American Chica_ Two Worlds, One Childhood - Marie Arana [115]
“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