American Chica (41 page)

He was a Peruvian in New York City: a gray hat, gray wool straphanger, roaming the labyrinth, his heart in another land. In all our years in Peru, not one week had passed that the man did not greet his father, receive the blessings of his mother, stretch his legs under a table with a friend. Now he was one bewildered face in a line that trudged from the station. “There he is! I see him!” I’d sing from the back of the car, pointing into the dark of a New Jersey winter. But it was hardly the father I’d known. He’d waft through the house like a wisp over embers, clap his Smith-Corona on a table, roll the onionskin through, fill a glass, tamp an ashtray with a butt, and peck out wistful dispatches from the North.

Gringo life perplexed him, with its golf-cart weekends, Monday morning ball talk, barbecue aprons and hats. Suits moved through offices disparaging “the Third World,” speaking of us as if we were the back end of civilization, as if he were an invisible man. “Hey, Freddy! Be sure to take gum and cigs when you go down to bananaland. Those
cholos
will kiss your ass!”

There was a frayed edge to his days on Tulip Street, a slow corrosion of the soul. Long, barren weeks were made bearable by the prospect of Peruvian interludes: The Ariases had invited us to dinner in a suburb two hours away. Carmen Cunningham, who now lived in Irvington, was bringing ceviche, made with
corvina
she had discovered in some tucked-away fish market. One of Papi’s cousins was coming to town. No
Señor
de los
Milagros, no Santa Rosa de Lima, no
apu
of San Cristóbal could bless him with greater gifts.

But there were times he’d ride in on a late train and clump upstairs in the wee hours of a Saturday morning, smelling of rum and smoke. In Peru, the bottle had been for
simpático
men—for high-living
gente lijera,
as my grandmother had said. In this country it was for the forlorn.

The day finally came when he realized he had to break free from that golf-shirt internment, from the wing-toed chain gang of the 7:25. It happened one Friday night in February. Kit and I had just received a mail-order package from the North Carolina Biological Supply Company: two tree frogs, a lamb’s heart, two lizards, one spotted king snake. (Pickled in formaldehyde. Suspended in clear plastic. Only in America! A middleman ships the remains!) We laid the lamb’s heart out on a wood slab in the basement, poked it with our scalpels, imagined the lamb’s blood coursing through it, then wrapped it back up and stuck it outside in a steep snowy bank between the back stoop and the garage. I smoothed over the snow, said good-bye to Kit, and we left our dissections for another day.

Hours after I went to bed, I awoke to the sounds of Mother moving from door to door, securing the latches from the inside.
Thwock. Thwock. Thwock.
I figured Papi had come home, and so I pulled up my alpaca blanket and nuzzled into its warmth. In truth, at that very moment, he was riding into the station. The Erie-Lackawanna’s last train chugged in from Hoboken, disgorged him and a few stragglers, then hissed off into the black.

It was still dark when I reawoke to a howl that sounded as if it were rising from a vault under my floorboards.
Bah-eeeee!
High and urgent, like the wail of a snared animal. Or a
loco
on the far side of loose.

I shot out of bed and ran to my window. The back-porch light
was on, and a yellow bulb threw its lemon glow over the snow. Out where the apple trees marked the frontiers of our garden, out by the hand-wringers of Fair Oaks, there was no trace of a footprint. If a
loco
were under my room, he had flown there. I peered at the big brown house on my left: No sign of movement there. Then I checked the one on the other side: pitch dark.

Whonk! Whonk!
Two loud bangs shook my room and shivered out along the walls of the corridor. I grabbed the sides of my window frame. Was an earthquake shaking the bedrock of New Jersey? I strained to see over the peaked gable, but it blocked my view of the porch. Nothing trembled. Nothing stirred. There was only a terrible silence, and a sulfurous light, like the gleam of a feral eye.

Suddenly, something gray bobbed out from under the gable and pulled in again. It was fast, small, quiet, like the hindquarter of an animal. I hiked myself up to get a better angle, but the overhang prevented me from seeing more. All I could make out were three porch steps, the packed snow on the driveway, the round white shoulder where the laboratory lamb heart lay, and the still of the garden beyond.

Then came a sight that will never leave me. The gray object slid out from under the gable again. All at once, I was looking down at my father, moving in the dreamy glissade of a dancer, as if I were watching from the rafters of a stage. His feet were skating on ice, and the calves of his gray wool pants legs were sliding out from under him. Back and forth, back and forth, struggling for purchase on that one treacherous step. His head hovered beneath me: a dark crest, black as a winter’s crow.

It was a simple thing. Over soon. He must have grabbed hold of something, for I no longer saw him. There was a long pause, and then the whack of fists against the door.

“Hoh-nee!” he bellowed. His voice reverberated through my toes, up my legs, and into my gut. “Oh-pen the door!” He took
hold of the knob, pulled at it, and shook the door so that the tiny panes of glass rattled in their frames.

“Hoh-nee bay-bee!” he yelled, and then staggered back to give me a bird’s-eye perspective on his head.

I looked out beyond him, into the night. One by one, lights were going on in our neighbors’ houses. I imagined their faces at the windows, talking over their shoulders. No dear, it’s fine, nothing serious. Only the alien next door.

HE WENT OFF
to Peru after that. It was to be a single trip, a field visit to Paramonga, just like the visits the New York gringos made when we lived in that hacienda, putting up at the guest house for months at a time. He left in February and said he’d be back in early April, when buds were jutting from trees. Mother seemed to carry on fine without him. There was little the woman couldn’t do. She shoveled the driveway, drove me to play rehearsals, stayed long into the night reading with Vicki. She was reveling in freedom now, as if she didn’t need a man.

