B0061QB04W EBOK Read online

  “That’s a lie,” Mago said softly.

  “What did you say?” Tía María Félix asked.

  “Those toys that you gave away were for us!” Mago yelled. “I know it. I just know it.” I wanted to believe that Mago was right. The thought that our parents had neglected to send us gifts really hurt. What if they had been too busy tending to their new baby to think about us?

  Papi and Elizabeth in El Otro Lado

  “You insolent child,” Abuela Evila said. “I’m going to teach you to respect your elders.” She looked around for something to hit Mago with, and when she couldn’t find anything, she took off her sandal. By the time she unbuckled the strap, the three of us were already bolting out the door and heading to the backyard to climb up the trees.

  “She could have given us something from the stuff she brought. It’s not our fault she lost the suitcase,” Carlos said.

  “No seas pendejo,” Mago said, punching him on the arm. She jumped off the branch, climbed over the corral, and disappeared down the dirt road that led to Don Rubén’s house.

  The preparations for Élida’s quinceañera were completed quickly because Tía María Félix had to return to her job in El Otro Lado. Tía Emperatriz spent hours making decorations for the hall, and Mago and I had to help. The times we refused, Tía María Félix spanked us under Élida’s mocking gaze. We made garlands using paper flowers and straws. Abuela Evila spent all day making dresses on her sewing machine. Élida’s dress was made in the U.S. because Tía María Félix said she had to have the best for her daughter. But when Élida tried it on, the dress wouldn’t zip up. She was put on a crash diet, and Tía María Félix bought her a girdle. Even then the dress wouldn’t fit, so it had to be altered.

  By the end of the week everyone had a new dress except for Mago and me. It wasn’t until the day before the party that Abuela Evila was finally done with everyone else and was able to start on our dresses. She bought a few yards of a silver material, shiny like a brand-new peso. She made Mago’s dress first. In the evening, she made my dress. By then she was so tired she made a mistake. The shiny part was on the inside. The dull part was on the outside.

  “But, Abuelita, I can’t wear the dress like that, it looks like I’m wearing it inside out! Please fix it.”

  “I’m too tired,” she said as she stood up and stretched her back. “You’re going to have to wear your dress just as it is.”

  The next day we watched while everyone fussed over Élida. A hairstylist came and did her hair up in tiny braids held together by pink and white bows. Then her mother, our grandmother, and Tía Emperatriz helped her put on the crinoline, the girdle, and the beautiful pink dress made with layers of satin and tulle. I hated seeing Tía Emperatriz fussing over Élida so much. Usually she didn’t pay much attention to her, but she was always nice to us.

  While everyone was at church for the ceremony, we spent the whole morning plucking chickens. Tía María Félix hired a woman to help with the cooking, and she showed up with huacales of live chickens clucking and shedding feathers that floated in the air like white flower petals.

  She killed the chickens by grabbing them by the head and spinning them around like a matraca until the necks broke. She told Carlos to help her, but he was too gentle on the chicken, and when he put it down, the poor chicken had a broken neck but still ran around and around, its head hanging to one side.

  The cook told him he was no good at killing chickens and made him help Mago and me pluck feathers. Our job was to hold the dead chickens by their feet and dunk them into boiling water to soften the skin. Then we put a chicken on our lap and pulled out the feathers. We complained about having to do it. “Why should we be helping out for Élida’s party?” we wanted to know. I’d never plucked a chicken and couldn’t pull hard enough for the big feathers to come out. The small downy feathers would stick to my fingers, and I couldn’t scratch my legs when mosquitoes bit me. Carlos kept complaining that this was a girl’s job, and why should he be plucking chickens?

  “Because you aren’t man enough to kill them,” the cook said.

  Mago loved plucking chickens. She threw herself into it with a frenzy, and she plucked, plucked away, plucking so hard sometimes the chicken skin would come off along with the feathers, and I wondered what the poor chickens had done to her to deserve such fury.

  By the time we were finished, the whole patio was covered in feathers. Flies buzzed around, settling on the chicken guts spilled on the ground as the cook chopped the meat to pieces on the washing stone before boiling it.

