picture of a mushroom on the blackboard and dotted a flurry of chalkmarks for the dusty fall
out that would kill us all.
The months grew cold, November, December. It was dark when I got up in the morning, frosty when I followed my breath to school. One morning as I sat at my desk daydreaming out the window, I saw dots in the air like the ones Sister Zoe had drawn—random at first, then lots and lots. I shrieked, “Bomb! Bomb!” Sister Zoe jerked around, her full black skirt ballooning as she hurried to my side. A few girls began to cry.
But then Sister Zoe’s shocked look faded. “Why, Yolanda dear, that’s snow!” She laughed. “Snow.”
“Snow,” I repeated. I looked out the window warily. All my life I had heard about the white crystals that fell out of American skies in the winter. From my desk I watched the fine powder dust the sidewalk and parked cars below. Each flake was different, Sister Zoe had said, like a person, irreplaceable and beautiful.
Floor Show
Sandi
No elbows, no Cokes, only milk or—” Mami paused. Which of her four girls could fill in the blank of how they were to behave at the restaurant with the Fannings?
“No elbows on the table,” Sandi guessed.
“She already said that,” Carla accused.
“No fighting, girls!” Mami scolded them all and continued The Epistle. “Only milk or ice water. And I make your orders. Is that clear?”
The four braided and beribboned heads nodded. At moments like this when they all seemed one organism—the four girls—Sandi would get that yearning to wander off into the United States of America by herself and never come back as the second of four girls so close in age.
This time, though, she nodded. Mami’s tone of voice did not invite contradiction. The procedures of this dinner out with the important Fannings had been explained to the girls so many times in the last few days and particularly today that there really was no point in clowning around to get their mother to be more lenient.
“Mami, just please don’t order anything I don’t like, please?” Sandi pleaded. She had always been a fussy eater, and now that they had come to the States, it seemed as if there were twice as many inedible foods that could be piled high on her plate.
“No fish, Mami,” Carla reminded her. “I get sick to my stomach.”
“And nothing with mayonnaise,” Yoyo added. “I can’t eat—”
“Girls!” Their mother lifted up her hands like an Island traffic policeman, halting their requests. On her face was the panicked look she had worn ever since they had arrived in New York three months ago after a narrow escape from the secret police. At the least provocation, she would burst out crying, lose her temper, or threaten to end up in Bellevue, the place, she had learned, where crazy people were sent in this country.
“Can’t you make a little effort tonight?” Her mother’s voice was so sad that the youngest, Fifi, began to cry. “I don’t want to go,” she moaned. “I don’t want to go.”
“But why on earth not?” Mami asked, her face brightening. She seemed genuinely mystified, as if she hadn’t terrorized them for days into thinking of this outing as equivalent to going to the doctor for their booster shots. “It’s going to be such fun. The Fannings are taking us to a special Spanish restaurant that was written up in a magazine. You girls will like it, I’m sure. And there’s going to be a floor show—”
“What’s that?” Sandi, who had lost interest in pleading for a reasonable menu and had been fiddling with the ribbon in her hair, looked up. “Floor show?”
A playful expression came on their mother’s face. She lifted her shoulders, curled her arms over head and clapped her hands, then stamped her feet, fast, fast, fast on the floor as if she were putting out a fire. “Flamenco dancing! ¡Olé! Remember the dancers?” Sandi nodded. They had all been enthralled by the folk dancers from Madrid at the Dominican World’s Fair last year. As Mami began to explain that this restaurant had shows of Spanish dancers as well as yummy Spanish food, a series of thumps sounded on the floor from below.
The girls glanced at each other and looked towards their mother, who rolled her eyes. “La Bruja,” she explained. “I forgot.” The old woman in the apartment below, who had a helmet of beauty parlor blue hair, had been complaining to the super since the day the family moved in a few months ago. The Garcías should be evicted. Their food smelled. They spoke too loudly and not in English. The kids sounded like a herd of wild burros. The Puerto Rican super, Alfredo, came to their door almost daily. Could Mrs. García turn the radio down? Could Mrs. García maybe keep the girls more in line? The neighbor downstairs had been awakened by the clatter of their shoes on the floor.
“If I keep them any more in line,” their mother began—and then Sandi heard her mother’s voice breaking. “We have to walk around. We have to breathe.”
Alfredo surveyed the fourth floor lobby behind his back, then murmured under his breath. “I understand, I understand.” He shrugged his shoulders, helpless. “It is a difficult place, this country, before you get used to it. You have to not take things personal.” He brightened his voice at the end, but Sandi’s mother merely nodded quietly.
