"What Tita Said"

For Modern Love

The backseat of the van smelled like old urine and a fresh dump. Nobody understood why AJ was still crapping his pants at nine years old. The family blamed Auntie Bea. They blamed it on her marrying a white man and moving 1500 miles away from the family to live in Vegas, where she worked for the casino by day and worried about a cheating husband by night. I didn't complain when they sat me next to AJ because, at eleven years old, I was the second youngest and the cousins said I had to pay my dues. Tito and Tita sat in the front, Mom, Dad and the aunts in the middle, and grandkids in the back.

Had she known AJ smelled like a toilet and remembered that the summer forecast in Mexico always called for unbearable heat, Mom wouldn’t have put her foot down to Tia Nora’s suggestion that we rent a pickup truck, on the grounds that the Mexican highways weren’t safe enough. So, for the next hour, we sang Elvis Crespo and stuck our noses out the small cracks in the van windows like canines, hurrying them back inside when lawless drivers cut us off with inches to spare a head-on collision. 

Conversations with Mom’s side of the family usually turned to boys and dating because it was the only subject that didn’t bore the aunts. While Mom forbade us to date until we turned 16, they soaked in the stories of Becky’s transient high school relationships with the sports captains and musicians, all of which had one thing in common: they were güeros. White boys. My cousins and I were becoming the first generation of Almaguer women who didn’t date and were likely not to marry Latino men because our parents opted out of the Latino neighborhoods of Chicago and into the Irish ones with the better schools. We knew the family preferred we marry into Mexican families to keep our traditions alive, but dated white boys anyway.  Becky was the first and wouldn’t be the last to get serious with a white boy.

For the next hour on our way to Monterrey, the back seat of the van filled with jokes about white boys and brown boys. Tita kept to herself in the front seat until someone mentioned the blacks. She didn’t engage in conversation because half the time she didn’t know what any of us were saying. Thirty-something years after coming to the U.S. from Mexico, she couldn’t keep up with the way young people talked. So when she did speak, we listened and remembered. I knew Tita didn’t think warmly of black people, or even dark-skinned Latinos, after Mom told me the story of her boyfriend, Hank, a man darker than the darkest Mexicans in Little Village. Mom would have married him if not for Tita. That’s how it went on Dad’s side, too. When Sonica came out of Auntie Juana looking like a black baby, Tia Chole called Sonica pobrecita (poor thing) and Aunt Juana never spoke to Tia again. 

So when Tita turned her head to the back row of the van and shouted, “I disown any granddaughter who marries a black man!”, not sure then if it was the truth or her racist humor, I soaked it in like my stool-scented t-shirt and carried its weight into the afternoon when the first black boy asked me to be his girlfriend. 

Not even after I flipped him the bird in front of the entire seventh grade class did Hiram understand I didn’t want to be his girlfriend. Before I could bat an eyelid at the boy I did like, the young Ms. Molly Meade gave me my second-ever demerit right then and there as the whole school shuffled into the gym for the assembly. She yelled my name like I was the first Catholic schoolgirl in Beverly to raise the middle finger to a black boy, and since Beverly was 85% Irish Catholic, I might’ve been. For a second her face matched the hot red flames of her hair so that her freckles disappeared and I understood why the boys called her a flaming leprechaun. After a year at Christ the King School, she still squealed when good-natured Catholic schoolboys and girls violated the Golden Rule.  

She pulled me aside in English class later that day. Because she was also to blame for my first-ever demerit--gifted to me when I shouted the word “shit” in front of her--she required an explanation  “This is very unlike you,” she began. With the rest of the seventh-grade class now pretending to read The Giver behind us, I started to cry. My first course of action was to blame it on my new best friend because everyone knew Hannah Pienton was meaner than any boy bully in the neighborhood. Even though Hannah wouldn’t do the same for me, I left her out of it and instead told my first ever lie to my favorite teacher. “Actually, Ms. Meade, I stuck this finger at Hiram’s face,” and flipped her my ring finger. 

I was prepared to lie my way out of it until she asked why I did it. Some things I didn't understand and others I didn't want to admit, but the part I could quantify was really quite simple. Hiram was the most annoying boy I had ever met, and his bug eyes stopped at me.

Hiram subscribed to the laws of grade school romance that dictated all lovestruck boys drive the girls they like mad by acting like infants. He didn’t speak but screeched and cackled like he was afraid of being ignored, and he flailed his thick arms and legs around like a tyrannosaurus rex so that the floors vibrated to announce his presence. Indigo, the only black girl in his class, was his best and only real friend. She sat with him at lunchtime and during school assemblies, and while she made friends with the other six-grade girls, each day Hiram walked home with only the silence his classmate begged of him during school.

The middle school boys called him oreo: black on the outside, white on the inside. As if the color of his skin didn’t draw enough attention to him, he spoke with a faint lisp, played guitar when all other boys played football, and never stopped smiling. One day a few weeks before the assembly, Hiram batted his beautiful brown eyes at me and became the first boy to ever flirt with me. I ran away, afraid he’d ask me a question to which I didn’t have the answer he was hoping for.

That’s how it went in seventh grade. Hiram stomped his dinosaur stomp and looked at me with his dumb cartoon smile. Meanwhile, Hannah made jokes about his big lips and loud mouth while I listened, not able to put my finger on why I stuck my middle finger up at him, or why, when I saw him trailing not too far behind when school got out one day, I walked home a bit faster than usual so he wouldn’t catch up and ask me to be his girlfriend.

Ms. Meade ordered me to write a formal apology. The next day I sat on the steps outside the cafeteria and drafted the letter that was henceforth known as my rite of passage into adolescence. Had she told Mom and Dad that their sweet Emily had a mean streak, they would have grounded me for a week but at least helped me write the letter. But she didn’t, so I was left to it with my God-fearing conscious and sorry seventh-grade eloquence. It went something like this:

“Dear Hiram,

I’m sorry I stuck my middle finger at you in the gym. I did not mean to do it. I hope you can accept my apology.

From,
Emily Guzman”

I gave it to him the next day and he smiled like I had handed him a love letter. He continued to smile at me so big I forgot all about it once springtime came, and I did think about was the gap in his two front teeth that shined so bright against the blackness of his skin that it occurred to me just how white our world was.

In the months following the incident, I said hi to him in the hallway, where I never smiled too warmly, while he still showered me with Valentine’s Day candy and haikus that I hid from friends and tossed in the garbage when I got home. I still watched for him on the sidewalk when school let out and listened to Hannah put him down for things he couldn’t control.

On the last day of seventh grade, I dragged behind on the front lawn while everyone else walked home with their friends. I figured the end of the school year meant the end of Hiram’s unrequited romance, until he came up to me from behind, pulled me aside, and out came the question I hoped he never asked.

“Emily, will you be my girlfriend?”

I shouted at my neighbor Allison to wait up before I hurried some excuses, not thinking to tell him some truths, like Mom didn't let me date until I turned 16, and not wanting to tell him others, like at eleven years old, I sat in the back of a stinking van in Mexico and heard Tita say that no granddaughter of hers will ever date a black boy.