Carlotta was a sturdy girl, tall and muscled, and although it was warm out, she wore a knit hat pulled down over her hair, sweatpants and a baggy sweatshirt. Antonio had said she was taking a semester off from college.
“Hey,” I said, offering a wave.
She turned her head in my direction, gave me a slow nod and backed into the house, leaving Mr. Blue squatting on the parsley plants staring menacingly, warning me to stay away.
The postman came up the drive with a package. “For you, Miss Gina Filomena,” he said. He always called me that, formally, as if I were a person of some status.
The package, from Nonna Filomena, contained a letter addressed to all of us and, wrapped in pale yellow tissue paper, a delicate, gauzy black scarf embroidered with dozens of multicolored flowers joined by sinuous green vines. It smelled slightly of roses.
I draped it around my neck and studied my reflection in the hall mirror. I felt transformed, as I often did when receiving these colorful gifts. They were imbued with lively sparks, filled with angel air.
Dad, translating, read from her letter:
I am thinking of you day and night and beaming you bushels of love and all good things.
I hope, Gina, that you will treasure this scarf. Each tiny flower I embroidered with my own old hands.
As Dad traced along a vine, he returned to the letter and translated the latest Angel Lucia news:
There was a mean man who was always in the local park shaking his cane at the children running and playing, and he sometimes hit the dogs as they ran past, and he spit on the sidewalk, too.
One time Angel Lucia placed a puppy at his feet, and the puppy had big sad eyes and sat on the man’s shoes until the man picked him up. The puppy licked the man’s face and the man cried and the children asked him what was wrong and the other dogs came to sniff the new puppy.
And now, you know what, Gina? The children and the other dogs look forward to the arrival of the man with the puppy, and the man no longer shakes his cane or hits the other dogs or spits on the sidewalk.
The World Turns
By late October, the bulletin boards were filling up with words and images and first lines.
Whenever any of us came across an interesting or puzzling word in our reading, we put it on the board, where they now formed a word-world of their own:
lunar
reflection
mångata
quantum
aggressive
passive
translucent
formidable
Neanderthal
harridan
sinister
perspicacious
trompe l’oeil
precipice
cascade
deluge
sinuous
resonate
affirmation
confirmation
. . . and dozens more.
One day even Freddy—scornful of so many things—proudly attached a word to the board: komorebi.
“It’s a word from my grandfather,” he explained, as he also attached a photograph of a tree-lined street. “See the way the sun comes through the leaves? That filtered light coming through—that’s komorebi.”
There was a single word for that?
Renaldo clapped. “Bravo, Freddy! That is a great word. Komorebi, komorebi, komorebi!”
The rest of us took up the chant: “Komorebi, komorebi, komorebi!”
Freddy blushed, permitting a brief smile to acknowledge the praise.
The images on the board now included magazine pictures, photographs, and drawings. There were majestic landscapes and eerie ones, unusual animals and adorable ones, and people of all shapes and sizes and colors.
The first lines from twenty or thirty books formed a long column on the adjacent board. The lines that most jumped out at me were:
“There is no lake at Camp Green Lake.”
“Rendi was not sure how long the moon had been missing.”
“In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.”3
“We didn’t always live on Mango Street.”4
“We think they took my papi.”5
“My name is Elizabeth but no one’s ever called me that.”6
One day, Margie turned to me and said, “Something is growing there,” and I agreed that yes, something was indeed growing there, but I was not sure what.
One morning as we entered class, Antonio, who was flanked by his growing posse, stopped abruptly, put his hands out as if to steady himself, and said, “Whoa! Feel that?”
“What?”
“Feel what?”
Antonio momentarily swayed. “Isn’t that amazing?”
“What?”
“What is amazing?”
“Didn’t you feel that?”
“Um . . .”
Antonio looked baffled. “No? Really?” He continued on his way to his seat. “Sometimes, you can feel the earth turning.”
I think that was the first day I noticed a few kids distance themselves from Antonio, as if some of his charm was fading or that he was deemed a bit odd. He still had many admirers, though, far outnumbering those few who now held back.
As for me, I was increasingly mesmerized by him, but I was silent and cautious, watching and listening. I felt as if we were both vulnerable, maybe in the way that I was vulnerable to the taunts and attacks of the Groube brothers and others when I was young. I hadn’t understood then that what I said or what I wore could be a source of irritation to others. Besides, I had felt I had Angel Lucia’s protection.
Now I was aware of that vulnerability and was more quiet and more the observer because of it, but I worried about Antonio. I still felt that odd obligation to protect him. I wasn’t even sure why.
Swirls
Words from the bulletin board swirled through my mind all day, so that out of nowhere, even in math class, words would appear, demanding attention:
Images from the board appeared—altered or exaggerated or combined—in my dreams at night. There would be a lake with a hobbit jumping into it, or a street lined with mangoes, or mountains beneath the ocean, or the moon underwater.
The first lines of books jumped in and out of my dreams, begging to be knitted together, but in doing so they formed new, strange combinations:
Antonio was not sure how long the house on Mango Street had been missing.
And
There was no moon in the lake.
And
In a hole in the ground lived Gina Filomena.
One time Miss Lightstone said, “Let’s write. Think of these boards as your personal well of inspiration. Pull from them whatever you like—a word, an image, a first line—and run with it.”
“Run?” Audrey said.
“You have paper, pens, pencils, mm?” Miss Lightstone said. “Have some fun. Experiment.”
Margie said, “I’m not exactly sure what you want us to do.”
“I want you to do what you want to do. Does one of those images remind you of something? Do you want to write about that? Or combine some of those words? I want you to experiment.”
“But,” Audrey asked. “How will we be graded?”
“Ah,” Miss Lightstone said. She was wearing a peach-flowered dress and when she stood by the window, the light of the dress reflected on her face. “Experiments are not graded. Begone, grades!”