American Chica_ Two Worlds, One Childhood - Marie Arana [117]
I hadn’t thought of that. Now I genuinely tried to squeeze that possibility into my brain. “No idea,” I responded.
“Jee-zee-kew-zee. They do things crazy in Pay-roo,” Suzi said. She laughed merrily, a tinkly, high titter as sweet as a canary’s. Freckly Sara flashed her big, buck teeth and put out a hand. “Friends?”
“Yip. Sure.”
While George and I were running up and down the driveway behind those apartments, working to seal a friendship with these girls, Mother was humming through our rooms, settling into the life she had dreamed of for so long. She’d whisk outside from time to time, smoothing her hair, trotting to a cab, pointing to our big sister’s face in the window. “You mind Vicki, you hear?” When we asked where she was going, she’d reply, “To Summit Food Market!” Or “Off to your school!” Or “Off to see about the house!” Off!
She seemed enraptured with her new life, was a bundle of energy. I watched her cook meals, wash dishes, scrub floors—do tasks I had never seen her do before—but she dug in with relish, singing as she went, looking up joyfully when I walked in, pushing the hair from her eyes.
If it had never been clear before, it was crystal clear now: My mother had been a sad woman in Peru. There was nothing sad about her now. It didn’t seem to matter that she wasn’t with the Clapps. She did not visit them, nor did she call or write them, as far as I knew. She didn’t seem to need them at all. It began to dawn on me that it wasn’t them she had missed in Peru; she’d missed these American streets and her freedom to roam around in them.
Papi was another story: He dragged out to the train station earlier and earlier in the morning, shuffled home beat at the end of the day. He grew more and more disengaged. He missed his Peruvian family and his compadres. You could see it in the way he slumped through the door, headed for his chair, heaved himself down with a sigh. “Write to your abuelita,” he’d tell me day after day, pointing to the stack of letters from her. “She wants to know how you are.”
In town, he had trouble understanding the fast-talking, slang-slinging suburbanites; he’d cast a weary look my way to signal me to translate. At first, I was as puzzled by accents as he was. But his reliance on me made an impression. In Peru I had always thought he and I were similar, that Mother was the different one. But here in Summit, I felt more kinship with my mother, my father the odd one out. “You kids are turning into gringos,” he’d say, staring at us in amazement. But I knew our mother was the only gringo among us; she was it a full hundred percent. My father was the only Peruvian; he, too, was one hundred percent. They were wholes. They were complete. They were who they were. They would never become anything like the other. We children, on the other hand, were becoming others all the time, shuttling back and forth. We were the fifty-fifties. We were the cobbled ones.
SUMMIT WAS NOTHING like Mother, really, nor was it anything like the American school in Lima, nor like Rawlins, Wyoming, whose lingo we heard in our dreams. At first, we swaggered around, George and I, like cowboys, a-yawin’ and a-struttin’, thinking we knew what America was. But when Easterners looked at us, they drew their chins into their necks, pocketed their hands, and sidled away. We trotted down Springfield Avenue, hiking our jeans, jiggling our heels, only to find that the places that drew these gringos were Roots haberdashery and Summit Athletic. Not bars with decapitated fauna. Not general stores with buckshot and beans. There were men in hats, plenty of them, but they were scurrying out of the Summit train station with their faces pulled down and their collars pulled up, repairing to Brookdale Liquors, then tearing home with their wives behind the wheel. On weekends, a different breed swept down Main Street: in pastel cardigans, with bags of charcoal briquets, golf clubs, and Roots merchandise dangling from their hands, pennies winking out of their shoes.
It was the way they spoke that was most puzzling. Why didn’t it sound like English