Aunt Delfina’s house reminded me a little of Nana’s house. It was small, one-story, and filled with plants. Except it wasn’t red. It was pink. Pepto-Bismol pink. Instead of music or Spanish soap operas, I only heard birds chattering and chirping as we walked up to the front door.
Tony had just reached for the doorbell when a large woman appeared at the door. She had a flowered scarf on her head and was wearing a flowered housecoat to match. When she opened the screen door I saw she had pink slippers on, which matched the house.
“¡Ay! ¡Antonio!” she yelled when she saw Tony. He soon disappeared into her embrace. I stood staring at her flowered head buried in Tony’s hair. Then she looked up and spotted me.
“Hello. Who’s your little friend, Toño?” Aunt Delfina asked.
“Oh, sorry, Tía. This is Cesi Álvarez. I met her on the train, and invited her for dinner.”
Aunt Delfina looked a little confused. “Your daddy isn’t John Álvarez is he?”
“Yeah. He is.” It was impossible that this flowery woman with the Pepto-Bismol house would know my dad! Things like that didn’t happen in real life.
Instantly, I was in her arms, too. “Oh, I haven’t seen you since you were in diapers. I can’t believe it! What are the chances? That’s why I believe in miracles, Toño. This is why. Little miracles like this happen every day.” She backed up and looked me over. “So how is your papá?”
“He’s fine . . . but how do you know him?”
Aunt Delfina opened her mouth to answer, but Tony broke in. “Let’s go inside and talk about this, okay, Tía?”
“Oh, I’m so sorry. I was so shocked to see her here that I forgot all about being a good host. Come in. Please.”
We followed her into the house. In even more ways it reminded me of Nana’s house. Lots of pictures and statues everywhere. But there wasn’t a speck of dust. The place was absolutely immaculate. Tony and I sat on the couch as Aunt Delfina disappeared into the other room, which by the sounds coming from it I guessed was the kitchen.
Tony stretched out on the couch, obviously quite at home here. I looked around from my spot. Then I saw in a corner a little altar just like Nana’s, except there were different people in the pictures, and the statue in the center wasn’t St. Martin. It was a woman wearing pink and blue. But just like Nana’s altar, there were candles, and photographs, and little objects next to the pictures. When I looked closer, one of the photographs looked familiar.
Aunt Delfina came back into the living room with three glass bottles of Coke and a bowl of peanuts, still in the shell. She smiled, but her smile caught where I was looking and got even bigger.
“Oh, so you like my ofrenda?” she grinned.
“Pardon me?” I asked.
“Do you know what that is, Cesi? You look confused,” Tony said.
“Nana has one, but I don’t know what it is,” I replied honestly.
Aunt Delfina walked over to it and pointed things out as she talked. “This is my sister, and my little daughter. They both died too young. And this is my mamá.” She made the sign of the cross over her chest. “And this is the Virgin of Guadalupe. She’s my patron saint. I pray to her for all the people that I have loved who have gone on to Heaven before me.” She stared lovingly at the pictures.
“But what are those things next to the pictures?” I asked.
“Oh. These are just some of their favorite things. In case they decide to visit me.” Aunt Delfina continued to smile at the pictures.
I looked at Tony. She couldn’t really think they would come visit her. But Tony had gone back to cracking peanuts. Apparently he didn’t think this was strange at all.
“My Nana has something like that at her house. Except the pictures are different, and the stuff next to them is too.” I continued to check out her ofrenda.
Aunt Delfina didn’t look surprised. “Of course she does. The people she knew were different, and they liked different things. Anybody who has seen a few people pass before them has one. At least us Mexican families do.”
I moved closer to the picture of a young woman. “Did you say she was your mom? She looks familiar. I think Nana has a picture just like that,” I said, a little confused.
Aunt Delfina nodded. “That’s my cousin Lydia. She was your Nana’s brother’s wife, so your Nana could have a picture of her on her ofrenda.”
I looked up, shocked. I took a deep breath. “Does that mean we’re related?” This whole impossible situation was getting weirder by the second.
