Free American Chica by Marie Arana Page B

by Mother’s bedside, holds her hand, and as the contractions intensify, so do the festivities on the other side of the wall. The birth of an Arana Cisneros is no private affair. More like a family extravaganza. It’s 1945, a decade before women’s suffrage comes to Peru, and the principal duty of a woman is to bear and raise children. The responsibility of her relatives is to see that she gets it done. A child is the finest expression, the ultimate bond of an extended family. To that end, courtships need to be vetted, the union of two families consecrated, and when the fruit of that marriage drops, the family attends as if it’s a party. It’s as simple as that.
    These things may make all the sense in the world to aPeruvian mother, but to mine—an Anglo-American of free-spirited pioneer stock—they are more vocabulary she doesn’t have. It doesn’t occur to her that an act she considers private will be a spectacle for people she’s only just met.
    From the instant Vicki exits her mother’s womb, she is family property. The Arana Cisneroses break out the champagne. Abuelita longs to hold her, teach my mother all she’s learned about babies in having six of her own. Mother, on the other hand, is nervous: wary as a feline dam. In her mind, this child is not the cumulative handiwork of a complicated Peruvian family. It’s her only blood relative in a bewildering land.
    She digs in, marks her turf.
    When Papi brings Mother back to my grandparents’ bedroom, the struggle begins in earnest. The Aranas may not realize it. There’s no reason for them to suspect a new calculus at work: They’re in their own country, their own culture, their own home. But there’s an American card in the game now. Mother, too, does not reason through differences. She only knows she wants what her instincts tell her she has every right to have: both hands on her infant child.
    As days wear on, the tug-of-war becomes more evident. In the mornings, my grandmother asks for the child. Mother reluctantly hands her over. By week’s end Abuelita delegates her daughters to carry the babe out to her. Mother’s face twists into a snarl. By month’s end, the household is sending in the squealing ama: La señora de la casa is anxious! She wants the baby right now!
    My grandfather’s sister, Tía Carmen, visits. She’s a serious woman who fancies herself a writer but is, in my grandmother’s view, a weird little crone with a meddlesome side.
    That gringa is the very picture of sadness, Tía Carmen pipes up. Her little face breaks my heart.
    One day, months into the ground battle, when Vicki is already cooing and crawling, Mother decides she’s had enough. Thewomen in the family are playing with the baby in the other room. Their laughter tinkles through corridors, brittle as mockery, skittering under the door like shards. When she hears it, she glowers into a corner where her maidservant huddles. The girl stares back at her, fighting the tears.
    Qué pasa, Concepción? my mother asks.
    Your eyes, señora. They make me want to cry.
    That’s the thing that begins it. Mother bangs out of the room, shuttles down the corridor, hell-bent for the laughter. She swings the door open and stands there, large, in the frame.
    Le toca? Feeding time? Abuelita asks her, and the faces all turn up to see. She is a mammary gland, a biological necessity. That is all.
    It’s an account she recites over and over, like the bead of a penitent’s rosary, like the point where a frayed string is broken: They have no gauge on her feelings. It’s a family of strangers. Her child is Peruvian. And a gringa in this country always stands at the door.
    She is old now. She sits at a wooden table my father has made for her in their sunny kitchen in Maryland, recounting a moment that is more than half a century, half a world away, and yet her voice is shaking with indignation. Her account involves far more than woman and mother-in-law. Whole cultures are in dispute. My gringa