I found out I was poor one week before Christmas.
Before dinner, the doorbell rang, and I rushed to the door trailing behind my sister. We got to it before the sound faded, before whoever was at the door had taken their finger off the buzzer. It was like this every time anyone rang our doorbell.
“Can you play?” It was Summer. Her hair was the same color as the uncooked spaghetti Mom cracked in half and dumped into boiling water every Wednesday—spaghetti night. She was the only girl that lived on our street, in the same fifth grade class as my sister. I had never met anyone named Summer before. Before Summer, the names of girls I knew were Maria, Guadalupe, Rosita, Marisol: girls named after virgins in the Bible or flowers, not seasons of the year. “A few of us are going to make a snowman at the park if you want to come,” Summer told my sister.
I pushed my head through the opening between Isabel’s arm and her ribs. “I want to make a snowman,” I said.
“My little sister,” Isabel said, as if I were a mosquito annoying her. “Go ask Mom.”
Before I left, Summer pointed at my shirt. “You’ve been to Puerto Rico. Cool.”
I was wearing a red shirt with a fading image of a green frog on a lily pad and a word cloud that said “I (heart) Puerto Rico.”
“I got this shirt at the Salvation Army down the street,” I said.
Isabel let out a high-pitched laugh. Her laugh was always shrill when she was nervous.
“We did go,” Isabel told Summer, then turned to me. “Go ask Mom if I can go to the park with Summer. Tell her it’s the girl from the library. She’ll know who it is.”
We had moved into the house in October that year after Dad got promoted to manager. It was the first house we could afford to live in. All the places we lived in before had been crummy apartments, places with paint peeling off windowsills and stains you couldn’t bleach out of toilet bowls. We were closer to school now, two blocks, and near the library. And even though Dad said the neighborhood was safe, Mom was distrustful of everyone, including Summer, who had been partnered with my sister for a science project that required various trips to the library that fall. Mom always went with them. We guessed Mom’s fear of people came from being born and having to live through adulthood in Colombia. Whenever we told anyone where we were from, we got jokes about white powder up our noses. That, or how we danced the best salsa. Mom loved hearing that.
“Okay, but I’m going, too,” I shot back to my sister.
“Just go do it.” She looked at me the same way Mom looked at us when she was getting ready to bring out her chancleta.
I disappeared behind the door.
“I don’t know why she said that,” I heard Isabel tell Summer. “We did go to Puerto Rico.She’s been in a lying phase lately. Not sure what that’s about.”
“My little brother does that too. Annoying.”
They both giggled.
In the kitchen Mom was dropping empanadas into a pot of hot oil. “Stand back,” she yelled as she dropped a yellow meat pie the shape of a crescent moon into the pot, oil immediately popping and hissing. She had a glass of wine on the kitchen table and was listening to villancicos, Colombian Christmas Carols. She always had wine and she always listened to those Christmas Carols when she cooked large orders.
“Summer, the girl from the library, wants to know if we can go to the park to make snowmen,” I said.
Mom turned around and looked out the kitchen window. “No. It’s dark. Plus, I can’t go with you two. I have about three hours left in this kitchen.”
“It’s not dark yet,” I said.
She gave me a stern look. “I said no.”
I yelled from the kitchen to let Isabel know that Mom said no and walked to the dining room table where three large foil baking sheets full of empanadas sat. I tried to sneak one, but Mom wasn’t taking her eyes off of me.
“Don’t you dare touch those,” she said. “They’re for the church.”
Later that night, when we were brushing our teeth and getting ready to go to bed, Isabel turned toward me, her toothbrush still in her mouth and said, “You’re not supposed to tell anyone you buy clothes at the Salvation Army. Don’t you know anything?”
“Why not?”
“You just don’t,” she said.
I squeezed some toothpaste on my toothbrush.
“You know nothing,” she said, and dropped her toothbrush into the toothbrush holder and pirouetted out of the bathroom.
Everything was always worse than it really was with Isabel. When she was hungry, she’d double over on the floor hollering about how her stomach was eating her insides it was so hungry, and on certain days of the month she would take to her bed because of excruciating pain she insisted I couldn’t possibly understand.
I shrugged it off. But as I lay in my bed staring at the lights dancing across the walls from the cars that drove past outside, I thought about what Isabel had said and wondered what was so bad about shopping at the Salvation Army. Where else could you get ten books for a dollar and that cool shirt with the frog?
***
Having made the manager’s list two days before it went to print, Dad was invited to the company Christmas party, which was hosted by the owner of the company and his wife in their home in Winnetka. When we pulled up to the house, their front door was bigger than any other door I had ever seen. It was made of a heavy dark wood with deep grooves and rings, and there were two stone lions decorated with Christmas wreaths hanging on their necks at either side. A man dressed in a suit and tie hurried up to the car and opened our doors. When we all got out, he got in and drove our car behind the house.
At the door stood Dad’s boss and his wife. He was short with a potbelly, and she was a tall, curly-haired blonde with two large bright white front teeth and red lips. They both had drinks in their hands. The wife bent down and said hello to my sister and me, then led us inside.
