American Chica (38 page)

Crossing to Mother’s side of America, on the other hand, we encountered no family at all. The Clapps, Brooks, Reeds, and Adamses were nowhere to be seen when we flew into Miami that spring of 1959. They were not alerted, and they were not there. They stayed in far corners of the country, unmindful of
our existence. If I had arrived on these shores expecting warm ties to my northern relations, I’d soon discover how different family life could be. I would never set foot on Grandpa Doc’s land again. I would never set eyes on Mother’s sisters again. I would never meet the full complement of her siblings, never really know who the gringo half of my family were. We emigrated to America in quintessentially American fashion: declaring our independence, reshuffling the deck.

Papi had yielded to Mother entirely. “The
señora
is making him do it,” I heard Nora say to the maid upstairs as the movers took our things from Avenida Angamos. Men were trooping to the curb with our furniture on their heads. The blond dining room table, the carved consoles, the portraits by Sir Joshua Reynolds copied by indigenous hands: All our worldly goods promenaded by for the United States ambassador, the next-door soldier, and the upstairs electrocutioner to see. Mother’s piano, an antique too delicate for sea voyage, was hauled to my grandparents’ house and wedged into the
sala.
All that was left of our material Peru was packed and wrapped and fitted into a wooden container, then nailed shut and ferried away.

Tío Víctor and Tío Pedro came around to watch the enormous crate lurch away in a flat truck. They stood on the
avenida,
wrinkling their foreheads, rubbing their temples, chewing on cigarettes, wondering how Techo Rex would survive. “Don’t worry,” my father told them. “I’ll do what I can from there.” But
there
meant New York City. He had gone back to his bosses at W. R. Grace, taken a job in Manhattan. He’d be planning large-scale engineering projects for a number of Latin American countries, but he’d be sitting a hemisphere away.

“Watch out for those giants up north, Marisi,” Tío Víctor told me, sweeping me up and letting me kiss his lavender-scented chin. “They’ll step on you, you’re so small.”
Cuidado. Te pueden pisar.

Mother bustled about energetically, issuing promises at every turn. We could eat off the floors once we got there, her side of America was so clean. Water would course from the spigots. Milk would not be contaminated. Everything would come tucked in boxes with colorful pictures on top. We could eat berries from bushes. We could swim streams with our mouths open. A germ-free country! With perfect roads and tidy houses, just like the village in Papi’s garage.

I took my last look down Avenida Angamos and saw the uppity ambassador’s son peering out his gate at us. “Will we have swans?” I asked.

“We will,” she confirmed gaily. “Or geese or ducks or pelicans or anything else your little heart desires.”

THERE WERE NO
swans at the Dutch Maid Motel on Route 22 in Springfield, New Jersey. The discount emporia rose up beside it like floats in a carnival day parade.
MOTHER GOOSE SHOES,
said one billboard, and behind it—as though to deliver on an uncle’s warning—a giant’s shoe, big as a building, with smiling gringos streaming through its doors.
BIG BOY LUMBER,
said another sign, and looming above it, a musclebound Gog in a red plaid shirt with his head shaved clean as a tub.

The Dutch Maid Motel was shell pink with white lace in its windows, a picket fence leading the way. Two yellow-haired dolls in frilled aprons framed the front lawn marquee, cocking their wooden toes and bending over so that their underpants showed. In the back garden, freshly planted shrubs stood at attention, and white lawn chairs waited for swimmers to clamber out of the pool. It was the antithesis of anything we had ever known in Wyoming. We’d never seen a highway so busy, with so many people and such enormous stores. We had never seen such shiny
long cars, such a webwork of roads. We looked around for the familiar: open prairie, cattle, horses, and boots. But none of these was in evidence. This America was different.

We had come to New Jersey for the public schools. Not because it would be the most convenient commute for my father. It was not. It took nearly an hour for the hulking Erie-Lackawanna to cart a clamoring army of worsted wool to the Hudson River every weekday morning. Nor were we there, as far as we could tell, because of my mother. She didn’t have a relative within a five-state radius.

“Because of the public schools?” said Papi, scratching his head with wonder. To him, the notion of building a life around children was alien, bizarre, inexplicable. In Peru, it had been the other way around: children built lives around their parents. The elders defined the world.

While Papi traveled to Hoboken on the lurching, squealing Erie-Lackawanna, then ferried across the Hudson to Fulton Street, snapping a newspaper as smartly as any itinerant company man, Mother sallied forth with school ratings and a real-estate map in hand.

George and I headed for the Dutch Maid’s lobby, where we’d discovered how well we were going to fare in these United States. “See that?” I said to George, pointing a finger at Lucy and Desi in the lobby’s box. “She’s the wife, and her husband speaks Spanish. Their family’s just like us!” “See that?” said my brother, as Hoss Cartwright swung a leg over a horse. “He’s a guy with a ranch, just like Grandpa. This place is gonna be great!” Only Vicki reserved opinion, peering at us from a far corner, seeing that those lambent shadows bore no resemblance to the trawl of highway outside.

“Ey!
Mangia, mangia!”
crowed an Italian waitress with high hair in the Howard Johnson across the road from the lumber
giant. Her lips were beige patent, her eyes winged like Nefertiti’s, her black hairdo leaning like a tower about to crash. “You people
paesan’
? You just get hee or what?”

“No, no,” said Papi, flashing a smile and flirting. “That’s Spanish you’re hearing.”