  Afterward, even though we took a bath and scrubbed ourselves hard with the apple-scented shampoo we liked, we still smelled like wet chicken feathers, and once in a while throughout the evening we pulled out feathers buried in our hair. I pretended I was turning into a dove. I imagined flying in search of my parents.

  The quinceañera was held at a beautiful hall near la colonia called Las Acacias. Élida looked like a princess wearing her puffy pink dress and matching slippers. Mago spent the whole time sitting in a corner of the hall, feeling sorry for herself, her jealousy consuming her to the point where she couldn’t even talk without saying a bad word in every sentence. “That stupid frog-eyes doesn’t deserve this stupid party.”

  Carlos, who didn’t get any new clothes, took advantage of the fact that everyone was too busy to see him sneaking into the kitchen to grab some sodas and a plate piled high with chicken mole and rice. I spent the whole time hiding from people, ashamed about wearing a dress that had the shiny part on the inside and the dull part on the outside. It’s a new dress, I told myself again and again, I should be happy because it’s a new dress. But I crawled under a table and cried about the dress, and about the fact that my parents had replaced me.

  I only came out to see the waltz, which is the highlight of any quinceañera party. Élida danced with her chambelán, and when that waltz was over, she danced with her godparents. The last waltz was meant to be danced with her father, as is tradition, but since she had no father, she danced that waltz with my aunt’s cousin, Tío Wenceslao, who was a butcher. He raised and killed pigs and had a restaurant in La Guadalupe where he sold pozole, chorizo, chicharrón, and everything else that comes from pigs. “Look at her, dancing with the pig man,” Mago said. “How appropriate.”

  My eyes got watery as I watched Élida dance with the butcher whom we called uncle even though he wasn’t an uncle but a distant cousin. But since the only male she could have danced with—our grandfather—was passed out on a chair from too much drinking, and the other male—my father—was away, what choice did Élida have but to dance with this man, this distant cousin of ours?

  I prayed and hoped for Papi to come back soon. When I turned fifteen, I didn’t want to dance El Vals de las Mariposas with anyone but him.

  Carlos had been following Élida’s American brother around to ask him to say things in English. When little Javier did, Carlos would burst out laughing so hard, he didn’t care that everyone could see his crooked teeth. He thought Javier sounded so funny speaking English. “Do you really think it’s English he’s speaking, or is he just making up words?” Carlos asked us.

  Mago said, “He could be speaking Chinese for all we know.” Back then, I could never have imagined that one day, I would speak English better than I spoke my native tongue.

  As Tía María Félix was packing her suitcases and getting ready to leave, Carlos went up to ask her what El Otro Lado looked like. He said he wanted to know more about the place where our parents lived. My aunt looked at him and didn’t say anything, and we thought that maybe she wouldn’t answer, but then she smiled and said:

  “El Otro Lado is a beautiful place. Every street is paved with concrete. You don’t see any dirt roads there. No mosquitoes sucking the blood out of you,” she said, as she slapped a mosquito dead on her leg. “There’s no trash in the streets like here in Mexico. Trucks there pick up the trash every week. And you know what the best thing is? The trees there are specia
l—they grow money. They have dollar bills for leaves.”

  “Really?” Carlos asked.

  “Really.” She took some green bills out of her purse and showed them to us. “These are dollars,” she said. We had never seen dollars, but they were as green as the leaves on the trees we liked to climb. “Now, picture a tree covered in dollar bills!”

  She left in the afternoon with little Javier. She promised Élida that one day soon she would send for her, and although she did eventually keep her promise, Élida had to stay behind for now and watch a taxicab take her mother away. Abuela Evila put her arm around Élida and held her while she cried. Élida buried her face in Abuela Evila’s arms. It was so strange to see her crying. The ever-present mocking gaze was gone. The Élida that made fun of us, that laughed at us, that called us Los Huerfanitos, had been replaced by a weeping, lonely, heartbroken girl.