Aunt Delfina smiled at the picture, not noticing the looks of surprise on my face and Tony’s. “Yes, we’re related, cousins I guess. That’s why it’s a little strange that you would just run into each other on the train. Small world, huh?”
Aunt Delfina turned back to us and then sat in a wicker rocking chair with her Coke. “So how’s your daddy? I haven’t talked to him in awhile.”
I took a sip from my bottle. I guessed if Aunt Delfina thought it was normal to just run into your cousin on a train to Mexico, I should just let it go. I answered her, “He’s fine. Were you very close to him?”
Delfina nodded. “I grew up with your daddy. We were in the same class until he moved. I guess right after the fifth grade. There weren’t many kids like us in that class, so we all kind of stuck together. Then later on, when it got harder to find work in Arizona, I moved out to California for a little while and worked with him. That was before I moved here.”
“So you guys were friends?” I asked.
“I guess so. Although, we were family first. In those days everyone who was related lived close to each other. People had big families. We looked after each other, but we didn’t play together. Your daddy was a great football player when we were small, so he was always playing, but us girls weren’t allowed to play sports. I usually just sat by myself and watched.” Aunt Delfina took a sip of her own Coke and stared at one of her brightly painted walls. But it wasn’t so much like she was staring at the wall as through it, as if she were looking out at that schoolyard of long ago.
“School was okay. It was tough though. The other kids were all white. They were always polite, but it was hard to become friends with any of them. The teachers though—well that just depended on your luck,” Aunt Delfina said.
“What do you mean?” I asked.
Aunt Delfina leaned forward in the rocker and looked at us. “To begin with, we weren’t allowed to speak Spanish . . .”
I interrupted, “Dad said something about that. But if you didn’t speak English, then how could you . . .”
“Ah, so you see how it was hard. You had to be quiet until you were pretty sure you knew what to say in English. Otherwise . . . WHACK!” She slammed her hand down on the arm of the rocking chair.
Tony stopped cracking his peanuts for a second, “You mean they hit you if you said a word in Spanish?”
Aunt Delfina nodded. “With a ruler. Right on your knuckles. I don’t have to tell you that I hardly ever talked in school. I remember one day your dad really had to use the bathroom. We must have been in second grade. He didn’t know what to do until finally he just asked in Spanish anyway. The class laughed and then . . . WHACK!” Aunt Delfina closed her eyes for a minute.
“Did the teacher let him go to the bathroom?” I asked, wincing at the idea of my poor young dad getting hit with a ruler.
“No. Of course not. He couldn’t remember what to say. So he just went back to his seat with a sore hand, and he still had to go. He didn’t even cry. He just waited until the recess bell and then ran as fast as I had ever seen any child run, all the way to the bathroom.”
“Aw, man, that’s terrible!” Tony shook his head.
“Yes. It was. But we all went through it,” Aunt Delfina said, quietly.
“But why didn’t you tell your parents? They would have done something,” I said. Mom would have been at the school so fast the principal’s head would have spun.
Aunt Delfina shook her head. “Our parents wouldn’t know what to do. They spoke even less English than us, and because of how poor most of us Mexicans were, we were ashamed of how our parents looked, how they dressed. Our parents were just grateful that we got to go to school at all. Most of them hadn’t gone past the third grade. They did their best by making sure we were as neat and clean as possible. Our clothes were always ironed, our hair always wet down and combed neatly. That was how they tried to protect us.” Aunt Delfina took another deep breath.
“So we had to think of ways to protect ourselves. We would practice speaking English to each other when we walked back to our own neighborhood after school. We would correct each other and compliment each other. But that wasn’t really the worst thing though. The language, I mean,” she said.
I wasn’t sure I wanted to hear any more stories. A slap on the hand with a ruler for speaking a different language would have been enough to convince me not to teach my own children Spanish when I grew up. I sighed, and then looked back at Aunt Delfina.
She looked like she had just remembered something. “I haven’t thought about this day in years. It was right before your daddy moved to California, so we must have been in fifth grade. People just didn’t trust us. They thought we were dirty, or liars, just because we were born brown, and they were white. It didn’t matter how clean our mamás scrubbed us, or what our papás taught us.”
