American Chica (42 page)

BY THE TIME
I settled into junior high school, my parents had bought into North American soil for good. We never imagined they wouldn’t stay together. They cared for each other deeply, that much was written on their faces every time Papi walked through the front door and they saw each other for the first time. She would wait for him nervously, running upstairs to fix her makeup, spraying perfume under her blouse. Somehow, as years went by, the separations became the norm for us. We learned to live without our father; we were happy to see him when he came back, happy to be handed so many presents, and then, as he grew restless to return to Lima, we were happy to see him go.

We moved from the rental on Tulip Street to ownership on Parkview Terrace. The new house was crawling with vines. Creepers sprang from the flower beds, working their way up brick. The sun would vault the sky, and Mother would still be outside, hacking back foliage, digging into the loam. I would sit and watch her work silently, wondering why she wouldn’t talk to me about herself. Why was she so unwilling to tell me the details of her childhood, pour out her stories to me as Antonio the gardener had done? I marveled that I had watched Antonio’s hands do the same labor. My mother’s violinist fingers were just as strong.

Antonio: I remembered every
historia
he’d taught me, but the man seemed like ancient history now. “What were those belly button stories you used to tell?” my mother would ask me. I’d shrug my shoulders and grin. My
qosqo
was powerless now. Unplugged. Deactivated. Dead.

I laughed when I recalled the
bruja’s
prophesy. A vine was to mount my house and grab me by the throat? It seemed so foolish now in my Episcopalian maturity, in my confirmed membership in the Calvary Church. Mother’s faith had won my soul. No talk
about black light, no sorcery from a crone in braids could bobble my God or the machinery of an observable world.

Trees did not mourn. Skies did not weep. Vines did not leap through your window in revenge.

“WHY DO YOUR
mother and father live apart?” asked Kit one day. “Are they divorced?” She was polite when she said it, quaint and Victorian, as she tended to be.

“No. They’re not divorced,” I said. “My father lives in Peru, my mother lives in the United States, that’s all. He lives there because he works there. She lives here because we go to school here.” It made all the sense in the world to me.

“Oh,” said Kit, and ended it there. Her father was a scientist; her mother, a viola player. They were functional versions of my parents, but they lived in one house, spoke one language, visited their in-laws within one hundred miles of one another, stared at each other’s faces every day.

“Why do your mother and father live apart?” A German girl who lived behind our new house asked the same question on another day.

I gave her the same answer. “Oh,” she said, but her reaction was more interesting than Kit’s. “That makes things better, doesn’t it? That way you have two homes, not one. Two languages. Two totally different lives.” Her name was Erika, and she’d been born in Frankfurt during the Allied Occupation. Her mother had been a dancer; her father, a British military man. Erika had never seen her father except in a photograph album. He was in England somewhere, alive. On paper, he seemed a stiff man, oddly handsome, with Erika’s blond locks and her dimple in his chin. He’d been posted to Germany to help piece the country together, but he’d clearly left chaos behind. Unanswered questions hovered over Erika. Questions about names, marriages,
nationalities. Her mother had left Germany to escape them. We had our alien origins in common, but there was something else, too, about our mothers, about their burdens from the past.

“Heil Hitler!” the boys would shout as we strolled down to Memorial Field arm in arm.

“Hey, cut it out!” I’d call back over my shoulder. “I’m not German!”

“Remember the Alamo, then!”

They’d yuk about that, pumping their shoulders like vultures.

It was the idea of Erika’s two-ness that attracted me. Half German, half English. She was an exotic in the suburban landscape, an indisputably eccentric girl. The idiom we shared was ballet. There was not much else we had in common. She was plump, whereas I had grown scrawny. She was honey, where I was mahogany. Her mother made pastries and sewed fancy dresses, whereas mine knew only the rudiments of housekeeping. I sat in her family room watching Adolf Eichmann on trial, hearing her mother spit German in his face. I looked at the stacks of magazines with inexplicable photographs of mass graves, my friend’s fingers dancing across pages, pointing out heart-stopping details. I played piano when she and her mother asked me, Beethoven after Mozart after Brahms, until they leaned back and stared at the ceiling like dolls.

Erika’s mother, Minna, had been rounded up during the war and made to work in a Frankfurt munitions plant. That bit of information sprang from her lips one day as she taught me to make sauerbraten. It wasn’t clear—she couldn’t say—why the Nazis had singled her out on the street and marched her to the machines. (Was she Jewish, like the dead in the photographs? She was dark-haired, dark-eyed, nothing like Erika. But she wore crosses and kept a rosary in her purse.) As bombers climbed the air from the runways of Germany, she polished steel instruments,
dancing away nights in a cabaret on the lively side of town.

Unbidden admissions would spring from her as we sat, heads down, rolling dough or pinning a pattern onto cloth. These were things she did not tell her own daughter, but she would blurt them to me, unpacking the burdens of her heart, as if I were a priest in a confessional.

Erika would be somewhere else, belting a song into a mirror or shimmying to some idiocy in the box, and Minna would pour her history into my twelve-year-old ears, doing what I longed for my mother to do. There was much about our families that was different: They had a television, whereas my parents most intentionally did not. They were willfully frivolous—in dress, entertainments, and dreams—whereas my family most assuredly was not. There was a Pentecostalist stepfather, Minna’s husband: a rangy, red-haired American who had taken in the immigrants the way a vestryman takes up a cause. He came and went, consuming his meals in silence, hardly denting a pillow, hardly touching their lives. Going to visit Erika and Minna was like flying into foreign territory. There was always something new there: When I studied my hands like a gringo, another secret would come my way.