“And how are my little señoritas?” Alfredo called over Mrs. García’s shoulders. The girls forced smiles as they had been taught, but Sandi, in revenge, also crossed her eyes. She did not like Alfredo; something about the man’s overfriendliness and his speaking to them in English even though they all knew Spanish made her feel uneasy. La Bruja downstairs she thought of as the devil—her being below them made sense. When Sandi played Toro, bullfighting Yoyo with a towel, she would shout after each successful scrape with death, ¡OLE! and stamp her feet in triumph, lifting her right hand to the crowd. She always had a bad conscience afterwards, but she couldn’t help herself. One day soon after they had moved in, La Bruja had stopped her mother and the girls in the lobby and spat out that ugly word the kids at school sometimes used: “Spies! Go back to where you came from!”
As soon as Papi came home from his shift at the hospital, he showered, singing a favorite Island song that made the girls giggle as they slipped on their party dresses. They were already in a giddy mood from an inspired discovery that the Fannings’ name sure sounded like the word for a person’s bottom they had recently learned in the playground at school. “We’re going to eat with the fannies,” one sister would say to make the others laugh. Papi emerged from the bathroom combing his dark wet curls flat. He looked at the girls and winked. “Your Papi is a dashing man, eh?” He posed in front of the hall mirror, turning this way and that. “A handsome man, your Papi.”
The girls indulged him with cries of “Ay, Papi.” This was the first time in New York that they had seen their father in a lighthearted mood. Mostly he worried about la situatión back home. Some uncles were in trouble. Tío Mundo had been jailed, and Tío Fidelio was maybe dead. Papi had not been able to get an American doctor’s license—some hitch about his foreign education—and the money was running out. Dr. Fanning was trying to help out by lining up jobs, but first Papi needed to pass his licensing exam. It had been Dr. Fanning who had arranged the fellowship that had allowed them all to get out of the old country. And now, the good doctor and his wife had invited the whole family out to an expensive restaurant in the city as a treat. The Fannings knew the Garcías could not afford such a luxury these days. They were such nice people, that was the truth, Mami said, they gave you hope that maybe at the bottom Americans were kind souls.
“But you must behave,” Mami said, going back to the same old Epistle. “You must show them what a nice family you come from.”
As Mami and Papi finished dressing, the girls watched, fussing at their tights, an uncomfortable new article of clothing. These things bunched at the ankles and sagged at the crotch so you always felt as if your pants might be falling down. They made you feel like those bandaged mummies in the museum. If you unwrapped them, Sandi had pondered, misting the glass case with her breath, would they still be dark Egyptians or would their skin have turned pale after such long bondage—like American skin under all these heavy clothes for t
he winter that was just starting?
Sandi leaned her elbows on the vanity and watched her mother comb her dark hair in the mirror. Tonight Mami was turning back into the beauty she had been back home. Her face was pale and tragic in the lamplight; her bright eyes shone like amber held up to the light. She wore a black dress with a scoop back and wide shoulders so her long neck had the appearance of a swan gliding on a lake. Around her neck sparkled her good necklace that had real diamonds. “If things get really bad,” Mami sometimes joked grimly, “I’ll sell the necklace and earrings Papito gave me.” Papi always scowled and told her not to speak such nonsense.
If things ever get that bad, Sandi thought, she would sell her charm bracelet with the windmill that always got caught on her clothing. She would even cut her hair and sell it—a maid back home had told her that girls with good hair could always do that. She had no idea who would buy it. She had not seen hair for sale in the big department stores Mami sometimes took them through on outings “to see this new country.” But Sandi would make the needed sacrifices. Tonight, she thought, with the rich Fannings, she would present herself as the daughter willing to make these sacrifices. Maybe they would adopt her, and give her an allowance like other American girls got, which Sandi would then pass on to her real family. Provided she could see them periodically, that would not be a bad life, being an only child in a fine, rich, childless American family.
Downstairs, the doorman, Ralph, who had himself come from a country called Ireland as a boy, stood by the opened door and gave each young lady a sweeping bow as she passed by. He always flirted with the girls, calling them the Misses Garcías as if they were rich people’s children. Mami often quipped that Ralph probably made more money than Papi on his fellowship. Thank God their grandfather was helping them out. “Without Papito,” Mami confided in her girls, swearing them never to repeat this to their father, “without Papito, we would have to go on welfare.” Welfare, they knew, was what people in this country got so they wouldn’t turn into beggars like those outside La Catedral back home. It was Papito who paid the rent and bought them their winter clothes and spoiled them once with an outing to Lincoln Center to see the doll-like ballerinas dancing on their toes.
How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents Page 14