Free Woman Hollering Creek by Sandra Cisneros Page A

father had shrugged sheepishly and said, No speak English.
    But he was no economic refugee, no immigrant fleeing a war. My father ran away from home because he was afraid of facing his father after his first-year grades at the university proved he’d spent more time fooling around than studying. He left behind a house in Mexico City that was neither poor nor rich, but thought itself better than both. A boy who would get off a bus when he saw a girl he knew board if he didn’t have the money to pay her fare. That was the world my father left behind.
    I imagine my father in his
fanfarrón
clothes, because that’s what he was, a
fanfarrón
. That’s what my mother thought the momentshe turned around to the voice that was asking her to dance. A big show-off, she’d say years later. Nothing but a big show-off. But she never said why she married him. My father in his shark-blue suits with the starched handkerchief in the breast pocket, his felt fedora, his tweed topcoat with the big shoulders, and heavy British wing tips with the pin-hole design on the heel and toe. Clothes that cost a lot. Expensive. That’s what my father’s things said.
Calidad
. Quality.
    My father must’ve found the U.S. Mexicans very strange, so foreign from what he knew at home in Mexico City where the servant served watermelon on a plate with silverware and a cloth napkin, or mangos with their own special prongs. Not like this, eating with your legs wide open in the yard, or in the kitchen hunkered over newspapers.
Come, come and eat
. No, never like this.

    How I make my living depends. Sometimes I work as a translator. Sometimes I get paid by the word and sometimes by the hour, depending on the job. I do this in the day, and at night I paint. I’d do anything in the day just so I can keep on painting.
    I work as a substitute teacher, too, for the San Antonio Independent School District. And that’s worse than translating those travel brochures with their tiny print, believe me. I can’t stand kids. Not any age. But it pays the rent.
    Any way you look at it, what I do to make a living is a form of prostitution. People say, “A painter? How nice,” and want to invite me to their parties, have me decorate the lawn like an exotic orchid for hire. But do they buy art?
    I’m amphibious. I’m a person who doesn’t belong to any class. The rich like to have me around because they envy my creativity; they know they can’t buy
that
. The poor don’t mind if I live in their neighborhood because they know I’m poor like they are, even if myeducation and the way I dress keeps us worlds apart. I don’t belong to any class. Not to the poor, whose neighborhood I share. Not to the rich, who come to my exhibitions and buy my work. Not to the middle class from which my sister Ximena and I fled.
    When I was young, when I first left home and rented that apartment with my sister and her kids right after her husband left, I thought it would be glamorous to be an artist. I wanted to be like Frida or Tina. I was ready to suffer with my camera and my paint brushes in that awful apartment we rented for $150 each because it had high ceilings and those wonderful glass skylights that convinced us we had to have it. Never mind there was no sink in the bathroom, and a tub that looked like a sarcophagus, and floorboards that didn’t meet, and a hallway to scare away the dead. But fourteen-foot ceilings was enough for us to write a check for the deposit right then and there. We thought it all romantic. You know the place, the one on Zarzamora on top of the barber shop with the Casasola prints of the Mexican Revolution. Neon BIRRIA TEPATITLÁN sign round the corner, two goats knocking their heads together, and all those Mexican bakeries, Las Brisas for
huevos rancheros
and
carnitas
and
barbacoa
on Sundays, and fresh fruit milk shakes, and mango
paletas
, and more signs in Spanish than in English. We thought it was great, great. The barrio looked cute in the daytime,