“Speaking of New York,” Nivea began. She hurried her sign of the cross and kissed the crucifix on her rosary. Nivea, the latest of our laundry maids, was “black-black”: my mother always said it twice to darken the color to full, matching strength. She’d been nicknamed Nivea after an American face cream her mother used to rub on her, hoping the milky white applications would lighten her baby’s black skin. The whites of the eyes she now trained on me were the only place where the cream magic seemed to have worked. “Show us what your father brought you.”
“Lucky, lucky,” Nivea continued before I could explain. “These girls are so lucky. What a father! He doesn’t go on a trip that he doesn’t bring back a treasure for them.” She enumerated for Gladys, who had been working for us only a month, all the treasures el doctor had brought his girls. “You know those dancing dolls from the last time?”
I nodded. One thing you never did was correct Nivea and risk being called a young miss-know-it-all. But the dancing dolls were from two trips back. From the very last trip, the gift had been tie shoes that were good for our feet, a very bad choice, but that’s what came of my mother’s being in charge of what the surprise would be. Before he left on each trip, my father always asked, “Mami, what do the girls need?” Sometimes, as with this trip, Mami replied, “Not a thing. They’re all set for school.” And then, oh then, the surprises were bound to be wonderful, because as Papi explained to Mami, “I didn’t have the faintest idea what to get them. So I went to Schwarz, and the salesgirl suggested …” And off would come the wrappers from three suggested dancing dolls or three suggested pairs of roller skates or this very night, three wonderful surprises!
Gladys took the postcard back and smiled at it. “What did your father bring you?” she asked.
“Not yet.” I let out a sigh, disappointed that I couldn’t oblige their curiosity, for even Chucha had given half a roll over to hear what the surprise had been. “We have to eat our supper first.”
“Speaking of supper,” Nivea said, reminding the two others, “our work is never done.” Then she added, “Night and day, and what surprise do we get!” She grumbled on as she braided her kinky black hair into dozens of tiny braids. Her complaints were different from Chucha’s. They were bitter and snuck up on you even during the nicest conversations. Chucha’s were a daily litany, sometimes cried out at the dog, sometimes scolded at the rice kettle she had to scrub, sometimes mumbled under her breath at Doña Laura, whose diapers she had changed and whose actions, therefore, she had a right to criticize.
Supper that night was spaghetti and meatballs, thank goodness, so it wasn’t difficult to clean one’s plate. I spooled the strands on my fork and rolled my two meatballs around until I got tired of that, and ate them both. Mami was in a good mood, letting the baby go off with the nursemaid, Milagros. Usually Mami insisted the baby stay, bawling in her high chair, so the family could have one official meal together like “civilized people.” Tonight the family were spared the torments of civilization, and of vegetables, for Mami allowed us to serve ourselves, which I did, just enough peas to go around my neck in a necklace, had they been strung together. My sisters and I ate quietly, listening with wonder to our father’s stories about taxis and bad snowstorms (How could a snowstorm be bad?!) and the Christmas decorations on the streets. We felt the blessedness of the weeks ahead: this very night, a wonderful surprise, and in less than twenty days, according to the little calendar with doors we opened with Mami every night at prayers, Christmas. And more surprises then! We were lucky girls, Nivea was right, oh so lucky.
Finally, Papi turned to Gladys, who was pushing the rollaway cart around the table, clearing off the plates. “Eh—”
“Gladys,” Mami reminded him; after all, she was the new girl and Papi had not had much occasion to use her name.
“Gladys,” Papi asked. “Would you bring me my briefcase?”
“In the study,” Mami directed. “On the desk next to the smoking table.”
Away Gladys hurried, her slippers frantically clacking, de-lighted to be sent on such an important errand; then she was back, his leather briefcase cradled like the baby in her arms.
“Good girl!” Papi gave Gladys a bright, approving smile and snapped open the locks. The lid flew up like a jack-in-the-box. Inside were three packages, wrapped up in white tissue paper, and clustered together in a tender, intimate way like eggs in a nest. Papi handed one to each of us and then lifted a tiny box from the side pocket of the case and smiled at my mother.