  Mago grabbed our hands and took us to the backyard to give Élida privacy. “Los quiero mucho,” she said, pulling us close to her. Then I realized how lucky Mago, Carlos, and I were. We at least had each other. Élida was on her own.

  We climbed up the ciruelo and talked about those special dollar trees in El Otro Lado. Even though we knew that what Tía María Félix had said couldn’t be true, we fantasized about them anyway.

  “If we had trees like that here, Papi wouldn’t have had to leave,” Mago said. “He could have bought the brick and cement and built us a house with his own hands.”

  “And Mami would still be with us,” I said.

  “And the new baby would have been born here, like us,” Carlos said.

  We talked about the day our parents would return. Carlos’s fantasy was that Papi and Mami would fly to us in their own private helicopter. “I can just picture it,” he said. “It would land here, in the middle of the yard.” We giggled at the image of Papi emerging from the helicopter, his hair blowing in the wind, his face framed by aviator sunglasses as handsome as Pedro Infante, then Mami coming to stand next to him, looking just as glamorous. We pictured the whole colonia rushing over to see them come home. And we would be so proud.

  6

  Reyna, Carlos, and Mago

  IT WAS 8:00 AM sharp, and Carlos, Mago, and I lined up with the rest of the students around the school’s courtyard to salute the flag.

  “Who are they?” I asked Mago. I tugged on her dress and asked again, as I pointed to a group of six students wearing white uniforms and not the navy blue ones everyone else was wearing.

  “That’s la escolta,” Mago said.

  “And what do they do?” I asked.

  “Just wait and see, and stop bugging me with all your questions. You’ll soon learn your way around here.”

  I couldn’t help being excited to be there. It was my first day of first grade. I’d been waiting for this day for a long time. Abuela Evila didn’t send me to kindergarten because she said it was too expensive to have all four grandkids in school, as if my parents hadn’t been sending money to pay for uniforms, school supplies, and the monthly school tuition. Even though we went to public school, there was nothing free about it. She held me back a year, but finally I was there, and I would get my own books, like the ones Mago and Carlos brought home. Books full of beautiful poetry and fun stories with colorful pictures of clouds, stars, people, and animals like foxes and birds. I liked it when Mago read to me from her books, but I wanted to learn to read them myself.

  Tía Emperatriz spent the weekend at my grandmother’s sewing machine making our school uniforms. On Mondays, when we honored the flag, we had to wear a uniform in navy blue with a white sailor shirt. The uniform for the rest of the week was made of a checkered print in white and green. We also got new patent leather shoes and a few pairs of knee-high socks with the extra money our parents sent.

  The color guard began its march around the courtyard. The student in the middle carried the flag on a pole, another shouted out directions: “¡A la izquierdaaa, ya! ¡A la derechaaa, ya!” The green, white, and red colors of the flag blurred in my mind like salsa.

  “I’m going to be a flag bearer when I’m in sixth grade,” Mago said as she stared longingly at the escolta members, looking great in their crisp, white uniforms. I believed Mago would be a flag bearer one day. She was really smart and always brought home good grades, mostly tens and nines, not like Carlos who, with fives and sixes, almost flunked first grade. How shameful.

  “I’m going to be a flag bearer, too,” I told Mago. She laughed and said that it was my first day of first grade, and sixth grade was ages away. And I said it didn’t hurt to plan for the future.

  As the flag passed by me, I stood straighter and maintained my hand firmly pressed again my chest in salutation as I sang the Mexican anthem as loud as I could.

  Mexicanos, al grito de guerra

  el acero aprestad y el bridón.

  ¡Y retiemble en sus centros la Tierra,

  al sonoro rugir del cañón!

  Mago told me that we should be proud to have been born in Iguala because it was in our city that the treaty which ended the Mexican War of Independence was drafted. It was in Iguala that the first Mexican flag was made by a man named José Magdaleno Ocampo on February 24, 1821. This is why Iguala is called “Cuna de la Bandera Nacional,” Birthplace of the National Flag. The first time the national anthem was sung, it was sung in Iguala.

