American Chica (22 page)

“Vamos,”
said Carlos, ignoring her and nodding toward our lopsided tent. “Let’s go in.”

“No, no,” said George. “Not like that,
tonto.
You can’t just go in. This is a club and I’m the president. We have to have rules.” Then he turned on his feet slowly, thinking what those might be.

“I know,” he said finally. “Rule number one: You have to learn the handshake.” He made it up right there and then—grab the right with the right, slide up, clasp the elbow, swipe arm against arm, one side then the other, intertwine fingers, and shake. We all did it after that. Again and again, messing up hopelessly, laughing, then starting over, until it was neat and rote.

“Rule number two!” said George. “In order to be accepted into the club, everyone has to go into that tepee with my sister. One at a time. And once you’re inside, you have to kiss her.”

“Yechh,” said Carlos, his chest caving with the thought. “Will you go first?”

“Not me!” said George. “I told you, I’m president. I’m already
in
the club.”

“Okay. Me!” said Manuel, a buck-toothed boy with droopy eyes.

“George,” I protested. “I—”

“And, Marisi, if you don’t like him, you have the power to say no.”

My protestation hung in the air. The power to say no? To say who gets in? All of a sudden, the kisses seemed trivial, no more than sealing wax on a queen’s table.

I was so quick to trot along behind George, I never stopped to wonder at the fact that I was the only girl there. It is clear to me now, sitting as I am forty years later, looking out over the rooftops of Washington, seeing other people’s daughters scoot by with their skinny little arms around boys, how different I was from my counterparts in the hacienda. The girls of Paramonga—at least the ones of a certain class—were in their houses, in starched
dresses, teetering on their mothers’ high heels, kissing their dolls. They were acquiring the manners my abuelita expected of me: learning to contain myself when others were too boisterous, to be pleasantly outgoing when others were too shy. They lived monitored girlhoods, in aesthetically pleasing places, with carefully selected playmates, and someday they would pass into chaperoned young womanhood, during which their virtues would be guarded like family jewels.

Peruvian girls were not running about, pounding stakes into earth, tying a tepee down. They were securing respectability, studying the polarities between
señor
and
señora,
grooming their lives accordingly, making themselves scarce. Now that I recall, the only ones who came around unannounced were daughters of servants, dirty girls who would shuffle up with their eyes cast down, offering themselves wordlessly to our games.

It didn’t occur to me that I was anything but a boy’s equal. I was my mother’s daughter, ready to pit myself against boys if I had to, ready to grin at them openly, as I’d seen my mother grin at the
solteros,
facing them squarely when they strode down the streets, tipping their hats her way.

But there was a dichotomy at work, and it would take a long time for me to understand it. As much as I was a gringa, chasing through that neighborhood in the wake of my big brother, I was also studiously acquiring a Peruvian femininity. It came in subtle ways: During one of Tía Chaba’s visits, when she stepped into the garden, leaned over, and hissed in my ear—“Marisi, cross your legs,
hijita;
you’re showing the world your very soul.” Or, “Don’t sit there with your mouth hanging open like a lizard; close it until you have something interesting to say.” Or hearing an engineer’s wife gossip at my father’s table—
“Oy, por Dios,
Jorge, have you seen that
criatura
the Martinez girl has turned into?
She walks like an
hombre,
waves her hands about like a
chola,
props her fists on her hips, and spits out ear-singeing
groserías.”
So that by the time I was grown, I knew there were two women I could be—the Latina or the gringa—and that at every juncture I would need to choose one. I picked my way through life, deciding to try one identity and then the other. I transformed myself into an all-American in high school; became Peruvian again in college. I was a good Latina in my first marriage, going to the altar with the first man who ever touched me, hanging my future on his, never reaching for him in bed. And then I was a good gringa in my second, throwing out all the rule books and following my heart. But all that came later, after Paramonga. Long after I discovered a thing or two about boys.

It was in George’s club that I learned boys were clannish. They loved the company of other boys. Backslaps and fellowship. The code of the gang. For these things they were willing to undergo any humiliation, suffer any outrage. To be
in.
But if it was true for them, it was also true for me. I longed to be part of a team, to wield a little power. Were kisses the price of admission?
Caramba!
They could kiss me all day long. My hair was too long, my dresses too girly, God hadn’t bothered to fit me with a hose, but that hadn’t seemed to stop me so far. Kisses? Sure. I could do that. I’d get by. I’d belong.

“Okay,” I said to Manuel briskly. “Follow me.”

The buck-toothed boy came through the flap of the tent meekly and watched as I tramped to the center and sat on the grass, cross-legged.

“Now what?” he asked, his skewed eyes focusing.

“Sit here and let me see if I like you,” I said, and motioned to the space before me.

He sat down and I studied his face. “Look,” he whispered nervously, and put a hand in his pocket. “I have something I can
give you.” He pulled out a
caramelo
in red wrapping and offered it to me. His face was mottled with expectation.

“What flavor?” I asked.

“Strawberry.”

Candy. I hadn’t anticipated bribes. My power was beginning to seem infinite. I could hear the giggles and guffaws outside.

“Fine,” I said, and put out my hand. He dropped the warm cube in. “You tell anyone about this and you’re gone,” I said.
“Ciao.”

“And the kiss?” he said.
El beso?

I put out one foot. “On my shoe.”

He obliged.

“Okay. You’re in.”

He scrambled to his feet and burst outside with a whoop.

Three more filed in, one at a time. I extracted a variety of treasures from them: a green marble, a Coca-Cola top from the
loco
boy’s garden, a fifty-centavo piece. The kisses were minor obligations: my elbow, my wrist, a hand, and with each, the promise to never tell.

The last was Carlos. He came in, peering up through his lashes.

