Mujer
says she is bringing me a surprise. I hope it is a present. I hope it is a
puppy. I hope it is something sweet.
When my
grandmother descends the plane’s steep staircase, stepping onto the tarmac on
an overcast Sacramento day, she is holding the hand of a small girl. Mujer
doesn’t look like she has a present for me, but maybe it’s too big to carry.
Maybe it will be on the conveyor belt inside her large, blue suitcase.
“This
is Little Diana.” Mujer beams her famous smile. I know who that girl is.
Debbie’s daughter. My niece. But I don’t talk to her, not for the whole long
drive from the airport to our house.
“Where’s
my surprise?” I ask after watching Mujer unpack her suitcase for hours and
hours.
Mujer laughs. “The surprise is Little Diana. I brought her to see you. Why don’t you take her outside to play?”
This
is worse than no present. Diana is barely two, a baby. What am I supposed to do
with a baby?
Diana
follows me to my bedroom. She touches Bianca and Bernard, my stuffed mice from The Rescuers. She hugs Pooh and makes
Cookie Monster’s eyes rattle. This is so upsetting that I have to put on my
pink dress.
I am
not supposed to play in my pink dress. It is delicate, with white lace and a
skirt that goes all the way to the ground, like a real dress for a real lady.
But the best thing about the dress is that when I spin around, it billows out
around me like a bell.
In the
backyard, there is a swing set with a slide and monkey bars. Diana is too
little, though, so I put her in the sandbox. I don’t play in the sandbox any
more because I’d recently discovered that the Indian Clay I used to make
sculptures of tiny towns by adding water and sand to make the clay more pliable
was not clay at all. Carol, who is ten and therefore knows everything, says
there’ve never been Indians here.
“Then
what’s this?” I’d asked her last week, showing her the house I’d build out of
three chunks of Indian clay.
“Cat
poop.”
Luckily,
Diana is a baby, so she won’t know any better. I leave her in the cat poop.
She’s happy there, giggling and being stupidly cute, until she sees me swinging
high overhead like a trapeze artist in a sparkly dress. She cries and cries, so
I go on the slide instead.
I
whoosh down the slide’s metal surface, like a sleek otter. The pink dress makes
the journey smooth, especially when the hem tears a little, and I can cover my
feet, too.
Diana’s
still crying, so next I spin and spin in my pink dress. I spin so fast that I
can’t hear her, or if I do, it sounds like “whaaAAaaAAaa.”
“What’re
you doing to Diana?” My mom, Big Diana, comes out of the house. “You’re not
supposed to wear that dress outside.”
A lady
always wears a dress. I stand my ground, silent but resolved.
“Get
Diana,” Mom says, but when I don’t move, she stomps over and yanks me by the
arm. I stumble on the ripped hem and fall.
Grass
stains! Grass stains! On my knees, on the hem. Now, I’m the one crying. A lady
never has grass stains on her pink dress.
“It
was getting too small for you anyway,” Mom says. “We can cut it down to fit
Little Diana.”
Her
words only make me cry harder. I can’t get off the ground. My dress is ruined
and stolen by a baby and now I can never be a real lady.
