The Woman I Kept to Myself, Page 2

  from a trip to France, an advanced degree

  by the family intellectual,

  or the announcement of religious vows

  by the plain cousin (pobrecita!)

  with the faint mustache and the heart of gold—

  a gathering of the tribe, two dozen strong,

  scrubbed, perfumed, permed, coifed, and gussied up,

  a command performance at my grandparents’ house,

  while he, dressed cheaply in a faded suit,

  sweat beading his brow, struggled to record

  that unforgettable day, posing us

  in perfect order, faces to the sun,

  jokes cracked for smiles, cowlicks patted down,

  sashes and bows retied, the boys’ flies checked:

  a perfect tableau for posterity,

  hereditary gods and goddesses—

  but every time he was about to snap,

  a giggling bout attacked the children’s row

  or Tío sneezed or Abuelita burped

  or someone who wouldn’t fess up farted,

  and the portrait was ruined! He’d poke out

  his mournful face from under his black hood,

  glancing around at his marred masterpiece,

  his passion trivialized, his art abused—

  pobrecito! Now I know how he felt

  struggling to get all that life on paper.

  THE RED PICKUP

  The wish I always made in childhood

  before the blazing candles or when asked

  what gift I wanted the Three Kings to bring

  was a red pickup, which Mami vetoed

  as inappropriate. And so I improvised,

  trading in speed for a pair of cowboy boots,

  bright red with rawhide tassels that would swing

  when I swaggered into my fourth-grade class

  asking for an exemption from homework

  from my strict teacher, Mrs. Brown from Maine.

  She called my mother weekly to complain

  of my misbehaviors, among them

  a tendency to daydream instead of

  finding the common denominator.

  (But what had I in common with fractions?

  I wanted the bigger, undivided world!)

  She was one more woman in a series

  of dissuaders against that red pickup

  in all its transformations, which at root

  was a driving desire to be a part

  of something bigger than a pretty girl,

  the wild, exciting world reserved for boys:

  guns that shot noisy hellos! in the air

  and left crimson roses on clean, white shirts;

  firecrackers with scarlet explosions

  that made even my deaf grandfather jump.

  I wanted what God wanted when He made

  the world, to be a driving force, a creator.

  And that red pickup was my only ride

  out of the common denominator.

  SPIC

  U.S.A., 1960

  Out in the playground, kids were shouting Spic!

  lifting my sister’s skirt, yanking her slip.

  Younger, less sexy, I was held and stripped

  of coat and bookbag. Homework tumbled out

  into oncoming traffic on the street.

  Irregular verbs crumpled under tires

  of frantic taxis, blew against the grates

  of uptown buses we would later take

  when school let out, trailed by cries of Spic!

  What did they want, these American kids?

  That night when we asked Mami, she explained:

  our classmates had been asking us to speak,

  not to be so unfriendly, running off

  without a word. “This is America!

  The anthem here invites its citizens

  to speak up. Oh see, can you say,” she sang,

  proving her point, making us sing along.

  She winked at Papi, who had not joined in

  but bowed his head, speaking to God instead:

  “Protect my daughters in América.”

  I took her at her word: I raised my hand,

  speaking up during classes, recess time.

  The boys got meaner. Spic ball! they called out,

  tossing off my school beanie, playing catch

  while I ran boy to boy to get it back.

  They sacked my stolen lunch box for their snacks,

  dumping the foreign things in the garbage bin,

  Spic trash! But I kept talking, telling them

  how someday when I’d learn their language well,

  I’d say what I’d seen in America.

  ALL-AMERICAN GIRL

  I wanted stockings, makeup, store-bought clothes;

  I wanted to look like an American girl;

  to speak my English so you couldn’t tell

  I’d come from somewhere else. I locked myself

  in the bathroom, trying to match my face

  with words in my new language: grimace, leer,

  disgust, disdain—feelings I had yet to feel

  in English. (And would tristeza even feel

  the same as sadness with its Saxon sound?

  Would pity look as soulful as piedad?)

  I didn’t know if I could ever show

  genuine feeling in a borrowed tongue.

  If cortesía would be misunderstood

  as brown-nosing or cries of alegría

  translate as terror. So, mirror in hand,

  I practiced foreign faces, Anglo grins,

  repressing a native Latin fluency

  for the cooler mask of English ironies.

  I wanted the world and words to match again

  as when I had lived solely in Spanish.

  But my face wouldn’t obey—like a tide

  it was pulled back by my lunatic heart

  to its old habits of showing feelings.

  Long after I’d lost my heavy accent,

  my face showed I had come from somewhere else.

