American Chica_ Two Worlds, One Childhood - Marie Arana [128]
As it was, I was in thrall to the ghosts of Minna’s past. I told my mother I was going to her house to sew, to cook, to talk about ballet, but what I really did there was listen. Her stories would never disappoint me. In the cabaret where she had danced, she told me, the Nazis came for their revels, demanding a single performance from her every night. “I was beautiful then,” she made a point of saying, “dark and different; that’s why they came.” She told me about a body stocking of sheerest silk, how she would trail long skeins of perfumed chiffon and dance barefoot, hair coiled down her spine. A scarf masked the lower half of her face. Her eyes were rimmed black as an Egyptian’s. “It was fascina-a-a-tion!” she rasped at me in her deep, husky voice, and I could imagine her silk-hung pulchritude shivering the night, filling the monsters with desire.
“I’m going to Erika’s,” I said to my mother. “If that’s all right with you.”
“What for?” Mother asked, narrowing her eyes.
“Her mother is teaching me a dance. You know, she was a ballerina once.”
“Really? I didn’t know that. What’s the music you’re dancing to?”
“‘It Was Fascination,’” I replied, and hummed a few bars.
“Oh, I know that tune,” Mother said. “It was popular during the war. Fine. Go right ahead.” I left her chirping the song.
Minna and Erika never asked about my father. They had no curiosity about him whatsoever. When he pulled up in a taxi with his suitcases bulging with gifts, they understood they would see me less for a while. Minna was more interested in my mother, asking me questions I could not answer. What had she done during the war?
One day when Papi had been on a long assignment in the interior of Peru, Minna parted the bushes and saw my mother on her knees in our yard. Mother’s hair was tied back in a cotton bandanna; sweat dripped from her chin to the soil; she was jabbing the earth with a spade. Minna watched her work for a while, then stepped to the fence to ask, “Everything okay?” Mother looked up, startled. “You’re digging so hard in one place there,” she commented in her thick German accent. “Is something wrong? Are you all right?”
As it happened, things were not right at all. My father had not written in months. Bills were stacked in a kitchen drawer, unpaid.
“I’m fine,” said Mother, pulling herself to her feet and dusting her knees. “Thank you very much.” But when she came in and recounted that brief exchange, quizzing me about what in God’s name I’d been spilling to the neighbors, I deduced that Minna’s powers did in fact go beyond normal. She’d seen into my mother’s heart.
I LEARNED MANY things from Erika and Minna, but chief among them was that I was no foreigner. I did not have the requisite distance, the emotional remove. There was much about me that may have looked different, felt different, but I was deeply and indelibly American, from this hemisphere, taught Americanness from infancy, ready to defend it with my soul.
“How can you eat that gummy stuff they call bread here,” Erika said to me, piquing me with her arrogance.
“Get off it, Erika. It’s not as bad as you say.”
“It’s awful! You should taste German bread. They have so many kinds there: black, white, rye, egg, salty, sweet, big loaves with seeds on top, flaky little rolls that melt in your mouth. It’s real bread. Not like here.”
I recalled the street vendors in Peru, with their mounds of fragrant bread: hard golden crusts, feathery soft centers, baked fresh and brought to your door. But I defended the supermarket variety.
“You can’t possibly like it!” Erika argued. “You’re not even from here!”
“Yes, I am,” I said. “I’m an American from way back. My great-great-great-great-grandfather was born here! One of my ancestors was a president!”
“Oh, yeah?” she said. “Then why are you living in that dump?”
I could have lived in a palace, and Erika would have said it wasn’t as good as the German kind. Everything German was better. The chocolate