“You dear.” Mami patted his hand. She opened the box, pulled out a doll-size perfume bottle, undid the stopper and smelled. “This is the one all right! You know, I never did find the old bottle. But you remembered, even without the name!” She leaned over and kissed Papi’s cheek.
There was the sound of ripping paper and Papi cheering us on: “¡Ay, ay, ay!” Gladys lingered by her cart, organizing the dirty dishes, slowly, into neat stacks before rolling them away to the kitchen where Nivea and Chucha would wash them. But once we’d torn open the boxes, my sisters and I gave each other baffled looks. Mami leaned over and lifted a small cast-iron statue from Yoyo’s box: an old man sat in a boat looking down at a menacing whale, its jaws hinged open. Sandi set hers on the table and tried to look pleased: it also was an iron statue of a little girl with her jump rope frozen midair. I didn’t even bother to unpack mine. I stared down at a girl in a blue-and-white nightgown who stared up at a puffy canopy of clouds. What could the Schwarz salesgirl have been thinking of this time?
“What on earth are they, Papi?” Mami asked, picking up Sandi’s little jump-roper and looking into the dotted eyes.
“Guess …” Papi smiled coyly, then added, “They’re all the craze now. The girl at Schwarz said she’d sold half a dozen already that day.”
Mami turned the statue over and read out loud from the underside: “Made in the U.S.A.” Then she noted a keyhole for a tiny key. “Why”—she looked up at Papi—“it’s a bank, isn’t it?”
My father beamed. He took the jump-rope girl and set her down on the table before him. She stood poised on her stand; an arc of wire rose over her head and looped through two needle-holes in her fists. The polka dots on her dress and the yellow in her hair had been painted on the iron. “Watch this,” he said, picking a penny from the pile of change he had rattled on the table. The coin fit in a groove on a fencepost beside the girl. Papi pulled a lever at the base of the stand, the lever popped back in, the coin dropped with a tinkle and tap, and then all of us—my sisters and Mami and Gladys and I—blinked, for the girl took a skip and the jump rope turned a turn.
A sigh of wonder passed around the room.
“Mechanical banks.” Papi grinned and picked another penny from the pile. “So that my girls start saving their money to take care of us, Mami“—he gave her a wink—“when we’re old and grey.”
“Do mine,” Yoyo begged, and Papi placed a penny in the old man’s slotted hands so that the coin looked like the wheel of a boat. When he pulled the lever, the sailor turned and the coin rolled into the whale’s mouth.
My sisters and I burst out laughing. “Jonah’s Bank,” Mami said, reading the name on the side of the boat, and then with a look of mischief in her eye, she said, “Ay, Lolo, I wonder what the sisters would say to that?”
Papi’s eyebrows rose up. “Wait till you see this one.” He laughed, lifting my bank out of its box. “Actually, these Jonah and Mary banks are supposed to encourage the children to save for their offerings at church. Surely the sisters can’t object to that?” He stood a penny in a slot on the canopy of cloud and pulled the lever at the base. The coin disappeared; the young woman, her halo painted on her hair, rose up towards the clouds, her arms lifted at the joints of the shoulders. As the lever popped back in, she descended to the ground.
“Blessed Mother!” Gladys whispered. Then everyone, including my mother, laughed because we had forgotten Gladys was still in the room, and there she was, neck craned forward, her ey
es as round and coppery as those very pennies that had worked such wonders.
Papi held up a coin to her. “Here, Gladys, give her a spin.” But Gladys backed off and looked shyly at her slippers. “Go on,” my mother encouraged her, and this time she came for-ward, wiping her hands on her apron, and took the coin from my father, who directed her to stand it on the cloud. Again the coin rattled down, and Mary ascended for a moment, then fell back to earth until the next penny saved. Gladys’s face was radiant. She made a slow, dazed sign of the cross.
“They’re like children,” my father said tenderly when Gladys left the room. “Did you see her face? It’s as if she had seen the real thing.”
After dinner as my parents gossiped over their expressos and cigarettes, my sisters and I shared a disappointed look. I tried giving my Mary a shake to see if I couldn’t get the pennies out and buy myself a box of Chiclets.
“No, no, no, Carlita! They stay in there saved.” My father patted his pocket. “Papi keeps the keys.”
