Fifth grade
I once gave a lecture called “Quiet as Snow” at a librarians’ conference where I told the story of my many childhood libraries and mentioned a much-borrowed book. Why did that little book from so long ago stay with me all these years? Writing is the tug of a question, but you don’t know the question until after you’ve written the answer.
This essay was one of two written for the Thomas Wolfe Lecture, the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and delivered on October 21, 2014.
My first crush was over a book, and not just any book, but a book about a house. Virginia Lee Burton’s The Little House. My brother Kiki and I were wild about this picture book as kids and checked it out of the Chicago Public Library seventeen times. Okay, maybe I’m exaggerating, but what I remember for sure is that we memorized its pages, we fell asleep with the book, we wanted to keep it, and we even planned to steal it. Can you blame us? Like many inner-city children, we had no idea you could buy a book. For a long time I thought books were so valuable they were issued only to institutions and not individuals. We’d never seen a bookstore or books that didn’t have a stamp in them that said “Property of Saint Mel’s” or “Chicago Public Library.”
One exception. My cousins had a collection of books behind a glass cabinet in their apartment thanks to Aunty Lily, who worked at a book-binding company. I read bits and pieces of Charles Kingsley’s The Water-Babies, fascinated by the illustrations, but was never able to read more than a page or two at a time, because I was told it was rude to prefer books over cousins.
The only books we owned as children were the glossy cardboard ones you could get at Woolworth’s or the supermarket, but these didn’t count as real books to me. As a kid, I’d never seen a store that specialized only in books. In our neighborhood anything that mentioned books was prefaced with the word “exotic,” and that meant for adults only. Nowadays with bookstores disappearing the way of the dodo bird, I bet there are plenty of kids who haven’t seen a bookstore either.
We may not have known where to buy a book, but we did know the price of The Little House by checking the cards tucked inside the front cover pocket. Back then library books came with two cards tucked into a manila pocket glued onto the front page. This card had the name of the book and price on it, and it also had a rubber-stamped date that told you when the book had to be returned. It stated in clear letters along the border there would be a twenty-five-cent fine if you lost the cards. I touched these cards over and over to make sure I wouldn’t lose them, and blame the Chicago Public Library for the beginning of my obsessive-compulsive anxieties.
Kiki and I got a fifty-cent allowance each Sunday. If we pooled our money and saved for a few months, we could own our favorite book. We meant to tell the librarian we’d lost it and pay for it, so it wasn’t technically a theft. But the idea of lying to a librarian was infinitely more difficult than stealing a book, and we gave up on the plan before carrying it out.
The Little House is the story of a house set on a pretty country hill. The landscape changes as the years pass, but the house is solid and constant. All the while, lurking beyond the horizon is the faint glow of the city, growing steadily closer with the decades. We see the horse-drawn carriages giving way to automobiles, the country roads paved over with steam shovels, the clothes of the homeowners changing with the times. Only the house remains the same as everything around it is altered, the city gobbling up the countryside, replacing it with tall buildings and elevated trains, so that in the end, the house finds itself no longer in the country but in the middle of a busy downtown street, neglected and shabby, but still as good as new deep down inside. Finally, at the climax of the book, the house is rescued by the original owner’s great-grand-descendants, who haul the house away on wheels and drive it out into the countryside and place it on a beautiful hill spangled with daisies just as when the story began.
The Little House arrived at a time when my life wobbled. My brother Kiki had been my best buddy while our older brother, Al, was away in military school, but I found myself alone on Al’s return. It was hard for me to make friends. I was not pretty. I had asymmetrical bangs thanks to my mother, who invented the Vidal Sassoon look years before Vidal Sassoon. My school uniform, a plaid skirt, was patched in the front because Mother had scorched it accidentally while ironing. At school I was convinced everyone who saw me was staring at the patch on my skirt. I knew what it was like to feel like the Little House when it was sad, afraid, and run-down. I needed to know that, though the world around me was often frightening, I would be all right in the end, especially in my family, where things happened nobody told you were coming, or they told you and you weren’t listening.