“You want to be in this club?” I said, narrowing my eyes as he sat.

“Sí.”

“Bueno.
You have to do two things. First, the kiss. And then you give me something.”

“Give you what?”

“What do you have in your pockets?”

“Oh.” He checked. There was nothing there.

I looked him up and down, taking my time to think. Outside, the boys were crawling up, trying to eavesdrop. I could hear George wrestle them back.

What could I get the boy to give me? And then I thought of Antonio.

“I know,” I said. “Tell me something. A story. But it has to be true, it has to be secret, and it better be quick.”

He frowned, smoothing his cowlick. “Okay,” he said.

“Un beso primero,”
I said, and pushed my lips out for a kiss.

He didn’t hesitate. He sucked air, leaned in, pecked me on the mouth, and sat back down.

“And now,
el secreto,”
he said calmly, folding his manicured hands together in his lap while I caught my breath and wiped his kiss onto my forearm. “It’s something I heard my mother say to my father. And it has something to do with you. She said your mother is weird.
Rara.
She talks funny, doesn’t fit. She should get on a boat and go back to wherever she came from. She doesn’t belong in Peru.”

I could feel heat rise through my chest, fly up my neck, and lodge in the back of my throat. A boy staggered through the flap, fell, and rolled in at us, red-faced and cackling, but I hardly registered him at all. Carlos stood, brushed himself off, and walked out of the tent. “She said yes,” he announced to the others, assuming consent when I’d sat there with my mouth hanging open like a reptile.

Doesn’t belong in Peru?
What did that mean exactly? Did she fit any less than anyone else in that makeshift hacienda? There was a carnival of misfits here: Tommy the
loco,
the long-legged
solteros,
and
—por el amor de Dios
—how about Wong?

Step inside a corner bodega anywhere in Peru and you were likely to see a Chinese face behind the counter. Step inside Paramonga’s shabby little
bodega china
and there would be Wong, his colossal head trailing a goatee to his abacus the way a genie trails a wisp to its lamp.

“Qué quiele? Tulón?”
You want a
turrón?
And a long, bony finger would point to the tall glass jar with its colored chunks of nougat. “One
sol
buys five!”

“How about
flan?”
we’d call out, just to tease him. Just to ask him for something we knew he didn’t have.

“Mo lo!”
he’d bark back in Cantonese. “All gone.”

Wong, we had been told, was from the village of Huarmey. His parents had been coolies from Shanghai. Slavery had been outlawed for almost a century in South America, but a new “Chinese law” was in place when his family was lured to Peru. The sugar and guano moguls paid one pound sterling for Wong’s father, half that for his mother. The two made the nine-thousand-mile voyage to Callao in the hold of a ship with four hundred others like them. By the time they stepped into the cane fields five months later, they knew they should never have come. Wong’s father had to be shackled to keep him from trying to make a run for the sea. His mother took an overdose of opium and lay down by the sugar shoots to die.

Old Wong grew up, married, had sons. But he stayed in Paramonga, peddling his dried food and sweets, clinging to the cane field as tightly as a locust husk—as shriveled as the shrimp and
tau-err-tong
that filled the barrels of his shop.

“Mo lo!”
the Peruvian children would mimic as he hobbled home in the dark. All gone.

Doesn’t fit.
Like who? Like the Dane who lived next door in the lemon-yellow
casa de solteros?
He had come years before, bright-faced and handsome, bragging of pink-assed women. At first he was one of the ordinary ones, shuttling out to the factory in the morning and sucking on rum at night. Until one fine day when he began to drool, drop things, and spin through the rooms with his hands on his head. They took him to a hospital after that. “Nerves,” they whispered, “something to do with his spine.” Then they brought him back to the house beside us, and he was all fixed, shiny as a new steel tool.

But one afternoon George and I looked up from our cowboy wars and saw the gringo flinging tables and chairs through his
second-floor window, wriggling wildly, pausing only to hang his head out over the sill and gurgle at the pile below. When they edged upstairs to grab him, they said the man had gone crazy. When they took him off and opened his head, they found a fistful of worms inside.

We Peruvians have a name for that.
Taki Onqoy:
a plague of worms that fills a body with an irresistible urge to wiggle. The mountain Indians had been known to invoke the
Taki Onqoy
against the Spaniards for all the agonies they had brought to Peru. The Spaniards danced and writhed until they flung themselves into the rivers—a useful thing to have happen to foreigners, a curse to slam them back where they belonged.

Back where she came from.
All these years later, I am still drawn up tight by that phrase, with a fury I can hardly contain. Who was to say that Carlos Ruiz’s mother with her roots tracing back to Segovia belonged in Peru? Or the king’s conquistador, Francisco Pizarro, for that matter, an illegitimate pig farmer from the Spanish fringe—did he have a birthright to the land of the Inca? If
Señora
Ruiz and Pizarro had pioneer birthrights, as my Peruvian family claimed to have, did they have one any more than my gringa mother?

Before that moment in the tepee with Carlos Ruiz, I did not know that my mother was an outcast in my father’s country. I knew that she was different, that she and my grandmother were at odds with each other, that she seemed awkward in Peruvian settings, that people giggled at the way she spoke. It wasn’t that she was reviled in any way for how she looked, for the color of her skin. Not at all. Light complexions were admired in Peru, and her alabaster skin seemed an asset: a credit to my father. He had married a
blanca
and in so doing whitened future generations of Aranas. It was good to be pale. What I learned from Carlos Ruiz that afternoon was that the problem with us was not about skin. It was not about language. It was not about money. It
was about being American. It was about seeing my mother, despite all evidence to the contrary, as a cartoon
yanqui:
the big-boned, clumsy, loud-mouthed, bragging, dim-brained, swaggering kind.