The banks turned out not to be such a disappointment after all. They were far better than tie shoes, that was certain. At school they created a stir among the other children. The most popular girls in my class elbowed each other in line to stand next to me. They invited me to help myself to my favorite red Lifesaver when it was the next one unwound from its wrapper in the roll, and even when it wasn’t the next one, several were collapsed to get to it. Sister read Doña Laura’s note explaining that this was an offertory bank, and everyone got to work a penny in the cloud and watch the little figure rise. Then Sister, whose job it was to make a lesson out of everything fun, told our class how Our Blessed Virgin did not die but got to take her body to heaven, she was so good. The class gazed dreamily at the bank, half-expecting it to shoot up to the ceiling in a puff of smoke.
I took my bank back home heavy with coins. My father un-locked the bottom and out came a few less than a hundred pennies, and he kindly made up the difference and gave me a big silver dollar that looked more like jewelry than money. Then business slowed. Once in a while, my mother’s canasta friends, who declared they hated pennies in their purses, disposed of them gladly in the whale’s mouth or the canopy of cloud. Of course, the jump-rope girl was the favorite, lucky Sandi. But Gladys protested that the best one of all was the Mary bank, and she used up all the pennies in her mayonnaise jar to work the miracle. The pity was it didn’t take quarters.
Eventually, the banks found their way to the toy shelf along with all our other neglected toys. Christmas was coming! My mother complained that she would die of exhaustion—there was so much to be done. Our pageant costumes had to be sewn. Next door Tía Isa needed help getting the garden and house ready for the big Christmas-night bash to be held there this year on account of this was her first divorced Christmas, and she should be kept busy. Then the grape tree had to be cut down at the seashore, painted white, and hung with silver and gold balls and showered with tinsel. What a sight! Especially at night when Mami turned off all the lamps and the tree blazed with lights, blinking on, off; little vials like the stoppers of nose drops filled first with colored water and then drained out.
As the day approached, with fewer and fewer windows to open on the Advent calendar, my sisters and I were unruly with excitement, but the grownups seemed too busy to care. The house was fixed up as for a party. The giant poinsettias in the courtyard looked like flaming torches. Nuts and fruits filled the silver platters at the centerpieces of tables and sideboard. An elegant soldier took an almond in his mouth and cracked it open for you, and every time he did so, my mother sighed and said, “It’s a pity there’s no national ballet for the girls.” Gladys was busier than ever, polishing silver, preparing canapes, following her mistress through the house with vases of calla lilies and bougainvillea. Instead of the radio merengues, Gladys now sang an endless repertoire of Christmas carols:
Glo-oh-oh-oh-oh-ohh
Oh-oh-oh-oh-ohh
Ria!
Best of all, Mami seemed not to mind the singing anymore and once or twice broke out into song herself in a delicate, quavery soprano:
A Santa Claus le gusta el vino,
A Santa Claus le gusta el ion …
And, of course, at the Christmas Eve pageant, all the children sang:
Adestes fideles
Laetes triumphantes …
I, costumed in a nightgown with a tinsel crown on my head, was to announce to the poor shepherds tending their flocks by night:
Do not be afraid
For behold I bring you
Tidings of great joy:
The baby Jesus is born!
But I was so flustered by the lights in my eyes and the sea of faces in the packed auditorium that I stumbled over my lines and said, “The baby doll is born!” instead of “the baby Jesus.” Mami said no one but she, who knew I wanted a baby doll from the baby Jesus, had caught the slip.
The next morning the baby doll was under the tree, a ribbon in her gold hair, and a bottle tied to her wrist. She cried out “Mama” when I laid her down and wet her diaper after she drank a bottle through a little hole in her mouth. And that was not all! The room was a treasure cave of gift-wrapped boxes. “Something for everyone,” Papi said, laughing. And a lot for his darlings! Each one of us sat at the center of a pile of ripped paper and empty boxes and gaily colored toys. Even the baby had her sizable pile, though she preferred crawling about, rip-ping up paper, and putting the shreds in her mouth while poor Milagros scrambled after, scolding that no charge of hers was going to choke and die on the very day our Savior had been born. All the servants were there, Mario and Chucha and Nivea and Gladys, opening their gifts carefully so as not to tear the bright tissue paper. Their faces lit up: a wallet with a pretty lip of green in the billfold!