Minna had spent a lifetime pulling her mother’s head out of an oven. It had started when she was a girl of six. One gray winter weekend, as we puttered about her sewing room, she received a telephone call from Frankfurt: The mother was at it again.

That was hardly the half of it. If Minna knew who her father was, she never said so. Her world was staunchly female, and the males—even the fathers and husbands—in it incidental. They were largely incomprehensible, sometimes irresistible, but ultimately expendable. In Minna’s life story, they came and went like brisk winds.

During the war, she had lived in a Bohemian quarter of Frankfurt. Prostitutes lived in the apartments above. Night after night, she could hear the clump of Nazi boots as officers made their bibulous way upstairs to savor the retail charms. They were twisted, those Nazis, perpetrators of the unnatural, forcing the women to treat them like animals, roaring their pleasure through walls. One day, as I carefully pinned a facing to a perfectly round collar, she told me about one of them—one of Hitler’s generals, no less—who demanded to be served his hostess’s feces in Dresden porcelain, with her urine in crystal on the side. How Minna had extracted that information from the upstairs neighbor, it did not occur to me to ask.

I staggered from those confessions into the glare of a suburban landscape, hopping the fence, into my tidy brick house. “Mareezie?” my mother called as I came in the back door. “Did you finish your sewing?” When she noted my pale face slipping past to my room, her voice would rise in alarm: “What goes on in that house anyway?”

I was afraid to tell Minna’s stories, just as I’d been afraid to tell about Antonio’s spirit world. These were tales of dark forces, best kept to myself. Minna was of another dimension, from another side, a
bruja
who spoke terrible truths. If I relayed her words to my mother, she would surely be swept from my life.

As it was, I was in thrall to the ghosts of Minna’s past. I told my mother I was going to her house to sew, to cook, to talk about ballet, but what I really did there was listen. Her stories would never disappoint me. In the cabaret where she had danced, she told me, the Nazis came for their revels, demanding a single performance from her every night. “I was beautiful then,” she made a point of saying, “dark and different; that’s why they came.” She told me about a body stocking of sheerest silk, how she would trail long skeins of perfumed chiffon and dance
barefoot, hair coiled down her spine. A scarf masked the lower half of her face. Her eyes were rimmed black as an Egyptian’s. “It was fascina-a-a-tion!” she rasped at me in her deep, husky voice, and I could imagine her silk-hung pulchritude shivering the night, filling the monsters with desire.

“I’m going to Erika’s,” I said to my mother. “If that’s all right with you.”

“What for?” Mother asked, narrowing her eyes.

“Her mother is teaching me a dance. You know, she was a ballerina once.”

“Really? I didn’t know that. What’s the music you’re dancing to?”

“‘It Was Fascination,’” I replied, and hummed a few bars.

“Oh, I know that tune,” Mother said. “It was popular during the war. Fine. Go right ahead.” I left her chirping the song.

Minna and Erika never asked about my father. They had no curiosity about him whatsoever. When he pulled up in a taxi with his suitcases bulging with gifts, they understood they would see me less for a while. Minna was more interested in my mother, asking me questions I could not answer. What had
she
done during the war?

One day when Papi had been on a long assignment in the interior of Peru, Minna parted the bushes and saw my mother on her knees in our yard. Mother’s hair was tied back in a cotton bandanna; sweat dripped from her chin to the soil; she was jabbing the earth with a spade. Minna watched her work for a while, then stepped to the fence to ask, “Everything okay?” Mother looked up, startled. “You’re digging so hard in one place there,” she commented in her thick German accent. “Is something wrong? Are you all right?”

As it happened, things were not right at all. My father had not written in months. Bills were stacked in a kitchen drawer, unpaid.

“I’m fine,” said Mother, pulling herself to her feet and dusting her knees. “Thank you very much.” But when she came in and recounted that brief exchange, quizzing me about what in God’s name I’d been spilling to the neighbors, I deduced that Minna’s powers did in fact go beyond normal. She’d seen into my mother’s heart.

I LEARNED MANY
things from Erika and Minna, but chief among them was that I was no foreigner. I did not have the requisite distance, the emotional remove. There was much about me that may have looked different, felt different, but I was deeply and indelibly American, from this hemisphere, taught Americanness from infancy, ready to defend it with my soul.

“How can you eat that gummy stuff they call bread here,” Erika said to me, piquing me with her arrogance.

“Get off it, Erika. It’s not as bad as you say.”

“It’s awful! You should taste German bread. They have so many kinds there: black, white, rye, egg, salty, sweet, big loaves with seeds on top, flaky little rolls that melt in your mouth. It’s
real
bread. Not like here.”

I recalled the street vendors in Peru, with their mounds of fragrant bread: hard golden crusts, feathery soft centers, baked fresh and brought to your door. But I defended the supermarket variety.

“You can’t possibly like it!” Erika argued. “You’re not even from here!”

“Yes, I am,” I said. “I’m an American from way back. My great-great-great-great-grandfather was born here! One of my ancestors was a president!”