At the university I work for a program that no longer exists, the Educational Opportunity Program, that assists “disadvantaged” students. It’s in keeping with my philosophy, and I can still help the students from my previous job. But when my most brilliant student is accepted, enrolls, and drops out in her first semester, I collapse on my desk from grief, from exhaustion, and feel like dropping out myself.
I write about my students because I don’t know what else to do with their stories. Writing them down allows me to sleep.
On the weekends, if I can sidestep guilt and avoid my father’s demands to come home for Sunday dinner, I’m free to stay home and write. I feel like a bad daughter ignoring my father, but I feel worse when I don’t write. Either way, I never feel completely happy.
One Saturday the woman at the typewriter accepts an invitation to a literary soiree. But when she arrives, she feels she’s made a terrible mistake. All the writers are old men. She has been invited by Leon Forrest, a Black novelist who was trying to be kind and invite more women, more people-of-color, but so far, she’s the only woman, and he and she the only coloreds.
She’s there because she’s the author of a new book of poetry—Bad Boys from Mango Press, the literary efforts of Gary Soto and Lorna Dee Cervantes. Her book is four pages long and was bound together on a kitchen table with a stapler and a spoon. Many of the other guests, she soon realizes, have written real books, hardbacks from big New York houses, printed in editions of hundreds of thousands on actual presses. Is she really a writer or is she only pretending to be a writer?
The guest of honor is a famous writer who went to the Iowa Workshop several years before she got there. His latest book has just been sold to Hollywood. He speaks and carries himself as if he’s the Emperor of Everything.
At the end of the evening, she finds herself searching for a ride home. She came on the bus, and the Emperor offers to give her a lift home. But she’s not going home, she’s got her heart set on a movie that’s showing only tonight. She’s afraid of going to the movies alone, and that’s why she’s decided to go. Because she’s afraid.
The famous writer drives a sports car. The seats smell of leather, and the dashboard is lit like an airplane cockpit. Her own car doesn’t always start and has a hole in the floor near the accelerator that lets in rain and snow, so she has to wear boots when she drives. The famous writer talks and talks, but she can’t hear what he is saying, because her own thoughts are drowning him out like a wind. She doesn’t say anything, doesn’t have to. She is just young and pretty enough to feed the famous writer’s ego by nodding enthusiastically at everything he says until he drops her off in front of the cinema. She hopes the famous writer notices she is going to see Gentlemen Prefer Blondes alone. To tell the truth, she feels miserable walking up to the box office by herself, but she forces herself to buy the ticket and go in because she loves this movie.
The theater is packed. It feels to the young woman as if everybody is there with somebody, except her. Finally, the scene where Marilyn sings “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend.” The colors are cartoon-wonderful, the set deliciously campy, the lyrics clever, the whole number is pure old-style glamour. Marilyn is sensational. After her song is over, the audience breaks into applause as if this were a live performance, though sad Marilyn has been dead years and years.
The woman who is me goes home proud of having gone to the movies alone. See? It wasn’t that difficult. But as she bolts the door of her apartment, she bursts into tears. “I don’t have diamonds,” she sobs, not knowing what she means, except she knows even then it’s not about diamonds. Every few weeks, she has a messy crying jag like this that leaves her feeling shipwrecked and awful. It’s such a regular occurrence she thinks these storms of depression are as normal as rain.
What is the woman in the photograph afraid of? She’s afraid of walking from her parked car to her apartment in the dark. She’s afraid of the scuffling sounds in the walls. She’s afraid she’ll fall in love and get stuck living in Chicago. She’s afraid of ghosts, deep water, rodents, night, things that move too fast—cars, airplanes, her life. She’s afraid she’ll have to move back home again if she isn’t brave enough to live alone.
Throughout all this, I am writing stories to go with that title, The House on Mango Street. Sometimes I write about people I remember, sometimes I write about people I’ve just met, often I mix the two together. My students from Pilsen who sat before me when I was teaching, with girls who sat beside me in another classroom a decade before. I pick up parts of Bucktown, like the monkey garden next door, and plop it down in the Humboldt Park block where I lived during my middle and high school years—1525 N. Campbell Street.