I remember climbing into the backseat of our Chevy once and asking, “Where we going?” “Mexico,” my mother said. I looked out the rear window and caught a last glimpse of our apartment, 1451 West 63rd Street, second-floor rear. It was just another graceless Chicago building whose best feature was its fifty-dollar-a-month rent. Four rooms with linoleum floors. Nothing to love, but it was home. My heart sank.
Fifth grade
The story of The Little House gave me courage. It opens with the man who built the house declaring, “The Little House shall never be sold for gold or silver and she will live to see our great-great-grandchildren’s great-great-grandchildren living in her.” No wonder this book was a favorite! Why couldn’t my own grandfathers make such a promise? Why couldn’t Father? He traveled back and forth to his hometown, Mexico City, almost every year the first six years of my existence, or at least that’s the way it felt to me. Could it be Father was homesick even when he was home with us?
My Mexico City grandparents lived at Fortuna, number 12, in the neighborhood officially named la Colonia Industrial, but more commonly known as la Villa or Tepeyac for its most famous visitor—la Virgen de Guadalupe, in 1531. If only Abuelito Cisneros had declared that the house on Fortuna would never be sold, not for Mexican pesos or U.S. dollars, so that I wouldn’t have had to live long enough to witness its mint-candy facade painted a fecal brown. Even if it hadn’t been sold, how could Abuelito have bequeathed the Fortuna house to eighteen grandchildren scattered across two countries.
My mother’s father, Grandpa Cordero, was a widower before I even began grade school. In Chicago’s Lawndale neighborhood, Grandpa shared his dark and dreary two-flat at 3847 West Grenshaw with four of his grown children. Uncle Maño, who didn’t work for reasons we never thought to ask; Aunty Lily, thrice married (and twice divorced from the same man!); Aunty Margaret, raising two daughters alone; and upstairs, Aunty Lupe, her husband, Pete, and their three kids. No room for any more guests there, that was for sure.
We whirled about Chicago from apartment to apartment in neighborhoods where we were able to find a flat on the cheap. Father’s forays back to Mexico kept us constantly broke, until finally Mother, born the year of the stock market crash, figured out we needed a house for stability. Like so many working-class women, Mother knew a house meant safety from the wolf at the door.
Maybe Father never would’ve followed Mother’s advice if Divine Providence hadn’t stepped in and given him a good kick in the pants. In January of 1966 the pipes in our old brownstone froze, burst, and forced us to haul water up four flights of stairs in glass milk gallons. When Father saw our icy coat sleeves, shoes, and mittens, he realized it was time. He sold his beloved new Chevy station wagon for three thousand dollars, borrowed money from any relative who would trust him, and placed the down payment on our first home, a two-story bungalow in Humboldt Park on Chicago’s Near North Side.
At our old address we lived on the top floor of what was once an elegant one-family brownstone at 2152 West Roosevelt Road. It was already divided into three-flats when we moved in. We told everyone we lived on the third floor, but technically it was the fourth, because of a raised basement. Behind a hidden door on the second-floor hall, you climbed up a narrow flight of stairs to what were once the servants’ quarters. That was our flat. You entered by way of a middle room, but this room outfitted with two beds served as a bedroom for my four younger brothers and me.
Imagine how overjoyed we were at our new address to turn the faucets and have water gush out. We could walk easily to the nearest public library only five blocks away instead of the five-mile hike to the library on Madison off Western Avenue. And best of all, I no longer had to sleep with my little brothers. I had a real bedroom—the size of a closet, but I wasn’t complaining. That closet was mine.
The Little House sparked a lifelong hunger for a house of my own, a place to restore yourself from the world that might rough you up a bit now and then. A house meant a lot for a girl who lived with too many people, in run-down neighborhoods, who talked to trees, whose family thought she cried too much because she did. A house, even borrowed for a little, but all your own, would mean a place to imagine and be safe. All my life I’ve dreamt and dream about a house the way some women dream of husbands.
