American Chica (17 page)

“Gufi,” I repeated. An English word I didn’t know. I hunted down Vicki and asked her what it meant. She rolled her eyes, set down her book, and swung around to face me.

“Why do you want to know?”

“Because one of the
solteros
called this gufi,” I said, pointing to my dog.

Vicki’s eyes widened. She let out a loud guffaw and thumped her pillow with a fist. “Oh, that’s good! That’s really good!” she squawked. Then she was up and flinging herself onto her bed, flailing her legs and laughing wildly. Finally, she turned to look at me again, red-faced and panting.

“That’s what that dog is really called?”

I nodded yes.

“Goofy means
stupid,
you twirp.
Es-tú-pi-da.”

Vicki was clearly leagues ahead of George and me as far as learning was concerned. She always would be. But the day came when Mother dressed us up in sober clothes, put us in the company Chevrolet with our jolly chauffeur, Don Pepe, and sent my brother and me off to the new Escuela Primaria, a school that had just been built to my father’s orders, off Cartavio’s main square. The school was meant to serve every child of every race, from every walk of life in that complex socioeconomic gridwork
we called a hacienda. It was meant precisely to ease the political divide between the workers and the bosses.

“When you walk in,” Papi said that morning as he surveyed us with warm approval, “look at the lettering over the door. My design.” He poked his solar plexus and crinkled up his brown eyes with such good humor that I was convinced his connection with that place was a good omen.

I was wrong.

We were put in a large classroom with what seemed to be children of mixed ages. They were all from the cinder-block houses. There was no Billy or Carlitos or Margarita. Our neighborhood friends had been sent off to the nuns or sent away to Trujillo. There was nobody here we knew.

“Mocosos,”
a big boy said as George and I sat down. Snotnoses.

“Mataperro,”
George shot back at him. Thug.

We’d never been in a room with so many children. The teacher was a plain young woman with bright lipstick and a sheath-tight skirt. She introduced herself as
“Señorita,”
made us each stand and say our names, and told us that she would brook nonsense from no one.
“Somos una clase de i-guales,”
she said. We’re a class of eeee-quals. But try as
Señorita
might with her ruler and her chalkboard and her stentorian announcements, I couldn’t help but gape at the rich spectacle about me. It seemed anything but equal to me.

There was a girl in front with hair so perfectly curled that it seemed to spring from her head like a doll’s: straight out the hole, down the back, and coiled tight at the ends. Her dress was butter yellow, crisscrossed with blue lines. A white belt burst into a perfect bow in the back. Her shoes were smudged with dust. But they were topped with the most heartbreakingly beautiful lace socks I had ever seen: woven with ribbons as blue as the sky-kissed lines of her dress. Just at the point where the sock met her brown skin, the white lace shot out and over, like a frill under a duchess’s chin.

I looked down at myself. Plain blouse, round collar, breakfast stain. Skirt swelling at the belly. Not a pretty sight.

Señorita’s
bullhorn voice was coming at us over our desks. “WHO knows how to write their name?” The doll’s hand shot up, as did everybody else’s in the room, including mine.

A round boy in the corner was stuffing chunks of
dulce de camote
into his mouth in full view of the teacher and then holding a pencil to his lips, as if that could hide the machinery of his chewing. The candy was making his black hair stand on end, and making my mouth water.

“WHO knows how to write the colors—
azul, rojo, verde?”
Fewer children raised their hands, but when I looked around and saw George punch the air, I put my hand up, too, and waved extravagantly.

On the other side of the class a gaunt girl leaned forward, her left arm stiff against her waist. One of her legs was shackled in metal, and two black straps girded the ankle and knee. I strained over my desk to see her foot, but a sharp
thwack
of the ruler against the chalkboard brought me up straight.
Señorita
had her eyes on me.

“Yes?” she said. “Yes?”

I looked at my hands.

“Not paying attention is rude.
Sí?
Staring is rude.
Sí?”
She said this, although she was plainly staring at me. “Do you suppose this is a circus,
Señorita Arana?”
she went on. “Or do you suppose this is a school?” Her bright lips stopped here and puckered.

“Es una escuela,”
I said, with a voice as tiny as an Andean flute. Two dozen faces were trained on me.

“Good,” she said. “You may be the chief engineer’s daughter, but you have no privileges in my classroom, you understand?” she added, and gave me a parting glower. “Now, class. How many of you can add?”

Far fewer hands sought the air, but seeing George’s there, I floated mine up, too. The bully between us snorted.

“Aha,” the
señorita
said, surveying us. “I see. And now, the final question, the
big
question, the one that will tell me if I have a future Pythagoras in here: Who among you can
multiply?”

Here, as she uttered the magnificent word—
mul-ti-pli-car—
she flung out her hands like a priest at a mass benediction. Her head was back, her white teeth bared, a feverish expectation in her eyes.

My arm shot up. I could not have stopped it if I had tried. Multiply! My hand was banner high, triumphant. When I looked around, it was the only one there.

The boy beside me exploded into raucous laughter.

“Now, Guillermo,” said the teacher. “Now, now. How do you know our young friend here doesn’t know her multiplication tables?” She was bouncing her ruler against her palm.
“Cómo lo sabes, ah?”

Her red mouth spread into a smile, and she pulled her green sweater over her wide hips like a duck ready to waddle into water. “Come here,
gorda.
Come up here and show Guillermo your bright little engineer’s brain.”

I pushed myself out of my chair and looked over at George. His lips were frozen in a perfect O, his eyebrows suspended in the air. Staggering forward, I followed the
señorita
to the chalkboard, like a rogue to the gallows. She picked up a piece of chalk, rested it against her chin for a moment, then scratched two numbers onto the blackboard with a flourish of her elbow: 4, and then 5. Last, she punched an X between them with such fury that my knees began to give.

