Heels click impatiently outside, manicured nails rapping. There’s always a ride coming, or a party starting, or a shift to get to. There’s always an emergency, and it’s never mine. Tonight, the voices increase, decibel by decibel. I don’t answer, because I don’t have to. What can they do? It’s the only door in the house that locks from the inside.
In front of me, in a bathroom shared between four sisters, stands an arsenal of beauty supplies. Liners, shadows, powders, masks. Polishes and mascaras and highlighters. In front of me, my face’s own reflection stands staunchly naked, brown and a little freckled. A protest flag.
My name is Chicky Quintanilla, it says. And I won’t be painted like a doll.
The mantra is almost enough to get me out the door unscathed.
“It’s about time!”
“Are you serious?! What were you even doing in there? You look the same!”
“Berto’s gonna be here any second! Move!”
“Girls, let’s keep it to a dull roar, please. Your mother’s balancing the books.”
The hallway creaks under the boots my mom raised her eyebrows at in the department store, and I like the sound. It means I’m causing a small reaction, even in the din. It says I was here, even if it doesn’t say it loudly. I’m never saying anything loudly. Not here, not anywhere.
“Chicky?” my mom calls from her office—a renovated closet once full of board games with missing pieces. She sits in there like a queen on a throne with the accounting books she barely keeps out of the red, so proud of the space she’s earned by keeping our family’s diner running for a decade. Dad fixed up the closet/office for her on her thirty-fifth birthday. He’s not great with practical stuff like bills, but he cares, you know?
“Hey,” I say, shaking my hair out of my eyes, exposing them for once.
Brown today, green tomorrow, my dad always says. But that sunflower in the middle always stays the same.
“Sit with me while I balance?”
There’s loud music to listen to, and magazine pictures to cut out and stick to the walls, and sure, homework to do, if I get that desperate. But I make myself at home on the rag rug in the corner anyway, not caring about the tiny cat hairs that immediately adhere to my diner uniform.
I wish I could say I stay because I love my mom. I mean, I really do, but tonight it’s about something more. My eyes are scanning everything—the chair with the stuffing poking through, the three-light-bulb lamp with two burned out, the worn spot on her shoe that’s about to become a full-on hole.
To everyone in Meteor, New Mexico, the Quintanillas are a family of self-starters, immigrant parents who came across the border “the right way” (as if there’s a right way to run from danger) and built a business that’s become a town institution.
Never mind that half the customers have tabs in the triple digits that they never intend to pay. Never mind the worry lines beside my mom’s eyes, and the sleepless pacing of my dad’s sneakers down the hallways during tax season.
Four beautiful girls, the neighbors say. Though the youngest is a little odd with her flannel shirts and her boy’s haircut.
We get good grades, we help out at the diner, and we stay out of trouble for the most part. Between that and the neon Open sign that clicks on every day at seven a.m., we must have it all, right? Not like those other immigrants. The “lowlifes and criminals” the news is always screaming about.
As if financial security is any measure of a person’s character. Or their humanity.
Personally, I consider those stereotypes a singular and offensive lack of imagination on the part of the news. But I probably shouldn’t be surprised by that.
“What’s on your mind, Banana?” my mom asks, and I grimace.
“Mom, please,” I say for at least the billionth time.
She laughs, and the sound is so bright and rare, like a butterfly in a rainstorm that lands right on your finger and just makes you marvel at the fact that life can exist. I vow at that moment to never give her grief about my name again. She deserves better.
“Should I say Chiquita instead?” she asks, her smile young, her pen forgotten atop the painstaking columns of numbers that never seem to add up to a new dryer, or a radiator for the car. “Your grandmother was awfully fond of it.” She looks up at the picture above her makeshift desk, and her smile changes temperatures, cools into something nostalgic like the autumn wind that only blows one week out of the year in the New Mexico desert.
The photo should be in the Smithsonian, and that’s not an exaggeration. Not because it’s particularly good artistically, but because it documents an actual, modern-day miracle. My sisters and I, existing in the same two feet of space, without anyone being maimed or ridiculed.
In the picture, we almost look happy.
The Quintanilla girls are all named by an archaic tradition that has persisted through you don’t want to know how many generations. Exactly twenty-six days before a Quintanilla baby’s birth, her bisabuela will have a dream that decides her name. She hands it down like the verdict of a grand jury, and no one dares question it. Even if the name is something really stupid, like say, Chiquita.
From oldest to youngest my sisters smile from the frame, and as my mother gazes at it I swear I will try to love them, if only for this moment, and if only for her sake.
Cereza, the eldest, tart and sweet like the fruit our father’s grandmother dreamed of picking in a summer rainstorm. No one argues with Cereza, not even Papa. With her dyed red hair curling to her waist and every diner customer wrapped around her nude manicure, she’s juggling nursing college, too. She’s the queen of the family, the daughter we should all aspire to be. Sometimes we all secretly hate her for it.
Next to her is Uva, named for bisabuela’s dream about stomping grapes between her bare brown toes. Round and smiling, full of the giddy headiness of young wine (bisabuela’s words, not mine, Uva’s the peacekeeper. The common thread. The comic relief. She’s the kindest and the best of us.
Beside her is Fresa, la princesa, the apple of Papa’s eye and the cruelest and most beautiful of us all. I’ve thought on more than one occasion that my parents should have stopped there, with this sweet and wicked sister, the balancing fire, the face and figure that made her the second runner-up in the Miss Meteor pageant last year. She tells anyone who’ll listen that if there wasn’t a rule against entering twice, she’d have the crown this year.
Her boyfriend, Berto, who drives a vintage Camaro, claims she tastes like the strawberries she was named for when bisabuela dreamed of flowering vines crawling across the desert, digging in deep and cracking open the ground before their fruit swelled bloodred.
I know it’s just her lip gloss. Two ninety-nine at Meteor Mart. She buys them five at a time.
Mama clucks her tongue, drawing me out of the photo, as if her disapproval can change the earning and spending totals her neat hand follows down each column.
There’s only one sister left to examine, and of course, it’s me.
Twenty-six days before my birth, my bisabuela dreamed of the dancing girl with the fruit-filled hat from the banana commercials, smiling and spinning circles beneath a thousand twinkling lights. No one dared name me banana, of course, but bisabuela didn’t hesitate. She’d always liked that girl, with her bold dress and her wide smile, and so she handed down my name. Decided my future.