That night, although I had got to bed much later than usual, I couldn’t sleep. Even when I shut my eyes tightly in an honest effort, I saw now my new doll, now my puzzle or coloring book loom larger than life in my vision, and I had to turn on my light and look at my gifts to make sure they were real. Mami came by briefly from the noisy party next door in a long, silvery gown, her pale arms bare, one arm linked to Tio Mundo’s arm. She wagged her finger at me for having my light on, but she didn’t seem to mind really, and she laughed a lot when my uncle shot himself dead several times with Yoyo’s new revolver. Much later, Gladys stopped in on her way back from helping out next door. “It’s past midnight, young lady!” But instead of turning out the light, she sat herself down on my bed, took off her slippers, and began massaging her tired feet. We could hear the uncles and aunts and Mami and Papi singing carols in the distance. “It’s a gay old time next door,” Gladys said. Doña Laura had danced a bolero with Don Carlos that was as good as in the movies. Don Mundo had taken off his shirt and done a workman’s jig on top of the dining room table. Crazy Doña Isa had been thrown or threw herself into the swimming pool, you couldn’t be sure.
Gladys’s gaze wandered around the room, taking in the clutter of new toys before alighting fondly on the shelf. A hopeful look came on her face. From her pocket she brought out her new wallet, opened it and withdrew the ten pesos from the fold. “I’ll buy the bank from you,” she said in a hesitant voice.
The bank! Why that old thing was certainly not worth ten brand new pesos. Not since the gadget had gotten rusty from its being left out in the patio overnight. Half the time the spring didn’t work at all. “Why, Gladys, no,” I advised her.
Gladys’ gaze faltered. She put the bill back in the fold and held the wallet out. “I’ll throw in the wallet too.”
For a moment, I didn’t know how being good worked. Most times, Mami was around, telling me the rules: you weren’t supposed to give away gifts you received. Gladys should keep her wallet. But that meant I should keep that old bank, which to give away would be a generous deed. Muddled, I looked-up at the shelf.
“You can have it for nothing,” I said. Gladys’s mouth dropped open. The surprised look in the young maid’s eyes c
onfirmed my suspicion that I had done something I would get punished for if caught, so I added, “Don’t tell, Gladys, okay?” The maid nodded eagerly as she left the room, the bank bundled in her apron and tucked under her arm.
But Mami was one to always notice the stain on one’s placemat at the table or the bruise accidentally punched on a little cousin’s arm or the empty space on the bedroom toy shelf. “That reminds me,” my mother said a few weeks after New Year’s when the whole household had been mobilized to look for her reading glasses on top of her head. “Where’s your Mary bank, Carla?” Just then, as Gladys and I exchanged a guilty look, Mami found her glasses on her head and slipped them down on her nose. She looked curiously from me to Gladys.
“My bank?” I asked, as if I’d never heard of such a thing.
“Come, come,” my mother said, and again she looked at me and again she looked at Gladys.
“Ah, that bank,” I answered, and explained that it was “around.”
Mami was very patient and said nicely, “Well, let’s find it, shall we?” And when we didn’t, of course, find it anywhere in my room—although I gave a very credible, thoroughgoing search, looking even inside my tie shoes—Mami did not persist but let the matter drop.
That Sunday after the maids went off to early mass, my mother inspected their quarters while my father kept watch by a window. Later, I heard my parents’ concerned voices be-hind the closed door of the study. Then the door flew open, and my father came down the hall, followed by my scowling mother, and just in time, I ducked behind the wicker chair as they went by. Then they were back again in a somber single file, my father, a grumbling Chucha, and my mother bringing up the rear. The same procession went back and forth with Nivea, then Milagros, and last of all, with Gladys, her eyes small and round. The door shut. Voices were raised in the study. I watched a powderpuff of dust turn cartwheels in a cross-breeze. In the corner, a shred of tinsel glimmered with leftover holiday cheer. Finally, the door flew open, and Gladys, sobbing into her upraised skirt, scurried down the hall.