American Chica (26 page)

“Oye,”
I said, turning to George. “Tell me about Wyoming.”

He shrugged. “I don’t remember much. There’s just Grandpa Doc. He’s huge.”

“A cowboy, no?” I asked, prodding him. “With a gun?”

George squinted at me, his lip in a vigorous tic. He said something back to me, but I was no longer listening. I sat and stared into the whir of green. I’d never seen so many trees before: at least not like this, with wide trunks and round, verdant pompadours. Backs of houses flew by; laundry flapped in gardens. Streets gleamed with shops. There were no ramshackle stands, no hawkers, no one pushing a cart, touting wares. There were front doors, which, like the Birdseyes’, you could walk right up to and knock. There were dogs lazing by. There were stretches of farmland, heaps of rusted-out cars.

Where were the rivers sparkling with gold dust? Where were the gem-lined streets? Where was the money growing on trees? Where were Moby Dick, Sitting Bull, Honest Abe? I was looking at a place unrecognizable from my mother’s
historias.
The only Americans, as far as I could see, were hurtling by behind glass, over black rubber, down a long asphalt snake.

Our train was a Union Pacific Pullman, a long gray bullet on a
string of long gray bullets just like it. It was tidy and comfortable, with ample seats and chummy passengers.

“Where you from, honey?” a towering woman asked me, shoving her head in my face when she heard me chatter in Spanish. I didn’t understand a word of what she said.

Mother reached across the aisle to fend for me. “She was born in South America. This is her first trip to the States.”

“Well, I’ll be,” the woman said, taking me in, head to toe. “She’s a little foreigner.”

“No, ma’am,” Mother said with a tight little smile. “She’s one hundred percent American citizen.”

“Unh-huh,” the woman said, and shambled down the aisle.

“You’re an American,” Mother lectured me gravely, “through and through. Don’t let anyone ever tell you anything different.” She looked through the window and sighed, stroking my hair. In time, she began reciting a verse or two, in her funny macaronic way: “Breathes there a man with soul so dead, who bumpdy-bumpdy-bumpdy said, ‘This is my own my native land!’”

I could see why she loved her native land. It was clean, polished. Even the garbage was tidy. The stops along the way in it were linoleum oases, fitted with candy counters, milk-shake vendors, hot-dog grills, and wide arcades. Tallahassee, Birmingham, Memphis, St. Louis, Topeka, Denver. I wanted to swing through those train stations like a monkey through rain forest, but George held me back, skittering after Mother and Papi, fretting that I’d get us lost or that we’d miss the next train. He was preoccupied and surly since we’d left Paramonga. His words were herky-jerky, full of worry. His face was leaping with tics.

In the St. Louis station, Vicki and I took off in search of a bathroom and came to a stop before two doors marked
Ladies.
One said
Colored.
The other said
Whites.
We puzzled over the words, wondering what they meant, but Mother came by, grabbed our hands, and pulled us through the second door.

“Why does that other one say
Colored,
Mother?” Vicki asked.

“Because only the colored are supposed to go through it,” she replied.

“Colored?” my sister asked, revealing a rare lack of enlightenment.

“Yes. Haven’t you noticed in the station, darling? Or on the train? The black people?”

“With black hair, you mean?” Vicki said.

“No, dear,” Mother answered on her way into a cubicle, latching the door behind her. “Not black hair. Black
skin.
You have black hair, but you’re white. Your skin is white. So is mine.”

I listened and looked down at my dark-olive knees dangling over the snowy commode. They were green. They were yellow. They were brown. They were colored. Never in a million years could they be called white. But when Vicki and I emerged from the bathroom and looked around the station, we saw what was meant. There were Americans of a deeper hue. Not ocher like me, not hazelnut like Antonio, but chocolate. We had boarded the trains with them, peered into their faces when they leaned over to chat, bought candy from them at counters. It had not occurred to us that we wouldn’t be allowed to go through the same doors.

