“Hey white girl.”
The Girls were calling. The Rosario girls. Sari and Maritza, maybe even Wanda. They might all be there, sipping on molasses-colored bottles of malta, snapping their gum, sucking down mango juice on their front porch. The large pine in their front yard blocked their porch from view. The Rosario house was emerald green and the color of the giant tree was so similar that it seemed like a needled extension of their home.
“Mira blanca,” they said again, and I smiled and headed over to their place, a soft-shingled two-story a few houses from my own. They might have said “white girl” or “blanca,” “tiza” or just plain “chalk”; it didn’t matter, because they were talking to me.
I was the white girl.
My status had been confirmed long before I met them. I had been a paleface on the reservation, and then a honkie, a cracker, even a saltine, in city schools and city streets where my face stood out like a puff of lint on a gown of midnight silk. Even in Catholic school, as I dipped my head into our recess huddle, pretending to know more than I did about boys and marijuana, I’d chew on peanut butter and jelly sandwiches while my friends ate jarred octopus and talked of their quinceañeras—the coming-out parties they’d have in a few years—the line of girls who’d stand up with them, the dresses they’d wear. I’d blink my eyes and take in their lives as though they were publicly funded educational programming. I knew that being white was not such a good thing, and that their approval of me was an exception. When the seventh-grade social studies teacher showed Roots for three days straight, I became only whiter, my skin glowing like the moon as I took in slave ships and tried to avoid the dark eyes of just about every other student.
More than anything else about myself, I knew that I was white. Plain old white. Not even Italian or Polish or Greek—there were no vowels rounding out my last name, no swollen consonants, no grandma’s language on the tip of my tongue. Neither dark enough to qualify as interesting, nor blonde enough to beguile, my long hair did not curl, and except for a thick pair of lips that earned me the unsought evaluation from other kids “you don’t look like a regular white girl”—except for these things, nothing about me stood out.
“Hey blanca,” came their voices.
And though I had wished myself anything but pale, had torn into my mother with questions about our ancestry, mining hard for the slightest bit of spice, in the end, I knew who I was.
“Hurry up, white girl,” they called.
And whether there were two of them or five, they were the Girls. Hardly anyone called them by their names. The fact that they looked so much alike might have accounted for the group name. Hair hung like rope down their backs, they had full mouths, thin bodies, and were narrow as grade-schoolers. Las Flacas, they were called in the neighborhood, the Skinnies.
I was with them every day. Once I’d convinced my mother to let me transfer from Nazareth Academy and start attending East High like other kids on the street, I’d stop by their house on the way to school and home. I’d climb the stairs to the Girls’ room, where we’d listen to music and flip through fashion magazines—castoffs from their older sisters, who had jobs and could afford Vogue and Mademoiselle.
The Girls were fashion hounds. It was all about style with them, and an otherwise suspect person whose hair happened to be en moda or who wore shoes like they did in magazines was all right with them.
“Ay que linda,” they’d gather around and say in unison about certain pocketbooks, earrings, or hats. “Cute!” Certainly they were more inspired by something on the cutting edge of style than by anything they ever heard at church or school.
The Girls didn’t have much money either, but their mother was a gifted seamstress who fashioned clothes based on things they’d eyed on MTV. She’d lay newspaper on the floor and snip out patterns for Gautier knockoffs.
“Mas corta?” Shorter? she’d asked as they circled and made demands for the latest miniskirt or palazzo pants.
Even back before we were friends, when we still cautiously eyed each other, fashion was a part of our relationship.
When our family first moved to Lamont Place, I recognized the sour-faced Puerto Rican girl who did not return my smiles, but wore the same striped sweater as me to School no. 33. Long belted sweaters were in style then, and ours were nearly to the knee and belted around the waist. It seemed to me that having the same sweater and being from the same street should have bonded us, and the fact that it didn’t could only be viewed as failure.
One time, my mother came home with a plastic container of spiced-up vegetables and a green garbage bag full of used clothes.
“Where’d you get this stuff?” we asked, as she bit into red peppers and corn.
“Oh, from Marta Rosario,” she answered, as if we should know who Marta was, as if Marta were a member of the family or, at least, a frequent visitor.
“She thought we might be able to use these clothes.”
They were still strangers then, but I’d seen the Girls and knew they were well dressed, and though dignity should have prevented it, I practically jumped into the bag. Hardly anything was usable. It was all too small, even the platform sandals I’d have killed to clog around in were half the size of my own feet.
My mother visited the Girls’ mother regularly, but that was her way; cup of coffee in hand, she’d wander into other women’s kitchens, and talk her way through the better part of an hour, wearing down their ears on the virtues of the White Mountains, the taste of fresh berries, the feel of snow in May. No one was ever a stranger to my mother for long, not the Pakistani family that had just moved in, the quiet old ladies across the street, nor Marta, whose limited English was no barrier to my mother, and may only have served to entice her. While Harun and Bada taught her about cooking with curry and Pakistani history, Marta taught her how to recite the rosary in Spanish. My mother loved these connections, in the same way that she loved watching birds.
Always, my mother seemed most energized by things just out of reach.