American Chica_ Two Worlds, One Childhood - Marie Arana [6]
Very early, somehow—I don’t recall exactly why—in the same way that I dared not imagine what was beneath her frocks, I learned not to ask about her life before she married Papi. The sweet mildness of her demeanor, like the silk of her clothes, masked some indeterminate thing beneath. There was a hardness behind her glow. An ice. I felt I could quiz her to my heart’s content about music, which came to be the language between us. But beyond that—like the point beyond the animal cages—lay a zone I was not supposed to know.
Her past was the only thing Mother was stingy about. Attentive to her children to the point of obsession, she doted on us, worried about us. Every headache was the start of some dread calenture of the brain. Every bellyache, the possibility that we were teeming with tropical parasites. I could make her ooze with love by telling her that I had eaten a wild strawberry from the roadside: She would be anxious for days that I had contracted some rare, Andean disease, taking my temperature at every opportunity, padding into my bedroom at night to lay a cool hand on my brow. Nowhere was her love more evident, however, than in the way she imparted her music to her children. It was, for her, a constant vocation. Any drama, any spectacle, any mathematical conundrum had a corresponding phrase of music, a melody that might frame it more effectively than words. It was as if she needed to convey the vocabulary and syntax of music to us as urgently as she needed to impart English. She would teach all three of us the language of music to some degree, but with time it became clear that I was the one she had chosen to be the beneficiary of this particular gift, and it was through music that she ultimately spoke to me most directly.
At siesta time, she’d recite long strings of poetry from memory for me. Or she’d try singing me to sleep—hopeless enterprises, since I found her poetry and songs more seductive than any prospect of slumber. Outside her room, I spoke Spanish. But inside, we were range-roving Americans, heirs of the king’s English, and Mother unfolded that world in verse: Whitman’s “Leaves of Grass,” Coleridge’s “Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” Gilbert and Sullivan’s pirates and maidens, Stephen Foster’s dreamers and chariots, Robert Burns’s banks and brae, George M. Cohan’s flag and salute, Irving Berlin’s moon and champagne.
I would lie big-eyed, starstruck, as she spun visions of a faraway country where cowboys reigned, valleys were green, wildflowers sprang from the feet of great oaks, water was sipped—unboiled—from streams, opera houses were lined with red velvet, and sidewalks winked with radiant flecks of mica. “You’ll see it all someday, Mareezie,” she’d say of her melody-filled historias. “You’ll see it for yourself.”
She would sing, then peek to see if I had drifted off. Into the fifth or sixth song, I knew to pretend. I’d burrow my ear into the place between her shoulder and her large, firm breast, reach an arm across her white throat to feel her corn-silk hair, and feign a deep, heavy breathing. When she stopped singing, I’d open one eye and see that she was asleep.
She was a beautiful woman. Big-boned yet slender. Her forehead was deep, unlined, nearly browless, which gave her the look of a perpetually startled doll. She painted her lips to a fullness they did not have, and, when they were in repose, you could see their thinness beneath the color. It was a beguiling mouth, sloped slightly to one side, so that if you positioned yourself to her left you saw someone pensive, to her right, someone playful. “My slop-pail mug,” she called it, leaving me to wonder, in