There were kids of all ages running around in the background. A tall, thin girl with the same large white front teeth as the wife walked toward us and introduced herself as April, the family’s twelve-year-old daughter. It was April’s job to show us around and introduce us to the other kids. Make us feel welcome. I looked back at Mom as Isabel and I followed April into what she called the playroom, a whole room in the house dedicated to playing with your toys. Walking in, my sister and I looked at each other, then we looked at the toys. There was a pinball machine against one wall, a dart board hung on another wall, and a corner of the room with three large bins of Barbie and Ken dolls with all their hair and body parts. The Barbies at the Salvation Army didn’t look like this. I was lucky if I could find one without pen marks on its face.
Isabel and I bounced between the pinball machine and the Barbie doll house until they called us all to the dinner table. We ate roasted chicken with mashed potatoes. There was ice cream for dessert, vanilla. After dinner, all the kids got handed a Christmas present to take home with them. Isabel got a gift that came in a square red box with a large golden bow. My gift was in a slim box and had pieces I felt moving around inside the cardboard box—a jigsaw puzzle.
As we walked out to wait for our car to be pulled up at the front door, I noticed a black garbage bag full of presents next to the front door.
“You forgot to give these out,” I told April, who saw us to the door. I pointed at the bag of presents.
She waved them off. “Those are for the poor kids at the church.”
“Poor kids at the church?” I asked.
“The kids that are too poor for their parents to buy them presents. My mom buys gifts and wraps them and takes them to the church.”
I felt as if a weight suddenly sank into my stomach. I got gifts from church on Christmas.
***
That Sunday Mom loaded the empanadas in the trunk. The church always put in an order of five dozen empanadas for the congregation on the first Sunday of the new year, on Easter, and on Christmas Eve. It was 9:00pm when we arrived. Mom wore her best red dress, the same one she wore for the company Christmas party. Dad wore a shirt and tie with black pants that had a hard crease down each leg. Isabel and I wore the same blue dress and white tights. Even though we were three years apart, Mom always dressed us the same. It was embarrassing, but she said it was so we didn’t fight over who got the better dress. Neither of us cared; we just wanted to look different. One year for Halloween, we both got the same witch costume, and we could never tell who was who in the pictures.
Mom and Dad put the trays of empanadas with their tinfoil covers on the white fold-out tables in the kitchen where the coffee and donuts were served after the service. Then we all took our seats in the third row from the front where Father Paul delivered his sermon and did communion.
In the front of the church, next to the choir, stood a large green Christmas tree full of ornaments: blue ball ornaments, a string of popcorn draped around the tree that my sister and I helped make along with the other children in our Sunday school class. At the bottom of the tree, on the red velvet carpet covering its metal feet, two boxes of toys were stacked at either side. The boxes were marked “boys” and “girls.”
I looked at the tops of those boxes. The corners of the gift-wrapped presents jutted out. Some were red, some were shiny green, and some had cartoons on the paper: snowmen, snowflakes, tiny Santas.
After Midnight Mass, one of the altar boys led Isabel and me to the tree where we each were handed a gift and asked to smile for a picture with Father Paul. A picture that would be included in that month’s newsletter to the congregation. We were the children April’s mother bought gifts for. We were poor. As the flash from the camera stung my eyes, I realized my picture would be in the monthly newsletter that went to the entire congregation. I thought of all the people I knew who would see that picture: the kids at my new school, Summer, April.
On the car ride home Mom put the villancicos on the radio. That night, for the first time, I paid attention to the words in those Christmas Carols. One sang about a boy whose only wish on Christmas was for Santa to bring him a pair of shoes because the ones he owned had holes in the soles where rocks would crawl in. Another one sang about a girl looking through a store window at a little dress her mother couldn’t afford. That night on the car ride home, listening to those songs in the back seat, my sister sleeping, I cried. Because being poor meant you were charity. Being poor meant you couldn’t have a room in your house dedicated to playing with your toys. Being poor meant you were different, and you should be embarrassed.
The week before we were due back to school from the Christmas break, Mom said she was going to the Salvation Army to get some clothes for back to school, and Isabel and I went with her. I didn’t want to go. Mom handed Isabel and me a dollar bill each to go pick out something for ourselves. Isabel raced to the toy department. I unzipped my fanny pack and put the dollar inside and wandered down the main aisle. I don’t know if it was the way the sun was coming in through the large front windows, but things looked different. Things felt different. There was a new smell I hadn’t noticed before that stuck to my nostrils. It made my stomach turn.
I heard Isabel call out to me. She ran down the aisle. “Look what I found.”
Isabel extended a pink box toward me, the lights from the overhead lamps reflecting off the glossy cardboard. I didn’t want to take it, but Isabel pushed it onto my chest, and I grabbed it to keep it from falling on the floor. I took the box and looked through the clear plastic window. It was a Barbie doll, brand new, still in her box. She was perfect. Her hair was straight and blond, her hands and feet not chewed up or missing, her face pristine—the blue eye shadow, the pink lips. The Barbie was dressed in a golden gown.
Isabel ran back to the toy section. I walked to a corner of the Salvation Army with the Barbie doll tight against my chest and sat on the floor. I looked around the store to make sure no one was watching, and I opened the box and pulled out the Barbie. She was strapped to cardboard. I had never held a new Barbie in my hands. Her clothes felt stiff, and her hair was smooth. I unzipped my fanny pack and reached for the black pen I carried with me. I took the cap off and drew lines on her face until she looked like the rest of them.