When my father was sick and knew he had only a few months to live, he confessed to me in private, “I wanted to leave each of you children a house. But I’ve failed.” And then he started to cry.
It astonishes me even now to think Father’s idea of success was leaving each of his seven kids a house! Father had given us so much by not giving us much.
Necessity. That’s what he gave us. Necessity taught us to value what we worked for, to recognize others who, like us, didn’t have much, to be generous to others because we hadn’t had much. When you haven’t had much, you never forget what that feels like. Compassion. That’s what Father gave us.
In my life because of my poor choices, men came and went, but mainly went. I couldn’t rely on them to buy me a pumpkin shell. I bought my house with my pen. All by myself. Without having to borrow from my father and mother for the down payment. I bought my first house in San Antonio with tremendous fear, in a neighborhood so beautiful I didn’t think I belonged. Could I meet the mortgage on a freelance-writer’s income? Two women in my life convinced me I could. My literary agent and my then accountant, Pam Hayes.
When the Brooklyn writer Betty Smith finally earned some money with A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, she went out and bought herself a house in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. For her, for her mother before her, for my mother, for so many working-class women, a house is a life raft to keep you afloat when the storms sweep everything else away. Maybe things have changed, but back then, that’s what a house meant to women. For Betty Smith it meant something she could give her kids to make up for the hard times her writing had caused all of them to suffer.
Smith once wrote, “Serene is a lovely word. It means to me, a walled garden with a gate in it and end-of-the-day sunshine and peace and sanctuary.”
One of the first things Smith did with her new house was pull down the front porch and build that wall about the garden. The neighbors were aghast. I understand. A front porch is supposed to be for waving at neighbors and chatting. But for a writer it’s when you look like you’re not doing anything that you’re actually writing; people who don’t write don’t understand this.
I’m reminded of something the novelist Helena María Viramontes shared. When she was young and still living at home, her mother would see her writing at the dining room table and say, “Mi’ja, ayúdame, no estás haciendo nada.” Daughter, help me, you’re not doing anything. Her mom worked so hard physically that Helena would feel what she was doing in comparison wasn’t really work. She’d sigh, get up, and help her mom.
When I was young and still living at home, my father would call me vampira for writing at night. I couldn’t tell him the night was my own private house.
In grad school we were assigned to read Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space for a seminar. It left a wrinkle in my brain then, and rereading it all these years later wrinkles me now. He said: “If I were asked to name the chief benefit of the house, I should say: the house shelters day-dreaming, the house protects the dreamer, the house allows one to dream in peace.” He forgot to add: but only if one lives alone and can afford to have someone else clean it.
My first house was my invented Mexico. I painted, decorated, and built it according to the Mexico of my childhood memories. (Only now as I write this do I realize that my house in San Antonio is painted the same shade of pink as the Little House of the storybook. We’d found a historic house in the neighborhood that had originally been pink when it was built in the 1880s. Its original owner, it turns out, was Cuban. Maybe he was homesick too.)
When I added an office to my house, I chose a Mexican Bauhaus style that reminded me of Mexico City, a building with un lavadero, an outdoor laundry sink, and a spiral staircase leading up to a rooftop terrace. I built it with the idea of taking care of others—my mother, my fellow writers, a space for an assistant or houseguests.
And now I’m searching for my last house. I imagine one with a high wall. Someplace to protect me from folks who want to interrupt my writing. At sixty I want a house pared down to what nourishes my own spirit. I want a wall for privacy, un zaguán, a vestibule between the outside and inside areas, and again un lavadero, an outdoor sink, so I can wash under the sky and think and think. I want a house to take care of me.
The Little House planted a seed without my knowing it all these years. What I’ve longed for is a refuge as spiritual as a monastery, as private as a cloistered convent, a sanctuary all my own to share with animals and trees, not one to satisfy the needs of others as my previous homes have done, but a house as solid as the Little House, a fortress for the creative self.
The day I announced I was leaving my house in San Antonio, March 31, 2011