  I looked at the flag with new eyes, a newfound admiration, and as I sang el himno nacional on my first day of school, I puffed up my chest, feeling especially proud about being born in Iguala de la Independencia!

  My school was small. It was laid out in a square, with all the classrooms facing the courtyard. It had two bathrooms, one for boys and one for girls, but no running water. We had to fill up a bucket from the water tank inside and dump it in the toilet. But still, at least there was a toilet, although it was hard for me to get used to it after having to squat on the ground my whole life.

  When the morning activities were over, we lined up, and our teachers led us into our classrooms. We took our seats and after a brief introduction, el maestro started the lesson by teaching us the alphabet. He said we should have learned it in kindergarten, but half the students in the class hadn’t gone to kindergarten. We repeated after him, and I felt proud that I knew my letters already because Mago had taught them to me. When he told us to write our names down, I didn’t have to look at the board to spell my name: R-E-Y-N—I felt a stinging on my hand, and it took me a second to realize that el maestro had hit me with his ruler.

  “What are you doing?” el maestro asked. He held his ruler in his right hand and tapped it over and over on the palm of his left hand.

  “I’m writing my name,” I told him. “See?” I raised my brand-new notebook to show him.

  “You are not to write with that hand,” he said to me. He took the pencil from my left hand and made me grab it with my right. “If I see you using your left hand, I will have to hit you again, ¿entiendes?”

  My eyes welled up with tears because everyone was looking at me. I took a deep breath and nodded. He walked away, and I looked down at my notebook. I wrote and erased, wrote and erased, and no matter how hard I tried, the letters didn’t come out right. It was like trying to write with my feet.

  Abuela Evila and Élida always teased me for being left-handed. My mother’s father, Abuelito Gertrudis, had also been left-handed. Because he died a week before I was born, Mami said he had given this gift to me. And that is how I had always seen it, as a gift, until we came to Abuela Evila’s house. She didn’t agree. She said that the left hand was the hand of the devil and I was evil for using it. Sometimes during meals, she would hit my hand with a wooden spoon and tell me to eat with my right hand.

  “Don’t you know that the right side is the side of God?” she asked. “The left side is the side of evil. You don’t want to be evil, do you?” Since I didn’t want anything to do with the devil, I would pick up my spoon with my right hand and try to eat with it. But I could only manage a few
bites before my spoon found its way back to my left hand.

  Measles crippled my grandmother’s left arm when the open sores got so infected they were crawling with maggots, but she would tell me that if I kept using my left hand it would shrivel up, just like hers. Even though it was a disease that crippled her, I lived with the constant fear of waking up one day with a shriveled left hand. It was ironic that it was Abuela Evila who ended up shriveling when osteoporosis set in several years later. And it would be Tía Emperatriz who had to change her diapers, who continued to tend to her because nobody else would.

  “Don’t listen to her, Nena,” Mago would sometimes tell me. “There’s nothing wrong with being left-handed.” But just as Mago couldn’t ignore Élida’s taunts about her scars, I couldn’t ignore Abuela Evila’s or my teacher’s. He didn’t understand that my pencil obeyed my left hand, but not the right one. I tried once again to write my name, but the letters came out all twisted and ugly. When Mago taught me to write my name, she wrote it with beautiful letters and made the tail of the Y long and curly. It looked so pretty it made me finally start liking my name. I used to hate my name because sometimes when Mami and I were on our way to el mercado, men would whistle at Mami from across the street and yell “¡Mi reina!”—my queen—and the way they said “mi reina” made me want to throw a rock at them and make them bleed. Then I would ask Mami why she gave me a name that sounds so foul in a man’s mouth. I asked why she couldn’t have just named me Regina, as Abuela Evila had wanted. I wished she had chosen another time to rebel against my grandmother’s bossy ways. “Reyna is a very nice name,” Mami would say. “Those men are just not saying it the right way. And it wasn’t your grandmother’s place to name you. You aren’t her daughter!”

  I looked at my name on the notebook. I had never hated it as much as I did at that moment. And I didn’t stop hating my name until many years later, when I realized that it wasn’t a name to be ashamed of, but one to live up to.