American Chica_ Two Worlds, One Childhood - Marie Arana [126]
We moved from the rental on Tulip Street to ownership on Parkview Terrace. The new house was crawling with vines. Creepers sprang from the flower beds, working their way up brick. The sun would vault the sky, and Mother would still be outside, hacking back foliage, digging into the loam. I would sit and watch her work silently, wondering why she wouldn’t talk to me about herself. Why was she so unwilling to tell me the details of her childhood, pour out her stories to me as Antonio the gardener had done? I marveled that I had watched Antonio’s hands do the same labor. My mother’s violinist fingers were just as strong.
Antonio: I remembered every historia he’d taught me, but the man seemed like ancient history now. “What were those belly button stories you used to tell?” my mother would ask me. I’d shrug my shoulders and grin. My qosqo was powerless now. Unplugged. Deactivated. Dead.
I laughed when I recalled the bruja’s prophesy. A vine was to mount my house and grab me by the throat? It seemed so foolish now in my Episcopalian maturity, in my confirmed membership in the Calvary Church. Mother’s faith had won my soul. No talk about black light, no sorcery from a crone in braids could bobble my God or the machinery of an observable world.
Trees did not mourn. Skies did not weep. Vines did not leap through your window in revenge.
“WHY DO YOUR mother and father live apart?” asked Kit one day. “Are they divorced?” She was polite when she said it, quaint and Victorian, as she tended to be.
“No. They’re not divorced,” I said. “My father lives in Peru, my mother lives in the United States, that’s all. He lives there because he works there. She lives here because we go to school here.” It made all the sense in the world to me.
“Oh,” said Kit, and ended it there. Her father was a scientist; her mother, a viola player. They were functional versions of my parents, but they lived in one house, spoke one language, visited their in-laws within one hundred miles of one another, stared at each other’s faces every day.
“Why do your mother and father live apart?” A German girl who lived behind our new house asked the same question on another day.
I gave her the same answer. “Oh,” she said, but her reaction was more interesting than Kit’s. “That makes things better, doesn’t it? That way you have two homes, not one. Two languages. Two totally different lives.” Her name was Erika, and she’d been born in Frankfurt during the Allied Occupation. Her mother had been a dancer; her father, a British military man. Erika had never seen her father except in a photograph album. He was in England somewhere, alive. On paper, he seemed a stiff man, oddly handsome, with Erika’s blond locks and her dimple in his chin. He’d been posted to Germany to help piece the country together, but he’d clearly left chaos behind. Unanswered questions hovered over Erika. Questions about names, marriages, nationalities. Her mother had left Germany to escape them. We had our alien origins in common, but there was something else, too, about our mothers, about their burdens from the past.
“Heil Hitler!” the boys would shout as we strolled down to Memorial Field arm in arm.
“Hey, cut it out!” I’d call back over my shoulder. “I’m not German!”
“Remember the Alamo, then!”
They’d yuk about that, pumping their shoulders like vultures.
It was the idea of Erika’s two-ness that attracted me. Half German, half English. She was an exotic in the suburban landscape, an indisputably eccentric girl. The idiom we shared was ballet. There was not much else we had in common. She was plump, whereas I had grown scrawny. She was honey, where I was mahogany. Her