  I couldn’t keep the southern continent

  out of the northern vista of my eyes,

  or cut my cara off to spite my face.

  I couldn’t look like anybody else

  but who I was: an all-American girl.

  BELLEVUE

  My mother used to say that she’d end up

  at Bellevue if we didn’t all behave.

  In the old country when we disobeyed,

  she’d drop us off at the cloistered Carmelites

  and ring the bell and drive away. We sobbed

  until the little lay nun led us in

  to where a waiting sister, whose veiled face

  we never saw, spoke to us through a grate

  about the fourth commandment, telling us

  how Jesus obeyed His mother and He was God.

  In New York, Mami changed her tack and used

  the threat of a mental breakdown to control

  four runaway tempers, four strong-willed girls,

  four of her own unruly selves who grew

  unrulier in this land of the free.

  I still remember how she would pretend

  to call admissions, pack her suitcase up

  with nothing but a toothbrush, showercap.

  “I’m going to Bellevue, do what you want!”

  She’d bang the front door, rush out to the car.

  Who knows where she went on her hour off?

  She needed to get away from her crazy girls,

  who wanted lives she had raised them not to want.

  So many tempting things in this new world,

  so many young girls on their own, so many boys

  with hands where hands did not belong.

  Of course, she wanted to go to Bellevue,

  where the world was safe, the grates familiar,

  the howling not unlike her stifled sobs

  as she drove around and around our block.

  ABBOT ACA
DEMY

  Fall 1964

  Mami sent me to Abbot where they tamed

  wild girls—or so she’d heard—into ladies,

  who knew to hold their skirts down in a breeze

  and say “Excuse me” if compelled to speak;

  ladies who married well, had lovely kids,

  then inexplicably went mad and had

  gin and tonics or the gardener for breakfast—

  that part my mother hadn’t heard; ladies

  who learned to act like blondes even if they

  were dark-haired, olive-skinned, spic-chicks like me.

  And so that fall, with everything checked off

  the master list—3 tea dresses, 2 pairs

  of brown oxfords, white gloves, 4 cardigans—

  I was deposited at Draper Hall

  to have my edges rounded off, my roots

  repotted in American soil.

  I bit my nails, cracked my knuckles hard,

  habits the handbook termed unladylike—

  (sins, the nuns called them back at Catholic school).

  I said my first prayer in months that night.

  “Ay Dios,” I begged, “help me survive this place.”

  And for the first time in America,

  He listened: the next day for English class

  I was assigned to Miss Ruth Stevenson

  who closed the classroom door and said, “Ladies,

  let’s have ourselves a hell of a good time!”

  And we did, reading Austen, Dickinson,

  Eliot, Woolf, until we understood

  we’d come to train—not tame—the wild girls

  into the women who would run the world.

  BY ACCIDENT

  Sometimes I think I became the woman

  I am by accident, nothing prepared

  the way, not a dramatic, wayward aunt,

  or moody mother who read Middlemarch,

  or godmother who whispered, “You can be

  whatever you want!” and by doing so

  performed the god-like function of breathing

  grit into me. Even my own sisters

  were more concerned with hairdryers and boys

  than with the poems I recited ad nauseam

  in our shared bedrooms when the lights were out.

  “You’re making me sick!” my sisters would say

  as I ranted on, Whitman’s “Song of Myself”

  not the best lullaby, I now admit,

  or Chaucer in Middle English which caused

  many a nightmare fight. “Mami!” they’d called,

  “She’s doing it again!” Slap of slippers

  in the hall, door clicks, and lights snapped on.

  “Why can’t you be considerate for once?”

  “I am,” I pleaded, “these are sounds, sweet airs

  that give delight and—” “Keep it to yourself!”

  my mother said, which more than anything

  anyone in my childhood advised

  turned me to this paper solitude

  where I both keep things secret and broadcast

  my heart for all the world to read. And so,

  through many drafts, I became the woman

  I kept to myself as I lay awake

  in that dark bedroom with the lonesome sound

  of their soft breathing as my sisters slept.

  VAIN DOUBTS

  Years ago now—a breezy, bygone day,

  walking a city street, my hair tossing,

  feeling the beauty of my young body,

  that animal friskiness triggered by spring,

  I glanced admiringly at my reflection

  in a storefront window, tossing my head

  to watch that mirrored waving of a mane

  I thought my best feature—when a young man

  coming in my direction barred my way.

  Glaring at me, he uttered, “Vanity!”

  And I was stopped in my mindless moment

  of physical joy, shamed to associate

  that deadly sin with the upsurge of life

  and self-love I’d been feeling, never doubting

  my urban prophet had been right. Vanity—

  so this was what that ugly sin felt like!

