American Chica_ Two Worlds, One Childhood - Marie Arana [122]
The woman was older, graying, her hair swept up off her face. “Thank you, yes,” she said, and hopped in, nimble as a bird. She shivered and chattered in the back, perched on the edge of her seat, hanging on to the front, motioning where to go. “Look at you, child,” she said to me, but she wasn’t looking at all. “Your nose is crisp as a radish!” Then she waved a frantic finger at the windshield. “I’m just down here on Prospect. Off Tulip. Very close now! Very close!” Her voice was high and wobbly, as if she’d been laughing too long.
Mother peered at the rearview mirror. “You look very cold,” she said.
“Not so!” the woman chirped. “Here we are. Here’s the driveway. Turn here.”
FAIR OAKS, the sign said. We were just around the corner from our house, yards away from our apple trees, but I had never noticed this place before. It was hidden by pines, set off the road. Mother steered the car up the driveway and finally pulled to a stop. A massive building was in front of us, with bright lights blazing within. Patient Registration, one door said. Staff Only, said another. The woman sprang from the car and wordlessly darted inside.
“I wonder,” Mother said as we turned back onto the road, “what the poor soul was doing wandering down Tulip Street like that. Did you see, Mareezie? Do you realize what this is?” She was half awed, half alarmed. I shook my head no. “A nuthouse, honey. That’s what.” She looked at me sideways and issued a little laugh.
We were living by the loony bin. The loco depository. Behind our garden. Near as the berry bush.
George and I patrolled the other side of our apple trees routinely after that, half expecting ghouls to lurch out, drooling and clawing at our eyes. But all we saw were heads with vacant faces, staring from windows, working their hands with their hands. In the evenings at times, I thought I could hear keening, as woeful as a wolf’s on Elk Mountain. “That’s a dog,” Mother would rush to say. But I knew otherwise. It was a woman in a cotton tunic, standing on her toes, scanning the night for home.
IF SUMMIT WASN’T everything Mother had ever hoped for, she was fooling us well. She was radiant, steaming up and down Springfield Avenue, with a strong wind in her sail. She was doing things we’d never imagined could make her happy: going to market, hustling to the discount stores, speeding forgotten things to school for us with pin curls against her scalp. Even with a once-a-week maid to help her, there was plenty of work to do. She was tired and high-strung and driven, but there were no furrows in her brow.
As for Papi, he was coming and going in the dark now—leaving before dawn and arriving long past dusk—collapsing onto the sofa. He spent weekends behind a typewriter, writing long missives to Peru. You should see how the children are growing, he’d plick-plack, but he himself was seeing less and less of us by the day.
His life was unfolding in Manhattan, up a crowded elevator, behind a littered desk, over papers sketched with imagined columns of steel. If work culminated in a belching factory, a carmine furnace, a caroming machine part—if there were pishtacos snapping hands off at the wrists—he did not see them. His days were long white sheets of paper, coiled tight, stamped blue.
He was a Peruvian in New York City: a gray hat, gray wool straphanger, roaming the labyrinth, his heart in another land. In all our years in Peru, not one week had passed that the man did not greet his father, receive the blessings of his mother, stretch his legs under a table with a friend. Now he was one bewildered face in a line that trudged from the station. “There he is! I see him!” I’d sing from the back of the car, pointing into the dark of a New Jersey