6
Reyna and Mago
AT ALDAMA, THE girls in fifth and sixth grade were taken to the auditorium and shown a video about puberty. The girls around me kept giggling while watching the video, but I didn’t. I couldn’t understand the words much, but I could understand the meaning of the images on the screen just fine. Besides, I already knew about menstruation because Mago had told me all about it back in Mexico.
Mago still hadn’t become a señorita. Mila said it was because we were so undernourished in Mexico that Mago’s body didn’t do what it was supposed to do. Now that we’d been in the U.S. for eight months and had better food to eat, Mago prayed her period would come soon. I hoped mine would, too. Even though I was ten and a half, I couldn’t wait to become a señorita.
After the assembly, I was given a booklet with a picture of a girl on it. I was also given a sanitary napkin wrapped in cellophane. My very first sanitary napkin! I showed it to Mago as soon as she came home from school.
“Look, look!” I said. “I am going to become a señorita very soon!” I stored my sanitary napkin in my dresser drawer where I kept my underwear.
Every day after Mago picked me up at Mrs. Giuliano’s, I would rush home and take my sanitary napkin out to look at it. I had also tried to read the little booklet I was given. There were many words I didn’t yet understand, and I had to keep looking them up in the dictionary. My favorite was “rite of passage.” It sounded important.
I was confused by this sentence: “Changes take place in a girl pretty fast.” For the life of me I couldn’t understand why the word “pretty” was there, after the word “girl.” Mr. López had taught me that an adjective goes before the noun, so it should have read “pretty girl.” But if that was so, I wondered if only pretty girls got their periods and not ugly ones. I stood in the mirror and looked at myself, wondering which category I was in. I was not pretty like Mago. Even Betty, as little as she was, was prettier than me. Cindy was way prettier than any of us.
“Am I ugly?” I asked Mago.
“Of course not!” she would say, but she’s my sister, so I knew she had to say that.
The following week, Carlos came to pick me up at Mrs. Giuliano’s instead of Mago. He said that Mago wasn’t feeling well, and she had ended up not going to school. She’d gotten off the bus in front of Burbank, turned around, and come back home.
When we got home, I did what I had always done, open my drawer to look at my sanitary napkin. But it was gone. I took out the drawer and looked behind the dresser wondering if it had fallen out, but it wasn’t there. Mago came out of the bathroom looking very pale.
“What’s wrong?” I asked her.
She went to lie down on the couch, clutching her stomach.
“I have a fever and really bad cramps,” she said.
I felt bad for her, but I wanted to know where my sanitary napkin was. I asked her if she had seen it. “I’m sorry, Nena,” she said. “I took it.”
“But why?” I yelled. “That was my sanitary napkin. It was mine!”
“It’s just that I got my period this morning, Nena. I couldn’t find any pads here so I didn’t know what else to do.”
“I hate you!” I yelled, and then I ran outside into the yard to cry.
When Papi came home, he already knew that Mago had missed school because he got a call from Burbank at work. I had never seen my father so furious. He came barging into the house, and without asking for an explanation, he took off his belt and gave my sister the biggest lashing any of us had gotten thus far, right there on the couch where she had been writhing in pain all day.
“Papi, stop!” Carlos said, but Papi didn’t listen and the belt kept whistling through the air. What was worse was that Mago wouldn’t tell him what was wrong with her. She just said, “I’m not feeling well, Papi.” But those past months we had learned that according to Papi, being sick was no excuse to miss school. But this isn’t a common cold! I thought. Mago put her arms up to cover her face. Suddenly, I couldn’t take it anymore. I forgot I was supposed to be angry at my sister, and I rushed at him and pushed him.
“Don’t hit her!” I yelled. “She’s menstruating. She’s become a señorita. Stop it. Stop it!”
Then Papi steadied his belt and put it down. He looked at the three of us, and for a moment it was as if he had just awakened, as if that person who had just beat up my sister wasn’t the one who was now in the room with us. He blinked once, twice, then went into his room and didn’t come out.
Mila arrived half an hour later. She’d stopped at her mother’s house after work to visit her children. When we told her what Papi had done, she said, “Your father didn’t mean to. He doesn’t know any better. It’s the way he was raised.” She went to the store to buy Mago a package of sanitary napkins.
I clutched my sister’s hand and looked at the angry welts. “Why didn’t you tell him?” I asked Mago as I sat next to her on the couch.
“I was too embarrassed, Nena. You just don’t go telling men you’re on your period. Especially a father you haven’t seen in eight years!”
“But, but, he wouldn’t have hit you.”
Mago looked out the window. “It doesn’t matter,” she said.
“Of course it matters,” Carlos said. “And I can’t believe he hit you. I mean, you’re his favorite.”
On hearing that, Mago started to cry. I punched Carlos in the arm even though I was thinking the same thing myself. Mago was Papi’s “Negra,” after all.
When Mila came back with the sanitary napkins, Mago took one from the bag and gave it to me.
“Here, Nena. I know it isn’t your special one, I’m sorry.”
“It’s okay. It was just a napkin,” I told her. “This one will be just as special to me.” I put it in my drawer to save it for that day when I would become a little woman. I glanced at my father’s bedroom door and hoped that my rite of passage wouldn’t be as painful as my sister’s.