American Chica_ Two Worlds, One Childhood - Marie Arana [124]
It was a simple thing. Over soon. He must have grabbed hold of something, for I no longer saw him. There was a long pause, and then the whack of fists against the door.
“Hoh-nee!” he bellowed. His voice reverberated through my toes, up my legs, and into my gut. “Oh-pen the door!” He took hold of the knob, pulled at it, and shook the door so that the tiny panes of glass rattled in their frames.
“Hoh-nee bay-bee!” he yelled, and then staggered back to give me a bird’s-eye perspective on his head.
I looked out beyond him, into the night. One by one, lights were going on in our neighbors’ houses. I imagined their faces at the windows, talking over their shoulders. No dear, it’s fine, nothing serious. Only the alien next door.
HE WENT OFF to Peru after that. It was to be a single trip, a field visit to Paramonga, just like the visits the New York gringos made when we lived in that hacienda, putting up at the guest house for months at a time. He left in February and said he’d be back in early April, when buds were jutting from trees. Mother seemed to carry on fine without him. There was little the woman couldn’t do. She shoveled the driveway, drove me to play rehearsals, stayed long into the night reading with Vicki. She was reveling in freedom now, as if she didn’t need a man.
As for us children, we were Americans now. We hardly thought of our pasts; we hardly spoke Spanish. As the months went by, I shucked Peru entirely, referring to it only when I thought it would give me a moment’s advantage, a teacher’s attention. When Papi returned, I wished he wouldn’t speak Spanish to me in front of the neighbors; I hoped he wouldn’t reveal to my friends that I was a faker; I prayed he wouldn’t show up on our door stoop high.
But he went off more and more after that. It began with two months, and then, before we knew it, it was six. By the time summer warmed our apple trees to life again, Papi was off on a long-term engineering project somewhere in Colombia. Then it was eight months in Mexico. He would leave Mother presigned checks so that she could handle the family finances; he would sign off complete power of attorney. By the time my own frame pushed forth cautious blossoms, he was gone nine months at a time, returning only long enough to gasp at us as we mutated into other forms of life.
George had shot up well past him: a confident, lanky boy. Vicki had chewed through whole libraries, feeding her polymathic brain. Marisi had become Marie, a molting I first saw in a mirror on the sixth floor of the Carnegie Hall building, where my body had metamorphosed under the spandex of leotards. I was twelve years old, taking ballet classes in New York two afternoons every week now, catching the bus to Port Authority at Forty-second Street, or taking a train to Grand Central, skipping through midtown past the Biltmore Hotel, navigating my way to Carnegie Hall. “There’s nothing you can’t do, Mareezie,” Mother would tell me. “Decide what you want, don’t be afraid, go after it. There is nothing you cannot do.”
When Mother’s car wended its way down Tulip Street to pick me up after school one day, I looked across the playground and saw a black head of hair sitting where she should be. Could it be? My father had not been home in almost a year. I ran to the fence to be sure. He got out of the car and stood by the gringos, searching for his offspring in the crowded field. His eyes swept past me three times before I leapt up and screamed out, “Papi! Papi! Aquí!”
“You’ve changed,” he said to me, laughing. “I hardly know you anymore,” and then he handed me a fuzzy white llama