I had not yet turned seven, but I knew what race meant. There were Peruvians who measured color with what seemed the precision of laboratory calipers, but I had never suspected that any of it would pose a danger to me. I had balked at not being permitted to invite an
india
to my birthday; I had pressed my ear against bedroom doors to hear the scandal of the laundress’s daughter, I had been humiliated by a schoolteacher who didn’t think I was sufficiently brown. But race in Peru was a subtler issue than in the United States.
Indios
came down from the mountains, in from the jungle, went to convent schools, mixed with
mestizos,
and then their
mestizo
children mixed with the
blancos,
mixed with the
chinos,
mixed with the
sambos,
moved to the cities, mixed it up more. I cannot claim, at such a young age, to have understood any of it really, but I’d seen Peru in shades, felt it. Here in March of 1956, in the St. Louis train station, however, where black and white was spelled so boldly—where colors were carved on doors with directives—I do believe that for the first time I feared a little for myself.

AFTER FIVE DAYS
on the rails, we arrived in Denver and boarded a bus for Rawlins. “We’re almost there,” Papi told us; half a day to go. The view from my window flattened into long stretches of prairie with barbed-wire fences winding like Möbius strips, to the horizon and back again. I tried to count telephone poles, the only promise that life awaited us somewhere up the road, but by the time I got to 157, my eyes surrendered to the landscape itself. There were sprays of tall grass, forlorn and yellow, whipped by a furious wind. Pale tufts of sagebrush and greasewood squatted along the highway. Every once in a long while, I’d see an oil rig, or a cattle shed, or an abandoned shack with its roof blown off and a trail of sun-bleached wood tumbling after. These looked like Peru to me—dunes, ramshackle
chacras,
dusty remnants of life—and so I found myself dozing off, unmoved by the sights that reeled past. A leaping jackrabbit, the quick duck of a prairie dog, wings aflap in the vaulting blue sky would bring me scrambling back to the window. Until quite suddenly, in the distance, I saw a mountain flex up—white-haired and mighty—under a salmon sun.

“There, children, there,” said Mother, pointing to the peak. “Your grandparents are down the road now, just up ahead.” She drew out a tube of lipstick and slicked her mouth.

We passed Walcott Junction: a combination of filling station, general store, and “café lounge.” A sign flew over it all, perched
so high that it summoned a clientele for miles.
MOJO GAS,
it said. A solitary word pulsed in a window
—Pabst.

So much was familiar. So much was not. The earth, the bareness of it, could have been Pachamama. But there was a different life to it, something else there I couldn’t make out. It wasn’t the prairie that was drawing my eye. In Peru, ground was all I had looked at: the mountains, the deserts, the rocky shore. My orientation had always been down.

In this place I found myself looking up, scanning sky. A canvas arched over Wyoming, a vast brilliant dome that made my head rise, drew my eyes up. If Pachamama were alive in that dust, you would hardly have noticed her. There were hardly trees anymore in this part of America, no branches for spirits to wave from. Not one gurgling stream to satisfy a ghost. No vines. Were the
pishtacos
that stalked Peru not here in these flatlands at all?

Fifteen miles past Walcott, a ganglion of metal loomed out of the plain. As we drew nearer, we saw the full immensity of the thing, a steel-pipe cathedral against a darkening sky.
SINCLAIR OIL,
the billboard said. And then a boulevard of houses trailed past, under a brume of smoke. Gringo machines. If their
maquinaria
were here, so were their
pishtacos.

I started from my seat, convinced this was our destination, but Papi looked over at me and shook his head. The factory and the hacienda were a mirage. A familiar door in an unfamiliar world.

