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By Root 702 0

there. It is clear to me now, sitting as I am forty years later, looking out over the rooftops of Washington, seeing other people’s daughters scoot by with their skinny little arms around boys, how different I was from my counterparts in the hacienda. The girls of Paramonga—at least the ones of a certain class—were in their houses, in starched dresses, teetering on their mothers’ high heels, kissing their dolls. They were acquiring the manners my abuelita expected of me: learning to contain myself when others were too boisterous, to be pleasantly outgoing when others were too shy. They lived monitored girlhoods, in aesthetically pleasing places, with carefully selected playmates, and someday they would pass into chaperoned young womanhood, during which their virtues would be guarded like family jewels.

Peruvian girls were not running about, pounding stakes into earth, tying a tepee down. They were securing respectability, studying the polarities between señor and señora, grooming their lives accordingly, making themselves scarce. Now that I recall, the only ones who came around unannounced were daughters of servants, dirty girls who would shuffle up with their eyes cast down, offering themselves wordlessly to our games.

It didn’t occur to me that I was anything but a boy’s equal. I was my mother’s daughter, ready to pit myself against boys if I had to, ready to grin at them openly, as I’d seen my mother grin at the solteros, facing them squarely when they strode down the streets, tipping their hats her way.

But there was a dichotomy at work, and it would take a long time for me to understand it. As much as I was a gringa, chasing through that neighborhood in the wake of my big brother, I was also studiously acquiring a Peruvian femininity. It came in subtle ways: During one of Tía Chaba’s visits, when she stepped into the garden, leaned over, and hissed in my ear—“Marisi, cross your legs, hijita; you’re showing the world your very soul.” Or, “Don’t sit there with your mouth hanging open like a lizard; close it until you have something interesting to say.” Or hearing an engineer’s wife gossip at my father’s table—“Oy, por Dios, Jorge, have you seen that criatura the Martinez girl has turned into? She walks like an hombre, waves her hands about like a chola, props her fists on her hips, and spits out ear-singeing groserías.” So that by the time I was grown, I knew there were two women I could be—the Latina or the gringa—and that at every juncture I would need to choose one. I picked my way through life, deciding to try one identity and then the other. I transformed myself into an all-American in high school; became Peruvian again in college. I was a good Latina in my first marriage, going to the altar with the first man who ever touched me, hanging my future on his, never reaching for him in bed. And then I was a good gringa in my second, throwing out all the rule books and following my heart. But all that came later, after Paramonga. Long after I discovered a thing or two about boys.

It was in George’s club that I learned boys were clannish. They loved the company of other boys. Backslaps and fellowship. The code of the gang. For these things they were willing to undergo any humiliation, suffer any outrage. To be in. But if it was true for them, it was also true for me. I longed to be part of a team, to wield a little power. Were kisses the price of admission? Caramba! They could kiss me all day long. My hair was too long, my dresses too girly, God hadn’t bothered to fit me with a hose, but that hadn’t seemed to stop me so far. Kisses? Sure. I could do that. I’d get by. I’d belong.

“Okay,” I said to Manuel briskly. “Follow me.”

The buck-toothed boy came through the flap of the tent meekly and watched as I tramped to the center and sat on the grass, cross-legged.

“Now what?” he asked, his skewed eyes focusing.

“Sit here and let me see if I like you,” I said, and motioned to the space before me.

He sat down and I studied his face. “Look,” he whispered nervously, and put a hand in his pocket. “I have something I can