Often all I have is a title with no story—“The Family of Little Feet,”—and I have to make the title kick me in the behind to get me going. Or, sometimes all I’ve got is a first sentence—“You can never have too much sky.” One of my Pilsen students said I had said this, and she never forgot it. Good thing she remembered and quoted it back to me. “They came with the wind that blows in August …” This line came to me in a dream. Sometimes the best ideas come in dreams. Sometimes the worst ideas come from there, too!
Whether the idea came from a sentence I heard buzzing around somewhere and saved in a jar, or from a title I picked up and pocketed, the stories always insist on telling me where they want to end. They often surprise me by stopping when I had every intention of galloping along a little further. They’re stubborn. They know best when there’s no more to be said. The last sentence must ring like the final notes at the end of a mariachi song—tan-tán—to tell you when the song is done.
The people I wrote about were real, for the most part, from here and there, now and then, but sometimes three real people would be braided together into one made-up person. Usually when I thought I was creating someone from my imagination, it turned out I was remembering someone I’d forgotten or someone standing so close I couldn’t see her at all.
I cut apart and stitched together events to tailor the story, gave it shape so it had a beginning, middle, and end, because real life stories rarely come to us complete. Emotions, though, can’t be invented, can’t be borrowed. All the emotions my characters feel, good or bad, are mine.
I meet Norma Alarcón. She is to become one of my earliest publishers and my lifetime friend. The first time she walks through the rooms of the apartment on North Paulina, she notices the quiet rooms, the collection of typewriters, the books and Japanese figurines, the windows with the view of freeway and sky. She walks as if on tiptoe, peering into every room, even the pantry and closet as if looking for something. “You live here …” she asks, “alone?”
“Yes.”
“So …” She pauses. “How did you do it?”
Norma, I did it by doing the things I was afraid of doing so that I would no longer be afraid. Moving away to go to graduate school. Traveling abroad alone. Earning my own money and living by myself. Posing as an author when I was afraid, just as I posed in that photo you used on the first cover of Third Woman.
And, finally, when I was ready, after I had apprenticed with professional writers over several years, partnering with the right agent. My father, who sighed and wished for me to marry, was, at the end of his life, much more gratified I had my agent Susan Bergholz providing for me rather than a husband. ¿Ha llamado Susan? he asked me daily, because if Susan called it meant good news. Diamonds may do for a girl, but an agent is a woman writer’s best friend.
I couldn’t trust my own voice, Norma. People saw a little girl when they looked at me and heard a little girl’s voice when I spoke. Because I was unsure of my own adult voice and often censored myself, I made up another voice, Esperanza’s, to be my voice and ask the things I needed answers to myself—“Which way?” I didn’t know exactly, but I knew which routes I didn’t want to take—Sally, Rafaela, Ruthie—women whose lives were white crosses on the roadside.
At Iowa we never talked about serving others wi
th our writing. It was all about serving ourselves. But there were no other examples to follow until you introduced me to Mexican writers Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Elena Poniatowska, Elena Garro, Rosario Castellanos. The young woman in the photograph was looking for another way to be—“otro modo de ser,” as Castellanos put it.
Until you brought us all together as U.S. Latina writers—Cherríe Moraga, Gloria Anzaldúa, Marjorie Agosín, Carla Trujillo, Diana Solís, Sandra María Esteves, Diane Gómez, Salima Rivera, Margarita López, Beatriz Badikian, Carmen Abrego, Denise Chávez, Helena Viramontes—until then, Normita, we had no idea what we were doing was extraordinary.
I no longer make Chicago my home, but Chicago still makes its home in me. I have Chicago stories I have yet to write. So long as those stories kick inside me, Chicago will still be home.
