All about Skin (14 page)

“Boys? At your age?” My mother looked at me, Yahira, Alexa, and then Ruthie. If I was guilty, so were they. As it turned out, the news for this week was that Yahira's mother had caught me getting felt up by Robby Rodriguez in her stairwell last week.

Three years ago, when we were fifteen, was the first and last time they let us, their daughters, into one of their meetings. We walked in looking sober, but deep down inside we were giddy. We had been listening to them since their first meeting, when we were twelve, envisioning their expressions as they talked, and I always imagined that the room looked different whenever they went into it, that like a dress it took on their shape.

“You're old enough to be running around with boys, huh?” My mother's voice was one notch below yelling. I knew she was mad, but she said this all in English, so I knew we, or I, hadn't reached her capacity for anger. “Don't tell me. Don't tell me that's what you really think?” The other mothers shook their heads in unison. “I know you girls live in a more liberal world, a more
American
world.” (My mother liked to throw out the A-word whenever she really wanted to insult us.) “But
we
don't.

“Carmencita was the one we compared ourselves to,” my mother continued. “If we did this would we be going too far? Is this something Carmencita would do? And if we thought the answer might be yes, no matter how fast the thought came and went, we didn't do it. We were not going to be like her. Clearly, Carmencita was a….” I knew my mother wanted to use the word
puta
, but she was a coarse prude who wouldn't really utter such language. My mother's raspy voice grated on my nerves constantly, but today more so than usual.

Instead of telling us stories about people doing it, or pulling out a story from one of their books, they told us a ghost story. The story of boogie-woman Carmencita. We had all heard versions of the Carmencita story. Her name was the one whispered in back alleys, around campfires, and under the faithful light of slumber party-goers, way after the parents have gone to sleep. As if she's made a pact with our mothers, she comes howling in the middle of the night. Carmencita tells ghoulish bedtime stories of love gone awry. She comes to girls and women who believe in love, when they shouldn't. But our mothers offered something new. They said they knew her. When she was alive. So they knew the truth.

My mother pulled out a newspaper clipping, yellowed and in Spanish. She passed it around before she read it to us, even though she knew none of us girls could read Spanish very well.

“We saw her at the beach and were probably the last ones to see her alive.” My mother uses her lips to point to the other women in the room. “Carmencita came down the beach with her boyfriend Luis, his older brother who worked in the United States, and two of their cousins from Rio Piedras we had never seen before. Imagine, a girl unchaperoned with one, two, three, four men.” My mother throws a look my way. “They stopped and talked to us for a few minutes. Then, we didn't see them the rest of the night. The next day there are the rumors that she's missing, can't be found, her mother's worried, thinks Carmencita ran off.” My mother paused to inhale exhale from her cigarette. She did this constantly. Start. Stop. Smoke.

“All kinds of rumors. Screams heard. Nobody knew what where. Sand poured down her mouth. Raped by each boy. Two boys on top of her at once. Beat up like a man. On and on they went. There were so many. Then, the worst rumor: that Luis set her up.”

My mother then stated that months after these stories, girls began to hear her screams by the beach. Carmencita started to come to women before weddings nights, before third dates, second dates, first dates, and before
quinces
. She told these women and girls her story and as the years went on, she had so many stories, so much hurt to pass on to other generations of girls.

My mother finished by crushing out her cigarette and looking each of us girls in the eye.

“Carmencita's going to get you,” girls would say to each other in elementary school. It was a game to us. But as we got older, the less we heard this story, so we became more concerned that boys
wouldn't
be able to get us, not some boogey-woman.

“See, if she hadn't been out …” One mother started, and the rest continued.

“If she hadn't been out with those boys …”

“I'm sure they were guilty …”

“I had to walk by the boyfriend's house every day. He didn't even seem sorry …”

They all talked over each other, forgetting for several minutes, lost in the haze of their past constrictions that they were making sure to pass on to us, that we were there.

“You remember how fast he was after little Maria …”

“Didn't stop to mourn Carmencita …”

“Still lives in Arecibo today. Nothing ever happened to them …”

“
¡Ve como los hombres engañan a las mujeres!
”

My mother had the windows open, but we sat scrunched in between them, so all I felt was an intense heat. I looked at the six women in the room—most of them our mothers. They came out in their housedresses, stretch pants, oversized T-shirts, and hair dyed a “Boricua bronze,” as we liked to call their particular hair color. Looking at them, spreading in their seats like melted ice cream … no wonder our fathers left. I mean at first I was on her side. I really was. But over the past few years, my mother had morphed into someone I could never know. Didn't want to know.

“But this is what our mothers taught us, and this is what we want you to learn: her boyfriend wasn't just some
cualquiera
. He was someone who we all thought was kind to her. So the person who betrayed her was someone she knew, not someone she would suspect would hurt her. Of all the rumors we heard, that was the worst one.

“Like you, we didn't listen to our mothers. We only paid attention to the first part of the Carmencita story, the sex part, but we didn't heed the love part. Don't ever be that stupid. Don't ever trust a man.”

They told us that we must not live lives like Carmencita, that we should stay away from men (until an appropriate age, of course), or they would be the cause of our destruction. Didn't we want to marry in white? Be good girls? Make our mothers happy?

I saw the looks on my friends' faces after our mothers dismissed us from their meeting. “God, I can't believe them. Telling us that story. I mean, why don't they focus on how fucked up those boys were?” I said.

The girls were silent.

“Why would they blame her? Basically, it was like she was stupid for trusting those boys and then she gets raped and killed. That's not fair,” I continued.

I looked at my friends again. They were still silent.

“I mean where's the proof that he set her up? She didn't do anything wrong by loving Luis. I mean that could have been any of us,” I stated.

