My Lucy Friend Who Smells Like Corn; Eleven; Salvador Late or Early; Mexican Movies; Barbie-Q; ’Mericans; Tepeyac”
Note: These 22 stories and sketches are grouped in three sections, each with one story that bears the same title as the section: “My Lucy Friend Who Smells Like Corn,” “One Holy Night,” and “There Was a Man, There Was a Woman.” The stories will be considered here in groups for the most part, beginning with the first and second sections treated as two units.
The stories and sketches in this first section are set in childhood. Five are narrated by children; the two that are not (“Salvador Late or Early” and “Tepeyac”) have children as main characters. “My Lucy Friend … ,” whose speaker is a seven- or eight-year-old girl, is set in a poor neighborhood of a fairly large Texas city. The story has no plot; the speaker describes her friend, relates some of the things she and Lucy do together, and tells a few details about Lucy’s house, family, and life. The speaker also reveals something about her own situation (she is living or staying with her grandmother). She likes Lucy and envies her having eight sisters; she feels that she and Lucy are like sisters.
“Eleven” takes place on the speaker’s eleventh birthday. Rachel opens by saying other ages before eleven are still present inside the 11-year-old. She is in school; the teacher brings a sweater out of the coatroom and tries to determine its owner. A girl says it is Rachel’s, and although Rachel denies it, the teacher puts the sweater on her desk and eventually makes her put it on, which brings her to tears. Later another girl remembers the sweater is hers, but Rachel is still upset and wishes she were invisible.
Salvador (in “Salvador Late or Early”) is a small, apologetic boy who has no friends, comes from an very poor neighborhood, and (because his mother has a baby to care for) must get his two younger brothers ready for school, give them breakfast, and lead them by the hands to school and then home again.
In “Mexican Movies,” the speaker is a young girl (six or seven years old) who describes a typical Saturday evening with her parents and little brother at a theater that shows Mexican movies. She tells about being sent to the lobby during sexy scenes and describes the furnishings of the theater and lobby and the things sold there; she tells about her favorite movies and talks about the things she and her brother do during the shows. Sometimes, she says, they go to sleep, and when the movie is over their parents carry them home to bed.
“Barbie-Q,” set in Chicago in the early 1960s, features a nine- or ten-year-old speaker who talks to her friend directly about their Barbie dolls, their outfits, and the story they always enact with these dolls. One Sunday at a flea market, they find and buy Ken and several more Barbie outfits, friends, and relatives that have been damaged in a fire. These dolls smell smoky and have slight flaws, but the speaker and her friend don’t care.
The speaker in “‘Mericans” is Micaela, a young American girl visiting relatives in Mexico City. She and her brothers wait outside the church for their grandmother, who is inside praying. The older brother dozes in the sun; the younger one runs around shouting. They have been told not to leave, so they watch a procession of penitents approach the church. The speaker goes into the church for a while, then goes back outside. An American man and woman, tourists, take her brother’s picture and are surprised he speaks English; he tells her they are “‘Mericans.”
The speaker in “Tepeyac” describes, in present tense, a typical weekday evening spent in Mexico City where she lives or is staying with her grandparents. She walks home with her grandfather from his shop, describing the places and people they pass. They count the steps from the street to their front door together and go in to their supper; from that house, she says, she will return to the U.S. Her grandfather will die, everything will change, and when she returns, years later, the house itself will seem different.
