Every morning, the same teacher led us all in a stiff Pledge of Allegiance. Then she made us all—even those of us who didn’t know the American words—sing “Home on the Range,” with this change: She made us block out the word “seldom” from the line “Where seldom is heard a discouraging word and the skies are not cloudy all day,” as printed in a mimeographed song sheet she passed out. We then had to substitute the word “never”—she spelled it out slowly—“because, after all, this is Texas, … where never is heard a discouraging word.”
In another classroom, for half an hour, Mexican students were again separated from “Americans.” We could hear the Anglo children through the windows laughing in the playground while the sturdy teacher attempted to teach us the profound mystery of the difference between “ch” and “sh.” “Tcha, tcha, tch, tcha, tcha!” she would fire at us, beating on her desk with a stick. We would respond, “Shuh, shuh, shuh, shuh, shuh!” Her face growing dangerously red, she would shift to this example: “Tchildren, Tchihuahua, tchildren, Tchihuahua!” and we would respond: “Shuldrin, Tchihuahua, Shuldrin, Tchihuahua.”
My older sister, Blanca, had been the object of similar cruelty within our own family. Because her name meant “white” and her complexion was darker than my mother’s—and certainly my father’s—my determinedly “Spanish” grandmother on my father’s side ridiculed her. She called Blanca la India, inflicting pain that would bruise my sister all her life, despite the fact that she became very beautiful, a queen at a yearly bullfight in Juárez, where she once was courted by a matador with the ear of a slain bull.
My two brothers were opposites in coloring. Yvan, athletic, good-looking, would have been an all-American type except that he was brown; Robert, the older, was fair, with blue eyes, and as handsome as Robert Taylor, whom he resembled. My sister Olga, eventually to blossom into a beauty, looked entirely Spanish.
My mother often said that if the haughty grandmother had been alive, I would have been her favorite because I looked “so entirely white” and had “such long, curled eyelashes.”
Many years later, my beautiful sister Blanca would legally alter her name to Blanche, attempting to banish the pain the grandmother had caused her for mocking her about her darker color.
* * *
In the same kindergarten and grammar school where, daily, Mexicans were separated from Anglos to be checked for lice and to learn to pronounce “chuh,” and around the same time, my name was changed. Knowing not a single word of English, I sat confused through a silly game that involved a colored ball of yarn to be pinned onto the back of one of the children. I knew only that before the count of ten, the child so pinned had to guess what the color of the yarn was.
“One—” the teacher began.
I got up.
“What?”
“Juan,” I said, pointing to myself and smiling at having been called.
“No, no. Sit down.”
She began again: “One—”
Exasperated myself but thinking she had decided to make amends for having called my name and then make me return to my desk, I went up to her, not smiling.
“One!” She understood. “Not Juan.”
The Anglo children laughed raucously.
“I’m going to call you Johnny,” she said. “You look much more like a Johnny than a Juan. Doesn’t he, children?” she asked those who understood English.
“Yes, yes!”
I did feel more like Johnny than like Juan.
But I was sure of this, after I left my sister’s Olga’s house and I replayed her accusations of Isabel Franklin—Alicia Gonzales—never had I been ashamed of being Mexican. Regretting poverty, yes. Ashamed of being poor, allowing people to think I lived elsewhere, yes. … But ashamed of being Mexican?
No, no, never.
8
I got an after-school job in the call office of the Acme Laundry, picking up bundles of clothes from cars and bringing them to the checkout desk, then writing out a receipt. There were two other clerks, freshmen in college, both Anglos. I was paid fifteen dollars a week and allowed a fifty percent discount on laundry. My mother no longer had to do the washing. I gave my salary to her and kept two dollars for myself.
One early evening my rich uncle Carlos came across the border from Juárez into El Paso to visit us and show off his new Cadillac. In front of our house, the Cadillac was parked like the ship of an invader, an alien in our Texas neighborhood of run-down cars that had to be cranked up daily. The Cadillac gleamed, standing out rudely, disdainful. Kids roamed around it; one touched it and then fled as if it had singed him.
