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By Root 688 0

age. It was the American way, he said, and her boy was an American boy. Lady, you must raise these children up. Make them walk. Be somebody. The mother looked down and saw her son slumped on the school lawn, cradling his sister between his knees, tears sliding down his cheeks. He was a good boy, an honor to his mother, and the man was misunderstanding everything, twisting her motives and her family traditions into something they were not. She was not taking advantage of her son, exploiting him to pick a few more peaches, enslaving him to another child; she was teaching him a responsibility to something greater than himself. The next year, she and the children stayed in Mexico. Her husband hit the migrant road alone.

I tell this as if I agree with that mother. The truth is: I do not know. The principal may have been right. The Mexican woman may have been right. As I sit in my mother’s kitchen in Maryland listening to her angry recollections of my grandmother, I do not know what to think about the two of them. I’m on my mother’s side one minute. I’m on my abuelita’s side the next. I am an ark of confusion.

In the Lima house, my mother issues a letter of grievances. She sits down with her worn dictionary and composes—in ridiculous Spanish—a declaration of her rights. If I say something to you, she writes to her mother-in-law, I’m doing the best I can. I say it as an American. Don’t take my words at face value. They may not say what I mean. Allow me to make mistakes.

As for the baby, she is Jorge’s and mine. I want her with me at all times. Not just for feedings. I am not a cow.

I had always sensed the antagonism between my mother and my grandmother. I knew there were variances in the ways they lived, things they believed. But only in later accounts—told by both of them—did I understand the gulf of their divide. My grandmother was wary of my mother’s independence, of her unwillingness to have her life pried into, of the utter rigidity in her upper lip. My mother was caught off guard by the family, surprised to find it commandeered by a matriarch, taken aback by her rein on so many lives. Abuelita drew her clan with a magical charisma, funneling their energy toward her, deep into the sanctum of that hearth. Not out, not away, not in the typical vector of a Yank.

Mother’s list of grievances is received like a low-grade detonation. Abuelita shows it to others, then folds it into a drawer. She has tried to make the gringa feel welcome: She has given up her bedroom, moved her estimable husband into a side room, given the woman advice on her disastrous ways: For God’s sake, hijita, I don’t care what you did during the war in Boston. You can’t slather your calves with makeup and go out bare-legged in Peru. People will assume you’re something you’re not.

She has, above all, tried to initiate her into the art of motherhood. She has given the gringa everything and has had it flung back in a coolly penned note.

The letter begins a standoff Peruvians call pleito: that inching toward fury, that lingering grudge to the grave. There’s no word for it in English. It’s more than a simple resentment, less than an all-out war. It’s coal fire beneath a prairie, hell under the vista. You come, you go, you chat in the sala—the exterior looks perfectly normal—but a fire is reaming your gut.

Mother asks that dinners be sent to her room, sends kind regards through her maid. Abuelita sews dresses for Vicki, sets them out for everyone to see. But unless etiquette demands it, the two do not talk at all. They bristle, walk wide arcs around each other, scowl from behind beatific smiles.

I can’t play this charade much longer, says my mother to my father one night. I can’t fake it like she can.

It’s late July. They’ve been there for almost a year.

My mother doesn’t fake anything, my father responds. She’s an honorable woman.

A cable tightens. She’s expressed pique. So has he. There are more words along these lines. Her anger escalates. So does his. She is barefoot, in nightclothes, in no condition to leave their room, but she snatches Vicki and