American Chica_ Two Worlds, One Childhood - Marie Arana [27]
She digs in, marks her turf.
When Papi brings Mother back to my grandparents’ bedroom, the struggle begins in earnest. The Aranas may not realize it. There’s no reason for them to suspect a new calculus at work: They’re in their own country, their own culture, their own home. But there’s an American card in the game now. Mother, too, does not reason through differences. She only knows she wants what her instincts tell her she has every right to have: both hands on her infant child.
As days wear on, the tug-of-war becomes more evident. In the mornings, my grandmother asks for the child. Mother reluctantly hands her over. By week’s end Abuelita delegates her daughters to carry the babe out to her. Mother’s face twists into a snarl. By month’s end, the household is sending in the squealing ama: La señora de la casa is anxious! She wants the baby right now!
My grandfather’s sister, Tía Carmen, visits. She’s a serious woman who fancies herself a writer but is, in my grandmother’s view, a weird little crone with a meddlesome side.
That gringa is the very picture of sadness, Tía Carmen pipes up. Her little face breaks my heart.
One day, months into the ground battle, when Vicki is already cooing and crawling, Mother decides she’s had enough. The women in the family are playing with the baby in the other room. Their laughter tinkles through corridors, brittle as mockery, skittering under the door like shards. When she hears it, she glowers into a corner where her maidservant huddles. The girl stares back at her, fighting the tears.
Qué pasa, Concepción? my mother asks.
Your eyes, señora. They make me want to cry.
That’s the thing that begins it. Mother bangs out of the room, shuttles down the corridor, hell-bent for the laughter. She swings the door open and stands there, large, in the frame.
Le toca? Feeding time? Abuelita asks her, and the faces all turn up to see. She is a mammary gland, a biological necessity. That is all.
It’s an account she recites over and over, like the bead of a penitent’s rosary, like the point where a frayed string is broken: They have no gauge on her feelings. It’s a family of strangers. Her child is Peruvian. And a gringa in this country always stands at the door.
She is old now. She sits at a wooden table my father has made for her in their sunny kitchen in Maryland, recounting a moment that is more than half a century, half a world away, and yet her voice is shaking with indignation. Her account involves far more than woman and mother-in-law. Whole cultures are in dispute. My gringa mother had assumed that her baby was something between her, her husband, and God. My abuelita had assumed that her grandchild was the first of a new generation, the next row in the family cloth, an offering to the family matriarch. Hers.
They say that motherhood everywhere is the same. That mothers give birth and mothers give milk, and up and down the animal kingdom real differences do not exist. I know it isn’t so.
I once met a Mexican woman who returned to Monterrey with her three children after many years as a migrant laborer along the southeastern United States. She had picked apples, strawberries, tomatoes for years alongside her husband, borne him three healthy children, followed him wherever their hands were wanted. That she was a loving mother, loyal wife, was never questioned by anyone. Until one spring day, when she found herself on the steps of a school in Danville, Virginia, listening to some wattled gringo tell her that if she were a better mother she would understand that her fourteen-year-old boy shouldn’t be so worried about the family coffers. He shouldn’t be working the orchards after school, helping her harvest peaches, minding his baby sister. He should be on the soccer field, playing with boys his