“Here,” she said, and thrust the chalk toward my paunch.
“Tómala.”
Take it.

I stood there paralyzed, the chalk poised between my fingers like a bloated caterpillar, fat and white and venomous.

“You ready, my little
ingeniera?”
she said.

I shook my head no. A tittering came from the class.

“What, you can’t remember your multiplication tables,
princesa?”

I shook my cretin head again. The snickers grew louder.

“Or maybe you never knew?” The red mouth broke into an ominous leer, an army of teeth perched behind.

I lowered my chin into my chest as my classmates slapped their desks and chortled with glee.

“She’s a liar!” roared Guillermo. “A fat, ugly liar!”

It was too much for George. He stood up and threw a mean punch into Guillermo’s abdomen. It folded my critic in half.

But Guillermo came up like a barracuda, grabbed George by the hair, and pulled him down, chairs and desks falling over in a clatter. The boys slugged and huffed, twisting every which way on the floor. The lame girl winced. The candy eater gawked. The doll face pressed her fingers to her temples. Finally,
Señorita’s
long green arm yanked George out by the collar, and her big voice bellowed, “Enough!
Ya! Basta!”

“Guillermo! You sit down,” she said. “The rest of you, too. And
you,”
she snarled at George, “I’ll show
you
what happens to troublemakers. Everyone take note!
Fíjense
what happens to this uppity boy!”

She trotted George—still dangling from her hand—over to the closet, opened the door, and thrust him in. She turned the lock with a click and whirled around. “Go to your seat,
chica,”
she snapped, waving disdainfully at my chair.

I sat down and silently vowed not to move, not to open my mouth, not to bring any more attention to myself. To be as small as I could be.

The
señorita
was having us copy words into our notebooks, booming them out syllabically and then printing them on the
board. I hunched into that work with intensity, laboring to copy the shapes she was forming.

But through the sounds of scribbling and coughing and shifting in chairs, I thought I heard something else. I listened closely. It was a muffled whimper, and it was coming from the closet.

All of a sudden, a wave of despair washed over me. George was in there weeping, and I was out here thinking of nothing more than my wretched self. My belly started to jump: up and down, bounce, bounce. Suddenly the skin on my face was spreading out, pulling tight. I threw back my head, gulping down air. What happened next, I cannot say, except that a sound like my father’s factory whistle came out of the deepest pit of my gut, long and piercing and full of alarm.

There was a sharp pull at my elbow. As I sniffled and blinked, I could see that the teacher was pushing me toward the left side of the room. She opened the closet, shoved me in, and slammed the door behind me.
Click.

“Cállense!”
she shouted. Quiet! “And the rest of you take note! These children get no special treatment here. If it happens to them, it can happen to you!
Fíjense bien!”

The air inside was black and damp. Though the classroom smelled of paint and cement, the closet smelled old, as if a thousand years of muck and llama grease had accumulated there.

“Georgie?” I whispered, my chest still heaving with aftersobs.

“I’m here,” came his reply, thin and frightened.

I groped my way toward him and crouched down on the floor, letting my eyes get accustomed to the dark. A shaft of light from under the door illuminated our feet.

“Look,” he said. “Look there.”

I followed the gray of his profile to a place on the highest shelf, over our heads, over the boxes and books. There in the shadows, gleaming white, was a human skull.

That was how we became our mother’s pupils. We did not go
back to
Señorita
’s classroom. From then on, whether at the dining room table, in the garden, on car trips, or on the rocky shores of the Pacific, we were beneficiaries of Mother’s perpetual tutelage. School became an all-day, year-round affair. To make it official, our notebooks—Vicki’s included—began shuttlecocking back and forth from the Calvert School, a private, nondenominational institution in Baltimore that made its curriculum and materials available not only to the three of us in our Peruvian hacienda but to children in “the farthest outposts of civilization.” The Calvert system boasted that it had been known to be delivered by dogsled, camel, even parachute. Every month, a box with the Calvert logo—a boy’s silhouette—would arrive on a truck from the port of Callao, and we would open it with relish, removing each neat blue notebook, each spiral-bound textbook, each colored pencil with awe. Sometimes four months would elapse between our completing the work and an “evaluator” from that school passing final judgment on it, but every day it was Mother who sat us down, got out her teacher’s manual, and drilled or tested us. Arithmetic, world history, English grammar, botany. If we visited a Chimu ruin, we’d go home and read up on Egypt and Greece. If we ran into the house with beetles as big as my shoes, she’d have us pinpoint the species, draw the insects into our notebooks, and guess where they figured in the food chain. Sitting at the piano would lead to a lesson about a Massenet tone poem. Scooping the dirt with a cup had its logical progression to fractions and math. If we begged for stories, we got them, from Roman to Norse. There was nothing so complicated that we couldn’t be made to understand it. There was nothing so simple that it couldn’t be wrapped in grand themes.

Mother was no academic. But her dedication to our cognitive welfare was nothing short of fanatical. She ordered books from the Calvert catalogs and devoured their contents. She looked things up in a fever. She presented them with flair. Not until
much later did I realize that the last-ditch aspect of my education was one of the most political lessons I’d ever been given. I had not been brown enough to be welcome in
Señorita
’s schoolhouse. Mother would not surrender us to a gentrified boarding school. If I couldn’t have a democratic experience, I would be subtracted from a Peruvian context altogether. Mine would be an American indoctrination, in a language I hardly used outside. In the process, I’d learn to see the world through a foreign scrim, feel apart. I’d begin to become the creature of a place I’d never smelled or seen—the product of a cloud-built school, where rootlessness was at the heart of the curriculum, isolation at the edge of the page.