American Chica_ Two Worlds, One Childhood - Marie Arana [119]
“You know what you are?” she said, puffing and panting her way toward me.
“What?”
“You’re a pain. You’ve brought nothing but trouble.”
“Trouble?”
“Yes, trouble. All that voodoo. You’ve poisoned Kit, and now you’re trying to poison everybody else. Devil worshiper! You’re disgusting!”
“I’m not … I’m a … You mean on the playground? Our games? It’s just fun, Kelly. We do it for fun.”
“You’re gonna burn in purgatory, you are, you … Spic! You call yourselves Christians? My dad says you’re a buncha dirty creeps. You come here with your—”
“Hey!” I said in a thin little voice. “I’m an American! My grandpa has a—”
“You are not an American. Don’t lie!” she screeched at me. “No American talks the way you do. You say words all wrong. Don’t you see us laughing at you? You make me vomit! Didn’t you hear what we were saying about you this morning?” She stopped and put her finger to her lip, trying to remember what it was. “Meat man,” she said finally, enunciating each syllable sharply and wagging her hand like a metronome. “How do you say the word for the man who sells the meat?”
I frowned at her, but decided to take the test. “You mean botcher?”
“Baw-tcher! Ha!” she exploded. “Do you hear how you say that? Baw-tcher! It’s butcher, you idiot. Buh-buh-buh-tcher!”
“Baw-baw-baw-tcher,” I said, nodding my head in agreement. It sounded the same to me.
“Wait …” she said, putting her finger to her lip again, and then she barked out another command: “How do you say the thing you read from? The thing like the ones you’re carrying there—the stuff you check out of a library?”
“Bucks!” I yelled triumphantly.
“Bucks!” she yelled back. “Listen to you! It’s books! Buh-buh-buh-book!”
“Kelly,” I said in a tiny, trembly voice, my chin shaking uncontrollably. “You listen to me … you listen to …”
But Kelly was not listening. She was snarling, her spittle flicking the cold air between us. “That dopey way you talk! And all your stoo-pid witch stuff. You know what you do? You make this neighborhood stink. Stink!” She pulled her books into her chest and stomped past me, her red kilt swinging about her big red knees. Then she whirled around and … Squeet! A gob of foamy saliva hit my coat and hung there, heavy as a question.
I wanted to throw my books down, march up, grab her by her greasy yellow hair and pull out her brain. But I stood my ground and felt my face quiver. My eyes began to fill. Against all instincts, I lowered my head and felt heat rise to my ears.
“So,” she said. “You’re a crybaby.” Then she turned on her heel and took herself down the road.
I watched her lumber away, my throat tight with the effort to keep from bawling. Then I drew myself up and stormed home, plotting revenge. How had she dared talk to me like that? I was just as American as anyone; my mother had told me so. Spit at me? I fumed. But then the thought of her spittle made me stop in my tracks. Spit. I knew something about that. I recognized a sign when I saw one. The next day—my fortieth at an American government desk, and Halloween Day besides—I swiped a Peruvian blow dart from our wall, smeared green paint on my cheeks, put feathers in my hair, and ran to school in an improvised costume. The instant O’Neill sat down in the front of the class, I shot a wet spitball into the back of her skull. Thwap, you die. The giant shrieked. My little green face sniggered. Mr. Schwartz’s head jerked up and saw me.
To Mr. Schwartz I had probably seemed a placid child until then. A good girl, an unremarkable pupil, a gray little thing, neither here nor there. But in that one act performed in that Amazon getup, I showed him the two-face I really was—the pretender par excellence.
Many years later, when I was studying at the British University of Hong Kong—linguistics to be precise, after I’d studied Chinese, after I’d studied Russian and French, trying on languages like so many dresses