Eventually I took a job in San Antonio. Left. Came back. And left again. I kept coming back lured by cheap rent. Affordable housing is essential to an artist. I could, in time, even buy my own first house, a hundred-year-old home once periwinkle, but now painted a Mexican pink.
Two years ago my office went up in my backyard, a building created from my Mexican memories. I am writing this today from this very office, Mexican marigold on the outside, morning-glory violet on the inside. Wind chimes ring from the terrace. Trains moan in the distance all the time, ours is a neighborhood of trains. The same San Antonio River tourists know from the Riverwalk wends its way behind my house to the Missions and beyond until it empties into the Gulf of Mexico. From my terrace you can see the river where it bends into an S.
White cranes float across the sky like a scene painted on a lacquered screen. The river shares the land with ducks, raccoons, possums, skunks, buzzards, butterflies, hawks, turtles, snakes, owls, even though we’re walking distance to downtown. And within the confines of my own garden there are plenty of other creatures too—yappy dogs, kamikaze cats, one lovesick parrot with a crush on me.
This is my house.
Bliss.
October 24th, 2007. You come down from Chicago for a visit, Mama. You don’t want to come. I make you come. You don’t like to leave your house anymore, your back hurts you say, but I insist. I built this office beside the river for you as much as for me, and I want you to see it.
Once, years ago, you telephoned and said in an urgent voice, “When are you going to build your office? I just saw Isabel Allende on PBS and she has a HUGE desk and a BIG office.” You were upset because I was writing on the kitchen table again like in the old days.
And now here we are, on the rooftop of a saffron building with a river view, a space all my own just to write. We climb up to the room I work in, above the library, and out to the balcony facing the river.
You have to rest. There are industrial buildings on the opposite bank—abandoned granaries and silos—but they’re so rain-rusted and sun-bleached, they have their own charm, like public sculptures. When you’ve recovered your breath, we continue.
I’m especially proud of the spiral staircase to the rooftop. I’d always dreamed of having one, just like the houses in Mexico. Even the word for them in Spanish is wonderful—un caracol—a snail. Our footsteps clang on each metal step, the dogs following so close we have to scold them.
“Your office is bigger than in the pictures you sent,” you say delighted. I imagine you’re comparing it to Isabel Allende’s.
“Where did you get the drapes in the library? I bet they cost a pretty penny. Too bad your brothers couldn’t upholster your chairs for you and save you some money. Boy, this place is niiiiice!” you say, your voice sliding up the scales like a river grackle.
I plop yoga mats on the rooftop, and we sit cross-legged to watch the sun descend. We drink your favorite, Italian sparkling wine, to celebrate your arrival, to celebrate my office.
The sky absorbs the night quickly-quickly, dissolving into the color of a plum. I lie on my back and watch clouds scurry past in a hurry to get home. Stars come out shyly, one by one. You lie down next to me and drape one leg over mine like when we sleep together at your home. We always sleep together when I’m there. At first because there isn’t any other bed. But later, after Papa dies, just because you want me near. It’s the only time you let yourself be affectionate.
“What if we invite everybody down here for Christmas next year?” I ask, “What do you think?”
“We’ll see,” you say lost in your own thoughts.
The moon climbs the front yard mesquite tree, leaps over the terrace ledge and astonishes us. It’s a full moon, a huge nimbus like the prints of Yoshitoshi. From here on, I won’t be able to see a full moon again without thinking of you, this moment. But right now, I don’t know this.
You close your eyes. You look like you’re sleeping. The plane ride must’ve tired you. “Good lucky you studied,” you say without opening your eyes. You mean my office, my life.
I say to you, “Good lucky.”
For my mother, Elvira Cordero Cisneros
July 11th, 1929–November 1st, 2007
May 26th, 2008
Casa Xóchitl, San Antonio de Béxar, Texas
The
House
on
Mango Street
We didn’t always live on Mango Street. Before that we lived on Loomis on the third floor, and before that we lived on Keeler. Before Keeler it was Paulina, and before that I can’t remember. But what I remember most is moving a lot. Each time it seemed there’d be one more of us. By the time we got to Mango Street we were six—Mama, Papa, Carlos, Kiki, my sister Nenny and me.
