To the Last Man I Slept with and All the Jerks Just Like Him (2 page)

At the age of six, one of my goals was to learn to be sexy. Our cousins and babysitters Monica and Biba, although they now deny it, were my most influential mentors in this regard. They had the long hair and tight jeans that I yearned for and that kept their teachers from telling them apart. My brother and I knew the difference, though, having spent many hours with them between elementary school dismissal and my father’s rush hour commute. Biba was the fighter with the extra-spicy vocabulary. Monica was the lover with the sophisticated ways. Sixth-grade men left their longtime girlfriends in hopes of catching Monica’s eye. When these girlfriends sought vengeance, Biba defended her sister with furious, birthstone-ringed fists. Then, the sisters fought each other with icy taunts, dramatic slamming of doors, and hair pulling extraordinaire.

I aspired to Monica’s popularity and Biba’s independence. They taught us many, many things: how to make wishes with fallen eyelashes, which cartoons were worth watching, the meaning of the word fag, and how to curve one’s knuckles perfectly while throwing the finger.

One year Monica showed us the school portrait in which she stared haughtily into the camera.

“How come you’re not smiling?” I asked.

“Because boys think it’s sexier when you look mean,” she explained.

I mentally filed that away.

The next year, her picture featured crinkled eyes and a dimple on which all the grownups commented favorably.

“How come you’re smiling?” I asked when we were alone.

“Because the stupid fucking camera man kept telling me I was sexy,” she scowled. I resolved to be on my guard for such things.

Whenever we wished on eyelashes, stars, or slow-moving planes, Biba’s wish was to be fifteen. I lived in awe of that age, wondering what the teenager who’d taught me about bras and Kotex could possibly have left to learn.

One afternoon, Monica and Biba taught us to dance. Biba put a disco record on the turntable they’d gotten for Christmas. In the dark little corridor between their bedroom and the bathroom, Monica said, “Look, I’ll show y’all The Freak.” She danced to the slow throbbing beat. We copied her movements, rocking our tiny pelvises back and forth and running the tips of our fingers from our hips to our heads and back down again. My brother Zonky, in pre-Kindergarten at the time, successfully mimicked Monica’s eyeclosing and sensual moans.

During the twenty-five years that have elapsed since then, he has done The Freak or variations on that theme with women all around the world. Unable to loosen up enough to win approval that day in the hall, I eventually became a housewife. So did Monica and Biba, actually. I was disappointed, expecting them to end up as game show hostesses or Russian double agents. There’s still time, though. I’ll give them another couple of years.

When I was in first grade, I played a secret game with another Spanish-surnamed, white-looking girl whose name was Regina. We would run to the space below the stairs or the corner under the fire escape slide. I would whisper, “Let’s speak Spanish!”

She would gesture and toss her hair like her mother as the long vowels and un-aspirated consonants flowed from her mouth. I would hold my hands up as if smoking one of my grandmother’s Pall Malls and rasp,
“Bueno . . . éste . . .
mapalapa repalaba catobalabra.
Pos, mira
. . . el quelapracapa.
¡Ven p’acá! ¡Ándale!”
One of the few real Spanish words I knew was
bolilla.
It meant “white girl.” I never said that during our games.

I went to a different, special school for second grade but saw Regina again years later, in a different, special high school. Unnerved by my new surroundings and relieved to see a former comrade speaking fluent Spanish with her friends, I pulled Regina aside and asked if she remembered me. She said she did.

“Hey, remember we used to pretend to speak Spanish all the time? I finally learned it for real, too!” I proudly confided.

There was a pause and a vague reply. Then she smiled and gently went away.

It didn’t even occur to me until many years later that she had probably been speaking real Spanish from the very beginning.

Still in first grade, I had a fight with a new Spanishsurnamed white-looking girl. (It was the 1970s. Suddenly, they were popping up all over the place.) Peggy and I decided that we didn’t like the looks of each other and nothing would remedy the situation more quickly than a fistfight in the schoolyard.