As for us children, we were Americans now. We hardly thought of our pasts; we hardly spoke Spanish. As the months went by, I shucked Peru entirely, referring to it only when I thought it would give me a moment’s advantage, a teacher’s attention. When Papi returned, I wished he wouldn’t speak Spanish to me in front of the neighbors; I hoped he wouldn’t reveal to my friends that I was a faker; I prayed he wouldn’t show up on our door stoop high.

But he went off more and more after that. It began with two months, and then, before we knew it, it was six. By the time summer warmed our apple trees to life again, Papi was off on a long-term engineering project somewhere in Colombia. Then it was eight months in Mexico. He would leave Mother presigned
checks so that she could handle the family finances; he would sign off complete power of attorney. By the time my own frame pushed forth cautious blossoms, he was gone nine months at a time, returning only long enough to gasp at us as we mutated into other forms of life.

George had shot up well past him: a confident, lanky boy. Vicki had chewed through whole libraries, feeding her polymathic brain. Marisi had become Marie, a molting I first saw in a mirror on the sixth floor of the Carnegie Hall building, where my body had metamorphosed under the spandex of leotards. I was twelve years old, taking ballet classes in New York two afternoons every week now, catching the bus to Port Authority at Forty-second Street, or taking a train to Grand Central, skipping through midtown past the Biltmore Hotel, navigating my way to Carnegie Hall. “There’s nothing you can’t do, Mareezie,” Mother would tell me. “Decide what you want, don’t be afraid, go after it. There is
nothing
you cannot do.”

When Mother’s car wended its way down Tulip Street to pick me up after school one day, I looked across the playground and saw a black head of hair sitting where she should be. Could it be? My father had not been home in almost a year. I ran to the fence to be sure. He got out of the car and stood by the gringos, searching for his offspring in the crowded field. His eyes swept past me three times before I leapt up and screamed out, “Papi! Papi!
Aquí!”

“You’ve changed,” he said to me, laughing. “I hardly know you anymore,” and then he handed me a fuzzy white llama toy, stuffed and smiling, with a spangle around its neck.

Mornings would come and I would wake to the sound of my parents’ voices, chatting on the other side of my wall. They were scrolling through lives each was living, sharing events after the fact. He had his subjects. She had hers.

“Papi,” I said to him, during one of his longer visits, “I’m writing a report on the Andes, for my seventh-grade social studies class.”

“On the Andes? Why?” He looked up from the living room sofa and lowered
The New York Times.

“Because.” I stopped there, stymied. His face was awaiting my answer, open in genuine surprise. “Because I’m
Peruana,
Papi,” I said.

“You?” he said. “A Peruvian?” And then he laughed, shaking his head, long and hard. “No, Marisi. You’re a gringa, like your mother. You’re not a Peruvian anymore.”

I went off and thought about that, my heart a little smaller for his words. Had Peru fallen out of me? Like a leaf in a winter wind?

What of my language, my patrimony, the power of my
qosqo?
Was that gone, too? I looked down at the copper money winking out from my loafers. I loved my mother’s country, pledged it allegiance every day, dreamed its golden dreams, bought its daily lotteries of the soul. But I was sure that somewhere inside me I was also Peruvian.

It was Lucilla who reminded me of that.

Lucilla was black as Antonio’s stone, a cocky, junior-high-school girl who chose her friends by the color of their skin. She was sassy, funny, filled with dislike for much about Summit, and part of that much was me.

“Hurry up, girl!” she’d yell as we scooted from one class to another, and then she’d give me a kick in the can.

“Git! Git! Can’t be late!” And then—
foomp!
—her pointy shoe would connect with my tail.

It had started in gym class, where the lineup put her behind me. She was ahead of me in one significant way: superior in every sinew of her body. If I could pound out a hundred sit-ups, she could
pound out a hundred fifty-five. One day—who knew why?—she decided to stick her foot into my life. She tripped me on the playing fields, kicked me down corridors, slapped a boot up against the door of my bathroom stall and kept me there until the bell rang, until I begged her for mercy. Then Lucilla and her girls would holler and slap their knees as I flitted, panicked, down the hall.

Once, when she was standing alone on the hockey field, away from her gang of girls, I decided to risk the question. “Lucilla,” I said, “why do you want to get me in trouble?”

“You’re already there, girl,” she said, and bugged her eyes.

“What?”

“You a wiggle-butt wetback,” she added. “You nothing
but
trouble. You oughta go back where you belong.”

There it was. Lucilla’s proof. The Truth, whether or not my father could factor it. His children had not gone from any first thing to a second. We were the “neither-here-nor-there people”: one thing when here, the other when there. Or forever from some other place. We were neither; we were both.

Funny that it was a black who reminded me of that. I’ve often thought of Lucilla as I sit in my corner of Washington now, seeing how this country has changed since I was a girl. There were days I felt George, Vicki, and I were the only Latinos in the United States; I certainly did not see any others around. I knew we were the only ones in the Summit school system. But I’ve returned to Summit often over the years and watched its subtle transformations. Today, you cannot walk down a main street in New Jersey and not hear Spanish, or pass a Latin grocery, or see a Latino face. The last time I checked, there was a child with my surname—no relation—in the corridors of Summit High School. There are thousands of families with Spanish surnames in the American capital. There are nearly forty million of us in your country now, Lucilla. We belong here. Just like you.