Mexican Girls

The house is empty

Mama is down at the expensive, healthy grocery store – aptly painted green, full of its clean organic foods. It’s all the way down in the classy minimart in Almaden, which is a good 30 minute drive from our house. My mama, though, would drive any distance to shop where all the rich, classy families live. I wonder if she pretends we live there when she pushes her cart and click-clack click-clacks her shiny black shoes through the isles.

My mama believes in organic apples like some people believe in antibiotics, in vitamin pills like some people believe in chemotherapy, in no-sugar-added juice like some people believe in vaccinations. She lives, I swear, to fill my sin-ridden body with clean, clear nutrients. “Don’t you want to be pure inside?” She likes to ask me, as though unsoiled, un-tampered celery will turn me into the Virgin Fucking Mary. She forgets that my heart needs to be fed just as much as my stomach.

Her food, her nutrients, may be clear of all pesticides and chemicals but my mama’s not. She washes down her lemon drenched apple slices with diet pills and energy pills and medication for her cramps, her migraines, her nerves, her joints – her boobs, even, but I don’t think that one’s FDA approved.

She doesn’t know that the only thing feeding my small, organic heart is her. Whatever she contaminates her body with, contaminates my heart.

I only really live with her – Dad’s nearly always far away. My brother’s at the university, but he’s an even bigger problem that I will deal with later.

So when she’s away at the grocery store, the house is empty.

I stand in front of the mirror and mimic the Mexican girls from the public school, who I see loitering outside my campus on Friday afternoons, waiting for their boyfriends.

At my school, the rich respectable boys have white girlfriends who straighten their hair and go to weddings in pastel-colored dresses; the poor respectable boys have Asian girlfriends who play bridge with their grandparents on Sundays; but the cool boys, whether rich or poor, have Mexican girlfriends.

Of course, being poor at my school means being middle class, and being girlfriendless makes you a fag.

Being boyfriendless, however, makes you respectable.

And I am a respectable girl.

None of the Mexican girls have ever talked to me, and I have never talked to the Mexican girls. We aren’t the same kind of people, not at all. They were educated by their mamas, who taught their daughters how to speak and how to love and how to fuck and how to believe in God. Thank Goodness I’ve got a classy school to teach me things – my mama doesn’t know anything that can’t be learned from a pop-up ad: sex and drugs and games.

I pretend I am talking to the Mexican girls, I pretend I am a Mexican girl. I retell the story of my Biology teacher, Ms. Brion with the curly black hair and the huge yellow eyes like a feral cat, who – yellow eyes ablaze – handed me back my essay with a B+ smeared in red ink across the top on Tuesday.

“That fucking bitch don’t even know what she’s talking about. I don’t fucking need that shit, no way. She got a stick up her ass or what, huh? As if I give a fuck! Bitch can suck it.” I say to my imaginary comrades. I roll my eyes and hips appropriately, leaning almost painfully to the left and gesticulating wildly with my pale hands.

I don’t come off sounding like the Mexican girls, though. I just sound like a bitch, and I look like a crazy white girl talking to herself in the mirror.

For my sake, I hope mama comes home soon.