Free Wild Child: Girlhoods in the Counterculture by Chelsea Cain Page B

it hung on his blackened clothes. He bathed in a washtub in water Balbina heated pan by pan on her outside fire. Then each of the children bathed in fresh water, then Balbina. Everyone changed into clean clothes, Balbina and the two girls into dresses, with fresh ribbons in their neatly braided hair, and Froylan and Maely into white shirts and dark pants. Dressed to the nines, everyone in San Antonio took a stroll. Even the baby girls had gold earrings and ribbons in their hair. We walked down the street toward the school, stopping to nod or talk to friends. Tight clusters of girls in bright dresses giggled past us. In the distance we might hear ‘Tears on my pill-ow, pain in my heart, caused by you,’ sung by the groups of young men who lounged in front of the general store after it had closed, smoking cigarettes while the sunset turned to dusk.

    At the small store by the river Senora Bobadia sold cubes of frozen sugar water, colored red, orange, blue and green, called ‘Ideals.’
    These came in a clear plastic wrapper which you chewed open to get at the sweetened ice. All the colors tasted exactly the same, a sweet, faintly chemical taste. On the day we got our ears pierced we were allowed two Ideals each. We took them to old Dona Donatila’s house and held them against our ears until the skin went numb. Dona Donatila was a tiny, toothless woman with a tenacious grip. She poked a threaded needle through our ears and tied the thread into loops. Shelly didn’t cry at all. On the way home we ate our softened Ideals, our hands reaching up of their own accord to touch our cold ears. We left the loops of white thread in our ears for two weeks, turning them twice a day. My first real earrings were a tiny pair of straw sandals, painted pink, that my mother bought in Orange Walk.

    After my uncle and his family returned to Minnesota for the spring semester, my mother worked in the cane fields. She was the only woman who did, except for the occasional wife or daughter who helped out for an afternoon. My mother got up before dawn and waited by the general store with the other workers for a cane truck to come by. Whoever had rented a truck and needed to get cane in that day would pay to have it cut and loaded. My mother started out cutting cane but eventually switched to loading it. She stood on a board over the back wheel of the truck and passed great bundles over her head. Sometimes, she told me, there’d be ants swarming on the cane. She made maybe six dollars a week. Now, when I ask her why she did it, she shrugs. ‘I wanted to make a little money. I wanted to see what it was like.’
    No one had much money in San Antonio. Two families were rich enough to own generators. There was one television, run off one of the generators. It belonged to the Castillo family, and they watched it religiously in spite of the fact that the picture on the screen was barely visible. Froylan and Balbina refused to take anything my mother gave them toward food. One night as they sat around the table in the lamplight, my mother slipped a twenty-dollar bill into Balbina’s hand. They sat and talked, and later the three of them walked down the hill to visit friends. While they walked, Balbina, unaware of what it was, absentmindedly shredded the paper; the scraps dropped from her hand and fell to the ground, leaving a trail like a line of leaf-cutter ants. Twenty dollars was a shocking amount of money and Balbina was scandalized. Later it became a great joke and the mention of it would make all three laugh uproariously.

    We went to Orange Walk with Balbina a few weeks before Easter. Balbina was there to buy Easter dresses for Mirna and Teti, and we followed her into shops packed tight with children’s white dresses, bolts of red velvet, display cases overflowing with lace and ribbons. Balbina wore her leather shoes with the raised heels. She bartered fervently in her soft Spanish. Shelly and I had never had new clothes for Easter before, but our