“I never believed that story, but I mean they had a newspaper article. What if Carmencita is for real? I mean none of us have really been in love, so what if she does come to people who are?” Baby Ruthie asked.

I sighed. “Come on. That's just a story. Do you believe in the tooth fairy too?”

“Okay, well even if that isn't true, it's true that this girl disappeared. And just look at how our fathers left. What if that's the way they all are? What if that's all we have to look forward to?” Alexa asked.

“Listen, our mothers weren't always like this.” I tried to emulate my mother's booming voice as I dramatically walked around the room as we had all seen my mother do at the height of her fervor. “They were happy once. Things change. I assure you that if they had new boyfriends now, they would feel differently.”

I knew their stories. Heard them. When I was younger, before the meetings, the newly single or unmarried women clamored around our house and said things like “I'll die without him—I'll die without his love.” Because I never saw them die, I always assumed it was because their love had been maintained in some way. By the time I knew that people didn't literally die because of love, my father left my mother and I saw the way she died.

“Just think about how you've felt every time you've even just
liked
a boy. Remember how that feels, then imagine what
love
must be like,” I said.

I saw their faces change—open up a bit to let my ideas in. I imagine that every love/like sensation they had ever felt came flooding back to them, soaking their resistance, drenching their fear, washing the boogie-woman away.

Seizing the moment, I asked, “What do our mothers want the most?”

Everyone looked around, but no one answered.

“I'm confused. I don't know what they want. Why do they even want us to get married?” Ruthie said.

My sister Betsy, who was a bored graduate student on break, popped in then and said leisurely, “You know, they're traditional, there are still some things they can't shake. I mean it would take a whole other revolution before they get to that point.”

I nodded my head, but Betsy kept spitting these random comments at us, some that we understood and some that we didn't.

“Yeah, and they want us to keep our legs closed,” Alexa finally ventured.

“Or they don't want us to get felt up by boys in my hallway,” Yahira said, and the girls started laughing.

I gave her a dirty look and tried not to laugh. “They want us to get married. And today, we will swear we will never get married.”

“Are you serious?” Yahira asked.

“Yeah,” Ruthie said, but really asked.

“You're crazy,” Alexa said.

Betsy smirked.

I looked around the room at the faces of the girls who have mothers who believe the same stuff as my mother. Did my mother have such a hard time with their mothers?

“Well, why don't you explain more, Rosie,” Betsy said.

“Thank you,” I said. “Well, what I mean is that above all they want us to get married, but I think instead we should focus on falling in love.” The atmosphere dramatically changed after I said that. With more confidence, I continued, “They want us to marry and not believe, but I think we should believe and not marry.”

“That makes sense,” Yahira piped in, and the rest of the girls nodded in agreement.

We started a war. It was a communal effort. I, along with my friends, went down and wrote poetic verses. It was our offering; we did not want Carmencita to be a hungry ghost for all eternity. Chased by the furies, whipped for eternity for being a whore. No, for being a woman. We took turns reciting our poem each night to all those who would listen. Hoping to recruit others who would not applaud her destruction but who would see the wrong in it. In the poem, we rewrote her story.

The kids gathered around me as I read and the news traveled quickly from porch to porch.

“That García girl is up to it again,” they murmured from lip to ear down the four corners of our world.

But all the while that I stood fighting for human justice, my mother crept up to where I was. A great silence ensued and I was fooled into believing that I had gained the noble art of persuasion.

“
Niña
, what are you doing!” she bellowed in Spanish.

She stood there with her housedress on, hair pulled back into a tight Victorian bun, hands on her hips, looking absolutely ferocious. She snatched our poem and ripped it into 2, 4, 6, 80, 30, 40 million, zillion pieces and it spread into the wind like cremated ashes. She marched me home, but I kept my head up as we walked by the porches full of neighborhood women who awaited my appearance. I didn't even bother to look at these women perched on their porches even though they rumbled, rattled, and hoofed. The fact that they were out there let me know that I had become my mother's equal.

But when we got home, my mother thrashed out her words, letting them bounce off the walls. She would not have this, love is a farce, men do nothing but beat and trample on women and so help her God no daughter of hers was going to turn out to be low-life
basura de la calle
. So she beat me, telling me all the while that that was the way men would beat me. And for each stroke there was a story. She took me through history, through all the ages, telling me about the plight of
las mujeres
.

In ancient Greece, Penelope waited, weaving for a man who went out into the world and had a helluva time fighting the mighty Cyclopes and the Laestrygonians and shacking up with a different woman in every port. Then there was Julia, who lamented over Don Juan, gave up her life, her social standing, all the comforts of the aristocracy for mere sex. Even the Romantic poet couldn't make this romantic. After all, her only lot in life was to love again and be again undone.

“No more victims,” my mother finally whispered.

But the stories kept pouring forth, even through my delirium.

The next day at school, though, I rose in esteem in the eyes of my friends. I could see the shift from hare-brained girl to leader. I took my place among them, and I knew I could lead them forward. From then on, it was possible to get them to do anything. And from there, our weekly battles ensued. We read about other revolutionaries. We read Sor Juana, Erica Jong, Julia de Burgos, Sandra Cisneros. We read about Che, Fidel, the Black Panthers, the Puerto Rican Young Lords. We got berets, puffed out our hair. Wore leather jackets. Got sunglasses. We even came up with a ten-point plan in order to keep us organized. We started a newspaper, passed out leaflets, had chants, gave speeches, had consciousness-raising sessions for the other girls in our neighborhood, in our schools. We were cohesive, we yelled, we marched, and every Saturday until we went to college, we rallied against our mothers.