Under the coaching of my cousins and Peggy’s big sisters, we managed to complete three rounds of mutual hair pulling before the bell rang and all the spectators deserted us for class. Sweaty and exhilarated from our moment in the ring, Peggy and I became friends.

This relationship filled the recent gap in my social life left by the slow desertion of my best friend, Letty. Although she had, like many of our classmates, newly arrived from Mexico, Letty’s love of learning and quick ear for language had made her the only child in our Kindergarten, besides me, who knew the whole alphabet. This mutual exclusivity had forged our friendship. The very next year, however, cutthroat classroom politics erected barriers between us.

“Which one do you like better—red or blue?” asked jealous Idresima as Letty looked on. I picked red, being that it was the color of lipstick and the sports cars driven by the best characters on TV.

“Ha, ha! We like blue because
that’s
the color of heaven,” she said, fingertips touching and eyes piously rolling upward. “Red’s the color of the DEVIL! You’re going to HELL!”

I met Letty’s eyes silently as everyone around us laughed. She said nothing.

Exposed as the agnostic liberal my parents had raised, I had no choice but to spend the rest of my recess hours at the school playing with the white children of hippies. They had trickled into our neighborhood as their parents got old and discovered the joys of renovating Victorian homes.

In second grade, I went to a school that had a special program for students deemed “gifted and talented.” We fed the government’s hunger for statistics by filling out forms several times a year. On the line above “RACE,” I copied what I had seen my father write many times: Mexican, hyphen, American. Later that would change to a mere check in a box next to “Hispanic,” and then a darkened bubble next to “Latino,” and then a write-in of “mixed” before, twenty years later, I finally decided it was none of anyone’s business. My best friend Fay’El was half-white and half-black, but she adamantly claimed the non-white half of her heritage and taught me to do the same with pride. One of the most popular girls in our grade was half Mexican and half Chinese. Although I felt comfortable with children of all races, I became increasingly aware, through my interactions with our classroom’s ethnic majority, that I was not really white.

Now I only had to convince everyone else. We still lived in the same neighborhood. I knew that I now went to a better school than most of the other kids, and that my father made a little more money, and I tried to be gracious about it. I shared my Barbies with girls in the neighborhood. I learned enough Spanish to pay proper respect to their mothers. I walked to the corner store and supported my brothers and the neighborhood boys in their struggles against the video game consoles.

Or maybe,
sometimes,
I wasn’t so gracious. Maybe I learned to show off by saying big words or writing cutesy stories, just like a smart-assed little white girl—pissing off the neighborhood kids but making our white teachers wish they could take me home and buy me candy and barrettes. Maybe only sometimes when I felt like a lonely little loser. I don’t remember for certain. It was a long time ago.

My attempts to conform weren’t enough to please certain people. María from three blocks away decided she hated me because of the color of my skin. “Hey,
bolilla!”
she’d yell down the street. “Hey,
pinche bolilla!”

One day I gained the courage to yell back, “I’m not a
bolilla!”

“What are you then—a nigger?” she screamed laughing.

Overcome by the foreignness of her logic and vulgarity, I turned and ran away.

My submission to puberty brought about a change of status and expectations within my family. At holiday gatherings, I graduated from the games of the front yard to the conversation of the kitchen. I was allowed to perform the most junior of traditional
tamale
-making tasks—the spreading of the
masa
—while listening to the women talk. Sometimes the topic was me and the other examples of burgeoning womanhood in our family.

“Whatever you do, don’t marry a Mexican,” our cousin Helen, who had married a Mexican, would tell us teenage girls. Her mother and all the others who’d married Mexicans or men of Mexican descent would laugh. Our cousins who’d married white men would laugh. Our cousin Joanne, a white woman who’d married into our mostly Mexican family, would laugh, too.

“Go for the white meat, y’all!” Helen would tell us, while all the women laughed some more. Then, one of the cousins who married a white man was sure to say, “Don’t marry a
bolillo,
either. They ain’t any goddamned better.” And they would all laugh like witches, only pausing to hand a Budweiser to any husband who might poke his head into our kitchen.