Free American Chica by Marie Arana Page A

1945, just as Hiroshima disappears beneath a swiftly banking cloud, Jorge and Marie Arana land in the port of Callao. Mother is telling me the story of her arrival now, and I can see her old eyes grow deep green at the thought of that morning.
    The two of them are standing on the deck of a homebound Argentine freighter, looking out at the swirling crowd. Mother’s belly is large with my older sister, Vicki, her face chalked with anxiety. She holds on to my father as she searches the landing, scanning brown faces for features like his. There! yells Papi, but when she wheels around to see, she cannot tell what he’s pointing at. A throng of strangers surges forward, waving arms at the floating steel.
    The Aranas are there: Abuelito in his hat and cane, Abuelita in her waisted silk, all five of my father’s siblings trussed up in their teatime best. When the young couple descends the gangplank,Abuelita steps forward to reach for the gringa across the swell of her first grandchild. She greets her warmly, moves her firmly to one side, and flings herself hungrily on my father. It’s perfectly natural—that show of partiality from a mother—but the message is unmistakable.
    The house on Calle San Martin is another indication of how different Mother’s life will be. It is walled off from the street, its front door at the top of an ornate staircase, its interior a seemingly endless warren of rooms. There’s an atrium at its center; a chapel with a crucifix. The living rooms are dark with Victorian furniture and relics of a venerable past. Papi’s five brothers and sisters—all adults by then—still live in this colonial town house: children minding their parents, South American style.
    These rooms are for you and Jorge, says her mother-in-law, addressing her in the well-enunciated Spanish one reserves for a child. What is being shown her is my grandparents’ own bedroom, with an extra room on the side.
    They move in, set up a nursery. It is, at first, a pleasant task. Clearly, my father is loved beyond measure. His progeny will be received with all the honor that an eldest male’s firstborn deserves. For Mother there’s the immediate problem of language: the wall of incomprehensible chatter that rattles from dawn until dusk. Papi is sympathetic. He’s lived through those puzzlements himself. But in the case of my mother, the social pressures are more acute: Here is a round pink foreigner with the verbal capacity of a backward child in a society that prizes, above everything, the turn of a graceful phrase.
    Qué hiciste hoy, Marie? What did you do today? The family’s eyes shift onto the gringa’s face at the dinner table, and her head whirls with the little Spanish she knows. She wants to say that she organized her drawers.
    Limpié mis cojones, she attempts, putting one vowel where another should be. I cleaned my balls. She wonders why they squirm in their chairs.
    She’s as spoiled as a princess, as scorned as a cretin, and before September is upon them she moves through the house like a rabbit through flames. Her husband is back at his desk in the Department of Public Works, and she is marooned, untongued, expatriated, alone.
    Abuelito speaks English, as do some of the others, but he rarely appears, and besides, a clear proclamation has been made in the house: The only way she’ll learn Spanish is if she’s made to speak it, by everyone, all day. An exception is made the day the United States claims victory over the Japanese emperor, bringing the war to a close: They congratulate her in her own language. She excuses herself, ducks into the bedroom, sits on the bed, and cries.

    VICTORIA IS BORN in Lima’s Clínica Franco. My grandmother had expressed a preference for that hospital, where they allow long visits from the family, as Peruvians are accustomed to having. When Vicki enters this world, she enters it as a princess during the Conquista might have, with family courtiers in an adjoining room.
    Abuelita sits