Since his wife, Carmen, slightly sober, was with my uncle, I assumed she had managed not to kill any of her cronies during her raucous poker games—or, at least, she had not been caught. She smelled faintly of perfume and strongly of whiskey. She was wearing spangled earrings and kept elbow-nudging me in the ribs to indicate how good-looking she thought I was, eh?
“Do you know how to drive?” my uncle startled me by asking when I admired the gleaming Cadillac.
“Yes!” I said quickly. My brother Robert had taught me in his own cantankerous Nash. I had even acquired a beginner’s permit.
“Would you like to drive the Cadillac?”
My mother protested that I was too young, my father roused himself out of silence to warn that I would wreck the car and wasn’t worthy of it, and Robert attested to my excellent skills: “My little brother,” he said, “is the smartest of us all.” I thanked him, and insisted he was—and he was at least as smart; he had given up an opportunity to prove that by choosing to go to work to help out, even after he was married, instead of continuing his education.
I did not pause to wonder at the astonishing offer my uncle had extended, this stroke of generosity. Nor would it have mattered that it might have something to do with his vaunted disdain of wealth, including his own—he was later identified by some government agency or other as a “rich communist.” The Cadillac was last year’s, because, in one of those strange regulations that only regulators can understand, foreigners were allowed to buy new American cars but only last year’s models.
My uncle handed me the magical keys as if they were petty change.
“Remember everything I taught you,” my brother said. “Let the clutch out … smoothly … if it has one.”
“I will, brother.” I held the keys in my hand, disoriented momentarily by what I was about to do. My first clear thought after that was this: I would call Isabel Franklin! Because of the lack of what was now possible—a good-looking car—I had never thought to date a girl until now. My brother’s Nash constantly needed repairing. He spent more time under it, tinkering with the engine, than he and I did driving. When he lent it to me, I would not drive far, a few blocks, around, enjoying driving, just that. The girls whom I was attracted to in school, and who might be attracted to me, were all from the “rich” neighborhood, Kern Place. The thought of asking any of them out, and waiting for a bus—if they accepted—was dismaying.
But now! Now Isabel and I would go to the drive-in diner, where everyone from school who had a car and money to go there went on weekends. Everyone would see us there, together.
I began to run out of the house raising my hand to grasp my mother’s benediction when I realized I didn’t have Isabel’s telephone number.
I retreated into the house—“I forgot something”—and sauntered back to a small entry way where our telephone was. Only recently acquired, it was a party line, and the first time it rang, my mother clasped her hands with joy at the marvelous acquisition. I looked up Isabel’s mother’s name, praying it would be listed, as almost all numbers were then. Ernestina Gonzales—there it was: Main-8282-J. I ran out before anyone could ask me what I had forgotten.
I glided along the street in the beautiful spaceship—it had fins, of course—until I located a public telephone. I inserted the requisite nickel, picked up the telephone.
“Operator.”
I was spee
chless and quickly hung up.
Would Isabel—I must remember to call her that and not the name she had rejected, Alicia—recognize my name, or even me when I turned up, if she agreed to go out with me? Had I been misleading myself into thinking her avoidance of me at school was a deliberate avoidance, as pointed as mine? Worse still, if she recognized me, might she turn down my invitation? Even if she did say yes, might her decision be based on my mentioning the grand Cadillac—should I mention it at all?—and offering to take her where everyone would see her in it? Well, there was this: She had smiled at me that one day.
Had she? Or had she just looked back?
There was something else that was entering into my decision, not yet made: that she was related to the kept woman of Augusto de Leon, that we had shared the image of her years ago.
“Who?”
The telephone had been answered by a woman—Isabel’s mother, Tina?—and I had asked for Isabel Franklin.
“Who?” the voice asked again; I detected an edge of annoyance. At me? At anyone who called her daughter? Then I remembered: “May I speak to Alicia?”
