American Chica_ Two Worlds, One Childhood - Marie Arana [118]
“Beg your pardon, miss?”
I cleared my throat and tried again, raising my voice this time. “This here Jee-you-see Fah-root, mister. How much yew want?”
“Oh, ho! No need to shout, my dear. That’ll cost you … a nickel.”
“Nekel? Qué quiere decir nekel?” I whispered to George.
“That big moneda there,” he hissed, pointing into my palm. “The five-cent one.”
“Oh.” I surrendered it to the man. He pursed his lips.
“Y’ever chaw weed?” I asked Suzi, sitting on the stair step of our apartment, looking out at the pristine grass where children were not to go.
“Chaw weed?”
“Yip. My cousin Nub, he’s a cowboy, and he larned me how.”
“Taught me how.”
“O-keh, o-keh. Taught me how. Have you ever done it?”
“No, I haven’t. Gee, Marie, you gotta stop talking weird. You say things all wrong. And I don’t know why. I hear your mother talking just like everybody else. If you don’t talk right you’ll never fit in school. Kids are gonna make fun of you, for sure.”
Suzi and Sara became our tutors, whiling away summer days until fireflies bumped our faces, teaching us what to say. You said okay, not o-keh. You went to a movie, not a cinema. You caught colds, not constipations. You wrote on a clean, spanking new sheet of paper. Not a fresh shit. It was clear we had entered a new phase, far from our dirt-lot hankerings on Avenida Angamos. We weren’t hoping to be thought of as better. We just hoped we wouldn’t be made “fun of.” We hoped not to be noticed at all.
BRAYTON WAS A school fit for giants. Its bricks rose high as the Rawlins Penitentiary’s that first Monday in September when Mother shooed us up the concrete stairs into the principal’s office. He was bending over the windowsill, clanking metal with a ruler, talking to himself.
“Mr. Nelson?” my mother ventured.
The man whirled around with his ruler in the air. He was large, bald, like the lumbergog at Big Boy, with a face as bright as a toy’s. “Come in! Come in! Day one, and this thingamajig’s giving me trouble. Whew! Hot in here, don’t you think?”
“What is it?” I whispered to George.
“Heater,” he whispered back. “For when it gets cold.” I studied the iron serpent. I’d never seen anything quite like it before.
This world is filled with all manner of signs, Antonio once taught me. If we only have the wisdom to see them. The ruler on the radiator was one. I was going to be colder than I’d ever thought possible, an arctic wind piercing my bones. I’d freeze by the time I had a best friend, before my teacher thought to look at me, before I’d counted forty days at my desk. Fall rolled in like a torrent, tempering leaves with frost. Freezing them hard so that branches disowned them and they clicked to earth one by one. George and I scampered down Tulip Street like two caracaras in an ice storm, shivering and chattering all the way to Mr. Nelson’s overworked coils.
There were no other Latinos at school. Nor were there any as far as we could see in the whole of that leafless town in the fall of ‘59. Vicki was the junior-high Hispanic. The only face like mine in the elementary school’s corridors was my brother’s round, sunny one.
My first best friend was Kit, a pale, black-Irish beauty, wan as the tragic heroine that hung on my grandmother’s wall. She was big-brained and cameo-delicate. Musical. Wicked. And she shared my passion for a scare.
“Have you read Poe?” she asked me, leaning her chair toward mine in Mr. Schwartz’s fifth-grade English class.
“Only once upon a midnight dreary,” I replied, sealing a fiendish bond.
We staged catatonic fits, saw apparitions in the windows, channeled spirits in the playground, held witches’ séances, plotted to steal Johnny Britt’s soul. Before long, Suzi and Sara Hess were eyeing me nervously, crossing the street to walk on the other side.
One winter day, as I