American Chica (40 page)

To Mr. Schwartz I had probably seemed a placid child until then. A good girl, an unremarkable pupil, a gray little thing, neither here nor there. But in that one act performed in that Amazon getup, I showed him the two-face I really was—the pretender par excellence.

Many years later, when I was studying at the British University of Hong Kong—linguistics to be precise, after I’d studied Chinese, after I’d studied Russian and French, trying on languages like so many dresses—I came across a theory claiming that bilingualism can hurt you. This was not one of those theories about the educational process or the capacities of the brain. It was a slender little monograph, not particularly well written,
which claimed that in operating as two distinct personalities with two distinct tongues, a bicultural person will be highly suspect to those who have only one culture. The bicultural person seems so thoroughly one way in one language, so thoroughly different in another. Only an impostor would hide that other half so well. A liar.

An African-American friend of mine, Carol, once told me that this happens to blacks in a white culture, too: You talk like a white in the workplace, like a black in your neighborhood. You use two dialects, two personalities, two senses of humor, two ways of shaking a hand, two ways of saying hello—one for the world you’re trying to make a way in, another when you’re home with your kin. Now, Carol was a very sedate woman—elegant in bearing, cautious with words. I came upon her unexpectedly one day as I elbowed my way through a party: There she was, in a group of black women, swiveling her hips, flinging her hands, carrying on in another lingo, so that I hardly recognized her. She laughed about it later, but I could see it was nervous laughter. She confided that she’d always thought that whites who saw her in her other context wouldn’t understand it. She worried they wouldn’t trust her when she resumed standard English, they might conclude she was insincere. I mentioned the linguist’s monograph. She and I agreed that, however different our backgrounds were, the fear of being called a faker, an impostor, had meaning for both of us.

But the monograph doesn’t begin to tell the story. The truth about biculturalism is more complicated. That others doubt you is not the point. The doubt creeps into you, too. What Carol was saying was that not only did she fear people would think her a two-face, she was confessing that
she
was afraid she was. I understood it, because I, too, had doubted my own trustworthiness. I had been fooling people for years. Slip into my American skin,
and the playground would never know I was really Peruvian. Slip into the Latina, and Peruvians wouldn’t suspect I was a Yank. But even by the age of ten, I had gone one giant step past Carol: I was flitting from one identity to another so deftly that it was just as easy to affect a third. I could lie, I could fake, I could act. It was a way for a newcomer to cope in America. You can’t quite sound like your schoolmates? Never mind! Make it up, fashion a whole new person.
Act the part,
says the quote under my school photo,
and you can become whatever you wish to become.
Invention. It was a new kind of independence.

M
OTHER WAS IN
such a festive mood, settling into our new home on Tulip Street, that she didn’t seem to mind that I had been made to stay after school and write
Halloween costumes are not supposed to harm my friends
one hundred times on the blackboard. She was so cheerful about the three floors of rooms, the two-piano salon, our part-time cook, even the piles of frozen apples in our backyard, that she dismissed O’Neill’s venom as little more than a schoolyard spat. She read my teacher’s note about the importance of a safe Halloween, slipped it into a drawer, turned to my painted face, and asked where the blow dart was. “Here,” I said, drawing the bamboo quiver from inside my poncho. She hung it back on the wall.

“What you did was wrong, very very wrong, but I think you’ve had all the flogging a green-cheeked jungle girl can stand,” she said. “Come, I want to give you some pie.” I whooped, threw my arms around her waist, and dragged her into a tango until she giggled so breathlessly I had to steady her with the kitchen counter.

I spent a winter trying to do things the O’Neill way, although I never would have admitted it. I studiously avoided words like
book
or
butcher,
gorged on Wonder Bread, wailed with Chubby Checker, wheedled a pair of loafers, scored a perfect attendance
at Calvary Episcopal’s Sunday school, made sure I could Peppermint Twist. But when no one was looking, Kit and I sharpened our dark arts, and I fed my best friend a bundle of lies.

“You know what this is?” I said one day, waving a little flask in her face.

“Perfume?” she ventured, and quite reasonably, since a golden liquid was in it and the image of a blossom on its side.

“Wrong!” I said. “It only looks like perfume. It’s a magic potion. My father brought it from Peru. One drink of this stuff and I have special powers. I can summon ghosts, witches, spirits. Anyone you’d like me to bring back from the dead?”

“How about Edgar Allan Poe?” she said excitedly.

“Poe, it is,” I said, and smacked my lips in anticipation.

“How will I know you’ve summoned him?” Kit asked, superbly rational creature that she was. “Will I get to see him?”

“Oh,” I said, rolling my eyes and thumping the bedspread under me, “believe me, you’ll know when I see him. Trrrrrrrust me, you’ll know. This is powerful stuff. Straight from the jungle. My father went down the Amazon to get it. In a canoe! Bought it himself from a cannibal.” I think she believed me. I could see it in the wide black of her eyes.

It was true that my father had bought it for me. He had wandered into a little Latino
mercado
in Manhattan. Orange-blossom perfume.
Agua de azahar.

I twisted off the tiny gold cap and raised the vial to my lips. An intense sweetness flooded my nostrils. I put my tongue to the rim. It was bitter. I thought twice about taking the lie too far, but then the romance of my remarkable powers overtook me. I squeezed my eyes shut and guzzled the contents down.

“Oh!” Kit said, and her hand flew to her throat.