I thought of the two girls in my class last year with the too-tight braids and burrito lunches, and felt a little sick to my stomach for not even trying to be nice to them.
Aunt Delfina continued, “I had learned by that time that it was best not to stand out too much. I just did my work and never raised my hand in class. I did my best to disappear.”
Tony hadn’t touched the peanuts in a while. He leaned forward with me, the same look of worry on his face.
“Your daddy wasn’t like me though. He was smart. He liked to talk in class. He had learned English, even though he still had an accent, and he was going to use it. Anyway, he always got straight A’s, and most of the kids really liked him. He was the pride of the family. All of that didn’t change the fact that he was Mexican though.”
“What do you mean?” I asked in a whisper.
“Well, one day we were about to take a spelling test when Cindy Bradshaw realized her brand new set of colored pencils was missing. Now, why she thought to check them right before a spelling test, I’ll never know. Anyway, our teacher Mrs. Grady called all the class to attention and asked if anyone had seen the pencils. No one had. So Mrs. Grady asked Cindy where she last had them. Cindy said she put them in the closet that very morning. So Bobby Macintosh said that whoever was last in the closet probably took them. Mrs. Grady asked who it was, even though we all knew who it was.”
“Why did you all know?” Tony asked.
“Because Cesi’s daddy was the closet monitor. Every morning he was the last one out of the closet, and every morning he closed them. So right in front of the entire class, Mrs. Grady asked John to come to the front of the classroom. He did. She asked him if he had taken Cindy’s pencils. He said no. So calmly, he looked her right in the eyes and said no.”
Aunt Delfina shook her head at the memory of it. “Well, Mrs. Grady would have none of that. She called him a filthy thief. She said he was just proof that no matter what you tried to do, you couldn’t get a Mexican to change his true nature. They would always be lying, dirty and lazy. Your daddy’s eyes never left hers. He didn’t cry. He didn’t yell. His face remained completely calm.”
“So then she took the ruler out?” Tony asked quietly, not wanting to know, but unable to keep from asking.
Aunt Delfina shook her head. “No. That would have been too easy. We were all used to that. Mrs. Grady had a point to prove. Your daddy had been driving her crazy all year with his perfect grades and perfect behavior. She wanted to prove that she was right. She wanted everyone to know that she had always been right.”
I was angry. “About what? What was she always right about?”
“Don’t get so upset. People still feel the way she did. A lot more people in that town felt like she did than didn’t. They didn’t trust Mexicans for all kinds of reasons. They thought Mexicans were taking all the jobs away from the citizens, even though most of those jobs were as fruit pickers or housecleaners. Jobs most self-respecting white people wouldn’t take.”
I was so confused. Here Aunt Delfina was telling me this horrible story about the white people in the town my father and she had grown up in, and I was so angry at them. But at the same time, I was part white too.
As if she could read my mind Aunt Delfina said, “Not all white people were like Mrs. Grady. She just had a very popular opinion. Anyway, after Mrs. Grady had gone on for a while about how she had known all along what kind of boy John was, she had him go and make a sign to wear around his neck for the rest of the day. It said, ‘Thief.’ Then she tied it around his neck and had him stand at the front of the classroom wearing it with both his arms raised at his sides, as high as his shoulders. He stood that way until lunch. With his arms out like that. It must have been at least two hours. And his arms never shook. He didn’t cry. His face was as calm as if he’d been lying on the beach.”
“Did they ever find out who really stole the pencils?” I asked, hoping maybe there would be some justice at the end of this story.
Aunt Delfina nodded. “Funny thing was, Cesi, they were never stolen. Cindy found them in her book bag at the end of the day. She told Mrs. Grady. Mrs. Grady just nodded her head and then dismissed us.”
Tony’s mouth gaped open. “You mean she didn’t apologize for what she did?”
Aunt Delfina smiled weakly. “No. She never did. She didn’t have to.”
We all sat there in silence. Waiting for something. Maybe some sort of happy ending.