“Oh, yes, she’s here, yes, I’ll call her.”
As I froze in terror at what was already happening, the woman called out, “Is-sa-bel!” Did I detect a trace of pointed sarcasm in the way she phrased the name, stretching each syllable?
I might still hang up; she would never know who was calling; I would …. If Isabel didn’t recognize my name, that would mean she hadn’t inquired about me, as I had about her, and then—
“Hello?”
I stopped myself just in time from calling her Alicia: “Isabel?”
“Yes.”
Emboldened by the courage I was dredging up, I identified myself—“Johnny.” Johnny? The name I didn’t use for myself had come forth without my intention, and I quickly identified myself again: “It’s John.” No reaction from her, more panic for me. “John Rechy. From school.” Into the deadly silence that extended, I shoved added words that I believed formed an invitation to her to go with me to the Oasis Drive-In. Before the vile silence could extend again, I added, “In my uncle’s new Cadillac. Will you?”
“Yes,” she said, “that would be nice.”
Had the Cadillac cinched it? What if the address she would have to give me—my relief leaped to anxiety—was the one she had made up to transfer to El Paso High and was not really where she lived, if my gossipy sister was right? And what if when I reached it, she would not be there?
Doubts and questions intruded on my happiness. Had Isabel been out on dates?—and so would be much more sophisticated than I? I felt reasonably sure she hadn’t, the way she acted, so aloof, the way others came eventually to react to her, matching her indifference.
She had given me an actual address, of a small neat house in one of the poorer, though not the poorest, sections of the city, I noticed as I drove up. There was no way she could have given this address and been allowed to transfer across the tracks. Did she know that I, too, lived in a poor section—but not across the tracks—and had she therefore told me where she really lived? Or was she just as eager to go out with me as I was to go out with her and that was it, just that?
I walked to the door, knocked, greeted her mother, Tina, the kept woman’s sister!—that thought took my breath away. She was pretty but not beautiful. I bowed slightly before her, to impress her with my good manners, which my mother had drilled into us. (Even when we were poorest, she insisted that we cross our forks over our knives on the plates, to signal that we didn’t care for “seconds,” although at that time we hardly could afford “firsts.” Among some of the formerly privileged immigrants, poverty was not talked about, as if the subject would be rude.)
When she saw me, Isabel did not react in surprise. That assured me that she had known all along who I was when I called. She looked prettier than ever, much prettier, so pretty. Was it possible that eventually she might come to look like the kept woman, her aunt?
In a blue dress fitted to her body, she seemed to me to have more curves than any of the other girls at school. Was that only because the dress was meant to show her off?—unlike the loose sweaters and blouses the others wore. And—was she wearing stockings? Older women wore them all the time, younger ones on special occasions, but most of the time younger girls wore white socks, bobby socks. Yet there it was, yes, she was wearing sheer stockings and high-heeled shoes. Perhaps I was only now allowing myself to look at her fully, without pretending that I didn’t notice her. Was it possible that, this very evening, I would be able to erase the feeling I still nurtured of something very wrong in the encounter with Miss Edwards? I was so enthralled by Isabel’s presence that I hadn’t answered her hello until now:
“Hello, Isabel.” More doubts instantly: In the course of the evening, would I have to explain my pretended cool demeanor of previous times, thus revealing my infatuation? Would she leave me isolated with a one-sided declaration?
She did not seem awkward at all as we walked toward the finned spaceship that managed to gleam especially brilliantly even though the sun was just about to sink into deep dusk. Nor did she seem particularly impressed, as if she would expect nothing less. Her poise annoyed me because I was sure that, despite my rigid intent, I seemed anxious and awkward. I was holding my hands firm to keep them from shaking.
She was waiting for me to open the door for her.
“Thank you.”
“You’re welcome, Isabel.” I took that opportunity to practice the name she went by.