“Oh!” I said, and flung the bottle onto the bed. The liquid was burning its way down my gullet; I had no problem pretending
convulsions. I clutched the bedspread behind me and arched my back in a serpentine curve. When I snapped to, I bounced on my haunches like a demented monkey. I bared my teeth, growled, and goggled maniacally over the top of Kit’s head. “It’s him!”

“Where?” she screeched, and jumped around to face the wall behind her.

“No!” I cried. “Over there! In the window!” and I stumbled my way there from the bed.

As I went past her, I could see that Kit’s face was red, her eyes terrified. She staggered back.

“Do you see?” I screamed, and, somehow, I actually pictured Poe’s sallow face hovering outside my window, his hair in wild disarray. “Aaaaayeeeeee!” I wailed, and pointed to the disembodied head. “It’s coming in!”

Suddenly, Kit bolted from the room, and, paralyzed with fear, I chased after. We scurried downstairs, squealing and jumping, throwing our arms around each other in the radiant light of the hall. “Did you see him?” I panted, my trachea burning from the full ounce of perfume that had wended its way through it.

“I think so,” said Kit. “Yes, I saw him. I did.”

“Oh, Mareezie,” my mother said, coming out from the living room, smiling and shaking her head. “I can see you two have been housebound too long. You’re playing your ghost games, aren’t you? Why don’t you bundle up and I’ll take you to the rink, let you air out awhile?” We shook our flushed faces vigorously and ran to pack up our skates. If there was one thing better than a scare, it was speeding like a demon over ice.

Hard water. My first time on it, I’d been gawky as a toucan on marble, my knees splaying out over my blades. But before long, I had straightened my cap, pushed off the chain-link, swung my arms out, and sailed the ice free, making my mother’s eyes dance. She loved to watch me skate. That night, while we spun around the rink, she sat in the car, elbows propped on the steering
wheel—a cigarette in her hand, a grin on her face—her collar pulled high to her ears. I watched her watch me, turning to see her over my shoulder, feeling the pride and alcohol in me, thinking my chest would burst.

One evening not too long after that, we were driving home from the rink alone, when Mother pointed to the side of the road. A woman was navigating the curb on her toes, hugging her body, waving at us to stop. She had no purse, no keys, no bag: nothing at all in her hands. “Look at that,” Mother said, “a thin little tunic on a freezing night like this. What’s that poor woman up to?” She pulled the car over, cranked down the window, and offered her a ride. I’d never seen her do anything remotely like that in Lima. She had always been wary of strangers there.

The woman was older, graying, her hair swept up off her face. “Thank you, yes,” she said, and hopped in, nimble as a bird. She shivered and chattered in the back, perched on the edge of her seat, hanging on to the front, motioning where to go. “Look at you, child,” she said to me, but she wasn’t looking at all. “Your nose is crisp as a radish!” Then she waved a frantic finger at the windshield. “I’m just down here on Prospect. Off Tulip. Very close now! Very close!” Her voice was high and wobbly, as if she’d been laughing too long.

Mother peered at the rearview mirror. “You look very cold,” she said.

“Not so!” the woman chirped. “Here we are. Here’s the driveway. Turn here.”

FAIR OAKS,
the sign said. We were just around the corner from our house, yards away from our apple trees, but I had never noticed this place before. It was hidden by pines, set off the road. Mother steered the car up the driveway and finally pulled to a stop. A massive building was in front of us, with bright lights blazing within.
Patient Registration,
one door said.
Staff Only,
said another. The woman sprang from the car and wordlessly darted inside.

“I wonder,” Mother said as we turned back onto the road, “what the poor soul was doing wandering down Tulip Street like that. Did you see, Mareezie? Do you realize what this is?” She was half awed, half alarmed. I shook my head no. “A nuthouse, honey. That’s what.” She looked at me sideways and issued a little laugh.

We were living by the loony bin. The
loco
depository. Behind our garden. Near as the berry bush.

George and I patrolled the other side of our apple trees routinely after that, half expecting ghouls to lurch out, drooling and clawing at our eyes. But all we saw were heads with vacant faces, staring from windows, working their hands with their hands. In the evenings at times, I thought I could hear keening, as woeful as a wolf’s on Elk Mountain. “That’s a dog,” Mother would rush to say. But I knew otherwise. It was a woman in a cotton tunic, standing on her toes, scanning the night for home.

IF SUMMIT WASN’T
everything Mother had ever hoped for, she was fooling us well. She was radiant, steaming up and down Springfield Avenue, with a strong wind in her sail. She was doing things we’d never imagined could make her happy: going to market, hustling to the discount stores, speeding forgotten things to school for us with pin curls against her scalp. Even with a once-a-week maid to help her, there was plenty of work to do. She was tired and high-strung and driven, but there were no furrows in her brow.

As for Papi, he was coming and going in the dark now—leaving before dawn and arriving long past dusk—collapsing onto the sofa. He spent weekends behind a typewriter, writing long missives to Peru.
You should see how the children are growing,
he’d
plick-plack, but he himself was seeing less and less of us by the day.

His life was unfolding in Manhattan, up a crowded elevator, behind a littered desk, over papers sketched with imagined columns of steel. If work culminated in a belching factory, a carmine furnace, a caroming machine part—if there were
pishtacos
snapping hands off at the wrists—he did not see them. His days were long white sheets of paper, coiled tight, stamped blue.