When the bus lurched into Rawlins, we might as well have lurched onto the moon. The town was unlike anything I had ever seen. Gray buildings, massive and squat, sprawled against a hillside. Trucks lined the streets. There were offices, shops, hotels, but no one came and went from them. A stillness reigned. I could see lights winking in windows and doors, illuminating the signs:
BOOTS, LIVE MUSIC, WESTERN BAR, RIFLES, BAIT, SHERIFF, FEED, MEATS, SPIRITS, THE FERRIS HOTEL,
and then, down the road with a well-lit driveway in front,
WYOMING STATE PENITENTIARY.
On the other side of a bright white train station, a profusion of little houses—clapboard, metal, brick—spilled over the hill and down to a two-lane highway. Tidy patches of green lay in front. The bus made its way to Main Street, lumbered around corners, screeched and then rumbled forward again, until it pulled to a stop.

The driver barked out the destination—“Rawwwlins!”—yanked back the door, and a night wind sliced in. I pulled my alpaca sweater around me, ran in front of the rest, and hopped two steps down to the pavement in front of the Come On In! lounge. In its window, a row of dust-caked bottles lined the sill, and through the glass pane, over the bar, I could see a giant moose face. The head was outlandish under the antlers, its dull eyes dazed, as if the animal had needed a drink and walked through the wall to get it.

“Hullo there!” a voice said, and I spun around to see a tall, broad-shouldered man coming toward us in the twilight. He was wearing a bone-white hat: guttered on top, dipped at the brim. Around his neck hung a string tie with a quartz stone as blue and translucent as the eyes he trained on us. Blue as the blue of my mother’s. “Hullo there, Takey,” he said, using her baby name, and she flew into his arms.

Grandpa Doc seemed big as an Inca fort, larger than any gringo
soltero
I had ever known. He whopped Papi on the shoulder, welcomed back Vicki and George, and then swooped me up, past all six feet of him, so that I could take a close look at his face. His chin was square as a shovel, his cheeks ruddy. His head gave off the irresistible scent of whiskey and tobacco. His breath was sweet as molasses. I instantly liked the man.

He helped Papi organize our luggage and then walked us down Cedar Street to the Ferguson Building, a mausoleum of red brick and white stone, where he insisted on installing us in an apartment of our own.

The Ferguson was where he and Grandma Lo lived during the week. The building took up a whole city block and housed a dry-goods store and grocery downstairs, apartments and offices above. We clattered up the metal stairs to the second floor, marched through the cavernous hallway, and passed brass plaques that proclaimed a spectrum of pursuits from large-elk taxidermy to the appraisal of rare stones. Eventually we reached a door marked
Number Six, James Bayard Clapp, Dental Surgeon,
and Grandpa Doc ushered us into the rooms we would call home for the next four days.

It had been only three years since Mother had seen her mother, but clearly Grandma Lo’s health had slipped away in that time. Mother was tense, nervous, pacing the floor as my grandfather told her what she would see. Lo hadn’t eaten in weeks, he said. Was in constant and excruciating pain. She floated in and out of consciousness. Was dying for sure. Grandma Lo had had the care of two of Mother’s three sisters, he said—women whose names I wasn’t sure I’d ever heard before—but they had gone now, back to their families: down the road, or somewhere in Nebraska.

Grandma Lo, it turned out, was in the next room. Mother hurried in alone and the rest of us prepared for a long vigil. George and I slumped on the floor, too tired to talk. Vicki, who had come to know Grandpa Doc on her last trip, nestled into his lap and took his large hand. Papi settled down with a
National Geographic.
At first our silence was punctuated only by the grim cadence of a clock. But before long, we heard Mother’s moans—muffled and desolate, as if something were wringing her heart. Papi stood sharply and went out into the corridor for a smoke.

One by one, we were waved in to see Grandma Lo. When I first met her, she was lying on her side, facing the wall, her soft white hair matted against the back of her head. I could hear wheezing, as light and regular as an ailing child’s.

“Mother?” my mother whispered, and my grandmother’s mottled fingers fluttered up like flags in wind—up and then down again—but her wrist never left her hip.

“I have my littlest here,” Mother said gently, wiping her eyes with a handkerchief. “You’ve never met her.” She nudged me. “Go on up, Mareezie, give her a kiss. Let her see your face.”