“Oh, yes,” she said easily, “you may be wondering about this. I don’t really live here, you know. I just come here to visit now and then, a poor friend—and I happened to be there when you called.”
At the telephone listed as her mother’s? No question now; she had given a false address at school.
She stepped into the car gracefully, tucking her dress neatly under her lap, and then, discreetly, smoothing her stockings to obliterate any possible wrinkle. She placed her small purse carefully beside her. Then she did this: She held her hands in her lap—properly, I assumed; yet it seemed a strange dissonant detail, as if she was hiding something.
Now what? While I was wondering how to fill the looming silence in the car, I noticed that her eyes were … appeared to be … amber, even in measured light, amber, not brown—although perhaps I only hoped so. And her eyelashes—would there be a time when I would not be compelled to notice this?—were not only curled but very curled and long.
I flooded the silence with music from the radio. It issued a loud blast of Mexican music, country Mexican music, charro music my uncle’s wife had probably been listening to.
“You like Mexican music?” she asked me.
I didn’t. It seemed old-fashioned to me. In the poorer sections of the city, the air would be suffused with a cacophony of sung laments, loud, pulsing into the air, Mexican male and female singers, and strumming guitars, romantic songs in which women sorrowed over lost opportunities at love and in which men yearned for what was lost, for what was never found, deeply lamented, longing for what was still sought, what was never recovered, almost crying voices. Younger Mexicans listened to American songs, Harry James, Frank Sinatra, jitterbugging music. On the radio I had acquired years ago, by collecting stamps from the comic strip page of the newspaper, I listened to dramatic shows—Lux Radio Theater was my favorite—and mysteries: I loved the dramatizations of Poe, creepy voices, screams, secrets. And I listened to classical music, sitting outside on the steps we called a porch. Those times, I would notice my father lurking about, as if to share the sounds of the music he, too, loved but not daring to commit himself to the sharing.
Alicia—I must remember to call her Isabel!—was waiting for my answer. Now it became even stranger to me that she continued to hold her hands on her lap, rigidly, guarding whatever she was guarding—or hiding? “Oh, sometimes, I do like Mexican music,” I felt it safe to answer—I did like, very much, “Las Mañanitas,” the Mexican serenade
my father still sang to my mother on her day, now accompanied by two or three old musicians. “Do you like Mexican songs?”
“No,” she said.
I turned the radio off, not knowing how to shift the stations. There were so many panels on the dashboard, so many knobs.
“It’s not too hot today, is it … Isabel?” I must implant that name in my mind.
“Not too, no.” She turned to smile at me. It was a dazzling smile. It was so: If she wasn’t beautiful yet, she would be soon.
“Do you like school?” she asked.
I wasn’t sure; sometimes I did, sometimes not. Some classes I did like especially: English and mathematics, although my arithmetic teacher would throw me into confusion when he sent me to the board to solve a problem and at the same time stroked my neck. I didn’t like gym unless I could be alone on the bars. Then, I liked the sense of my body challenging motion, and, too, I noticed what calisthenics did for my body, forming muscles.
“Yes,” I said, “I like school. Do you?”
“No. I can hardly wait to get out and leave.”
Leave? It seemed like a curious betrayal, now that we were getting together. “Where do you want to go … Isabel?”
She looked out the window, away, her silhouette against the declining light that was etching desert mountains against the darkly brilliant sky. There seemed to be for her a lingering moment of longing when the hands on her lap seemed to release whatever she held. “To Mexico City,” she answered.
“Oh,” was the only response I could think of.
At the Oasis Drive-In, there they were, the students from school, munching on hamburgers dripping with yellow cheese, slurping malted milks, sipping Cokes, gobbling fries in their cars; “rich” Anglos, the popular ones. I recognized a cheerleader, giggling as she did constantly at school; she stopped giggling and gaped when she saw us in the Cadillac. My spirits soared; no one was driving a more spectacular car. I waved at those staring. Isabel barely smiled in their direction.