“Zat right?” She stared at us for a while, cracking her gum, thinking it over. “Don’t hee mucha that around hee. I don’t speak Italian myself, but for a minute, you sounded like
paesan’.”
She walked away, keeling against the cant of her hair, wiping her hands on her hips.

I was living on strawberry milk shakes. Was there a nectar so silky, so sweet on the tongue, so satisfying to the eye in its prettily tapered glass? Afternoons would come and Mother would bring hot dogs and french fries wrapped in wax paper, with mustard and relish on the side. George tore in happily. He was pudgy now, constantly eating. The yellow pills he’d been taking ever since Boston had made him jolly and fat. He polished off his frankfurters, praising their tidy ingenuity, but I could hardly take more than a bite. It would take time before I could eat from cardboard, sitting on the edge of a bed, with paper spread out on my knees. I longed for fragrant
sopa de albahaca
from my abuelita’s table, with her well-ironed napkins and oversize spoons. As it was, I consumed very little in that wholesale paradise. I sat in the pink motel, awaited my fluted shakes, checked on Desi’s progress in his wife’s country, listened to the thrum of the road, and read neon messages that squiggled from the giant’s chest like fortunes down a
bruja’s
braid.
Shop here, America. We build you.

NOT PARAMONGA, NOT
Cartavio, not Rawlins could have prepared me for Summit, New Jersey. Mother chose it for the excellence of its schools, but she might as well have chosen it for its
polarity to everything we’d known. Moving from Lima to Summit was like wandering into Belgrade from Bombay, the differences were so marked.

It was a small-town suburb of New York City, bedroom community for company presidents and businessmen. Split between Anglos and Italians, the residents were largely prosperous, but there was a hierarchy to that prosperity I was slow to see. The rich were the commuters, WASPs who had graduated from the Ivy League, played golf at the Beacon Hill Country Club, shopped at Brooks Brothers, and sent their children to prep schools nearby: Pingry, Lawrenceville, Kent Place. The less rich were the Italians—merchants, landscapers, restaurateurs, mechanics—who serviced the town. There was another notable category: scientists who worked in nearby Bell Labs or Ciba-Geigy, and their brainy, musical children. But there were no indigents: no beggars in the streets, no
señoras
hawking fruit.

Ours was the only Hispanic family. There were few Jews. The relative sizes of the town’s churches told the story. Summit Presbyterian was the largest, most prestigious. That imposing stone structure sat squarely in the middle of town, and the rich could be seen strutting in and out of it in their finery. The Catholic Church of St. Theresa, with steps sweeping up to its portals as if they led to salvation itself, was situated several blocks away, next to its own school. The Episcopal, Methodist, and Baptist churches were scattered about town, signaling lesser lights.

By June we were in Troy Court, a cluster of brick apartment buildings on New England Avenue. It was a modest district, on the other side of town from the mansions, and it would have been clear to anyone but us children that it was home to people on the fringes of society. There were strings of apartments up and down the avenue, where transients came and went, and old ramshackle houses, where nurses and waitresses lived.

Mother had her eye on a house in the middle range of the Summit spectrum, but it would be months before the owners vacated it. She had decided we would be wise to wait. When we moved into the apartment, it was empty save for an upright piano, the one thing we had bought on Route 22. We took our meals on it, plinking while we chewed, sleeping on the floor, waiting for our crate to arrive.

Within a week, we had recreated Lima on New England Avenue
—huacos
on the shelves, llama skins draped through the rooms. The display looked odd, even to us. The Lima we had come from had been a jumble, a place where Spanish and indigenous objects mixed freely—where modern and ancient accompanied each other, where a rich man’s house might be flanked by a tenement—but here, in this quiet, suburban setting, our possessions looked out of place. When the truck finally pulled away, two neighbors came over to see.

They were ten and eight, as sunny and frisky as Dutch maids on a roadside billboard. “You new?” said the older one.
“We’re
new. We just moved in a few days ago.”

They were from Westfield, a few towns over. George and I told them we were from Peru, but they puckered their mouths, rolled their eyes, and allowed as how they didn’t know where that was.

“Your parents are Westfieldian people?” I asked, trying to make conversation, figuring Westfield to be a country, like Peru.

“Were,” the tall one said. “Our mother got married last week.”

I was taking that information in, but she sailed ahead breezily. “My name is Suzi Hess. This is my sister, Sara. My mother used to be called Hess, too. Like us. But she’s Mrs. Loeb now.”

There it was. The gringo roulette.

“Oh, I know all about that,” I said, flaunting my urbanity. “My mother has a different name, too.”

“Different from you?”

“No.” I rushed to explain. “But different from her parents.”

“Well, of course, silly. Every married woman has a different name from her parents.”

My head felt fat as a blowfish. I needed to say that in Peru women strung their married and maiden names together, and that when my mother did that, her maiden name had turned out to be married, too, but it was going to take so much explanation. It was more complicated than I was willing to say: I was ashamed of my mother; ashamed that she was ashamed. In Peru, divorce was unthinkable. These girls, on the other hand, spoke of it so freely. I wanted them to be my friends. I burbled, dithered, stared down my nose, pulled on my ear. It didn’t take long for Suzi to take pity. “Okay, let’s see now. Your mother is divorced like ours, right?” she said, trying to help me along.

“Unh, yeah,” I said, and my head filled with the miracle that we might have this great flaw in common.