The first time I see anyone with skin the color of a caramelo I am walking behind the Grandmother and step on the Grandmother’s heel.
—Clumsy! Look where you’re going!
Where I am looking is the rooftop laundry room where the girl Candelaria is feeding clothes through a wringer washer. Her mother, the washerwoman Amparo, comes every week on Monday, a woman like a knot of twisted laundry, hard and dry and squeezed of all water. At first I think Amparo is her grandmother, not her mama.
—But how could a girl with skin like a caramelo have such a dusty old mother?
—¡Hocicona! the Awful Grandmother says, calling me a big-mouth. —Come here. And when I am within reach, thwacks me on the head.
The girl Candelaria has skin bright as a copper veinte centavos coin after you’ve sucked it. Not transparent as an ear like Aunty Light-Skin’s. Not shark-belly pale like Father and the Grandmother. Not the red river-clay color of Mother and her family. Not the coffee-with-too-much-milk color like me, nor the fried-tortilla color of the washerwoman Amparo, her mother. Not like anybody. Smooth as peanut butter, deep as burnt-milk candy.
—How did you get like that?
—Like what?
But I don’t know what I mean, so I don’t say anything.
Until I meet Candelaria I think beautiful is Aunty Light-Skin, or the dolls with lavender hair I get at Christmas, or the women on the beauty contests we watch on television. Not this girl with too many teeth like white corn and black hair, black-black like rooster feathers that gleam green in the sun.
The girl Candelaria with long bird legs and skinny arms is still a girl, even though she is older than any of us. She likes to carry me and pretend she is my mama. Or I can say, —Caw, caw, caw—and she will drop a little piece of Chiclets gum in my mouth as if I was her little bird. I say, —Candelaria, swing me in a circle again, and she will swing me. Or, —Be my horsie, and she tugs me on her back and gallops across the courtyard. When I want, she lets me sit on her lap.
—And what do you want to be when you grow up, Lalita?
—Me? I want to be … a queen. And you?
Candelaria says, —I want to be an actress, like the ones that cry on the tele. Watch how I can make myself cry. And we practice trying to make ourselves cry. Until we start laughing.
Or she takes me with her down the street when she is sent to run an errand. On the way there and back, we say, —Let’s play the blind game, and take turns walking down the street with our eyes shut, one leading, the other being led. —Don’t open your eyes until I say. And when I do, I am standing in front of the gate of a strange house, the girl Candelaria laughing and laughing.
¿Qué quiere usted?
Mata rile rile ron.
Yo quiero una niña.
Mata rile rile ron.
Escoja usted.
Mata rile rile ron.
Escojo a Candelaria.
Mata rile rile ron.
When we play mata rile rile ron I want to hold hands with you, Candelaria, if your mother will let you, just for a little, before you go back to the job of the laundry, please. Because did I tell you? The girl Candelaria is a girl who likes to play even though she wakes up with the rooster and rides to work asleep on the hard shoulder of her mother, the old washerwoman, the long ride into the city, three buses to the Grandmother’s house on Destiny Street each Monday, to wash our dirty clothes.
—How can you let that Indian play with you? my cousin Antonieta Araceli complains. —If she comes near me, I’m leaving.
—Why?
—Because she’s dirty. She doesn’t even wear underwear.
—Liar! How do you know?
—It’s true. Once I saw her squat down behind the laundry room and pee. Just like a dog. I told the Grandmother, and the Grandmother made her scrub all of the roof with a bucket of soap and the broom.
Who can say if the cousin Antonieta Araceli is telling the truth or telling a story? To see if it’s true that Candelaria doesn’t wear underwear, my brother Rafa makes up this game.
—We’re going to play “It” except you can’t be tagged “It” if you squat down like this, understand? Now I’m “It.” Run!
Everyone, brothers and cousins, scatters across the courtyard. When Rafa tries to tag Candelaria, she hunkers like a frog, and the rest of us squat down too and look. Candelaria smiling her big corn teeth smile, skinny legs drawn beneath her.
Not underpants. Not exactly. Not little flowers and elastic, not lace and smooth cotton, but a coarse pleat of cloth between her legs, homemade shorts wrinkled and dim as dish towels.
—I don’t want to play this game anymore, Rafa says.
—Me neither.
The game ends as suddenly as it began. Everyone disappears. Everyone is gone. Candelaria squatting in the courtyard, grinning her big teeth grin like kernels of white corn. When she gets up finally and comes toward me, I don’t know why, I run.
—Stop that! Stop it, Mother scolds. —What’s wrong with you?
—It’s that my hair is laughing, I say.
Mother makes me sit on her lap. She tugs and parts my hair in every direction.
I’m rushed to the outdoor sink, my scalp scrubbed raw with black soap till my crying makes Mother stop. Then I’m not allowed to play with Candelaria. Or to even talk to her. And I’m not to let her hug me, or chew the little cloud of gum she passes from her mouth to her fingers to my mouth, still warm with her saliva, and never let her carry me on her lap again as if I was her baby. —Never, understand?
—Why?
—Because.
—Because what?
—Because they won’t let me, I shout from the courtyard balcony, but before I can add anything else they bring me inside.
Candelaria in the courtyard leaning against the wall, biting a thumbnail, or standing on one stork leg, or slipping off her dusty shoes with the backs squashed like house slippers, making a circle with her big toe on the courtyard tiles, or folding sheets, or hauling a tin basin of wet laundry to the rooftop clothesline, or hunkered in a game we made up, the dingy cloth of her underpants like the wrinkled diaper Jesus wears on the cross. Her skin a caramelo. A color so sweet, it hurts to even look at her.