American Chica_ Two Worlds, One Childhood - Marie Arana [114]
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