My Lucy Friend
Who Smells Like Corn
Lucy Anguiano, Texas girl who smells like corn, like Frito Bandito chips, like tortillas, something like that warm smell of nixtamal or bread the way her head smells when she’s leaning close to you over a paper cut-out doll or on the porch when we are squatting over marbles trading this pretty crystal that leaves a blue star on your hand for that giant cat-eye with a grasshopper green spiral in the center like the juice of bugs on the windshield when you drive to the border, like the yellow blood of butterflies.
Have you ever eated dog food? I have. After crunching like ice, she opens her big mouth to prove it, only a pink tongue rolling around in there like a blind worm, and Janey looking in because she said Show me. But me I like that Lucy, corn smell hair and aqua flip-flops just like mine that we bought at the K mart for only 79 cents same time.
I’m going to sit in the sun, don’t care if it’s a million trillion degrees outside, so my skin can get so dark it’s blue where it bends like Lucy’s. Her whole family like that. Eyes like knife slits. Lucy and her sisters. Norma, Margarita, Ofelia, Herminia, Nancy, Olivia, Cheli, y laAmber Sue.
Screen door with no screen. Bang! Little black dog biting his fur. Fat couch on the porch. Some of the windows painted blue, some pink, because her daddy got tired that day or forgot. Mama in the kitchen feeding clothes into the wringer washer and clothes rolling out all stiff and twisted and flat like paper. Lucy got her arm stuck once and had to yell Maaa! and her mama had to put the machine in reverse and then her hand rolled back, the finger black and later, her nail fell off. But did your arm get flat like the clothes? What happened to your arm? Did they have to pump it with air? No, only the finger, and she didn’t cry neither.
Lean across the porch rail and pin the pink sock of the baby Amber Sue on top of Cheli’s flowered T-shirt, and the blue jeans of la Ofelia over the inside seam of Olivia’s blouse, over the flannel nightgown of Margarita so it don’t stretch out, and then you take the work shirts of their daddy and hang them upside down like this, and this way all the clothes don’t get so wrinkled and take up less space and you don’t waste pins. The girls all wear each other’s clothes, except Olivia, who is stingy. There ain’t no boys here. Only girls and one father who is never home hardly and one mother who says Ay! I’m real tired and so many sisters there’s no time to count them.
I’m sitting in the sun even though it’s the hottest part of the day, the part that makes the streets dizzy, when the heat makes a little hat on the top of your head and bakes the dust and weed grass and sweat up good, all steamy and smelling like sweet corn.
I want to rub heads and sleep in a bed with little sisters, some at the top and some at the feets. I think it would be fun to sleep with sisters you could yell at one at a time or all together, instead of alone on the fold-out chair in the living room.
When I get home Abuelita will say Didn’t I tell you?and I’ll get it because I was supposed to wear this dress again tomorrow. But first I’m going to jump off an old pissy mattress in the Anguiano yard. I’m going to scratch your mosquito bites, Lucy, so they’ll itch you, then put Mercurochrome smiley faces on them. We’re going to trade shoes and wear them on our hands. We’re going to walk over to Janey Ortiz’s house and say We’re never ever going to be your friend again forever! We’re going to run home backwards and we’re going to run home frontwards, look twice under the house where the rats hide and I’ll stick one foot in there because you dared me, sky so blue and heaven inside those white clouds. I’m going to peel a scab from my knee and eat it, sneeze on the cat, give you three M & M’s I’ve been saving for you since yesterday, comb your hair with my fingers and braid it into teeny-tiny braids real pretty. We’re going to wave to a lady we don’t know on the bus. Hello! I’m going to somersault on the rail of the front porch even though my chones show. And cut paper dolls we draw ourselves, and color in their clothes with crayons, my arm around your neck.
And when we look at each other, our arms gummy from an orange Popsicle we split, we could be sisters, right? We could be, you and me waiting for our teeths to fall and money. You laughing something into my ear that tickles, and me going Ha Ha Ha Ha. Her and me, my Lucy friend who smells like corn.
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