The house on Mango Street is ours, and we don’t have to pay rent to anybody, or share the yard with the people downstairs, or be careful not to make too much noise, and there isn’t a landlord banging on the ceiling with a broom. But even so, it’s not the house we’d thought we’d get.
We had to leave the flat on Loomis quick. The water pipes broke and the landlord wouldn’t fix them because the house was too old. We had to leave fast. We were using the washroom next door and carrying water over in empty milk gallons. That’s why Mama and Papa looked for a house, and that’s why we moved into the house on Mango Street, far away, on the other side of town.
They always told us that one day we would move into a house, a real house that would be ours for always so we wouldn’t have to move each year. And our house would have running water and pipes that worked. And inside it would have real stairs, not hallway stairs, but stairs inside like the houses on T.V. And we’d have a basement and at least three washrooms so when we took a bath we wouldn’t have to tell everybody. Our house would be white with trees around it, a great big yard and grass growing without a fence. This was the house Papa talked about when he held a lottery ticket and this was the house Mama dreamed up in the stories she told us before we went to bed.
But the house on Mango Street is not the way they told it at all. It’s small and red with tight steps in front and windows so small you’d think they were holding their breath. Bricks are crumbling in places, and the front door is so swollen you have to push hard to get in. There is no front yard, only four little elms the city planted by the curb. Out back is a small garage for the car we don’t own yet and a small yard that looks smaller between the two buildings on either side. There are stairs in our house, but they’re ordinary hallway stairs, and the house has only one washroom. Everybody has to share a bedroom—Mama and Papa, Carlos and Kiki, me and Nenny.
Once when we were living on Loomis, a nun from my school passed by and saw me playing out front. The laundromat downstairs had been boarded up because it had been robbed two days before and the owner had painted on the wood YES WE’RE OPEN so as not to lose business.
Where do you live? she asked.
There, I said pointing up to the third floor.
You live there?
There. I had to look to where she pointed—the third floor, the paint peeling, wooden bars Papa had nailed on the windows so we wouldn’t fall out. You live there? The way sh
e said it made me feel like nothing. There. I lived there. I nodded.
I knew then I had to have a house. A real house. One I could point to. But this isn’t it. The house on Mango Street isn’t it. For the time being, Mama says. Temporary, says Papa. But I know how those things go.
Hairs
Everybody in our family has different hair. My Papa’s hair is like a broom, all up in the air. And me, my hair is lazy. It never obeys barrettes or bands. Carlos’ hair is thick and straight. He doesn’t need to comb it. Nenny’s hair is slippery—slides out of your hand. And Kiki, who is the youngest, has hair like fur.
But my mother’s hair, my mother’s hair, like little rosettes, like little candy circles all curly and pretty because she pinned it in pincurls all day, sweet to put your nose into when she is holding you, holding you and you feel safe, is the warm smell of bread before you bake it, is the smell when she makes room for you on her side of the bed still warm with her skin, and you sleep near her, the rain outside falling and Papa snoring. The snoring, the rain, and Mama’s hair that smells like bread.
Boys & Girls
The boys and the girls live in separate worlds. The boys in their universe and we in ours. My brothers for example. They’ve got plenty to say to me and Nenny inside the house. But outside they can’t be seen talking to girls. Carlos and Kiki are each other’s best friend … not ours.
Nenny is too young to be my friend. She’s just my sister and that was not my fault. You don’t pick your sisters, you just get them and sometimes they come like Nenny.
She can’t play with those Vargas kids or she’ll turn out just like them. And since she comes right after me, she is my responsibility.
Someday I will have a best friend all my own. One I can tell my secrets to. One who will understand my jokes without my having to explain them. Until then I am a red balloon, a balloon tied to an anchor.