  In his disgust, I heard the click of keys

  in convents, harems, attics, marriages,

  down the generations, doors closing on

  bodies that could give both pleasure and life.

  Now that the years have granted me release

  from such vain doubts, I’d like to post myself

  at slumber parties, bathrooms, dressing rooms,

  wherever young girls gather, frowning at

  their wrong-size figures, blah hair, blemished skin—

  already taught to find fault or disguise

  joy in their bodies. I’d like to be the voice

  that drowns out their self-doubt, singing in praise

  of what I couldn’t see when I was young:

  we’re simply beautiful, just as we are.

  FIRST MUSE

  When I heard the famous poet pronounce

  “One can only write poems in the tongue

  in which one first said Mother,” I was stunned.

  Lately arrived in English, I slipped down

  into my seat and fought back tears, thinking

  of all those notebooks filled with bogus poems

  I’d have to burn, thinking maybe there was

  a little loophole, maybe just maybe

  Mami had sung me lullabies she’d learned

  from wives stationed at the embassy,

  thinking maybe she’d left the radio on

  beside my crib tuned to the BBC

  or Voice of America, maybe her friend

  from boarding school had sent a talking doll

  who spoke in English? Maybe I could be

  the one exception to this writing rule?

  For months I suffered from bad writer’s-block,

  which I envisioned, not as a blank page,

  but as a literary border guard

  turning me back to Spanish on each line.

  I gave up writing, watched lots of TV,

  and you know how it happens that advice

  comes from unlikely quarters? She came on,

  sassy, olive-skinned, hula-hooping her hips,

  a basket of bananas on her head,

  her lilting accent so full of feeling

  it seemed the way the heart would speak English

  if it could speak. I touched the screen and sang

  my own heart out with my new muse, I am

  Chiquita Banana and I’m here to say . . .

  LUNCH HOUR, 1971

  It was the autumn of my discontent

  in New York City. I was twenty-one

  with nothing to show but a resumé

  of thin successes: sundry summer jobs,

  a college-writing prize, four published poems

  in a small journal edited by friends.

  I got a job on 42nd Street

  with Special Reports, Incorporated,

  a series of newsletters that went out

  to schools and libraries on hot topics.

  I was put in charge of Special Reports:

  Ecology and the new Women’s Issues,

  which I manned from the tiny broom closet

  called my office, from which I could see—

  once the leaves fell—two lions reclining

  before the public library. That fall

  our bestseller, Special Reports: The World,

  was full of news about the Vietnam war.

  The blood-red oak leaves falling in the park

  outside my window seemed sad mementos

  of mounting casualties a world away,

  and closer in the choices I had made.

  Each day at noon, I’d race down to the street,

  past protestors handing out peace buttons

  and stale leaflets I’d prete
nd to read.

  I ate a quick snack sitting on the steps

  between the lions, wiped my greasy hands

  on their stony manes, and still hungry,

  I spent my lunch hour in the library,

  feeding the poet starving inside me.

  HEARTLAND

  Those heartsick days living in the heartland.

  Those hard days that I thought would never end.

  Houses so homey they seemed appliquéd

  on the landscape, hedges and trees in place

  as if they had been rented for each lawn

  along with picket fences, pastel mums,

  and politically incorrect lawn ornaments:

  Mexicans sleeping with sombreros on,

  black footmen with their faces painted white

  out of some vague respect for civil rights.

  My landlady had a lady on our lawn,

  bent over so her frilly panties showed.

  I’d look out at her and my heart would sink.

  Depression is always in the details.

  Homesick and lovesick, I kept mental lists

  of objects that seemed sentient with advice:

  churches like thumbtacks stuck in every block

  to hold down what might otherwise rise up,

  drapes drawn at dusk, tunafish casseroles

  no one back east was making anymore—

  back east . . . where the man I was obsessed with

  was living on the verge of his divorce

  —or so he wrote in passionate letters

  utterly discredited in this setting.

  Is this true love? I kept asking myself.

  Desperate for answers, I applied to her:

  What would you do to bypass this impasse?

  But she just mooned me (with her panties on)

  as if to say, My dear, don’t be an ass.

  Honestly, what a tiresome question!

  BAD-WEATHER FRI ENDS

  Old friends from my other, less successful lives

  who put up with me, how grateful I am

  to each of you for how you saved the day

  when all my days were dark nights of the soul.

  I must have been one of those sad cases

  you see on late-night movies, thirty-plus,

  insomniac, twice divorced, unsettled, poor,